Viva: The Socially-Condoned and Yet Still Mildly Transgressive Art of Loving Las Vegas
The sunrise in Las Vegas is not like sunrise in the rest of the world. Which is quite fortunate for the rest of the world.
You see, for most of the world, sunrise is the most purposeful time of day. For most of the world, save for the poor souls working night shift, morning is get-at-it time. The first few lemon-yellow rays appear in the east, the twittering machine of birds starts up, lights click off as punctuation. They're all signals to get moving, to start a new day, to brew coffee and read the paper and embark on whatever rituals we've adopted in the dubious but crucial goal of getting from a prone position on a bed to an upright position in an office.
If you've been to Las Vegas, you know that sunrise is the one time of day Las Vegas looks completely out of synch with itself. Yes, if you look hard at the hotels along the Strip, you can still see signs that life exists in the way we'd expect it to in Vegas. Cab drivers are moving tourists out of the hotels, with the implicit promise they'll be moving more in later in the day. A few stragglers, presumably placing their faith in a law of averages that rewards their tenacity, are seated at slot machines in windowless and massive hotel lobby casinos. You can even see a few people who have taken it upon themselves to honor some unspoken code of Vegas, literally partying all night, retreating to their hotel rooms. Some of them even manage to not look bleary and shaky doing so.
For a city that prides itself on nightlife and makes its fortune on gambling and is awash in thousands upon thousands of electric lights, sunrise is a caesura more than an event. It's when Vegas is least like Vegas, and is more like any other decent-sized American city in which people struggle with their alarm clocks, fumble their way to consciousness, and fill the air with smog on their way from the house to the job.
Of course, to most of those who visit Vegas each year -- the literal millions of them -- they're not likely to see sunrise. This is probably one of the few times in their lives they not only get to sleep in, but feel they are expected to.
Even if you tell yourself you're merely in observation mode, and you're driving around Vegas at sunrise with the resolve to not get sucked in by Vegas's temptations (and the resultant smugness that comes with it), know that Vegas is aiming one of its sequined arrows at your heart. It knows you have a weakness -- that there is something base and carnal within you that cries out for fulfillment. The billboards will seek you out. There are seven deadly sins. If it's not a high-level vice like sex or gambling, maybe it's something on the order of hobnobbing with Klingons at the Hilton's Star Trek: The Experience or eating a sushi dinner.
At nightfall, Vegas truly becomes Vegas, blotter-thick with images that either find their way onto postcards or are judiciously airbrushed from postcards: the lights, the buffets, the rows of street urchins clicking their escort services ad cards in the hopes you will make eye contact with them (which pretty much dooms you to taking one, and you only make that mistake once), the come-hither enticement of rows of slot machines, and come to think of it, the slippery-voweled double entendre of "loose slots."
At nightfall, Vegas becomes the full manifestation of Vegas. Vegas the city becomes Vegas the archetype. At sunrise, Vegas is something else entirely, but it's still not nearly as dormant as the majority of its tourists are.
Vegas at sunrise, you see, is not resting. It's reloading.
I’m sure this is not a novel thesis, but it’s one that bears repeating and reinforcing, so we can better understand our nation’s love affair with Las Vegas – the love that makes the little desert outpost that is McCarran International Airport the eighth busiest airport in the world. Las Vegas, even without a major sports franchise [1], even though it is currently ranked between Louisville and Jacksonville as the 51st largest media market in the nation, is the ultimate American city. New York might have the history and the melting pot, Los Angeles may have the most fertile climate for rags-to-riches ascent, Washington D.C. is the seat of power, and a number of cities would lay claim to being the most representative of the current America or the new, burgeoning America, depending on what thesis on America circa 2004 you’re trying to forward. But nowhere is the drive to consume, defended to the death as the pursuit of happiness, more evident than in Las Vegas – which makes Las Vegas, to me at least, the ultimate American city.
Vegas is where countless Americans come to play, and though there's not the sense that you can find everything you want in Vegas, like there is New York, there's definitely the sense that you can have your pleasure sensors suitably sated and diverted by its range of offerings. Chances are, you're not going to find that obscure album you've been scouring the bins of your mid-American record stores for in Las Vegas, but that same desire to be entertained will be filled by a stage show which will attempt to justify its ticket price in a sheer display of over-the-topness.
Go down the list of the fancier Strip hotels, and you can tick down the fantasy locations of a broad cross-section of Americans, depositing them in their choice of comfortable, dangerless recreations of where they'd most like to be. The Paris, the Monte Carlo, and the Venetian all conjure up images of a well-to-do, come-on-in-Americans version of Europe which may not be so welcoming in the George W. Bush era. The Mirage is a mélange of tropical settings which, through a name suggesting the windows of the imagination, isn't bound by any sort of geographical assignation whatsoever. The Excalibur, Caesars Palace and the Luxor opt for taking the guest back to a time in which their setting was the most desirous location to the people of that epoch -- certainly similar to how Americans view the United States of today. The Bellagio, though it hints at an Italian theme, seems to shoot for an aesthetic based on pure wealth.
If you look closely at the signs in front of what will become Wynn's, the newest and shiniest of the Strip hotels, you can see construction permit signs that read "La Reve." According to the Vegas native who served as my de facto tour guide for my last trip to the city, La Reve was too obscure and too hard to pronounce for most everyone, so developer Steve Wynn, the force behind Bellagio, Mirage, and Treasure Island, in a move hinting at both frustration with our plebeian ways and a Napoleonic ego, slapped his own name on the project and left it at that.
Steve Wynn is responsible for maybe my favorite juxtaposition of highbrow and lowbrow in the city -- the Wynn Collection. The museum, on the site of the former Desert Inn, features a dozen or so works by the likes of Picasso[2], Gauguin, and Matisse. You'd know this, even if you weren't an art aficionado, because the jumbotronic LED sign out front, which looks like it wouldn't be at all out of place fronting a suburban strip mall, scrolls through a series of messages:
Works by
Pablo Picasso (flash, flash)
Paul Gauguin (flash, flash)
Henri Matisse (flash, flash)
Here, on a giant tacky sign on a street resplendent with giant tacky signs, in a city resplendent with giant tacky signs that all ache to be giant tacky signs with Las Vegas Boulevard addresses, some of the most admired painters of the 20th Century are relegated to the same mode of advertising as $5.99 dinner specials and "loose slots." The sign would not look out of place at the aptly-named Terrible's Casino, as a matter of fact.
But the giant sign reminds you that it is, in fact, Steve Wynn's ragingly expensive art collection housed here, and even though the gallery exterior is slight on ambience, he does lord over works by some of the undisputed masters of 20th Century Art. And you're not likely to forget it. After all, Wynn Collection.
If you're in the mood for more aptly-curated, ragingly expensive art, you can wander over to the Venetian, walk under its very pink, very garish, very frescoed and not-quite-authentic-looking ceilings, and go to the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum, which boasts collections that wouldn't at all be out of place at the Whitney or MOMA. And then, in the spirit of having it all, you can walk for three minutes and plop down at a Wheel of Fortune slot machine, letting the lights and the hysteria and the promise of a magic, jingly pull suck you in.
--
It wasn’t always like this, of course. Las Vegas was connected to railway by 1905, and what became known as Glitter Gulch, the downtown enclave of casinos now firmly entrenched as the Strip’s tacky, embarrassing older brother, sprang up in the following decades. The hotel-casino concept started in Las Vegas with the Rancho El Vegas in 1940. The Flamingo, the first of the Strip hotels still around today, opened in 1946. The Riviera was the first of the Strip high-rises, built in 1955. Before that, the relatively squat Desert Inn, with a third-floor “skyroom,” was considered the place to go for a panoramic view of the city and the surrounding valley. The Rancho El Vegas began booking stars in 1941 to begin entertaining guests, and topless showgirls made their debut in 1957. A century earlier, Mormons settled in the area, later abandoning their modest adobe homes due to Indian raids. There’s still a sizable Mormon population in Las Vegas, even though there may be no worse place on Earth to be Mormon. [3]
When I announced to acquaintances living in Vegas that I was writing an essay about Vegas as the ultimate American city, even though I was doing so online, I could see the dramatic eye rolling and hear the expelled sighs that accompanied their online responses. The message could be summed up to say, "Here we go again," and indeed, they want to point out something that was clearly evident from driving off the Strip and into its residential clusters -- Vegas is not a 24/7 party for most of its residents.
There are not showgirls hanging out on every corner waiting to do a lavish musical number when the light changes from red to green. They wanted to make clear that Vegas is full of normal people having normal lives, in the same way that people from Dallas want to clarify that not everyone in Dallas wears a cowboy hat and lives on a ranch, in much the same way that people from Detroit want to point out that not everyone in Detroit lives in crumbling tenements and get around by stealing other peoples' cars.
Indeed, if you drive east of the Strip, past the airport, for about 10 or 15 minutes, you pass Henderson and then go into the heart of Green Valley, a 13,000-acre master planned community that is as lush and green and SUV-compatible as any other upscale suburban enclave you can picture in your part of the country.
Its primarily tourist attraction is the Ethel M. Chocolate Factory and Cactus Garden, which is exactly as advertised. You can tour the chocolate factory in a brisk ten-minute walk, browse in the gift shop (where the tour ends up, naturally), and then stroll outside to the cactus garden on the grounds, which allows you to learn more about indigenous desert plants than you ever thought possible with a box of chocolate tucked under your arm.
Green Valley, perhaps more than anything else in Vegas, hints at a normalcy along the lines of, say, a suburb in Phoenix, which might be as staidly normal as America gets. But this being Vegas, the normalcy feels worn more than owned -- an Epcot version of normal, a normal that looks as thematic and carefully contrived as anything on the Strip.
There are, after all, slot machines in the grocery stores in Vegas, newspaper vending machines full of escort services publications lining arterials well off the Strip, and fanciful backdrops of the Strip skyline behind the anchors delivering the local news. Many of Vegas's residents want to be thought of as normal people living in a normal city, but there's only so much of a case you can make for it before you say, "Yeah, but" and demand a local takes you to see Wayne Newton's house. Though some might refuse, others will invariably oblige, a little proud that they can lay claim to something that, while kitschy, is actually oddly iconic. [4]
Incidentally, the Wayne Newton house, which is really an estate called Shenandoah, is on that drive between the Strip and Green Valley at the corner of Sunset Road, a major east-west arterial connecting the Strip and the freeway to the eastern reaches of the Vegas Valley, and Pecos Road.
Shenandoah is in that uniquely conflicted realm between tasteful and tasteless that seems to be quintessentially Vegas and not really anything else. It wants to invoke the majesty of a Kentucky thoroughbred ranch, and at the same time, it wants its gilded golden gates and its placard-bearing public art.
To give you some indication of the sort of world we're in, Mike Tyson's house is about a block down Pecos, and it's infinitely more tasteful, the sort of house that gives me house envy (and my tastes run toward the clean and uncomplicated, just so you know). The only thing that even began to reveal the eccentricities of the owner inside was the rows of portable outdoor heaters along the walkways, strategically placed so Tyson could theoretically walk around the grounds of his house without experiencing a moment of cold; I can't say that's a particularly bad thing at all.
And we're not even in Vegas here -- we're in Henderson, where Vegas tries hardest to assert its normalcy, its just-like-youness, its anonymity. And yet, in this unassuming part of the metropolis, an instantly recognizable pop icon could call out "Hi, neighbor" and wave to one of the most notorious public figures of the last quarter-century, and then go back into his walled estate in preparation for another night of entertaining tourists from all over the world in a theater that bears his name.
With me, at least, the "we're just like you" argument isn't flying.
--
In a city where most of the tourist activity focuses on a single street, it's not surprising that so many of the Strip hotels want to control the vertical as well as the horizontal. The Bellagio has an elaborate series of motorized fountains in its massive pool fronting the Strip sidewalk. Every fifteen minutes, the Bellagio puts the fountains to work in a show marrying a song (could be Sinatra, could be Celine Dion, could be the National Anthem, could be anything emblematic and in broad brushstrokes really) with a synchronized dance of water jets. From across the street, at the Paris, one can see the show from the outdoor café terraces or from the air in the half-scale Eiffel Tower model.
The Stratosphere Tower, at 1,149 feet, is the tallest observation tower in the United States. Because it wouldn't be enough to have the tallest building in Vegas, the observation deck, at over 900 feet, boasts a roller coaster, a ride called the X Scream which basically dangles its riders over the side of the tower and then -- perversely -- stops there to let you peer at a potential death-by-falling, It also features a ride called the Big Shot which takes you 160 feet above the observation deck at a force of 4 Gs. It would seem that sadists got together to decide what attractions would be placed at the Stratosphere, though you can already see that someone in some marketing Gulag assigned to promote these rides would refer to fans of this sort of thing as "ultimate thrill-seekers."
And finally, the winner of the Sky Sweepstakes may be the Luxor -- built as a giant pyramid with a replica of the Sphinx of Gaza out front -- which projects a toxically-bright beam of light from its top triangular windows to the heavens once night falls. I'm no physics major, so I have no idea if there's a point where the light just dissipates to nothingness. I assume it does. Maybe it does go to infinity. I feel I should know this, and I feel like a failure for not being able to conclusively state where the Luxor's light stops. All that really matters from a Vegas standpoint, though, is it reaches higher than anything else on the Strip, and if you're out on the eastern edges of town, past the airport, toward the fringes of Ostensibly Just Like You-land, you can see it. It sure as hell reaches higher than the Stratosphere Tower does.
--
The hotels themselves, from personal experience and reports from other friends, shape up this way: opulent, grandiose lobbies that give way to hotel rooms with sumptuous bathtubs and views resplendent with neon streaking. Which sounds good, except Vegas hotels also tend toward bed-pillow ensembles that don't so much beckon you to sleep a languid sleep as they do forcibly recharge you for another day of gambling. They also fuel you in the form of in-house restaurants that carboload you to absurd levels of satiation for considerable prices. Cheap buffets can be found if you look hard enough, though it's clearly in the spirit of getting what you pay for.
Your idea of romance has to encompass an ability to laugh at kitsch together; fortunately, this works out quite well for my wife and me. But Vegas, at some point in the proceedings, would really rather have you peel off from one another, perch you side by side at slot machines, and let you have at it. After all, Vegas is not built on letting you hole up in a hotel room that can be had for as little as $79 a night.
There's also shopping to be had, with the two best examples being the Forum at Caesars Palace and the Grand Canal Shoppes (sic) in the Venetian Hotel.
The Forum, though it has a wide assortment of stores housed under a fake Roman setting complete with columns and a vast, ice-blue sky filled with puffy cumulus clouds, doesn't necessarily have to be walked through to get the full effect -- you can do that just as well by watching what might be the consummate Vegas movie, Showgirls. There's a critical scene in which Elizabeth Berkley's Nomi Malone character bonds with Gina Gershon's Cristal Connors character while enjoying a ridiculously indulgent lunch at a "patio" table on the Forum walkway, contrasting their good fortune with the particular brand of dog food they both favored in considerably leaner times, to make the rags-to-riches nature of their story just that much more blatant.
The movie casts Vegas as a sort of purgatory, and at the end of the movie, when Nomi leaves Vegas behind after committing a horrible-but-justified (in this setting, at least) crime, hitching a ride to Los Angeles, L.A. becomes cast as heaven. No, scratch that. Vegas is cast as sort of a reverse purgatory, where, once you've adequately blackened your soul, you are expelled into the bowels of hell -- here, Los Angeles in all its plastic, money-grubbing horror. The subtle undercurrent message of the movie (if such a thing can be said for the movie that put Joe Eszterhas on the map) is that Vegas is able to tart up the grit enough to keep it from being a Boschian landscape of soot-encrusted hard luck stories. The Forum at Caesars Palace is one of these freshly-painted tableaus hoisted up to hide the treachery and inevitable fall from grace that L.A. is notorious for. But then again, I'm not a big L.A. fan.
The Grand Canal Shoppes, on the other hand, demand to be walked through -- or better yet, demand to be journeyed through in a gondola steered by some minimum-wage lackey in a festive striped shirt, to get the full effect. Yet there is one on-screen moment that allows one to get the sense of the onslaught that is the GCS without actually setting foot (or splashing down) inside it.
Through some odd coincidence in which televisual life synchs up with your lived life, my wife and I saw the Regis Galerie segment of the Michael Jackson BBC special only several hours after walking though the real Regis Galerie ourselves. If you recall, there's a scene in which Jackson takes now-notorious documentarian Martin Bashir through Regis Galerie. Jackson proclaims the store, located in the Grand Canal Shoppes, as his favorite place to shop.
Regis Galerie specializes in Hideous and Overpriced Art -- a lot of bronze, a lot of splashy paintings -- the type of place where they don't mind throwing around terms like "giclees." You do not want to break anything in this store, and unless you tend toward the gem-encrusted or the ornate, you probably do not want to buy anything in this store. It's like Versailles without the necessary spacing -- everything is clumped together in rows, with aisles far too narrow to be reasonably sure you won't catch your foot on the corner of something that will cost you $10,000 in a dangerous game of You Break, You Buy.
You can see why Michael Jackson would like a place like this. Remember, this is a man who tends toward sequins and gold trim and get-ups that make him look like a general in the Army of Oz. Even with his current legal troubles, he still strikes me as the celebrity most likely to wear a crown in public. So I can't imagine why he wouldn't find Regis Galerie attractive.
Is it too reductive to reduce the entire shopping complex into what might arguably be its most narrowly specialized store? Perhaps. Yet when it comes to crystallizing the horrors of more-money-than-taste that can be had at the GCS, I keep flashing back to that scene in the Bashir movie, brilliant in its ability to catch Michael Jackson in a swoon over art that, despite its hundreds of hours to make and thousands of dollars to buy, would set any good normal American, even those who make the pilgrimage to Vegas to nibble from Eve's apple, into icy recoil.
--
Of course, there's a whole other route to excess in Vegas that doesn't require a continual hemorrhaging of money, but rather, one hefty payment upfront, and that's the Vegas show. The stage shows, as you might expect, are elaborate affairs that try to dazzle and overwhelm. Any attempt to connect on an earnest level seem doomed for failure, though Rita Rudner has carved out a niche for herself at New York New York that I imagine few could have predicted. Celine Dion, on the other hand, was probably on a trajectory for her own Vegas show from the time her emotive-yet-manly flexing moves entered her onstage repertoire.
With Siegfried and Roy on permanent hiatus, an impressionist/singer named Danny Gans (who shared face time with S&R in Mirage's full-court-press billboard campaign) is now ruling the Mirage [5], and the Amazing Jonathan, who appears to be a rougher, more plebian version of Gans, features at the Flamingo. You can, reductively, still group most of the Vegas show set into three categories: B and C-List Stars In Freefall, Multi-Taskers You've Never Heard Of, and Elaborate Stage Shows With Complete Unknowns (Featuring Breasts). But then you have to also figure in Cirque de Soleil, and that has completely changed the landscape of Strip hotel entertainment, thank God.
Currently, Cirque de Soleil is ruling the roost in Vegas, show-wise, and that's really not a bad thing. There are three official CdS shows currently running -- Mystere, at Treasure Island, which appears to be the most run-of-the-mill of the three; Zumanity, at New York New York, which is adult and racy and apparently so pointedly ribald that Paris Hilton walked out on it, according to Local Tour Guide after one of the troupe members pointed to her table and said, "Here's where all the prostitutes sit;" and O, at the Bellagio, which is of such a startling scale that it probably merits an essay all to itself.
Cirque de Soleil does not translate to TV, although the Bravo cable channel certainly tries by airing CdS specials whenever it's not airing Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. This is especially true of O, a show involving 81 performers, a deluxe theater at the Bellagio with a 1.5 million gallon tank of water with moving sections of floor, constantly shifting from pool to stage to stage with sections of pool. The whole show is stunning, and given that our tickets were $150 each (when my wife and I went), it's a good thing that it is so stunning. Even the opening unfurling of the curtain is orchestrated to be stunning. There are some vague themes and emotional tones in the piece, but if you broke it down and analyzed it, I think you would only make yourself sick, so really you should just watch it and enjoy it for the eye candy it is. And at the risk of sounding like a bourgeois consumer that can't quite make it to highbrow, you need to see this show when you're in Vegas -- yes, you, dear reader -- than for no other reason but to have this remain at one end of your theater spectrum. For the other, you should see a single actor perform Wallace Shawn's The Fever. Those are probably the most extreme theater poles you could seek out. [6]
Of course, you don't have to spend a Benjamin or more to see Vegas at its most over-the-topability. If you're going to see one schlocky, free piece-of-crap production, I heartily suggest The Sirens of TI, an elaborate 20-minute stage show designed for public consumption (sort of) which also doubled as the opening PR gambit in Treasure Island's transformation into TI.
Back when Treasure Island was Treasure Island, they'd do a show out in front of the hotel where the pirate ship sinks the British ship. The show was predictably thematic, full of yo-ho-hoing and appropriately festooned with skull-and-crossbone flags and eyepatches. Treasure Island is now -- avast! -- trying to remake itself into something younger and sultrier, in order to compete with the other hotels. Ergo, TI. But unfortunately for them, the TI logo has arrived on its giant light-up sign out front looking vaguely like the opening card on a children's video, and the calling card for TI has turned into a show that strives to be, above all else, babelicious.
There's still a pirate ship in The Sirens of TI, but it's placed in more of an adversarial role. Indeed, the show is essentially a chance to get away with as many clumsy sexual allusions as possible and sink a boat in the process. We start with voice over announcing that it's the 69th day at sea for the pirates (see, not subtle), and a cabin boy alights upon the deck of the Sirens' boat. The Sirens establish themselves early on, through dancing and costumes in the opening number, for lack of a better term, as hotties.
They establish their characters, and the character of the show, early on. The leader of the Sirens, Cinnamon, asserts that you can call her "Cin" (wink, nudge), and makes it a point to inform the audience about all the "seamen" she's brought into her "cove." (I wish I were kidding.)
It goes on from there to feature babe dancing, the emergence of the pirate ship, babe boasting, babe dancing, some pyrotechnics, the sinking of the pirate boat, and pirates boarding the deck of the siren boat for pornographic cavorting about. The music's horrible, too -- a collision of rock and schlock, truly outrageous in the cartoonish way that Jem (obscure '80s reference) was truly, truly outrageous.
It's as if the producers said, "Okay, here's a concept: let's make a show that's reeaaaally bad ... but we'll say it's good!" Clearly, though, there's something great about the show, if I can give you a cursory "Go see O" without describing a single scene, and yet painstakingly break down the Sirens show plot point by plot point. What's great about Sirens is this: people stay through the whole thing. Stunningly, some video tape it. As in record. The whole thing. I joked to my wife, in the post-show, shaking-our-heads analysis, that if I was recording it, I'd be a few minutes into it and go, "Ohhh, okay ... never mind," and pull the camera down.
But not these people. They were dutifully filming the whole thing. You would think that's nothing special, since, you know, Vegas, tourist, videocameras. Yet this phenomenon is rarer than you'd think in Vegas. I didn't see a lot of the compulsive videotaping people you'd expect at other tourist destinations.
I'm guessing that, other than the fact that a spinning slot machine doesn't translate well to the small screen, especially if it's spinning for several hours at a stretch, it's because people are indulging in behaviors they might not want recorded. The new motto for Vegas (this is the official motto, mind you, from their CVB) is "What Happens Here, Stays Here." By that line of reasoning, if you record it, it goes with you.
And I think, really, Vegas resists recording. It has to be experiential. You can't adequately film the adrenaline roller coaster that accompanies slot machine reverie or blackjack gaming or the tense, sinister-looking game called Pai Gow Poker, which involves some cryptic mix of cards and dominos, played by some of the most focused people in the casino, who also happen to be the people who look most like bit players in Bond movies.
And I'm pretty sure you can't just take a video camera into one of the many strip clubs in Vegas, speaking of what happens here stays here. Someone was telling me there's something like 28 strip clubs in Vegas, and though I don't know it empirically, I'm willing to guess that there's a whole other archetype in Vegas -- namely, the archetype that sports radio talk show host Jim Rome likes to call the This Stripper Really Likes Me Guy.
During my last stay in Las Vegas, there was a news story about a hearing involving Dennis Rodman, who got a DUI for wrecking a motorcycle in front of a strip club called Treasures. I saw enough billboards and alt-weeklies and heard enough sports talk radio during the trip to get a sense that the This Stripper Really Likes Me Guy is well taken care of in Vegas.
Again, it makes sense -- a sort of deductive reasoning sense -- in Vegas. In our society, sex is still largely in the realm of the forbidden, and strip clubs effectively make sex commerce, put a price tag on human contact, and in the relatively brief interchanges in which dancers and customers, meet, talk, carve out what appears to be a temporary, mutual semblance of love, and consummate the illusion via lapdance, the feeling like love becomes a commodity itself. And then, with relative tidiness, the dancer moves on to create similar connections with other customers, and the customer can walk out of the establishment and back to his life again, wearing the cloak of anonymity most of us wear.
(Or, if you're not anonymous, like Dennis Rodman is not, you can just wreck your motorcycle in front of the strip club and add to your already inflated and even tired bad-boy lore with maximum effectiveness, for what in our culture says bad boy more than hangs out at strip clubs, sports tattoos, and rides a motorcycle?)
The strip club makes sense in Vegas, more so than it does in Oklahoma City or Indianapolis, or in my hometown of San Antonio, which has recently passed a new set of rules banning dancer-customer contact as part of a moralist campaign that has also placed new regulations on one of the other permissible evils of our day and age: smoking. San Antonio isn't alone in setting up special rules around strip clubs, and in any other American city but Vegas, rules set up to regulate strip clubs is not a particularly shocking development.
But Vegas reasons that there's nothing wrong with it. In a world where everything is reduced to crass commerce, why not the courtship ritual and a grinding intimacy, too? I imagine, that if our technology ever produces a marketable, consumable virtual sex arcade, Vegas will become the place to test drive it. Like the indoor skydiving room just off the Strip, like the jousting tournaments at Excalibur, like the close encounters with Klingons at the Hilton's Star Trek: The Experience, Vegas wants to take what might reside in the more fantasy-laden realms of your imagination and vivify them into glaring Technicolor reality. Not even decorum need be an obstacle, the 28 gentlemen's establishments of Vegas seem to tell you in one throaty voice, as long as you create a culture of permission. After all, as even the CVB tells you, what happens here, stays here.
--
But Vegas is not just a magnet for degenerates looking to escape their lives, to exchange their gritty existences for elaborate fantasies. I would say that a majority of the millions of tourists who come through each year are here to, mechanically and with purpose, play games of chance in the hopes of making money. And so, we can't really talk about Vegas without mentioning the Octogenerian Slot Machine Players.
They're an archetype unto themselves, and as with other Vegas archetypes, they only become archetypical in the rarefied air of Vegas. In their normal, day-to-day lives, they're pleasant, retired people, many of them fussing over grandchildren and living humble but comfortable lives on savings accumulated through years of hard work, aided by buying into a real estate market more conducive to creating a nest egg and building for one's future than today's double-income, debt-happy economy. My septuagenarian in-laws are perhaps the prototype for this brand of Vegas tourist. [7]
Several times a year, something stirs within the souls of the OSMPs, they make the pilgrimage to Vegas, collect a bucket with quarters (or, for the ultra-spendthrifty, nickels), find a favorable machine, and pull away. Some slot machines don't even have levers anymore -- you just push a button and watch yourself lose money/win money/break even, for hours at a stretch. Some smoke. Some drink. All achieve a glassy reverie at some point in the proceedings. Eventually, they return home, doing helpful things on the plane ride home like waking up Your Correspondent to see if he wants anything from the stewardess, even though he's clearly asleep, even though there's nothing in his slumping, snoring figure to suggest he thirsts.
Whereas there's a certain level of intimidation to the games of chance controlled by a hotel employee -- perhaps reminiscent of hollow-eyed carneys who preside over carnival midway games you know are stacked against you -- there's something about the rows of slot machines that are inviting by contrast. By telling someone to deal you in, or that you want to put a chip down on your lucky number in roulette, or that you want a turn at the dice, you're having to admit to another person (no matter how professional a countenance or no matter how neutral an expression that person is able to maintain) that you gamble.
Though your inner devil might say, "Of course you do, you're in Vegas, that's what you're here for," your inner angel might feed you full of Puritan messages about the evils of gambling. Vocalizing your desire to gamble to another human being, even one in the employ of a casino, might be enough to push that debate front and center.
But slot machines don't talk. They don't have to fight to maintain a poker face whenever you do something brilliant or do something stupid at one of the tables. They don't remind you of your pastor back home. They just sit there, rows and rows of them, with the latent promise that one of them is going to deliver.
Despite being set to randomly deliver jackpots at unpredictable intervals, OSMPs like my mother-in-law will claim there's a system to playing the slots. My father-in-law goes as far as to talk about how playing the slots successfully is "a lot of work." I tend to believe him, and because he's the type of man who will look forward to his home improvement projects and stretch them out over multiple days, puttering and fussing under the guise of "getting things just right" in order to make them last and even savor them, I think that he probably actually enjoys the "hard work" of playing slots.
So they work. They scout out machines that have been recently abandoned by players who spent interminable amounts of time pulling or pushing with no results. They themselves sit for hours, mechanically feeding coins into the face of the machine, hoping for the release of coins that you would hope could fend off orgasm metaphors yet really can't, especially when you see a jackpot winner's reaction, an outpouring of joy that derails a personal sense of modesty en route to unfiltered bliss.
Of course, it's not all work -- as I said earlier, some drink, which is a simple way of saying that gambling and drinking are helplessly intertwined. That's another reason I believe slot machines are so popular -- it dawns on you at some point in the proceedings at the blackjack table or the poker table or even the roulette wheel that alcohol may cloud your judgment and cause you to lose more money that you would while sober. But in front of the slot machine, you're not losing more money with every pull so much as you're investing the time necessary to work the law of averages to your advantage and win that money back. And then some.
Clearly, though, the mission of Vegas is to get you to drink while gambling -- hence, the scantily-clad cocktail waitress, who in most of the hotels look decidedly like a paean to a dying age: the Playboy Club Epoch. Though seemingly engineered to salve the various hurts of middle-aged men, the costumes, I think that maybe, perversely, the Greatest Generation set, now spending their golden years on Vegas vacations, might be the real target of the scantily-clad cocktail waitress outfit.
You see, the outfit is evoking the nostalgia of a bygone era, and by wearing the outfit as rendered during the time where today's septuagenarians and octogenarians were first middle-aged men in need of spiritual/sexual balm, it's reflecting that reassuring reminder of "the way things used to be, back when they were good." Note, though, that is still has the same effect on a certain percentage of today's middle-agers. For today's hipper, snottier generations, it has a different appeal, predicated on the same kind of anti-cool cool that explains a predilection toward trucker caps and Pabst Blue Ribbon.
In any case, it's not so much what the cocktail waitress is or isn't wearing, but rather, what they're parading around on their trays.
Alcohol is pretty much inescapable in Vegas. Though it's not quite a situation where you're handed a drink as you get off the plane [8], drinks can be had pretty much anywhere you please. On our recent trip, we went up to the observation deck of the Eiffel Tower at the Paris, a half-scale model of the real thing that allowed you to, among other sightseeing endeavors, see the Bellagio fountain show from overhead. One fellow tourist glibly noted, to whoever would hear him, that this was the only place in Vegas without a bar attached to it. In other words, pretty much everyone notices there's a lot to drink.
This brings me to another of my favorite Vegas archetypes, the I Can't Believe They're Letting Me Drink On The Street Guy, who is either carrying a can of crappy domestic beer from a second-rate hotel for $1 or is carrying a large drink in a tall souvenir receptacle. [9] I saw at least three plastic Eiffel Towers being consumed on my walks up and down the Strip, and saw none in my two nights inside the Paris. Why not? The only reasonable explanation is that I Can't Believe They're Letting Me Drink On The Street Guy migrates. Any chump can drink from a sitting position -- it takes the professional acumen of I Can't Believe They're Letting Me Drink On The Street Guy to drink while walking. Besides, it's no fun to advertise that you've actually been inside the Paris while sitting in the middle of the Paris. It's better to let the throngs gathered on LVB know where you've stayed. [10]
The funny thing is, you don't have to have that level of professional drinking acumen to pick up your drink and walk. The latent permissiveness of Vegas allows unsuspecting candidates to walk around brandishing a drink like a trophy. It's a way of saying to the world, "I work hard and fit in the vast majority of my life; I've earned this moment of unbridled hedonism." And, in our world, by safe and conservative middle-American rules, this is just the kind of thing that passes for unbridled hedonism. We're perfectly willing to let this slide under these circumstances. We even welcome it. None of us have probably ever witnessed the amiable drunk at a party actually don a lampshade and start dancing, but if one did, we would recognize the trope, and we would laugh about it (provided, of course, that we took his keys and called him a cab at the end of the night).
What the Vegas pilgrims have done, essentially, is made this former little desert outpost a place to absorb and hold an ever-increasing number of mildly transgressive behaviors. It's no accident, for instance, that the Las Vegas season of MTV's seminal reality show The Real World was a running soap opera of sex, bad choices and aberrant behavior, all set against the tableau of the Palms, an off-Strip casino which has become the home base of choice for twentysomething enfants terribles.
Forget, for a moment, that the show was later surpassed in sex and sordidness by the cast of Real World San Diego -- they merely had to answer the call put forth by the Vegas cast. [11] And it was Vegas itself that incited the cast to riot, to such ludicrous extremes that Trishelle Cannatella, the central figure of the RW Vegas season, became something of a professional reality show cast member, later assigned to drink on camera and titillate fellow cast member Ron Jeremy on the WB's aptly-named Surreal Life. Trishelle, as you might expect, morphed into such a quasi-celebrity that she never donned her last name for her subsequent reality show appearances. She became a mononym, a sure sign as any of disposable pop icon status.
--
Though Real World Las Vegas is a prime indication of how Vegas is trying to market to a new generation of people with a healthy disposable income, the Vegas metro area is no longer merely a nice place to visit.
Between 1990 and 2000, the largest metro area growth in the nation, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, was easily Las Vegas. Its population spiked an incredible 83% percent in that ten-year period; the next biggest jump was Naples, Florida, with 65%, and Yuma, Ariz., at just under 50%. This is not just a one-time spike. Since 1960, Vegas has grown from just under 140,000 people to its current 1.5 million plus, at astounding growth intervals. The population more than doubled in the 1960s and has been above 60% growth in each subsequent decade.
And the people just keep coming. The city's official site claims that the Vegas Valley could reach the two million mark by next year. Last month, the Las Vegas Sun reported that another million people are expected to be added to the city's rolls in the next two decades. The article glosses over why this growth is continuing, instead focusing on some of the concerns a massive growth explosion brings to the metropolis, such as the hard-to-overlook fact that Las Vegas sits in the middle of a desert, and that might make water a contentious issue as more people flock to the city to take advantage of what gets euphemized as "favorable business conditions."
What I can surmise, after trolling business development agency websites and various newspaper articles, is that Vegas is a great place to do business because the burden of taxation in Clark County falls largely on the millions of tourists who come through McCarran each year. The weather is nice. You're never at a loss for how to entertain your clients, and though you may grow weary of it, and mutter to yourself, "Yeah, yeah, Wayne Newton's house" as you drive first-timers past Shenandoah yet again, there's always someone who's going to be wide-eyed and appreciative, who will actually be impressed that he Lives Among Us, that you are so seemingly well-connected.
At the risk of being reductive yet again, businessmen like sun, they like golf, and they like being able to get a drink after work. Ergo, Las Vegas. And while the tourism industry remains the major engine driving Clark County (and by extension, Nevada, since Clark Country makes up a good 70 percent of the state population), there are people living in Vegas that have nothing to do, occupation-wise, with the hotels and the hordes of tourist who come to Vegas each year seeking several days' escape from the rules that normally corral them into stagnant routine.
And you can tell that even at sunrise: a desert sunrise in the first week of Advent in the Christian calendar, where the air is tingly with cold -- where it is crisp, invigorating, all those things you say about a cold that you welcome, a cold you want to believe was delivered to your vacation destination expressly for your enjoyment. You can look around and notice subtle hints of Christmas if you try, but it's different from other cities, where the march toward Christmas is relentless, where wreaths and ads and glad tidings come in battalions.
At sunrise, in the outer reaches of North Las Vegas, of Henderson, of picture-perfect Green Valley, in the parts of Vegas that don't look like our postcard-ready images of Vegas, it's showers and cereal as part of this complete, nutritious breakfast and commutes to work. But on the Strip, where the nerve endings of Vegas crackle and sing, there's a temporary stillness that seems unnervingly quiet and disarmingly out-of-character. The jingling and whirring in the hotel lobby casinos is at an off-kilter staccato, and hotel employees see it fit to break out vacuum cleaners and bottles of cleaning solutions.
In hours, these places will be readily transformed again, with people from Iowa, from Massachusetts, from Europe and Japan. Throughout the lobby, in enough myriad languages to remind you that this is now, for all intents and purposes, an international city, it will essentially be the same message. It will be tourists, the lifeblood of the city with all that that entails, here for the express purpose of shedding their inhibitions for a few precious days, trying to figure out which compulsory layer they'd like to peel off first.
###
Footnotes:
[1] The closest thing to a major professional sports team in Vegas is the Las Vegas 51s, a Triple-A baseball franchise which used to have the more mundane moniker of the Las Vegas Stars. The 51s is a play on Area 51, the rumored military-controlled alien research center. The team's mascot is one of those almond-headed, big-eyed alien prototypes, which, in a shocking development for new parents, is precisely what your child looks like through the ultrasound at three months -- pretty much the first time you can actually view what looks like a face.
[2] Wynn owns a Picasso piece named "La Reve," incidentally.
[3] The above historical information comes from Las Vegas Online Entertainment Guide's history page, which delves much farther into the role of the casino and the Strip hotel in Vegas's development than the city's official site does, although the city's official site does note that Spainards traveling through the Vegas valley in the 1700s referred to the trip as a "journey of death," which can't be good for tourism even if it is historically accurate.
[4] Like my tour guide for the trip, a food stylist who hosts a nationally-syndicated radio show, moonlights as a UNLV instructor, and is clearly in a gustatory, golf-playing love with Vegas.
[5] That's not to suggest that Gans was in cahoots with that white tiger or anything.
[6] Okay, so maybe now I look highbrow.
[7] Though, actually, they can stave off the siren song of Vegas by going on a lower-rent version of the Vegas pilgrimage -- the Louisiana pilgrimage. Louisiana, which is also a den of sin, features casinos in a number of the towns (Lake Charles, Kinder, Bossier City) bordering Texas. Native American-run casinos, even closer than the Louisiana border, also serve as a sort of morphine to the heroin of Vegas. But, somehow, Vegas always beckons.
[8] A la the '70s ABC drama Fantasy Island, which used the "give the guests their Mai Tais" scene as a regular device, showing them happy and relaxed just before they started their fantasy vacations, which (like a Faustian bargain) had specific intents and aims that would always go horribly awry.
[9] Though you're actually more likely to see I Can't Believe They're Letting Me Drink On The Street Guy in New Orleans. Or, at least, you'll see him there more exuberantly.
[10] And, really, when all is said and done, and you factor in the breakfast buffet and the bathtubs and the relative calm in its casino, the Paris is a fine place to stay.
[11] No way do we let San Diego beat Las Vegas in anything.
You see, for most of the world, sunrise is the most purposeful time of day. For most of the world, save for the poor souls working night shift, morning is get-at-it time. The first few lemon-yellow rays appear in the east, the twittering machine of birds starts up, lights click off as punctuation. They're all signals to get moving, to start a new day, to brew coffee and read the paper and embark on whatever rituals we've adopted in the dubious but crucial goal of getting from a prone position on a bed to an upright position in an office.
If you've been to Las Vegas, you know that sunrise is the one time of day Las Vegas looks completely out of synch with itself. Yes, if you look hard at the hotels along the Strip, you can still see signs that life exists in the way we'd expect it to in Vegas. Cab drivers are moving tourists out of the hotels, with the implicit promise they'll be moving more in later in the day. A few stragglers, presumably placing their faith in a law of averages that rewards their tenacity, are seated at slot machines in windowless and massive hotel lobby casinos. You can even see a few people who have taken it upon themselves to honor some unspoken code of Vegas, literally partying all night, retreating to their hotel rooms. Some of them even manage to not look bleary and shaky doing so.
For a city that prides itself on nightlife and makes its fortune on gambling and is awash in thousands upon thousands of electric lights, sunrise is a caesura more than an event. It's when Vegas is least like Vegas, and is more like any other decent-sized American city in which people struggle with their alarm clocks, fumble their way to consciousness, and fill the air with smog on their way from the house to the job.
Of course, to most of those who visit Vegas each year -- the literal millions of them -- they're not likely to see sunrise. This is probably one of the few times in their lives they not only get to sleep in, but feel they are expected to.
Even if you tell yourself you're merely in observation mode, and you're driving around Vegas at sunrise with the resolve to not get sucked in by Vegas's temptations (and the resultant smugness that comes with it), know that Vegas is aiming one of its sequined arrows at your heart. It knows you have a weakness -- that there is something base and carnal within you that cries out for fulfillment. The billboards will seek you out. There are seven deadly sins. If it's not a high-level vice like sex or gambling, maybe it's something on the order of hobnobbing with Klingons at the Hilton's Star Trek: The Experience or eating a sushi dinner.
At nightfall, Vegas truly becomes Vegas, blotter-thick with images that either find their way onto postcards or are judiciously airbrushed from postcards: the lights, the buffets, the rows of street urchins clicking their escort services ad cards in the hopes you will make eye contact with them (which pretty much dooms you to taking one, and you only make that mistake once), the come-hither enticement of rows of slot machines, and come to think of it, the slippery-voweled double entendre of "loose slots."
At nightfall, Vegas becomes the full manifestation of Vegas. Vegas the city becomes Vegas the archetype. At sunrise, Vegas is something else entirely, but it's still not nearly as dormant as the majority of its tourists are.
Vegas at sunrise, you see, is not resting. It's reloading.
I’m sure this is not a novel thesis, but it’s one that bears repeating and reinforcing, so we can better understand our nation’s love affair with Las Vegas – the love that makes the little desert outpost that is McCarran International Airport the eighth busiest airport in the world. Las Vegas, even without a major sports franchise [1], even though it is currently ranked between Louisville and Jacksonville as the 51st largest media market in the nation, is the ultimate American city. New York might have the history and the melting pot, Los Angeles may have the most fertile climate for rags-to-riches ascent, Washington D.C. is the seat of power, and a number of cities would lay claim to being the most representative of the current America or the new, burgeoning America, depending on what thesis on America circa 2004 you’re trying to forward. But nowhere is the drive to consume, defended to the death as the pursuit of happiness, more evident than in Las Vegas – which makes Las Vegas, to me at least, the ultimate American city.
Vegas is where countless Americans come to play, and though there's not the sense that you can find everything you want in Vegas, like there is New York, there's definitely the sense that you can have your pleasure sensors suitably sated and diverted by its range of offerings. Chances are, you're not going to find that obscure album you've been scouring the bins of your mid-American record stores for in Las Vegas, but that same desire to be entertained will be filled by a stage show which will attempt to justify its ticket price in a sheer display of over-the-topness.
Go down the list of the fancier Strip hotels, and you can tick down the fantasy locations of a broad cross-section of Americans, depositing them in their choice of comfortable, dangerless recreations of where they'd most like to be. The Paris, the Monte Carlo, and the Venetian all conjure up images of a well-to-do, come-on-in-Americans version of Europe which may not be so welcoming in the George W. Bush era. The Mirage is a mélange of tropical settings which, through a name suggesting the windows of the imagination, isn't bound by any sort of geographical assignation whatsoever. The Excalibur, Caesars Palace and the Luxor opt for taking the guest back to a time in which their setting was the most desirous location to the people of that epoch -- certainly similar to how Americans view the United States of today. The Bellagio, though it hints at an Italian theme, seems to shoot for an aesthetic based on pure wealth.
If you look closely at the signs in front of what will become Wynn's, the newest and shiniest of the Strip hotels, you can see construction permit signs that read "La Reve." According to the Vegas native who served as my de facto tour guide for my last trip to the city, La Reve was too obscure and too hard to pronounce for most everyone, so developer Steve Wynn, the force behind Bellagio, Mirage, and Treasure Island, in a move hinting at both frustration with our plebeian ways and a Napoleonic ego, slapped his own name on the project and left it at that.
Steve Wynn is responsible for maybe my favorite juxtaposition of highbrow and lowbrow in the city -- the Wynn Collection. The museum, on the site of the former Desert Inn, features a dozen or so works by the likes of Picasso[2], Gauguin, and Matisse. You'd know this, even if you weren't an art aficionado, because the jumbotronic LED sign out front, which looks like it wouldn't be at all out of place fronting a suburban strip mall, scrolls through a series of messages:
Works by
Pablo Picasso (flash, flash)
Paul Gauguin (flash, flash)
Henri Matisse (flash, flash)
Here, on a giant tacky sign on a street resplendent with giant tacky signs, in a city resplendent with giant tacky signs that all ache to be giant tacky signs with Las Vegas Boulevard addresses, some of the most admired painters of the 20th Century are relegated to the same mode of advertising as $5.99 dinner specials and "loose slots." The sign would not look out of place at the aptly-named Terrible's Casino, as a matter of fact.
But the giant sign reminds you that it is, in fact, Steve Wynn's ragingly expensive art collection housed here, and even though the gallery exterior is slight on ambience, he does lord over works by some of the undisputed masters of 20th Century Art. And you're not likely to forget it. After all, Wynn Collection.
If you're in the mood for more aptly-curated, ragingly expensive art, you can wander over to the Venetian, walk under its very pink, very garish, very frescoed and not-quite-authentic-looking ceilings, and go to the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum, which boasts collections that wouldn't at all be out of place at the Whitney or MOMA. And then, in the spirit of having it all, you can walk for three minutes and plop down at a Wheel of Fortune slot machine, letting the lights and the hysteria and the promise of a magic, jingly pull suck you in.
--
It wasn’t always like this, of course. Las Vegas was connected to railway by 1905, and what became known as Glitter Gulch, the downtown enclave of casinos now firmly entrenched as the Strip’s tacky, embarrassing older brother, sprang up in the following decades. The hotel-casino concept started in Las Vegas with the Rancho El Vegas in 1940. The Flamingo, the first of the Strip hotels still around today, opened in 1946. The Riviera was the first of the Strip high-rises, built in 1955. Before that, the relatively squat Desert Inn, with a third-floor “skyroom,” was considered the place to go for a panoramic view of the city and the surrounding valley. The Rancho El Vegas began booking stars in 1941 to begin entertaining guests, and topless showgirls made their debut in 1957. A century earlier, Mormons settled in the area, later abandoning their modest adobe homes due to Indian raids. There’s still a sizable Mormon population in Las Vegas, even though there may be no worse place on Earth to be Mormon. [3]
When I announced to acquaintances living in Vegas that I was writing an essay about Vegas as the ultimate American city, even though I was doing so online, I could see the dramatic eye rolling and hear the expelled sighs that accompanied their online responses. The message could be summed up to say, "Here we go again," and indeed, they want to point out something that was clearly evident from driving off the Strip and into its residential clusters -- Vegas is not a 24/7 party for most of its residents.
There are not showgirls hanging out on every corner waiting to do a lavish musical number when the light changes from red to green. They wanted to make clear that Vegas is full of normal people having normal lives, in the same way that people from Dallas want to clarify that not everyone in Dallas wears a cowboy hat and lives on a ranch, in much the same way that people from Detroit want to point out that not everyone in Detroit lives in crumbling tenements and get around by stealing other peoples' cars.
Indeed, if you drive east of the Strip, past the airport, for about 10 or 15 minutes, you pass Henderson and then go into the heart of Green Valley, a 13,000-acre master planned community that is as lush and green and SUV-compatible as any other upscale suburban enclave you can picture in your part of the country.
Its primarily tourist attraction is the Ethel M. Chocolate Factory and Cactus Garden, which is exactly as advertised. You can tour the chocolate factory in a brisk ten-minute walk, browse in the gift shop (where the tour ends up, naturally), and then stroll outside to the cactus garden on the grounds, which allows you to learn more about indigenous desert plants than you ever thought possible with a box of chocolate tucked under your arm.
Green Valley, perhaps more than anything else in Vegas, hints at a normalcy along the lines of, say, a suburb in Phoenix, which might be as staidly normal as America gets. But this being Vegas, the normalcy feels worn more than owned -- an Epcot version of normal, a normal that looks as thematic and carefully contrived as anything on the Strip.
There are, after all, slot machines in the grocery stores in Vegas, newspaper vending machines full of escort services publications lining arterials well off the Strip, and fanciful backdrops of the Strip skyline behind the anchors delivering the local news. Many of Vegas's residents want to be thought of as normal people living in a normal city, but there's only so much of a case you can make for it before you say, "Yeah, but" and demand a local takes you to see Wayne Newton's house. Though some might refuse, others will invariably oblige, a little proud that they can lay claim to something that, while kitschy, is actually oddly iconic. [4]
Incidentally, the Wayne Newton house, which is really an estate called Shenandoah, is on that drive between the Strip and Green Valley at the corner of Sunset Road, a major east-west arterial connecting the Strip and the freeway to the eastern reaches of the Vegas Valley, and Pecos Road.
Shenandoah is in that uniquely conflicted realm between tasteful and tasteless that seems to be quintessentially Vegas and not really anything else. It wants to invoke the majesty of a Kentucky thoroughbred ranch, and at the same time, it wants its gilded golden gates and its placard-bearing public art.
To give you some indication of the sort of world we're in, Mike Tyson's house is about a block down Pecos, and it's infinitely more tasteful, the sort of house that gives me house envy (and my tastes run toward the clean and uncomplicated, just so you know). The only thing that even began to reveal the eccentricities of the owner inside was the rows of portable outdoor heaters along the walkways, strategically placed so Tyson could theoretically walk around the grounds of his house without experiencing a moment of cold; I can't say that's a particularly bad thing at all.
And we're not even in Vegas here -- we're in Henderson, where Vegas tries hardest to assert its normalcy, its just-like-youness, its anonymity. And yet, in this unassuming part of the metropolis, an instantly recognizable pop icon could call out "Hi, neighbor" and wave to one of the most notorious public figures of the last quarter-century, and then go back into his walled estate in preparation for another night of entertaining tourists from all over the world in a theater that bears his name.
With me, at least, the "we're just like you" argument isn't flying.
--
In a city where most of the tourist activity focuses on a single street, it's not surprising that so many of the Strip hotels want to control the vertical as well as the horizontal. The Bellagio has an elaborate series of motorized fountains in its massive pool fronting the Strip sidewalk. Every fifteen minutes, the Bellagio puts the fountains to work in a show marrying a song (could be Sinatra, could be Celine Dion, could be the National Anthem, could be anything emblematic and in broad brushstrokes really) with a synchronized dance of water jets. From across the street, at the Paris, one can see the show from the outdoor café terraces or from the air in the half-scale Eiffel Tower model.
The Stratosphere Tower, at 1,149 feet, is the tallest observation tower in the United States. Because it wouldn't be enough to have the tallest building in Vegas, the observation deck, at over 900 feet, boasts a roller coaster, a ride called the X Scream which basically dangles its riders over the side of the tower and then -- perversely -- stops there to let you peer at a potential death-by-falling, It also features a ride called the Big Shot which takes you 160 feet above the observation deck at a force of 4 Gs. It would seem that sadists got together to decide what attractions would be placed at the Stratosphere, though you can already see that someone in some marketing Gulag assigned to promote these rides would refer to fans of this sort of thing as "ultimate thrill-seekers."
And finally, the winner of the Sky Sweepstakes may be the Luxor -- built as a giant pyramid with a replica of the Sphinx of Gaza out front -- which projects a toxically-bright beam of light from its top triangular windows to the heavens once night falls. I'm no physics major, so I have no idea if there's a point where the light just dissipates to nothingness. I assume it does. Maybe it does go to infinity. I feel I should know this, and I feel like a failure for not being able to conclusively state where the Luxor's light stops. All that really matters from a Vegas standpoint, though, is it reaches higher than anything else on the Strip, and if you're out on the eastern edges of town, past the airport, toward the fringes of Ostensibly Just Like You-land, you can see it. It sure as hell reaches higher than the Stratosphere Tower does.
--
The hotels themselves, from personal experience and reports from other friends, shape up this way: opulent, grandiose lobbies that give way to hotel rooms with sumptuous bathtubs and views resplendent with neon streaking. Which sounds good, except Vegas hotels also tend toward bed-pillow ensembles that don't so much beckon you to sleep a languid sleep as they do forcibly recharge you for another day of gambling. They also fuel you in the form of in-house restaurants that carboload you to absurd levels of satiation for considerable prices. Cheap buffets can be found if you look hard enough, though it's clearly in the spirit of getting what you pay for.
Your idea of romance has to encompass an ability to laugh at kitsch together; fortunately, this works out quite well for my wife and me. But Vegas, at some point in the proceedings, would really rather have you peel off from one another, perch you side by side at slot machines, and let you have at it. After all, Vegas is not built on letting you hole up in a hotel room that can be had for as little as $79 a night.
There's also shopping to be had, with the two best examples being the Forum at Caesars Palace and the Grand Canal Shoppes (sic) in the Venetian Hotel.
The Forum, though it has a wide assortment of stores housed under a fake Roman setting complete with columns and a vast, ice-blue sky filled with puffy cumulus clouds, doesn't necessarily have to be walked through to get the full effect -- you can do that just as well by watching what might be the consummate Vegas movie, Showgirls. There's a critical scene in which Elizabeth Berkley's Nomi Malone character bonds with Gina Gershon's Cristal Connors character while enjoying a ridiculously indulgent lunch at a "patio" table on the Forum walkway, contrasting their good fortune with the particular brand of dog food they both favored in considerably leaner times, to make the rags-to-riches nature of their story just that much more blatant.
The movie casts Vegas as a sort of purgatory, and at the end of the movie, when Nomi leaves Vegas behind after committing a horrible-but-justified (in this setting, at least) crime, hitching a ride to Los Angeles, L.A. becomes cast as heaven. No, scratch that. Vegas is cast as sort of a reverse purgatory, where, once you've adequately blackened your soul, you are expelled into the bowels of hell -- here, Los Angeles in all its plastic, money-grubbing horror. The subtle undercurrent message of the movie (if such a thing can be said for the movie that put Joe Eszterhas on the map) is that Vegas is able to tart up the grit enough to keep it from being a Boschian landscape of soot-encrusted hard luck stories. The Forum at Caesars Palace is one of these freshly-painted tableaus hoisted up to hide the treachery and inevitable fall from grace that L.A. is notorious for. But then again, I'm not a big L.A. fan.
The Grand Canal Shoppes, on the other hand, demand to be walked through -- or better yet, demand to be journeyed through in a gondola steered by some minimum-wage lackey in a festive striped shirt, to get the full effect. Yet there is one on-screen moment that allows one to get the sense of the onslaught that is the GCS without actually setting foot (or splashing down) inside it.
Through some odd coincidence in which televisual life synchs up with your lived life, my wife and I saw the Regis Galerie segment of the Michael Jackson BBC special only several hours after walking though the real Regis Galerie ourselves. If you recall, there's a scene in which Jackson takes now-notorious documentarian Martin Bashir through Regis Galerie. Jackson proclaims the store, located in the Grand Canal Shoppes, as his favorite place to shop.
Regis Galerie specializes in Hideous and Overpriced Art -- a lot of bronze, a lot of splashy paintings -- the type of place where they don't mind throwing around terms like "giclees." You do not want to break anything in this store, and unless you tend toward the gem-encrusted or the ornate, you probably do not want to buy anything in this store. It's like Versailles without the necessary spacing -- everything is clumped together in rows, with aisles far too narrow to be reasonably sure you won't catch your foot on the corner of something that will cost you $10,000 in a dangerous game of You Break, You Buy.
You can see why Michael Jackson would like a place like this. Remember, this is a man who tends toward sequins and gold trim and get-ups that make him look like a general in the Army of Oz. Even with his current legal troubles, he still strikes me as the celebrity most likely to wear a crown in public. So I can't imagine why he wouldn't find Regis Galerie attractive.
Is it too reductive to reduce the entire shopping complex into what might arguably be its most narrowly specialized store? Perhaps. Yet when it comes to crystallizing the horrors of more-money-than-taste that can be had at the GCS, I keep flashing back to that scene in the Bashir movie, brilliant in its ability to catch Michael Jackson in a swoon over art that, despite its hundreds of hours to make and thousands of dollars to buy, would set any good normal American, even those who make the pilgrimage to Vegas to nibble from Eve's apple, into icy recoil.
--
Of course, there's a whole other route to excess in Vegas that doesn't require a continual hemorrhaging of money, but rather, one hefty payment upfront, and that's the Vegas show. The stage shows, as you might expect, are elaborate affairs that try to dazzle and overwhelm. Any attempt to connect on an earnest level seem doomed for failure, though Rita Rudner has carved out a niche for herself at New York New York that I imagine few could have predicted. Celine Dion, on the other hand, was probably on a trajectory for her own Vegas show from the time her emotive-yet-manly flexing moves entered her onstage repertoire.
With Siegfried and Roy on permanent hiatus, an impressionist/singer named Danny Gans (who shared face time with S&R in Mirage's full-court-press billboard campaign) is now ruling the Mirage [5], and the Amazing Jonathan, who appears to be a rougher, more plebian version of Gans, features at the Flamingo. You can, reductively, still group most of the Vegas show set into three categories: B and C-List Stars In Freefall, Multi-Taskers You've Never Heard Of, and Elaborate Stage Shows With Complete Unknowns (Featuring Breasts). But then you have to also figure in Cirque de Soleil, and that has completely changed the landscape of Strip hotel entertainment, thank God.
Currently, Cirque de Soleil is ruling the roost in Vegas, show-wise, and that's really not a bad thing. There are three official CdS shows currently running -- Mystere, at Treasure Island, which appears to be the most run-of-the-mill of the three; Zumanity, at New York New York, which is adult and racy and apparently so pointedly ribald that Paris Hilton walked out on it, according to Local Tour Guide after one of the troupe members pointed to her table and said, "Here's where all the prostitutes sit;" and O, at the Bellagio, which is of such a startling scale that it probably merits an essay all to itself.
Cirque de Soleil does not translate to TV, although the Bravo cable channel certainly tries by airing CdS specials whenever it's not airing Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. This is especially true of O, a show involving 81 performers, a deluxe theater at the Bellagio with a 1.5 million gallon tank of water with moving sections of floor, constantly shifting from pool to stage to stage with sections of pool. The whole show is stunning, and given that our tickets were $150 each (when my wife and I went), it's a good thing that it is so stunning. Even the opening unfurling of the curtain is orchestrated to be stunning. There are some vague themes and emotional tones in the piece, but if you broke it down and analyzed it, I think you would only make yourself sick, so really you should just watch it and enjoy it for the eye candy it is. And at the risk of sounding like a bourgeois consumer that can't quite make it to highbrow, you need to see this show when you're in Vegas -- yes, you, dear reader -- than for no other reason but to have this remain at one end of your theater spectrum. For the other, you should see a single actor perform Wallace Shawn's The Fever. Those are probably the most extreme theater poles you could seek out. [6]
Of course, you don't have to spend a Benjamin or more to see Vegas at its most over-the-topability. If you're going to see one schlocky, free piece-of-crap production, I heartily suggest The Sirens of TI, an elaborate 20-minute stage show designed for public consumption (sort of) which also doubled as the opening PR gambit in Treasure Island's transformation into TI.
Back when Treasure Island was Treasure Island, they'd do a show out in front of the hotel where the pirate ship sinks the British ship. The show was predictably thematic, full of yo-ho-hoing and appropriately festooned with skull-and-crossbone flags and eyepatches. Treasure Island is now -- avast! -- trying to remake itself into something younger and sultrier, in order to compete with the other hotels. Ergo, TI. But unfortunately for them, the TI logo has arrived on its giant light-up sign out front looking vaguely like the opening card on a children's video, and the calling card for TI has turned into a show that strives to be, above all else, babelicious.
There's still a pirate ship in The Sirens of TI, but it's placed in more of an adversarial role. Indeed, the show is essentially a chance to get away with as many clumsy sexual allusions as possible and sink a boat in the process. We start with voice over announcing that it's the 69th day at sea for the pirates (see, not subtle), and a cabin boy alights upon the deck of the Sirens' boat. The Sirens establish themselves early on, through dancing and costumes in the opening number, for lack of a better term, as hotties.
They establish their characters, and the character of the show, early on. The leader of the Sirens, Cinnamon, asserts that you can call her "Cin" (wink, nudge), and makes it a point to inform the audience about all the "seamen" she's brought into her "cove." (I wish I were kidding.)
It goes on from there to feature babe dancing, the emergence of the pirate ship, babe boasting, babe dancing, some pyrotechnics, the sinking of the pirate boat, and pirates boarding the deck of the siren boat for pornographic cavorting about. The music's horrible, too -- a collision of rock and schlock, truly outrageous in the cartoonish way that Jem (obscure '80s reference) was truly, truly outrageous.
It's as if the producers said, "Okay, here's a concept: let's make a show that's reeaaaally bad ... but we'll say it's good!" Clearly, though, there's something great about the show, if I can give you a cursory "Go see O" without describing a single scene, and yet painstakingly break down the Sirens show plot point by plot point. What's great about Sirens is this: people stay through the whole thing. Stunningly, some video tape it. As in record. The whole thing. I joked to my wife, in the post-show, shaking-our-heads analysis, that if I was recording it, I'd be a few minutes into it and go, "Ohhh, okay ... never mind," and pull the camera down.
But not these people. They were dutifully filming the whole thing. You would think that's nothing special, since, you know, Vegas, tourist, videocameras. Yet this phenomenon is rarer than you'd think in Vegas. I didn't see a lot of the compulsive videotaping people you'd expect at other tourist destinations.
I'm guessing that, other than the fact that a spinning slot machine doesn't translate well to the small screen, especially if it's spinning for several hours at a stretch, it's because people are indulging in behaviors they might not want recorded. The new motto for Vegas (this is the official motto, mind you, from their CVB) is "What Happens Here, Stays Here." By that line of reasoning, if you record it, it goes with you.
And I think, really, Vegas resists recording. It has to be experiential. You can't adequately film the adrenaline roller coaster that accompanies slot machine reverie or blackjack gaming or the tense, sinister-looking game called Pai Gow Poker, which involves some cryptic mix of cards and dominos, played by some of the most focused people in the casino, who also happen to be the people who look most like bit players in Bond movies.
And I'm pretty sure you can't just take a video camera into one of the many strip clubs in Vegas, speaking of what happens here stays here. Someone was telling me there's something like 28 strip clubs in Vegas, and though I don't know it empirically, I'm willing to guess that there's a whole other archetype in Vegas -- namely, the archetype that sports radio talk show host Jim Rome likes to call the This Stripper Really Likes Me Guy.
During my last stay in Las Vegas, there was a news story about a hearing involving Dennis Rodman, who got a DUI for wrecking a motorcycle in front of a strip club called Treasures. I saw enough billboards and alt-weeklies and heard enough sports talk radio during the trip to get a sense that the This Stripper Really Likes Me Guy is well taken care of in Vegas.
Again, it makes sense -- a sort of deductive reasoning sense -- in Vegas. In our society, sex is still largely in the realm of the forbidden, and strip clubs effectively make sex commerce, put a price tag on human contact, and in the relatively brief interchanges in which dancers and customers, meet, talk, carve out what appears to be a temporary, mutual semblance of love, and consummate the illusion via lapdance, the feeling like love becomes a commodity itself. And then, with relative tidiness, the dancer moves on to create similar connections with other customers, and the customer can walk out of the establishment and back to his life again, wearing the cloak of anonymity most of us wear.
(Or, if you're not anonymous, like Dennis Rodman is not, you can just wreck your motorcycle in front of the strip club and add to your already inflated and even tired bad-boy lore with maximum effectiveness, for what in our culture says bad boy more than hangs out at strip clubs, sports tattoos, and rides a motorcycle?)
The strip club makes sense in Vegas, more so than it does in Oklahoma City or Indianapolis, or in my hometown of San Antonio, which has recently passed a new set of rules banning dancer-customer contact as part of a moralist campaign that has also placed new regulations on one of the other permissible evils of our day and age: smoking. San Antonio isn't alone in setting up special rules around strip clubs, and in any other American city but Vegas, rules set up to regulate strip clubs is not a particularly shocking development.
But Vegas reasons that there's nothing wrong with it. In a world where everything is reduced to crass commerce, why not the courtship ritual and a grinding intimacy, too? I imagine, that if our technology ever produces a marketable, consumable virtual sex arcade, Vegas will become the place to test drive it. Like the indoor skydiving room just off the Strip, like the jousting tournaments at Excalibur, like the close encounters with Klingons at the Hilton's Star Trek: The Experience, Vegas wants to take what might reside in the more fantasy-laden realms of your imagination and vivify them into glaring Technicolor reality. Not even decorum need be an obstacle, the 28 gentlemen's establishments of Vegas seem to tell you in one throaty voice, as long as you create a culture of permission. After all, as even the CVB tells you, what happens here, stays here.
--
But Vegas is not just a magnet for degenerates looking to escape their lives, to exchange their gritty existences for elaborate fantasies. I would say that a majority of the millions of tourists who come through each year are here to, mechanically and with purpose, play games of chance in the hopes of making money. And so, we can't really talk about Vegas without mentioning the Octogenerian Slot Machine Players.
They're an archetype unto themselves, and as with other Vegas archetypes, they only become archetypical in the rarefied air of Vegas. In their normal, day-to-day lives, they're pleasant, retired people, many of them fussing over grandchildren and living humble but comfortable lives on savings accumulated through years of hard work, aided by buying into a real estate market more conducive to creating a nest egg and building for one's future than today's double-income, debt-happy economy. My septuagenarian in-laws are perhaps the prototype for this brand of Vegas tourist. [7]
Several times a year, something stirs within the souls of the OSMPs, they make the pilgrimage to Vegas, collect a bucket with quarters (or, for the ultra-spendthrifty, nickels), find a favorable machine, and pull away. Some slot machines don't even have levers anymore -- you just push a button and watch yourself lose money/win money/break even, for hours at a stretch. Some smoke. Some drink. All achieve a glassy reverie at some point in the proceedings. Eventually, they return home, doing helpful things on the plane ride home like waking up Your Correspondent to see if he wants anything from the stewardess, even though he's clearly asleep, even though there's nothing in his slumping, snoring figure to suggest he thirsts.
Whereas there's a certain level of intimidation to the games of chance controlled by a hotel employee -- perhaps reminiscent of hollow-eyed carneys who preside over carnival midway games you know are stacked against you -- there's something about the rows of slot machines that are inviting by contrast. By telling someone to deal you in, or that you want to put a chip down on your lucky number in roulette, or that you want a turn at the dice, you're having to admit to another person (no matter how professional a countenance or no matter how neutral an expression that person is able to maintain) that you gamble.
Though your inner devil might say, "Of course you do, you're in Vegas, that's what you're here for," your inner angel might feed you full of Puritan messages about the evils of gambling. Vocalizing your desire to gamble to another human being, even one in the employ of a casino, might be enough to push that debate front and center.
But slot machines don't talk. They don't have to fight to maintain a poker face whenever you do something brilliant or do something stupid at one of the tables. They don't remind you of your pastor back home. They just sit there, rows and rows of them, with the latent promise that one of them is going to deliver.
Despite being set to randomly deliver jackpots at unpredictable intervals, OSMPs like my mother-in-law will claim there's a system to playing the slots. My father-in-law goes as far as to talk about how playing the slots successfully is "a lot of work." I tend to believe him, and because he's the type of man who will look forward to his home improvement projects and stretch them out over multiple days, puttering and fussing under the guise of "getting things just right" in order to make them last and even savor them, I think that he probably actually enjoys the "hard work" of playing slots.
So they work. They scout out machines that have been recently abandoned by players who spent interminable amounts of time pulling or pushing with no results. They themselves sit for hours, mechanically feeding coins into the face of the machine, hoping for the release of coins that you would hope could fend off orgasm metaphors yet really can't, especially when you see a jackpot winner's reaction, an outpouring of joy that derails a personal sense of modesty en route to unfiltered bliss.
Of course, it's not all work -- as I said earlier, some drink, which is a simple way of saying that gambling and drinking are helplessly intertwined. That's another reason I believe slot machines are so popular -- it dawns on you at some point in the proceedings at the blackjack table or the poker table or even the roulette wheel that alcohol may cloud your judgment and cause you to lose more money that you would while sober. But in front of the slot machine, you're not losing more money with every pull so much as you're investing the time necessary to work the law of averages to your advantage and win that money back. And then some.
Clearly, though, the mission of Vegas is to get you to drink while gambling -- hence, the scantily-clad cocktail waitress, who in most of the hotels look decidedly like a paean to a dying age: the Playboy Club Epoch. Though seemingly engineered to salve the various hurts of middle-aged men, the costumes, I think that maybe, perversely, the Greatest Generation set, now spending their golden years on Vegas vacations, might be the real target of the scantily-clad cocktail waitress outfit.
You see, the outfit is evoking the nostalgia of a bygone era, and by wearing the outfit as rendered during the time where today's septuagenarians and octogenarians were first middle-aged men in need of spiritual/sexual balm, it's reflecting that reassuring reminder of "the way things used to be, back when they were good." Note, though, that is still has the same effect on a certain percentage of today's middle-agers. For today's hipper, snottier generations, it has a different appeal, predicated on the same kind of anti-cool cool that explains a predilection toward trucker caps and Pabst Blue Ribbon.
In any case, it's not so much what the cocktail waitress is or isn't wearing, but rather, what they're parading around on their trays.
Alcohol is pretty much inescapable in Vegas. Though it's not quite a situation where you're handed a drink as you get off the plane [8], drinks can be had pretty much anywhere you please. On our recent trip, we went up to the observation deck of the Eiffel Tower at the Paris, a half-scale model of the real thing that allowed you to, among other sightseeing endeavors, see the Bellagio fountain show from overhead. One fellow tourist glibly noted, to whoever would hear him, that this was the only place in Vegas without a bar attached to it. In other words, pretty much everyone notices there's a lot to drink.
This brings me to another of my favorite Vegas archetypes, the I Can't Believe They're Letting Me Drink On The Street Guy, who is either carrying a can of crappy domestic beer from a second-rate hotel for $1 or is carrying a large drink in a tall souvenir receptacle. [9] I saw at least three plastic Eiffel Towers being consumed on my walks up and down the Strip, and saw none in my two nights inside the Paris. Why not? The only reasonable explanation is that I Can't Believe They're Letting Me Drink On The Street Guy migrates. Any chump can drink from a sitting position -- it takes the professional acumen of I Can't Believe They're Letting Me Drink On The Street Guy to drink while walking. Besides, it's no fun to advertise that you've actually been inside the Paris while sitting in the middle of the Paris. It's better to let the throngs gathered on LVB know where you've stayed. [10]
The funny thing is, you don't have to have that level of professional drinking acumen to pick up your drink and walk. The latent permissiveness of Vegas allows unsuspecting candidates to walk around brandishing a drink like a trophy. It's a way of saying to the world, "I work hard and fit in the vast majority of my life; I've earned this moment of unbridled hedonism." And, in our world, by safe and conservative middle-American rules, this is just the kind of thing that passes for unbridled hedonism. We're perfectly willing to let this slide under these circumstances. We even welcome it. None of us have probably ever witnessed the amiable drunk at a party actually don a lampshade and start dancing, but if one did, we would recognize the trope, and we would laugh about it (provided, of course, that we took his keys and called him a cab at the end of the night).
What the Vegas pilgrims have done, essentially, is made this former little desert outpost a place to absorb and hold an ever-increasing number of mildly transgressive behaviors. It's no accident, for instance, that the Las Vegas season of MTV's seminal reality show The Real World was a running soap opera of sex, bad choices and aberrant behavior, all set against the tableau of the Palms, an off-Strip casino which has become the home base of choice for twentysomething enfants terribles.
Forget, for a moment, that the show was later surpassed in sex and sordidness by the cast of Real World San Diego -- they merely had to answer the call put forth by the Vegas cast. [11] And it was Vegas itself that incited the cast to riot, to such ludicrous extremes that Trishelle Cannatella, the central figure of the RW Vegas season, became something of a professional reality show cast member, later assigned to drink on camera and titillate fellow cast member Ron Jeremy on the WB's aptly-named Surreal Life. Trishelle, as you might expect, morphed into such a quasi-celebrity that she never donned her last name for her subsequent reality show appearances. She became a mononym, a sure sign as any of disposable pop icon status.
--
Though Real World Las Vegas is a prime indication of how Vegas is trying to market to a new generation of people with a healthy disposable income, the Vegas metro area is no longer merely a nice place to visit.
Between 1990 and 2000, the largest metro area growth in the nation, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, was easily Las Vegas. Its population spiked an incredible 83% percent in that ten-year period; the next biggest jump was Naples, Florida, with 65%, and Yuma, Ariz., at just under 50%. This is not just a one-time spike. Since 1960, Vegas has grown from just under 140,000 people to its current 1.5 million plus, at astounding growth intervals. The population more than doubled in the 1960s and has been above 60% growth in each subsequent decade.
And the people just keep coming. The city's official site claims that the Vegas Valley could reach the two million mark by next year. Last month, the Las Vegas Sun reported that another million people are expected to be added to the city's rolls in the next two decades. The article glosses over why this growth is continuing, instead focusing on some of the concerns a massive growth explosion brings to the metropolis, such as the hard-to-overlook fact that Las Vegas sits in the middle of a desert, and that might make water a contentious issue as more people flock to the city to take advantage of what gets euphemized as "favorable business conditions."
What I can surmise, after trolling business development agency websites and various newspaper articles, is that Vegas is a great place to do business because the burden of taxation in Clark County falls largely on the millions of tourists who come through McCarran each year. The weather is nice. You're never at a loss for how to entertain your clients, and though you may grow weary of it, and mutter to yourself, "Yeah, yeah, Wayne Newton's house" as you drive first-timers past Shenandoah yet again, there's always someone who's going to be wide-eyed and appreciative, who will actually be impressed that he Lives Among Us, that you are so seemingly well-connected.
At the risk of being reductive yet again, businessmen like sun, they like golf, and they like being able to get a drink after work. Ergo, Las Vegas. And while the tourism industry remains the major engine driving Clark County (and by extension, Nevada, since Clark Country makes up a good 70 percent of the state population), there are people living in Vegas that have nothing to do, occupation-wise, with the hotels and the hordes of tourist who come to Vegas each year seeking several days' escape from the rules that normally corral them into stagnant routine.
And you can tell that even at sunrise: a desert sunrise in the first week of Advent in the Christian calendar, where the air is tingly with cold -- where it is crisp, invigorating, all those things you say about a cold that you welcome, a cold you want to believe was delivered to your vacation destination expressly for your enjoyment. You can look around and notice subtle hints of Christmas if you try, but it's different from other cities, where the march toward Christmas is relentless, where wreaths and ads and glad tidings come in battalions.
At sunrise, in the outer reaches of North Las Vegas, of Henderson, of picture-perfect Green Valley, in the parts of Vegas that don't look like our postcard-ready images of Vegas, it's showers and cereal as part of this complete, nutritious breakfast and commutes to work. But on the Strip, where the nerve endings of Vegas crackle and sing, there's a temporary stillness that seems unnervingly quiet and disarmingly out-of-character. The jingling and whirring in the hotel lobby casinos is at an off-kilter staccato, and hotel employees see it fit to break out vacuum cleaners and bottles of cleaning solutions.
In hours, these places will be readily transformed again, with people from Iowa, from Massachusetts, from Europe and Japan. Throughout the lobby, in enough myriad languages to remind you that this is now, for all intents and purposes, an international city, it will essentially be the same message. It will be tourists, the lifeblood of the city with all that that entails, here for the express purpose of shedding their inhibitions for a few precious days, trying to figure out which compulsory layer they'd like to peel off first.
###
Footnotes:
[1] The closest thing to a major professional sports team in Vegas is the Las Vegas 51s, a Triple-A baseball franchise which used to have the more mundane moniker of the Las Vegas Stars. The 51s is a play on Area 51, the rumored military-controlled alien research center. The team's mascot is one of those almond-headed, big-eyed alien prototypes, which, in a shocking development for new parents, is precisely what your child looks like through the ultrasound at three months -- pretty much the first time you can actually view what looks like a face.
[2] Wynn owns a Picasso piece named "La Reve," incidentally.
[3] The above historical information comes from Las Vegas Online Entertainment Guide's history page, which delves much farther into the role of the casino and the Strip hotel in Vegas's development than the city's official site does, although the city's official site does note that Spainards traveling through the Vegas valley in the 1700s referred to the trip as a "journey of death," which can't be good for tourism even if it is historically accurate.
[4] Like my tour guide for the trip, a food stylist who hosts a nationally-syndicated radio show, moonlights as a UNLV instructor, and is clearly in a gustatory, golf-playing love with Vegas.
[5] That's not to suggest that Gans was in cahoots with that white tiger or anything.
[6] Okay, so maybe now I look highbrow.
[7] Though, actually, they can stave off the siren song of Vegas by going on a lower-rent version of the Vegas pilgrimage -- the Louisiana pilgrimage. Louisiana, which is also a den of sin, features casinos in a number of the towns (Lake Charles, Kinder, Bossier City) bordering Texas. Native American-run casinos, even closer than the Louisiana border, also serve as a sort of morphine to the heroin of Vegas. But, somehow, Vegas always beckons.
[8] A la the '70s ABC drama Fantasy Island, which used the "give the guests their Mai Tais" scene as a regular device, showing them happy and relaxed just before they started their fantasy vacations, which (like a Faustian bargain) had specific intents and aims that would always go horribly awry.
[9] Though you're actually more likely to see I Can't Believe They're Letting Me Drink On The Street Guy in New Orleans. Or, at least, you'll see him there more exuberantly.
[10] And, really, when all is said and done, and you factor in the breakfast buffet and the bathtubs and the relative calm in its casino, the Paris is a fine place to stay.
[11] No way do we let San Diego beat Las Vegas in anything.
posted by philwest at 4:37 AM
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