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164 8 The Power of Place Experiencing Las Vegas Through Popular Writing and Fiction pa u l i i n a r a e n t o “No, this not a good town for psychedelic drugs,” wrote Hunter s. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and concluded, “Reality itself is too twisted.”1 This was an apt confirmation that places have an impact on us. Their atmosphere and local culture may please or intimidate , and evoke strong images and memories. These feelings are universal and always subjective in nature, but necessarily unique for each individual. They are conditioned by complex interactions between memory, meaning, and experience and bound by culture at various scales. all humans experience space through “visual perception, touch, movement . . . thought,” sound, and smell.2 Thus, “the body is [the] very means of entering into relation with all things.”3 This means, among other things, that experiences of space can be manipulated. Each place is shaped by global and nationwide political, economic, and cultural processes, in which people participate in local settings. The outcome of this interaction is unique in each place, and so are the images, identities, and atmospheres of places. These “microcultures” make one place different from others, but similar mechanisms apply and all places have a “personality .”4 This is acknowledged and actively pursued in contemporary casino and destination design, in the context of a harshly competitive market in North america and elsewhere. The destination’s image, reputation, and amenities are key assets for its marketing to customers who can choose from several accessible options. Once the customers come, the goal is to make them stay and return. Carefully designed spaces and a stimulation of all senses are tools of this persuasion.5 Las Vegas is the gaming industry’s prime example of the making of unique atmospheres and place-related experiences. “Everything about casinos is designed to assist gamblers in slipping the perceptual boundaries of their worlds.”6 The visitors choose from diverse options in a fully equipped concentration of miniature world cities and cozy hometown saloons staged The Power of Place | 165 somewhere in the make-believe West. Thus, “it’s not just the games; it’s the whole town.”7 Despite the constant change of this particular town’s landscape and the advances in casino design, the constituents of the Las Vegas experience have remained fairly stable through the decades. This is so because manipulation of space and time—the two elements that root us in “reality”—still forms the foundation of this experience. This foundation gives Las Vegas its unique, globally influential sense of place and deliverthe -goods flavor, making the city the pilgrimage destination—a cultural and spiritual center—for gamblers. For popular and fictional writers, Las Vegas has epitomized anything from alienation, depression, and moral decay to positive absurdity and joy of life.8 This creative approach to space and time contributed to the triumph of Las Vegas in the global gaming market. Building on this understanding, the entertainment city developed into a famous, carefully managed mass product that “can be processed, treated, and decorated like any other commodity .”9 This made of Las Vegas what geographer Edward Relph calls an “other-directed place”—a place that is “directed towards outsiders, spectators , passers-by, and above all consumers.” This production logic, he writes, is supported by “mass communication, mass culture, big business, powerful central authority and the economic system.”10 Instead of surrendering to the external challenges and consumer demands in a conventional, usually negative sense of “other-directedness,” this logic became an essential ingredient in Las Vegas’s identity as a place and a constituent of local culture and lifestyles . It is the foundation of an efficient, sophisticated entertainment machinery (and supporting popular narratives) that flexibly caters to a variety of postmodern needs and delivers what it promises. In this chapter, examples from popular writing and fiction about Las Vegas illustrate the constituents of this powerful sense of place and its impact on the individual. sources such as travel accounts, memoirs, and novels are fairly little used in the expanding social-scientific and cultural studies about gambling but acknowledged in cultural geography and other fields that contribute to interdisciplinary tourism studies.11 This introductory assessment promotes the view that fictional sources can offer unique insights into (gambling) places and their occupants’ minds. By describing freely the character of a place, its people and their sentiments, these texts bring together “the experiential foundation of our world” and...

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