By John Shirley
I'm a guest at a book festival in Las Vegas. The festival organizers are a tad
defensive in tone about culture and books in Las Vegas. As if they feel people
assume there isn't much literary culture here. Well, I strongly suspect there
isn't much, relative to the size of the population. But there's some, there are
literate, smart, cultured people who live here, and they're trying. Still, it's
impossible for any reasonably bright person to view LV, in a blanket sense, as
anything but a great parasitical sheep-shearing device. It is a town built on
parasitism. So is Orlando, tourist towns want to separate you from your
money too, but the persistent sense of a vampire at work, using her supernatural
powers to keep you mesmerized as your blood is sucked, is even more intense in
Las Vegas.
I'm in Las Vegas for a book festival and some of the events are at the Las Vegas
Library. A cab driver was asked at the airport to take an attendee to the
library. The cab driver said, "Oh yeah I know that strip club."
I gamble only a little, the occasional low-stakes poker game, and I'll play a
little poker while I'm here, but I won't risk much and I won't play anything
else. The horror of the vampiric hypnotist is never far from me. My wife has
toyed with the slots a little and will play some blackjack, but she won't go far
either--she seems startled when she loses money gambling, though she knows
perfectly well it's a likelihood--and we'll pass through Vegas relatively
undrained, losing only a pint at most between us.
But the haunted faces, the agitated motions of the gambling addicts and the
"temporary addicts", those caught up in gambling fever, are as everpresent as
the slot machines, the perpetual noise--the NOISE!--and the lights in Vegas.
One sees slot machines almost immediately on deplaning at the airport. I was
amazed to see them in between the baggage turntables. You can lose a great deal
of money before you've even claimed your baggage. Theoretically, a susceptible
person, and there are many, could get off the plane, lose all their money before
getting their luggage, and have to use their return ticket immediately,
returning the luggage to the airline without ever leaving the airport. If one
wants to take a cab from the airport one has to wait in a long, long, long line,
for an endless parade of cabs all probably destined for the casinos--and
inevitably one pictures lines of sheep going into a chute for the shearing.
Most of the people who work here as dealers, cashiers, shills, seem half dead,
they have 'how did I end up doing this?' looks in their eyes...They've built a
grand pedestrian mall in place of Fremont Street, or enclosed it, really, eliminating
cars, so that visitors go from kiosk to kiosk and casino to
casino, the Four Queens to the Golden Nugget, by strolling under this vast
templelike over-arching roofed area, past some of the most exquisitely kitschy
bad-taste artifacts ever conceived and sold by man--things, like the glimmering
light spinning behind the crucified Jesus image, that are beyond campy, beyond
irony, in some special realm of vulgarity, the Platonic ideal of vulgarity. The
casinos all have low-rez screens out front, now pseudo-video screens with images
of people winning, girls gyrating and offers of loose, loose, the loosest games.
They're so loose they're barely making incredible outrageous profits every day
off legions of clueless people operating under the delusions fostered by
national and international tv and internet advertising. The pinnacle of
vulgarity, though, almost literally, is the ceiling of the great mall,
stretching like a metal webbing from casino to casino, which is many blocks long
and a half-block wide, and is one big digital screen. It's an attraction in
itself, it must be admitted--and god, suppose they gave it to an actual artist
to use sometime? At intervals it lights up gigantically with images of racing
cars and money and fireworks, all moving in accompaniment to the music endlessly
thudding from gigantic speakers on all sides. They had a "God Bless America"
sequence with giant waving flags in this digital ceiling, with bursting rockets
and images--upside down, often, depending on where you're standing--of the
Statue of Liberty and Mt. Rushmore, and it went on and on, blurry images of the
Constitution, all to booming patriotic music--it was hideous and fantastic in
the original sense of that word, all at once. You may not be picturing the
hugeness of this imagery, surely the biggest video (or digital?) screens on the
planet, consuming block after block, like a sky display from the God of Bad
Taste. It's just amazingly BIG. All of this gives the place a kind of
Bladerunner affect--but it's a cleaned up Bladerunner. Despite the giant images
of strippers flashing by on the fronts of some building, everything is, in terms
of physical grime, squeaky clean--they don't even allow panhandlers on this
giant gambling mall...but I did spot a few discreet prostitutes, eyes darting
for just the right guy to accost.
I've not conveyed a sense of the frenzied
activity here, the endless drone of the money-sucking machine that is this town,
nor even mentioned the oxygen bars on the mall, with flavored air for sale, but
I must go, my wife is a tad bored, and she wants to go to the Luxor and ride
around inside a pretend pyramid...
PART TWO: The Great Parasite
THAT SUCKING SOUND
"Strip club? There's a strip club called The Library?" Turns out there is.
"I'm
talking about the library...the actual library..."
"Oh...I didn't know we had one. I have no idea where it is."
Here's a telling stat: Las Vegas has 200,000 registered strippers.
Here's another: Of any US city of 1,000,000+ population, Las Vegas is dead last
in per capita college graduates.
It's a city of addictions, my wife points out--gambling addiction is just the
most obvious. Smoking is allowed pretty much anywhere. (I played poker in the
Golden Nugget's so called 'smoke free poker room' which turns out to be an area
separated from the slot machines by a rail. Someone should tell them that smoke
doesn't stop at railings. It was noisy and smoky there. But I played for several
hours...) Drug addiction is assumed, speed a likelihood in an environment that
encourages you to stay awake for days at a time. I know it's there because the
woman who brought our room service at the Four Queens was an obvious
tweaker--I've never seen a more obvious one....Carb addiction is certainly
encouraged in Vegas--deals on high fat food are traditional here and there are
vast numbers of obese people (most of them, addmittedly, tourists, a jiggling
slice of Obese American life), sex addiction is much in evidence, and
alcoholism: people drink alcohol out on the mall, drift in an out of casinos
with drinks in their hands (one liquor store simply advertises, ALCOHOL), and
the addiction to distraction, to being mesmerized by flashing lights and noise
and promises, is fundamental.
The noise in the casinos is in large part from the slot machines, which come in
hundreds of varieties now. There are slot machines inspired by the movie ALIEN
in which you have to hatch alien baby monsters in the right denominations to
win. There are STAR WARS slots, there was even a MONTY PYTHON slot machine. The
noise they make in toto varies little from casino to casino--yet it's always
changing, always in flux, always formless. It chimes and burbles and dings and
tinkles in patterns and non patterns. The overall effect is remarkably like the
music of certain avant garde composers, maybe John Cage getting drunk with Terry
Riley.
My wife Micky right now just finished playing the slots again...got to get her
to the airport...actually though she had the strength of character to quit while
she was 20 dollars ahead.
Las Vegas doesn't want her kind here...
But of course there's more to Las Vegas we don't normally see. Here is a hint
from a friend of mine who lives there: "...there is a great music scene here,
off the strip. All the players in the strip's big shows are great players, and
they assemble in various combinations in
other venues, and as a musician myself, that part of it is fun. Sort like
Broadway in NY, pretty depressing unless you are wealthy, but the actresses and
dancers give the place a great flavor."
