Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

Celine Bloody Dion

Las Vegas, NV - 5 April 2004

"Great God", wrote Scott while slowly freezing to death in the Antarctic wastes, "this is an awful place". Still, it could have been worse for him - he could have been in Las Vegas. If Scott, Oates and co. had been stuck on the South Strip having Celine Dion blared at them from all directions, Scott would have discovered some harsher words to use than the almost polite 'awful' he used in his diary.

There is a certain initial goshwow factor to all the neon, flashing lights and astonishing buildings - after all, there's something to be said for a compact replica of the New York skyline, complete with Statue of Liberty and integral rollercoaster - but after that wears off there's very little here but grind, grind and more grind. For a city designed from the outset for tourism, no effort at all's been made to accomodate pedestrians comfortably on Las Vegas Boulevard (aka The Strip). The pavements are narrow and crowded, the cycle times at crossings favour road traffic to a ridiculous extent, and it's occasionally impossible to proceed further in the direction you're going without looping through a casino lobby. Of course, this is good for the casinos as once you're inside they're incredibly disorientating and it can be hard to find your way out again without being presented with any number of chances to spend. It's not much better if you're in a motor vehicle - despite having up to five lanes in each direction the Strip is a constant traffic jam, only with more than the usual complement of stretch limos, vast pickups and cars which seem to be powered by the bass component of their enormous stereo systems.

The mega-hotel-casino complexes on the South Strip are themed in a way that strips and distils the cultures they're supposed to represent down to the simplest visible symbols. Inside they have all the ambience of a slightly up-market motorway service station, presenting a thousand opportunities for visitors to have their wallets emptied even if they don't want to go gambling - steak restaurants, all-you-can-eat buffets and shops selling all kinds of tat clamour for the tourist dollar as well as the more traditional slot machines and gaming tables. Slot-jockeys sit at their machines (or at two machines in some cases) praying silently for a big payout that will most likely never come. Because it's something you have to do, I lost a dollar on the nickel slots, lost a dollar on impulse on a dollar slot, then won $1.75 on a quarter slot and decided to quit while I was almost back to where I started.

Outside, a billion hustlers push cards advertising assorted services of a more or less dubious nature on passing tourists (allegedly erotic in nature, but I get the impression that most of these exercises have all the raw, heaving erotic appeal of a gynaecological procedure) while crowds of visitors shuffle slowly up and down the road like commuters on their way to work. The various pools and water features outside the casinos, one of which scared me half to death last night by kicking off a display of water jets accompanied by a recording of Celine bloody Dion (who seems to be the reigning queen of Vegas showland) singing that song from Titanic, smell strongly of chlorine.

Downtown is slightly more manageable, only with slightly smaller casinos, lots of wedding chapels and (of course) the first stop for many couples arriving here - the faceless bureaucratic architecture of the Clark County Courthouse, probably the only government office on the planet that's open 24 hours at weekends. An average of 300 couples a day stop here to obtain marriage licences, and when I passed by this afternoon the queue was out of the door and halfway across the entrance yard. Various hustlers and salespeople pushing wedding packages work the crowds, hungry for commission. Very few of the people standing in line looked ecstatically happy at their impending nuptials, and most just looked tired, hot and harassed. Once they've done the paperwork and got their marriage licences there are effectively two choices - the county Civil Marriage Commissioner will marry them across the street or they can get themselves to one of the many (as I said before, 15 pages in the Yellow Pages) wedding chapels. Most of these push a romantic image of eternal bliss and how Very Special they'll make your wedding, while in reality it's generally a case of being processed as quickly as possible before being shoved out the door for the next couple waiting behind you. I came away with the impression that marriage in Vegas is great for people who like standing in queues, and with my opinion that compulsory waiting times before the grant of a marriage licence are a very good idea strengthened enormously.

I'm sitting drinking coffee in the Excalibur before heading back to my room across the road. Above me a sign points to "Sir Galahad's Prime Rib House", while just around the corner is the Canterbury Wedding Chapel. I hadn't been aware of Galahad's skill at cooking steak before, but you're nobody in the Vegas service industry unless you can cater to the almost infinite demand for inappropriately-sized portions of prime rib and shrimp.

So what is Las Vegas? Well, the realist in me says that it's a veneer of fun and chlorine-bleached hygiene covering a whole mass of exploitation on any number of levels. Vegas is one of the minimum-wage service job capitals of the universe, too many people come here with dreams of riches or a quick route to an improved life only to lose everything they had in the first place, and I doubt that all those full-service girls (and boys) that can be delivered to your room with one quick phone call are pursuing an active career choice.

The sheer conspicuous consumption of the place (and Vegas is located somewhere with very, very limited water resources, not to mention the fact that you can't even get here without consuming huge amounts of fossil fuels in one way or another) is something I can't bring myself to overlook. I can't help but think this place is an environmental disaster waiting to happen, and having seen the piles of uneaten food being carted away from the buffet area at the Luxor and the thousands of overpowered cars grinding slowly up and down the Strip the only conclusion I can come to is that it's possibly the most selfish, exploitative, greedy and shallow place on the planet. The constant push is to spend and consume, and there's very little else to the place. Despite its claims to the contrary, very few people indeed come to Las Vegas and get rich, and most of them own casinos.

But there's another voice inside me as I write this. There is certainly something amazing about a city in the middle of the desert with so few inhibitions having grown so explosively in less than a century. 30-plus million visitors a year can't all be wrong. At least a few dreams have come to life here, and there must be plenty of people for whom a Vegas wedding has proven to be the foundation of a solid and lasting marriage. It would be churlish and unfair of me to ignore all these factors in my evaluation, and plenty of people around me at the moment appear to be having fun. Some of the buildings are fun too, and if you take away the giant Sphinxes and other paraphernalia surrounding it I find the fascist architecture of the Luxor pyramid strangely appealing. I think it's because it reminds me of the Ministry of Love in Nineteen Eighty-Four, or maybe the Met Éireann building in Dublin.

Oh yes, and the hot-off-the-line Krispy Kreme doughnuts sold in the Excalibur are splendid.

I'm still glad that I'm getting out of here tomorrow morning, though. I'm leaving early, before the traffic on the Strip builds up to its usual choking intensity, and heading to.. hmm, not sure yet, via the Hoover Dam.

Posted by mpk at April 6, 2004 5:12 AM | TrackBack