mike davis - Libcom

SCRIPTING LAS VEGAS 23
gaming tables dominate, framed by rectangular molding on the ceiling,
recalling Monaco and the high rollers that the Monte Carlo has tried to
lure. Of course, here, too, myths precede facts: high rollers generally
have their own private spaces, with restricted entrances, not on casino
floors. Tables on the main floor at the Monte Carlo merely suggest James
Bond in a tuxedo at baccarat.
At New York New York, gaming tables suggest an imaginary proletariat,
craps on the Lower East Side in 1915, with the velvet tables
submerged under canopies. Apparently, however, the appeal of craps is
diminishing. As of 1950, perhaps, or 1955, when the Strip really took
off, craps was very much perceived as a sidewalk sport. The war added
to its romance: many GIs identified craps with months stuck on a ship;
the Sergeant Bilko or Damon Runyon mystique came to mind. Craps
suggested the nineteenth-century mining-town West as well; that was
essential to the Vegas Vic promotional campaign of the late 1940s into
the 1950s. Today, very few men remember playing craps in a submarine
or at the motor pool. Increasingly, the anonymity of the slot machine is
more soothing for men and women alike: the bodiless cybernetic dealer;
poker as private, not communal.
In short, while Vegas may be more “pedestrian friendly,” the slot
machine yet again raises the question of where is everyone walking to—
not through neighborhoods, not inside a world of mixed use. They make
their way through narratized retail shopping as tourists; this is utterly
different from the patterns of the industrial city or the baroque city that
are being idealized. I won’t say worse, only different. I leave moral judgments
for others. Of course, my urban nostalgia probably shows
through anyway. But my taste for thin-crust pizza and chewy bagels is
irrelevant. Instead, let me repeat the key issue: the new Vegas Strip enhances
the interior narrative, not the communal process. That is not
particularly evil, simply a new version of what Baudelaire meant by
mixing your solitude in crowds of people. It is less like walking through
New York in 1930, more like gambling on a movie set. It is part of what
I call “the metropolitan suburb,” where streets are privatized and urban
interiors operate like cable TV with a food court.
We make too much of the myth that thousands of people watching
the volcano at the Mirage constitute an urban experience. Why in that
sentence do we leave the term “urban” undefined? Certainly, we do not
mean urban in the sense of Parisians in a Daumier lithograph watching
the saltimbanques perform. Do we really imagine any return at all of
the warm evening we see in Whistler’s famous painting of the fireworks