Las Vegas

[FC_SS]

Here is an article from www.suntimes.com.

The Sin City 'Experience'
November 13, 2005
BY DOUG ELFMAN Television Critic

"Before I moved from Las Vegas to Chicago this summer, I had come to realize Vegas is everything people say it is. Gambleaholic tourists. HIV-positive prostitutes. People jumping off parking garages to their deaths.

Wait, I'm not finished.

Strippers doing things in back rooms. Gatsby-esque, million-dollar parties. Drinking, dancing and vast amounts of sexual hookups.

Vegas is a great place where terrible things happen. Life in this Disneyland for adults can be exceedingly fun, as long as you're not an addict of any kind. And as schmaltzy as this may sound, locals -- other than the occasional gang-bangers -- are genuinely kind (except when they're criticizing someone's out-of-date designer clothes).

White-collar residents just have to get used to the fact that a college degree often doesn't earn the annual $60,000-$300,000 income that gets thrown at good-looking and hard-working people in the blue-collar jobs of drink servers, strippers, valets and showroom entertainers.

Some women earn CEO salaries merely by sitting next to VIP gamblers. They are not hookers. They're employees.

So why are these slices of life missing in PBS' two-night "American Experience" series, "Las Vegas: An Unconventional History" (9 p.m. Sunday and Monday on WTTW-Channel 11)?

The documentary seems like a moving picture of a brochure on the 100-year history of the city -- running, no less, in conjunction with the city's promotional campaign for its centennial. Co-sponsors include Las Vegas' UNLV and the Vegas tourist bureau. Unsurprisingly, it seems best-suited for viewers who don't know the first thing about Vegas, such as a beginning history student in a Nevada classroom.

*Missing: The story about Vegas' real estate market, so expensive that yardless two-bedroom houses that cost $140,000 three years ago are selling for $300,000-$450,000.

*Missing: The story about how difficult it is for teachers and cops to live there on disgraceful salaries while working in a school system that has one of the nation's highest dropout rates.

*Missing: The story about Vegas' fight with other states over water, the desert's most precious commodity.

*Missing: A fuller story about how one-fourth of the population is now Latino.

*Missing: Any information on the sizable Mormon population that does not even drink caffeine yet lives in Las Vegas.

Or for that matter, it would have been nice to see a day in the life of a local partier/sexual player.

It's not until the last five minutes of Monday's installment that newspaper columnist John L. Smith -- perhaps the most insightful person on Vegas (and a former co-worker of mine) -- is finally shown summing up the rugged side of the city's individualism.

"There isn't a lot of sympathy in Las Vegas," Smith says. "We can talk about how many philanthropists we have here on the Strip and downtown in the casino business. The fact is this is a very tough community. It's kind of the old libertarian ethic of the West. I mean, you are pretty much on your own. If you're looking for a well-knitted social [fabric], you're not gonna find it here."

Now, I know I just made Vegas sound like the worst place on Earth. In fact, I love Vegas and miss the fun, because it's not just Sin City, it's a sincere city. Maybe you don't want to believe Vegas is genuine, but it is. The 1.5 million residents don't pretend to be anything other than who they are, except for a publicist or two.

On this score, "Unconventional History" gets it right when author Marc Cooper nails Vegas dead-on.

"People say that Las Vegas is a town based on fantasy. But I don't think so. I think Las Vegas is in some ways the more honest and most authentic place in America," he says. "This is a city where the only currency is currency. It's a place where, as long as you have the chips, you are equal to everybody. Nobody cares what your race is, your color, your gender, your sexual orientation.

"Everybody's the same until you're out of money. Then, when you're out of money, you're just out."

So the secret to being in Las Vegas is: Don't run out of money.

Or, as Smith puts it: "In America, the ultimate expression of capitalism is that greed is good. Las Vegas shows you that greed is at least fun."

Scattered through the nearly three-hour series are some truths on the soul of the city: "It just feels free"; "The wastefulness of it is very sexy"; it's "the licensing of fantasy." Right, right, right.

What's hard to realize unless you wake up in Vegas every day is that the freedom of the place gets embedded in the bones, and one may begin to feel ... whole, possibly for the first time. "Unconventional History" stumbles on a blackjack dealer who tries to tell the documentarians this, but they don't quite frame his statement in that context:

"You come out here," the dealer says, and "you could be a totally different person. You don't have to be who you were back home."

Put another way, the city's openness to all kinds lets the more talented transplants fulfill self-actualization, and they can stop pretending to be the person they thought they had to be elsewhere to fit in. They just have to deal cards all day to drunk tourists.

As in any city, a lot of transplants don't quite make it. A stereotype has it that men and women arrive in Vegas by bus, quickly lose their meager earnings, and immediately begin turning tricks downtown.

"Unconventional History" doesn't go there. It shows the life of a transplant, a non-trick-turner, who ends up on welfare.

"I came out here thinking a job would just fall into my lap," she says. "You see on TV everybody's smiling, everybody's got a job, it seems like it works out. ... It's not exactly what it's cut out to be. I guess I was naive."

Las Vegas is not a good place for naive people. Is that a news flash?

Some Las Vegans aren't naive, but they want to become that way. "Unconventional History" briefly presents a cocktail waitress whose daughter told her she wanted to grow up just like mommy, so mommy quit drink-slinging with her buns hanging out of an itsy uniform, and she entered a slightly more respectable profession: real estate.

Speaking of real estate, "Unconventional History" also steers clear of the subject of who owns the Strip. Two companies, MGM Mirage and Harrah's, control most of the hotel rooms on the Strip, after the federal government recently allowed both companies to merge, buy and gobble up competing hotel-casinos.

And for all the talk about Vegas' remaining libertarian leanings, video cameras are everywhere, not just inside casinos but in elevators, parking garages and on traffic signals. No one complains. The thinking is cameras keep crime down. My car was never broken into on the camera-swamped Strip. In two years, at one apartment in a good neighborhood I lived in: six break-ins.

"Unconventional History" also doesn't explain one of the most unconventional things about Vegas. The Strip consists of an indoor city. Yeah, it might be 116 degrees outside. But everyone's indoors. Hotel casinos are gargantuan. Two hotels each hold an arena, nightclubs, restaurants, shopping and gaming -- all on one floor.

Instead of going over any of that unconventionality, the documentary hopscotches 100 years of Las Vegas in fits and bits: Vegas was a railroad stop with saloons, then got the Mafia, gambling, the Hoover Dam, nearby atomic bomb testing, integration, the Rat Pack, a crackdown on the Mafia, Howard Hughes, a few horrible fires, Elvis-impersonator weddings, Siegfried & Roy and strippers.

The atomic bomb stuff, in Monday's 90-minute installment, is the most interesting nugget. People used to climb atop hotels at 6 a.m. to watch mushroom clouds go poof into the air at the horizon. Yet "Unconventional History" doesn't dig into the nearby disposal site where President Bush plans to dump America's nuclear waste.

Journalists often speak of such documentaries, or investigations from out-of-towners, as "parachute journalism." Journalists drop in, take a snapshot, and leave. Vegas always benefits from these pro-Vegas reports, just as it benefits from being seen on E!'s "Wild On," CBS' "CSI" and NBC's "Las Vegas."

There's no such thing as bad publicity in Vegas, except when an MGM fire killed tourists in the early '80s.

The NBC show, by the way, also delved into the history of the city in an episode last week where the characters traveled through time, via a daydream, and turned into old-Vegas ruffians, beating cheating gamblers with baseball bats and hooking for johns. (It repeats at 9 p.m. Tuesday on TNT.) That old Vegas story line will never die.

In a way, though, "Las Vegas" (8 p.m. Mondays, WMAQ-Channel 5) normally gets more to the heart of Vegas reality -- the contemporary glitz and corporate goals -- than "Unconventional History" does. This week, "Las Vegas" characters try to protect a gemstone in a hotel while a noted magician is hired to entertain a mover-and-shaker. That's half-stupid and half-exact.

To be fair, "Unconventional History" is concerned not with today so much as it is with how today got here from yesterday. When contemporary Vegas is addressed, one guy makes me want to stick my tongue out at him. Architecture critic Paul Goldberger complains that he goes to Vegas and enjoys the exhilarating brazenness, but then gets sick of the superficiality:

"It's kind as if you were force-fed chocolate mousse. The first taste is really good, but then there comes a time when you actually want some nutrition," he says.

Here's the deal. Vegas is in the middle of the desert. It is impossible to stumble into the town accidentally, just as it is impossible to inadvertently order 40 pounds of mousse. No one forces adults to go there, Goldberger included. Vegas is free will, even if nothing's free. Go or don't go. There are no surprises except the degrees to which stereotypes turn out to be true. There is sand there, for instance. Lots of it.

And there's a mayor who represents Vegas' unapologetic individualism. Last week, Mayor Oscar Goodman, a former attorney for organized crime defendants, said graffiti artists should have their thumbs cut off. He also endorses a liquor company. Earlier this year, he took a guest spot as a photographer of nude models for Playboy.

Some Las Vegans who complain about the very popular mayor may be showing their grudge that the city hasn't turned into Seattle or another, more polished city where they clearly belong instead. Because Goodman is Las Vegas. Frisky. Gregariously overextended. Uninhibited.

But some Las Vegans do complain about Goodman and Vegas' outlandishness, as if they have no choice in living there. Some even say they don't like the Strip and the downtown Fremont area. But what's left? The suburbs? They are the clone-iest suburbs in the Western world. Suburban businesses are largely corporate retailers and franchises in strip malls, anchored by Starbucks and Linens & Things.

Yet at the start of "Unconventional History," a maid says, "There's so much more to Vegas than the Strip. And when you get here and see what else they have, you won't even come to the Strip."

I laughed so hard at that. As she says this, cameras focus on suburban streets, row after row after row of sandy-colored, exactly-the-same homes with 8-foot areas of space between them, and rocks for yards.

Anyway, all this is what I remember of Vegas, plus a lot of intriguing, dirty stories I could share with you, though I'm sure my editors would let me tell only about 4 percent of them here. Don't think I or most Las Vegans have taken part in every shenanigan available. Some, maybe, but not all."

Best regards.

[lisa]

I was in Las-Vegas two times but all was wonderful If you like some special thinks finely you will found it. Las-Vegas for me, the Great Imaging Place in the world!!!