Jae eats Thanksgiving dinner, crashes, wakes up early on Black Friday and heads for the Luxor, where he joins a morning poker tournament, starts drinking and going all-in when he has anything resembling a hand. Finishes first in the tournament. Just another ordinary day in Las Vegas.
Jae Song rides his first Harley, looks cool.
A couple of days ago my friend Jae and I entered a three-table late-night poker tournament at Bill's Casino on The Strip. It had a thirty-dollar buy-in and the top three finishers, out of about thirty players, got paid. I “cashed”, finishing third, and won fifty-eight dollars, or would have if I hadn't made a bonehead play on my third or fourth hand — an ill-advised all-in that felted me and forced me to re-buy. So I ended up twenty-eight dollars ahead but with the satisfaction of feeling, for a few hours afterwards, like a poker god.
[© 2011 Huger Foote]
Despite its subject matter, dead leaves in a gutter, this image has a delicate, sweet quality, and something of the feel of a Japanese woodblock print.
. . . that there are still people who think Obama is “doing the best he can” and might secretly stand with the 99%. What good is secret sympathy? Has he uttered even a peep in support of the OWS goals or against the excessive force being used against the protesters? Is he going to have to pick up a police baton and smash an old woman in the head with it before people get the message?
Illustration by Henry McCarter for the Century Magazine, 1898.
This painting was refused admission to the Salon of 1878 on the grounds of indecency — quite rightly, I think. Degas had convinced his friend Gervex to show the lady's discarded corset on the chair beside her, which didn't help.
This is Shelby Foote's massive three-volume, three-thousand-page narrative history of the Civil War, in a fourteen-volume illustrated edition published by Time-Life to commemorate the 40th-anniversary of the appearance of the first volume.
I read it when the third volume appeared, in 1974, and it instantly became one of my favorite books. If there has been a greater work of literature written in America in my lifetime, I don't know what it would be. I've always meant to read it again, and thought this illustrated edition would be a good one for a second visit. It will be my winter reading project.
I wouldn't recommend this version for a first read — Foote's prose is so fine that it really ought to be experienced initially on its own — but this edition has the virtue of being less daunting, taken one slim volume at a time, and the pictures and color maps are cool.
. . . of a grand Victorian house in the French Quarter of New Orleans. A good place to be.
This photograph excites me to an indecent degree . . .
[Via Farran Smith Nehme on Facebook]
. . . an imaginary location somewhere in Florida.
The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin's uncompleted magnum opus, is one of the greatest and most important books of the 20th Century. I started reading it just before I moved to Las Vegas, almost seven years ago, and just finished it this week. It's not a book you can dash through, or would want to dash through. Benjamin designed it to be a compendium of quotes from various sources which would sum up his reflections on the culture of the 19th Century. What he left were a great number of those quotes, grouped into various categories, along with his notes about them, which have been assembled into the present book, along with a few of his other writings connected to the subjects covered or to the project.
I started reading the book after I decided to move to Las Vegas because I had a sense that it would be useful in understanding the town, and it is. Although Benjamin died in 1940, The Arcades Project is essential reading about Las Vegas today.
Benjamin believed that each age is “enchanted” by assumptions that are so common and so deeply held that they cannot be seen by most people living in that age. He saw the enchantment of the 19th Century summed up in the shopping arcades of Paris — commercial developments that mimicked public streets and celebrated the commodity fetish in fantastic ways. Many of the legendary arcades had disappeared by Benjamin's time in Paris, but he wanted to show how the ideas, or what he called the “phantasmagoria”, associated with them had helped create the modern world.
His prescience about this was greater than even he could have imagined, as witnessed by the rise of the modern shopping mall — commercial developments that have replaced the village square and downtown's main street as the centers of our public culture. And the best way to understand the modern Las Vegas mega-resort — with its shopping arcades and food courts and high-end restaurants and bars and clubs and theatrical shows and movie theaters surrounding the action on the gaming floor — is to analyze it as a kind of super-mall.
Indeed, The Paris, Las Vegas casino-resort — the entire city of Paris rendered as an arcade — would have required a whole section in The Arcades Project if Benjamin had lived to see it. In a way, it endorses every insight of his magisterial work.
My friend Mary Zahl is a master pie maker. When we stayed at her family's cabin on Lake Butler, Florida this summer she made pies for us. I'm dreaming about them now.
Yesterday, in a moment of absentmindedness, I unleashed my beard trimmer on the right side of my face without the blade guard on, shredding that part of the beard, giving it the look of a crop circle gone horribly wrong. I had no choice but to shave away both sides of the beard so they could grow out again evenly. It left me, though, I suddenly realized, with a rough approximation of Nathan Bedford Forrest's beard during his time of military service to the Confederacy, which is not unpleasing to me. It has made me feel reckless and ruthless, terrible in battle.