Vive Las Vegas (yes, I said vive not viva)
About a month ago we took a trip to Las Vegas and had a wonderful time, although not quite the wonderful time we imagined we were going to have, for the city had somehow transformed itself in the eight years since we were last there, when Tom Jones was playing the strip, when Richard Kitch, Simon and Briony were with us, not to mention Stuart the inflatable dinosaur, and we were but recently engaged. Following that earlier mesmeric experience I had been warming myself up for a tale of gargantuan buffets, $1.99 steak and eggs after midnight, tawdry mockney piratical displays, Elvis impersonators calling keno (bingo) numbers, old ladies shovelling quarters from plastic buckets into semi-bulimic slot machines, desperate couples hurling loaded dice across the baize of futility, the light in their eyes slowly dying as the ageing cocktail waitress doled out another round of complimentary sea breezes in the musty, low-slung everlasting twilight of the Tropicana. You get the picture.
Instead the feeling that consumed me as we stared out across the city through the plate glass window that formed one edge of our hotel room on the 53rd floor of The Wynn hotel, was a heady mixture of wonderment and (uncharacteristic) humility. I felt perhaps as a minor official from rural Gascony might have on his unlikely arrival at the court of Louis XIV. The spectacle was simply awe inspiring.
With a construction cost around $3 billion (a full billion more than New York's forthcoming Freedom Tower), I suppose you'd expect the Wynn to be comfortable, and they didn't let us down with the view, the marble bathroom, the widescreen plasma TV and the extended minibar wherein each item was electronically tagged and charged to your room if moved out of place for more than thirty seconds. We didn't even toy with the variety of super-upscale restaurants to be found in house (including a chinese where the set menu was $120 per person), the majestic pool or of course the 18 hole golf course; neither did we gamble or attend the broadway or (now obligatory) Cirque de Soleil show running downstairs; nor did we shop at the selection of in-house designer stores, which included a Ferrari dealership. Though on the last night we did order room service and enjoyed a panorama every bit as good as that of the Stratosphere, down the street.
The Wynn is only the latest example of Vegas' recent shift from blue to white collar decadence. Of course outposts of the old Vegas remain: the Tropicana, the Monte Carlo, the Sahara, Circus Circus; yet somehow their lustre has been stripped from them, their gaudy, cheap and cheerful all-you-can-eat, neon-lit, clankety-clank "what happens in Vegas..." almost rootsy dive-bar charm suddenly squalid in comparison to the mock Venetian canals, Parisian side-streets and white tigers from distant Araby, flatteringly lit in the reflected twilight of a trompe l'oeil fresco. It's a bit like finding Bette Lynch (or Paris Hilton) at a debutantes ball. Or how Tanya Turner probably felt when she met Eva de Wolffe (Joan Collins) in series 5 of the excellent Footballer's Wives (available on a bittorrent near you, probably). NQOCD: Not quite our class, dear. Which, when you think about it, is all very unamerican. This is, after all, the only country I've ever visited where you can tell absolutely nothing about a man's wealth by the way he dresses. Make no mistake though, there is a class system here; yet its vagaries continue to elude me.
In any case, I cannot recommend a trip to Vegas highly enough. It is quite simply one of the wonders of the modern world. By any almost every rational (indeed ethical) standard it should not exist; and yet it flourishes. Vive Las Vegas, bebe.
The view from our window by day...
...and by night
New Vegas vs Old Vegas. Yes, that a 2:1 Arc de Triomphe there.
That Frontier billboard in close-up. Unashamedly old-school.
Not NASA's mission control, but the sports-betting area at The Wynn. Not exactly Ladbrokes.
Hey, look, I'm in New York.
...I mean Paris
...I mean Venice (or maybe not; although, on the plus side, it does smell a lot better)
Just rounding things off with a tiger. It breaks the narrative, but my future biographer will rightly interpret this as a deliberate attempt to caricature the postmodern mise-en-scene. Although she may just take it as further evidence of my obsession with cats, which I feel would be doing me a bit of a disservice. Don't buy that one.
Instead the feeling that consumed me as we stared out across the city through the plate glass window that formed one edge of our hotel room on the 53rd floor of The Wynn hotel, was a heady mixture of wonderment and (uncharacteristic) humility. I felt perhaps as a minor official from rural Gascony might have on his unlikely arrival at the court of Louis XIV. The spectacle was simply awe inspiring.
With a construction cost around $3 billion (a full billion more than New York's forthcoming Freedom Tower), I suppose you'd expect the Wynn to be comfortable, and they didn't let us down with the view, the marble bathroom, the widescreen plasma TV and the extended minibar wherein each item was electronically tagged and charged to your room if moved out of place for more than thirty seconds. We didn't even toy with the variety of super-upscale restaurants to be found in house (including a chinese where the set menu was $120 per person), the majestic pool or of course the 18 hole golf course; neither did we gamble or attend the broadway or (now obligatory) Cirque de Soleil show running downstairs; nor did we shop at the selection of in-house designer stores, which included a Ferrari dealership. Though on the last night we did order room service and enjoyed a panorama every bit as good as that of the Stratosphere, down the street.
The Wynn is only the latest example of Vegas' recent shift from blue to white collar decadence. Of course outposts of the old Vegas remain: the Tropicana, the Monte Carlo, the Sahara, Circus Circus; yet somehow their lustre has been stripped from them, their gaudy, cheap and cheerful all-you-can-eat, neon-lit, clankety-clank "what happens in Vegas..." almost rootsy dive-bar charm suddenly squalid in comparison to the mock Venetian canals, Parisian side-streets and white tigers from distant Araby, flatteringly lit in the reflected twilight of a trompe l'oeil fresco. It's a bit like finding Bette Lynch (or Paris Hilton) at a debutantes ball. Or how Tanya Turner probably felt when she met Eva de Wolffe (Joan Collins) in series 5 of the excellent Footballer's Wives (available on a bittorrent near you, probably). NQOCD: Not quite our class, dear. Which, when you think about it, is all very unamerican. This is, after all, the only country I've ever visited where you can tell absolutely nothing about a man's wealth by the way he dresses. Make no mistake though, there is a class system here; yet its vagaries continue to elude me.
In any case, I cannot recommend a trip to Vegas highly enough. It is quite simply one of the wonders of the modern world. By any almost every rational (indeed ethical) standard it should not exist; and yet it flourishes. Vive Las Vegas, bebe.
The view from our window by day...
...and by night
New Vegas vs Old Vegas. Yes, that a 2:1 Arc de Triomphe there.
That Frontier billboard in close-up. Unashamedly old-school.
Not NASA's mission control, but the sports-betting area at The Wynn. Not exactly Ladbrokes.
Hey, look, I'm in New York.
...I mean Paris
...I mean Venice (or maybe not; although, on the plus side, it does smell a lot better)
Just rounding things off with a tiger. It breaks the narrative, but my future biographer will rightly interpret this as a deliberate attempt to caricature the postmodern mise-en-scene. Although she may just take it as further evidence of my obsession with cats, which I feel would be doing me a bit of a disservice. Don't buy that one.
posted by Richard Tammar at 8:37 AM
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