Viva Las Vegas

Flying over the Nevada Sierras from the sky, Las Vegas looks every part the sprawling trading post in the red clay of the desert plains. As the plane wheels over the city, you are reminded of a vast movie lot with endless studio buildings and at the centre a strip that cuts through the whole looking from a height like those flat town facades of old westerns. At the moment you disembark, starting from the baggage hall the energy hits you; unrelenting booming music and illuminated advertising shifts your inner gears into sport mode. Even here in the airport, you hear the constant squirling jingles of the slot machines mimicking the shower of coins poised to spill out from the guts of their golden bellies, from the get go that not a single moment of your time here will be left without stimulus and excitement. Nothing and everything is left to chance. This is the ultimate real-time game show, its earthly delights boldly emblazoned across the barren flatlands.

Sin City is all the things you’d expect. But this is no Sodom or Gomorrah. Despite the superficial decadence, there is an air of conservative innocence everywhere. Of course, wherever money, testosterone, bourbon and sex conspire, debauchery will ensue but by and large this is childish enough play. I see mostly couples taking a break or numbing the tedium of their lives . It’s endearingly simple in a way. Life is a gamble. Everything that we do sets contingency against risk. From the first people out on the plains hunting bison to the space pioneers of today, from the elderly lady on her zimmer frame to the baby teetering on the arm of a chair everything we do represents the potential of disaster. In Vegas every dollar in the slot, every roll of the dice, every spin of the wheel represents that frisson of risk wrapped in a spirit-raising, coating of neon and beize. 

I don’t gamble. Not since my youth. Like so much of my idiocy at the time, I took things too far and literally put it all on red and lost the lot. It was money I had borrowed, so I spent the next two years paying it back. Now even the thought of risk floods my adrenal glands. But there are so many other windows to look through. As for the incredible hotels, despite my natural sniffiness, I think they are rather fabulous expressions of human pleasure and desire, postmodern pastiche maybe but why not? Caesar himself would have been delighted with these self-conscious expressions of architectural outrage. And for many people, this may be the closest to Venice, Rome or Paris they will ever get. Escapism is one of the fundamental aspects of the human condition. People love nothing better than throwing their money around or away and to do so in surroundings of such splendidly outrageous extravagance, what could be more satisfying?