IVIV (13-14) Las Vegas

[Clément Lévy]

I lost the opportunity to post a few comments on Las Vegas at the  
right moment, but here's my point.
Pynchon in his views of the city, p. 219, 232 and 235 seems to refer  
to a very classical analysis of Las Vegas: a city of illusion, lost  
in the desert sands. I tried to find pages where I thought I read the  
remarks that IV attributes to a "Marxist economist," (232) and found  
this in Baudrillard's America:

http://www.amazon.com/America-Jean-Baudrillard/dp/0860919781
http://www.scribd.com/doc/2891928/Baudrillard-America

« I speak of the American deserts and of the cities which are not  
cities. No oases, no monuments; infinite panning shots over mineral  
landscapes and freeways.
Everywhere: Los Angeles or Twenty-Nine Palms, Las Vegas or Borrego  
Springs. . . No desire: the desert. Desire is still something deeply  
natural, we live off its vestiges in Europe, and off the vestiges of  
a moribund critical culture. Here the cities are mobile deserts. No  
monuments and no history: the exaltation of mobile deserts and  
simulation. There is the same wildness in the endless, indifferent  
cities as in the intact silence of the Badlands. » (p.118-9)

« The towns of the desert also end abruptly; they have no surround.  
And they have about them something of the mirage, which may vanish at  
any instant. You have only to see Las Vegas, sublime Las Vegas, rise  
in its entirety from the desert at nightfall bathed in phosphorescent  
lights, and return to the desert when the sun rises, after exhausting  
its intense, superficial energy all night long, still more intense in  
the first light of dawn, to undestand the secret of the desert and  
the signs to be found here: a spellbinding discontinuity, an all- 
enveloping, intermittent radiation.
The secret affinity between gambling and the desert: the intensity of  
gambling reinforced by the presence of the desert all around the  
town. The ari-conditioned freshness of the gaming rooms, as against  
the radiant heat outside. The challenge of all the artificial lights  
to the violence of the sun's rays. Night of gambling sunlit on all  
sides; the glittering darkness of these rooms in the middle of the  
desert. Gambling itself is a  desert form, inhuman, uncultured,  
initiatory, a challenge to the natural economy of value, a crazed  
activity on the fringes of exchange. But it has a strict limit and  
stops abruptly; its boundaries are exact, its passion knows no  
confusion. Neither the desert nor gambling are open areas; their  
spaces are finite and concentric, increasing in intensity toward the  
interior, toward a central point, be it the spirit of gambling or the  
heart of the desert – a privileged, immemorial space, where things  
lose their shadow, where money loses its value, and where the extreme  
rarity of traces of what signals to us there leads men to seek the  
instantaneity of wealth. » (p. 123-3, the last pages of the book)

Baudrillard's prophetic tone and economical vocabulary are somewhat  
strange, and they could be a serious version of the economist's  
nervous breakdown: "I have lost reality" (IV, 232).

But this also made me think of Paul Virilio's pages on esthetics of  
disappearance, but it could be off-topic, and I don't have the books  
I need at hand (I browsed through The Lost Dimension, and found a  
good presentation of the author here:
http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=133
)

But I also found great photos of Las Vegas in 1968 here:
Las Vegas pictures by architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott  
Brown, in 1968 (they wrote the first essay on Las Vegas ugly  
architecture):
http://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/1996064.article (click on the  
first photo to watch the other pictures in a bigger format)

All the best,
Clément