i have been driving a lot lately, with no stereo
The new Green Valley Anthem branch of the Las Vegas Athletic Club is located in the part of the city that doesn't have very many things in it yet. Out of a gently sloping bowl-wall of desert there rises a two-story glass-topped building, screaming its name in 10-foot sans serif letters to the adjacent freeway, and next to it is another new building, an empty one that hasn't been named yet. The facade of this second building consists of three concentric rectangles radiating out at angles from one another like cards in a hand of poker. You know, Postmod Prison Chic. The LVAC building is so streamlined in its rendering that it seems to lean cockily to one side, like a cartoon. Inland Empire Ren and Stimpy would go to a gym like this. The parking lot is very large.
I can't begin to imagine what a shock of scale Europeans must experience when they come here (come to think of it, Baudrillard won't shut up about it), with every city block a quarter of a mile long. This doesn't seem wrong here-- or maybe it is its very wrongness, its violation of the vast space around it, that recalls the more expansive aspects of the divine. Las Vegas architecture and entertainment must compete with the daily combustion offered by a sky that consumes the landscape. The people here can look at the sky and see fire every day-- puple blue orange and yellow, souped up together in the "hour of christ" [from 4 to 6 pm, depending on the season-- the notion is that this was when christ expired; the reason that I am noting this is because I can't remember if this is common religio-aesthetic parlance or if Bev and I made it up], and the opposing cloudless blue all day is equally fucking deafening. Sometimes I am glad to live in a place where people are desperate to make it look like they belong there, like it's not another planet. Sometimes it is good to do aerobics in a biodome of fierce West Coast denial.
I can't begin to imagine what a shock of scale Europeans must experience when they come here (come to think of it, Baudrillard won't shut up about it), with every city block a quarter of a mile long. This doesn't seem wrong here-- or maybe it is its very wrongness, its violation of the vast space around it, that recalls the more expansive aspects of the divine. Las Vegas architecture and entertainment must compete with the daily combustion offered by a sky that consumes the landscape. The people here can look at the sky and see fire every day-- puple blue orange and yellow, souped up together in the "hour of christ" [from 4 to 6 pm, depending on the season-- the notion is that this was when christ expired; the reason that I am noting this is because I can't remember if this is common religio-aesthetic parlance or if Bev and I made it up], and the opposing cloudless blue all day is equally fucking deafening. Sometimes I am glad to live in a place where people are desperate to make it look like they belong there, like it's not another planet. Sometimes it is good to do aerobics in a biodome of fierce West Coast denial.