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.