I won't gamble and I don't drink (much). But for the past decade, about once a year, I visit. It still fascinates. Vegas, in all its excessive neon splendor, is so weirdly improbable that it's oddly compelling, like a traveling carnival on steroids. How do you not stop and gawk? I mean, what city demolishes an historic landmark like the Tropicana to build an undersized, open-air stadium to host the "boys of summer" when it's so hot that eggs fry on the sidewalk? It's the jarring jumble, the unapologetic "what the hell why not" attitude that attracts. Vegas has no memory, no coherence, no wish for either. All true, and all compelling.
And yet also beside the point. Vegas is not so much a place to arrive as a point of departure, a doorway to elsewhere, to dreams. We visit not to be there, but to dream, to be, briefly, as unreal as the city itself. These pictures, taken over the past several years, are less description than departure, they are those dreams, inspired by but no more "real" than the city itself. And, like the city itself, I offer them -- in all their jumbled, gaudy, reasonless nonsense -- without excuse or apology. I hope they amuse.
