Savannah - Salt, Sex & Death

I want to die in Savannah. I want to be a 19th century ghost.

An open-ended graveyard sits wishfully by the police station. Grave robbers don’t go there anymore. There is nothing left from the mausoleums and carcass-fed flowerbeds to extract except for the tombstones themselves. But cemeteries too wish for patrons and there is no shortage of bodies in Savannah. Fresh flowers on youthful graves lay boastfully next to hardened moss covered crypts. Wind and rain has withered much of these decrepit stones. Some have been washed to the bone, leaving only a date or a partial name, a forgotten epitaph or the story of a child lost to cholera. Even in death, we grow old.

A sweet sea breeze drifts down the boulevards and avenues, lamenting the past and serenading the present. Savannah itself is a crypt of memory – Civil War treaties, Southern generals, murdered mistresses, cotton colonies, abandoned slaves, abandoned wives, the whorehouses… the dead have memories and they dance and drink on their graves at midnight to remember.

Savannah was once the dollhouse for the old and the rich – the Belle Époque. Now their kids have grown up and turned it into their playground. The introduction of the Savannah College of Art and Design has brought a youthful zealousness to this culture of death. Youth is the great antidote for death, as death is but the great intoxication of youth.

It is a sensual town. The duality of sex and death flavours the air – a mixture of salt water and aged moss. All that curved and ancient stone: mighty monuments to the memory of the South. One always hears the “click-clock” of a nearby horseshoe echoing from the oyster shell pavements. One imagines parades of fornicating bodies perched on benches, clawing behind/beneath tombstones, lining dim avenues and thumping rickety awnings.

They call Savannah the ‘Garden of Good and Evil’, as if the two were absolutely singular to one another. However man is naturally an organism infused with seeds of both – irrevocably bonded to the twin forces of nature. The human mind is a twisting well of caverns, forms and shadows trying to resurface all that was lost and forgotten. However at midnight the latter gene takes prominence above all. The haunting ghosts of a blemished life take hold. Strange things happen in Savannah at midnight. “Not gonna lie”, says Leigh.

Virginia - Slim and Narrow

Virginia is a marsh where all of the past and future soldiers congregate in death and bog[god]. One could envisage a scenario out in the sticks, where both the Islamic Jihadists and the Confederate militias practice their skirmishes in between the highway belts and tobacco farms, narrowly missing confrontations until the day when they both have God sitting high and mighty on their shoulders.

The idea doesn’t seem so obsolete. After all, this is God’s country where the twin pillars of the American economy stand side-by-side in the name of God and Dollar: the miliary and American Tobacco. We can pinpoint geographically where the majority of the world’s cancers and smart bombs germinate. These two industries – along with dairy farming – gave the Commonwealth of Virginia (population 7.5 million) a Gross Domestic Product of US$327 billion for the first year of the war. War is big business for Virginia and of course everyone needs to smoke in war. What else will they do? Army rations usually consist of a tin of Spam, a stick of gum, condensed milk and five packs of Winston.

American flags drip onto the asphalt of the ‘Old Dominion’. It perpetrates so much of the landscape that one may confuse it as a natural fauna. Driving under the infinite sky – flat from horizon to horizon – is like driving under God’s open wound. It’s easy to see how one can lose themself here, then later find their soul down in a whiskey den, at the altar of a church or conscripted into the marines.

The long arms of interstate extend out among the open marshes, past fathers and forefathers of the brave and stolen. Is the Underground Railroad still in practice?

Houston - Got a Shotgun?

Concrete and steal arteries reach over vast planes of Texan desert, bleeding across the horizon. Houston is the car crash of the millennium waiting to happen. The motorcades of two million of the Space City’s patrons glide down six, seven, eight, nine lane highways. Even God gets stuck in rush hour traffic here.

In Los Angeles I garnered that it took half an hour to get to anywhere from anywhere. In Houston it takes forty-five minutes. And the scenery is a lot less pretty. Houston is like the practice range for placing highways anywhere in the world – I-10 version 1.0. In fact, highway is probably Texas’ third largest export after oil and drill parts. They build them out across the Beltway and ship them off to Abu Dhabi.

Of course, Texas has a ‘rich’ history with the Middle East. Back in the ‘90s Houston became the home away from home for the Sheiks, the Muftis and the Taliban, led in-hand by all those great Texan oil barons. Thanks to innovations in communication they no longer have to come here. Though, George Bush Senior still makes his home off some hazy highway, veritably curdling away in his anxiety, as his son launches a war on everything from free speech to ‘My Pet Goat’. The son sometimes makes his home here too, relinquishing his saddle to their old friend Dick Cheney when he’s not off hunting Democrats or lawyers.

They say as you steadily go from West to East in the United States, the layers of courtesy shed and by the time you get to New York you’re deep in the throws of a venom-spitting inhospitable waiter having a bad day. (Of course, New York is a lot closer to France than the rest are.) A thin layer of nicety lies over all off America in varying gradations. There’s something to be said though of that ‘Southern Hospitality’. It’s both infectious and sometimes nauseous. All of that “How are you doing?”, “Have a great day”, “Thanks for asking”, can be a warm welcome, especially when people in Sydney are generally assholes.

But a dark unconscious force broods; it’s been brooding since the last great slaughter of the Wild West. The twin desires of aggression and sex are not mediated well enough here. All the spite and angst that individuals need to cultivate a healthy mentality is getting buried underground with buckets of TNT and a shotgun to boot. There is a cumulative unconscious dark matter waiting to latch onto an ideology. Perhaps it has already found one, but regardless of creed, there is the ordinary fear of not God, but of the Other.

Those who can afford it bunker down behind large housing estates with several layers of wall and security. Everyone else has large walls surrounded by more walls. For Houstonians, most of the time spent outside of these walls is spent in one of their large cars. Everything one needs to mediate their consumption can be bought drive-thru or have Fed-Exed to them. Groceries, pharmaceuticals, even Starbucks; one never has to leave their car ever again out of the ordinary fear of not God, but the Other.

Providence - “At the Heart of the Swamp Yankee”

The habitual way of getting around Rhode Island is by foot or cycle. If you drive, you’ll be out of the state within ten minutes. But then maybe they want that.

Though New Englanders are vehemently proud of their Anglo-Italian heritage, they really don’t care for Anglos, or anyone else for that matter. The male of the species is extremely territorial. Really all of New England is. They get this from the English – “Southern Ferries”, “Northern Bastards” - that sort of bullocks. The Irish own Boston, and Providence is really, well, up for grabs. The accent here is Cockney English drowned-out by American-Italian, or vice versa. This of course makes for huge issues at the level of procreation. The English and the Italians were never really meant to be together, ever.

The Rhode Island education system is a dreary scene. It’s a popular destination for immigrants on the Eastern Seaboard – all those boats that couldn’t make it to Canada. There are Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Haitians, Dominicans and West Africans… the whole of Guadeloupe. (I’ve even heard rumors of remnants of Suharto’s ex-government hiding out here.) Perhaps this is why they refer to the colony as “the Ocean State” – you never know what catch the Great Blue will yield!

So Providence is the starting point for all those wide-eyed educational reformers. Everyone wants to deconstruct the system, wants a hands-on roll for building the America of tomorrow. Its failures loiter in between the Elizabethan houses and tuck-shop art galleries. The mad, the unemployed, the hip and the arty. There is a lot of sense of “come to Providence and fuck the system”. Though the only system-fucking really happening is the cost one pays for tobacco rolling paper - $6 for a sheet of 50. Don’t smoke! Big Tobacco has got their eyes on you!

Failure in the American system really means active rejection of the system, refusal to work within it. However, in a slow and jacket-drawn town like this, everyone seems to be doing something - even the youth - just not up to the expectations of the rest of the economy. It must be the latitude. There’s a lot of blowing on your coffee, rolling a second pipe, tucking in your sandwich… a “how you doin?” and “I’m not too sure about that?” How does anything get done here? Yet it does! Maybe it’s all that pretty architecture. It keeps one livid and content. It is nice to walk around Providence – pastel columns, Victorian and Elizabethan maid’s quarters, old brick smoke stacks. Every house has an enormous front door, attached to a burdening atrium. However, I’m not too sure what this facilitates, as locals are afraid to let other people (local or not) into their houses.

Providence sits solemnly on the North East hugging the Atlantic. It tempers the bounty of big-city crime that comes out of Boston. It’s a suburb in search of a city, which may prove difficult, as the tallest building I encountered in “downtown” was the five-story shopping mall. Providence city itself seems ludicrously non-violent, but on the West Side, ghetto-inhabitants taunt the local paper-youths and out-of-towners/college students.

What really happens in Providence after dark? I don’t know. At half-past-five the drowsy inhabitants climb their spiral staircases to their Victorian lofts to lay and drink eggnog and eat turkey. They don’t come out until Starbucks reopens at 8am. I feel that sex is not a common occurrence here either. It’s too much effort to pull-off ankle warmers and pull-on your lover’s organs. The cold tends to make people dirty, irritable and obscenely neurotic (of course the last two can be blamed on the lack of sex. The first on the unwillingness to remove garments). Add to this the fact that the average Rhode Islander is pretty damn unattractive (recall the Anglo-Italian genes), and you get a declining white population, coincided with massive non-white immigration. This of course makes everyone more fearful, which in turn keeps him or her locked-in at night and away from said lovers. Cyclically viscous.

The more boisterous way in which Rhode Islanders sublimate all this tension and fear is through showcasing their aggressive personas. Bar chat solicits a lot of “peckerheads” and “fuckin’ cockroaches” and “those fuckin’ Boston motherfuckers”. This makes for random outbursts from just about everyone to everyone else. But I’ve yet to see a punch thrown. I’ve yet to see any physical display of aggression. What shitty part of the English gene did they get (again, recall Italy)? I feel that Australia or England could take over this State through a strategic and decisive onslaught of pub brawls.

To add further anxiety to the witches pot, Rhode Island has the highest percentage of troops per population sent to Iraq of all 50 (51 inc. Australia) of the American States. There is a great deal of both pride and regret. The war and its perpetrators are condemned, but of course the troops are honored. The posters for Iraq food/Christmas drives sit side-by-side with “Bush Lied” and “The Neo-Conservative Dream is Over”. But of course Rhode Island has always seen itself as the custodian of the conservative dream. The official name of the state is Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. It was the first colony to declare its independence from the Commonwealth, though now some think this was a bad decision. There is not a lot of talk on the war, only talk of political turmoil and change. The Right and the Left live harmoniously side-by-side, drinking each other’s coffees, serving each other’s suppers and car-pulling each other’s children. However they dream at night of a time where they might have each other’s throats and bodies. Until then, they’ve got other problems.

All this anxiety and dread over the war, the immigrants, the education, each other… Rhode Island is but a simple representation of every other State in America (minus California who should really annex). Slowly one-by-one, the Americas are realizing too that their dream is over. Their days in the sun have left them swollen and brown. Of course the browness comes from other things too.

Las Vegas - Neon Sarcophagus

Las Vegas is like a grand over-the-top elephant graveyard, where the cold and wind-hardened players of North America go to die and become reborn. They spin that wheel, like a rat in a cage, sweating out every last breath of wholesome song and dance. However, for the God-fearing people, death is not the end; they never quite reach the cemetery, but instead get lost in a maze of neon and slot machine, with the voice of God chanting “One night only at the New York New York”, or “Try the Venetian’s… [whatever]”

They get continually resurrected in sexier and more blindingly colourful formats. Celine Dion is on her third or fourth farewell tour. Cher had a string of comeback performances before she finally hung-up her face. I’m not quite sure she has yet. Barry Manilow very scaringly lives 200 feet tall hugging the walls of the Bellagio – an iridescent icon to the youthful refusal of death, but at 63 years old. There are those who I wasn’t sure were still alive. Even 2Pac, whose body was found bullet ridden off the strip, refuses to let his musical repertoire dwindle. He’s only released about seven singles since 1997. For the man who sang, “live and die in LA”, he’s truly found a greater fate.

Vegas is the last great cosmopolitan in the world and the only city that the Chinese are losing money in. Yet the town represents all the great potential between East and West, a Diaspora of humanity’s great civilizations. (Why do you think they filmed ‘Rush Hour 2’ here?)

At some point in the last ten years, the bigwigs decided that it was the Chinese bringing in the currency to Vegas. The locals were coming in, playing a few rounds of roulette, catching a show, trying out a new steakhouse (like they’re any different?) and then going back home to Kentucky to count their Kodaks. It was the Chinese, they learnt, who were dropping massive amounts of US tender into the Nevada desert, à la American economy. Sure the lovely old ladies of yesteryear were pushing a few pennies into the slot machines, but nothing beats watching the ferocious fearlessness of a Honky or Shanghainese matron dropping her dowry down a roulette hole in a matter of hours. I call it an R-Hole (similar to K, but without the messy sheets).

So the Americans want entertainment, the Chinese want a fast dealer and good feng shui. The kwai-lohs complied. Las Vegas represents the cultural needs of easily 100,000 Asians per month. The concierge will always speak a dialect or two. There are Asian-inspired bars, hotels and strip clubs. I found Hainanese Chicken Rice on the room service menu at the Wynn. I had Penang kway-teow for dinner. It cost US$40, as opposed to 4 Ringgit in Penang. Every hotel has at least two “high quality” Chinese restaurants. Restaurant menus will be written in several languages, none of them European (if you count American as a language). Wolfgang Puck, the great American restaurateur, has leant his name to about thirty fusion restaurants across the city. He has pioneered the art of mass-producing artisan food.

My favourite is the one that sits right next to the Venetian’s water feature. It’s called Tsunami – “authentic Asian cuisine with a twist”. (You see. This is the problem when the only international news content on Fox News comes through a segment called “Around the World in 60 Seconds”). But who cares? Certainly not the Asians. They’re all in Steve Wynn’s lap throwing down at the tables: “Li li li li li! Bet red! Red 28.” The Tsunami could cover the desert to reach the strip and the Asians would still be the last ones betting.

Las Vegas is either the entertainment capital of, or the most entertaining capital in America. I haven’t decided yet. Magicians, singers, cabarets, comedians, strippers, celebrities, the American Billboard Awards… There’s nothing like a decisive and well-oiled culture industry. The entertainment mediates the balance between gambling and existential being. So all this “culture” must be maintained in order to sublimate the fears of retardation by poker machine, which is a common enough cause of death in suburban Australia.

There are great hopes for the future though. They’re working on a new business model at the MGM Grand, mixing psycho-chemistry, quantum mathematics and a new kind of Black Jack. Soon culture will be available in a clear liquid form that you can inject or swallow in-between hands, just in case you feel the need to leave the casino floor. It can also be laced in your cigarettes for a slow in-take or shovelled up your asshole if you like to stand whilst betting. But sex is such an important industry in Nevada – “the home of legalised prostitution” and annulments thankfully – that they’ll have to give pass-outs to under-sexed husbands, whilst their wives handle those long gear-knobbed slot machines. Gambling makes one so tense, that sex is the only real cathartic expression for post-capitalism.

Nevada also has a prohibition on cocktail waitresses with mediocre breasts. They were all sent back East and then an influx of Latinos and Russians came in from Southern California to take over. I struggle to find an American accent here in fact.

The last great cosmopolitan on earth, its towers prey towards the sun like the cyborg replicant of every commercializeable, mass producible culture that ever came in and out of existence. The Incas, the Egyptians, the Indians, the New Yorkers, the pirates… they are all represented here, encased in domes of fluorescent glass beaming out to the desert. Las Vegas is the museum of apocalypse, enshrining our common fates in a sarcophagus of excess. It is the spiritual zenith of excess. Its accountants and marketing managers have perfected the formula for a mass religion of consumption. Every great empire came to its downfall from the follies of its excess. Las Vegas has found a way to thrive on its. And that in its own decadent perversity is quite a beautiful thing.