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| © University of Nevada-Las Vegas 2000 |
PLAY SETS
Three distinct traditions converged in the 1940s and 50s to create the Las Vegas casino resort -- European casino spas, Western
dude ranches and Victorian spectacle theater, as mediated by the movies.
David Schwartz, in his brilliant book "Suburban Xanadu", has linked the casino resort to general suburban development
throughout America during and after WWII, and in doing so he offers a useful way of analyzing the form these resorts took
in the years when they became fixtures in the popular imagination and wildly successful commercial enterprises. But his approach
leaves out a lot of what made these resorts appealing -- aspects which continue to inform their function and design as the
Strip, and Las Vegas in general, become more urbanized.
I would argue that these resorts were not just a reimagination of urban gambling halls in more isolated (or quarantined)
suburban forms, but in fact reflected at least as clearly the confluence of several other even deeper cultural trends.
It cannot escape our attention that the first two resorts built on what would become the Strip -- the El Rancho (in 1941)
and The Last Frontier (in 1942) -- were Western-themed. This was natural enough -- the more traditional gambling halls of
downtown Las Vegas had always employed Western saloon themes, and this "wild West" image was obviously part of the
town's marketing appeal, appropriate enough for the only place in America where gambling was legal.
When transposing this theme to the larger self-contained resorts outside the city limits, the developers had a ready model
to hand -- the dude ranch, where Easterners had long come to taste the adventure and enjoy the recreational attractions of
a vanishing lifestyle. (Nevada had already developed a specialized form of the dude ranch -- where people stayed while establishing
the brief residency required by the state for a divorce.) Like a traditional dude ranch, the first casino resorts in Las
Vegas offered horseback riding and other outdoor activities as prime attractions. Las Vegas didn't have much genuine Old
West history under its belt -- it didn't even become a town until 1905, when the railroad arrived and the Old West was already
slipping into legend. But it was at least IN the West -- and it had always sported a frontier mentality.
Whether or not they realized it, the developers were continuing a long tradition of combining recreational and therapeutic
resorts with the activity of gambling. Spa, in Belgium, from which we get the name for all health-based resorts, had been
offering a combination of gambling and healing waters since the 17th Century, and the great casino resort of Monte Carlo,
established in 1860, called itself the "Sea Bathing Society" -- even though its primary offering was gambling in
extravagant surroundings.
It's perhaps obvious why gambling and resort destinations go hand in hand. For one thing, resorts tend to be isolated
from the regular activities and hometowns of their visitors. Gambling can be conducted in a special zone where it is (at
least theoretically) less likely to infect everyday life. Schwartz argues convincingly that this aspect of the Las Vegas
casino resort was a large part of its appeal to a nation repulsed by the social and political corruption associated with urban
gambling activities after WWII.
Taking the waters or sea bathing or horsebacking also lend a higher purpose to resort-going, even though the main appeal
for many might be the gambling alone. And sophisticated visitors to resorts, used to varied activities and entertainments
in their regular life, could substitute the excitement of gambling for these usual diversions -- it was, at the very least,
something to pass the time between bouts of self-improvement.
| AERIAL VIEW OF THE EL RANCHO |
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| © University of Nevada-Las Vegas 2000 |
The dude ranch had been a phenomenon in the American West since the 1880s and grew in popularity as the true Old West vanished.
It became something of a craze in the Roaring Twenties. Before development on the Strip began to push the desert further
and further away from the resort corridor, casino resorts like the El Rancho and The Last Frontier could certainly pass muster
as genuine dude ranches -- real wilderness awaited just paces from their outer gates -- even though the comforts and activities
they offered within their compounds were hardly consistent with life on a real ranch. They were, however, places "themed"
as ranches -- though organized structurally as upscale motor courts -- and in this theming they began to converge with another
important cultural trend.
That trend had its immediate source in Victorian spectacle theater. Just before movies superseded it as the primary form
of popular drama, Victorian theater was entering an odd and interesting phase in which it sought ever more realistic representations
of three-dimensional reality -- first on the proscenium stage itself, then in large arena settings, such as The Spectatorium,
designed by the theatrical visionary Steele MacKaye. The Spectatorium -- conceived for the Chicago Exposition of 1893 but
never fully constructed -- featured a gigantic stage with an 8-foot deep tank beneath it, so that the arena could be converted
into a seascape, complete with wave and wind machines. On this sea, MacKaye proposed to send life-sized replicas of Columbus's
ships sailing forth to an island representing North America.
There was but one small step from such an arena to a theme park attraction -- in which visitors could themselves enter the
theatrical setting . . . but that step was never taken. The movies intervened. They diverted this cultural desire for spectacular
physical recreations of reality -- because movies could provide a convincing image of it at less cost and with greater scope.
But the desire never really died, and found an outlet in the tours Universal offered of its stages and standing sets almost
from the day it opened its vast lot in 1915. The tours were immensely popular, since almost everyone wants to visit a film
set and almost everyone finds the experience enchanting.
Universal closed its back lot tours when sound came in -- visitors simply became too problematic, given the technical demands
of sound recording -- but the desire to walk inside film sets remained, and it took the vision and profound cultural insight
of Walt Disney to exploit it. Disneyland, built in 1954, offered the sensation of visiting the sets of Disney films, actual
or imaginary, and provided a greater opportunity for interaction with those environments. Disney thus revived, unconsciously
no doubt, but with the intuition of genius, the buried ambitions of late-Victorian theater.
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The idea was in the air elsewhere, however, as Schwartz points out. In 1950, when Disneyland was just a madcap scheme in
Disney's mind, The Last Frontier, the second casino resort on the outskirts of Las Vegas, expanded its Western theming to
include a replica of an entire Western town, complete with authentic artifacts.
Curiously, around the same time, Louis Marx, the great toy magnate, began offering "play sets". Derived from small
tin panoramas of things like gasoline stations, which had been popular in the Thirties, the play sets of the early Fifties,
using modern plastics, expanded to include stunningly vast environments -- like that of the legendary Rin Tin Tin At Fort
Apache set, first issued in 1954. This included a large plastic Western fort, a tin cabin with numerous accessories, like
a butter churn and bunk beds, a table and a cupboard, hordes of U. S. Cavalry soldiers and Indians, horses, cannons, wagons,
teepees, rocks, a well and a campfire.
The Rin Tin Tin version of the Fort Apache set also included well-sculpted, recognizable figures of Rusty, Captain Rip Masters
and Rinty -- familiar from the popular TV series of the time. What made these sets new was that they offered, in one box,
a dazzlingly complete miniature "set" -- the word had a perhaps deliberate connection to the film term -- a tiny,
self-contained but wildly elaborated themed environment. The connection to the movies and television was increasingly explicit
-- Marx would eventually offer sets based on Disney's television series Zorro and the film Ben Hur and many other film and
TV productions.
The resorts of Las Vegas may have taken their initial form from suburban building projects elsewhere, but the desire for
self-contained, manageable, fantasy-themed environments predated suburbia by over fifty years. Serious thought must be given
to the question of why this desire returned to the surface so spectacularly in the early 1950s, with the increasingly elaborate
themed resorts of Las Vegas and the emergence of the Disney-inspired theme park . . . while at the same time surfacing even
under the Christmas trees of little boys, in the shape of miniature play sets.
Undoubtedly, deep cultural insecurities were involved, and desperate desires for safe, self-contained playgrounds in a
world that had gone totally and horribly mad for almost six years in the late Thirties and early Forties and then had to come
to terms with the unthinkable -- the almost unimaginable horror of nuclear holocaust. It is a fact beyond irony that America's
program of nuclear testing took place within sight of the Las Vegas casino resorts, and that the resorts undertook a deliberate
campaign to turn them into harmless diversionary spectacles.
It is also interesting to note that as the casino resorts on the Strip evolved into more and more elaborate theatrical
environments, this upped the ante for the more conventional theatrical spaces within them -- so that companies like Cirque
du Soleil came to offer ingenious marvels of technical stagecraft that closely resemble the dreams of Steele MacKaye and his
vision of the Spectatorium.
The matrix of cultural desires that brought forth both the Spectatorium and the Hollywood spectacle film is still at work
in modern day Las Vegas . . . which leads me to suggest, finally, that we need to look at the themed "play set"
of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries -- in all its guises, large and small -- as an art form, or the continuation of
an art form, and evaluate it aesthetically as such. This is no more far-fetched than suggesting, in 1905, that movies ought
to be looked at and evaluated in the same terms.
Here's an excellent article by David Schwartz on the early history of the El Rancho and the Last Frontier:
History Of the Early Strip Resorts
You can buy his book on the entire history of the casino resort here:
Suburban Xanadu
TRANSFORMATIONS
28 June 2005
"The Experience Economy", by Gilmore and Pine, looks past the near future, in which the economy will be driven
by businesses that provide consumers with experiences, to the next phase, when it will be driven by businesses that provide
consumers with transformations.
All experiences involve a kind of transformation, simply because an experience, in order to be an experience, must be
memorable -- it must become a part of the consumer's conscious sense of his own personal history, by shaping or affecting
that history significantly.
An experience, however, need not offer a profound or sustainable transformation -- it may simply lend glamor and prestige
to a consumer's interior and/or communicable narrative about his or her self. The "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas"
ad campaign posits a private experience in Sin City which one is proud one can't talk about, but of course secretly wants
to talk about, because it was so daring and sexy and exciting . . . but it doesn't suggest that the experience was life-changing.
Obviously a deeper kind of transformation can also occur through experiences -- a sustainable transformation, affecting
one's core values and ability to live by them. One of the appeals of Las Vegas is that it offers a flirtation with sin and
dissipation and recklessness that is ultimately safe -- you might pick up a hooker at a bar in the Bellagio, but you're not
going to get rolled by her pimp in the course of any transaction you might conduct with her there. And in the typical 48-hour
visit to Las Vegas, you will almost certainly lose some money if you gamble, with the odd win thrown in every now and then,
but you probably won't lose (or win) enough to seriously affect your financial well being. (There are exceptions to this
rule, of course, but they represent a statistically small number of visitors who gamble in Las Vegas.)
Deeper transformations move far beyond the diversionary experiences offered by Las Vegas, the current capital of the emerging
experience economy. Real transformations require experiences which involve not just manageable risk but genuine sacrifice
and even suffering. This has always been known to spiritual as well as to military and athletic disciplines -- but Gilmore
and Pine argue that businesses which move from providing experiences to providing sustainable transformations will have to
embrace the principal, too.
Hollywood has now fully embraced the "experience film" -- so overwhelming in its visual spectacle that it becomes
an event. But that sort of "event film" has now become so standardized that it is expected, and thus is losing
its power to surprise. The experience of the "event film" is becoming a commodity -- and thus not really an experience
at all.
There is, however, a counter trend in movies -- pioneered by directors, like Steven Spielberg and James Cameron and many
lesser lights, who have a kind of sixth sense about the modern audience's unspoken wants and needs. Those needs involve a
desire for deeper transformations than a mere spectacle experience can provide. So in movies like "Saving Private Ryan"
and above all "Titanic", the most successful film of our time, you have stories which are centrally concerned with
the idea of sacrifice -- which are powered emotionally not by their often dazzling cinematic excitement but by a celebration
of the suffering which alone leads to true transformation.
This is part of a trend I call "full-frontal decency" -- a presentation of humane values so frank and unapologetic
that it shocks us, as full-frontal nudity once shocked us. It penetrates the ironic armor which has arisen in an age grown
cynical and disaffected, a culture in which material comfort and luxury have not delivered the satisfaction that their advertisers
promised. Quite simply put, the age of irony is over -- though it's acting out a long and increasingly boring death-bed scene
. . . as well it might. Facing this world we're living in without irony is a terrifying prospect -- embracing the need for
suffering and sacrifice is a violation of all that our culture has been selling us for the past fifty years or so. What on
earth will we replace irony with?
As the experience economy matures, those businesses, including those specializing in the popular arts, which offer answers
to that question will prosper, and those which don't will fail and disappear.
Other recent reflections on "The Experience Economy", an essential modern text, can be found in the Nowhere Confidential
Archive section below. Just scroll down. You can buy the book here:
The Experience Economy
DEEP VEGAS
27 June 2005
This past Saturday there was an interesting fight being offered on pay-per-view -- Mayweather versus Gatti, a great boxer
going up against a reckless brawler. It was taking place in Atlantic City, so I couldn't attend in person, but it was being
broadcast at a few bars and clubs and casinos here in Vegas, where you could see it for several bucks more than ordering at
home would cost.
One of the venues offering the fight was The Beach, a notorious party-bar just up Paradise from where I live, across from
the Convention Center. I'd always wanted to visit the place so I headed up there just before the broadcast was about to begin,
at 6pm.
The place was totally deserted, except for staff. The big barn-like main room was dark and gloomy, and looked shabby
in the dim daytime work lights.
The fight was being shown at the upstairs sports bar -- which was also totally deserted, except for a sleepy-looking bartender
sitting and sipping some juice on the wrong side of the bar.
"Do you need anything?" she asked, as though she hoped I didn't. I ordered a $3 beer and went to sit in a plush
chair at a table in front of the big projection screen, whose image was muddy and fuzzy, even when they turned off the work
lights before the show started. Another guy came in just before that -- we were the only customers in the bar when the undercard
fights began. By the time the main event rolled around an hour or so later, three other customers had drifted in, and five
or six employees also arrived to watch the featured bout.
There were about 20 TV sets in the sports bar and adjacent pool room -- all of them showing the fight. Three of them
would have sufficed for the audience assembled.
It wasn't much of a main event. Mayweather beat the crap out of Gatti -- who took the pounding like a man but could find
no way past Mayweather's defense and no way of dodging his lightning-fast hands. Gatti's corner mercifully called a halt
to things after the sixth.
No one ever got around to collecting the $50 fee they were supposed to be charging to watch the fight, and I wandered
outside in the dusk grateful for that, at least. Then I realized that Piero's restaurant was right next to The Beach -- and
I decided to go blow the money I'd saved on the fight there. I'd had a great meal at Piero's once, long ago, in a different
lifetime, and I'd always wanted to go back to see if it was as cool as I remembered. It was.
 Piero's is one of the few true old-Vegas establishments still surviving in the 21st-Century town. It opened in 1982 and moved
to its present location in the late 80s. It's always been a hang-out for Rat-Pack era mega-stars -- Jerry Lewis is still
a regular -- and part of the movie "Casino" was shot there. Recently an accused mob hit-man was arrested in its
lobby.
It's clientele, celebrity and non-celebrity, is mostly old -- and people dress up to go there, which is unusual in Las
Vegas. To me it has the exact feel of a trendy Hollywood restaurant back in the 80s, when even the talent could wear suits
and not feel weird.
The food, Italian, with an emphasis on seafood, is superb in an old-fashioned way -- nothing new-age about the dishes
or the way they're presented. The service is impeccable but reserved, with none of the cheerful familiarity you find at most
restaurants in Las Vegas today. I was wearing a T-shirt and a flight jacket, and I felt just the tiniest bit of suspicion
from the maitre d' and the waiter -- not disapproval exactly, but a bit of uncertainty . . . about my motives, perhaps, or
my worthiness to dine at such a place. However, after the meal was done and the bill settled, my waiter came and ceremoniously
shook my hand, as though congratulating me on having passed a rigorous test. I'd left him a very nice tip.
I took a cab to the Hard Rock and, in a very good but very surreal mood, squandered $40 at the roulette tables. I spun
it out for a long time, playing and winning with Michelle, a thirty-something babe -- in town with her husband, alas, but
happy to flirt with me for a few hours, just for fun. Things ended badly, as things at a roulette table usually do. Michelle
lost all her chips, and I started losing mine -- she took her leave, feeling that she was bringing me bad luck, but my bad
luck continued and I was soon on my way home.
An empty pick-up joint, a nearly empty sports bar, a one-sided prize fight playing out on a fuzzy projection television,
an excursion into the 80s, some hopeless dreams spinning off into nothingness at a gaming table. It should have made for
a melancholy night, but it was all delightful for some reason -- like a restful vacation on another planet.
SUMMER MAGIC
25 June 2005
I saw this film when it first came out, in July of 1963, when I was thirteen. It was showing at a theater a couple of
miles from my home in Washington, D. C. I took a bus to the theater, but afterwards I had an urge to walk home, which I did,
in a kind of dreamy state.
The film is not a great one, but it has a kind of sweetness you don't find in movies anymore, and a kind of modesty --
it wasn't meant to be an event, just a pleasing way of passing the time on a summer's afternoon or evening. If you were a
kid in 1963 you'd go see any Disney film that came out, knowing you'd like it, more or less.
I was on the cusp of puberty then, and Haley Mills was a person of deep fascination to me. I might not have identified
my interest in her as sexual, consciously, but she was a sexy girl -- not just cute but self-possessed in an alluring way.
Her good-natured charm allowed one access to her female power, made it approachable.
A few months after this film came out Kennedy would be assassinated, and a few months after that the Beatles exploded
on the scene, and the Sixties officially got going. It's tempting to think that the dream state this film induced in me,
and the long walk home I took in order to prolong it, arose from a presentiment that this summer would be the last innocent
one of my life -- that sex and tragedy and cultural derangement would soon transform me and transform America.
I was taking a deep breath, perhaps, knowing that the slow climb of the rollercoaster had reached it zenith and that the
delirious fall was about to begin.
THE FUNGIBLE AND THE UNIQUE
23 June 2005
In "The Experience Economy", authors Gilmore and Pine argue that service, the basis of advanced economies in
the latter half of the 20th Century, is becoming a commodity, and that this transformation will mark the end of service as
the driving force of 21st Century economies. A commodity has very little potential for added value -- coal is coal is coal
-- and quickly becomes ineffective as a spur to growth, tied as it is to market forces alone, supply and demand.
Service becomes a commodity when it is expected and systematized. It succeeds too well, as it were. Automated bank teller
machines and customer service phone lines save customers time but increasingly grow to resemble each other -- as one lump
of coal resembles another. Consumers are free to select services based on price, not quality, which is taken as a given.
An ATM is an ATM is an ATM. It is a fungible phenomenon.
Fast food and chain restaurants employ minimally skilled workers in largely automated, rote tasks -- again saving customers
time and money but becoming standardized and boring. This leaves customers in the market for something else, something more,
in a dining experience.
That something more was in the past available only to certain affluent classes of consumers and in cultures where certain
forms of specialized service are privileged. Take France, for example -- please. In France, dining is considered an important
cultural experience. Waiters are well paid and respected socially. Each meal, and thus each guest in a restaurant, is considered
special -- not just as an opportunity for a commercial transaction but as a symbol of cultural virtue. It has a meaning,
and thus a value, which exceeds the immediate practical worth of any particular dining experience.
A meal in any good French restaurant, and it's hard to find a bad one, is a theatrical performance, highly ritualized,
highly professionalized, and the quality of service and food preparation has a transcendent cultural value -- it contributes
to a generally recognized social good.
It's easy to have a bad experience in a French restaurant, especially in Paris, which might seem to contradict the observations
above -- but the underlying cause of such bad experiences in fact reinforces them. Foreign guests in France who do not recognize
the cultural significance of dining and restaurant service, and do not observe the rituals which reinforce that significance,
can easily transgress against cultural norms. Waving to get the attention of a waiter in a French cafe, for example, and
thus assuming that he has not seen you, or not greeting him formally and respectfully when he appears, and thus assuming that
his job is not prestigious, violate the theatrical decorum of the restaurant experience. It would be like chatting loudly
on a cell phone during a performance in an actual theater.
If the norms are observed, however, the experience of dining in France can be exhilarating -- and not just for the food.
Service is carefully customized to the individual diner. The best service you will ever receive at a French bistro occurs
when you are dining alone. Waiters know the social awkwardness of solitary dining and work extra hard to minimize it.
At one memorable meal at a three-star restaurant, my companion and I each ordered spectacular appetizers, and were dying
to try each other's, but not sure if this would violate etiquette. However, our brief covetous glances at the other's plate
quickly brought a waiter with extra silverware, as though, of course, we would naturally want to sample everything. Whenever
I tried to light a cigarette during the meal I was never able to even reach for a match -- previously invisible servers instantly
materialized to light the cigarette for me.
The whole thing was a piece of theater -- a designed performance for its audience . . . me. I will never forget that
meal, or a dozen others like it in France, while it is difficult to remember any single meal in a MacDonald's, except for
those when something went wrong, a sure sign that service in a fast food chain has become a commodity. Interestingly I don't
remember exactly what I ate at that three-star restaurant, beyond some sublime pate de foie gras -- only that it was all extraordinary,
beyond expectation, even though I had been expecting a lot. The theatrical experience of the whole event became the medium
through which I appreciated the food, echoing it in a sense -- the elaborate and painstaking transformation of the meal into
an experience was a metaphor for what the suppliers and chef had done to turn a piece of duck liver into the foie gras.
One can find high-end, theatrical service in other places than France. Once, while staying at the Savoy in London, at
company expense, I was working late on a writing project. At 3am I called for some room service. A waiter in white tie and
tails appeared almost instantly at my door -- in character . . . friendly but not familiar, formal but not stuffy. It was
a well-considered dramatic presentation of self. I asked what sort of food might be available at this late hour. "But,
sir," he said, "what do you WANT?" The moment was instantly transformed from a service transaction to an experience,
a performance piece, theatrical and memorable.
What's astonishing about Las Vegas is that one can find this sort of professional theatrical service almost everywhere.
I eat a lot at the Hard Rock, mostly at their lower-end restaurants, and I am constantly amazed by the cheerful, expert,
customized service I get. A waiter or waitress will inevitably appear two sips from the end of any beer to ask if you want
another. All wait persons keep an eye out on all diners, not just the ones in their section, to detect the slightest sign
of need. Once when I had to wait a few minutes at the Pink Taco for someone to take my order, the manager of the place ran
-- literally ran -- to my table to apologize. He took my drink order himself, ran to the bar to put it in, and ran back with
the drink.
What's most astonishing is how young the servers at the Hard Rock are. These are not career wait persons. Someone has
taken the time to teach them attitude. Servers in Las Vegas are unusually well-paid, many are unionized and receive extensive
benefits. They obviously feel respected, proud of their competence, and amused by the cheerful interactions they are encouraged
to have with guests. All of this is apparent in their behavior towards each other and towards their patrons. The camaraderie
between the gorgeous female waiters at the Hard Rock and the young busboys, mostly Mexican, that they work with sets a tone
for the place, an almost intangible aura of general goodwill and fun.
Meals at the Hard Rock are memorable, because they are theatrical, well-designed and well-executed performances. It goes
infinitely beyond the perfunctory "have a nice day" slogans that servers elsewhere are taught to parrot. It derives
from a savvy business understanding that visitors to Las Vegas don't want good service, or even superlative service -- they
want memorable experiences, and they will pay for them. The "experience factor" is what allows a place like the
Hard Rock to add value to service, charge extra for that value and keep it from turning into a commodity.
Last year the Hard Rock made more money from drink sales than from gaming. A lot of that profit from drinks undoubtedly
comes from a policy of always being ready to fetch a customer another drink exactly when he or she wants one, which runs the
bill, and thus the tip, up a little higher and also makes the customer feel special, recognized, catered to. (When I went
back to the Pink Taco tonight for a burrito and to take the pictures above and below, the waitress said. "Hey -- you
were here last week! I was so busy I kept you waiting -- sorry about that!" This is attention above and beyond the
requirements of mere service.)
It's so simple -- but if you've ever tired your arm out waving for a wait person at a chain restaurant, or grown old trying
to get the attention of a terminally hip bartender at a trendy New York club, you know that logic and self-interest don't
always drive the marketplace. Minimizing service to create an impression of value through scarcity, or standardizing service
to meet the requirements of the average customer, instead of the immediate needs and desires of individual customers, are
notions carried over from a commodity-based economy.
The future has different rules.
A TYPICAL VEGAS NIGHT
22 June 2005
A couple of nights ago, late, after a few intense hours composing my latest philosophical musings for this web site, I
discovered I was running out of cigarettes and also hungry. I walked down to the convenience store on the corner of Paradise
and Harmon for some smokes and then headed over to Mr. Lucky's 24/7 at the Hard Rock for some food.
As I walked up to the front entrance under the porte cochere and the giant neon guitar I could hear the Beatles' "A
Hard Day's Night" blasting from the outdoor speakers, and it was blasting inside, too. It put me in a good mood.
I had the All-American Breakfast -- two eggs, hash browns, ham and toast -- and a couple of screwdrivers. As I was finishing
the second drink I heard The White Stripes on the Hard Rock sound system for the first time -- "Blue Orchid" from
the new album. The Hard Rock usually plays classic rock songs, and this sounded right at home in the mix -- as though it
had been around forever and would always sound brand new, as the Beatles do.
Then I headed to the bar for a nightcap.
When passing through the Hard Rock I always pull out any spare quarters I have in my pockets and play them in the slot
machines. This is getting harder and harder to do in Las Vegas, since slots increasingly accept paper money only. This is
happening at the Hard Rock even as you read this -- every time I visit, there are fewer and fewer machines which accept coins.
There are still two or three video poker machines on the perimeter of the central circular bar which do take quarters --
I had four in my pocket and played them there.
I lost on the first three spins but on the last I hit a royal flush -- with a pay-out of $63 on the 25 cent bet. I cashed
out immediately -- not being a degenerate gambler. The cash-out was by paper receipt, which has to be redeemed at the cashier's
cage. While the receipt is printing the machine plays a recording of coins falling into a metal tray.
I went up to the bar to celebrate my good fortune. I sat next to a woman who was definitely a degenerate gambler. I
saw her feed $100 in $20 bills into the video poker machine imbedded in the bar in front of her -- she lost it all in about
15 minutes, making very strange choices about which cards to hold before her draws, and finally had to be dragged from the
bar by her companion, as she fished in her purse for more bills.
Her place was soon taken by a hip-looking young guy in a short-sleeved shirt with an elaborate tattoo around his upper
arm. He nursed a drink for a while, looking forlorn, so I asked him what he was doing in Vegas. He said he was in town on
business, from San Diego, for five weeks, doing an audit for a company that was about to make an IPO. "That's really
all I can say about it," he added mysteriously.
As we chatted about cool places to check out in Vegas we were interrupted by a woman on my left screaming. She was playing
some kind of powerball game on the machine in the bar in front of her and had just hit some numbers. She was dividing her
attention between the game and a young man she'd met earlier in the evening, sitting on the other side of the bar. From time
to time she would point at him and yell out, "Hey! You! Don't do it!"
It turns out he was in town for his bachelor's party. The woman eventually explained to me, "I've been married three
times, so I know what I'm talking about." Then her face fell. "I'm forty now. It's all over for me." She
was from Columbia, South Carolina but had recently moved to Boca Raton, Florida. The guy she was with managed to pull her
away from her machine while she was still ahead, and she was too drunk to protest much.
I finished my beer and walked home. Even with the smokes and the food and drink I was $20 up on the night.
You've got to love this town. If you don't, you're way too mature for your own good.
THE EXPERIENCE ECONOMY
19 June 2005
This is the most profound work of cultural analysis published since "Learning From Las Vegas", the 1972 book
by Venturi, Brown and Izenour which explained the logic of suburban sprawl to high-culture intellectuals and also celebrated
its energy and zany creativity.
The central thesis of "The Experience Economy" is that the service economy of the late 20th Century is rapidly
giving way to a new one -- in which people pay for transactions involving highly personalized and memorable experiences.
Though these may involve services, entertainment, and purely aesthetic attractions they are essentially different from all
these things -- they center on interactivity with places or events or virtual environments that create a measurable inner
transformation within the consumer . . . measurable, for example, by the desire to buy a T-shirt to memorialize the event.
One is rarely moved to buy a T-shirt to memorialize watching a really great episode of a TV show -- but often moved to buy
one to memorialize attending a sensational live concert or sporting event. The former simply involves the consumption of
entertainment -- the latter is an experience.
The authors rightly identify Las Vegas as a town wholly based on experiences -- not gambling, not sex, not entertainment,
not spectacle, not food and drink, not shopping per se, but an orchestration of them into a memorable visit, a psyche-changing
(if not life-changing) experience . . . something that by definition becomes a significant part of one's personal history
and a subject for discussion when you get home. Experiences are taking the place of material goods as the prestige purchases
of consumers.
Gambling and sex are experiences in their own right -- they are intrinsically interactive and memorable because they involve
risk and psychic jeopardy. The attendant attractions of Las Vegas must be invested with experiential weight. Restaurants
must be designed as vivid, preferably breathtaking theatrical spectacles, food servers must be exceptionally professional,
cheerful and personal, shopping must take place in stunning environments that recall, for example, the splendor of ancient
Rome, entertainment must be phenomenal, involving either high-profile celebrity entertainers (or impersonators of same) or
extravagant, eye-popping, mind-bending production values.
The aim is not just to provide a higher quality dining experience or entertainment experience or shopping experience than
other venues -- but a new level of experience that has the flavor of uniqueness, of the extraordinary, the ultimate. This
explains why Vegas embraces both preposterously elaborated reconstructions of distant, original things -- like the Grand Canal
in Venice, Italy -- and actual original things like paintings by Picasso, or a piece of the Berlin Wall, or a community of
living, breathing white tigers. All have the extraordinary qualities that make for highly-charged, transformational experiences
when they are encountered.
The book extrapolates from examples like these to posit that all business is in the process of becoming theatrical, and
that we will become more and more willing to pay for the experience value of a transaction -- just as, in the 20th Century,
we became more and more willing to pay for the sorts of services we used to perform for ourselves (like washing lettuce.)
As the authors say -- "Companies . . . must go beyond 'how we did' and even 'what you want' to 'what you REMEMBER.'"
"The Experience Economy" is aimed at businessmen -- it has none of the literary elegance or pretension we normally
associate with significant cultural criticism and analysis. But it is a book which sees what is happening in our culture
clearly and precisely and comprehensively.
It has extremely useful concepts for drawing distinctions between, say, entertainment and experience events -- i. e. the
difference between "absorption", with regard to watching a movie, and "immersion", with regard to sipping
a tropical drink inside a convincing replica of a rainforest, or even in an actual rainforest, on an organized and semi-scripted
eco-adventure.
If you don't know this book you can never hope to know what's really happening in a place like Las Vegas -- and you can
never hope to understand the 21st Century and the dawning experience economy you are already living in . . . and already participating
in, most likely, to one degree or another.
It's that important.
You can buy it here:
The Experience Economy
MERRY CHRISTMAS, KID
15 June 2005
It's startling to me to realize how many Christmas presents from childhood I still remember. I'm speaking of the big
ones, that Santa brought, that were waiting unwrapped under the tree on Christmas morning. They are memorable for many reasons,
connected partly to the supernatural nature of their appearance but also partly to the fact that they were the most desirable
objects one could imagine at any given age. They would have been amazing no matter how they got under that tree.
When I was six and seven I lived in a tiny town in North Carolina, the center of an agricultural region. The feed store
was the biggest establishment in town, but there was also a small movie theater and a barbershop, which doubled as a variety
store, offering miscellaneous goods like candy and toys.
In the Fall of 1956 or 1957, when I was either six or seven, I was walking home from school one day when I saw something
astonishing in the front window of the barbershop. It was a Roy Rogers Fix-It Chuck Wagon set, by Ideal. I had never seen
anything quite like it, in the intricacy of its parts and accessories. I was already obsessed with toy soldiers, and sometimes
these came with forts and artillery pieces, but the Roy Rogers Chuck Wagon was executed on a bigger scale than most toy soldier
sets and was more rigorously focussed. Here was a chuck wagon with utensils and a trunk to store them in, horses with driving
reins and a whip . . . and here were Roy and Dale and Pat Brady and Bullet, Roy's dog, and Pat's Jeep Nellybelle -- all familiar
from Roy's show on television.
I really couldn't believe my eyes. I felt as though someone had entered my psyche and created the toy I'd most like to
play with -- if only I could have imagined it in advance.
I ran home and told my parents that I had beheld the present I would ask Santa for at Christmas. I think I had some subconscious
notion that Santa might have to act quickly to secure this treasure before it was bought out from under him from the barbershop/variety
store. I'm not sure I understood that the chuck wagon set was not a unique example of the toy.
Of course it duly appeared under the tree that year and I can still remember carrying it into the dining room to unpack
it from its box and marvel at its various parts. It was pure magic.
The set lost its component pieces over the years, until finally none of them remained. I still have a few toys from that
era but the chuck wagon got played to pieces. The aura of it, though, has never left my consciousness, and a few years ago
I began to wonder if I might find another set to replace it -- as a kind of link to my first and second grade self. Those
were the years when movies became consciously important to me as magical creations and central to my imaginative life, and
I always go back to them when I need inspiration.
Last week I found a Roy Rogers Chuck Wagon set in good condition on eBay and bid for it and won it, and a few days ago
it arrived at my home here in Las Vegas. When I unpacked it and set it up on my dining room table I didn't feel especially
excited or particularly sentimental or even remotely nostalgic for times gone by. Those years in the middle Fifties have
not gone by -- have not slipped into the past. I took up my imaginative conversation with the Roy Rogers Chuck Wagon set
as one takes up a conversation with an old fried one hasn't seen in many years -- as though no time at all has intervened.
This tiny little plastic wagon is one of the vehicles that got me from there to here and it takes me back there any time
I ask it to. Its horses can pull the weight of dreams.
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| THE MIRAGE |
LAS VEGAS OBSERVED
12 June 2005
In "The Arcades Project", Walter Benjamin quotes Sigfried Giedion as follows -- "Wherever the 19th Century
felt itself unobserved, it grew bold." The quote is part of a section dealing with the rise of cast-iron construction
in architecture. Cast-iron had a tensile strength 40 times that of stone and 10 times that of wood, though its net weight
was only 4 times that of stone and 8 times that of wood. This freed the architect, theoretically, to create radically new
architectural forms.
In practice, though, as Benjamin observes, new forms were only applied, at first, to buildings with transitory functions
-- wholesale markets, shopping arcades, train stations and exhibition pavilions. Structures devoted to more permanent activities,
of work and habitation, remained tied to the more massive forms dictated by wood and stone construction, even if they used
cast-iron as a building material.
Today we can see the great glass and iron vaulted train stations of Paris as works of art -- and indeed one of them, the
Quay d'Orsay, has been turned into an art museum -- but the genius of these buildings was possible only because they did not
have to conform to the conscious dictates of art generally shared at the time. The architects and engineers who built them
were "unobserved" from that perspective.
Classification as art can have a chilling effect on the imagination -- and this is why disrespected forms often, one might
say always, produce the most dynamic and radical "art". The true art of cinema was established during a time when
movies were disrespected culturally and mistrusted economically -- there have been very few significant aesthetic advances
in the medium since the industry took its place as a respectable and regularized business under corporate management. (The
corporation has now replaced the state and the academy as the chief arbiter of public taste.)
The Las Vegas casino resort will one day be recognized as an art form, but it came into being "unobserved" --
as a nutty phenomenon out in a distant desert meant to serve culturally suspicious ends. Free from any obligation to the
culture's official notions of art, and financed by bold speculators and entrepreneurs, it could take chances, it could harness
unconscious trends in the popular imagination -- it could, in fact, be more creative, more original, more radical than traditional
art forms and simultaneously better reflect and predict trends in the larger culture which were masked by allegiance to less
supple aesthetic concepts.
We are now, however, in a transitional stage. The brilliant insights of Robert Venturi and his associates in "Learning
From Las Vegas" have finally, after more than a quarter of a century, begun to penetrate the intellectual mainstream.
Cultural critics are beginning to appreciate the vast importance and implications of Las Vegas as an urban phenomenon. And
corporate consolidation of the ownership of most of the Strip casino resorts will certainly begin to limit the imaginative
license of the casino resort creators and managers.
The great, silly, lyrical nuttiness of Steve Wynn's Mirage has been institutionalized, as it were, in the grander but
more methodical Mandalay Bay. Wynn himself has grown by turns grandiose and respectable, with the Bellagio, and creatively
cautious, overly tasteful, in the "dream" he's just offered up in his newest casino resort, the Wynn, which does
not have the chaotic unpredictability and psychological jeopardy -- the action -- of a genuine dream.
The last of the mavericks, the Maloof brothers at the Palms and Peter Morton at the Hard Rock, are keeping the imaginative
risk-taking tradition alive in Las Vegas. It is my opinion that their off-Strip empires will eventually eclipse the increasingly
stodgy spectacle of the Strip today -- and that downtown may well have the renaissance that Mayor Oscar Goodman foresees,
as long as it keeps its edge and aura of danger as it travels upscale.
But everything is in the balance. There are too many eyes on Las Vegas today, intellectual and corporate. The minute
it becomes too self-conscious as a cultural and economic phenomenon it will calcify and die -- and we'll all have to move
to Shanghai if we want the creative energy, the imaginative action, of unobserved culture.
GET BEHIND ME SATAN
9 June 2005
There was much excitement at my house about the 7 June release of the new White Stripes album "Get Behind Me Satan".
That's the cover above -- here is a link to the music video for the first single, "Blue Orchid":
"Blue Orchid" Video
The Amazon critic says it's the Stripes's strangest and least focussed album but also their finest -- and that's not a bad
summary. As with a lot of great Bob Dylan albums it gives the impression of someone rummaging around in the attic of American
music and American culture, looking for answers to some desperate personal problems -- and even if the answers aren't always
forthcoming, one is consoled nevertheless by the realization that there are a lot of cool and scary things up there.
Jack White on this album bumps into a lot of ghosts, and has a disturbing encounter with Rita Hayworth, as he deconstructs
his garage band style and inflects it with deranged pop and country interpolations. He's always done this sort of thing musically,
tying it all together with his strong blues-based guitar -- but this time nothing gets tied together too neatly. It's almost
as though he's thinking out loud in the studio and letting us eavesdrop on the session.
The result is raw and silly and powerful and eloquent by turns, defying the slick sound and off-the-rack attitude that
homogenizes most bands these days, even those in the neo-rock movement the Stripes have spearheaded.
Jack and Meg are back, and their conversation with every tradition of American popular music continues -- powered by the
blues but ranging far beyond them . . . on a spiritual and anguished search for the soul of the times. In his liner notes
to the album Jack rails against the sarcasm and irony of pop posturing today -- he wants us to face the terror squarely.
The White Stripes, like the great bluesmen that inspired them, are taking on the devil himself -- determined to get at least
a few steps ahead of him before it's too late.
If you haven't seen the White Stripes concert DVD "Under Blackpool Lights", check it out. Shot entirely on 8mm
it's a gorgeous thing -- sort of a cross between "The Last Waltz" and the Zapruder footage. You can buy it here:
Under Blackpool Lights
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| © Paul Kolnik |
GHOSTS
1 June 2005
[Below are some exhibition notes I wrote for an upcoming show of photographs by Paul Kolnik. The show, opening at the
Kennedy Center in Washington on 21 June, covers the career, as performer and ballet mistress, of Suzanne Farrell, one of the
great artists of our time.]
The history of dance abides in a ghostly museum, a hall of mirrors erected by memory, in which fleeting acts and images of
passion have their echoes and reflections.
Dancers alone preserve these echoes and reflections in material form, in the sense memory of their muscles -- in the way
they walk and carry themselves once they quit the stage and the center of attention. The dancers who follow them into the
spotlight can read the evidence of past dances in the bodies of the dancers who become their teachers -- but it is by means
of a secret language that they speak only between themselves.
Once upon a time Suzanne Farrell, the way she moved, the way she had her being in dance time, inspired George Balanchine
to his creative heights as a lyrical artist -- it seemed as though everything he knew about women, about love, about sex,
found its expression in her physical genius . . . and it became impossible to say who was teaching whom. The art they made
together transcended each individually, and both together. It became a genuine act of love.
Balanchine is gone -- Farrell no longer performs his work on the world's stages. He himself seemed to anticipate the
fate of their collaboration in times to come -- in the ballets he made at the end of his life, which seemed to be set in remembered
time, in "Davidsbundlertanze" and especially in "Mozartiana", which is peopled by spirits who inhabit
the realm of Eternity.
The steps of Balanchine's ballets are still executed -- Farrell herself now sets them on new dancers and communicates
to them her own knowledge of the interior springs of inspiration that gave them their true life and true meaning. In Paul
Kolnik's eerily evocative photographs, images of past dances and dancers summon up the uncanny illusion of an eternal present.
They have their place in the ethereal museum of dance and in many cases are our most reliable guides through its haunted
corridors. They eavesdrop on the conversations that echo there -- especially in this series, which ranges from Farrell's
actual presence in performance, under the eye of Balanchine, to its resonance in the dances she has set on others.
It's important to say, though, that in noting the ghost guides who hover over and behind every new dance performance,
we are not looking backwards -- we are looking past the appearance of things to their heart . . . to the essence that survives
the moment of performance, and even the mortal lives of dancers.
In "Faust", Goethe said, "The Eternal Feminine leads us on." It might have served as Balanchine's
artistic motto, but it's worth remembering that it wasn't just the courage and beauty and power of Woman, or even of one woman,
Suzanne Farrell, that Balanchine celebrated. It was in fact what Woman pointed him towards that fascinated and sometimes
tormented Balanchine -- the terror and the consolation of Eternity. Whatever leads us on to an appreciation of that partakes
in the essence of the divine.
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| © Paul Kolnik |
[Paul chose a poem by Rilke to accompany the photograph of Farrell below:]
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| © Paul Kolnik |
"The Gazelle"
Enchanted one: how shall two chosen words
achieve the harmony of the pure rhyme
which in you like a signal comes and goes?
from your forehead the leafy lyre climbs,
and all your being moves in sure accord
like those love-lyrics whose words softly flow:
rose petals laid upon the closed eyelids
of one grown weary, who no longer reads
but shuts his eyes to see you -- swiftly brought,
as though each leg were charged with leaps but not
fired, as long as the neck holds the head
quiet to listen: as when in a green place
a bather in the woods is interrupted . . .
with the lake's shine on her averted face.
-- Rilke
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