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DEW DROP INN
17 June 2006
As I've written before, Baudelaire saw the world, at its best, as an inn. I see Las Vegas as a phantasmagorical rendition
of that idea into an urban space, and an urban ethos. It's also possible to see the phantasmagorical aesthetic of Las Vegas
as a radical critique of 20th Century art, 20th Century fine art, in particular, which perhaps strayed too far from the auberge.
The idea of art itself as a kind of inn is not new. In his preface to "Tom Jones", way back in the 18th Century,
Henry Fielding says that "An Author ought to consider himself, not as a Gentleman who gives a private or eleemosynary
Treat, but rather as one who keeps a public Ordinary, at which all Persons are welcome for their money." (Eleemonsyary
means charitable, and a public Ordinary is of course a public tavern -- a pub.)
The fine arts in the 20th Century, alas, out of a kind of decayed Romanticism, a puerile rebellion against Victorian forms
and an often hypocritical reaction against commercialization, became a hermtically sealed system, which the public was not
invited to enter -- popularity was considered demeaning and art itself became a specialized realm which the ordinary person
could approach only as a supplicant, in the care of priestly academic guides.
Pop art was a reaction to this insufferable piety about art -- Warhol's soup cans and Lichtentein's comic strip panels were
like inn signs welcoming the public back into the ordinary. Sadly, there were no inns attached to these signs -- they were
gestures, wonderful jokes on the art world, but behind them lay empty rooms . . . no comfort or sustenance for the weary traveler.
People used posters of them as wall decorations, but went to the movies and to rock and roll for art that had a transformative
power in their lives, that offered shelter from the storm.
Meanwhile, officially discredited Victorian forms continued to carry, unofficially, art's burden in the culture. Victorian
melodrama, 19th-Century program music and academic painting migrated into the movies in obvious but unappreciated ways --
at least by the official academic/intellectual observers of the 20th Century, who insisted on seeing film as a "modern"
art, though it was modern only in its technological means. The scenic ambitions of Victorian theater and world expositions
resurfaced in theme parks and in the megaresorts of Las Vegas.
Above is the interior of the Grand Palais in Paris, built for the Universal Exposition of 1900. Below is the interior of
the conservatory at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, built in 1998.
At the world exposition of 1900 in Paris, there was a "Paris street", which offered a minature Paris in a succession
of attractions themed as a Parisian boulevard -- Loie Fuller, the famous dancer and early film subject, had a theater in it,
a popular satiric journal sponsored a Punch and Judy show. An artificial Paris presented a sort of summary of the real city's
spirit -- a real city which lay just outside the gates of the exhibition. This is obviouslty connected conceptually to the
more ambitious rendition of Paris afforded by the Paris Las Vegas, to the Venetian, and to the Monte Carlo. It's an example
of architecture as theater, as a vehicle of narrative.
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| © 2006 Paul Kolnik |
While a self-respecting intellectual today might see the megaresorts of Las Vegas as unique and alien examples of late 20th-Century
vulgarity, a 19th-Century visitor to modern Las Vegas would feel quite at home, culturally speaking. She would immediately
recognize the megaresorts as variants of the pavillions of the sensational world expositions of her time. Most importantly,
she would recognize the feeling of being at home in the presence of art -- an art which, like the movies and rock music, like
Fielding's "public Ordinary", welcomes all for their money. Fielding's Gentlemen of art, with their private, charitable
Treats, will come back to Las Vegas eventually, offering to stand a round of drinks for the house . . . or maybe a few rounds
of drinks. They've been away a disgracefully long time, after all, and the culture has moved on quite cheerfully without
them.
WHORES
20 April 2006
Baudelaire searched the dark back streets of 19th-Century Paris for harlots whose painted faces, whose company and whose
smiles offered him a glimpse into the abyss, exciting because it was profound. There was more than a commercial transaction
going on between the poet and his flowers of evil -- there was a bargaining between lost souls, a danse macabre beyond the
pale of bourgeois stasis and despair.
[Of the painting by Delacroix above, "Women Of Algiers", Baudelaire wrote, "This little poem of an interior
. . . seems somehow to exhale the the heady scent of a house of ill repute, which quickly enough guides our thoughts toward
the fathomless limbo of sadness." When quoting this in his "Arcades Project", Walter Benjamin chose to emphasize
the word fathomless.]
What would M. Baudelaire have made of the harlots of modern-day Las Vegas, sitting at the elegant casino bars playing video
poker, indistinguishable by sight from the non-working girls passing through those same bars? What would he have made of
the billboards and taxicab ads, in plain view in the bright desert sun, featuring exotic "dancers" from the "gentlemen's
clubs"?
In the commercialized sexual transactions of modern-day Las Vegas, souls do not figure. The terror of damnation is reduced
to a haggling over access to body parts and the means by which a bodily emission is induced. Whatever intercourse results
is undoubtedly difficult to distinguish from congress with a rubber sex doll.
Prostitution in Las Vegas enters the realm of bourgeois commercial trafficking -- honest, innocent, drained of life .
. . not far removed from bodily functions performed in a lavish marble-clad rose-lit bathroom. Today we speak unselfconsciously
of "sex workers" and the "sex industry". In the "Arcades Project", Walter Benjamin remarks
that "Prostitution can lay claim to being considered 'work' the moment work becomes prostitution." Today, it's
not just the proletariat which is alienated from its labor, but the bourgeois, too, even the haute bourgeois -- the moneyed
class that patronizes the "respectable" whores who work the classy casino bars.
There are undoubtedly more desperate sisters of the night working the dark back streets of Vegas' shabbier neighborhoods
who more closely evoke the lost ladies of Baudelaire's world, but the distinction today is more apt to seem one of style and
economic status than of existential depravity. The only time you can readily distinguish a working girl from a female tourist
in a casino bar is when the former opens her mouth to speak and reveals a kind of slow-witted banality of mind. ("Nobody
gets into my pants for less than, like, $500," I once heard one say -- the "like" being an inelegant indication
of her willingness to bargain.) She is simply less educated than her non-commercial sister, with a less developed sense of
irony and play.
We're all in hell now, and we all know it -- there is no more glamor in damnation.
[In the painting above, Picasso goofs on the Delacroix painting at the head of this report, deconstructing it. It's not just
an aesthetic exercise. It seems to me that Picasso is appropriating the bourgeois hatred and fear of the female and using
it to dissect the female into lifeless, if vivid and lurid, component parts. It's possible to see cubism in general as an
attempt to RENDER three-dimensional reality onto a two-dimensional surface. It's also possible to see it as an attempt to
REDUCE three-dimensional reality into two dimensions, to make it superficial. Study the two pictures and come to your own
conclusions about Picasso's aims. Consider the use of body doubles in movie sex scenes, where disassociated, anonymous parts
of the naked female body are made to stand in for the whole woman. Consider the question of whether Delacroix's willingness
to confront FATHOMLESS sadness is not more courageous that Picasso's hysterical attempt to master it, to bring its contents
up to the surface and lay them out on a butcher's table. It may lead you to conclude that one goal of modern artists ought
to be restoring the image of the whole woman to art, whatever the psychic consequences for men.]
MERRY-GO-ROUND
1 March 2006
One of the cultural pleasures -- yes, cultural pleasures, I say -- of living in Las Vegas is that it allows one to get
in touch, imaginatively and sensually, with other delirious places in other delirious times . . .
. . . such as, for example, the Paris of the Second Empire, when that great city tried to distract itself, and the world,
from the coming rule of finance and industry with a mad whirl of elegant frivolity, all set to the ironically careless music
of Offenbach.
Among the great features of the Second Empire (1852-1870) were the spectacular international expositions that drew the world
to Paris and beguiled it with magical visions of exotic places and an even more exotic future in which technology would harmonize
and elevate all the peoples of the planet.
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| © 2006 Paul Kolnik |
One cannot fail to see echoes of the legendary pavilions of these expositions in the phantasmagorical resorts that now gleam
preposterously on the Las Vegas Strip. We even have here a replica of the Eiffel Tower, a surviving relic from one of those
expositions in the 19th Century's City Of Light. (The Tower dates from a later time than the Second Empire but epitomizes
the wonders of cast-iron construction that so dazzled the Second Empire with its fantastical possibilities.)
Here, too, we can feel precisely the mood of visitors to the Prater, the fabulous playground of pre-WWI Vienna -- a place
where shopgirls and hussars gathered for elegant gaiety on the eve of apocalypse . . . the weight of the old world's doom
only adding to the lyrical charm and dazzling enchantment of the old world's last sweet celebration of pure, careless joy.
Echoes of this poignant moment in time can be found in art, of course -- in Viennese operetta and most explicitly in the
visions of Old Vienna conjured up in the films of Erich Von Stroheim. But in Las Vegas today you can experience it for yourself.
Writers always look for darkness in Las Vegas -- an example of literary and intellectual irony, I suppose, since Las Vegas
is an empire of light. But it is also an empire of lightness, of silliness, of carefree release.
The emptiness of the surrounding desert is keenly felt here -- a perfect image of the disintegration of humane life and
vital culture in the world at large. The dark revelations of Las Vegas's conventional literary observers are entirely redundant,
banal and obvious. The Luxor resort is a pleasure palace built in the form of an ancient tomb. Grant's final resting place
is faithfully reproduced at the New York New York casino. Las Vegas knows what it is about and needs no reminders from emissaries
dispatched by the old, dying culture to "expose" it.
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| © 2006 Paul Kolnik |
Here, as on the Boulevard des Italiens in Offenbach' time, as at the Prater in the time of Von Stroheim's youth, people congregate
heroically to remind themselves that the sweet, silly, ephemeral pleasures of life will survive the collapse of civilizations
and the ossification of culture.
Here, as on Offenbach's stages, as on the Prater's carousels, "everything turns, everything dances . . ."
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| © 2006 Paul Kolnik |
LAS VEGAS:
REALITY CHECK
14 February 2006
When you steal away from the "real world" and your "ordinary life" to visit Las Vegas, you may doing
exactly the opposite of what you think you're doing -- because the "real world", where you lead your "ordinary
life", is largely a fantasy construction, a theatrical facade of superseded historical concepts applied to a reality
that is very different indeed, in order to make it seem manageable and familiar.
This fantasy world is necessary because the world we actually live in is changing so rapidly and profoundly that the change
can barely be processed. So we still think of "modern art" -- a form which took shape about a hundred years ago
and petered out in the 1960s. We're not sure what has replaced it -- so we speak of post-modern art, still relating contemporary
events to an historical era long vanished. We think of culture as "the fine arts" -- painting, sculpture, opera,
symphonic music . . . forms which are no longer alive in the popular imagination, no longer contributing new work to the contemporary
consciousness. They are part of archived culture -- fine things, as museums and libraries are fine things, but things that
tell us little about the culture we actually live in now.
Theatrical box office returns for movies are regularly printed in newspapers, preserving the illusion that we still have
a public culture of moviegoing, whereas in fact movies are primarily consumed through, and all movies make their profits from,
private viewings in the home. "News", as presented on television, is about entertainment, not information, much
less truth, and has about as much connection to reality as the "reality television" which fills the nominal entertainment
slots on the TV schedule.
Our "representative government" is owned lock, stock and barrel by corporations, which have all the rights and
privileges of individuals but none of the responsibilities -- as gross a parody of humane civic order, of "democracy",
as it's possible to imagine.
Former cultural centers like New York are becoming a combination of regional retail shopping centers, like huge malls,
and refuges for the upper middle class, who imagine they are living in a lively contemporary hotbed of cutting-edge culture,
even as they drive out the young bohemians who alone fuel such culture.
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| © 2006 Paul Kolnik |
So where are we really? It's hard to say precisely, because all the wheels are spinning so quickly -- but Las Vegas is the
most productive place to come and consider the subject. Las Vegas has an ironic archived culture, in the form of gigantic
three-dimensional representations of former cultural centers like Paris and Venice (and New York.) It builds the sort of
buildings that people want to inhabit, as opposed to the sort of buildings that academic culture thinks they OUGHT to want
to inhabit. It presents shows and spectacles that they actually want to see as opposed to shows and spectacles that the overeducated
classes think would be good for them.
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| © 2006 Paul Kolnik |
In Las Vegas, gambling, one of the largest industries throughout America, and the true American Pastime, is legal, as opposed
to underground and hypocritically outlawed. In Las Vegas, men are encouraged openly to appreciate women's bodies in various
stages of undress without any polite fictions masking their desire to do so. In Las Vegas, the lust for money, the operative
principle of our society, is celebrated frankly. In Las Vegas, the democratic spirit, the camaraderie of all citizens, is
practiced in individual exchanges on a massive scale.
In Las Vegas, all the civic and psychic and class-based masks are ripped away, all the institutional veils are lifted
. . . here the lid is off and you get a look into the works. You may like what you see, or not -- though it's surprising
how well and pleasantly the town functions without the fantastical facade most of us use to cope. But like it or not, understand
it or not, appreciate it or not, this is where we are -- and wherever we're going, we have to start from here.
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| © 2006 Paul Kolnik |
[The report above is illustrated with photographs taken by Paul Kolnik on a recent visit to Las Vegas. I'll be publishing
more of them, and writing about them, in the weeks to come . . .]
JUBILEE!
14 January 2006
"Jubilee!" is one of the last two classic showgirl revues still playing on the Las Vegas Strip. It's an extraordinary
cultural artifact, that seems to exist outside of time.
At the core of the classic showgirl revue are the choreographed parades of the half-naked showgirls, bare-breasted but
fantastically costumed, mainly above the ears, in the elaborate headdresses they manage to balance miraculously as they go
through their parade evolutions.
The display of female pulchritude is almost overwhelming. The traditional showgirl has a fantastic body and knows how
to move with a dancer's grace and so it is with the girls in the "Jubilee!" revue. They all have lovely breasts,
of course, but what's really stunning is that all of them seem to be real. Real breasts have become a novelty in Las Vegas
-- and not just in the strip clubs -- so it's really breathtaking to see so many of them in one place, bobbing gently as the
girls promenade, in their wondrous variety of natural shapes, with no trace of the overstretched, shiny skin that so often
gives away the presence of an implant.
It's all so much more erotic than the bumping and grinding of girls with artificial tits and no dancerly grace in the
lap dance emporia of this town. I think that most strip clubs are designed to help men feel temporarily superior to women,
but at "Jubilee!" this is not possible -- there are too many of them, they are too poised and dignified. You must
worship them or slink away like a whipped cur.
It's the numbers of naked women appearing onstage at any given moment that turn the show into a celebration of Woman,
that keep it from becoming a spectacle-display of women. The show is also an object lesson in the concept of nudity. Sometimes
the women wear slightly transparent bras, sometimes they wear spangled strings that outline their breasts, sometimes they
wear no tops at all. There is no progression here, as in a strip "tease", just a witty and seductive kind of play.
The lines of naked women make entrances at various times throughout the variety show -- then, in the second act, there
is a long section (about the sinking of "The Titanic", of all things) where they make no appearance at all . . .
so that when at last they do reappear the moment is joyous. There is clearly a long tradition of showgirl-revue theatrical
practice being drawn on here, and the skillful calculation of it is impressive. (The late Donn Arden, who created "Jubilee!"
more than twenty years ago, once worked for the Cafe Lido in Paris, home of the famous Bluebell girls and one of the classic
French topless revues from which the showgirl revues of of Las Vegas descended.)
Even more impressive is the fact that this tradition is presented in "Jubilee!" without a wink, without quotes
around it, without apology. It's as though the years since 1957 never happened -- we are in a timeless, mythical place while
the show plays, the land of the showgirls. The singing and dancing and juggling and acrobatics that make up the bulk of the
revue itself are professional and sometimes awesome, but they are just there to set off the girls, to serve as reminders that
there is simply nothing like a dame -- nothing you can name that is anything like a dame.
THE GREAT GOOD PLACE
5 December 2005
It's rare to read a work of sociology that makes you cry, but "The Great Good Place" by Ray Oldenburg is such
a work. Even the title touches my heart, describing as it does a place and phenomenon which has been all but eradicated from
American life by urban planners and suburban zoning laws . . . the local tavern, coffee house, diner, corner store, soda fountain
. . . the "third place" set in between home and work where the sometimes overwhelming confinement of the former
and the often stressful environment of the latter can be mediated by informal conviviality with a small voluntary community
of fellow citizens.
A true third place must be convenient, not dependent on traveling a great distance to reach, so its gatherings need not
be planned -- it must be utterly inclusive, public, welcoming, and it must have regulars who frequent it by happy choice and
not out of any sense of obligation. Whatever its physical ambiance might be, it becomes cozy and warm through sociability,
free and easy conversation, a sense of belonging not maintained by any rules except those freely chosen by each individual.
Oldenburg's valuable synthesis of sociological insight into the third place, and the dire consequences to the quality
of American life brought about by its demise, is also a quiet Jeremiad against the society, against all of us, who have allowed
this catastrophe to happen.
I think one reason people come so far in such numbers to Las Vegas is to experience, in a brief concentrated dose, the
free and easy mood of the vanished third place -- to drink and play with strangers who are not really strangers, once greeted
cheerfully and respectfully. Las Vegas is America's lost mythical corner tavern, with the naughty calendar on the wall, poker
in the back room, cheap food and drink at the bar. No expectations, no networking, no snobbery -- a true exercise in democracy,
inclusiveness, civility amidst diversity.
It's a fantasy, of course, since the unique mood of Las Vegas is not integrated into the lives of those who visit here,
and so can never take the place of a real third place. It is a great good place, though, where you can kick back a little,
forget the troubles of the workaday world, see a few familiar faces and have a friendly word or two with almost anyone you
meet, from any walk of life and any place on the map.
Oldenburg argues persuasively that we're not really human, fully human, if we don't have places in our regular day-to-day
lives where that is possible . . .
You can buy the book here:
The Great Good Place
WATTEAU IN VEGAS
30 November 2005
Very few works of art have anything interesting to say about Las Vegas. Partly, perhaps, this is because there isn't
very much that's interesting to say about Las Vegas. As the cultural critic Dave Hickey says, ". . . 'the secret of
Vegas' is that there are no secrets." Everything is out in the open, on the surface, leaving art no mysteries to unveil.
But there's more to it than that -- since the surface of things is interesting, profound, consisting as it does of all
those things we see without seeing, and art could certainly bring them into our realm of conscious experience in interesting
ways. The nude in art may have gained a certain frisson from the fact that female nudity used to be a private thing, but
the breasts of a cocktail waitress bursting out of her bodice are no less lovely and worthy of our attention for being all
but exposed in public.
Movies about Las Vegas veer between neo-Puritanical visions of sinful dissipation ("Leaving Las Vegas") and fantasies
of beating the house ("Ocean's Eleven") -- neither of which are true to the actual experience of the place, where
sin is mostly under control and the house always makes out like a bandit. What's really interesting about Las Vegas is not
that cocktail waitresses walk around half naked but the elaborate rituals defining what is and is not permitted in exchanges
between cocktail waitresses and their customers. What's even more interesting is not the occasional lucky gambling win but
how people deal with the routine losses they know they must expect here.
The only movie that's really true to Las Vegas is Elvis Presley's "Viva Las Vegas", because it simply participates
in the place on its own level of cheerful and inventive vulgarity.
The only painter who's ever really gotten Las Vegas, I think, is Watteau, whose celebration of the pleasures of the ephemeral,
the sweetness of hopeless yearning, the comic tristesse of all theatrical enterprises, accords perfectly with the late night
mood of the town.
Has there ever been a better evocation than the image below of a Midwest businessman trying to get a cocktail waitress
to acknowledge him as a sexual being?
Has there ever been a better evocation than the image below of the psyche of a poker player who's just busted out of a big
tournament because of a cruel suck-out on the river? Or of a guy who's just had a five-hundred dollar fuck with a breathtakingly
beautiful hooker and perhaps didn't perform as well as he hoped he might?
The many images of social flirtation Watteau painted present an image of romance as gaming -- a blend of vexing and piquant
action with negative expectation, and the rueful, self-deprecating acknowledgment that 1) this is all there is to life, and
2) it's wonderful.
Indeed, it's fabulous . . .
A DINING EXPERIENCE
A follow-up on my report of 23 June 2005, "The Fungible and the Unique", inspired by a reading of "The Experience
Economy":
I heard Wolfgang Puck on the radio discussing the best meal he'd ever had in his life. It was at a restaurant in the
South of France but, astonishingly, Puck cannot remember what he ate at the meal. It was the atmosphere and the service and
the food which combined to make the meal into an experience -- transcending any particular detail of the whole.
In their book, Pine and Gilmore expand upon this phenomenon in their analysis of the emerging experience economy, of which
Las Vegas is the epicenter. It is not coincidental that Puck was the pioneer here in making dining part of the experience-oriented
appeal of Sin City.
There were plenty of standard upscale dining opportunities in Las Vegas before Puck, generic replicas of fine dining establishments
elsewhere, but the chief culinary attractions were the buffets -- which offered a kind of experience . . . one remembered
and talked about the abundant offering and the shockingly low price, even if there was nothing particularly memorable about
the food itself.
The experience of the buffet quickly became a Las Vegas cliche, and thus a commodity. By concentrating on the experience
element of dining, Puck found a way to add value to the traditional Las Vegas eatery and transformed the town into one of
the world's great culinary centers . . . making a lot of money for himself along the way.
You can now have a Puck dining experience at five different locations in Las Vegas. You can buy Pine and Gilmore's book
here:
The Experience Economy
HARMONY
6 July 2005
Larry McMurtry's "Lonesome Dove" is one of the great American novels. He took three weeks off from writing
it to pen "The Desert Rose", which is a fine novel in its own right, and one of the best ever written about Las
Vegas. Set in the 80s, when Vegas was a little down on its luck, it's the story of a showgirl coming to the end of her career
as her teenage daughter starts one, as a dancer in the casino where her mother works. It captures the melancholy laced with
enchantment that can overtake people who actually live and work in this strange town -- the good-natured sadness you often
see in the eyes of older cocktail waitresses . . . in their relentless hopefulness that you're not going to be a jerk.
There are only a couple of revues left in town which feature showgirls like Harmony, the novel's protagonist, but the
type of woman who is basically paid to be beautiful remains -- and the town has its share of girls like her daughter Pepper,
whom the system has robbed of joy and compassion.
In Harmony, McMurtry creates a character whose only strength is optimism, but he grants her the grandeur of that strength,
without condescension. She's a wondrous creation -- as heroic in her way as any of the legendary frontiersmen of his period
fiction.
"The Desert Rose" is period fiction itself now, twenty years on, but the feel of the city hasn't changed all
that much -- it still takes courage to find real joy amidst the ruthless merriment of it all . . . and women like Harmony
are still the key to everything.
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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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| © University of Nevada-Las Vegas 2000 |
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
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.
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
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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.
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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
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.
THE END OF SOMETHING
28 April 2005
Steve Wynn's new 2.7 billion-dollar casino opened to the public at midnight on the morning of the 28th. I had an irresistible
urge to go see it, for several reasons.
Wynn is one of the seminal Vegas visionaries, with a genius for creating casinos. He has an uncanny instinct for designs
that capture the imagination and work as commercial enterprises -- and also for spotting (or creating) trends that shape whole
phases of Vegas development.
The tower of the new resort promised much. With its curving, sculptural form it signaled, perhaps, that the era of the
Pastiche Palace -- embodied in the Paris, the Venetian, the Monte Carlo, New York New York and Wynn's own Treasure Island
and Bellagio -- was over . . . that a return to the unmoored fantasy of 50s Vegas was at hand.
I showed up at the place about an hour after the doors opened. I still had to wait in line to get in, and the interior
was packed -- with curious locals, mostly, it seemed, and left-overs from the more exclusive opening parties earlier in the
evening.
My first impression of the resort was -- "underwhelming". Wynn has abandoned, happily, the dull bourgeois vision
of tasteful luxury that informs the Bellagio and makes it a cold place to me. There's an attempt at whimsy and fantasy, instead,
but it has a shopworn feel, as though Wynn couldn't think past the haut-circus decor of the restaurant Circo at the Bellagio.
It's like a classy version of Circus Circus.
The spaces are magical, however -- cozy and inviting. Here you see Wynn's genius in high gear, and there's much to be learned
from the result. But there is a suffocating tidiness and cuteness about the ambiance, and a weird sense of anachronism, of
creative exhaustion.
The mountain attraction in front of the place, only the back of which can be seen from The Strip, turns out to be a perfectly
ordinary artificial landscape, with a few waterfalls. It has one big square waterfall that ripples over what seems to be
a stone wall but is in fact a gigantic video screen, on which play from time to time boring music videos. Wynn said he wanted
the centerpiece outdoor attraction of the resort to be visible only to those who come inside -- unlike the Mirage volcano
or the Bellagio fountains, which he says he regrets "giving away for free". But the truth is that this outdoor
attraction wouldn't lure anyone into the place, and so would serve no function out on The Strip -- and I can't imagine it
will do much more than disappoint those who witness it inside.
I just kept thinking -- this is a place for old people, rich old people who want to think they're hip. The main cafe
is non-smoking, even out on the terrace that looks over the pool area -- a sure sign that Wynn has no hopes of attracting
20-somethings here. The drinks at the bars are way overpriced. The upscale shopping areas dominate the casino space, which
seems like an afterthought.
(I did see Evelyn Ng, the great up-and-coming hold-'em player, waiting for someone outside the cafe. She was extremely
tall and thin and beautiful, and I wished she'd been waiting for me. To me she struck the only note of authentic glamor in
the whole joint.)
The future of Las Vegas is not here -- this casino is like the last gasp of the 80s sensibility that revitalized the Strip,
beginning with Wynn's visionary Mirage, but that will soon be eclipsed by the hipper off-Strip casinos like the Hard Rock
and the Palms.
Those places, by attracting a younger crowd, are creating patrons who will return for decades to come. The Bellagio and
Wynn Las Vegas are appealing to their parents and grandparents -- a big market, and better-heeled today, but destined to diminish
rapidly as the next few years go by.
It's not just a question of demographics, either. The hipper off-Strip joints are keeping alive and revitalizing the
edginess that has always been at the core of Las Vegas's appeal -- even back in the Fifties when the big Strip resorts were
patronized by older folks in coats and ties and evening dresses. The attempt in the 90s to market Las Vegas as a family-friendly
fun destination was a violation of this core appeal, and quickly abandoned -- but the stodgy respectability of the Bellagio
represents the same sort of violation.
The "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" advertising campaign was wildly successful, and the line became a
national catchphrase because it zeroed in on Vegas's primary appeal -- as a place that doesn't just offer delirious excess
but also the lure of the forbidden, indulged lightly and safely by most but still delivering the frisson of sin lurking dangerously
close at hand.
It's hard to imagine anything worth hushing up ever happening at Wynn Las Vegas -- except perhaps for a scandalous credit
card bill run up at Louis Vuitton. It's interesting that the Maloof brothers, who own the Palms, and Peter Morton, who owns
the Hard Rock, both took out full page ads in the front section of the Las Vegas Review Journal the day of the new resort's
opening, congratulating Wynn on his achievement. Partly this might be set down to two of the last remaining privately controlled
casinos saluting a fellow maverick. (Due to a recent series of mega-mergers, most of the Strip resorts are now owned by two
large casino consortiums.) But I think it also reflects relief that Wynn Las Vegas isn't going to be competing with the hipper
establishments for the Vegas visitors of the future.
What Wynn Las Vegas lacks is a sense of action, of possibility, of risk. Wynn talks about the place as a series of "experiences"
but they're not really that, because true experience destinations require the potential for genuine surprise and an edge of
danger. The bold colors and dramatic spaces of his new resort seem like cosmetic holiday decorations in a dreary old-folks
home.
The place will make a lot of money in the short term -- Wynn knows his market well. But it doesn't mark the beginning
of a new era in Las Vegas -- as the Mirage once did. It marks the end of one instead.
ON THE FRONTIER WITH XENI
31 March 2005
Xeni Jardin, Internet frontier scout, weighs in with a piece on Mark Cuban in the new issue of "Wired". Cuban
is initiating what he expects will be the future of theatrical film distribution -- by all-digital routes. People have been
talking about this idea for ages, but Cuban thinks its time has come and he's putting his vast resources into the task of
making it happen:
You can read the piece here:
The Cuban Revolution
It's all very provocative, but I wonder if Cuban isn't still thinking inside the box a bit. Digital distribution to theaters
will come, of course, and theaters will survive as long as teenagers want to get out of the house on weekends, which is to
say -- forever. But the general trend is towards "experience" excursions. Already for many teens, moviegoing is
just part of the mall experience -- which is the real destination.
The question is, then, I think -- where are malls going? And the answer, of course, is to be found, as always, in Las
Vegas. Take the Palms here, for example. I go there for the poker room. But there are a lot of other things to be found
there. For example, in the wee hours the bars fill up with stunning young prostitutes, plus lots of young non-professional
girls looking to add a little extra experience to their evening. These in turn attract guys looking for one or the other
type. (And they are impossible to distinguish on sight. Once at the airport I saw an attractive young woman at the baggage
carousel, talking on her cell phone. "I'm heading right to the hotel, putting on my hooker outfit and going out!"
She wasn't going out hooking, clearly -- she was just looking for a hooker-like experience to talk about when she got home.)
There are also at the Palms two hip clubs, one hip steak joint, two trendy upscale restaurants, a couple of cheaper snack
places -- plus a full multiplex cinema, one of the best in town, plus a fast-food court (McDonald's, Baskin-Robbins, etc.,)
plus a video arcade room. (It has a tattoo parlor, too -- which I consider a stroke of genius.)
The Palms has done something extraordinary -- it has managed to appeal to a bifurcated market, catering to locals during
the day, with low-stakes poker and loose slots and the movie theaters, and to hip young things after dark. Little in the
way of shopping yet, but that's coming with an expansion, which will also include expensive condos. But of course the hip
kids play the slots, too, and the locals stick around at the poker tables to fleece the young hot shots from out of town --
and the multiplex hosts the CineVegas Film Festival, which caters to beautiful people from elsewhere.
In other words, it's a super-mall offering just about everything, including an "action mix" of people from different
backgrounds with different agenda -- and you can look at other casinos here in the same way. They are in fact traditional
town centers -- without the towns (which most visitors here are happy to leave at home, because they're calcified and boring.)
It won't be long (a decade, maybe) before malls elsewhere will start to compete seriously with the casino-malls of Las
Vegas in offering "experiences" -- themed spaces, extraordinary live performances and the like. Movie theaters
which aren't integrated into an environmental spectacle that offers experience variety will die. It will be too easy to consume
movies at home via the Internet and on the go through portable devices.
Meanwhile, you can visit the future any time you like -- for the price of a plane ticket to las Vegas.
SUN, SIN AND SUBURBIA
21 March 2005
Neither sensational nor profound, "Sun, Sin and Suburbia" is nevertheless required reading for anyone who wants
to understand the modern reality of Las Vegas. Hal Rothman, in "Neon Metropolis", does a better job of evoking
the dynamics of local politics, but Schumacher offers a more lucid explication of the big picture -- of the forces and mechanisms
that have shaped and driven, and continue to shape and drive, the eternal boomtown that is Sin City. His analysis is oddly
upbeat. Las Vegas has prospered by giving free rein to the gaming interests and developers who constitute the economic engine
of the valley -- while local government has struggled to play catch-up with the vast social consequences of rapid growth.
What's amazing, argues Schumacher, is how close to catching up the metropolis has actually come -- how much worse, in other
words, things could easily be. And he does not rate too lightly the benefits to locals of the furious competition for tourist
dollars. Service and entertainment here are designed to capture the imagination and memory of short-term visitors, and the
result is an embarrassing richness of pop-cultural amenities for those who live here year-round. The excess offered to catch
the fleeting attention of a convention-goer has inflected the whole town with a spirit of largesse and welcome and solicitude,
which is available to residents 24/7/365.
You can buy the book here:
Sun, Sin and Suburbia
[Booklovers will be pleased to note that this hardback edition is bound in sewn signatures.]
BEAU GESTE
16 March 2005
In a recent issue of "The New York Times" David Brooks writes about the desiccation of our culture due to something
I call Yuppie Tidiness, though it's really Duppie Tidiness -- the tyranny of social hygiene forced upon others by Depressed
Urban Professionals, people whose own lives are so leached of meaning and transcendent purpose that they have fallen back
on a kind of secular Puritanism, trying to make everyone live "clean" and tidy lives, physically. It's the last
refuge of the spiritually vacuous. Brooks writes:
"I blame the arbiters of virtue. Sometime over the past generation we became less likely to object to something because
it is immoral and more likely to object to something because it is unhealthy or unsafe. So smoking is now a worse evil than
six of the Ten Commandments, and the word 'sinful' is most commonly associated with chocolate.
"Now we lead lives in which everything is a pallid parody of itself: fat-free yogurt, salt-free pretzels, milk-free
milk. Gone, at least among the responsible professional class, is the exuberance of the feast. Gone is the grand and pointless
gesture.
"But at least we have New Orleans. After stumbling out of Antoine's, some of us headed across the street to a piano
bar run by Gennifer Flowers, Bill Clinton's old flame. And there was Gennifer herself in a black leather miniskirt, belting
out a song called 'Ya Gotta Have Boobs.'
"It was a reminder that no matter how dull and responsible you become, an alternative and much stranger moral universe
is always just one slippery step away."
"Beau Geste" is what the French call "the grand and pointless gesture" -- literally "the beautiful
gesture", whose meaning resides only its beauty. Interestingly I first heard the phrase in New Orleans, from the lips
of a rummy at a bar there in 1971, on a cross-country drive. He gave me a handful of Mardi Gras coins, cheap bendable things
thrown out to the crowds by the costumed revelers on parade floats. He said he wasn't giving them to me for any particular
reason, that it was just a beau geste.
A life made up entirely of beaux gestes is likely to be amusing but brief -- the life, say, of a too-brave cavalry officer
of the 19th Century. But every small beau geste puts us in touch with those whose pleasure it is to risk their lives unnecessarily.
(". . . but what else is a life for?" asks Dennis Finch-Hatton in "Out Of Africa" as he and Karen Blixen
head off to hunt down a couple of cattle-thieving lions.)
A city made up entirely of beaux gestes is likely to be -- Las Vegas. The only "here" here is the Mojave Desert,
cruel, pitiless, unvanquishable. Every bastion thrown up against it, here in its midst, is a gesture . . . temporary, futile,
beautiful.
One comes here to remember that the meaning of human life is somehow mixed up with an embrace of the ephemeral, the futile,
the merely beautiful . . . that life is not good for you -- it's just good. One might regret that Las Vegas has to make its
point so loudly, so vulgarly -- but it's so silent out there in the desert, with its smokeless, noise-regulated bars, its
treadmill fitness, its tasteless food, its tasteful gated communities filled with gossamer families and long-departed passions.
In the context of modern American life, this whole city is a beau geste.
LAS VEGAS: THEN AND NOW
20 February 2005
Las Vegas works overtime trying to forget or deny or destroy its history, but it does have one -- almost all of it, before
1931, quaint and provincial, almost all of it since then profound and emblematic. A watering-hole in the middle of the Mojave
Desert, about halfway between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles, Las Vegas was visited and settled briefly from time to time
by native Americans, frontier scouts, Mormons and finally, towards the end of the 19th Century, by a few ranchers. It didn't
become a city until the railroad reached it in 1905, and it didn't become much more than a whistle stop until 1931, when the
Nevada State Legislature legalized gambling and the Federal Government started building Hoover Dam nearby.
It's history as a genuine city thus falls entirely within the era of the automobile and the photograph -- something which
can't be said for almost any other major metropolitan center.
The book "Las Vegas: Then and Now" presents the whole modern history of the place in a series of vintage photographs
juxtaposed with contemporary photographs of the same views. There's a brief summary introduction to that history and concise
capsule explications of the photographs, but it's the images which tell the story and tell it in a way that's uniquely useful.
There is no writing about Las Vegas, at least not yet, which manages to successfully evoke the surreal, preposterous physical
fact of it -- its visual essence, its mixture of mad excess and structural incongruity, all inflected with a kind of poignant
frailty when experienced in its geographical context, as a surreal urban mirage thrown up against the odds perpetually established
by the desert around it, vast, inhospitable and merciless.
You can't really understand America in the 21st Century unless you understand Las Vegas, and as terrifying or exhilarating
as that understanding might be, it's something worth pursuing. "Las Vegas: Then and Now" can help.
You can buy the book here:
Las Vegas: Then and Now
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