Ulysse Dôme
Last weekend marked my sixth trip to Vegas in as many years and my tenth visit lifetime, but it is still hard to know what exactly to think about the city. Any attempts at intellectualization are bound to run up against the tired concept of hyperreality and it is difficult to relate the sheer spectacle of the experience: the city is one gigantic optical enigma where nothing scales appropriately.
Over the past decade alone, Vegas has undergone dramatic changes. I remember walking the Strip with my father, back during city's rather un-halcyon days, collecting coin buckets from all the casinos - a relic of the days when gambling was the primary attraction. [On Sunday when I scored a cool $2.60 from the nickel slots, my cashing out entailed handing a print out receipt to a cashier; I didn't even have the option of pulling the lever.] Most of the iconic landmarks of the city are recent additions: the Bellagio, the Venetian, Mandalay Bay, New York New York, Paris Las Vegas, the Aladdin, and the striking new $2.7 billion Wynn, have all been built in the last ten years. The primary catalyst for this great transformation of the Vegas topography was the installation of Cirque Du Soleil's first permanent standing show - Mystère.
At ten years, Mystère is certainly showing signs of its age. It lacks the technical marvel of Kà, the overt sexuality of Zumanity, and the emotional resonance of O, but it still packs the one sentiment that only Cirque du Soleil can provide: awe. The show garbs itself in the semiology of the universal through syncretic iconography and indecipherable world music, but I think its most effective currency is wonder - a transcendental feeling that does not seem to me all that far removed from the sublime.
And in a world of overexposure and in a city of hyper-sensation, that is truly something.
Over the past decade alone, Vegas has undergone dramatic changes. I remember walking the Strip with my father, back during city's rather un-halcyon days, collecting coin buckets from all the casinos - a relic of the days when gambling was the primary attraction. [On Sunday when I scored a cool $2.60 from the nickel slots, my cashing out entailed handing a print out receipt to a cashier; I didn't even have the option of pulling the lever.] Most of the iconic landmarks of the city are recent additions: the Bellagio, the Venetian, Mandalay Bay, New York New York, Paris Las Vegas, the Aladdin, and the striking new $2.7 billion Wynn, have all been built in the last ten years. The primary catalyst for this great transformation of the Vegas topography was the installation of Cirque Du Soleil's first permanent standing show - Mystère.
At ten years, Mystère is certainly showing signs of its age. It lacks the technical marvel of Kà, the overt sexuality of Zumanity, and the emotional resonance of O, but it still packs the one sentiment that only Cirque du Soleil can provide: awe. The show garbs itself in the semiology of the universal through syncretic iconography and indecipherable world music, but I think its most effective currency is wonder - a transcendental feeling that does not seem to me all that far removed from the sublime.
And in a world of overexposure and in a city of hyper-sensation, that is truly something.
posted by d l wright at 3/23/2006 05:37:00 PM
1 Comments:
As a fan of some Baudrillard, I agree that talking about the hyperreal of Las Vegas is overdone.
What's more interesting is that I don't think it really fits that description anymore. (Or it does even more than it ever has, and I'm wrong.) There is some complication in the fact that the only simulations in Las Vegas are of other cities.
I think that upon the inevitable creation of a casino that is meant to simulate "classic" or “current” Las Vegas (I have many ideas for how this could be done, and I’ll post them in a subsequent blog entry), only then will the hyperreality become notable.
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