Phthursday Musings: Meta Vegas

This is easiest to explain as a daily itinerary, starting last week:

• Wednesday: Flew to Las Vegas for a work conference

• Thursday: Work conference; family flew in that night

• Friday: Work conference wrapped up; family day in Las Vegas

• Saturday: Drove to Springdale, Utah

• Sunday: Zion National Park

• Monday: Zion National Park

• Tuesday: Drove back to Las Vegas and flew home

Utah, Zion, all that will get its own entry next week.

This one is all about Vegas.

Vegas blows.

Now, I could have stopped there, and it probably would have been a pretty good summary of the place. But I’m sure you crave more detail than that, you… cravers.

This was actually the third time I’ve been to Las Vegas. The second time was in 2012. My wife and I went there for reasons I’m not sure about. Actually, maybe I should ask her:

P: Darling?

M: Mhmm?

P: Why did we go to Las Vegas ten years ago?

M: I don’t know.

So, she doesn’t know either.

Like, seriously, we have no idea why we chose to go there.

It was February, we stayed at Palms Place, we saw some random comedy show. We lost about $4 gambling, and had a difficult time finding anything decent to eat. The way I remembered 2012 is that I remember being at a bar with a basketball game on in the middle of Linsanity.

Nothing abut the trip compelled us to return, so we didn’t, until we had, you know, reasons.

My work conference was held at Caesars Palace. The work conference is boring so just a couple sentences about that. It was nominally a training conference put on by our parent corporation, where our customers could show up and engage with one another in a setting many of them rarely get a chance to experience. This included the Thursday night disco themed banquet. (Imagine people trying to channel Debbie Harry and instead channeling Stevie Nicks… solo Stevie Nicks.)

At one point on Wednesday I went from the conference rooms to the hotel check-in kiosks to the car to get my bags to my room. It took about 50 minutes to do all of this, because Caesars Palace is gigantic, the wayfinding is horrid, and everything is designed to guide you through casino space. Is it interesting that they have a replica of the Statue of David? It is. But as interesting as that other replica of the Statue of David? I think you know where I stand on the matter.

Yeah, that’s right, I’d rather go back to Sioux Falls than go back to Las Vegas.

Hanging with the family was interesting though. Goofy Child was quite taken by the sheer size of Caesars Palace, especially the numerous pools. He has though an uncanny ability to absorb and internalize new experiences. One day he’s seeing The Strip for the first time and processing how bright and busy everything is, the next day it seems like it’s old hat to him.

I feel like it was a little different for me when I was first in Las Vegas, in 1991, for the annual convention of the Coin Laundry Association.

Okay, I’m not 100% sure that it was the Coin Laundry Association. But if not it would have been some other trade organization for the same thing. So I’m going to stick with Coin Laundry Association.

Their trade journal, if you were wondering, is:

No, I was not myself, at age 13, a card carrying member of the Coin Laundry Association. That distinction would have gone to my grandmother, proprietor of Kishwaukee Coin Laundry in Rockford. She decided to go to the 1991 convention and take me and my cousin with. We spent a day at the convention, and the rest of the time we spent doing other Vegas type things, including but not limited to:

• The medieval show at Excalibur

• Taking in a AAA baseball game (Tucson Toros at Las Vegas Stars)

• Drinking a lot of orange floats

• Hanging out at the Stardust pool

• Seeing an Elvis impersonator at the fabulous El Morocco

• Flying over the Grand Canyon, which was an awful experience

• Standing on the edge of the Hoover Dam

Obligatory:

Fun, if for only me and my cousin, is that the 1991 Las Vegas Stars were managed by Jim Riggleman, while the 1991 Tucson Toros featured a promising star outfielder in Kenny Lofton.

The only specific thing I remember about that though is that afterwards we had to wait a long time for a cab, because no tourists actually went to AAA baseball games, and while we were waiting my cousin did the limbo under a security gate.

The Stardust is of course no longer there. But I can draw a little contrast between what it was like and what Caesars Palace is like today. Slot machines everywhere, versus slot machines… nowhere. Because now it’s all digital.

The Stardust was like nothing else I’d ever seen. Caesars Palace? Well, I can play video slots at the Speedway on U.S. 20 in Belvidere next to that super unhappy looking woman. Not quite the same thing, you say, except, kind of exactly the same thing, except the pop is cheaper at the Speedway.

And maybe that’s the thing. When the initial blast of stimuli wears off, Las Vegas more than anything else is just more than anything else. It is, perhaps, the most American of cities, because it is the most meta of cities. It is the most spectacularly capitalist place imaginable, which means it is also spectacularly vacuous. This of course is a feature, not a flaw, and much like moths to the zapper, it keeps drawing people in.

To my early teenage eyes, it was not quite like this. I’d never seen nor heard of anything like Excalibur. (But if I want that today, I don’t go to Vegas, I just go to Medieval Times in Schaumburg.) The clangor of the casino was wildly unfamiliar. (But if I want a close enough approximation today, I just go to Dave & Buster’s in Addison.) And gambling itself, that was completely different from anything else I’d ever been around. (Now I can just drive to Hammond or Elgin or even stay home and blow my retirement on some combination of crypto and in game parlays.)

I totally understand the appeal, the escapism, and perhaps most vitally for some, the “what happens in Vegas” license. But for a 13 year old in 1991, the totality of the Las Vegas experience added up to something uniquely fun. Today, my feeling is that it adds up to something uniquely excessive, as though the actual fun has been replaced by excess in and of itself. It’s not that people might not be able to find or make fun while there, but the causation feels all inverted. What once upon a time made it Vegas was that it was fun, and now the sales pitch is that what makes it fun is that it’s Vegas, and… there are much less expensive ways to have much more fun. But I’ll write about Utah next week.

I do want to write a bit here about the Raiders.

At least one of you reading this will need this background: Las Vegas is home to an ostensible professional football team, the Raiders, who play at a gigantic, sleek new facility called Allegiant Stadium. The Raiders were an original AFL team out of Oakland in 1960, moved to Los Angeles in 1982, back to Oakland in 1995, and then to Las Vegas in 2020. The Raiders won three of the first twenty Super Bowls, were easily one of the five biggest teams going for a long time, and had a reputation (earned or otherwise) for being especially tough and physical, if not outright dirty. Their long time owner Al Davis coined two phrases still closely connected to the team: Just Win, Baby; and Commitment To Excellence.

I saw numerous license plates in Las Vegas featuring the Raiders logo which read, at the bottom, COMMITMENT TO EXCELLENCE, and each time I laughed out loud.

Never has there been a better hubristic marriage of sports franchise and city than the Las Vegas Raiders. Las Vegas proper is not a small city - at about 650,000 it’s between Boston and Portland - and I understand how cities like this want to prove that they’re BIG LEAGUE and all. Still there is this blatant over the top posturing about the Raiders, arguably the third least relevant football team of the 21st Century; even Caesars Palace had a store just for Raiders gear. The whole thing is terribly silly: the kind of terribly silly where everybody involved desperately wants some kind of approval even while they’re laughing their way to the bank.

I could go for a good orange float right about now.

Anyway, while I’m not too terrilbly interested in returning to Las Vegas any time soon, I suspect we’ll be there some time in the next few years anyway, because reasons.

It was a good family time though, as it’s always good to see this kid’s brain light up when confronted with new and weird things. Plus he’ll pose for things like this: