When I introduced Greater Vegas in my first blog, I explained that the idea was to extend Las Vegas out to state lines Nevada shares with California, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, and Oregon, at the same time that Nevada infiltrated the seemingly self-contained and autonomous Las Vegas city-state.
However, Greater Vegas exists as much in vertical time as it does in horizontal space. Perhaps no other city on Earth cares less about its past or is more indifferent to its future, and that’s all right. It’s the merging of time and space in which we’re interested in this episode.
And in my humble opinion, no writer has addressed this with more vision, eloquence, and irony than Michael Ventura. Michael is an author of fiction and non-fiction, a screenwriter, an essayist, and a critic. He wrote a dark dark Las Vegas novel, The Death of Frank Sinatra (1997), and a book of essays titled Letters at 3 a.m.—Reports on Endarkenment (1994), which contained an essay called “Las Vegas: The Odds on Anything.”
Here’s an excerpt from that piece addressing the time-and-space conjunction that Las Vegas represents:
It didn’t start with Vegas.
Rather, the concept that culminated in “Vegas” got drawn toward a place where some strange and wondrous phenomena had been happening for ages. The thing that’s Vegas was coming up out of the ground long before there were settlers, a railroad, a town, or casinos. In other words, Vegas as it’s presently constituted might not be a gross ecological travesty. Vegas might just be what the place itself always wanted to become, the “action” this environment likes — and has been drawing to itself for centuries.
This is how strong I think that draw is: Four hundred years before Vegas happened, Spanish conquistadors kept trying to find it. They were sure that somewhere to the north and west across the great deserts would be El Dorado, a city of gold and light, incredible riches, eternal youth, exquisite pleasures, an intoxicating metropolis of treasures and dreams.
Expedition after expedition failed to find it, yet they felt it out there. Many of them staked everything on the certainty that a place like Las Vegas already existed. And they would never know how right they were, that such a city lay right where they expected it. The only thing they were wrong about was when.
The earth itself was generating Vegas-vibe and they were called by and to it. But it would need 400 more years to engender an actual Las Vegas.
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