Word: luxor
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Inside the Luxor is a fake river and barges, plus several huge "participatory adventure" areas, an ersatz archaeological ride, as well as a two-story Sega virtual-reality video-game arcade. The joint has acres of casino space -- but the slots and blackjack tables are, astoundingly, quite separate from and mostly concealed by the Disneyesque fun and games. The bells and whistles are more prominent and accessible than the casino itself, and are not merely a cute, quick way to divert people as they proceed into the fleecing pen. The MGM Grand has gone further: it spent hundreds of millions...
...grinds, the Liberace-like gender-preference coyness -- is so Vegas that the city embraced him at every turn: a Jackson impersonator is a star of the Riviera's long-running show Splash; Jackson plays a spaceship commander in one of Sega's new virtual-reality video games at the Luxor; and Siegfried and Roy got the real Jackson to compose and sing their show-closing theme song, Mind Is the Magic. And Madonna? Her just finished Girlie Show world tour, with its Vegas-style dancers and meretricious Vegas-style lighting, is precisely as pseudosexy in 1993 as shows...
Today's casino-driven prosperity is a somewhat self-contained bubble. The state's welfare case load has risen 54% just since 1991. "We currently have 10,500 new jobs coming online," says welfare administrator Mila Florence, referring to the staffing of the Luxor, Treasure Island and MGM Grand. "The number of persons coming into the state seeking those jobs far exceeds the number of jobs available, so our agency becomes the safety...
...standard perverse quasi-affection, that Vegas could be a beacon for the nation's architecture, his manifesto had transformed America. Forget the Bauhaus and your house -- it is the Vegas aesthetic, architecture as grandiose cartoon, that has become the American Establishment style. And so the splendidly pyramidal new Luxor and cubist new MGM Grand (both the work of local architect Veldon Simpson) do not seem so weird, since equally odd buildings now exist all over the place...
...Strip in Las Vegas has come full circle, its vacant stretches filling in with so many new hotels and casinos that what had been the ultimate expression of car culture has masses of tourists walking from Bally's to Caesars to Treasure Island, and from the Luxor to the Excalibur to the MGM Grand. The Strip is virtually an old-fashioned Main Street...