in this town they love a drunk
Forget New York, Vegas is the town that perfected self-mythologising. It has everything: mafia beginnings, impeccable showbiz connections, obscene amounts of money being gambled on architecture and business schemes - not to mention on the official tables of its commerce. Showgirls, strippers, neon, 24 hour diners, 24 hour everything. Young Elvis romancing Ann-Margret, Elvis again in his Rhinestone years. Fitzgerald was wrong about American lives having no second acts - he was just born too early to bear witness to the post-war edifice that rose out of the Nevada badlands.
Vegas created a whole new visual language, a uniquely American mid-century vernacular with its skyline of glittering lights and advertising. Tom Wolfe celebrated its pioneering signage and dubbed it the "super-hyper-version", the epitome of a whole new style of life in America. Hunter S Thompson founded his personal legend there, emerging from the desert in his apple red convertible in search of the Great American Dream (attorney in tow). It is the city of pop culture conflations, grand illusions, Free Enterprise. You can't argue Vegas went commercial, that was always the point.
I know it's tawdry and glitzy and despite all the money flowing in and out it is cheap, and not at all the place I think of when I hear Gram Parsons lamenting his losses at its uncaring hands. I know gambling is not as glamorous as endless Bond films would have me believe (he got to have his own Vegas adventure in Diamonds Are Forever, trysting with the fabulously named Tiffany Case and indulging in other favoured vices: car chases and besting various alluringly dangerous girls) I don't really want to be married by an Elvis impersonator. But I do wish I could have seen Las Vegas in its early days of self-creation, when the Ratpack and their shady associates owned its fledgling dreams and the novelty of all those neon lights hadn't quite worn off.
Forget New York, Vegas is the town that perfected self-mythologising. It has everything: mafia beginnings, impeccable showbiz connections, obscene amounts of money being gambled on architecture and business schemes - not to mention on the official tables of its commerce. Showgirls, strippers, neon, 24 hour diners, 24 hour everything. Young Elvis romancing Ann-Margret, Elvis again in his Rhinestone years. Fitzgerald was wrong about American lives having no second acts - he was just born too early to bear witness to the post-war edifice that rose out of the Nevada badlands.
Vegas created a whole new visual language, a uniquely American mid-century vernacular with its skyline of glittering lights and advertising. Tom Wolfe celebrated its pioneering signage and dubbed it the "super-hyper-version", the epitome of a whole new style of life in America. Hunter S Thompson founded his personal legend there, emerging from the desert in his apple red convertible in search of the Great American Dream (attorney in tow). It is the city of pop culture conflations, grand illusions, Free Enterprise. You can't argue Vegas went commercial, that was always the point.
I know it's tawdry and glitzy and despite all the money flowing in and out it is cheap, and not at all the place I think of when I hear Gram Parsons lamenting his losses at its uncaring hands. I know gambling is not as glamorous as endless Bond films would have me believe (he got to have his own Vegas adventure in Diamonds Are Forever, trysting with the fabulously named Tiffany Case and indulging in other favoured vices: car chases and besting various alluringly dangerous girls) I don't really want to be married by an Elvis impersonator. But I do wish I could have seen Las Vegas in its early days of self-creation, when the Ratpack and their shady associates owned its fledgling dreams and the novelty of all those neon lights hadn't quite worn off.
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