Wondering Where the Lions Are
It's pretty easy to get songs stuck in your head here in Vegas. All the casinos are playing late 70s, early 80s music, the kind of stuff that makes you glad you don't listen to the radio much anymore. Although, to be fair, every now and then, something pops in that makes you wonder what they were thinking. Last night, heard the Motels singing "Suddenly Last Summer."
Everything here is planned, and that's what makes it so interesting, sort of like the David Cronenberg movie Crash, where they staged car wrecks. Everything, from the color of the walls to the texture of the carpet, is planned, and it's frightening how it all works. Nobody is smiling, but everybody will go home and say they're having a good time.
Is that burning rubber stink in my room just the air conditioning cleaning out the cigarette smoke from the casino--have had a sore throat since I got here--or is it true, that they pump extra oxygen into the rooms to keep you awake and make you think about going downstairs to gamble some more? Oxygen does smell a lot like burning rubber, when there's too much of it around.
What does all this have to do with lions? Very little. Between the Mirage and Treasure Island, there's a gigantic, marvelously ugly statue of Sigfried and Roy and a lion--apparently from happier days. And there tends to be a line of people, waiting their turn to have their picture taken with the thing.
You think about how, when the house is on fire, when the floods are coming, most people run in to save their photographs; is this what they're saving?
I think it was Jean Cocteau: someone asked him "What would you take out of your house if it was on fire?" And he said, "The fire, of course."
Which leads us through a process that probably only makes sense to me, to the Bruce Cockburn song, "Wondering Where the Lions Are," and that wonderful, wonderful line, "Sun's up, um hm, looks okay/well the world's survived into another day."
Everything here is planned, and that's what makes it so interesting, sort of like the David Cronenberg movie Crash, where they staged car wrecks. Everything, from the color of the walls to the texture of the carpet, is planned, and it's frightening how it all works. Nobody is smiling, but everybody will go home and say they're having a good time.
Is that burning rubber stink in my room just the air conditioning cleaning out the cigarette smoke from the casino--have had a sore throat since I got here--or is it true, that they pump extra oxygen into the rooms to keep you awake and make you think about going downstairs to gamble some more? Oxygen does smell a lot like burning rubber, when there's too much of it around.
What does all this have to do with lions? Very little. Between the Mirage and Treasure Island, there's a gigantic, marvelously ugly statue of Sigfried and Roy and a lion--apparently from happier days. And there tends to be a line of people, waiting their turn to have their picture taken with the thing.
You think about how, when the house is on fire, when the floods are coming, most people run in to save their photographs; is this what they're saving?
I think it was Jean Cocteau: someone asked him "What would you take out of your house if it was on fire?" And he said, "The fire, of course."
Which leads us through a process that probably only makes sense to me, to the Bruce Cockburn song, "Wondering Where the Lions Are," and that wonderful, wonderful line, "Sun's up, um hm, looks okay/well the world's survived into another day."
posted by e. Readicker-Henderson at 5:17 PM
1 Comments:
I hear there's a statue of Bugsy Seigel at the Hilton Flamingo somewhere, if you look for it.
Post a Comment
<< Home