Thailand Journal I: Chiang Mai Bargirls

The first thing one notices driving into the Northern Thai city of Chiang Mai from the airport at night are the bargirls. Thailand is famous for bargirls and prostitutes, but this Northern city is particularly dark after sundown, with shuttered storefronts, weathered buildings and desolate factories epitomizing its backwater status. The only thing lighting up the darkness is the girls, hundreds of girls, dressed to the nines but for what? There's nothing particularly unique about a tableau of Thai bar girls, yet the disparity between their appearance and the hopelessness of their predicament is what is most dramatic. Where are the customers? Hardly any are in sight. Women turn to prostitution in countries like Thailand due to poverty and while it’s not legal, it’s plainly more than tolerated by the local authorities. However this is not Las Vegas. Chiang Mai is known for its culture of serious Thai massage, for Lanna architecture and for being the gateway to the temples of the Golden Triangle, It's a far cry from fleshpots like Bangkok and Phuket, with their legendary "soapy massages" where the wandering sybarite can find him or herself turned into the filling of a human sandwich. However there is still the matter of the girls. Why choose a profession for which the supply is so far greater than the demand? When you look at these creatures, whose supernal beauty, creates its own olfactory sensation, a kind of imagined perfume that can ignite a fever of longing, you’re reminded of the painted horses on a children’s carousel, moving up and down, turning round and round and going nowhere.

Las Vegas Journal II: Leaving Las Vegas

Back in 1972 Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour wrote a watershed work, which became the bible of postmodernism, A Significance for A&P Parking Lots, or Learning from Las Vegas. Classics like Caesar’s Palace, The Golden Nugget and The Flamingo (the first real Las Vegas casino hotel, built by Bugsy Siegel)—became the centerpiece of the glorification of vernacularism, as manifested in architecture. If you’ve ever felt any love for the McDonald’s arch or how it might function as a secular form of the crucifix, then you understand Las Vegas’ heretical rebellion against the sleek perfectionism of Mies van der Rohe and other modernists who dominated the post-war landscape. But Las Vegas has not learned anything from Las Vegas. It’s the only city where you can buy a tee shirt on the strip that reads “Fuck You You Fucking Fuck,” and where you can experience a series of faux environments that are a black hole sucking in the big chains and the chain smokers and the cult followers of the movie Leaving Las Vegas, who, drink in hand (apparently there are no municipal ordinances against public drinking), attempt to outdo the depravity of the original script. Monumental glamour bathrooms that resemble mausoleums are Las Vegas’ contribution to modern architectural style. The musical Cats has a famous song called “Memory.” The theme song of Las Vegas could be titled “Mammary,” seeing as the ersatz Brooklyn Bridge, Eiffel Tower, King Tut’s tomb and Lake Como are littered with a plenitude of ersatz mammary. Silicone is everywhere, and it’s hard to tell the hookers from the wannabees just showing up for the weekend to audition. Venturi, Brown and Izenour had a cool idea, but the original site has abused their revelation. It’s an excuse for a proliferation of despair that’s infected the once pristine desert like a virus. After a day walking along the strip, one longs for the real Palladio.

The Golden Calf

If you want to gamble in New York or Connecticut, you have to go to a casino like Turning Stones, built like so many casinos on Native American land. In the case of Turning Stones, it’s the Oneida Indian Nation. The casino business has changed, even for the modest traveler who can’t afford Las Vegas, Monoco, or a private club in London.  In the old west, there were casinos with whores like Kitty from Gunsmoke, who plied her trade over the bar. Then there was the intermediate period that saw the advent of the gaudy strip, immortalized by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown in their famed tome Learning From Las Vegas, where the commercial architecture of the pleasure palace, with its chrome, mirrors and exuberant kitsch, solidified the foundations of postmodernism. While Venturi’s work may have exuded a certain self-consciousness, Las Vegas, and the casinos, motels and strip shows it spawned, was lacking in any aspiration beyond the totally over-the-top pursuit of the proverbial Golden Nugget. Today, travelers coming through Las Vegas visit the Bellagio, named after the resort on Lake Como, and see Cirque du Soleil more readily than they visit the raunchy Palomino Club. Rip-offs like Turning Stones in Verona, New York (just down the road from Rome) all similarly reek of Steve Winwood’s Higher Love. The mirrors on the ceilings are gone, along with the girls. Now, tattooed warriors, overweight hausfraus and octogenarians with walkers wander the aisles of slot machines, hoping to win enough coin to cover dinner at one of the tasteful chain restaurants inspired by celebrity chefs like Wolfgang Puck. Going to a casino has become a family event. The 1998 film Croupier with Clive Owen portrayed a darker and more romantic aspect of the gambling experience, which few casino goers encounter today.