IVIV (14): North Las Vegas

[Robin Landseadel]

	ACCORDING TO TITO, THE KISMET, BUILT JUST AFTER
	WWII, bad represented something of a gamble that the city of
	North Las Vegas was about to be the wave of the future.
	Instead, everything moved southward, and Las Vegas
	Boulevard South entered legend as the Strip, and places like
	the Kismet languished.
	IV, 235

"Kismet" is one of those words, frequently found in Pynchon's  
writings, that veer off into multiple possible meanings:

(Islam) the will of Allah

Kismet (1930) is a costume drama photographed entirely in an early  
widescreen process using 65mm film that Warner Brothers called  
Vitascope. The film was based on Edward Knoblock's play, and was  
previously filmed as a silent film in 1920 which also starred Otis  
Skinner.

Kismet is a robot made in the late 1990s at MIT with auditory, visual  
and expressive systems intended to participate in human social  
interaction and to demonstrate simulated human emotion and  
appearance. . .

More at: http://tinyurl.com/ylgyhry

Relative to gambling:

Fate; fortune.
[Turkish, from Persian qismat, from Arabic qisma, lot, from qasama, to  
divide, allot; see qsm in Semitic roots.]

Seems to bring us back to "Lots", doesn't it?

I'm not finding a historic "Kismet" casino in Vegas so my guess that  
this emerged from Pynchon's fertile imagination. Here are links to  
sites that list the historic casinos and hotels of Vegas:

http://www.lvstriphistory.com/ie/

http://www.jetcafe.org/npc/gambling/stripmap/

This is a site featuring famous casinos that were imploded, including  
tiny videos of the implosions:

http://www.vegastripping.com/implosions/

The notion of the northern end of Las Vegas being the avenue of dashed  
dreams has a famous literary source:

	About thirty minutes after our brush with Okies we pulled into an
	all-night diner on the Tonopah highway, on the outskirts of a
	mean/scag ghetto called "North Las Vegas." Which is actually
	outside the city limits of Vegas proper. North Vegas is where
	you go when you've fucked up once too often on the Strip, and
	when you've not even welcome in the cut-rate downtown places
	around Casino Center.
	Hunter S. Thompson: "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

If there is a touchstone for the Las Vegas episodes, it would be  
Hunter S. Thompson's best known work. There are echos of "F 'n L"  
throughout Inherent Vice, particularly "Stoned" as a 24/7 activity and  
the dashing of the dreams of "Freak Power."