I would find it hard to credit that I am the first person to notice these things. As ever, I merely re-arrange my influences in the process of groping towards either creativity and/or understanding.
The entire environment is designed to dismantle and sub-divide your attention (in order to separate you from your money, and bodily fluids, more easily).
Music is piped-in almost any place you go, a mash of pop hits from no genre in particular. This is annoying, and devilishly clever. Some people obviously resist, ignore...but it's almost everywhere. Sooner or later you will find yourself (I did) with a fraction of your consciousness caught by a song hook you know (and maybe even like) and you will mouth along with the words. Your gait will entrain to the rhythm. Multiple layers of your nervous system are hijacked at the same time. It's easier because your eyes are overwhelmed already, and maybe you're already cross-faded.
People with flyers and costumes wait on every sidewalk and street corner to proposition you. They smack stacks of cards together violently, call out one liners crafted to elicit responses, and sometimes they just step in front of you... or smack your ass with a whip as you walk by. There is a constant vying for your breaths and heartbeats, a continual reading of which passers-by are most susceptible right now. It could be good training for looking clueless and lost while preserving situational awareness, if you're into that sort of thing.
Substances of all sort are readily available to alter your perceptions: uppers, downers, entheogens...just look around. Yet even the non-indulging tourist of simple pleasures or stricter principles is affected, for the the ambient situation has the overall effect of altering perception subtly, especially if given days to "work" on you.
The detritus of peoples' excesses are left wherever people finished them: cocktail glasses walk out onto the strip and are left near escalators, cigarette butts end up on the ground inside and outside and also tucked into weird nooks, urine and shit is easy to find spread around sidewalks at dawn. Shockingly, I saw no used condoms on the street.
You cannot breathe well. Instead of oxygen you are given a mix of tobacco smoke (both fresh & stale), car exhaust, horrendous perfumes, and whatever the vapers are flavoring their thc/nicotine with today. Cognitive functioning declines as a result, making you more susceptible to the previously mentioned dynamics.
People come from every part of the planet. You will see every size, shape, shade, and fashion that humans appear in. You will hear more languages than you can speak (yes, even you, polyglot!).
And the crowds can't walk well. You think of any other packed-full-with-humans location (mall, airport, New York, Tokyo, etc.) and you can remember how there is a flow to the crowd, a way that the seething masses of bodies navigate past and around each other fairly skillfully. Not so in Vegas. People speedwalk, or they lazily stroll, or they stop suddenly to gape, or they veer erratically as new stimuli guide them hither and yon. It's a mess of bodies moving in every direction, mis-matched rhythms and faulty social signalling which lead to awkward sidewalk jams and people bolting suddenly to avoid them. Never before have I seen so many people move so poorly together.
You can get almost anywhere without going outside, if you're willing to be circuitous with the path you take. There must be whole towns underground, or behind interior facades, which I never even glimpsed.
....
There is a distillation that has been arrived at, an essential quality of advertising which pervades every facet of the place. Nothing is left unbranded. If you want a place to sit, or to enjoy quiet, you might have to pay for it. The compounded attempts of the environment to influence you begin to depart from a sort of "here-ness" and pile towards the archetypal. You are no place in particular: you are on a cruise ship, next to a theme park, above a mall, on your way to a forbidden worship. The sum of all the parts separates off from their earthly tethers, floats off (and you along with it) to a different depth of abstracting away from experience.
I can still feel it inside me.
In places nocturnal, where once my dreams would have a busy downtown now there might just be Vegas. Now when I'm out in the streets I see a bit of successful advertising and instead of noting it for content or technique, I think "Vegas is seeping through", as if the place itself was somehow the sole source no-holds-barred consumerism.
Inside me there is a Demi-plane of Debauchery now, and it spills out of every billboard and commercial jingle and mouth opened in order to get me to sign something--constantly calling back to itself, redirecting attention, gathering resources. Is it preparing? And, if so, what?
....
I neglected to gamble even once while there.
The place is insanely game-able: adventure hooks, memorable NPCs, and mysteries confront you constantly.
Figuring how to use it will be a trick. Probably best to pull it into smaller chunks instead of trying to encompass the whole. More on that later. ... in the meantime, do you have a Vegas anecdote to share? I'd love to hear some!
...
Las Vegas (NV) is run by sorcerers and vampires. This circumstance could be literal or metaphorical, depending on your purposes.The entire environment is designed to dismantle and sub-divide your attention (in order to separate you from your money, and bodily fluids, more easily).
Music is piped-in almost any place you go, a mash of pop hits from no genre in particular. This is annoying, and devilishly clever. Some people obviously resist, ignore...but it's almost everywhere. Sooner or later you will find yourself (I did) with a fraction of your consciousness caught by a song hook you know (and maybe even like) and you will mouth along with the words. Your gait will entrain to the rhythm. Multiple layers of your nervous system are hijacked at the same time. It's easier because your eyes are overwhelmed already, and maybe you're already cross-faded.
People with flyers and costumes wait on every sidewalk and street corner to proposition you. They smack stacks of cards together violently, call out one liners crafted to elicit responses, and sometimes they just step in front of you... or smack your ass with a whip as you walk by. There is a constant vying for your breaths and heartbeats, a continual reading of which passers-by are most susceptible right now. It could be good training for looking clueless and lost while preserving situational awareness, if you're into that sort of thing.
Substances of all sort are readily available to alter your perceptions: uppers, downers, entheogens...just look around. Yet even the non-indulging tourist of simple pleasures or stricter principles is affected, for the the ambient situation has the overall effect of altering perception subtly, especially if given days to "work" on you.
The detritus of peoples' excesses are left wherever people finished them: cocktail glasses walk out onto the strip and are left near escalators, cigarette butts end up on the ground inside and outside and also tucked into weird nooks, urine and shit is easy to find spread around sidewalks at dawn. Shockingly, I saw no used condoms on the street.
You cannot breathe well. Instead of oxygen you are given a mix of tobacco smoke (both fresh & stale), car exhaust, horrendous perfumes, and whatever the vapers are flavoring their thc/nicotine with today. Cognitive functioning declines as a result, making you more susceptible to the previously mentioned dynamics.
People come from every part of the planet. You will see every size, shape, shade, and fashion that humans appear in. You will hear more languages than you can speak (yes, even you, polyglot!).
And the crowds can't walk well. You think of any other packed-full-with-humans location (mall, airport, New York, Tokyo, etc.) and you can remember how there is a flow to the crowd, a way that the seething masses of bodies navigate past and around each other fairly skillfully. Not so in Vegas. People speedwalk, or they lazily stroll, or they stop suddenly to gape, or they veer erratically as new stimuli guide them hither and yon. It's a mess of bodies moving in every direction, mis-matched rhythms and faulty social signalling which lead to awkward sidewalk jams and people bolting suddenly to avoid them. Never before have I seen so many people move so poorly together.
You can get almost anywhere without going outside, if you're willing to be circuitous with the path you take. There must be whole towns underground, or behind interior facades, which I never even glimpsed.
....
There is a distillation that has been arrived at, an essential quality of advertising which pervades every facet of the place. Nothing is left unbranded. If you want a place to sit, or to enjoy quiet, you might have to pay for it. The compounded attempts of the environment to influence you begin to depart from a sort of "here-ness" and pile towards the archetypal. You are no place in particular: you are on a cruise ship, next to a theme park, above a mall, on your way to a forbidden worship. The sum of all the parts separates off from their earthly tethers, floats off (and you along with it) to a different depth of abstracting away from experience.
I can still feel it inside me.
In places nocturnal, where once my dreams would have a busy downtown now there might just be Vegas. Now when I'm out in the streets I see a bit of successful advertising and instead of noting it for content or technique, I think "Vegas is seeping through", as if the place itself was somehow the sole source no-holds-barred consumerism.
Inside me there is a Demi-plane of Debauchery now, and it spills out of every billboard and commercial jingle and mouth opened in order to get me to sign something--constantly calling back to itself, redirecting attention, gathering resources. Is it preparing? And, if so, what?
....
I neglected to gamble even once while there.
The place is insanely game-able: adventure hooks, memorable NPCs, and mysteries confront you constantly.
Figuring how to use it will be a trick. Probably best to pull it into smaller chunks instead of trying to encompass the whole. More on that later. ... in the meantime, do you have a Vegas anecdote to share? I'd love to hear some!
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