Areas of Unrest

23 January 2000 - In Which I Gamble Away 75 Cents Whilst Reflecting On the City of the Future

QOTD: "Beware of those who denigrate the value of fantasy. They are the same people who are likely to label their own private fantasy as reality and impose it on others." - G. Seth Kramer

Reading: Neil Gaiman, Stardust

Listening to: Afro Celt Sound System, Volume 2: Release

My very earliest gambling experiences were in junior high. During a brief period, betting on sports swept my class. I remember winning a few dollars on the Ali-Frazier fight and another few by betting on the Miami Dolphins in the Super Bowl, though I had little interest in either boxing or football. The fad passed and, other than a casino night (using fake money) at a math club awards ceremony, it was several years before I gambled again.

The first time I was ever in a casino, I was not quite 22 years old and taking a cross-country trip from San Francisco to New York on Green Tortoise, an "alternative" bus company. We had settled in on the array of mattresses that covered the rear of the bus some hours earlier and some people had dozed off, but everyone woke up for our stop in Reno. It was roughly 3 a.m., though you wouldn't have guessed that by the lights and buzz. The drivers set off for a grocery shopping expedition. Pretty much everyone else (myself included) spent the next hour in the casinos. I bought a roll of nickels, which I fed to the one-armed bandits. Once I lost my whole two bucks, I just watched other people gambling for a while.

About 6 or so years after that, I went on a bus to Atlantic City with my mother. I'm far more willing to risk other people's money than my own, but conservative enough that I mostly played video blackjack. I dabbled in slots a bit, but I didn't find the whole thing all that interesting.

And then I discovered Las Vegas. My first trip was for a conference put on by a feminist organization, around 1991 or so. The conference was at the Dunes - which has since been imploded and replaced - and I had just enough spare time to wander through (and gawk at) Caesar's Palace and see the erupting volcano at the newly opened Mirage. Oh, I gambled a bit, but I instantly understood the real heart of what Vegas is about. A few dollars here and there at video poker or the slots is nothing compared to the dawning of new heights of architectural excess and truly astonishing quantities of neon.

I made another trip a year or two later, when my friend Debby came out from New York to visit. She'd been through Vegas on a cross-country trip with her parents when she was 15, in the days before there was anything to do there other than gambling - which you had to wait until you were 18 for. We did gamble some, but we also played tourist in a major way, making sure to use every certificate in the tour package we'd bought. From breakfast buffets at the Hacienda and Golden Nugget (the latter being a way to get us downtown) to an IMAX film at Caesar's Palace and a girlie show at Riviera, we wandered aimlessly. I think the Forum Shops at Caesar's were open by then and I'm sure that Excalibur had added to the visual kitsch. Debby insisted we play table games as well as machines and I decided that blackjack is incredibly boring, but I enjoy roulette. We also discovered Red Dog and both won a lot at it at Harrah's. Neither of us lost more than about $50 in the three days we were there. Mostly we gawked at the lights, collected free souvenirs (mugs, keychains and playing cards), drank a little too much and slept a lot too little. It was fun.

I made a day trip once for my birthday, thanks to a free Southwest ticket. The Forum Shops at Caesar's were in full swing, with the artificial sky changing from day to night every hour and a half and the talking fountain. Luxor had opened and I reacted by saying, "Wow, what have they done now?" (The only other sane reaction is to say with disgust, "Sheesh! What have they done now?") The MGM Grand was mostly just big, but Treasure Island was soon to come with pirate battles out front. Each old hotel was imploded as a media event, only to be replaced by something bigger and wilder.

I went to Atlantic City with my mother another couple of times and went to Biloxi, Mississippi once as part of my obsessive travels to every state. I was in Reno for a conference and I checked out an Indian casino in St. Ignace, Michigan. I also stopped once in Laughlin overnight to avoid driving west at sunset. Nor was I immune to gambling overseas. The casino at the Ilala Lodge in Victoria Falls was particularly nice because the Zimbabwe dollar was only worth about seven cents, greatly reducing the impact of losing. I always found that I have too fine an appreciation for the laws of probability to thoroughly enjoy gambling, although I do admit to being as susceptible as anyone else to the positive feedback of winning. Mostly I stick to machines of various sorts, where I can think of the experience as being essentially paying 20 bucks to spend a couple of hours playing a video game.

Vegas is another matter. The last time I'd been there was a few years ago, when my mother came out to visit. She flew up to San Jose to visit Elliot, while I flew to Vegas, rented a car, and drove up to southern Utah for a few days of hiking at Bryce and Zion Canyons. (Which feature some of the most incredible scenery in the U.S. by the way.) I drove back through the Valley of Fire, toured Hoover Dam, and returned the car in time to meet Mom's flight. We spent three nights, if I recall correctly, which were pretty full with sightseeing. There were so many free spectacles to see, from the erupting volcano and the Forum shops fountain to the pirate battle and a bird show at Tropicana and the brand new Fremont Street Experience. One night we saw "Forever Plaid" at the Flamingo Hilton. We ate cheap but overly filling meals at various buffets and generally gawked between gambling. The ultimate in architecture, though, was New York New York. While it was being built, three people had sent me articles about it, expecting me to be appalled at the notion; instead, I abandoned any pretense of having good taste and was amused. The Statue of Liberty in front, the Brooklyn Bridge, the hotel towers shaped like skyscrapers - even though I had no desire to ride the Coney Island roller coaster, how could I not love the whole idea? Mom napped in the afternoon and stayed up until all hours, while I went to sleep at around midnight but stayed up during the day. We flew back to L.A. together and I couldn't find my car at LAX Lot C. Somehow I had written down that I was parked in row C14, while I was actually parked in row A6. Of course, I panicked and concluded that my car had been stolen, while my mother found out that there's actually a number you can call and, if you know your license plate number, they will tell you what row you're in. I spent much of the next year looking for signs that gremlins had moved my car.

About 15 months ago, I drove through Vegas on a brief jaunt to check off four of the five states I hadn't been to yet. The Bellagio had just opened. (It might even have been their opening night, in fact.) But it was Saturday night and I was not yet reacclimated to crowds and I just drove on to an overnight in St. George, Utah, eager to reach Montana, where I would waste a couple of hours driving on a very bad road to photograph a sign at the entrance to a town that used to be called Isme but had changed its name to Joe, Montana. (For non-U.S. readers, Joe Montana is a very famous football player, who used to be the quarterback of the San Francisco 49'ers. Don't ask me exactly what a quarterback does but he's sort of the star of the team; I'm unlikely to recognize the names of any football players who play other positions.)

Anyway, a lot of new things have opened in Vegas in the past year and I thought it was about time to see them, so I booked a flight and a hotel room (the MGM Grand since they give American frequent flyer miles) and this weekend was the trip. With limited time, I focused only on what was new. A short flight, a taxi ride to the hotel and a quick dinner at the hotel food court got the necessities out of the way. I walked over to Excalibur (via a couple of elevated crossings - one need no longer deal with traffic lights as a pedestrian along much of the Strip) and took the express tram to Mandalay Bay. There's a vaguely southeast Asian theme, but there's nothing unique architecturally, at least so far as I could tell. I wandered around a bit, read the menus posted outside several of the restaurants (I like to read food pornography, as well as write it!), and played nickel video slots, discovering the amusing bonus games they have. For example, the one I tried was called Filthy Rich. Getting a combination of farmhouses on the reels puts you into a bonus round, where you have to pick one of five pigs, which are covered in mud. After you pick your pig, the farmer hoses it off and it turns out to be a piggy bank, revealing the amount you've won.

I did see that Mandalay Bay has a coin museum, but it was only open during the day and costs $6. I'm not interested enough in coins to pay that, so I didn't go back to check it out. Instead, I went next door to the Luxor. I'd been there before but I always find the bizarre architecture impressive. My main motivation for this stop was my desire to see Fantasia 2000. I got a ticket for the 12:30 a.m. show (it was a bit after 11 p.m. at this point) and killed some time in the casino, playing more video slots. This time I played Little Green Men and the bonus round involved choosing which flying saucer to be abducted by.

The movie was mildly disappointing - not bad, but I have my own strong mental images for some of the music they used and their visuals were, therefore, distracting. The most successful piece from my standpoint was Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue which is a cute little New York jazz age vignette, drawn in a style intended to suggest Al Hirschfield's. As a child, I would probably have liked the rendition of Carnival of the Animals but, as an adult, the addition of yo-yo-ing flamingos does nothing to improve a piece of music I dislike. Overall, I have to question the use of the IMAX format, which adds too much weight to such essentially frothy material. I also hated the host presenters, none of whom had any obvious reason for being there. In the original, there was an obvious goal of introducing children to classical music; there was no such educational ambition to these blurbs.

I'm making it sound like I didn't enjoy the movie at all, which is not the case. I just think it didn't come close to living up to the standard of the original.

After the movie was out, I made my way back to the MGM Grand and decided to play video poker for a little while before going to bed. That was a rather dubious decision, since it was already after 2 a.m., but I did win and ended up about $5 ahead for the day. I finally quit and staggered up to my room at around 4 a.m., planning to sleep until 10.

I was awakened around 9 by some noise and blearily decided on coffee instead of further attempts to sleep. I also discovered that there was no water and, when I called the front desk, learned there had been some sort of emergency shutoff and it would be back in 20 minutes of so. So I dawdled through planning for day, took a very hasty shower, dressed and headed down to breakfast. The Coyote Cafe is one of those trendy places with a famous chef (Mark Miller) and I had been pleased to learn that it was open for breakfast. Southwestern cuisine is a personal favorite and the blue corn pancakes were excellent, as was the coffee! Then it was time to make my way up the Strip, via monorail to Bally's. Which is connected to my real destination - Paris!

This proved to be the most successful of the new hotels by my criteria. If you enter via Bally's, you start at Le Boulevard. Not only does the shopping street feature a ceiling painted to look like the sky and architecture that is decidedly French, they actually have people acting out various roles. I saw a man riding a bicycle down the artificial street, with baguettes in his bike basket, and another playing the hurdy-gurdy outside a store. I drooled at the patisserie (though I wasn't hungry enough to sample any of the goods) and read more menus as I made my way to the casino. Which overcame the flaw that many of the themed hotels have - namely, few of them carry the theme through to the casino in any significant way. Here, the supports of the Eiffel Tower do come through the middle of the casino. I played video poker for a while, winning about $80 and taking longer at it than I'd really intended. Then I spent $8 to go up the Eiffel Tower.

One minor catch to that is my fear of heights and I was grateful that the glass elevator only takes a couple of minutes. The top is screened in enough for me not to feel horribly panicky, but it suffers from being too close to the action to really take good photographs. You're essentially looking straight down at many of the attractions, requiring far fancier cameras than mine to shoot anything worthwhile.

By then I was hungry for a late lunch or early supper and I decided that meant the newest trend in eateries. There is apparently a new city-wide law that every hotel must have an Asian noodle place. I settled on the one in Caesar's Palace (called something bland like "The Noodle Cafe") where I had a very nice seafood noodle soup. A guy I work with would have hated it though; he'd have described it as having too many tentacles. After eating, I walked through Caesar's and their Forum Shops (there's a new aquarium and an Atlantis show designed to lure people into spending money on a motion simulator Race to Atlantis ride), through Mirage (where I discovered that the white tigers are temporarily off display) and across the street to The Venetian, watching the end of the pirate battle at Treasure Island while waiting for the traffic light. (No pedestrian overpass here!)

The first thing one notices when entering The Venetian is the Great Hall. The ceiling is a reproduction of part of the Sistine Chapel ceiling and I suppose it would be impressive if you've never seen the real thing. The casino itself is nothing special architecturally. (I did win a bit more money, though; usually I play just 1 coin at a time but on an impulse I hit the max bet button on the video poker machine and got a four of a kind). The real architectural achievement is the shopping area, which features a replica Grand Canal, complete with costumed singing gondoliers. Watching is free, but a gondola ride costs $10. I suppose if you were with the right person it would make a nice romantic moment, but I was alone so wasn't interested. There's also a replica of St. Mark's Square, but they failed in real authenticity by ignoring the basic principal of Italian city planning. In any Italian city, 1/3 of the buildings are bars (meaning coffee bars, where one stands around and drinks espresso at least 10 times a day), 1/3 are churches, and everything else is allotted to the remaining third. They did have some coffee bars, but there are, of course, no churches in a casino. I was also disappointed that there is no gelato shop, though there is a Haagen Dazs.

I was too late to go to their other attraction - Madame Tussaud's. It was still open, but only for another half hour and I didn't think that would be worth the money. I've been to the London one, so I doubt I missed much. (Incidentally, the chamber of horrors at Madame Tussaud's in London was one of my great early travel disappointments, as I found it to be entirely unfrightening.) So I started heading back towards Bellagio (which is next to Caesar's and across from Paris).

The main thing I wanted to see at Bellagio was their fountain show. There's a huge artificial lake there (I believe the lake is where the golf course at the Dunes used to be) and every half hour or so after dark, there's a "waltzing waters" type show, in which the fountains on the lake are synchronized to music. It's quite enjoyable and a nice addition to the other free shows along the Strip. Inside, I researched their art gallery, checking out the hours and deciding that the $12 admission price was not going to be worth it this trip, especially since it isn't as if I never go to art museums. I did wander around their conservatory, which was pleasant, though I prefer my botanical gardens to have some sort of labels telling me what plants I'm looking at. And, yes, I did gamble a little there, losing some of my profit from the day.

I took their tram to Monte Carlo and realized that the tram system has a serious negative impact on some of the older casinos. If I'd walked out on the street, I'd have had to pass by the Holiday Inn Boardwalk on the way and might have stopped in there. The tram bypasses it, so they probably lose a certain number of visitors they'd have gotten otherwise. I lost a little more at Monte Carlo and yet more back at the MGM Grand, though I did finish the day roughly $50 ahead. And I do know that the only way to win at gambling in the long term is to run the game, so it's not like I would have minded even had I lost the maximum I'd budgeted.

I collapsed fairly early that night (Saturday), fairly early for Vegas meaning about 2 a.m., with the alarm again set for 10. Again, I woke up at 9, but at least there was running water this time! I showered, packed and checked out of the hotel, checking my bag at the bell desk. I figured I'd try the coffee shop at New York New York. This proved to be a major mistake as the service was fairly slow and the fritatta I ordered turned out to be both bland and slightly overcooked. I played a few slots before going back to MGM Grand and checking out their newest attraction - the lion habitat. This is free and you walk through a glass enclosure which keeps you just inches from the lions. (In fact, the male was right above me at one point, which is very weird.) Then I gambled some more, with one slot win offset by several losses. The most amusing of the video slots was one called Winning Bid, in which the bonus round features a simulated auction. You choose an item to auction off and select which character will open the bidding. Other characters then get into the action until there's a final price at the auction, determining how much you win.

Before I retrieved my bag and set off to the airport, I ended up down a grand total of 75 cents for the weekend. I do, naturally, prefer winning, but that's not too shabby for several hours of entertainment.

It will inevitably be another few years before I go to Vegas again, but I do want to comment on why I think it's the city of the future. For one thing, the transportation system is practical and effective. The various trams and people movers are free, run frequently, and are usually close to full without being crowded. The architecture is whimsical, avoiding the cookie cutter appearance of all too many cities. (I should note, though, that there are some corners being cut inside some of the hotels. Of the new places, only Paris has ladies' rooms that are well-designed, carrying on the theme and grandeur of the rest of the building. The ladies' rooms at Mandalay Bay are a particular disappointment - clean, but generic in design, with no attempt at distinctive decor.) And, most importantly, Vegas is a place where time is entirely artificial. Between the miles of neon (sadly, lack of concern about the environment is all too likely a hallmark of the future and is reflected in the irrigation needed for all those gardens, as well as the overuse of electricity) and the indoor skies in the shopping malls, as well as the dimness of many of the casinos by day, there are no external cues to tell you what time it is. A society that overworks has to use leisure to overplay as well and nowhere else is that more apparent than in Las Vegas.

New York is called "the city that never sleeps" and Paris is the "city of lights." Either name would suit Las Vegas well. I can't wait to see what they do next.