mike davis - Libcom

4 HAL ROTHMAN & MIKE DAVIS
to gaming to tourism to entertainment with a success that causes other
places to salivate and slavishly imitate the once-shunned Sin City.
Wall Street and the international financial markets have applauded
the remake. Since 1990, the annual visitor turnover has increased from
21 million to more than 30 million, and blue-chip financial markets now
routinely fill the role once played by the mob-controlled Teamsters’ Pension
Fund. At the same time, jealous and fiscally starved cities around
the nation now see Las Vegas’s alchemy of sunshine, gambling, and entertainment
as a magic recipe for economic revitalization. Las Vegas has
developed a peculiar cachet: it is the success story—the ugly duckling
who becomes a swan—that others covet and try to emulate. In a richly
ironic reversal of fortunes, as Hal Rothman demonstrates in “Colony,
Capital, and Casino” and Bill Thompson affirms in “Nevada Goes
Global,” the pariah has become the paradigm; the colony, the colonizer.
The progression to corporate sources of capital for development has
made the town a driving force in America’s transition to a service economy.
The gaming leviathan can, of course, continue to grow at breakneck
speed only if it can colonize the future as well as the present. A new
generation of tourists have begun to follow their own celebrities and
pop idols to the hipper parts of the post-polyester Strip. About a mile
east of the Strip, the Hard Rock Hotel, where the entrance sports Stevie
Ray Vaughan’s adage “If the house is rockin’, don’t bother knockin’,
c’mon in,” opened up this niche. Planet Hollywood, which yet may become
the flagship of the new order, wanted a hotel to give Generation
X-ers a chance to rub shoulders with owners Bruce Willis, Demi Moore,
and Arnold Schwarzenegger, while dancing to Third Eye Blind, Matchbox
20, and the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies. Most industry pundits agree
that the future of Las Vegas will ultimately depend on its ability to integrate
gaming with virtual reality and other interactive entertainment
technologies.
Las Vegas, in other words, has become a vast laboratory, where giant
corporations, themselves changing amalgams of capital from different
sectors, are experimenting with every possible combination of entertainment,
gaming, mass media, and leisure. Architecturally, the Las Vegas
Strip has become a Möbius Strip where casinos merge into malls into
amusement parks into sports venues into residential subdivisions into
casinos again. Its fundamental malleability, so essential to its transformation
from the peripheral to the paradigmatic, has become an envied
trait. As Steve Wynn, the CEO of Mirage Industries, told Time maga-