Zeitgeist Las Vegas

Part One: What Las Vegas Means To Me

Being in Las Vegas has always been transformational. (For the newbies, no, I’m not kidding. The old guard may want to skip the ideology and go straight to the travelogue.)

I spent my childhood among cultural installations and artifice, both because I grew up in West Hollywood and because my mother is a fine artist who took me with her to some of the most significant art installations of the 1960s and early 1970s. Las Vegas conflates both, admittedly with an emphasis on artifice that should make the icicles on Walt’s cryogenic tank envy-green.

I love Las Vegas the way I loved Disneyland as a child. I love the colors, the lights and the sounds. The slot machines hypnotize and mesmerize me as they were designed to do. I wander among the beeps and twinkles and happily allow myself to be lured by new graphics; the prophet, the world-traveling gnome, the various Mayan/Chinese/Medieval ersatz storylines. I even love the cheesy 80s soundtrack that blasts everywhere. And the food, my oh my, I do love the food.

The yellow brick Interstate 15 leads to a neon burp in the desert. Look at aerial pix of the Strip, it’s absurdly small. For congenital visitors like us, it’s even smaller, since we only go to a few places within the bubble of buildings. The further in you go, the bigger it gets. I once timed the walk from the car to the room; ten minutes at a brisk pace. The “room” is a suite, two bathrooms, three wide-screen TVs (none of which I watched, except for the express check-out), a wet bar (to which we never take the key) and more.

The hotel itself (pun, it’s called THEHotel) is part of an international corporate conglomerate. Bigness, there. But in a throwback to the glory days when the Mob ruled, I deal with one charming casino host, who always comps our stay. We hadn’t been back since August. A long time for us, normally a blink for Vegas, but entropy had hit our beloved casino. About 15% of the slot machines were missing, and there weren’t many people playing the machines that remained.

Las Vegas is a metaphor for our entire culture. It probably always was, but it’s painfully apparent now. The high-stakes areas were just as full as always, the rich will always be with us. The rest of the casino was a wasteland. One favorite restaurant was closed, supposedly for “renovations”. The rest were understaffed because of low turnout. But the people were the same, each a character, almost all interesting. And while there weren’t as many stories this time, the ones there were, are choice. To me, Las Vegas will always be sanctuary.