Las Vegas differs for all kinds of people, so I can only speak based on my own experiences.
I watched "Lucky You" this morning, or rather fast-forwarded through most of it. I loathed the screenplay, but Curtis Hanson got it as a filmmaker: Las Vegas isn't a rushed edit as other movies show it. It is meant to be taken in slowly, a sensual experience that builds, evident in the pan-down shot from the Eiffel Tower replica at Paris, to the synchronized waterfalls at the Bellagio.
Sunday, May 29, 2011
Saturday, May 28, 2011
The Trader Joe's Fridge
Eggplant hummus
Edamame hummus
Blue cheese and roasted pecan dip
Frozen tortellini bowl
Baby spinach
Small peeled carrots
Meatless corn dogs (They're better for me than regular corn dogs and I like them more)
Pomegranate yogurt with granola
Organic blueberry yogurt
Organic peach yogurt
Blueberry Greek yogurt
Three packages of roasted seaweed
More bananas to add to those I already have, to stretch to Wednesday, since Mom and Dad sure as hell aren't shopping after they get home from Vegas.
A couscous-centered salad that I had for dinner tonight.
All this, along with the frozen dinners I got from Pavilions, the bananas, spinach and carrots from there, the carton of Silk, the drink boxes of Silk Very Vanilla, the Simply Orange full-of-pulp juice, the Yoplait Greek blueberry yogurt, the Sabra pine nut hummus, the ready-made guacamole, and Meridith and I are set for when Mom and Dad are in Vegas. All of this helps when considering that they'll be deep in what we consider food heaven.
Edamame hummus
Blue cheese and roasted pecan dip
Frozen tortellini bowl
Baby spinach
Small peeled carrots
Meatless corn dogs (They're better for me than regular corn dogs and I like them more)
Pomegranate yogurt with granola
Organic blueberry yogurt
Organic peach yogurt
Blueberry Greek yogurt
Three packages of roasted seaweed
More bananas to add to those I already have, to stretch to Wednesday, since Mom and Dad sure as hell aren't shopping after they get home from Vegas.
A couscous-centered salad that I had for dinner tonight.
All this, along with the frozen dinners I got from Pavilions, the bananas, spinach and carrots from there, the carton of Silk, the drink boxes of Silk Very Vanilla, the Simply Orange full-of-pulp juice, the Yoplait Greek blueberry yogurt, the Sabra pine nut hummus, the ready-made guacamole, and Meridith and I are set for when Mom and Dad are in Vegas. All of this helps when considering that they'll be deep in what we consider food heaven.
A New Las Vegas for Me
Before Dad, Meridith and I went to Pavilions, Dad spent most of the afternoon researching hotels off the Strip and away from the Strip in Henderson. There are some interesting choices, ones that we've only ever driven by, and that reminded me that I would like to see what The Orleans is like. I love the New Orleans theming on the front of the place, so there's bound to be a lot more to attract me. For example, Lily Tomlin's performing at the Orleans Showroom on June 18 and 19. I have to keep that in mind in case we're there, looking for apartments, if we haven't found one already.
When it comes time for Meridith and I to join Mom and Dad in this vast search, I will return to Las Vegas a lot lighter than when I was last there. Last May, the schedule I kept because of the book, the nocturnal living, the bad diet, the sometimes-little sleep all came to a head at a mall in Henderson when that anxiety hit me. Plus, Vegas always has the temptation to eat whatever you want and not care what you're eating. I care now. I know that breakfast, if it's quick and we go to 7-11 for it, will be that plastic container of Cheerios, soy milk (If they have Silk in a convenience store-sized container there), and a banana. We have a lot more choices than here in Santa Clarita for where to eat, but I think I'll be subsisting on bananas a lot during the day, especially with crisscrossing that entire valley. No more donuts for me, no chips, a lot less fried things. This is going to be my new, and hopefully final, home. I need to treat it like I'm already there.
Chiquita's Got Something
Dad, Meridith and I spent late yesterday afternoon at Pavilions getting a good number of necessaries, not only to restock the fridge, but also in anticipation of Tuesday, when he and Mom will be driving out to Las Vegas and Meridith and I will be home.
Mom insists on making sure we have enough, which is fine, but I don't need every snack in the world. My diet's been solid ever since the middle of November, when I felt comfortable with what I was eating, knew there were plenty of nutritional benefits, and that my calorie count wouldn't be vast. But I did want eggs again, for Meridith's incredible deviled eggs, which is the only thing I require on Tuesday, and especially if Mom and Dad end up staying in Vegas a little longer.
I needed yogurt, but $1.29 for the Yoplait Greek Yogurt is far too pricey, so I only got one blueberry and saved the rest of my yogurt search for Ralphs, which didn't yield much else.
In the produce section, in one of the refrigerated cases, I found something intriguing. You know how some fruit juices, like Odwalla and Naked, are pureed to drinkability? Chiquita came out with something they call a "crushed fruit snack", combining a few different fruits. Initially, I saw strawberry and banana, but put that back when I spotted blueberry and banana, and got two. There's three containers of blueberries in the fruit bin in the fridge, and when I run out of bananas, it's only for half a day to a day, but I was curious about how this one compares to all the others out there.
Well, this is a more thoughtful fruit juice. Because these fruits have been crushed, there's a thicker consistency. You can taste the fruit and not just a combination of all the fruits. My fruit juices of choice come from Boltwood Farms, when they're low enough in price. I imagine that the price of the Chiquita crushed fruit snack won't last for long, as it seems like an introductory price, but I'd get this wherever I could find it, especially in our Vegas travels, which certainly do eat up a lot of energy. At least for now, it's the most time I spend in a car in a day.
(This isn't a review. Chiquita provided no samples. These are just appreciative observations.)
Friday, May 27, 2011
A New Las Vegas for Us
Las Vegas continually redefines itself. Historical casinos change (Tropicana). Historical casinos close (Sahara). New casinos open (Palazzo), and the landscape itself changes, such as with the proposed ferris wheel that is soon to be built, that will be taller than the one in London and change Vegas's skyline. You have to expect that kind of change and adapt to it if you're either a repeat visitor or a resident. But when that change first happens, it's a shock. Not so much that you hoped it wouldn't happen (And believe me, I wish it hadn't happened), but that first time, you just can't believe that it's happening.
Dad called the America's Best Value Inn on Tropicana Avenue, the one we always stay at. We've known the manager there ever since we first came to Las Vegas because our dog Tigger was allowed there. There were pet-friendly rooms, not so much pet-friendly landscape for Tigger to do his business easily (He hated walking those rocks to find a spot to piss on), but just that we could do that was a relief because there was no one in Santa Clarita, no place that was reliable enough that we could feel good about boarding Tigger there.
The manager provided us with a decent, manageable rate every time we were there, well aware that we intended to become residents soon enough, as soon as the Clark County School District loosened up enough for Dad so he could find a teaching position there. Not only that, but he was such a nice guy, and was our introduction to the good people of Las Vegas, and we've found many others since, such as the two guys I met who run that movie poster business at the Fantastic Indoor Swapmeet on Decatur Boulevard.
When we last saw him, he had gone to the doctor about growths that he had and had the physical evidence of it with bandages. Unfortunately, it's gotten worse. Dad learned that he's completely cancer-ridden, couldn't continue on in the job, and was replaced. The new manager told us that she couldn't accomodate the rate the former manager had given us.
So Vegas changes around us. And we change with it. Dad's at the dining room table right now, thumbing through a AAA travel guide that he picked up at the AAA office across from the Valencia library on the way home, figuring out not only where we should stay (possibly nearest to or in Henderson, since we've got to look for apartments there and see what Boulder City has, too), but what hotel would provide the best rate for us. I don't mind not going to Hooters Casino Hotel as often as we did because of its proximity to America's Best Value Inn, but it really sucks that that great good man has to contend with cancer. He always made the time to chat with us whenever we saw his door open, and that made all the difference to us. It helped make us even more comfortable with the area, and certainly when I had my doubts when we got out of our rented SUV on that first night, and I looked around and thought that Vegas was even more desolate than I had imagined. It took a walk through the Mirage, and dinner at the Carnegie Deli to make me less uncertain, and that manager completely eliminated the rest of my doubts just in listening to our story about where we had come from, what we had intended to do, and recommending to us areas to look at to live and some restaurants, too. I truly won't forget that or him. The cancer news doesn't sound good, and I hope he's at least comfortable enough and can do whatever he has his heart set on in this forced retirement. He deserves that.
Dad called the America's Best Value Inn on Tropicana Avenue, the one we always stay at. We've known the manager there ever since we first came to Las Vegas because our dog Tigger was allowed there. There were pet-friendly rooms, not so much pet-friendly landscape for Tigger to do his business easily (He hated walking those rocks to find a spot to piss on), but just that we could do that was a relief because there was no one in Santa Clarita, no place that was reliable enough that we could feel good about boarding Tigger there.
The manager provided us with a decent, manageable rate every time we were there, well aware that we intended to become residents soon enough, as soon as the Clark County School District loosened up enough for Dad so he could find a teaching position there. Not only that, but he was such a nice guy, and was our introduction to the good people of Las Vegas, and we've found many others since, such as the two guys I met who run that movie poster business at the Fantastic Indoor Swapmeet on Decatur Boulevard.
When we last saw him, he had gone to the doctor about growths that he had and had the physical evidence of it with bandages. Unfortunately, it's gotten worse. Dad learned that he's completely cancer-ridden, couldn't continue on in the job, and was replaced. The new manager told us that she couldn't accomodate the rate the former manager had given us.
So Vegas changes around us. And we change with it. Dad's at the dining room table right now, thumbing through a AAA travel guide that he picked up at the AAA office across from the Valencia library on the way home, figuring out not only where we should stay (possibly nearest to or in Henderson, since we've got to look for apartments there and see what Boulder City has, too), but what hotel would provide the best rate for us. I don't mind not going to Hooters Casino Hotel as often as we did because of its proximity to America's Best Value Inn, but it really sucks that that great good man has to contend with cancer. He always made the time to chat with us whenever we saw his door open, and that made all the difference to us. It helped make us even more comfortable with the area, and certainly when I had my doubts when we got out of our rented SUV on that first night, and I looked around and thought that Vegas was even more desolate than I had imagined. It took a walk through the Mirage, and dinner at the Carnegie Deli to make me less uncertain, and that manager completely eliminated the rest of my doubts just in listening to our story about where we had come from, what we had intended to do, and recommending to us areas to look at to live and some restaurants, too. I truly won't forget that or him. The cancer news doesn't sound good, and I hope he's at least comfortable enough and can do whatever he has his heart set on in this forced retirement. He deserves that.
A Man Can't Dance Like That
For the past three days, I've been reading White House Diary by Jimmy Carter.
That's all.
It's a big book at 538 pages, especially with sometimes-multiple diary entries per page. It has been a huge help, especially for two of my books, being that Carter is an interesting president in what he read while in office, and why he read those books, once for political gain, other times themed to what he was doing, such as the steamboat cruise aboard the Delta Queen, where he spent a lot of time in the pilothouse, and also read Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain.
But it's been a huge mistake to read only that for three days. I realize that now. Here I am, still futilely thinking that I can get through a majority of the presidential books I checked out before the Valencia library closes for the transition from County of Los Angeles to City of Santa Clarita control, and I'm going about this entirely wrong. Again.
When I was doing research for What If They Lived? and had an even tighter deadline than my published-again-by-30 one, not only did I check out a massive amount of books, and not only did I read them all, but that book was all I worked on. Every single day. Not much of a break for anything else beyond eating and sleeping.
I don't have quite the same mindset as before, especially owing to having lost a significant amount of weight since October of last year. But I don't want to feel that same pressure of having to read these books in order to get another book written. Then, I just did it. I had that deadline, had to do it, and I enjoyed some of it, especially the Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, Paul Lynde, Brad Renfro, Aaliyah, and Heath Ledger essays (The first because of all the detail involved in his life as an intricate part of the silent film industry, Lynde because of all the clips I got to watch over and over on YouTube and I even Netflixed his Halloween special; Renfro, Aaliyah and Heath Ledger because there are no books about them and therefore my research was exclusively online and I had to put it all together like a big jigsaw puzzle, which was a lot of fun), but this wasn't really my subject. I do have favorite actors, but I've always been fascinated more by directors.
I love the history of the presidency and of the men who were our presidents. My favorite decades for presidential history are the 1930s on. I am just as comfortable reading about Truman as I am Carter. I am perhaps more fascinated by Nixon and Reagan because I've been to the Nixon library once, and the Reagan library numerous times, though I liked the Nixon library more.
But I don't want to grow tired of this. I can't feel again like I have to rush through these books in order to produce something. Every time this happens, I end up having to reorder my immediate reading list, like I will today. Besides White House Diary, I've also been reading an essay anthology called Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times, a biography called Sandra Day O'Connor: How the First Woman on the Supreme Court Became Its Most Influential Justice by Joan Biskupic (I'm also fascinated by the personalities and inner workings of the Supreme Court, past and present), and Unstrung Heroes by Franz Lidz (I saw the movie starring John Turturro, Andie Macdowell, Michael Richards and Maury Chaykin and loved it, wanted to read the book, and I ordered the DVD for my collection, which I received yesterday). Further back on my reading list, what has remained there without being read much further yet, is Ask the Pilot by Patrick Smith (owing to my interest in aviation; a series of columns in which Smith answers questions asked about aviation in all its facets, mostly commercial travel), Malled: My Unintentional Career in Retail by Caitlin Kelly, and The Company We Keep: A Husband-and-Wife True-Life Spy Story by Robert Baer and Dayna Baer, about meeting while working in the CIA.
It's not the amount of books that causes the trouble. It's always the instance being too gung-ho about my research. Reading should always be a pleasure, no matter what you're reading for whatever purpose.
There's no question that I'm not going to finish reading White House Diary today. I need a break. Tomorrow, I intend to return the rest of the books in the American Presidents series from the Times Books arm of Henry Holt and Company. That's what I think began this trouble because it's all that I've been reading up until now for my research, and even though it's useful to me to get an overview of each president, I've become tired of the format and still I tried to force myself through them. Big mistake.
Do I want to continue the Sandra Day O'Connor biography? I'm only 13 pages into 432 pages, so it's no problem if I let it go for now. I'm further into Unstrung Heroes, 39 pages of 194. Plus, the story's an inspiration to me with all that eccentricity.
The bottom of my reading list will remain. I'll get to those books. I'm never worried about that. But I need to add a new book. I need something that lets me luxuriate in words, kind of like a spa massage to relieve the tension. Bookmark Now could do that to some degree, but I need something even more vast. Maybe Best of the Oxford American: Ten Years from the Southern Magazine of Good Writing. Florida is still the South, no matter the technicalities. Driving from a point in South Florida to Naples, it takes an hour to cross the state from east to west, and you drive through Alligator Alley, where alligators can be seen at the side of the road. That's southern. Don't tell me otherwise. I am proud of that. Southern writing is genuine. There's no attempts at posturing. No assumptions on anything. What you read is what was lived, proudly, tragically, never with a broken spirit.
Or maybe the first of the Cornbread Nation anthologies, subtitled The Best of Southern Food Writing. Intense passion for the South is right here. I learned about these when I read the 2005 food issue of The Oxford American. It's all food writing. There are some themes. Volume 2 is The United States of Barbecue. Volume 3 is Foods of the Mountain South. I have all the volumes, though I intend to go in order. So the first volume might do me some good today. I need words that don't have a personal purpose.
Mr. Carter's Plains, Georgia is as interesting to me as my old stomping grounds in my beloved state, but not today. Relief needs to come. And so does a better organizational plan so this doesn't keep happening.
That's all.
It's a big book at 538 pages, especially with sometimes-multiple diary entries per page. It has been a huge help, especially for two of my books, being that Carter is an interesting president in what he read while in office, and why he read those books, once for political gain, other times themed to what he was doing, such as the steamboat cruise aboard the Delta Queen, where he spent a lot of time in the pilothouse, and also read Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain.
But it's been a huge mistake to read only that for three days. I realize that now. Here I am, still futilely thinking that I can get through a majority of the presidential books I checked out before the Valencia library closes for the transition from County of Los Angeles to City of Santa Clarita control, and I'm going about this entirely wrong. Again.
When I was doing research for What If They Lived? and had an even tighter deadline than my published-again-by-30 one, not only did I check out a massive amount of books, and not only did I read them all, but that book was all I worked on. Every single day. Not much of a break for anything else beyond eating and sleeping.
I don't have quite the same mindset as before, especially owing to having lost a significant amount of weight since October of last year. But I don't want to feel that same pressure of having to read these books in order to get another book written. Then, I just did it. I had that deadline, had to do it, and I enjoyed some of it, especially the Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, Paul Lynde, Brad Renfro, Aaliyah, and Heath Ledger essays (The first because of all the detail involved in his life as an intricate part of the silent film industry, Lynde because of all the clips I got to watch over and over on YouTube and I even Netflixed his Halloween special; Renfro, Aaliyah and Heath Ledger because there are no books about them and therefore my research was exclusively online and I had to put it all together like a big jigsaw puzzle, which was a lot of fun), but this wasn't really my subject. I do have favorite actors, but I've always been fascinated more by directors.
I love the history of the presidency and of the men who were our presidents. My favorite decades for presidential history are the 1930s on. I am just as comfortable reading about Truman as I am Carter. I am perhaps more fascinated by Nixon and Reagan because I've been to the Nixon library once, and the Reagan library numerous times, though I liked the Nixon library more.
But I don't want to grow tired of this. I can't feel again like I have to rush through these books in order to produce something. Every time this happens, I end up having to reorder my immediate reading list, like I will today. Besides White House Diary, I've also been reading an essay anthology called Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times, a biography called Sandra Day O'Connor: How the First Woman on the Supreme Court Became Its Most Influential Justice by Joan Biskupic (I'm also fascinated by the personalities and inner workings of the Supreme Court, past and present), and Unstrung Heroes by Franz Lidz (I saw the movie starring John Turturro, Andie Macdowell, Michael Richards and Maury Chaykin and loved it, wanted to read the book, and I ordered the DVD for my collection, which I received yesterday). Further back on my reading list, what has remained there without being read much further yet, is Ask the Pilot by Patrick Smith (owing to my interest in aviation; a series of columns in which Smith answers questions asked about aviation in all its facets, mostly commercial travel), Malled: My Unintentional Career in Retail by Caitlin Kelly, and The Company We Keep: A Husband-and-Wife True-Life Spy Story by Robert Baer and Dayna Baer, about meeting while working in the CIA.
It's not the amount of books that causes the trouble. It's always the instance being too gung-ho about my research. Reading should always be a pleasure, no matter what you're reading for whatever purpose.
There's no question that I'm not going to finish reading White House Diary today. I need a break. Tomorrow, I intend to return the rest of the books in the American Presidents series from the Times Books arm of Henry Holt and Company. That's what I think began this trouble because it's all that I've been reading up until now for my research, and even though it's useful to me to get an overview of each president, I've become tired of the format and still I tried to force myself through them. Big mistake.
Do I want to continue the Sandra Day O'Connor biography? I'm only 13 pages into 432 pages, so it's no problem if I let it go for now. I'm further into Unstrung Heroes, 39 pages of 194. Plus, the story's an inspiration to me with all that eccentricity.
The bottom of my reading list will remain. I'll get to those books. I'm never worried about that. But I need to add a new book. I need something that lets me luxuriate in words, kind of like a spa massage to relieve the tension. Bookmark Now could do that to some degree, but I need something even more vast. Maybe Best of the Oxford American: Ten Years from the Southern Magazine of Good Writing. Florida is still the South, no matter the technicalities. Driving from a point in South Florida to Naples, it takes an hour to cross the state from east to west, and you drive through Alligator Alley, where alligators can be seen at the side of the road. That's southern. Don't tell me otherwise. I am proud of that. Southern writing is genuine. There's no attempts at posturing. No assumptions on anything. What you read is what was lived, proudly, tragically, never with a broken spirit.
Or maybe the first of the Cornbread Nation anthologies, subtitled The Best of Southern Food Writing. Intense passion for the South is right here. I learned about these when I read the 2005 food issue of The Oxford American. It's all food writing. There are some themes. Volume 2 is The United States of Barbecue. Volume 3 is Foods of the Mountain South. I have all the volumes, though I intend to go in order. So the first volume might do me some good today. I need words that don't have a personal purpose.
Mr. Carter's Plains, Georgia is as interesting to me as my old stomping grounds in my beloved state, but not today. Relief needs to come. And so does a better organizational plan so this doesn't keep happening.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Let Me Introduce You to Primm
If you've flown to Las Vegas, you've never known Primm. If you've driven to Las Vegas and you weren't coming from Los Angeles, you've never seen Primm. It is the pre-show to Las Vegas, home to three casinos: Whiskey Pete's, Buffalo Bill's, and the Primm Valley Resort and Casino. They've got a roller coaster called The Desperado, but I find most fascinating the relatively high-end convenience store near the state line. I don't know the name, but when you walk in, there's that long hallway leading to the men's and women's restrooms that has a huge framed map of the United States stretching all the way. That's to your left. To your right, just before the convenience store, is a tight bank of slot machines with stools. Then, there's enough space to find what you might want to eat or drink for the drive back. Mainly snacks and sandwiches, and of course there's coffee and all kinds of sodas. I miss Vegas Chips, which I had on one drive back. Those were made in Las Vegas, but no more. On our last trip, we couldn't find them. They'd just disappeared. It reminds me of one trip to Vegas (We always drive), after we passed Primm, and we found a riverboat-shaped casino that had been closed and pretty much abandoned. The next trip, we drove past Primm and that riverboat casino wasn't there anymore. It had been torn down, dismantled, but think about it: Only in the desert can a riverboat disappear like that. And that's when I knew that Las Vegas was for me.
Yesterday, I received a book in the mail I had ordered upon learning that becoming a resident of Southern Nevada may be more possible now than in years before. It's called In the Desert of Desire: Las Vegas and the Culture of Spectacle by William L. Fox. Fox writes about art galleries in casinos, the shark reef at Mandalay Bay, as well as how Las Vegas barely funds museums and zoos. It's of course also about the spectacle of Las Vegas, but, to quote the copy on the back flap: "This compelling, disturbing discussion of entertainment and the arts in Las Vegas shows how our insatiable modern appetite for extravagance and spectacle has diminished the power of unembellished nature and the arts to teach and inspire us, and demonstrates the way our libertarian society privileges private benefit over public good."
I'll read about all that later. I found this book while wandering through the listings on Amazon for books about Las Vegas and I immediately wanted it after I read the first page of chapter 1. This is Primm exactly as Fox writes about it. I've never known the border making itself apparent like that as Fox writes about it, but I do know that once you cross the border into Nevada, the road becomes much smoother. They're maintained a lot better in Nevada:
"The border between California and Nevada makes itself apparent ten miles before you cross it. When you drive around the last curve on Interstate 15 before descending from the eponymously named Mountain Pass and into the Ivanpah Valley, several enormous structures appear at the far end of the playa, a lakebed that since the Pleistocene ended almost ten thousand years ago has been more dry than wet. Three hotel-casinos, a discount mall, and a nearby 500-megawatt, gas-fired, water-cooled power plant flank the freeway, forming a surreal gateway into the state, one that declares, "Abandon reality, all ye who enter here." The allusion to Dante's Inferno is strengthened not only by the feverish temperatures of the Mojave Desert but also by the sight of the Desperado roller-coaster on the left at Buffalo Bill's. It's actually a "hyper-coaster" that is one of the tallest and fastest in the world. Its cars drop 215 feet and hit 95 miles per hour at the bottom, which in my book is considerably more like torture than entertainment. Las Vegas is still thirty-five miles to the north, but the address out here is 31900 Las Vegas Boulevard South. Only a range of hills, another arid valley, and 319 blocks to go.
The high-rise hotels of Primm rise out of the Mojave with nothing to buffer them from the floor of the scorched alkali flat. No trees, houses, strip malls. It looks like a set for a cheap cowboy movie, the Wild West architectural touches on Whiskey Pete's and Buffalo Bill's not even trying to echo a real western town so much as a cartoon one. The layers of resemblance are not coincidental."
Yesterday, I received a book in the mail I had ordered upon learning that becoming a resident of Southern Nevada may be more possible now than in years before. It's called In the Desert of Desire: Las Vegas and the Culture of Spectacle by William L. Fox. Fox writes about art galleries in casinos, the shark reef at Mandalay Bay, as well as how Las Vegas barely funds museums and zoos. It's of course also about the spectacle of Las Vegas, but, to quote the copy on the back flap: "This compelling, disturbing discussion of entertainment and the arts in Las Vegas shows how our insatiable modern appetite for extravagance and spectacle has diminished the power of unembellished nature and the arts to teach and inspire us, and demonstrates the way our libertarian society privileges private benefit over public good."
I'll read about all that later. I found this book while wandering through the listings on Amazon for books about Las Vegas and I immediately wanted it after I read the first page of chapter 1. This is Primm exactly as Fox writes about it. I've never known the border making itself apparent like that as Fox writes about it, but I do know that once you cross the border into Nevada, the road becomes much smoother. They're maintained a lot better in Nevada:
"The border between California and Nevada makes itself apparent ten miles before you cross it. When you drive around the last curve on Interstate 15 before descending from the eponymously named Mountain Pass and into the Ivanpah Valley, several enormous structures appear at the far end of the playa, a lakebed that since the Pleistocene ended almost ten thousand years ago has been more dry than wet. Three hotel-casinos, a discount mall, and a nearby 500-megawatt, gas-fired, water-cooled power plant flank the freeway, forming a surreal gateway into the state, one that declares, "Abandon reality, all ye who enter here." The allusion to Dante's Inferno is strengthened not only by the feverish temperatures of the Mojave Desert but also by the sight of the Desperado roller-coaster on the left at Buffalo Bill's. It's actually a "hyper-coaster" that is one of the tallest and fastest in the world. Its cars drop 215 feet and hit 95 miles per hour at the bottom, which in my book is considerably more like torture than entertainment. Las Vegas is still thirty-five miles to the north, but the address out here is 31900 Las Vegas Boulevard South. Only a range of hills, another arid valley, and 319 blocks to go.
The high-rise hotels of Primm rise out of the Mojave with nothing to buffer them from the floor of the scorched alkali flat. No trees, houses, strip malls. It looks like a set for a cheap cowboy movie, the Wild West architectural touches on Whiskey Pete's and Buffalo Bill's not even trying to echo a real western town so much as a cartoon one. The layers of resemblance are not coincidental."
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