From Hedgehog Review, Fall 2025 issue:
What does it mean to “think Las Vegas”?
It comes buzzing into my mind like a hazy half dream, the kind that arrives when you’ve had too much espresso and need to close your eyes in the dark of your hotel room for a moment. I’m in two places at once: One is the Neon Museum in Las Vegas, where I am wandering around the sandy two-acre lot amid the retired signs of dynamited casinos, hotels, and other businesses on the Strip, listening to old Elvis live shows on my headphones; the other is the recently opened poker room in the Venetian Casino, where I find myself sitting next to Walter Benjamin, the German Jewish intellectual who once saw, with a clarity that remains difficult to reckon with today, the end of an epoch.
As Benjamin wrote in 1928, in his sprawling and unfinished magnum opus The Arcades Project, “if, sometime in the mid-nineties, we had asked for a prediction, surely it would have been: the decline of a culture.” He meant the 1890s, the European fin-de-siècle and the coming descent into fascism, but I could say the same thing about the 1990s today. Benjamin was writing about the arcades, those iron-and-glass canopied commercial passageways that he took as emblematic of Paris when it was the epicenter of the glory and fragility of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture. What Benjamin saw in the persistence of the remaining arcades in early-twentieth-century Paris (after the urban-renewal efforts of Baron Haussmann leveled many) is what I see in the persistently glitzy architecture and tightly time-constrained nightly shows of Las Vegas today: a culture attempting to grasp its own passing.
A Vacation Disrupted
Playing poker (or chess) with Walter Benjamin will always remain a fantasy. But the Neon Museum is real enough, and it was there, about a year ago, that I started thinking seriously about Las Vegas. I was on vacation with my wife, and, as empty nesters, we were taken by the city as a rambunctiously energetic site of aesthetic engagement, good food, and desert sun—plus poker tables and spas. Nevertheless, our visit began as it should for any semiotician—with a fully sober nighttime visit to that museum north of downtown that is sometimes called the Neon Boneyard because of the way it suggests a well-kept automobile cemetery, though featuring an assortment of beautifully designed signs instead of classic Cadillacs or Thunderbirds. There you can see many of the signs made famous in countless Vegas-set films: Sahara, Stardust, Riviera, and on and on. A subset of those signs appears in an installation called Brilliant! Jackpot, a work of projection art set to a Vegas-themed soundtrack, while an eight-hundred-square-foot mural on one of the outer walls of the museum features assorted Vegas luminaries, including Liberace, Sammy Davis Jr., and Denise Scott Brown, the last of whom was coauthor, with Robert Venturi and Steven Izenour, of that now-standard work of architectural theory, Learning From Las Vegas, copies of which are prominently displayed in the museum gift shop. This was my kind of place: hyper-nerdy about (supposedly) lowbrow culture, aficionado-friendly, and piping out just enough twentieth-century pop music to warm you up on a cold desert night.
Adding to our pleasure was the enthusiasm of the museum staff, who welcomed us and narrated the city’s history with vivid and telling details of aesthetic ambition and the rise and fall of various business ventures, all of which were enthusiastically received by the artists and Hollywood types who had bought tickets for this guided tour of pop art. We learned about the craftsmanship of the sign makers, especially the indomitable Betty Willis, who designed the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign (and was featured, naturally, in the museum’s mural). We were told the history of the Moulin Rouge Hotel-Casino and given an account of the Cold War insanity of witnessing atomic-bomb tests as a draw for the rooftop bars. We also heard tales about strikes, labor victories, and the first black Vegas dancing star, Delcenia Boyd Jones.
These tour guides, I gradually realized, were what the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci would call organic intellectuals—symbol-pushers tied to a specific location in the social structure, producing culture in, of, and for their milieu rather than attempting to map it all from the ivory tower. As befits such producers of adroit cultural and historical interpretation, the guides were not screwing around, not mailing it in, and that was what caught me off-guard—their earnest narration. These were Americans, in 2024, offering their interpretations non-ironically! As a product of late-modern academic culture, I was accustomed not only to irony but also to supreme cynicism as the dominant mode of discourse, especially of the kind on display at those gatherings of semi-strangers called academic conferences, where to suggest for even half a second that one enjoyed art for art’s sake or liked commerce because buying things you are attracted to is fun would guarantee social ostracism.
The guides, on the other hand, were engaged in a multilayered discourse that began to activate certain long-held, but never fully voiced, suspicions of my own about those grand theorists of postmodernism who insisted on maligning Las Vegas as the apotheosis of constructed desire, pernicious in the extreme. If the literary critic Fredric Jameson was right about the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles—that, like Vegas itself, its glimmering, reflective windows and over-articulated elevator design were signifiers of everything anti-human about the new capitalism—how come I was enjoying my time with these artists and tour guides remembering Vegas before it switched from neon to LED?....
....MUCH MORE
Not Fear and Loathing..., but then nothing is. Compare/contrast the above with a traveling man and his attorney on
their way to the National District Attorneys Association's Conference on
Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, April 25-29, 1971:
- We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive..." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: "Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?"
- The sporting editors had also given me $300 in cash, most of which was already spent on extremely dangerous drugs. The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug-collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.
- The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon.
- How long can we maintain? I wonder. How long before one of us starts raving and jabbering at this boy? What will he think then? This same lonely desert was the last known home of the Manson family. Will he make that grim connection...
- No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough.
- The car suddenly veered off the road and we came to a sliding halt in the gravel. I was hurled against the dashboard. My attorney was slumped over the wheel. “What’s wrong?” I yelled. “We can’t stop here. This is bat country!"
Or a snippet that could stand in for every deal gone bad, ever:
"Still humping the American Dream, that vision of the Big Winner somehow emerging from the last minute pre—dawn chaos of a stale Vegas casino. Big strike in Silver City. Beat the dealer and go home rich. Why not? I stopped at the Money Wheel and dropped a dollar on Thomas Jefferson—a $2 bill, the straight Freak ticket, thinking as always that some idle instinct bet might carry the whole thing off. But no. Just another two bucks down the tube. You bastards! No. Calm down. Learn to enjoy losing....
As seen in "CryptoKitty Trading Volume Collapses: Andreessen, Union Square and Climateer Hurt Worst" and many others.
