Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

Las Vegas interrupted a fine dirt road. In summary, that seems to be it. You are bouncing along, reveling in crags and creosote bush, a distant powerline or two, man it’s a good road. You come over a ridge and there it is, the Stratosphere Tower like a funny pencil choked in haze. So you go down a treacherous ridge into the haze, wander into Vegas because it’s there and park at the Riviera, way back in the garage, and sling your bag over your shoulder and lug it a half mile to the casino, beat the dust from your jeans. A little slow in town, $29.95 for a room. The nickel slots are “loose,” as in 98% payback, as good as it gets, so forget about making a living. Been tried. Language of luck is grasped in limited bursts in distraction, if at all.

But you had your drunken fun here. You rented that room with a funny smell for two weeks and tried to jog the length of the Strip with a water bottle full of Jim Beam. Got as far as that big lady with a snarling poodle and a gigantic slot machine with numbers ten feet high, and jokers jumped out of the plastic bubble with satanic goatees. Not sure what they mix into the Beam here, aside from psychedelic visions of towers, the fabulous, unexplainable wealth. And there was that time at the Gold Strike Hotel when the alarm went off at two something in the AM. You never saw so many suddenly pissed off zombies in a hallway. Someone always fucks with the exits.

Next morning you do a ragged dusty trundle on the Strip, and the nonsense of billions of dollars shoot up everywhere, out of your cloudy head, Way Out Rockers cranked to ten in the tape deck, Augustus Pablo no match for the towers. You thought about settling down over a few whiskey-cokes last night, but you’re into some strange subspace in Vegas; it’s not real geography and you get a lot of werewolves passing through. But rent is cheap, and it’s the only town smack in the middle of desert, the real desert, real space and light, not that fake Arizona stuff, and Vegas is lit up brighter than its blinding basin.

You came with ideas of blinding basins and poetry. Not cowboy poetry; running cows in a desert seems a bit absurd. You’ll miss the $6.99 steak butter and whiskey plates, the disastrous flashing glory, but you are convinced you’ll meet yourself on the other side of a ridge, not sure which one. You look for that same dirt road on the far side, in the crags and creosote bush, the one Vegas interrupted with its brown haze and psychotic proportions. The glaring tan gets bigger as flashing lights wane. Getting closer.

I like walking through the palpable force field that shuffles your brain, makes your ego jump for joy. In the pulsing lights of Vegas the buzz makes me feel like a kid at his first carnival. This is all here for me.
As if you can hear those dynamos up at Hoover Dam throbbing in your ears like an electric guitar.

The "Las Vegas Boulevard buzz" how much of it could be due to the electromagnetic field surrounding all that Neon. Far fetched I guess.

"To be able to apply a magnetic field to a specific brain region and change people's moral judgments is really astonishing."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8593748.stm

I catch a buzz every time I read you

Thank you.

please pardon the digressions the ramble

Thanks Jack. I dig Vegas, I really do, but it's such an overload in the middle of all that quiet light. And it interrupted my road!

"satanic goatees" . . . haha. that's pretty good. I really did jog the strip one time, went through some of the casino lots, but I made up that part about a water bottle full of Jim Beam. And the giant slot numbers were probably more like one foot tall, not ten, but you know . . . .

I added a part about trying to watch the Lakers at that bar in Henderson when twenty bikers pulled up. It was the day after that biker shooting in a Laughlin casino. I left . . . Not done with that part yet.

wanted to post the latest version of this one. I'll try to comment on some of the other work soon.

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Las Vegas interrupts a fine dirt road in the Biblical palisades on rolling roundscapes, in crags and creosote bushes where a powerline stretches and dissolves into a great arc. You come over a ridge and there it is, the Stratosphere Tower like a funny little pencil choked in brown haze. So you go down a treacherous ridge into the haze, wander into Vegas because it’s there and park in the old Riviera garage, beat the dust from your jeans, sling your bag over your shoulder and lug it a half mile to the casino. A little slow in town, $29.95 for a room. The nickel slots are “loose,” as in 98% payback, as good as it gets here, so forget making a living. Been tried. Sure there was a guy one time who almost took down Binion’s Horseshoe; unfortunately he kept playing. It’s what you do here, if not here for the dust and heat.

It makes a hell of lot more sense to get here in the whir and whine of a jumbo jet. Sit at the foot of McCullough Range and watch the planes wrap a slow 180 and float down toward McCarran, one after another, every thirty seconds, the only sensible way. No clue about terrain. Get here by dirt road and the shock is too great, a storm of noise on the ocean of peace and light like a wisdom drug, and it seems the isolation feeds mad logic; the desert is out there, merely a vast buffer zone around alternate reality. But that’s crazy; no one gets here by dirt road. You wander them for their own sake. Until one of them runs into Vegas.

Next morning you do a ragged trundle on the Strip, and madness shoots up everywhere, out of dust clouds in your head, and dust is caked on the truck in thick gobs and layers, in every last crease in the cab, on the sleeping bag and layers of road detritus behind the seat, motel stubs and wrappers, squashed empty containers of every imaginable kind, from a strange back draft when you crossed those dead dry lakes, dwarfed now beneath a towering gleam of billions, the song of the west, and Way Out Rockers is cranked on the tape deck but Augustus Pablo is no match for the towers. You thought about settling down last night over a few whiskey-cokes, but you’re into strange subspace in Vegas; it’s not real geography but a warp in the fabric, and not a single clock in the place, and you get a lot of werewolves passing through. But it’s the only town smack in the middle of desert, a real desert, real space and light, not that fake Arizona stuff.

You had your drunken fun, rented that room with a funny smell for a week and tried to get a little exercise, jogged the Strip with Jim Beam in the water bottle, got as far as the huge lady from Illinois with a log cabin purse, and that gigantic slot machine with ten foot tumblers and jokers with satanic goatees jumping out of the bubble. Not sure what they put in the Jim Beam here; the casino was a clatter of deranged bells and diffused hissing sounds and the towers seemed a little serpentine. Gold sky filled gold facades, gold funhouse mirrors a hundred stories high.

Ships vanish mysteriously here, like Bermuda; best to sail on, out from the looming phantoms of lucre into flung beige and random stucco, pointed at glaring tan beyond. Two hours later you’ve passed 163 identical subdivisions, each with the same masonry fence on the same boulevard and occasional spray paint verse, sun baked palms and mesquite in every possible permutation, and six lanes through it all to no literal end, headed down to the tracks now, where numbing sprawl gives out suddenly to an open stretch dotted with plastic bags and beer bottles caught in the scrub, and heat is getting sticky. The old gas plant twists in the distance, all of the sooty grim colors of the industrial revolution, and the Congos are playing an old reggae hymn on the tape deck. You gaze over the old gas plant and a realm of light comes into its own, an unexpected pause.

It shouldn’t hit you like that, stuck at the end of a mix tape in the sprawl and heat and trash-maligned scrub, but you’re talking about a hymn. “Li-ving on Jah so-lid foun-dat-ion”… one drop roots on the three, a deceptively simple math, the sheer propulsion, layers in layers layered on others, and you hadn’t counted on Cedric Myton’s falsetto to break a spell, all breathtaking and deft, and the improv inflections, syllables and spaces between them used in ways not seen since the jazz years. The hymn ends and you hit rewind, rewind a moment. You do it twice more, breathe in the dub. Then you cross the tracks.

At Water Street and the Rude American bike store in old Henderson town you begin to see the limitations of old reggae hymns in the grit of old desert crossroads, so you stop two blocks down at a bar to watch the Lakers. No one there gives a shit about the Lakers but it’s good shade. Okay, one more beer, it’s getting hot. And then thirty bikers roar into the lot and you’re a lot less thirsty. Seems a biker shootout went down at a casino in Laughlin two days before. Saw it on TV. And you’re not anxious to see if all debts were settled to everyone’s satisfaction. So now the truck is a furnace and the dubbed out roots spill forth once again. Makes no sense here. Worlds colliding.

You still have blinding basins; you came with ideas of blinding basins and poetry. Not cowboy poetry. Running cows in the Nevada desert is absurd. You’re looking for a glaring fringe, that dirt road taking up again in the crags and creosote bush, the same one Las Vegas interrupted with its haze and psychotic proportions. Sure you’ll miss the $5.99 buttered steak and whiskey plates and disastrous flashing glory, but you’re convinced you will meet yourself on a ridge somewhere, not sure which one, that’s all, and the glaring tan gets bigger as flashing lights wane. Getting closer.

really amazing writing... I have to read these posts again several times

really good stuff!