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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.
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| © Sharon Gaines |
COMBOS, BABY!
29 March 2005
I saw Sharon Gaines in action at a fight at the Silverton Casino in Las Vegas last January. She lost an unpopular decision,
but in my report of the fight I agreed with the judges, who gave it to her opponent. Sharon disagrees, and says the tape
of the fight proves her right. In the interests of fair play, here is Sharon's perspective on the contest:
"I do feel I won that fight v Salinas, for the record. I out-pointed her round after round and she had trouble getting
off the ropes. She did hit clean and had a lot of power, when she landed, but she NEVER followed up any of those great shots
with 2 or 3 more punches. Combos, baby!"
My guess is that Sharon will win her next bout decisively, just to prove the critics (like me) wrong, and all I can say
to that is -- you go, girl!
Click Here To Visit Sharon Gaines's Web Site
My report of all the girl fights at the Silverton can be found in the Nowhere Confidential Archive section, under the heading
GIRL FIGHTS and the dateline 31 January 2005.
CAESARS
27 March 2005
My friend John Sosnovsky is a member of the Fancy and a knowing cove, as Pierce Egan would have described a knowledgeable
boxing fan in Regency England. He told me I'd be wise to get a ticket for a match at Caesars Palace in April, with two good
featured bouts, Cintron v. Margarito and Diaz v. Elder, plus a first-rate undercard. I headed off to Caesars yesterday morning
to see what tickets were available.
I got there about two hours before the box office opened so I set about checking out the casino. The brainchild of Vegas
visionary Jay Sarno, Caesars was the first themed megaresort on The Strip, and the only one there when I first visited Vegas
in 1971. Circus Circus, also created by Sarno, was there by then, too, but had not yet developed into a mega -- indeed, when
it first opened it didn't even have hotel rooms.
Caesars was also the first place I ever stayed on The Strip, during a visit to Vegas in the 80s. The town was undergoing
a stretch of bad times then -- I think the room at Caesars was about $29.99 and utilizing the specials one could eat for almost
nothing at its restaurants. I won $250 at roulette, which paid for the whole brief trip with a good chunk of change left
over as profit -- a rare enough Vegas event to be memorable.
Caesars has expanded grandly since the 80s, with a bunch of highly-regarded and trendy restaurants and a spectacular upscale
shopping mall, but it's still the same place at heart -- a captivating labyrinth of cheerful excess and vulgarity. The name
Caesars has no apostrophe -- everybody is welcomed as a Caesar there. That was Sarno's idea. You have to pay dearly for
the consideration, but then again so did many of the real Caesars.
I had breakfast at the Cafe Lago -- the casino's obligatory 24/7 coffee shop-restaurant. It's decorated in the style
of a Hyatt Regency hotel eatery, with a few oddball Vegas touches to tart it up -- moderne fountains, very high ceilings and
a wall of windows looking out on the resort's vast pool complex.
The food is expensive and merely acceptable, but the service is remarkable, logistically speaking. The line was long
when I showed up but it moved with lightning speed under the hands of a small army of women wearing business suits and radio
mics. The maitre d' at the front desk dispatched them into the restaurant with parties of diners according to information
provided by scouts inside the big room. Everyone was super friendly. So when my pricey side order of bacon turned out to
have the leathery consistency of jerky, I was disappointed but not outraged. I felt that the place was doing its best.
I got a couple of good seats for the fight. When the cheerful ticket agent found out I was a local she grew extra friendly
-- like someone meeting a fellow-countryman abroad.
The replica of Michaelangelo's David in the picture above is one of the things I remember most about Caesars from my first
visit. The same size as the original, it looks much bigger, because it's on display in a very small rotunda in the middle
of a shopping arcade. When my then five year-old niece Nora saw the original in Florence she said, "Look, mom -- you
can see his private property." That's what you get the best view of at Caesars, since you can't step back very far from
it without tumbling into a shopping opportunity -- and there's something fitting about that.
A CONTEST OF HEROES
25 March 2005
I saw an awesome thing in Las Vegas last Saturday, at the MGM Grand Garden Arena. It was indeed what Piece Egan, the
A. J. Liebling of the early 19th-century prize ring, would have called, with a certain gaiety of spirit but absolutely no
irony, a Contest Of Heroes. Liebling, following in the footsteps of his beloved Egan, would have called it the same, and
so do I.
Erik Morales of Tijuana went twelve rounds with Manny Pacquiao of the Philippines, in a combat that took one back to the
epic days when boxing was both art and science, when men's souls were tried in the prize ring for the genuine edification
of those wise enough to know what they were seeing and humble enough to appreciate it. I'm still reeling from the experience.
Morales is a warrior -- a skilled technician whose reckless bravery has made him a legend among Mexican fight fans. He'd
recently lost a controversial decision to perpetual rival Marco Antonio Barrera -- a fight he thought he'd won and which initiated
talk that perhaps his best days were behind him. With more bravura than discretion, it seemed, he immediately made a fight
with Manny Pacquiao, the lightning-fast Filipino with a lethal left hand. The betting money in Las Vegas favored Pacquiao,
because he was the fresher and faster man -- and perhaps from a feeling, which I shared, that Morales would be too brave,
run into one of Pacquiao's killer lefts, and have no further opportunity to reconsider his rashness.
Or maybe not.
It looked to be one of those fights whose potential complexities approached the nature of imponderables -- as well as
a hell of brawl -- so I got a ticket to go see it.
I headed to the MGM Grand early on Saturday so I could polish off a pre-fight oyster po' boy at Emeril's New Orleans Fish
House there. The sandwich is filled to overflowing with small, fresh, tasty Gulf oysters, fried in a light and spicy cornmeal
batter. To say that it's good eating is putting it mildly. Then I wandered around the MGM, a casino I don't know well.
It doesn't make a good first impression -- with the exact feel of an upscale chain department store in a fancy suburban
mall. What redeems it are the restaurants. It has a good, though overpriced, coffee shop on an elevated terrace with a fun
view of the casino floor. Nob Hill, a high-end eatery, has wonderfully fresh food and superb service, and eating at the bar
at Emeril's is always pleasurable (besides being the only place in that establishment where you can smoke.)
I haven't eaten at Shibuya, Craftsteak, Seablue, Fiamma or Diego, but all of them are well-reviewed establishments with
dazzling decor -- which makes for quite a line-up of dining opportunities.
I checked out the sports book, which was jammed with people following the college basketball games. I was tempted to
put some money on Morales, because I figured the true odds on the fight were dead even, which made the line in Pacquiao's
favor a bargain bet for Morales. But I couldn't get the image of Pacquiao's redoubtable left out of my mind, where it kept
colliding with Morales's face, and the lines at the betting stations were long, so I just grabbed an iced latte and headed
to the arena.
The partisans in the crowd assembling there, waiting for the doors to open at 4pm, split about 70/30 Mexican to Filipino.
A lot of people carried flags. The mood was friendly -- because each side could giver honor to the other's champion. I eventually
ended up sitting between a young man born in Mexico and an older man born in the Philippines. They talked respectfully to
each other across this ethnic neutral, bearing a name concocted in France, which has no fighters of note and hasn't since
the lyrical loser Georges Carpentier. (It will be remembered that George Blanchine once admonished his dancers not to be
too lyrical. "Georges Carpentier," he offered by way of illustration, "was the most lyrical boxer who ever
lived -- but Dempsey took him out in four." Balanchine wasn't the only artist who learned from that fight -- it shocked
Hemingway, too, at an impressionable age . . . and he had money on the Frenchman which he couldn't afford to lose. This undoubtedly
contributed to his lifelong suspicion of the high-falutin'.)
Each of my neighbors desperately wanted his man to win, but seemed more concerned simply that he not prove an embarrassment.
They needn't have worried.
I saw Harold Lederman, HBO's unofficial scorer, wandering around the lobby of the arena before the event. In real life
he looks exactly like a cartoon character, short, with an enormous head and a goofy, infectious smile.
The arena holds about 15,000, which makes it intimate compared to Madison Square Garden, the only other place I've witnessed
a big fight in person. I had a $125 seat, which in the New York Garden gets you a place up under the rafters, but here got
me a one about halfway up from the ring with a superb view. It was the second cheapest seat in the house.
The three preliminary bouts, before the TV coverage started at 6, included two typical joke fights. Everything that Liebling,
back in the Fifties, feared that television would do to boxing has been done -- killing off the local club fights which used
to be a training ground for young fighters. Now promising kids are thrown out on undercards against bums until they have
enough stats to get a shot at something televised, whereupon they sink or swim. The general skill-level of The Sweet Science
has thus been dreadfully degraded -- which is why most of the great fighters of our time come from places where local boxing
traditions have survived.
The young man from Mexico I sat next to had been a professional boxer, briefly, and had started fighting when he was about
8 in the small village where he grew up. "They'd give me five pesos," he said, "which used to be a big coin
like this --" (he made a circle with his fingers about the size of a silver dollar.) "They said, 'Who do you want
to fight?', pointing to the other boys, and I said, 'I don't care -- I'll fight anybody.'" That's how Erik Morales grew
up, too, in the tough Zona Norte section of Tijuana, and Pacquiao is probably a product of a similar tradition.
Products of the risk-free routes to male self-esteem in our culture are not likely to find themselves fighting their hearts
out for a world boxing title but are increasingly likely to find themselves paying large sums of money to watch other men
do so. It's in the nature of a make-up class.
In the first prelim, two Filipino fighters waved at each other and butted heads. Then one of them suffered a flash knockdown,
told the ref he couldn't see too well, and retired from the contest.
In the second prelim, a big tall Polish Heavyweight named Sosnowski went up against a pudgy Teddy Bear named Fulton from
Cedar Falls, Iowa. Sosnowski looked a lot like Vitali Klitchko, the current top-ranked Heavyweight, and seemed to be trying
to fight like him, as well -- in a sort of robotic way. Fulton had clearly been doing most of his training at Fatburger and
he went down easily in the second.
The third prelim was a lot more interesting. Hilario Lopez, a tall, rangy Super Lightweight from Boise was matched against
the more compact and harder-punching Mike Alvarado from Denver. Lopez leapt at the smaller man and delivered blinding combinations
-- but his blows were glancing for the most part, sometimes discombobulating but never really hurting his opponent. Alvarado
counterpunched sharply and cleanly and clearly did some damage to Lopez. But Alvarado hardly ever threw a body punch -- the
classic technique for taking the legs out from under an elongated fighter like Lopez and neutralizing his height and reach
advantage. It was pleasing to watch Alvarado's skillful counterpunching but frustrating -- he could have saved himself so
much time and trouble by going to the body. This is the sort of basic ring technique which kids coming up in the sport today
simply do not learn. Alvarado won handily on points, to the disapproval of the crowd dazzled by Lopez's apparent punch-count
advantage.
In the first of the televised bouts, a spirited WBA Super Flyweight title fight, Eric Morel of Puerto Rico duked it out
with Martin Castillo of Mexico. It was a back-and-forth brawl, with Castillo attacking and seeming on the verge of stopping
Morel -- only to find Morel springing back at him with furious combinations. Overall Castillo had the best of it -- some
well-considered early-round body punching paying off in the later stretches. It was a unanimous decision for the Mexican
fighter.
A curious bout then followed. Julio Cesar Chavez, Jr., son of the near-mythological Mexican champion, faced off against
a not-quite journeyman fighter from Indianapolis, Ryan Maraldo. Julio, Jr. is just 19, with 16 (now 17) wins -- probably
all over opponents like Maraldo -- and no losses. His name is box-office magic, so I guess he's being brought up very carefully.
He came out fighting tentatively, as though weighted down supernaturally by the burden of that name, as though he'd rather
be doing anything else than standing in a ring with someone who might hurt him and tarnish the family's honor. The wild exclamations
of the crowd whenever he did land a blow, and the increasingly obvious fact that Maraldo couldn't hurt a fly -- try as he
might (and did) -- finally got the kid going. He hurt his opponent badly in the second, then hurt him some more -- to the
point I really thought the ref should have stopped the thing. But he let it go on into the third and finally called an end
when the beating got too savage.
The last match before the main event was a WBC Flyweight elimination bout between Hussein Hussein, fighting out of Bankstown,
Australia, and cocky, insouciant Jorge Arce of Los Mochis, Mexico. It was a furiously contested fight, in the course of which
Hussein knocked the cock and insouciance right out of Arce, as the two traded barrages that seemed ever on the verge of ending
things, one way or the other. My note for round two is simply "back-and-forth (H?)" -- meaning, maybe Hussein took
it by a hair's breadth. My note for round three is "back-and-forth (A?)" My note for round five is "back-and-forth
(?)". I don't know how anyone could have scored this one, and fortunately Arce saved us all the attempt by summoning
some last reserve of fury and knocking Hussein out in the tenth. The wildly partisan Mexican contingent in the arena had
been on the edge of its seats throughout this fight, and all but silenced for much of it by Hussein's courageous attacks on
its favorite. I think it only deepened the mood of suspense over what was to come next.
I didn't take notes on the Morales-Pacquiao fight. I couldn't have averted my eyes from the ring even to jot down an
abbreviated memorial of what was happening, not even between rounds, when it seemed most important to watch the fighters in
their corners and try to read their body language in repose. Someday I'll look at a tape of it, I guess, and try to reconstruct
the details of it -- but the details of it will never tell its story, which played out deep inside each fighter, and deep
inside all of us who watched them tell it, to us and to each other.
Watching two men fight each other is to eavesdrop on the second most intimate conversation possible between human beings.
Unlike sex, the most intimate, the conversation is accessible to an onlooker, because the interior give and take of the dialogue
has a close correspondence to its physical expression. Sexual intercourse is opaque by comparison -- unless you're a participant,
everything important about it must be inferred.
When the national anthem of the Philippines was sung, beautifully, the cheering and palpable emotion that rose up in the
arena was enough to make you think that Pacquiao's supporters had filled up most of the place. When the Mexican national
anthem was sung, less beautifully, the floor-shaking roar and delirious shouting made it clear that things were otherwise.
I found it all very moving. Most of the folk on both sides were Americans, after all, and it is the genius of America to
make a place for national sentiment originating beyonds its borders. It has ever been thus, and though I have long since
lost my identity as a descendant of French immigrants, I know the feeling involved, as a Southern-born American, through my
unaccountable emotional response to the song "Dixie", something which transcends both intellect and moral wisdom.
It is the national anthem of a long-vanished country that went to war with the United States of America, for the most questionable
of motives, but is still, in some sense, my country.
Pacquiao has the face of a boy always on the verge of tears -- as though any failing in his chosen profession would break
his heart. This belies, but perhaps explains, the viciousness of his attack. He's light on his feet, fast and apparently
flighty, until he jumps forward to throw his deadly left, often quicker than the eye of a spectator or the brain of an opponent
can follow.
Morales has the grave and mournful face that you sometimes see in photographs and films of great matadors -- or in antique
Spanish paintings of saints. Some great boxers can sell a jaunty confidence to the public, but even the cleverest of these,
like Muhammed Ali, cannot quite conceal a sadness behind the eyes. It is the sadness of one who has looked beyond Eternity
and seen the end of all things, of someone on intimate terms with the inevitability of physical ruin and death. Jaunty confidence
counts for nothing in the bull ring or the prize ring, where there is serious and difficult work to be done.
Styles make fights, they say, and styles made this one. Morales is a fine boxer who likes to attack, even when attacking
is not the best policy. He likes to please the fans, he says, especially the Mexican fight fans who want to see two guys
really mix it up -- but there must be more to it than this, some element of fatalism connected to his deepest self, which
would rather fail bravely following his courage to its uttermost end than win comfortably using only his skill.
Pacquiao is a great defensive fighter, who uses speed to dodge the weapons of his opponents and speed to exploit any opening
they give him. And he doesn't need much of an opening -- his left, when thrown from slightly outside an opponent's guard,
is so hard and so fast that it can decide a fight all by itself.
Both fighters have awesome wills, awesome courage -- not just great chins but the determination of a true champion to
stand up to any punch, to survive any assault.
The most likely mistake Morales might make in fighting Pacquiao was to expose himself too much in pressing the attack
-- to give Pacquiao the opening he needed to end things quickly. He might do this knowing full well how foolish it was, just
for the chance to demonstrate his bravery. So for Morales the drama of the fight would be his own struggle to balance that
bravery with cunning.
Pacquiao's challenge was simpler -- to keep moving, to keep calculating the angles, timing Morales's moves to find the
space and the moment for a coup de grace.
In the end, Morales kept his head for the most part -- he fought the fight he needed to fight to win, though it was close
from start to finish, and victory was never out of Pacquiao's reach. What Morales did, what his more reckless demons allowed
him to do, was exploit Pacquiao's limitations as a fighter.
Pacquiao can't do much damage fighting close in -- his power punches must start from outside. He also does not fight
well going back -- he dances in retreat, looking for room to regroup. So if you back him up, you have a lot of time and space
to hit him in, without much danger of being hit hard in response. You risk passing through the killing field of his left
hand when you move to back him up, but Morales used his jab effectively to distract Pacquiao when he came forward, and for
most of the fight it worked wonderfully.
Every time the system broke down, when Morales was too unscientific in pressing his attack, Pacquiao made him pay dreadfully
for it. But every time the system worked, Morales took it all back and then some out of Pacquiao's hide. This give and take
involved moments of intense excitement, when one fighter or the other seemed on the verge of ending the match decisively by
knock out. But neither man would let himself go down -- and every near disaster for one summoned forth the strength to inflict
a near disaster on the other in reply.
Pacquiao got a bone-deep cut above his eye in the fifth. The ref ruled that it was from a punch, though ringside observers
said it came from an accidental head butt. The cut caused a swelling that seemed to affect Pacquiao's sight in his left eye.
If the ref's ruling had been other than it was, Pacquiao might have been wise to retire and let the decision go to the judges.
I had Morales just slightly ahead on points at that stage of things, but I wouldn't have quarreled with anyone who had it
just as slightly in Pacquiao's favor. But Pacquiao would have lost the fight if he'd retired because of a cut ruled to have
come from a punch, so he fought on. At times it seemed that he was missing and getting hit as a result of his diminished
vision -- at other times he seemed right back at the top of his form, and a late rally in the twelth and final round almost
had Morales on the ropes.
The was an element of paradoxical monotony in the endless exchange of thrilling near-climaxes. One's nerves simply grew
numb from the intensity of it, the suspense of it. And one's spirit finally gave up trying to imagine what reserves of discipline
and pride and gallantry it must take to equip a man for a contest like this one. The fight stopped making narrative sense
to me at the end -- it fractured into a series of tableaux, of still images, like the ring paintings of Bellows or old black-and-white
newspaper photographs of great fights from the 40s. A kind of incoherent chant rang in my ears -- like the music of Homer's
hexameters, in Greek. I wanted it to be over -- to pass into legend. It became too much to comprehend in the moment, in
the flesh.
All three judges scored the fight 115 to 113 for Morales, which is just the way I saw it. Pacquiao's blurred vision in
the middle of the fight might alone have accounted for the tiny margin of Morales's victory. The predominantly pro-Mexican
crowd cheered -- but less enthusiastically than might have been expected. The glory of the night seemed to have transcended
national sentiment. The young Mexican fellow on my right shook hands gravely with me and with the older Filipino man on my
left -- he almost seemed to be apologizing for feeling so happy. I shook hands just as gravely with the Filipino gent --
he seemed sad but hardly devastated by his fellow Filipino's loss. I congratulated him on the fight, and he nodded. He knew
what I meant.
Afterwards, I needed a dose of blue ruin -- slang in Egan's day for gin. I was befuddled by incoherent emotions and worried
that I might burst suddenly into tears.
The bar at the edge of the MGM's gaming floor, near the front entrance, was jammed, but it seemed like the place to be.
I managed to get a gin and tonic at the bar and to find a place to perch at a high narrow table just in back of the crowd
at the rail. Larry Merchant, HBO's resident boxing sage and commentator, came and perched right across from me, in the company
of two young men who seemed to have been his guests at the fight. He was drinking a Bud Light.
"Beer, Larry?" asked one of the young men. "You usually drink wine."
"I know," Merchant said, "but I felt like I need something cold after that one. I felt like I fought it
myself."
I've often quarreled (in my mind) with Merchant's sometimes baffling fight commentaries, but I liked him a lot at that
moment. He looked as emotionally drained as I was. A celebrity buff came up and shook Merchant's hand. "Did you call
the fight tonight, Larry?" he asked, moronically.
"Yeah, I did," said Merchant, almost to himself, "but that one didn't need to be called."
Didn't need to be -- couldn't have been. It would take a bard in Homer's weight class to put it into words.
THE SPEED LIMIT
or
TEN THE HARD WAY
23 March 2005
"Turning fifty" has a dreadful sound to it, at least in this culture -- like the tolling of a mournful bell.
The reality of it is quite otherwise, and part of the delight of it is the unexpected nature of its pleasures. Now about
halfway through that sixth decade, I think it might be the best decade of them all.
If you're in your fifties and more or less solvent, it means you've arrived at some degree of mastery in the ways of the
world at large, and in your chosen or de facto profession. As a writer, for example, I feel comfortable with ambitions I
wouldn't have dared to entertain twenty years ago, because I simply didn't have the craft to pursue them with any serious
hope of success.
If you're a man and still love women (even to excess, as it may be) it means you've managed to absorb without bitterness
many baleful lessons about the frailty of the human heart and the mysteries of romance.
Still sturdy enough to have fun, you have a better idea of where to pursue it most profitably, with the utmost economy
of effort. (The endless hours of frenetic misery racked up in misguided expeditions in search of good times are among the
things, like acne, that pass away unmourned along with youth.)
If you are very wise, you have abandoned the hope of happiness, that wan state too often confused with pleasure or exaltation
or joy. "Happiness and unhappiness . . ." said Bob Dylan on turning fifty, "those are yuppie terms. The only
important thing is whether you are righteous or unrighteous." My friend Lincoln Kirstein, way past fifty at the time,
once asked me with genuine bewilderment, "What do people mean by 'being happy'? I've never been happy -- I've never
known anyone who was happy. What are they TALKING about?"
It's a silly word even in its sound -- like hippiness or hoppiness. It's word that ought to be applied only to rabbits.
"Ten the hard way" is of course a term from the game of craps -- it means rolling a ten with two fives. You
can make a sucker bet on this happening on any particular roll of the dice, which has a high payout, but not nearly high enough
to make up for the odds of it not happening. "The speed limit" is sometimes used in the game of Texas Hold-'em
(mostly by poker geeks) to denominate pocket fives.
On my recent 55th birthday, perhaps inspired by these gambling terms, I decided to reset my lifetime poker stats -- the
sum of my winnings and losses since I took up the game about three years ago. In this I was following the philosophy set
forth in Edith Piaf's great song "Je Ne Regret Rien" -- "I Regret Nothing" -- which contains the following
lines: "Avec mes souvenirs/J'ai allume un feu,/mes chagrins mes plaisirs --/Je n'ai plus besoin d'eux." ("I've
lit a fire with my memories, my sorrows and my pleasures -- I don't need them anymore.") This is a kind of freedom known
only to those of a certain age.
I went off to the Palms to begin my poker career all over again. It was a disaster. I got bad cards and sat next to
two lunatic brothers who work in a family mortgage brokering business. ("We're nationwide. We process about 4,000 loans
a month.") They made racist jokes at the expense of an older Asian woman at the table, who beat them consistently.
They held up the game to deliver their inane patter every time the action was on them. They went in on almost every hand
and bet it to the limit. It's a way to win big pots occasionally and to lose your shirt over time. I think each of them
bought in for about $300 in the short time I played with them and both left the table busted. But they ragged me for folding
hands.
It was an interesting pathology to observe, but it put me off my game (such as it is.) There was no way to beat this
one except by playing strong cards only, and the strong cards were few and far between for me. I bought in for more than
I should have and ended up $120 down.
Lifetime.
BOOKS
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.]
I have been reading again "The Sweet Science" by A. J. Liebling -- a "collection of boxing pieces" in
the sense that the Bible is a "collection of religious stories". Liebling wrote best about boxing and food, and
I can't help but think how much he would have loved Las Vegas today, where boxing, degraded as it is, holds the same degree
of prestige it once held in New York, and where superlative food, graciously served, has an almost sacramental function, as
it does in France, where Liebling felt perhaps most at home.
Liebling was a highly cultured man but also a highly democratic one, in the old sense of the word -- that is, his love
of heroes and superior people was not limited to persons of elevated social class, and he knew that genuine nobility was often
more likely to be found among the "low-life", as his "New Yorker" editors insisted on calling his usual
subjects, than among the respectable pillars of propriety.
He would not have recoiled from the cosmetic vulgarity of modern-day Las Vegas, any more than he recoiled from the fractured
grammar of a ring-Achilles from Brooklyn or the stale-cigar aroma of a Socrates of the Sweet Science from Philly.
Liebling's book, long out of print, has just been reissued, with an introduction by the fine boxing writer Robert Anasi.
It belongs in the library of every literate person.
Buy it here:
The Sweet Science
I have a first edition, which I wisely bought many years ago for $50. If you want a copy in as good condition as mine, you'll
pay several hundred for it today -- assuming you can track one down. And so the reputations of men and writers and books
(and cities and boxers) fluctuate in the currency of fashion. But if you have an eye for a champion, as Liebling did, you're
likely to get the best of it in the end. Read Liebling for an edge in the fine art of handicapping the nobler things of life.
POKER ROOM
19 March 2005
I slipped into a night schedule recently, as I often do when caught up in some intense episode of writing. I'll work
until dawn, go to bed, get up in the afternoon and start work again. It's a good schedule for the solitary misery of writing
but a tough one if you have to interact with the world, if you have errands in the 9 to 5 universe, and sometimes you just
have to wrench yourself out of the routine, usually by staying up 24 hours straight. Fortunately, that's not hard to do in
Las Vegas, which as far as I can tell is the only city in the word which literally never sleeps.
I'd been in the habit of walking over to Mr. Lucky's 24/7, the hip coffee shop at the Hard Rock next door, for a nightcap
breakfast at the end of my work day -- eggs, bacon, pancakes and a good stiff screwdriver. It's pleasant to live in a town
where waiters and waitresses don't blink when you order a screwdriver with breakfast at 6:30am. At most they smile indulgently,
as though you're doing your part to keep up the freewheeling atmosphere of the metropolis.
Last Thursday, St. Patrick's Day, as I was heading out for breakfast, I realized that I had a half-price coupon for the
breakfast buffet at the Palms which expired on that very date. It seemed a good excuse to start the process of turning my
schedule around. I headed first to the MGM Grand to get a ticket for the Morales-Pacquiao fight on Saturday, which will be
my first experience of a live high-profile prize fight in Las Vegas. Then I taxied over to the Palms for the buffet. At
half-price, the buffet cost me $3.31. I ate more scrambled eggs and bacon and biscuits and fruit than I really wanted --
which is the usual problem with buffets -- and then decided to see what was happening at the poker room. I knew I could spin
out a few hours there, no matter how tired I was.
There were two crowded games of $4-$8 Hold-'em going -- too rich for my blood -- but the list for a $2-$4 game in the
making was promising, so I signed up, and one cup of coffee later I was sitting with three other guys who were willing to
get the game going short-handed. The dealer shuffled up and dealt. Eight hours later my scheduling problems were all behind
me, as I lost the last of my modest buy-in and headed to the Hard Rock for a nightcap that really was a nightcap.
I'd been up and down over the course of the session, often playing really good poker, sometimes, towards the end, making
disastrous miscalculations. The best part of it was interacting with the daytime players at the Palms, who are quite different
from the usual nighttime players.
They're locals, for the most part, good players but not exactly sharks. Most of them know each other, and it seemed to
me that they used the poker room as a social club. It was as friendly a game as I think you could ever find in Las Vegas
-- not only in the cheerful banter but also in the style of play. There's a lot of friendly checking over small pots, and
aggressive betting of a bullying nature is sternly disapproved of.
I sat next to Mary, an older woman who lives in an upscale trailer park at Decatur and Flamingo and can thus walk to the
Palms, combining exercise and recreation most conveniently. She's an expert player in her own quiet way, only going in on
good cards but then betting them with ruthless efficiency. She seemed impressed by my own patience in waiting for playable
cards but dismayed by my reluctance to bet aggressively on winning hands. (This is a personality flaw I'm working on through
poker therapy.) "How long have you been playing Hold-'em?" I asked her after one of her spectacular runs -- five
pots in a row, I think it was. "I learned it last May," she replied. But she was obviously born with an instinct
for the game, one which a struggling student like myself can only view with awe.
She seemed genuinely thrilled when I took a big pot, often calling out my hand approvingly and patting me on the shoulder
-- like a parent encouraging a developmentally-challenged child. I think I only took one pot from her all day but it was
tremendously satisfying, because she was such a good player and had such a knack for reading other players. I'd stayed in
on the little blind with some unpromising cards, including a 10 of spades. When three low spades appeared on the flop everybody
checked. When a fourth spade appeared on the turn, I bet, assuming that people had been mostly drawing to a low straight
possibility on the board. (Since everybody checked the flop, I guessed that no one was holding two spades.) Everybody folded
but Mary.
The river was another low card. I bet again, and Mary called (but didn't raise.) From this I concluded that she'd either
made a straight (and was worried about the flush) or held a low spade. She uncovered her 4 of spades triumphantly, indicating
that she'd put me on a straight or, even more tragically, high pair or two pair. My 10 of spades took it.
She wasn't thrilled by this win of mine, I guess because it put her read of me in question, but I was soon back to my
usual blundering and her motherly encouragement continued. She could be as rough on players whose style she disapproved of
as she was kind to me. Late in the afternoon a would-be cowboy sat down who started betting up every hand he was dealt, in
the mistaken but common belief that such play is profitable among seasoned regulars at a Vegas casino.
"What is this -- a pissing contest?" Mary asked the guy in the course of a hand he was trying to bully her out
of. She stayed in and beat him handily. Sheepishly he asked, "Aren't you glad we had that pissing contest?" Mary
didn't crack a smile. "No," she said. After losing most of his chips and even more of his self-esteem, he slunk
away eventually. Mary looked at me with a twinkle in her eye -- no mercy for such as he.
The great thing about a Vegas card room is that you rub shoulders with every type and condition of human being. There
was a man at my table who could barely speak English and owned a gas station located at an intersection near the Palms. There
were the regulars and the occasional 20-something hot-shot (whose type takes over the room at night and on weekends.) The
hot-shots are warmly welcomed by the regulars, because they tend to pump the most money into their pockets. Otherwise it
would just be a trading of small sums between players who know each other too well.
You see more black players at the poker tables than you would at other games in a casino like the Palms, whose clientele,
at least at peak hours, is mostly young and white -- and also, these days, more young women than you'd expect, given the long
male-dominated tradition of the game. The Hold-'em craze has taken hold universally it seems, and the absolute democracy
of the game opens a door to everyone. If you can play, you can play, male or female, English-speaking or non, old or young.
It's very hard for a grizzled old misogynist to patronize a dazzling young hottie who's just relieved him of most of his
chips in a well-played hand. The evidence of his diminished stack is there for all to see.
It was early evening and dark outside when I taxied to the Hard Rock and had a few drinks in celebration of the holiday.
Things were hopping, even that early. Not only was it St. Patrick's Day, but March Madness has begun, as well as Spring
Break -- the town is teeming with young and insanely energetic party animals. I was sorry I couldn't have stayed until things
really got going, but it was time to go to bed -- at a shockingly reasonable hour -- and rest up for the errands I needed
to catch up on the next day. As schedule-reversing goes, this was a most agreeable and amusing one.
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.
DELIRIOUS LAS VEGAS
11 March 2005
That's Carrie in the picture above. She's a bartender from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Jae and I met her at the Palms near
the end of an epic and truly dreamlike Vegas day. It all started with the miraculous recovery of my Raleigh Retroglide bicycle.
Jae had been riding it over to the Excalibur to play poker of an afternoon -- along about the time the card room brings
out its free buffet. He'd had a spectacular run of winning sessions there -- then lost his touch, and eventually the bicycle,
too.
He'd been parking it in front of the New York New York casino, chained up to its iron fence, because it's hard to cross
Tropicana from there by surface routes. Thursday night around 2am, after a long session at the felt, he emerged to find that
the bike was gone. I'd always expected to lose the bike to theft sooner or later, but it occurred to me that the police might
have impounded it for being parked illegally on the sidewalk so close to The Strip. Jae couldn't get through to anyone at
the police department to ask, but he got the idea of checking with New York New York -- and sure enough they had it. They
make a practice of removing anything chained to their fence -- for reasons of security and aesthetic tidiness -- so they'd
cut the chain lock and hauled it inside. Apparently they impound a bike every two weeks or so.
Jae and I went over to the casino to retrieve the thing. A security guard led us back into the bowels of the casino,
to a storeroom in the security corridor where the bike was being held. Then he escorted us out through the casino to the
valet parking stand as I rolled the bike along the fake New York Streets.
Jae took a video of the surreal episode -- here's a frame grab:
And here's a short clip -- for those with a high-speed connection:
The Sidewalks Of New York New York
Recovering the bike called for a celebration so Jae and I headed to the Hofbrauhaus, where things are always cheerful, for
some beer and food. The oompah band was playing madly (but paused for a heart-wrenching rendition of "Lily Marlene")
and presiding over various party games -- a stein lifting contest, which was to be followed by a women's beer drinking contest,
which we didn't stick around for.
We drank vast steins of good beer ourselves, feasted on hearty food and enjoyed the insane mayhem around us. The couple sitting
across from us had their caricatures made by a resident artist of the place -- here's a picture of them holding it up for
us to see:
As we were leaving the restaurant the caricature artist came running outside after us -- he'd made a caricature of us as well,
and wanted us to have it, for free. I gave him some money for it anyway, then Jae and I hit the card room at the Palms.
I had a good run at first, then lost all my buy-in (the exact amount of which cannot be revealed publicly) but Jae had a really
great run. He got up $60, cashed in, walked around, came back and kept winning. I tapped out and went to the bar, and met
Carrie. It must have been 5am by then and she was about to fly back to Grand Rapids later in the day (it was Saturday by
then.) She'd had a wild time so far -- starting with her first night, when she was kicked out of the Ghost Bar at the top
of the Palms, for "flailing" (arms and legs.) This naturally impressed me to no end, as I'd never before met anyone
who'd been kicked out of the Ghost Bar, much less for flailing.
Jae showed up at the bar eventually, having won about all he expected to for one night, and we joined Carrie as she partied
down to the wire. We drank and gambled irresponsibly, Jae and Carrie did cartwheels around the craps tables, urged on by
the cool dealers -- then Jae did a handstand up against a pillar and security stepped in to put an end to the acrobatics.
Probably wise, as somebody was bound to barf sooner or later from all the upending.
We sent Carrie and her friend Michelle off with our heartiest good wishes, then took a cab back to my apartment in the
bright light of day, which was disconcerting. I'd been up more than 24 hours, and would nurse a major hangover for at least
that long. But, non, je ne regret rien. Rien de rien.
Carrie sends a delightful Report From Michigan, detailing her trip home and offering a little glimpse of life as bartender
in Grand Rapids, which can be found in the Mailbag section by clicking on the link below:
THE BLOW-TORCH PENIS
Cheers!
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