I've been spending some time in Las Vegas recently. In Spanish, "the fertile valleys," because once the valleys there really were green from artesian springs. The springs are gone, but not the green.
New gambling/restaurant/theme park/shoppingmall/tittybar monstrosities pop up daily, each more expensive and spectacularly gauche than the last. The place is blowing up. Five thousand people move there every month. To LIVE there. Not just sink cash and drink.
Las Vegas is full of math. Each piece of its land has a brand and a url. Each address on the strip is a self-contained kingdom, a discrete casinosphere. The shopping malls have floor shows.
It's not all lowbrow. One hotel near the Disney casino has a Picasso in the lobby. There's a mini-Guggenheim inside the Venetian. But the fact they're there feels wrong.
It's sucking all the glam out of Los Angeles. All of LA's best restaurateurs are opening newer, better venues out there. A number of the larger couture lines are opening virgin boutiques there, before breaking ground in LA. The Chanel shop in Vegas gets the 2005 Spring collection before the Beverly Hills store does. Some of the best plastic surgeons are there now, and hence, so are some of the world's best breasts. Trump's new condo tower is under construction, just down the street from Steve Wynn's new joint, which is already sold out for two full years even though it only opens next April.
One of the finest voices of this place, I think, is a writer named Lloyd Fonvielle. Here is his IMDB listing, and here is his blog. He is also responsible for these cool t-shirts.
I'm not sure why it's so compelling right now, but it is. Sometimes, a thing swells to a scale so tasteless, so grotesque, it crosses a magical threshhold and becomes beautiful. Like matter to antimatter. Beauty from antibeauty.
How did a place so full of decay become an emblem of growth? The future is here. But I'm not sure what that future is. Trying to call that is like trying to call a dice roll before the dice stop rolling. Las Vegas is perpetual motion. Los Angeles is not truly a 24 hour city. Neither is New York. That title now belongs to this place.
Image: a phonecam snapshot I took of Dale Chihuly's glass bloboforms hanging en masse from the ceiling at the Bellagio. Link to full-size image.
