Nothing
can really prepare you for Las Vegas.
Not old TV
shows, not movies, not postcards, not even previous visits. Las Vegas is unlike anything else
and not even very much like itself either.
It is
based on a theory of design which says that form need not follow function and
function is no fun anyway. This is
city as confection, a dessert in the desert, thought up by the same people who
invented wedding cakes, Easter peeps, and sundaes.
Las Vegas
was concocted not planned, by a mobster not a builder, and it is wise to leave
your prudence on the plane and grab a bag of marbles to lose.
Staying
there is like being swallowed – not unpleasant but not entirely refreshing
either – a big gulp through money without cash, sexless sex, brighter than
bright lights, and all those winning losses and losing bets. Any single casino is bigger and busier
than any place you have ever been and this is true even if it is not true since
truth was one of the most important ingredients left out of the recipe of
Vegas.
A white
tiger spends its days in a huge white room in the middle of the lobby of the
Mirage, which also has three restaurants in a tropical rain forest where you
can sit in a steamy, leafy veranda and eat Chicken Biryani. Birds fly, lizards dart. Plants grow. It rains every hour.
The Pyramid at the Luxor Hotel is bigger than the one at Cheops. The theme park behind the MGM/Grand has
a river ride that challenges the Amazon.
The female impersonators at the Riviera are more like Joan Rivers and
Diana Ross than the originals. The smaller of the two pirate ships in the
Caribbean lagoon in front of the Treasure Island hotel is bigger than the real
Santa Maria. More money is lost in
five minutes in Las Vegas than was earned by all humanity during the Dark
Ages.
It is all
about the stuff of legend or the legend of stuff, whichever matters less.
Yet Las
Vegas may be the purest American city.
No false promises. No
expectation of wealth like New York or health like L.A. Las Vegas is there to cheat you and you
know it. It is built entirely on
dreams of gold and foam and inert gas.
Here in New York, the old is under the new; you can feel it smoldering down
there. In Los Angeles the old is
in the middle; you can drive away from it. But in Las Vegas, there is no old or new. Instead everything hits you all at
once, at the same moment, with the same yearning. This makes sense because the great enemy in Las Vegas is
time and the dream-makers and the odds-givers have very cleverly erased
it. The casinos have no windows,
no clocks. Restaurants are open
round the clock serving finger-numbing smorgasbords. Anything you want, anytime you want. Vegas is based on an eternal instant,
that moment of anticipation of a win or a wonder. Everything else is held in suspension.
But head
outside the city to nearby Hoover Dam for true perspective. From that vantage looking back you can
see that Las Vegas – this roiling, glowing, blinking, buzzing Everland – is
really just a 3-mile long sliver of steel and electrical lines plunked down in
the flat vastness of the desert.
In an instant the whole concoction suddenly seems as slender as wish,
frail as a fancy.
In a way,
the dam and the city have similar functions. They were both designed to resist something that would
normally flow by...water in the first place, seconds in the second. The dam holds back the river to create
power for the city: the city holds back time to create dreams. But you cannot live in dreams or you would need dreams to escape from them.
At the
hotel that night, I was already pining for an appointment, a plan, a
deadline. Rain even. Or any old subway ride through the
ancient geology of the city’s bedrock.
A friend,
also a designer, once told me that, ”Las Vegas is the only city that, when I
first get there, I wish I had come a day earlier. But by the time I leave, I wish I had left the day before.”
I knew
just what he meant.
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