Las Vegas was and is a hard town that will make you pay for your inability to restrain your desires.... If you have a weakness, Las Vegas will punish you.
HAL ROTHMAN, Neon Metropolis
In Las Vegas, people seem to believe, the prosperity spawned by tourism and gaming can make them whole, financially and spiritually. Las Vegas now melds fun, work, and wealth, showing a path toward the brightest vistas of the postindustrual world. It is the first city of the twenty-first century.
HAL ROTHMAN, introduction, The Grit Beneath the Glitter
In a city of illusion, where change is what the city does, it's no wonder Las Vegas is the court of last resort, the last place to start over, to reinvent yourself in the same way that the city does, time after time. For some it works; for some it doesn't, but they keep coming and trying.
HAL ROTHMAN, Neon Metropolis
The outsiders have become kings and queens of the castle. It is a whole lot easier to sit outside the tent and throw firecrackers inside; it is much, much harder to sit inside the tent and govern not only your enemies, but your close friends as well.
HAL ROTHMAN, "Goodbye Preservation, Hello Recreation," New West, Jan. 15, 2006
From its founding, [Nevada] has always struggled to belong. It has had a series of masters--the mining industry, the railroads, the federal government, and now gaming and tourism--that have driven the state's economy and compelled its direction.
HAL ROTHMAN, The Making of Modern Nevada
Las Vegas is still socially sanctioned deviance. Its brand is just more comfortable to more Americans than it used to be.
HAL ROTHMAN, Neon Metropolis
Today's young people have a different idea of what is authentic. They are post-literate, twelve-images-per-second beings. The IMAX in high definition gives a better view than anything they can do themselves. And they don’t have to get cold or wet. From the point of view of an awful lot of young people today, why not? Why endure when technology can provide a visually better experience without the discomfort?
HAL ROTHMAN, "Goodbye Preservation, Hello Recreation," New West, Jan. 15, 2006
To survive, Nevada followed a different route than most states. Without the rich soil or developed manufacturing that could draw agriculture and industry, and with many of the profits of its mines directed out of state, Nevada embraced what society called vice. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and continuing through to the twenty-first, the state has sanctioned pleasures thought immoral elsewhere. In Nevada, you could be free of a spouse or see a professional boxing match when it was nigh on impossible to do either elsewhere. In Nevada, you could sit at the gaming tables or visit a brothel, all within the law. In Nevada, as nowhere else, you could be free of the constraints that the larger society put upon you. Such became the Silver State's promise.
HAL ROTHMAN, The Making of Nevada
Capitalism is a warrior culture, a hierarchical mode, and Las Vegas is its epitome.
HAL ROTHMAN, "The Shape of the City -- Money and the Visual Face of Las Vegas", Stripping Las Vegas: A Contextual Review of Casino Resort Architecture
No one thinks Las Vegas is real; it is illusion, but visitors willingly suspend disbelief and pretend.
HAL ROTHMAN, Neon Metropolis
Las Vegas is the therapeutic ethos of our time run amok, our socio-psychological promise to ourselves to be eternally young writ large on the landscape of aging self-indulgence.
HAL ROTHMAN, "The Shape of the City -- Money and the Visual Face of Las Vegas", Stripping Las Vegas: A Contextual Review of Casino Resort Architecture
Las Vegas is the most malleable tourist destination on the planet. It holds up a figurative mirror to visitors and asks, "What do you want to be, and what will you pay to be it?"
HAL ROTHMAN, Neon Metropolis
The reinvention of American culture as purely the self catapulted Las Vegas to prominence. The city took sin and made it choice -- a sometimes ambiguous choice, but choice nonetheless. Combined with a visionary approach to experience that melded Hollywood and Americans' taste for comfort and self-deception, Las Vegas grew into the last American frontier city, as foreign at times as Prague but as quintessential as Peoria. In Las Vegas, you can choose your fantasy; in the rest of America, you don't always get to pick.
HAL ROTHMAN, "The Shape of the City -- Money and the Visual Face of Las Vegas", Stripping Las Vegas: A Contextual Review of Casino Resort Architecture
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