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INSIDE LAS VEGAS
This is a rambling, conversational, gossipy meditation on Las Vegas by the author of "The Godfather". It retails
a lot of old Las Vegas myths, relates a number of amusing anecdotes and offers a cursory overview of the mechanics of the
town back in the Seventies. It's illustrated with a lot of photographs, which are oddly unsatisfying after the passing of
a few decades, since they concentrate on the people of Las Vegas, and the people of Las Vegas haven't changed that much.
Wider views of the scene are more fascinating now, since the physical face of the city has changed so much.
Puzo's cheerful cynicism about the corruption of American society in general, and the relative harmlessness of Las Vegas,
remains charming and persuasive.
ARCHITECTS
22 May 2005
The American Institute Of Architects was in town this week for its national convention -- 27,000 strong. Among those
attending were not one but two old friends and former roommates from my school days -- Deane Evans and John Carney.
Deane is the Executive Director of the Center For Architecture and Building Science Research at the New Jersey Institute
Of Technology in Newark. More importantly, he was my 9th-grade roommate in prep school. We spent many hours in our dorm
room debating which female movie stars we would or would not "kick out of bed" -- at a time when such choices were
firmly in the realm of highly advanced speculative fiction. Pictures of those we deigned to grace with our sexual favors
were taped to the walls of our room and included Francoise Dorleac and her sister Catherine Deneuve, Jeanne Moreau and Brigite
Bardot. True to our youthful idealism we have never, so far as I know, in all the years that have since passed, kicked any
of these women out of our beds.
Deane gave three talks at the convention here, two on school design and one on affordable housing design. Here's a link
to a web-site resource Deane created on the subject of affordable housing design:
Affordable Housing Design Advisor
Deane got into town Thursday evening and we hung out at the Mandalay Bay Resort, visiting the restaurant-nightclub rumjungle
and the bar Red Square, which has a heroic-scale statue of Lenin, imported from Russia after the fall of the Soviet empire,
outside its entrance. Protests against the installation of the dictator's image in one of the shrines of American capitalism
led to the decapitation of the statue. Lenin's head is now on view in a refrigerated case behind the bar, surrounded by the
establishment's collection of rare vodkas from around the world.
In the picture above, the headless tyrant gives Deane an unwitting benediction.
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| John At the Wynn Las Vegas Pool Complex |
John Carney got into town the next day and I met him for an investigation of the hotel he was staying at -- the new Wynn Las
Vegas resort. On my second visit to the place I discovered that the hotel rooms are on the small side but pleasant and well-appointed
and that there are many intriguing spaces and passages -- but the whole thing still had a musty air . . . no sense of the
"action" so crucial to the success of a good casino resort. It seemed more like a shopping mall with gaming opportunities
than like a true Las Vegas "experience destination". Indeed, it seemed like a monument to yuppie tidiness. John
was appalled by the bad taste of the decor -- I was appalled by the mediocrity of the overall vision. It continued to strike
me, on second viewing, as a tired rehash of things Wynn has done better in his earlier groundbreaking resort designs.
John is an architect based in Jackson, Wyoming, where he builds extraordinary homes for the well-heeled settlers there
-- enchanting structures that seem fresh but are still engaged in a dynamic conversation with the traditions of the American
West. (He also designs public buildings, like schools and churches, and hotels -- and has recently designed a skyscraper
now going up in Denver which will be the city's tallest building.)
I met John when I was a (temporary) undergraduate at Stanford. We roomed together briefly in the notorious hippie fraternity-sorority
Beta Chi, which introduced co-ed bathrooms to the Stanford campus -- considered a radical innovation in 1969. It proved an
enduring inconvenience to all. Playboy visited Beta Chi to record the shower room being used communally by men and women
-- an event which had to be staged for the photographer, since it never happened in the ordinary course of things.
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| © 2004 Carney Architects |
John was at the AIA convention to receive an award for a building he designed -- a wine silo attached to a private residence
in Wyoming. It's a good example of John's style. A wine silo is by its nature unconventional, though of course the structure
echoes the familiar grain silo, and so does not look precisely "modern" or out of place iconically in its rural
setting. The interior of the silo is said to be inspired by the inside of a wine cask, and it certainly echoes that, while
at the same time incorporating surprising inversions of expectation. We expect wine to be stored in a cellar, for example,
below ground, along cave-like corridors which run horizontally -- not in a tower with a vertical thrust above ground.
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| © 2004 Carney Architects |
The wine silo is a building then in conversation with tradition, but with surprising twists and turns. It has, to me, a narrative
quality, the quality of a tale or fable -- it is an object and a space with dramatic qualities. It is "fabulous"
-- as much modern architecture is not, because much modern architecture substitutes order and logic for the unexpected quirks
of a good story . . . or a powerful dream. This is a mistake which, in the context of Las Vegas, would prove fatal economically.
The casino resorts offer places where people can get comfortably lost -- as in the spell of a pleasing dream -- and also
places where they can have "experiences", can enact stories starring themselves in slightly different roles than
they normally inhabit.
Architecture in Las Vegas, and all good popular architecture, I think, possesses this quality of "action" --
of manageable surprise, jeopardy and risk, which are what the gaming tables and machines offer, and the bars and clubs, too
. . . places where the self can expand or relax in a theatrical environment designed for such metamorphosis.
You can see more pictures of the wine silo, and of other building by John's firm, here:
Carney Architects
In the picture below, John photographs the wine tower at the restaurant Aureole. In this design, the wine is housed in a
central core of racks and waitresses strap themselves into harnesses and are lifted up and down to retrieve particular bottles
as they are requested. This is an actual example of the conversation of culture in process:
It was of course extremely exciting to wander around Las Vegas with two people whose lives center around building and community
design. John and Deane were less enthralled than I am by the creative, if often vulgar, concepts at play in the physical
plant of Las Vegas -- more concerned than I am, but ought to be, by the issues of sustainability which the boomtown mentality
of Las Vegas tries its best to manage on an ad hoc basis, and otherwise ignore.
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| John and Deane Learn About Marine Predators at Shark Reef |
But the town served its primary purpose for us -- as a place and opportunity for fun. We visited the Shark Reef attraction
at the Mandalay Bay -- a fine walk-through aquarium in a dramatic environment. It wasn't as thrilling as I'd imagined it
would be, but it was enjoyable and even instructive.
John and I had drinks and some Cajun food at the bar at the House Of Blues, with its dazzling decor centering on crucifixes
made out of bottle caps.
I had a chance to buy John and Deane a drink at my local -- the center bar at the Hard Rock, where John became so entranced
by the collection of historic guitars that we had to drag him out of the place.
We dined in middle-American splendor at my favorite steak joint in Vegas -- Binion's Ranch Steakhouse, atop that casino's
hotel tower, with its splendid views of downtown and the valley beyond.
I persuaded John and Deane to place real money at risk at the roulette tables at the El Cortez -- the oldest casino in
Las Vegas, and thus the oldest legal casino in America. They each contributed $20 to the local gaming revenues -- I got lucky
on my last spin and so only dropped $3.50.
All in all it was a delightful and intellectually stimulating couple of days -- perfectly poised between the pleasure of seeing
old friends with lots of shared history and speculation about the future of our wayward and degenerate but oddly exhilarating
culture.
Below are the notes John was jotting down in the picture above -- he thinks and communicates often in purely visual terms:
FASHION AND DEATH
18 May 2005
Fashions in clothing, Walter Benjamin speculates, always involve a dialogue with death. Fashion, with its mercurial shifts
in style, its preoccupation with novelty, seems to thumb its nose at the eternal stasis of death -- defiantly proclaiming
life . . . but at the same time, by investing material things, articles of clothing, with the illusion of life, and especially
with the illusion of erotic life -- "the sex appeal of the inorganic", as Benjamin calls it -- followers of fashion
embrace death in a danse macabre, a merry whirl with a corpse. Even to thumb one's nose at something means always staring
it in the face.
The investment of clothing and other material objects with erotic life, a kind of fetishism that serves the marketing
of commodities in modern capitalism, extends its pathology, for men, to the female body itself, which becomes a commodity,
becomes essentially inorganic. If an old man can sleep with a young woman, he can deny death -- since he is not sleeping
with an individual, a human being who will age and die, but with the image of her youth. She must be interchangeable as a
partner, lest her individuality, her subjection to time, rob her of her commodity value as an elixir of immortality.
Always the corpse haunts the male vision of the female -- and this, as Benjamin points out, finds expression in the tendency
to dissect the female form and worship its component but severed parts. "I'm a breast man," you will hear men say,
or, "I'm a leg man," or, "I'm an ass man." But breast men and leg men and ass men are all butchers.
So in movies you have the phenomenon of body doubles -- offering dislocated parts of themselves in close-up to stand in
for the naked being of a modest star. The use of body doubles is, I think, one of the few phenomena in our culture which
can be indisputably designated as sexually obscene.
We worship the exposed female body in our culture, but in a sick way -- a way that robs it of life. Now might be a good
time to turn our eyes backwards to another culture that worshipped the naked human body, both male and female -- that of the
ancient Greeks. There was idealization in the Greek nude, but no gross exaggeration of component body parts. Its models
were real youths not radically endowed in any particular way but pleasing in toto as images of the beauty of the human body.
Almost any of us can look at them and think, "With a little exercise, even I . . ." or "When I was twenty,
I . . ."
As obesity, a kind of spasmodic surrender to somatic despair, claims more and more of us, and breast enhancement seduces
more and more young girls, it should become clear that the image of the "genetic celebrity", of the "perfect"
body, as the fashion of the day sees it, is a demonic phantasm, the shadow of a corpse, very specifically designed to lure
us into a dance with death -- with the only incarnation of death which is truly terrifying . . . the kind that happens before
we die.
[Note that the Venus de Milo, above, and the woman at her bath below, are both images of Aphrodite, the goddess of erotic
love. In our society, many might consider both to be candidates for cosmetic surgery -- breast enlargement in the case of
the first, liposuction in the case of the second. But both show that there was an age when men (most likely) expended extravagant
amounts of time and discipline and genius on the loving memorialization and exaltation of their "deficient" forms.]
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| (© 2005 Las Vegas Review Journal/John Locher) |
GOLDEN AGE
16 May 2005
For sheer scientific interest it's hard to beat a Winky Wright fight. Wright is a very skillful champion without a heavy
knock-out punch, so he has to find other ways to win, and those ways are always instructive and often fascinating in the extreme.
Last Saturday at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas he put his skills to work against the great Felix Trinidad, a
boxer whose technique has decided limits but who commands one of the hardest punches in the game. His power has made him
one of the most beloved of boxers, a true celebrity, and carried him to an awesome record of 42 wins, with 35 knock-outs,
against only one loss, to the great and crafty Bernard Hopkins. Wright had moved up a weight class, from 154 to the middleweight
limit of 160, for the occasion.
As the contest began on Saturday, the betting and the crowd's affection were all with Trinidad.
Trinidad has good upper-body and head movement and his killer punches are thrown with lightning speed. His great flaw
as a boxer is that he doesn't move well on his feet. He tends to stay in front of a man and look for the one opening he needs
to put him on the floor.
Wright moves exceptionally well on his feet -- he works his angles with fine calculation. He is also a great counterpuncher
-- used to dodging his opponents blows and then delivering short, sharp scoring blows in response. Over the course of a match
these blows are usually enough to gain him a decision.
The problem for Wright was this -- Trinidad's fists are so fast that dodging them in anticipation of a counterattack might
be impossible, and Trinidad only needed one of them to connect to put Wright down and out.
Wright, a lefty, solved the problem with classical elegance -- with his jab. He came straight in to Trinidad, from the
first moments of the first round, showing enormous courage in the tactic, and whipped out his right jab with blinding quickness.
It was enough to discombobulate Trinidad, to distract him from his head-hunting. Wright would then sometimes follow up with
a straight left, or double up on the jab -- and then dance away.
The strategy disconcerted Trinidad, but whenever he took the initiative to counter it, Wright would cover his head with
his gloves and his midsection with his elbows and let Trinidad pound away in a kind of rope-a-dope routine, with Winky as
the rope. Trinidad threw thunderous punches at Wright's gloves, hoping I guess to get him to drop one of them long enough
to make an opening for a more effective blow, but Wright kept to his defensive posture with iron discipline and never gave
Trinidad that opening. In frustration, Trinidad would go for Wright's body, but Wright's defense was such that Trinidad could
only find a good target below Wright's belt. Referee Jay Nady had to warn Trinidad twice about this infraction and in the
9th he finally took a point away for it.
Between these infrequent and ineffective charges by Trinidad, Wright came back with his jab -- which stayed fast and accurate.
It was a brilliant display of boxing -- a perfect plan perfectly executed.
About midway through the match I had the feeling of watching something beautiful and sublime -- a work of art. But there
remained a twofold danger for Wright -- one, that the awesome body blows by Trinidad, legal or illegal, would wear Wright
down eventually and reduce his hand speed, on which everything depended, and two, that Wright's utter domination of Trinidad
would make him ambitious to put him away in dramatic fashion, and that in any such attempt Trinidad might find his chance
to connect with a terminal blow.
In the event, Wright's hands stayed lively to the very end -- his jab a thing of wonder to behold. And even when he rocked
Trinidad badly in the 9th, he was not tempted to press the advantage -- perhaps remembering last week's fight between Corrales
and Castillo, with its demonstration of how dangerous an almost beaten fighter can be.
I gave only one round to Trinidad -- the last, in which he mounted a desperate attack to try and rescue the bout. Wright's
defense held, and he got off some good counterpunches of his own, but Trinidad was the busier and more aggressive man, and
I felt he earned the nod for the 12th, if only for the display of heart.
If you want to know why they call it "the sweet science", watch Wright's performance in this fight. The science
of pugilism was on full display, and it was as sweet as a lyric poem.
I've now been living in Las Vegas for a little over six months and I've seen three extraordinary prize-fights in that
time. The epic duel between Morales and Pacquiao, the sublime and almost unbelievable slugfest between Corrales and Castillo,
and Saturday night's poem on the art of boxing by Winky Wright. We are, suddenly, in a golden age for the game, at least
beneath the heavyweight ranks, where sloppiness and clownishness reign. Boxing is seen by our culture at large only through
the prism of the heavyweight division -- but for members of the Fancy, who can look past the bumbling of the big boys, these
are fast becoming legendary times.
For a brief glimpse of Winky's jab, in an exclusive Nowhere Confidential video clip, those with a high-speed Internet connection
can click on the link below (that's Winky in the red trunks:)
Winky's Jab
There were a bunch of high-profile professional poker players sitting near me at the fight, including Mike Sexton, co-host
of the World Poker Tour broadcasts and a respectable player himself, and Scotty Nguyen, former World Series Of Poker champ
and still a rounder to be reckoned with. People would shout at him, "Hey, Scotty -- all in!" and he'd laugh delightedly
in response. That's him in the picture above, wearing sunglasses and posing for a picture with a fan.
Celebrity sightings are common in Las Vegas, and always mildly amusing, but when I saw Diego Corrales enter the arena
on floor level below me (too far away to photograph) I got a chill. Corrales, victor in the already-legendary fight with
Jose Luis Castillo on 7 May, is way more than a celebrity. He's a hero -- and that's not something you see every day.
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| (Wikipedia) |
AWAKENING
14 May 2005
There is a history behind history -- that is, behind the pragmatic recording of what people and societies do there is
a history of the unconscious dreams that motivate their activities.
In his great unfinished magnum opus "The Arcades Project", Walter Benjamin saw in the covered shopping arcades
of 19th-Century Paris (the "Capital Of the 19th Century", as he called it) not just a development in the architecture
of retail sales, or urban design, or fashion or social organization, but a phantasmagorical landscape in which the hidden
dreams of an era converged. Barriers both collapsed and re-erected themselves there, as they do in actual dreams -- barriers
between street and interior, public and private, commodity and fantasy.
The dream which is instinct in any age and in its phantasmagorical spaces is hard to analyze, because everyone is dreaming
it -- no one recognizes it as a dream. We look for rational, practical explanations for the manifestations of that dream
-- while we are still inside it, dreaming it.
In "The Arcades Project" Benjamin was looking for a new literary form -- a loosely organized collage of quotations
from historical texts and commentaries on them -- which would have the effect of waking us from our dream and letting us step
back from it long enough to appreciate it for what it is. It's sort of like that phenomenon familiar from actual dreams when
something happens which makes us self-conscious, and within the dream itself we say, "This must be a dream!"
If I say that Las Vegas is the Capital Of the 21st Century, and that the "arcades" of its casino resorts and
satellite attractions are the phantasmagorical landscapes of this age's subterranean dreams, much as the arcades of Paris
once were for the 19th Century -- how can I possibly prove my point? If it's true, then Las Vegas can only be experienced
authentically from within the dream we are all dreaming but don't realize we are dreaming.
As Benjamin knew, a place, a phenomenon like Las Vegas cannot be understood fully from an historical or sociological or
aesthetic or economic vantage, as those disciplines are traditionally practiced. It needs to be analyzed as a dream -- with
the understanding that dreams can be explicated rationally only so far, and that in rational explications, the true nature
of the dream experience is violated.
Cunning is required to wake the dreamer from his sleep in such a way that he does not lose contact with his dream state.
One must sometimes speak the language of dreams to the dreamer, in order to trick her into an awareness of her state of narcosis.
This is the great challenge of writing about Las Vegas.
The importance of writing about Las Vegas is clear. "Each epoch dreams the one to follow," says the historian
Michelet. Most of us do not live in places that resemble the Las Vegas Strip -- except in subliminal ways we can't completely
appreciate. But our children and grandchildren will live in places that resemble the Las Vegas Strip in explicit ways.
Consider the Soho district in downtown Manhattan, for example. It's become a big New Jersey mall, housed in beautiful
old 19th-Century cast-iron buildings. The buildings lose their authenticity in the process, changing from urban structures
to suburban ones, in terms of the way they're used. This is not so different from building a fiberglass replica of the Venetian
Grand Canal in Las Vegas and turning it into a shopping arcade. In fact, the Vegas fakery is preferable in some ways, because
it's honest fakery -- we're less likely to lose our spiritual bearings in the midst of it. The yuppification and suburbanization
of New York are far more insidious and hard to appreciate.
Las Vegas is just like everywhere else -- only more so. It's where the future is dreaming itself into being.
Any serious thinking about or study of Las Vegas has to begin with "The Arcades Project', available in an excellent annotated
edition from Harvard's Belknap Press. You can buy it here:
The Arcades Project
SUBURBAN XANADU
12 May 2005
This is one of the few genuinely important books about Las Vegas -- part of a new trend of studies, mostly from academia,
which seek to revise the popular mythology about the city's growth, a mythology centering on a vast organized conspiracy by
criminal syndicates generally identified as "the Mafia".
Schwartz argues that the rise of Las Vegas is better seen as a logical result of various cultural and economic developments
in post-WWII America -- America's perennial and paradoxical repulsion from/attraction to gambling, and the general suburbanization
of the nation.
These two developments were intertwined -- since suburbanization was caused in part by a flight from the decay and the
social corruption of urban centers, which corruption included organized gambling interests and their attendant political pathologies.
Since giving up gambling was never a real possibility for Americans, the solution turned out to be quite simple -- isolate
gambling in suburban-style resorts in the middle of a distant desert, distant even from the traditional gambling halls of
downtown Vegas, thus providing familiar-feeling places suburbanites could patronize without fear that their activity would
inadvertently pollute their own communities back home.
Given this somewhat peculiar social function, the casino resorts of the Las Vegas Strip, argues Schwartz, developed according
to patterns remarkably similar to the general trends of development in the country at large. The difference was, he admits,
that casino managers in the post-war era had specialized skills which could only have been acquired illegally outside of Nevada
in the years before the war -- a fact which the state of Nevada viewed with unconcern -- and that traditional sources of capital
were unavailable to the casino resort developers, making them dependent on untraditional and often extra-legal sources.
One might argue that in making his case Schwartz goes too far in downplaying the import of those differences. The skills
possessed by mobbed-up Las Vegas casino men in the Fifties did not just include managerial and accounting procedures for running
profitable gambling establishments, but practical experience in the corruption of local political forces and a knowledge of
the uses of murder and terror to regularize their business.
He also suggests that investment of illegally acquired or directed funds in Vegas casino resorts was an alternative to
less savory investments, such as the narcotics trade, for example -- but in fact one of the primary functions of the casino
resorts in their first few decades was to launder money acquired in such socially noxious enterprises, conducted elsewhere,
perhaps, but dependent on the casino resorts for maximum liquidity and profitability.
In encouraging us to recognize the normative patterns of casino resort development, Schwartz also skirts the question
of the degree to which those normative patterns themselves included political corruption and other extra-legal activities.
Meyer Lansky may have come to resemble an ordinary businessman in many respects, once you discounted his violent past, but
one must also concede that many ordinary and even respected businessmen, such as Joseph Kennedy, for example, Ambassador to
the Court of St. James and father of a president, at times invested in and profited from the same illegal activities that
enriched the so-called Mafia kingpins. Since those activities depended on political corruption and violence, including murder,
it may be more sensible to think of a businessman like Kennedy as a thug with pretensions than to think of a thug like Lansky
as a businessman "with a past".
The point is that they were always part of the same system, and that, aside from a retreat from the cruder forms of violence,
the system has not changed, nor does it vary as much as we might like to think across the spectrum from legal to "illegal"
enterprises. There are stern laws on the books governing the trading of securities, but the SEC does not have the funding
to comprehensively investigate breaches of those laws, relying instead on occasional high-publicity prosecutions of egregious
transgressors. This was more or less how gambling was managed when it was an "illegal" activity operating under
the protection of corrupted local officials.
This view of things is essentially what Denton and Morris argue in their seminal book "The Money and the Power"
-- that the norms of corporate practice in America have always been deeply corrupted and corrupting . . . that Lansky and
Kennedy (and Ken Lay) are not exceptions to the rule but simply practitioners of normal business methods who got exposed and
were forced to pay a price, in posthumous reputation or exile or prosecution. The operators of rigged systems which depend
on the public's belief that they are not rigged have always been willing to sacrifice those who get caught "cheating"
-- in the interest of preserving the necessary illusion. That, too, is normative business practice in America -- in Mafia
clubhouses as in the hallowed precincts of the New York Stock Exchange.
Political protection money, such as that paid out by Lay, the largest contributor to George Bush's re-election campaign,
only gets you so much protection -- in the case of a public scandal, at a local carpet-joint or in a publicly-traded corporation,
the sheriff who used to be your best friend is going to be leading you off in handcuffs if he thinks that he can preserve
his own skin in the process.
But one can't really fault Schwartz for not compiling an exhaustive prosecutorial brief against corporate America -- his
focus is narrower here, and tremendously useful. The exceptional nature of Las Vegas has gotten plenty of attention -- in
reminding us of its essential normality, Schwartz tells us much about the nature and the structure of America itself.
You can buy the book here:
Suburban Xanadu
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| Promotional decor for the fight outside the restaurant Aureole at the Mandalay Bay |
CORRALES-CASTILLO
8 May 2005
They're already calling it a classic, one for the ages, the fight of the year -- a year which isn't even half over and
which has also seen the epic combat between Morales and Pacquiao, covered at length in my Nowhere Confidential report of 25
March [now in the Nowhere Confidential Archive section and in the Fists Of Fury boxing section.]
If you're a member of the Fancy you know I'm talking about the awesome battle between Diego Corrales and Jose Luis Castillo
at the Mandalay Bay Events Center in Las Vegas last night. If you're not, take a look at the fight when it's rebroadcast
on Showtime and try to believe your eyes. I was there, and I still don't believe mine.
The arena was barely a third sold-out for the event and when I got there for the second of the undercard fights it looked
almost empty. The non-televised fights on the card were all goofy and highly unscientific but entertaining. One of them
featured a preview of the sort of startling turn-around that would electrify the crowd (continually) in the main event.
Carlos de Leon, Jr. of Puerto Rico is a terrific-looking middleweight prospect from Puerto Rico -- 12 and 0 going into
last night's fight, with a high percentage of knock-outs. He's big, seems to be in top condition and has some boxing skills.
He was scheduled to fight an "opponent" named Shannon Miller, a boxer with a lot of experience, most of it on the
losing end, but for some reason not announced he found himself facing a journeyman named Marcos Perera, who clearly must have
taken the fight on short notice due to some problem with Miller.
de Leon easily dominated the much smaller man in the opening round and looked to be cruising to his 13th win. But in
the second round he delivered a low blow to Perera which sent him to his knees for several minutes in what looked to be excruciating
pain. When Perera made it to his feet he walked around slightly bent over at the waist, in a silly-looking variant of the
Groucho Marx gait. For some reason the crowd found this very funny, and I could hear several women in my section giggling
uncontrollably. (Aren't fight fans wonderful?)
The whole thing seemed to piss Perera off and he came back with a fury in the rest of the round. It wasn't enough to
win the round, but it was surprising, considering the way things had been going.
From then on Perera never let up. In the next round he knocked de Leon down. In the 4th he knocked him down twice and
the referee called the bout. Which goes to show that you need to be careful when you assault a man's dignity in the ring,
since you never know what reserves of pride might be unleashed in the process.
The first televised fight was an undistinguished contest featuring Juan Manuel Marquez, who holds two title belts in the
featherweight division and fought Manny Pacquiao to a draw in a memorable bout in which Pacquiao had him on the canvas three
times early in the fight but couldn't put him away. Marquez battled back for the rest of the fight to overcome the deficit
on the scorecards and proved himself a warrior to be reckoned with.
He fought Victor Polo at the Mandalay Bay on Saturday night. Polo is a respectable contender and a southpaw, and his
style gave Marquez trouble. The result was a tactical battle without much action which got the small crowd restive. "Somebody
throw SOMETHING," one guy near me cried out plaintively at one point. "Why don't you take him out to dinner?"
another advised Marquez. Marquez mostly threw sharp clean punches from way outside, building up points towards an inevitable
win. In the 7th round he threw one of these punches so suddenly and so swiftly that it put Polo on the canvas -- less it
seemed from the power of the thing than from its incalculable speed. That provided the only real excitement of the bout.
Polo got back up and finished the fight -- the two men avoided each other cordially as much as honor allowed and Marquez
won handily on all the judges' scorecards.
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| The fighters take the ring for the main event |
The goofiness and/or caution of the undercard fights did not prepare one for what was to come -- but looking at the faces
of Corrales and Castillo on the big video screens as they made their ways to the ring one could see that the mood of the night
was about to shift. These guys had the air of grown-ups facing something terrible but inevitable.
Castillo is a fighter who doesn't move exceptionally well on his feet or punch exceptionally hard, but he's a skillful
enough boxer. He likes to go forward and pound away at an opponent and grind him down. Corrales is taller and rangier, with
more speed and a harder punch but not known for his sturdiness. Like many rangy fighters he can't always absorb punishment
well and has been knocked down, though not out, a lot. Both men have awesome wills, though, and never give up, so the fight
did not figure to go the distance.
My sense of it was this -- either Corrales would knock Castillo out sometime in the first four rounds, or Castillo, if
he survived the early going, would knock Corrales out sometime in the last four rounds. Beyond that, prediction would be
foolish.
In the end it went much (though not quite) as I had foreseen, but on a level no one could have imagined.
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| The main event |
Corrales did indeed dominate the early rounds, but just barely. He hit Castillo repeatedly with combinations that would have
felled a lesser man, and almost felled Castillo. But Castillo gave almost as good as he got and the rounds were very close.
When the fourth ended, I thought -- now Castillo's time has come . . . now he will win.
But the balance never tipped too far in either direction and as the battle wore on I was gripped by a strong feeling of
sadness at the thought that someone was going to lose this fight. It had become a battle of wills, a contest on a moral and
spiritual plane. By the 8th round I had a feeling that Corrales had the edge. He seemed to be landing the harder blows and
he seemed, surprisingly, fresher. But that just made Castillo's refusal to surrender all the more admirable. Still, moral
determination can take you only so far -- in the end the body has its limits. But anyone who watched this fight now knows
that those limits are sometimes wider than the mind can easily conceive.
In the 8th Castillo made a startling comeback, fighting it seemed on willpower alone. He opened a cut under Corrales's
eye and nearly closed both of them. By this point both men seemed to have abandoned defense altogether, willing to take any
amount of punishment to find the opening that would end things decisively.
And then, in the 10th, it happened -- exactly as I had predicted. Castillo landed a combination that put Corrales down.
He got up to continue but he looked dazed and unsteady on his feet. The crowd, which heavily favored Castillo -- Las Vegas
boxing fans are overwhelmingly pro-Mexican, and Corrales was a mere American -- had been roaring incoherently throughout the
fight. The roar turned mournful in the middle rounds, with an undertone of shock and anger. Now it soared into the realms
of delirium.
A guy behind me screamed, "It's over!" And I agreed with him. Corrales's destruction was now just a matter
of time, and not much time at that. Castillo struck with more combinations and Corrales went down again. Somehow he got
up on all fours and then up on his feet to beat the count, but he looked like he was somewhere else, far from Las Vegas and
this ugly beating he was getting.
Both times he went down Corrales lost his mouthpiece -- by crafty design or simply from punch drunkenness. Fighters who
are ready to give up often spit out their mouthpieces in unconscious anticipation of surrender. In any case, retrieving the
mouthpiece and getting it put back in by his cornermen gave Corrales a few extra seconds to get his head together and his
legs coordinated.
Referee Tony Weeks, a seasoned veteran, seemed to take his time transferring the mouthpiece to Corrales's seconds -- I
had a feeling he was giving them a chance to stop the fight, because Corrales looked on the verge of absorbing some vicious
and possibly debilitating further punishment. But Joe Goosen, Corrales's trainer, obviously had no intention of throwing
in the towel. Indeed, after the second knockdown he gave his fighter a stern and admonitory look -- as though trying to convey
to him the gravity of the situation. Goosen appeared serious but oddly calm -- which may have had some influence on what
happened next.
The fight resumed. Corrales didn't yet seem to be all there, but his dislocation from reality took an astonishing form.
He stood up straight, with no attempt at defense, and attacked Castillo fearlessly. There was no time to tie up and regroup
-- he'd lost three points in the 10th, two from the knockdowns and one from Weeks, who had penalized him, quite correctly,
for spitting out his mouthpiece the second time.
At times in the middle rounds I'd had a sense watching Castillo of seeing a ghost in action. Physically beaten, he was
operating by pure will, transcending the physical. Now Corrales seemed to have entered the same disembodied territory. His
body was beaten -- something else was fighting in the ring in its place.
He hit Castillo with a punch that stunned him, sent him back into the ropes. He hit him again four times as he leaned
against the ropes, his hands down, his eyes rolling upwards, out on his feet. Weeks called an end to the fight to prevent
certain permanent damage to Castillo and possibly his death.
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| (AP) |
Corrales had come back from the dead and was now champion. Castillo, who'd had the fight won in merely mortal terms, had
lost. I discovered, when my mind settled a bit, that my mouth was wide open and that I was holding my head in my hands --
a perfect cartoon-figure expression of shock.
The cry from the crowd was indescribable -- filled with sorrow and astonishment and an almost inhuman excitement. The
place seemed suddenly crowded to the rafters, bursting its seams -- a case of emotional standing-room only.
An earlier fight had been postponed to accommodate the television schedule but almost no one stayed for it. The crowd
and the emotion and the noise surged out of the arena. I followed it, in order to have a cigarette outside the lobby area,
and it seemed to me as though everyone was screaming, though it was simply a question of many people talking at high volume,
in a state of extreme excitement about what they'd just seen. A fight broke out in the lobby between partisans of the two
fighters -- I was nearly knocked off my feet by a female security guard racing to quell the disturbance. I remembered that
there had been no metal detectors at the ticket gates, as there usually are at boxing matches, and decided to distance myself
from the fracas just in case any of the post-bout combatants were packing.
|
| The last fight |
I went back in to the almost deserted arena to watch the last fight -- as a way of winding down, I guess, and to do honor
to the toilers in the trenches of boxing, who would get no glory from this historic night. I watched a pretty good lightweight
named Razman Palyani defeat a journeyman fighter named Ortiz. In the middle of it, Steve Albert and Jim Gray, the Showtime
announcers, made their way past me out of the arena. Someone shouted something to Gray, who turned back and said, "You'll
never see a better fight than that."
I'm sure I never will. Joe Goosen, when asked about the possibility of a rematch, on everyone's mind after such a contest,
said, "These two should never fight each other again -- it's too much." They will, of course, boxing economics
being what they are -- but it's hard to imagine any other outcome than one of them killing the other in the bout.
I went over to RM Seafood, an ultra-moderne restaurant at the Mandalay Bay, for some soothing crabcakes and beer. I couldn't
think about the fight -- there didn't seem much to think about. All its meaning had been fully explicated and exhausted in
the ring. What remained for me was a kind of wonder, an expanded sense of the horizons of the human will.
The night was still young by Vegas standards, barely midnight, and I had more adventures in store, but I'll have to write
about them some other time.
[Postscript: Referee Tony Weeks was certainly right to intervene when he did to prevent serious injury to Castillo, but
he could have done it in a different way -- by ruling a knockdown on the grounds that only the ropes were keeping Castillo
on his feet, which was in fact the case, and giving Castillo a countdown, in which he might have had time to recover. I'm
glad it didn't go that way, because Castillo had taken enough punishment for one night, and might have only recovered enough
to get himself into more serious trouble -- but given Corrales's remarkable recovery from two knockdowns, I can certainly
see merit in the argument that Castillo deserved his own second chance at turning things around yet again.]
FROM THE BOTTOM OF THE OCEAN
6 May 2005
I worked into the early morning hours last Wednesday and along about 10am I realized a) that I hadn't eaten any food in
a long time and b) that the water was about to be turned off in my apartment building to accommodate work on the main water
line.
It seemed advisable to set out on some errands. I first taxied over to the Mandalay Bay to pick up a ticket for the Castillo-Corrales
fight on Saturday, which promised to be a thriller. I could tell that the fight wasn't selling well when I asked what seats
were available and the clerk at the box office pointed to the seating chart and asked where I'd like to be. I got a terrific
mid-priced seat and went off to have some breakfast at the House Of Blues. Eggs Benedict, merely acceptable, with soggy hash
browns and a first-rate screwdriver. (It's a place not to be visited before lunch time.)
Then I remembered that the Tropicana was hosting an exhibit of recovered artifacts from the Titanic and decided to go
see it. I took the tram from the Mandalay Bay to the Excalibur, which is located across The Strip from the Tropicana.
If you have a high-speed Internet connection you can take the tram ride with me by clicking on the link below:
RIDE THE TRAM!
At the Excalibur I crossed the pedestrian bridge over The Strip to the Tropicana for my first visit to the legendary resort.
It's not in great shape these days. It has a musty air and isn't crisply air-conditioned. It's interior design is haphazard
-- there are no cozy spaces apart from the one under the old colored-glass barrel vault, and even that is partially filled
up with a big, ugly stage for lounge acts. There's an enormous poker room at the Tropicana, non-smoking and almost totally
deserted when I went to look at it at noon (unlike, for example, the rooms at the Palms or the El Cortez, which allow smoking
and are jammed day and night.) Why the casino managers don't see a connection between these two facts is one of the major
mysteries of modern Las Vegas.
I headed quickly to the exhibit, having gotten got a discount on my ticket because I'm a local, which filled me with civic
pride.
The exhibit was spooky, mainly because it featured so many items in a state of remarkable preservation, considering that
they'd lain under a couple of miles of ocean for 80 years or so. Seeing dishes and silverware and lumps of coal that once
rode on the great ship was astonishing enough -- but seeing a quite well-preserved deck of playing cards was something else
again. Most of the paper items recovered intact had been inside leather pouches or luggage -- the tanning process apparently
makes leather and thus anything enclosed by leather inedible by marine organisms.
There was also on display a very large section of the ship's outer hull.
Such an exhibit is perfectly suited to a casino resort, which strives to provide visitors with "experiences"
-- not just remarkable scenes but dramatic spaces to inhabit and navigate, not just things to look at but things which look
back at you, which have "aura", as Walter Benjamin put it, trying to isolate the difference between seeing a mechanical
reproduction of a work of art and encountering the work of art itself.
It's the difference between an activity and "action" as the word is understood in gaming terms. An activity
can be pre-planned, pre-imagined -- action involves uncertainty, jeopardy, the possibility of tangible loss or reward. Action
can be found in other enterprises than gambling, as the sociologist Erving Goffman has argued -- in the hazards of trying
to hook up in a singles bar, for example.
People come to Las Vegas for action in many forms -- dining in the presence of actual paintings by Picasso, stuffing dollar
bills between the breasts of actual naked women, losing actual hard-earned money or winning actual unearned money at a slot
machine, watching actual men try to knock each other unconscious in a boxing ring, standing in the presence of an actual piece
of the hull of the doomed liner Titanic, or an actual toilet from one of its third-class bathrooms. At the Main Street Station
casino downtown you can even -- if you're a man -- piss against an actual piece of the Berlin Wall.
So much of modern experience is virtual these days -- Las Vegas specializes in what is real . . . cheap, tawdry, deracinated,
depraved, wrenched out of context and leached of meaning . . . but real, like a tattoo, like a hand-job for hire. What Las
Vegas sells is an exact reflection of the state of America's psyche, of the world's psyche, in our time.
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| © 2004 Bella Baran |
LOOKING UP THROUGH TREES/OUT TO SEA
4 May 2005
Above is a sketch by Bella Baran, a wonderful artist who lives in Israel and whom I know through the Bob Dylan newsgroup
rec.music.dylan. I know Bella's work from the Internet as well, through e-mailed reproductions -- and everything I've seen
up to now has been either still lifes or portraits, so this landscape (or treescape) came as a surprise and also as a delight.
I just think it's a lovely, powerful image -- slightly mysterious, like all of Bella's work, but intense and weirdly unmoored.
Bella lives in a place where the threat of violence is always present, and I've been tempted to see her calm, centered,
even grave images as a kind of antidote or counterweight to that. This image is different -- it's like gazing through chaos
in search of of an even deeper calm.
The light in Bella's paintings is distinctly Mediterranean -- as is the light in the paintings of my friend Elizabeth
White, one of whose works I recently bought. Elizabeth was born in the Midwest and did some time in Northern California as
an undergraduate at Stanford, but I think she found the light that informs her work in Italy, during a semester abroad there.
She moved to Southern California a bit over a decade ago and suddenly found herself living full-time in a close approximation
of that Italian light -- and her work changed. She began concentrating on landscapes, with the same attention to draftsmanship
and modeling that had always informed her work but with a new element added -- color and light seemed to suffuse and define
the material world, to set it loose from materiality.
Such light as one finds in Southern California and around the shores of the Mediterranean has had the same effect on other
painters -- Cezanne's example being perhaps the most dramatic. His instinct for precision in rendering the exact (but only
the necessary, the irreducible) details of the physical world was challenged in an extreme way by the light of Provence --
he was forced to reduce line to its barest essential suggestiveness in order to convey the weight of the air and light of
Southern France.
The picture by Elizabeth that I bought, reproduced below, is called "Inlet" and was inspired by the view from
the bridge at Sanjon Creek where it empties into the Pacific at San Buenaventura State Beach, near where I used to live in
Ventura. I always stopped at this bridge when rollerblading up to the Ventura Pier. I thought this was because it was the
first place on my route where the sand dunes fell away and I had my first clear view of the ocean -- but there was something
deeper going on in the place, in the quiet meander of the creek into the ocean . . . and Elizabeth has put it into this image.
Any good storyteller will admit that stories aren't made up -- they find the teller and the teller only gives them form.
Songwriters say it's much the same with melodies. Good painters aren't just making beautiful images, either -- they are
the servants of light . . .
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| © 2004 Elizabeth White |
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