Lost Vegas, Nevada USA

Mr. Robert Venturi, AIA, the clown prince of American architects and one of the great Culture Criminals of the 2nd half of the sad 20th Century, learned [Author's note: how to be an asshole...] from Las Vegas. America's greatest living national treasure, Dolly Parton famously said: "It costs a lot of money to look cheap."

Americans like kitsch: Disneyland, Big Macs, big MacMansions, big boobs (big asses are the Brazilians, apparently), they used to like big cars before they became big expenses, Bill Clinton.... Do people really and truly like America's substitute for Holy Communion in The Catholic Curch: the Sunday after oon barbecue where the priest – typo: Daddy, chars the body of Christ – typo: big beef steaks for everybody to enjoy in teh baking sun and if it's evening, the moquitos? Do they really like it or have thy been some combinatonof convinced and convincing themselves they like it, which leads to the same effect, they do it: Hic est corpus.... Please listen to Peggy Lees's dispositive song: "Is that all there is?"

Compared with "Sin City", Fflorida (right) is relatively innocuous.There you can waste your life retiring or vacating but if you're reaonably careful, you will not so fast run out of money especially of you eat dinner at the at the surf and turf restaurants during senior citizen's early bird hour. But everything it Vegas is targeting your wallet, deep dish with neon signs not just shopping malls.

Unless you are a shoppaholic, you can shopgo thru the mall without buying, but the only thing to do in a csino is bet. And you learn something from shopping. Not anything of substantive importance but you do find out what the newest fashions are or what' on sale. In the casino all ther is are the gambling setups which stay the same until they break. Why did Mr. Venturi like this stuff?

Here's my best guess: Robert Venturi was pissed off that he could not have Paul Rudolph's job as Dean of the Yale School of Archtecture. Prof. Rudolph was a modernis architect and his building do have their problems. So Mr. Venturi spent his life kicking the cat": dissing modern architecture.

And since he made a good income at it and probably was a very shallow person [Aside: like Dr. Sluggie....], he probably enjoyed, not being a straightforward Vegas dupe, but playing with Vegas dupery. A small selfish man, like Dr. Edward Teller vis-à-vis Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer. A dwarf . All drawfs try to destroy their betters so that they don't have anybody to compare themselves with to see how small they are. If nobody's bigger than me then I'm the biggest, i.e., the best. Right?

What goes on in Vegas may stay in Vegas, as the saying goes. All the sins, all the sleaze – one of their entertainers had an apposite name: Frank Sin Atra. But, as Marshall McLuhan always said: The medium is the message. The idea of Vegas itself permeates Amerian life, far beyond Clark County Nevada's boundary lines. America is Lost in Vegas, Running on empty, running around (Jackson Browne song).^[1]