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Went to Vegas for a family reunion. The family’s good. One of my male cousins got married, leaving my generation with only a few eligible bachelors left. Or, “illegible bastards” as my less-than-sober uncle put it. I like that. I got one older cousin just left the Army, back from Iraq, he was an orthopedic surgeon; he didn’t have much to say about the war more than “it was pretty rough”. He lives near some river in Washington or Oregon or something, he told us to come visit anytime. “Dude, you like guns? I got LOTS of guns, whatever you want. I got a couple jet skis too, those things are a blast.” I asked him if we could shoot guns while riding the jet skis, and he didn’t answer.
Las Vegas is hot in June. Take a hair dryer, set it on low, point it at your face and that’s what it’s like outside. At 11:00 o’clock at night. In the daytime it’s also like that, but in addition shine a 300-watt halogen floor lamp at your face. One hundred five degrees but, as they say, it’s a dry heat, so it doesn’t feel as miserable as one-oh-five in Boston. It does feel like you’re being aggressively dried out, you need a Fremen stillsuit and a constant supply of banana daiquiris to avoid being turned into jerky. Look around a few miles past the buildings and the lights and the sparkle and all you see a desert wasteland. It’s interesting, there’s really no reason for a city to be there – there’s no natural resources, no scenic attractions, no navigable waterways, none of the usual things around which such metropolae normally coalesce. Las Vegas is the most artificial city in the world, raised by sheer willpower in the most inhospitable desert on the continent. Given that, it makes the city’s wonders all the more magical.
Walking through the Wynn hotel there was a big poker tournament going on, a hundred tables of intense concentration and focused desire, and what struck me was the sound of it. Spectators seem hushed by the tense electricity of high-stakes contest, so what you hear is the constant soft clicking of small colored plastic chips, thousands of them being stacked, dropped, tossed, pushed across the felt tables, I swear it sounded like shells and pebbles tumbling in the waves on a shore. I closed my eyes for a few seconds and imagined I was hearing a small tropical island beach, a little natural paradise, then I opened my eyes and it turned into the movement of all these manufactured plastic objects which themselves have no value, just the representation of currency, which in itself is just a symbol used in a process of managing goods and services and energy in our system of living in this manufactured society. It’s pretty cool.
Saw one show, Le Reve, it’s an acrobatic theatrical dreamscape over water kinda like O, it was very much worth seeing but it didn’t have as much coherent art direction as a Cirque production, and I don’t think there were live musicians. I haven’t seen O but hear Le Reve is a bit more action acrobatic, one of the really stunning things they do is trapeze over the pool, the guys flip and twirl and fall into the water; everyone’s seen high flying trapeze stuff but you don’t often see them drop to the floor from forty feet. And then they pull the trapeze up and drop the guys from eighty feet high, now that gets your attention.
Everyone says go check out the water fountain show at the Bellagio lagoon, and I was thinking yeah whatever sounds totally cheesy, but my god it’s amazing. There are 1500 fountains and I don’t know what kind of pressure they have to maintain to shoot columns of water 250 feet in the air, but oh my god when those valves pop in chorus it sounds like thunder.
Las Vegas is hot in June. Take a hair dryer, set it on low, point it at your face and that’s what it’s like outside. At 11:00 o’clock at night. In the daytime it’s also like that, but in addition shine a 300-watt halogen floor lamp at your face. One hundred five degrees but, as they say, it’s a dry heat, so it doesn’t feel as miserable as one-oh-five in Boston. It does feel like you’re being aggressively dried out, you need a Fremen stillsuit and a constant supply of banana daiquiris to avoid being turned into jerky. Look around a few miles past the buildings and the lights and the sparkle and all you see a desert wasteland. It’s interesting, there’s really no reason for a city to be there – there’s no natural resources, no scenic attractions, no navigable waterways, none of the usual things around which such metropolae normally coalesce. Las Vegas is the most artificial city in the world, raised by sheer willpower in the most inhospitable desert on the continent. Given that, it makes the city’s wonders all the more magical.
Walking through the Wynn hotel there was a big poker tournament going on, a hundred tables of intense concentration and focused desire, and what struck me was the sound of it. Spectators seem hushed by the tense electricity of high-stakes contest, so what you hear is the constant soft clicking of small colored plastic chips, thousands of them being stacked, dropped, tossed, pushed across the felt tables, I swear it sounded like shells and pebbles tumbling in the waves on a shore. I closed my eyes for a few seconds and imagined I was hearing a small tropical island beach, a little natural paradise, then I opened my eyes and it turned into the movement of all these manufactured plastic objects which themselves have no value, just the representation of currency, which in itself is just a symbol used in a process of managing goods and services and energy in our system of living in this manufactured society. It’s pretty cool.
Saw one show, Le Reve, it’s an acrobatic theatrical dreamscape over water kinda like O, it was very much worth seeing but it didn’t have as much coherent art direction as a Cirque production, and I don’t think there were live musicians. I haven’t seen O but hear Le Reve is a bit more action acrobatic, one of the really stunning things they do is trapeze over the pool, the guys flip and twirl and fall into the water; everyone’s seen high flying trapeze stuff but you don’t often see them drop to the floor from forty feet. And then they pull the trapeze up and drop the guys from eighty feet high, now that gets your attention.
Everyone says go check out the water fountain show at the Bellagio lagoon, and I was thinking yeah whatever sounds totally cheesy, but my god it’s amazing. There are 1500 fountains and I don’t know what kind of pressure they have to maintain to shoot columns of water 250 feet in the air, but oh my god when those valves pop in chorus it sounds like thunder.
