The amazing couterfeit city in the Mojave desert
My cousin Cara lives in Las Vegas, which explains my visit: I'm more usually found in the Parises and Berlins of this world. But then in this place, you can be in Paris if you like. Or Venice. Or ancient Egypt. Not Berlin yet, or London, but I dare say their time will come. Because Las Vegas, the city built for vice in the Nevada desert, fakes the rest of the world like nowhere else.
Take the Venetian, one of the big casinos, hotels, resorts - whatever you want to call them - just off the Strip (or Las Vegas Boulevard as the road signs call it). Cara and I sat next to the canal sipping Sam Adams beer and watching gondoliers punt round the canal, singing to the delight of the American tourists (yes - it really is convincing!). The sky is always bright in this version of Venice, because it's lit from the back: a translucent blue-and-white painted screen covers the ceiling to give the impression of perpetual day. People wander round in renaissance-style costumes (or a few people do, anyway) towards an astonishing replica Piazza San Marco, just between two shopping malls filled with theme-appropriate outlets like Armani and Gucci. I'm making fun, of course, but being here, for an Englishman, isn't all about sneering at Vegas: the fact that it all seems so superficial, so fraudulent, so naff, makes you wonder whether it might be you there's something wrong with - not Vegas. Because while at first you're astonished that the natives seem not to have an internal cheeseometer capable of seeing the tackiness of these places, after a while you begin to think such feelings are simply the effect of an excessive English sensitivity to all things tasteful and polite, uncommercial and well-judged. The Americans here don't seem to need that stuff, and do pretty well without it.
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