I finally experienced Vegas for all its perfecto plasticity. The glaring oddity, coming from New York City where everyone walks, is that there are almost no sidewalks. Cars drive on roads and pedestrians walk from air condition tubes to buildings, back to tubes, escalators, trams, and more AC. The Hair tribe, in our case, about 15 of us, from the minute we walked into THEhotel, the Mandalay's new swanky hotel, you can feel yourself fall victim to oxygenated coconut scented air that fills the place. Its amazing. THEhotel's just adding to what is already this perfectly set up paradise. And like LA, anyone who tries to come and start something new that doesn't fall along the lines of anything I just mentioned will fall away. Vegas reminds me of those futuristic biospheres on Mars they were trying to bulid, fully enclosed and self self sustaining. what ever happened with those anyway? Isn't it time we start thinking about options? Yesterday I came in way rusty to a Texas Hold em game and lost $200 in about 3 hours and then before we saw Cirque Du Soleil's 'Ka', which was great btw, we dined at 'Olives', Todd English's chain which falls perfectly in line with the Vegas model. Your cheery fat waiters, classic overpriced American French food-sort of. As long as you fit in your carpaccio's, your tar tar, your foi gras, your ravioli, anyone coming to the Bellagio probably wont think anything of their $35 semi dry local roast chicken. that's what I had. Most folks wouldn't even question it and go about there gambling. The food was decent but still cooked under a corporate model and food in that vein [in my opinion] can only be mediocre.
Ka was brilliant. Somewhere into the show, I stopped watching acrobats and actors and started to see a video game unfold before me. very cool. literally. as if I took acid and at some point your watching something in a different dimention. It my first Cirque experience. Their other shows 'Love' and 'O' were on Holiday breaks. But sitting there in awe at the technicalities alone I was content to say the least. It made me think a lot about the future of Broadway. Better yet the booming entertainment future of Las Vegas which will only grow to more spectacle as the demand for 3-D spectacle theatre rises. With its built in hydraulics and flying systems, Ka and Vegas in general really make Broadway look like an old man. even the newer houses. 20 shows are closing in New York before Feb and its taken Spider Man almost 2 years to mount. Yet here I was watching a cast of 75, flying planes over the audience, vertical walls and free falling from the rafters. I asked a friend from Ka, Spencer, who worked as a clown in New York how long they loaded and took this show in. '3 months' he tells me. Again just like Vegas itself, a perfectly designed system.
I guess you didn't like the chicken! The fois gras, for my first time tasting it, was unappealing but the steak was great. So glad you saw the correlation between Cirque and Spider Man! In Mystere, the Cirque show Tanesha and I saw, there was a man LITERALLY crawling down the wall like a spider, up-side down, and I immidiately thought to myself "Why don't they just hire Cirque performers to do the acrobatics, people who are already trained to contort and tumble and fly trapeze and hang onto to poles with just their hands while their bodies swing in the air like a flag!" Just sayin!
ReplyDeleteAs for the BIO2 Habitat...it is very easy to get sucked into the easiness of life when everything you can possibly imagine is thought of and properly laid out before you like a smorges bord. That's if you have the money to pay for it and if you don't you gamble to try and get it. I enjoyed my time though, smelling the coconut scents and sleeping in a comfortable bed with a view of the mountains is something I could get use to. Maybe not in Vegas but somewhere.