The Real and the Fake

My current morning book is Jenny Odell’s Saving Time. It follows well on Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks, since both are critical assessments of how we approach time, but while Burkeman focused on undermining the self-help time management industry, Odell is going after modern ideas of time and how to live in a more political fashion.

Both are philosophical books and good examples of critical thinking about time, though very different from Carlo Rovelli’s equally fascinating book The Order of Time, which was my first morning book.

In an early chapter, Odell writes about the commodification of leisure time, which includes various businesses set up to give us manufactured “experiences.” Reading about not just theme parks, but businesses tricked out as theme parks in Saving Time made me remember a business trip I once took to Las Vegas.

I tell many stories about that trip, which was to a three-day conference on class actions. I lived in Washington, DC, at the time, so I flew out early and went to San Diego to visit a friend, and then went back to Las Vegas. It was February, and when I flew out of Baltimore there was about a foot of snow on the ground. (I’d had to struggle through snow drifts on my small and unplowed street to get to a corner where a shuttle could pick me up for the airport.)

It was glorious in San Diego and my friend lived in a place east of the city where we could sit on her balcony and just stare at the hills and trees. The weather was still glorious in Las Vegas, but the hotel was on The Strip.

It was, in fact, the New York New York hotel. When you entered, you had to navigate across a casino floor to get to the front desk. It was smoky, too — I think smoking was still allowed in such places in Nevada.

The room was fine, but to get a meal you went down to the main floor where, in addition to the casino, there was an area styled as Greenwich Village with cafes. It even had fake steam coming up around fake manholes.

I hated it. First of all, while I used to play a bit of poker, I’m not a serious gambler, so the casino held no attraction for me, particularly since it was just table after table of people playing games, plus slot machines. No character at all.

Secondly, it was all so plastic, particularly the fake Greenwich Village.

I remember talking to a friend about how much I hated Las Vegas and he said, “Most people like the energy.”

And I said, “It’s fake energy.”

I mean, I’ve been to Greenwich Village many times, starting the the 1970s — so back when it was much less gentrified than now. It has always had wonderful big city energy.

The energy in the hotel was theme park energy, completely fake. In fact, the whole Strip felt that way.

On the middle afternoon of the conference, when most attendees were out playing golf, I went for a walk to enjoy the weather. The sun was shining and the temperature was in the 60s.

I walked up and down the Strip, trying to find an outdoor cafe or a park or at least some place that had windows showing a view of the lovely day. There was nothing.

I finally asked at the hotel if there was a place where I could watch the sunset, and the clerk said “Well, you could go up on the second floor of the parking garage.”

So I did and the sunset was very good, but I lacked a place to sit or a nice drink to go with it.

Of course, if I had rented a car, I could have gone somewhere interesting. There is lovely country around Las Vegas.

But not in the city, especially not on the Strip, where it is impossible to walk to anywhere else in the city. You have to drive to get out of there.

Lots of people go to Vegas for vacation (“What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”). Probably millions. And I suppose it makes sense if you like to gamble and know where the good casinos are — though these days there are casinos in most places, so you don’t have to travel there.

I think most people go because it’s a safe place (unless you have a gambling addiction) that is associated with being a bit naughty. You can pretend you did something outrageous when all you did was hang out in over-air-conditioned spaces and lose some money at the roulette wheel.

I think Odell is right: such experiences aren’t leisure, but they are being sold — and sold is the important word here — to us as what we should be doing when we’re not working.

As it happened, I was in Vegas to work — I was reporting on the convention — so that may have affected my attitude. The vacation part of my trip was hanging out on my friend’s balcony and exploring some of the desert east of San Diego.

That was refreshing and an experience that stayed with me, especially when I flew back home and realized as we were landing in Baltimore that there was still a foot of snow on the ground.

The shuttle home to D.C. dropped me a couple of blocks from home, and I dragged my suitcase through unplowed snow and up my unshoveled steps, still very mad about not getting to truly enjoy the magnificent February weather in Vegas because the place just wanted my money and attention on its fake crap.

That was twenty-something years ago and I’m still mad about it.