Las Vegas seems to be everywhere we look these days. OK, for us it's always everywhere we look. I mean for the rest of the country. Las Vegas. The Casino. CSI is still chugging along, with William Petersen in the Encyclopedia Brown role and Marg Helgenberger as Sally. The Discovery Channel seems to highlight some aspect of Sin City every other week, and that's not counting its reality show, American Casino.
But like throwing a rock into a pond (we know, it's not the best simile during a drought but bear with us), the ripples from Vegas' cathode exposure are spreading out into other media.
As reported last week, the next installment of the hit video-game series Grand Theft Auto will have a chunk taking place in the fictitious desert city of Las Venturra, full of casinos with in-game betting. On the other end of the spectrum from shoot-em-up video games is poetry, and while you might think that any poem about Las Vegas has to rhyme with "craps," you'd be surprised. They sometimes also rhyme with "half-naked showgirls."
The latest issue of Poets & Writers magazine carries an interview with Donald Revell, multiaward-winning poet and instructor at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. His wife is poet Claudia Keelan, who directs the MFA program at UNLV, and the couple makes their home in Blue Diamond. The interviewer, W.T. Pfefferle (whose last name is like a Jerry Lewis schtick), has the attitude about Las Vegas we expect from someone who has spent his life in academia. In the same sentence, Pfefferie manages to turn up his nose at Vegas' "mindless, diffuse energy" while telling us with a sly wink and nod that the city was "researched extensively" while he was here.
Thankfully, Revell more than makes up for Pfefferle's condescension with a deep, and different, appreciation for both Sin City and Salt Lake, even finding a common ground between neon and temple, noting that both cities are built on leaps of faith and impermance. "In Las Vegas," Revell says, "you're going to make a lot of money and go somewhere else. In Salt Lake City, you're going to go to heaven. These are way stations."
Another sighting comes to us in Adbusters, a magazine produced by Canadians so bored with their own country that they have decided to focus their considerable intellectual prowess on American advertisements and commercials. (They could take shots at Canadian commercials, but those Captain High Liner fish-stick ones are too easy a target—"Ever been to sea, Billy?" is the perfect sequel to Peter Graves as the pilot in Airplane asking, "Joey, have you ever been to a Turkish prison?")
In the current issue, writer Jonathan Phillips compares his family's vacation in Las Vegas to his grandfather suffering a slow, painful death from lung cancer. Given that their vacation consisted of eating at the Excalibur's Sherwood Cafe, gambling at El Cortez and visiting a grimy Downtown titty bar, his grandfather got off light. And yet, what should we expect from a self-described New York political reveler and flash-mobber—New York Times-style evenhandedness? To be fair, Phillips' family, whom he seems to look down upon because they hail from the Midwest, also took time out for a trip to Hoover Dam and Lake Mead. His recently widowed grandmother wonders how much the vast body of water is worth. "Certainly more than we deserve," his father answers.
And with that non sequitur, we can only wonder where Las Vegas will turn up next.