Desolation Angeles and Other Desert Cities Where the Streets Have No Name
Los Angeles to Las Vegas and Back Again 2023: Part One of Two
I hope your New Year is off to a promising start. What follows is my first effort using an online transcription tool in Google Docs to translate (transmute?) some of my handwritten travel journal entries into digital text. Although the end-process requires extensive copy-editing, it is decidedly quicker and easier then fully typing my journals up; I am a terrible typist at the best of times and I would never even attempt to start such a project in that manner and would likely give up after 3 or 4 pages if I did. However, since the Google Docs transcription tool does require so much copy-editing after the fact, I may try a voice-to-text application the next go-round and simply read some of the entries aloud and see how that works. Thank you as always for having a look
For Wendy, as promised.
October 19, 2023
“This is an autobiographical novel written by someone who is quite possibly less intelligent than yourself.” ~ Bruce Caen, Sub-Hollywood: A Novel
The night before we left Austin, I went to see Wolves in the Throne Room for the third time at Come and Take it Live; I actually just walked right in without paying which happens rather frequently, some strange blessing or a cloak of invisibility (or middle-aged anonymity). Then it was up and at 'em and the mad dash to the airport at some dark ungodly hour. In all the rushing about and trying to get some breakfast and clear security at the Austin airport, I had neglected to wish my beautiful wife a happy birthday ("I'm a grown-ass middle-aged woman now,"she tells me). I felt really bad but hoped her four-day whirlwind trip would speak for itself, along with the concerts we were going to upon returning to Austin. The pilot made good time, and as we made our descent the smog of Los Angeles was so thick that we crashed into a cloud bank of pollution that shook the plane hard, then we were sailing past the City of Angels and still a long way from the airport; I always forget how far LAX is from the city itself. Once on the ground we waited for the shuttle to our rental car pick-up for some while, then the driver sat there even longer waiting for more passengers, including a delightful dwarf. Strangely, there was nowhere to stow luggage on the shuttle and soon every inch of the bus was filled with travelers and baggage, very much standing room only, but that did not stop our driver from stopping at every terminal and allowing ever more passengers to embark. Then, rather than take us directly to our rental car pick-up, we were instead dropped in a vacant lot to await a second shuttle from our rental company. By the time we got to the Midway Car Rental located at some airport hotel it had been over an hour since we landed, and the situation was clearly not getting better.
There was a massive line of people waiting for cars and the queue snaked back and forth inside the office then ran outside and back around the far corner of the building. This would clearly take a while. The guy behind us in line was a great one for passing the time with idle chatter; he was a California native and explained that it was a big weekend for sporting events and concerts in Los Angeles and that he had chosen Midway because all the other car rentals had jacked up their prices so high. I muttered that I had chosen the company for the same reason. He was a real font of information if something of a bore, but he did offer some sage wisdom about entering Los Angeles through LAX: Each step takes an hour, he said. An hour to get from the airport to the rental car company, another hour to actually get the car, another hour to get to wherever you are going in LA. So far he was dead-on; meanwhile as we waited and our new friend pontificated, my friend Wendy was calling and texting me regarding some cock-up with our dinner reservations at the Magic Castle that night, so I stepped outside to try and sort things out with her.
The Magic Castle is something of a hard nut to crack, something like the headquarters of a secret society of world-class illusionists, conjurers and cardsharps, and their private clubhouse to boot. Currently, after weathering the storms of the #MeToo and Coronavirus pandemics, membership for magicians costs $2500 + $150 a month, while regular non-magical folks can acquire a membership for a whopping $6000+ a $225 monthly fee. Other than becoming a dues-paying member, there are only a couple of ways to breach the castle walls: you either must be accompanied by a member or be given a guest pass by one. I was determined to find a way, so I told Wendy I was coming to Hollywood again and asked if she had a lead on some guest passes. Of course she did, having worked in the entertainment industry for over 30 years. However she wasn't 100% certain she could get hold of 3 passes, so I went digging around on the internet and eventually discovered a loophole. Adjacent to the Castle itself is the Magic Castle Hotel and this family-friendly joint offered a very limited number of admission passes to the Castle on certain dates but only with the purchase of a room reservation at the hotel. When I called the hotel and inquired about this secret perk, I was told that they could not guarantee me 2 passes to the Castle for October 19 at that time - this was several months prior - but the nice girl on the phone assured me it should all go at as planned, so I booked the $250 room on a wing and a prayer and justified such extravagance as part of Sherry’s birthday package. It wasn't until a couple of weeks before the trip that I called to hopefully firm up the Castle reservation and lo and behold, it was on. I then booked for a 6PM dinner reservation for Sherry and got back in touch with Wendy, who told me she would use her own quest pass and join us there. She expressed some amazement over the fact that I had found a way storm the impenetrable walls of this Magic Castle.
Now, as Sherry and I waited in the interminable line at Midway Car Rental, Wendy was texting me that there was a problem; the Castle keepers were not allowing her to add herself to our dinner reservation, so I would need to call them and sort it. However, when I called I was told that there was simply no more available spots for the 6:00 dinner service. So I called Wendy back and she said she would make some calls to some conjurers and Castle insiders and see what could be done. As Sherry and I finally made our way to the desk at the car rental, Wendy was blowing up both our phones; it was real Defcon One. It now appeared that our only option of dining together at the Castle that evening was to move the reservation up to 8:00, an idea I wasn't too keen on. Furthermore, I had to be the one to change the reservation and I had already noted that any day-of changes to reservations came with a healthy penalty fee from the Castle bursar. Plus I really had my hands full at the moment with Midway Rental Car; they required a mind-melting amount of documentation, including airline tickets, hotel bookings, etc. Meanwhile, Wendy is texting both of us that she can actually book the new reservation time for us but we have to let her know immediately or all the tables for 8:00 will also be taken. It was all very stressful, but it now appeared we were on for 8:00 at the Magic Castle.
So yes, it had in fact taken an hour to get from the plane to the car rental (without having to claim luggage even), another hour to get our car from the rental, and now most likely the better part of a third hour to drive to Hollywood. There had been a number of stressful situations in addition to the shuttle and rental car delays including "my crazy friend blowing up my phone with urgent texts while I am trying to book the car I've waited in line over an hour for," or so I only half-jokingly reprimanded Wendy on the phone as I slid behind the wheel of a gorgeous white Chevy Equinox. For example, while waiting for the shuttle at LAX, Sherry had performed her regular and rather perilous jump-on-the-first- mass-transit-apparatus - that arrives-no-matter-its-destination routine, walking aboard the first shuttle bus that pulled up, despite it clearly not being the one to the remote car rental agencies. “Sherry! Sherry !!” I screamed. She looked at me for a long moment through the window before disembarking at the last possible moment just as the driver closed the doors and the bus pulled away." What the hell are you doing ?" I asked her. “Why would you just assume that's our shuttle?!” As I said, she had a long history of this sort of behavior, the most dramatic example being back in 2017 in England when she hopped on a random train while I was using the men's room at the Swindon station. So, rather than getting to Oxford in a timely manner I had to spend the next several hours working with the British authorities to try and reconnect with her. She is wildly unpredictable when it comes to public transportation in foreign environments. But today was her 53rd birthday and she was now a grown-ass middle-aged woman as she liked to remind me, so I took a deep breath and tried to restore my patience and sweet-husband disposition. In fact, I promised her I would not yell at her or otherwise be rude to her the rest of the day and that anytime I felt myself close to losing my temper with her and felt my harsh tongue to be moving out of check, I would simply wish her a happy birthday. I said “Happy Birthday” a hundred times or more in Los Angeles on October 19, 2023. There were other frustrations as well; when the first shuttle dropped us off to await another shuttle to the car rental, a crazy Asian kid wearing pajamas and clutching an open suitcase with a bunch of empty clothes hangers spilling out of it delayed us further by standing outside the minivan and peppering our driver with a barrage of questions he was unable to answer. Welcome to L.A...
Once I was behind the wheel of our Luxury Equinox- an appropriately witchy name for Halloweentime in haunted Los Angeles- I calmed down a great deal as we turned onto the ever-congested freeway and were finally making our way toward Hollywood Babylon. I had almost forgotten how much I love to drive in LA. no matter how bad traffic can get. People here actually know how to drive and they actually follow the rules of the road. They allow you to change lanes without rushing to cut you off, they don't tailgate or dash madly from lane to lane, and they seldom even toot their horns. This is in stark contrast to most places in Texas, which has the most aggressive, discourteous and dangerous drivers in the nation; and is rather ironic as Texans are forever blaming the influx of Californians for ruining their state, which is a stupid notion on countless levels. Los Angeles is possibly the most beautiful and endlessly fascinating city in these United States despite all the derision heaped upon it. I quickly found the great jazz station on the radio dial and settled happily into the groove of Highway 1 and cruised toward Tinseltown. It is one of life's rare pleasures to drive through Los Angeles on a warm Fall day listening to Chet Baker. The street names themselves act as magical talismans to conjure with and are the best street names in the world for my money, pure poetry and even better than the mystical and mysterious streets of New Orleans: La Cienega. Sepulveda. Fairfax. Wilshire. Sunset Boulevard. Hollywood and Vine. Mulholland Drive. Ventura. Rodeo Drive. Laurel Canyon. Van Nuys. Beverly Boulevard. San Vicente. Los Feliz. La Brea. The Santa Monica Freeway. Melrose. Cahuenga. Coldwater Canyon. Century Boulevard. Westwood. Venice. Crenshaw. Topanga Canyon. Alameda. Street names like a litany of Saints. The City of Angels with a host of demons, neon and other.
The problem of Distances: a strange phenomenon. Flying in and crashing into the smog bank, there was the majestic metropolis in all its glory below us; yet on and on we had flown, LAX seemed a million miles from Los Angeles proper. Then once the plane touched down it rolled across the tarmac for the better part of a half-hour, seemingly taking us ever further from the City of Dreams. The perception of Distance, the perplexity of Distance, the complexity of distance, the occult nature of Distance; these themes would emerge as a constant throughout the next few days in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and cartographic points between (the Distance of the Desert, a Distance not like any other). We certainly could have mapped our entire road trip based on the Distances between CVS drugstores, as Sherry insisted on hitting every one in the vicinity of our travels the next four days.
For now, the distance between LAX and Hollywood was accomplished in a blissful, trancelike jazz state and we soon arrived at our first destination: The Academy Museum, located at the intersection of Wilshire and Fairfax. Turns out it is adjacent to, and shares a parking garage with the Peterson Automotive Museum, which perhaps houses any number of stars’ fast cars, the racing machines of McQueen, Newman and the like. There were a couple of interesting vehicles exhibited in the actual parking garage, presumably to justify the $25 parking fee; one of these was some sort of electric big rig cab, very sleek and modern and likely an Elon Musk Tesla innovation. There were some classic Porsches lined up there as well. From the garage and auto museum, we crossed the street and approached a courtyard manned by a security guard as we looked for the entrance to Academy Museum. There was a café here with outdoor tables and further up the path was the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. According to the posted sentry, the café, called Fanny's, provided one of the entryways into the Academy Museum and was also the museum's only eatery. We were famished so we headed on into Fanny's, which was actually within the vast lobby of the museum itself. A beautiful young black girl with long blue hair and a nose ring greeted us at the hostess' station and killed us with kindness and compliments, remarking on how wonderful my outfit was. I was wearing a shabby second-hand black jacket and a Samhain ballcap. She was very flirty and obviously on the market in that distinctly Southern California manner that I for one really appreciate. When I used to visit my sister in LA and San Diego, I would always marvel at how nice and cool the people were and had I asked her why this was. She said it was due to simply living there; it was a wonderful place with a perfect climate and an enchanted culture and the people here were just, well, happy. Meanwhile, in the Texas I live in, supposedly the seat of Southern hospitality, I find my fellow citizens to be overwhelmingly small-minded, hostile, rude and aggressive. As Wendy later told me, even when Texans are at their most courteous, there is some great lie about it, a cringeworthy falseness, as if the whole routine is just an elaborate agreed-upon charade, a construct of social engineering. Of course, in the City of Angels there is another factor at play as well - Everyone here is on the make, looking for the big break, every social interaction quickly becomes a networking opportunity, every encounter fraught with the potential for self-betterment, a possible life-changing big ticket sweepstakes. We are all of us aspiring young starlets hoping to strike it rich at the Schwab's Drugstore on Sunset Boulevard. But there is a sense of genuine kindness and courtesy here that supersedes all the star-fucking; when I browsed the museum gift shop a few hours later, a passing clerk stopped and told me how great my shoes were; I explained he could get a pair on amazon for $25.
Our pleasant young hostess led us to a table in the big open sunlit space of Fanny's, a booth set-up that was surprisingly filthy with crumbs and the like. Most of the tables were taken and all the patrons seemed to be self-important industry types having business lunches. In an alcove in the rear, a large group of feminists planned the upcoming calendar for their microcinema group; one of them wore a Lizzie Borden T-shirt (the radical black filmmaker, not the axe murderer or hair metal band). A stunning French waitress came by our table and chatted us up and offered recommendations; I asked her where in France she was from and she laughed and said Paris and I said of course. We ordered a burger and fries and salad to split, which was quite delicious. The café was named for Vaudeville comedienne Fanny Brice, immortalized by Barbra Streisand in "Funny Girl" and in the open gallery upstairs was an array of photos and costume designs from the film, which Sherry went to check out while we waited on our food. There were already a number of strange Synchronicities and Serendipities piling up as soon as we arrived in Hollywood, which sherry decided we should be keeping track of; these will henceforth be denoted with “$:” throughout the current journal. To begin with, the name Fanny's had some significance to us: A few years back Sherry and I had run into an old acquaintance at a restaurant, and while he remembered my name, he misidentified Sherry as “Fanny” for some reason. Which I found pretty hilarious although Sherry did not (I had at the time also associated it with Ingmar Bergman's "Fanny and Alexander", a film I had recently fallen in love with and a work that is for the most part decidedly not funny). Since that time, I had frequently needled poor Sherry by calling her Fanny. Furthermore, we had recently watched a number of classic Barbra Streisand films at home together: "The Owl and the Pussycat", “What’s Up, Doc?”, "A Star is Born", "The Main Event”, etc. Then there was the music that played during our lunch: The Cure (Sherry's favorite band whom we had just gone to see in Austin); Talking Heads (on constant rotation in our home, along with Jonathan Demme’s amazing concert film "Stop Making Sense", the 4K restoration of which we had seen at the Alamo Drafthouse just a few days before our current trip) and U2 (not only another firm favorite that often provided the soundtrack for our life together, but their upcoming show at The Sphere in Las Vegas was the big centerpiece of the current going-out-west trip). In short, the playlist on the speakers at Fanny's seemed to have been lovingly curated just for us and on Sherry's birthday no less.
After more exceedingly pleasant interactions with the beaming museum staff, we made our way to one of the upper levels to take in the “John Waters: Pope of Trash” exhibit, the banners of which had hung from many a lantern post on our drive to the museum. $: It was indeed fortuitous that this particular exhibit happened to be on display when we visited, as Sherry and I have a particular bond when it comes to Waters, having seen many of his films together upon their initial release and having seen his live act countless times; we had even met him and hung out with him for a bit on two occasions. John Waters is definitely one of “our things.” Up on the third floor of the museum, a beautiful mural for the Waters exhibit took up most of a long wall, at the end of which was a kind of hidden blackened door like that of a seedy porno theater, through which to enter Dreamland as it were. The collection was carefully curated to highlight the sleaze auteur's two incongruous if inarguably prominent themes: Trash Cinema and the Catholicism of his Baltimore upbringing. To drive this unlikely communion (?) of ideas home from the outset, the first space was a mock-up of a small Catholic Church, complete with pews and stained glass windows of the Saints. In this case, St. Divine, St. Mink Stole, St. David Lochary and the like, the players from Waters’ acting troupe known as "The Dreamlanders." $: Here we were in the City of Dreams and the Dreamlanders of Baltimore were enshrined around us, while the very book I am recording these thoughts in was apparently intended to be a “Dream Journal.” And of course one of the windows was devoted to the Pope of Trash himself, St. John of the Waters.
Where the church altar would normally be was a movie screen showing clips that demonstrated the filmmaker’s curious intersection of Catholicism and Trash Culture. The other gallery spaces provided an immersive overview of Waters’ life and career. There were numerous posters spanning his entire oeuvre, including flyers for his early screenings in the basement of, you guessed it, his local Catholic church. A lot of the materials on display were arranged in a timeline that contextualized Waters within the 1960s underground culture that inspired him and the debt owed to iconoclastic pioneers like Kenneth anger, Jonas Mekas, the Kuchar Brothers, and William Burroughs (who apparently bestowed the honorary title "Pope of Trash" on Waters). A white trash trailer befitting the "Filthiest People in the World" provided another screening room for clips related to the controversy generated by "Pink Flamingos." Several spaces were devoted to costumes, and every piece of clothing Divine ever wore seemed to be on display, along with the leather biker jacket emblazoned with "Cry Baby" once worn by Johnny Depp. $: Much to our surprise, we discovered that Waters’ muse Divine was born on October 19, not only the very day we were touring the exhibit but also of course Sherry's own birthday!! It was all very strange.
Eventually we moved on from the awesome John Waters exhibit to check out the rest of the Museum. Above the elaborate stairwell hung one of the models for the shark Bruce from "Jaws," its sharp-toothed maw hideously agape and bathed in the supernatural Los Angeles sunlight that blanketed all due to the building's clear glass wall. There was a walkway on the third level that led onto a gorgeous rooftop plaza where some sort of evening event was being prepped, off in the smoggy distance the Hollywood sign overlooked all from atop Mount Lee. Back inside, we discovered another temporary exhibit, this one devoted to Pedro Almodovar, who perhaps uncoincidentally was an acolyte of John Waters early on; Pedro’s first films like "Dark Habits" and "Pepi, Luci, Bom" were basically exercises in bringing Waters' camp trash aesthetic into Franco fascist- and punk- era Spain. $: Coincidentally, Almodovar was another favorite director whose career Sherry and I had long followed together. Other than the usual if impressive collection of film posters, the Almodovar exhibit was more of a video art installation, but like the Waters gallery show it highlighted the director’s cinematic influences. Each two-sided video screen paired scenes from Almodovar’s films with works that inspired them and were also grouped by themes like Film Noir, Religious Education, Musicals, Melodrama, Mothers, Sex, etc. There were also devotionals to Almodovar’s great muses- Victoria Abril, Antonio Banderas, Penelope Cruz, Cecilia Roth, etc. Almodovar's damaged Catholicism and roots in camp trash cinema provided a savvy companion piece to the Waters exhibit we had just seen.
Next, we found ourselves entering an eerie, dark and cavernous space called “The Path to Cinema” which housed an absolutely incredible collection of pre-cinema appartus(es?), many of which were also demonstrated in little alcove peep shows that called to mind the nickelodeon/ boardwalk/ sideshow subcultural environment that provided the platform for the earliest practitioners of the moving image. These cinematic roots were fascinating to me and I always included a lot of this history in any film course I taught. Cinema came about through the oddest of conflations of "high" and "low" cultures. The very earliest "filmmakers" were a motley crew of both sideshow hucksters and scientists, and indeed, the movies remain somewhere beyond a science and an act of magic. As much at I knew about these devices like the zoetrope, various types of magic lanterns, the cinematograph, etc., to actually see these devices with my own eyes and see how they actually functioned was something of a religious experience for me. Plus, there were so many cinematic prototypes and so much history I knew nothing of. Incredible. One of the little screening alcove peepshows ran old Lumiere Brothers films, among the first pure documentaries from the turn of the last century, recording remote faraway places like Kiev. The motion picture, the great transporter, transformer, transfigurer, and trance-maker...
There were further spaces devoted to animation and special effects, models of my beloved Jiminy Cricket from Disney's “Pinocchio”, Harryhausen Claymation creations, props from Ridley Scott’s "Alien" and "Blade Runner" and Kubrick's "2001", the “Donnie Darko” rabbit-man get-up, and the miniature sets from Tim Burton's “Batman Returns.” Lots of Jim Henson's "Dark Crystal" characters, quite a few Orc heads, and a great deal of Arnold Schwarzenegger prosthetics. Los Angeles is a city of secret spaces, and this area of the Museum was very much in channel with that notion. It was darker and far more sprawling and vast than any of the other gallery spaces. The monsters and aliens were arranged in glass coffin-like enclaves that imbued them with a sort of half-life. The darkness of the space gave it a distinctly haunted-house atmosphere, with carefully placed spotlights creating a prism effect and a funhouse hall of mirrors when the encased grotesqueries were viewed from certain angles.
Finally we found our way back to the first floor and to the highly anticipated exhibit on Francis Ford Coppola's "Godfather" trilogy. While I am far from alone in considering "Godfathers” I and II as desert island films nor in re-watching them every two or so years, there seemed to be some synchronicity here as well. $: Just over a year ago, James Caan had passed away and, rather serendipitously, the Paramount Theater in Austin played "The Godfather" a few weeks later (it was on the summer repertory film Calendar long before Jimmy's passing). I insisted to Sherry that we go, as I was not entirely sure I had ever seen the original film on the big screen. A couple of months later, less than a year ago at the time of this writing, we were in New York for Halloween and went to see Al Pacino present "Dog Day Afternoon" and do a talk after. Anticipating this, Sherry and I had gone on a Pacino feeding frenzy and watched all his classic films, including “The Godfather Part II” (which might be better than the first film, although Brando and Caan were sorely missed) and the new cut of "Part III" (still so bad it's sad no matter how much Coppola continues to tweak the edit). So "The Godfather" films. were very much fresh on our radar, and getting to see the Museum’s collection of Corleone goodies seemed rather timely. A lot of the original costumes were on display (elsewhere, I glimpsed James Dean's tuxedo from "Giant"!) and there was a spot-on recreation of Don Corleone's darkened study with some of the original props. The original camera operated by the great Gordon Willis was enshrined in a glass pedestal and there was a rich variety of production materials from all 3 films; Several casts of Brando's face that now read as the great man's death masks. A screening room showed screen tests of actors auditioning for the first film in the earliest 1970s. Surprisingly, Robert DeNiro was turned down for a role and his name is misspelled on a casting call log; he would of course go on to play the young Vito Corleone in the sequel and would "share" an Oscar with Brando: They each received academy awards for portraying the same character. Richard Gere tested for the role of Sonny, which, with all respect to Jimmy Caan, I can totally see. Harvey Keitel could have done wonders with the part as well. Also included was the original severed horse head given as a bed-warmer to John Marley, this seemed to transfix a young Italian boy visiting the Museum with his family. As we left the museum, we passed a large video screen which scrolled assessments by notable filmmakers, actors and industry insiders on what the “Future of Cinema” might hold.
It was now late afternoon and we left the Academy Museum just in time for Los Angeles rush hour. I texted Wendy that we were running a bit behind schedule but that she could proceed to our hotel and hang out by the pool whenever she liked. Things were getting a little stressful again. Sherry had been obsessing endlessly about her need to get by a CVS to pick up some cosmetics and toiletries; she was so fixated on this imagined ideal of CVS that I got the feeling she was unable to even enjoy the Museum (which had been her idea); she just had to get to a CVS and she could think of little else until this happened. I had assured her throughout the day that the drugstores are practically on every corner in Hollywood, but she was convinced that I was determined to not take her to a CVS for some reason and she was really breathing down my neck. Then, as we made our way to the CVS a couple of blocks away in the creeping congestion of rush hour Hollywood, I received an ominous text from my supervisor-from-afar at the college: “Please check your email.” I of course assumed I was either being fired or was in some sort of trouble. As it turned out, I was being ordered by Gloria to fix some errors on my electronic timesheet and resubmit the damned thing even though she had had a number of days - four, in fact- to review my timesheet and get back to me before I left town. Apparently with my recent promotion I now had to account for any time I took of off or any hours missed in a crazy, convoluted manner. This current pay period went back to my Greenland/ Newfoundland /NYC trip and I had to go back through the span of my entire 2-week trip and add various absence codes to account for missing 40 hours of work: vacation time, unpaid leave, administrative absence, etc., etc. So this had to be corrected today and was a huge pain in the ass; no one hates working this kind of action on a phone more than I do. This was in fact utter bullshit in my opinion.
I pulled into the hurly burly hustle and bustle of LA after-work errand runners that was the Whole Foods Market and CVS parking lot and dropped Sherry off, then found a parking space to see what I could accomplish with this latest ACC emergency. As I was tap-tap-tapping away on my stupid outdated broke-ass phone, some parking lot attendant was lurking around nearby, seemingly recording license plates and writing tickets. I rolled down my window and told him my wife was inside the CVS and asked was I all right parked there. He was a middle-aged Mexican guy and he proceeded to do a kind of routine I gave up years ago and found insufferable and annoying, although he intended it to be humorous. The routine goes something like this: One man asks another man a question, a situation that immediately puts the asker of the question in a submissive role and confers a sense of authority figure onto the man who might have the answer. Rather then reply with some straightforward information and courtesy, the newfound authority figure instead stares blank-faced at the initial interrogator and displays a reluctance to answer the simple question. This is all performed in deadpan good fun mind you, but is also a kind of test as to how much bullshit one guy will take from another. The coup-de-grace is when the man in charge finally acknowledges that he in fact understands your query, then chuckles to let you know he's only messing with you good-naturedly. "Yeah (ha ha), you're fine for now, amigo." Hardy-farging-har, I really wasn't in the mood for it and gave him my gaze of fire as I rolled up the window muttering "Up yours, jack" and returned to trying to revise my errant time sheet on the phone. Soon enough we were on our way through the scenic streets of Hollywood to our digs for the night, the Magic Castle Hotel. Wendy texted that she was now running late herself due to a mysterious “costume malfunction”…
“Magic exists. In fact, it’s all that exists.” ~ Antonin Artaud
The Magic Castle Hotel had one of those “very LA” basement garages that are almost impossible to get in and out of, much less park in. After we checked in, I somehow managed to squeeze the Equinox into a space down below and then tried to help a woman and her kid maneuver their car out of the garage; I'm pretty sure I was more trouble than assistance but she smiled and thanked me just the same. Despite such parking hassles, the Castle Hotel was quite magical indeed. The lobby was open-air to the rear, offering the newly arrived road-weary guest a splendid view of the swimming pool with stairs ascending and descending to different hallways and rooms all around. It was pure seedy midcentury Hollywood grandeur; you could see Orson Welles, Cary Grant, and James Dean frozen in time hob-knobbing poolside; although now there were just a bunch of loud kids swimming while their their exhausted hollow-eyed parents looked on. The hotel certainly made an earnest attempt to justify its $250 a night room rate. There was a full self-service coffee bar with espresso and cappuccinos and all the soft drinks and candy you could eat (sadly or perhaps fortunately, neither Sherry nor I were big on name-brand candy and soda pop. I also wondered aloud how such a place could still exist; offering an endless delicious buffet of sugary junk food for kids struck me as highly "unwoke" and politically incorrect). There was even a 24-hour popsicle hotline by the pool where quests could order frozen fruity treats by phone to be delivered around the clock. In our second-story bungalow room, the hotel staff had left Sherry a bottle of Champagne for her birthday, very classy. While Sherry got ready, I finished up sorting out the timesheet situation for work then I got to thinking of things…
I remembered the first time I ever heard of John Waters. Back in junior high school, I subscribed to a magazine called "Fangoria" which was dedicated to then-contemporary horror films and monster culture. I read each issue cover to cover obsessively and dreamed of seeing the R-rated films discussed in the beautiful colorful pages of the glossy publication. "Fangoria" was the heir apparent to the "Famous Monsters of Filmland" periodicals of my earlier childhood and these smart little mags acted as my first film school. In one notable "Fangoria" issue was a comprehensive career overview of Mr. Waters and his work, and even though the well-written text drove home the point that the films were actually trashy comedies, I found the imagery absolutely terrifying, particularly some of the pictures of Divine with a mohawk from "Female Trouble", his/her face hideously pocked with what appeared to be burn scars. These images seemed to me to be from some horrid cinematic underworld and I imagined such films to be the sickest and most frightening movies ever made; they seemed not just psychotic and pornographic but something like snuff films. The pictures really disturbed me and it would be many more years before the earlier Waters films made it to our local mom and pop video store and by then I was old enough to be in on the trash-camp joke and found the films themselves funny as all hell. Interestingly, "Fangoria" also introduced me to The Cramps, a punkabilly shockabilly cocktail of a band that has always struck me as the sonic equivalent of a John Waters film. Lying on the bed of our Castle suite, I also meditated on my oh-so humorous psychic power struggle with the parking attendant at the crowded CVS an hour earlier and how I had had to restrain myself from leaping from the car and choking him out. Stupid. I vowed to be a kinder and less volatile individual and so I wished Sherry a cheery birthday for the umpteenth time. By now Wendy was running so late that we agreed to just meet her at the Magic Castle itself, and so dressed in our formal finery Sherry and I marched forth up the winding hill where the wonderland was lit up in all its magical glory.
Night had just fallen and the bell tower of a large cathedral jutted skyward in the distance while elsewhere strange towers of eclectic Los Angeles architecture were illuminated in the eerie but beautiful twilight. We were dressed to the 8's I'd say and I didn't foresee any issues as far as the strictly enforced formal dress code. The entrance to the Castle was thronged with valet parkers and fellow reservation holders. A big and tall middle-aged black cat who looked like he should be working the door at one of the city's jazz clubs circa 1955 ushered us in with a glance and a nod, meanwhile a young man nearby was yelling into his phone and telling a friend who was en route that he would not be admitted in tennis shoes but that he would work on finding a pair of dress shoes for him to borrow. On the other side of the patio entrance was a stack of old analog TV sets emitting strange occult hauntological channelings, like a 1970s Lou Reed stage show. Stepping past the grandeur of the gates and into the reception area, a kind of dark and spooky anteroom from the Victorian era with wood paneling and dusty faded colorful carpets and another stack of old TVs transmitting communiques from a past with an uncertain future, we checked in, paid $90 to access the inner sanctum, and were instructed to say the secret password - "Open Sesame" - at a hidden side door, whereupon we would be ushered within. It took a number of tries before the door finally slid open, perhaps the issue was my strange accent people often comment on. Inside, the place was packed and it seemed pointless to try and order drinks at what appeared to be the main bar downstairs, so we poked around the labyrinthine castle, moving up and down stairs and stumbling upon one secret hidden corner after another. With its baroque interior design, red velvet curtains, old moldy carpets, creaking stairways, strange artwork, portraits of magicians and secret passageways it was very much the Magic Castle I had expected, but the overcrowded, boisterous vibe of the place was a bit disappointing. Wendy had somewhat prepared me for this, having visited the Castle several times. Whereas I had envisioned a quiet atmosphere like a Victorian-era Explorer's club out of Jules Verne or Joseph Conrad with perhaps 3 or 4 guests surrounding a card table commanded by a single magician in semi-private chambers, she had explained that really the place was more in keeping with Disneyland. In fact, it was so crowded this Thursday night that it was difficult to see any of the wonders therein, whether magical or merely ornamental. We found another bar equally crowded on the second or third floor and squeezed in to order drinks. A trio of middle-aged women wondered aloud and loudly whether they should in fact have another; meanwhile the overtaxed bartender announced that his internet connection had gone down and that all drink orders and tabs were on hold. This did not sit well with the dapper older gentleman next to me, who protested that he really needed to close his tab and leave. We however had no tab to close and did leave, moving back downstairs to the main bar to await the arrival of Wendy. She arrived just as we were finally managing to place a drink order, wearing a fabulous oriental Dragon Lady dress and glancing around for us; I would have known her anywhere; it was Denton 1989 all over again. We moved into a little lounging alcove, a sort of snug, and Sherry assisted Wendy with her "costume malfunction", which turned out to be a collar that refused to stay buttoned.
We wandered about the place a bit more then proceeded to a supper room on the second floor where our table awaited for our rescheduled, now 8:00PM dinner reservation. I told Wendy that despite my initial misgivings, her changing the reservation time had actually worked out wonderfully, as all 3 of us had ended up running late. She and I split the chef's special, which was an absolutely delicious enormous slab of meat still on the bone, while Sherry went the healthy route with a fish dish and also ordered a signature cocktail that was served in a crystal skull. I told our overworked waitress, who sported a fez, that the last time I was here at the Magic Castle, I had ordered some mysterious elixir that had made me cough up a pair of dice; she had no idea whether or not I was joking. By the time we had eaten, we had precious little time for more exploring as we had been assigned a 10PM show in the Palace of Mystery, presumably the biggest of the Castle's performance spaces, a proper theater venue. Sherry and I found some seats near the stage while Wendy ran off to order us more booze. Soon, the show began, the main act being the team of The Shocker and Bizzaro. The Shocker was very much a heavy metal professional wrestler type, very “yelly” and in your face, while Bizzaro was a sort of strange mostly-mute voluptuary who called to mind the great actor Charles Laughton. Together and separately they performed a mind-blowing array of sleight-of- and practical magic tricks that astounded the capacity audience. An audience member selected a card from a deck proffered by the The Shocker then wrote on it before placing it back in the deck. The Shocker shuffled the deck some more then selected a card and demanded of the volunteer," Your card !?"? The Volunteer said no and suddenly Bizzaro emerged from the wings and knocked the Shocker unconscious with a metal trash can lid. When the fallen magician recovered, he spit out a mouthful of broken teeth followed by the card the volunteer had in fact selected and marked. Bizzaro transformed objects before our eyes and made them change colors in plain sight. The Shocker asked a woman near us to write something on a slip of paper, then peeled a tangerine to reveal the selfsame note deep within the fruit. The tricks and illusions come fast and furious, at times they unfolded so quickly that I for one couldn't keep up and lost the thread. For his final act, The Shocker explained how seeing Alice Cooper as a kid had started him on the path to magic, and as a loving tribute to his musical hero, he then proceeded to cut off his own head with a guillotine.
After the show, the Castle began to clear out a bit and we checked out the place further, so many little nooks and crannies and small theater spaces where charmers and tricksters worked their magic on intimate stages and in secret alcove corners. Now drinking in the downstairs bar again, none other than The Shocker and Bizzaro joined us and we had a fine chat with them. I asked them if they knew Zabrecky, the otherworldly and rather Warholian magician we had met recently in New Orleans at the Overlook Film Festival. I had become a bit obsessed with the weird illusionist and had even sought out and read his autobiography "Strange Cures", which turned out to be a brilliant piece of alternative LA history in addition to detailing Zabrecky's descent into drug addiction, the tragic death of his first wife, and his time spent almost but not quite becoming a pop star. Sherry and I had really hoped Zabrecky would be performing at the Magic Castle when we visited, and she had even written to him on social media to ask if he might be there on her birthday, but alas, he had responded politely, no. We talked to The Shocker and Bizzaro for quite a while, and I was struck by the former's resemblance to Nils Frykdahl, the strange and Carnivalesque genius behind Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and Faun Fables, two of my favorite musical performance acts. Then Wendy, Sherry and I stepped out to smoke and taste the night air and take in the Castle at night and the eerie nocturnae of the Hollywood skyline.
Back inside, we browsed the small gift shop, made a few purchases, and settled our not inconsiderable tab; I believe I ended up dropping close to $500 at the magic Castle. Whatever, it had been a special night and it was a grand time to visit the place; not only was it Halloweentime so the Castle was decked out all spooky for its "Supernatural Soiree", but this year also marked the institution’s 60th anniversary - it was founded by the Academy of Magical Arts back in 1963. As Wendy waited for us to finish up in the reception area, she struck up a "very LA" networking conversation with a hired photographer (there was a strict no- photography rule for guests however) which began with the usual "Do I know you? You look very familiar." "Do you know so and so?" "I used to work with such and such", etc. Then we went back in for another round of drinks and magic; for some reason Wendy's intonation of "Open Sesame" worked far better than ours had hours earlier.
I forgot to mention that there was a third man involved in the show at the Palace of Mystery, a crazy Cat named Brett Loudermilk who was quite entertaining. He wore a silvery showman suit with matching platform shoes and called to mind Alejandro Jodorowsky's singer son Adanowsky as well as the McDonald brothers from Redd Kross at their most retro-nostalgic. Loudermilk was a talented sword-swallower and a brilliant smartass who delighted in subtly insulting the audience; I enjoyed a bit of repartee with him myself during one part of his act, but have forgotten the specifics of our interaction. There had been many drinks.
Now, with the crowd greatly thinned out, we were invited to enjoy our fourth act of the evening as we passed through yet another barroom with only four or five other patrons. The magician known as Maximus Pes called out to us and personally invited us to join him for a series of mind-boggling card tricks; with his long grey hair and beard he was a proper wizard who might have been the body double for Dumbledore himself. $: There had been a number of synchronicities, syntheses and serendipities during our time at the Magic Castle, many of which Sherry brought to my attention. To begin with, the table we sat at for dinner was presided over by a portrait of none other then Cary Grant, probably Sherry's favorite actor next to Audrey Hepburn. At the big show in the Palace of Mystery we experienced a number of resonant coincidences. As we waited for the show to begin, the music of Oingo Boingo blared over the sound system; the last time we had visited Los Angeles, in 2019, we had attended on incredible reunion show by most of the band's members- sans Danny Elfman of course - at the Whiskey a Go Go on the Sunset Strip. Then there was a lot going on with The Shocker himself that set off a tumbling dice of meaningful associations: He wore a Luchador mask and with his loud gravelly carny barker voice and rock 'n' roll demeanor he also recalled the great American grapplers of the 1970s, particularly Michael Hays of the Freebirds, and he also had a latter-day Mickey Rourke vibe about him. So, all our mutual wrestling fan bases were covered. Then there was the whole Alice Cooper routine and The Shocker’s praise and imitation of my own childhood rock god hero, not to mention the fact that two years ago this very day I had taken Sherry to her first ever Alice Cooper concert for her 51st birthday! (every girl’s dream) The volunteer whom the Shocker pulled on stage was named Beverly, same as Sherry's mother. Then, when we were talking to the magicians in the bar after their show, the strange subject of the distancing effect in Las Vegas came up as it already had several times before in recent days and would again; how the huge hotels and casinos there appear to be just a short walk away but the more you move toward them the further they seem to recede away from you; definitely some kind of desert mirage. Finally, we left the Castle and drunkenly made our way back down the winding hill and back to our hotel room, where we all three had a champagne nightcap. Then I waited out front with Wendy until her ride arrived, whereupon Sherry and I had an early morning nocturnal swim in the pool and called the Popsicle Hotline. I floated on my back and gazed up at the beautiful spectral LosAngeles night. Pure bliss.
I hadn't emerged from the comfort of the Magic Castle Hotel's glorious swimming pool to crawl into bed until around 3AM and neither of us were moving at warp speed when the bright sunshine of morning awoke us. The night before, Wendy had instructed us to leave LA after 11:00 rather than earlier in order to avoid much of the Vegas-bound weekend traffic so we were in no hurry. We partook of the Continental breakfast at a poolside table and enjoyed the beautiful sunny weather. As is the way with the Magic Castle Hotel, there was mostly just sugary kids’ cereal on offer but I was able to mix some plain old corn flakes in with a little box of Frosted Flakes, along with a banana, toast, and a tiny container of milk.
As we chomped away, Sherry started up her well-worn choking routine, which occurs every third meal or so. Here's how it plays out: She inhales a bit of food, sometimes even a gulp of liquid, and it "goes down the wrong tube" as she describes it, causing her to cough like crazy. The most bizarre part is that rather than continuing to violently cough until her throat is cleared, she instead insists on continuing to eat in between coughs, as if that is going to help anything! I mean, taking a drink might be the smart play but no, she just puts more food in her mouth and tries to swallow it while coughing away like a 90-year-old chain smoker. It is pretty unbelievable really, although I have grown accustomed to it over the years. So on this particular morning, she is in full-on choke-to-death mode and putting more food in her mouth as I beg her to quit eating and have a drink of water, nodding to the concerned families around the pool to let them know she is okay and that this is just a preexistent condition. Suddenly, her eyes go wide and she is struggling to tell me something as she wheezes and rasps. Taking another bite of food, with what appears to be for all clinic purposes her final breath, she manages to whisper-croak to me, “They're doing magic over there…” Sure enough, at the table behind me, an illusionist who very much resembles the actor Robert Blake is plying his trade for a family of four. Once Sherry recovered her health, we strolled over and joined the fun and I told the magus it was her birthday weekend. He laid a number of crafty tricks on us, including making one of my rings disappear and some devilry with other steel rings, then I asked if he had any good rope tricks. He darted off and returned quickly to mystify us with some cords that suddenly shortened then elongated; he snipped them with scissors only to have them magically rejoin, the works; it was quite a performance.
Checking out at the reception desk, I thought to ask whether there would be any issues getting our car out of the security gate - you had to access the underground garage electronically with your room key, which I had just turned in - and was told there would be no problem. Of course, there was a problem and I had no way to get into the garage. And so, a bit disgruntled and hungover, I marched back up the stairs and asked how the hell I was expected to get my car exactly. The situation evidently required some “managerial intervention”, a supervisor was called and he walked back out with me, scanned a room key and let me into the garage. I asked if I would encounter any more obstacles activating the gate from the inside and he said no, it was automatic (for the people). He could not explain why the desk clerk seemed to think I could magically (?) open the gate. Anyway, all I had to do now was figure out how to maneuver the Equinox out of that impossibly cramped garage.
We loaded up then drove up the hill to have a last look at the Magic Castle and the skyline in the daylight, then hit the road. Leaving Hollywood, we passed the legendary Hollywood Bowl, skirted the wilderness of the Angeles Forest, and caught a gorgeous view of the fabled Forest Lawn Cemetery, final resting place of Walt Disney, Elizabeth Taylor, Lon Chaney, Michael Curtiz, Douglas Fairbanks, Dwight Frye, Alan Ladd, Vincent Minnelli, Lash LaRue, Victor MacLagen, Ida Lupino, The Marx Brothers, William Wyler, Mary Pickford, Dick Powell, and countless other stars who once shone so brightly on Planet Earth. I recalled the wonderful afternoon Sherry and I had shared together back in 2019 at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, visiting the graves of some of our most beloved fallen stars. Los Feliz Boulevard to Glendale Avenue then onto the 210 and the 15 north toward Las Vegas. I kept thinking there still seemed to be a lot of available real estate on the grassy slopes of Forest Lawn Memorial Park...
“The Desert, as all monks know, is home to strange beasts that cannot be explained by any science.” ~ Paul Kingsnorth
October 20, 2023
We were in the wilds of the Indian summer desert within an hour, Los Angeles with its palm trees and lakes a distant memory. It was a truly desolate and alien environment, another planet almost like Iceland or the Burren in County Clare, Ireland. The place was so very eerily familiar to me, as though I had traveled this winding dusty road many times before, but when had I been here? I've driven all around California numerous times, but never from LA to Vegas; never even been to Vegas, so how had I traveled this trail before? Some past life? Perhaps with my parents when I was a child? A very strange and unsettling feeling came over me as I drove and the environment became ever more apocalyptic and further from humanity. We were entering the desolate domain inhabited solely by speed freaks, bikers, parole-violating felons, methed-up long haul truckers, and assorted Badlanders and Desert Rats ensconced in creepy hideaways amid the dust and shrubs, rattlesnakes and scorpions. We lost the signal of Los Angeles's KJAZZ 88.1 by the time we pulled off the highway at a gas station that looked to be the last vestiges of civilization that we would see for some time. We bought some water then queued up for the single restroom in the back corner; a line of women were waiting as well as a single male tweaker with prison tattoos on his face and he was all a-jitter, moving about in jerky fast-motion. Despite all his frantic energy, the line did not appear to be moving at all and we decided we could hold it for a while and left the place, only to discover there was in fact a port-a-potty in the parking lot. About an hour later, now firmly in the No Man's Land of the California desert, the coffee and water had caught up with me and it was already time for another pit stop. Here in the Wasteland, exits are far and few between as there is nothing here to exit for. So if you should find yourself heading in the wrong direction you have to keep going 10 or even 15 miles more before coming across a turnabout or exit. I espied an exit just ahead and turned off onto a treacherous unpaved mountain road and drove up it aways. It was like we were the only people left on some God-forsaken overheated desert planet; I saw evidence of some of the last inhabitants, the remains of a t-shirt and a single lonely tennis shoe. Sherry joked that I'd driven her here to kill her and I told her to watch out for rattlesnakes as she walked around or she might indeed die here. Back on the road the harsh landscapes were punctuated by the eerie remnants of ghost towns here and there, some of the ruins had been repurposed as public art canvases, spray painted with startling colors that really popped out from the vast empty earth tones of the Badlands. There was a cut off to Bakersfield at some point and this charged my imagination with a sort of mythology of the place and thoughts of Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, Dwight Yoakam, The Grateful Dead, “The Girl with the Far Away Eyes”; a mysterious realm of bikers and honky-tonk roadhouses, of Philo Beddoe and “Right Turn” Clyde.
We moved further into the strange lunarscape of the Mojave Desert and despite there being nothing out here, there was actually always some bizarre point of interest. There is a ban on highway billboards in a lot of California; it is rare to see such advertising eyesores throughout the state and this welcome absence is nowhere more dramatic than in the timeless heart of the Mojave. “Public art”, however, definitely seems to be encouraged and we found ourselves passing a succession of rather modest roadway signs, each one inscribed with one of the Ten Commandments. Further down the road a revival tent stood forlorn and abandoned. A bit further still, I just happened to glimpse the strangest most incongruous site so far and one that catapulted me back to my 1970s childhood. $: It was another small billboard art-type sign on the side of the highway but this one inexplicably featured a picture of the Shah of Iran as well as the old Iranian national flag with the lion on it; some kind of memorial to my childhood home, iconography that had been ubiquitous throughout my upbringing in Tehran. Unfortunately, by the time I clocked this uncanny phenomenon we had already blown by it so it was impossible to view it properly and try to figure out what the hell a tribute to the Shah and the Iran of the 1970s - my 1970s- was doing here in the middle of an American desert. I made a note to check it out on the way back but ultimately was unable to find it again, nor was I able to discover anything about it online despite various keyword searches. Very odd indeed. Coming up on the town of Yermo just over halfway to Vegas was the strangest site yet, which I initially took to be a mirage or hallucination. There were a number of large objects scattered in a dusty field, including an armored military tank, various weird statuary forms, and an enormous head that could surely only be that of the horrifying S&M demon Pinhead from Clive Barker’s “Hellraiser” films. It was some kind of sprawling open-air art exhibit known as the Liberty Sculpture Park. It was very eerie, and I made a note to stop and check it out on the way back.
Just as the otherworldly apocalyptic art zone flashed by us, I clocked another oddity just ahead, what appeared to be a massive milkshake plopped down by a UFO presumably. “Look at that big-ass milkshake,” I said to Sherry. She protested that it wasn't a big-ass milkshake at all but rather was “some kind of construction thing.” I was soon vindicated when we pulled off to have a closer look; this was in fact Eddie World, one of countless American eateries boasting the best milkshakes in the world. Much to my surprise, Sherry evinced no desire to sample the fare at Eddie World and I remarked that the name of the joint would be perfect for an Iron Maiden theme park. She gave me a puzzled look and nodded. Practically next door to Eddie World was a big place called Peggy Sue's, which advertised itself is a “50s diner” and who can resist one of those? Sherry, apparently, even though our hotel continental breakfast had burned off some hours ago. So we motored on, passing more scattered ruins of ghost towns and surprisingly colorful repurposed structures abandoned to the scorching heat, brush, and haunted hills. We were in touch with Wendy a bit along the way and she had heartily recommended a place to eat called The Mad Greek, with great Mediterranean cuisine as well as a quirky, kitschy atmosphere with classical statuary and the like. Sherry was holding out for The Mad Greek and it sounded good to me, but as it turned out we had somehow passed it by when we blazed through the town of Baker. Sherry was beyond pissed off about this and was quite inconsolable; she accused me of being a technophobe who went out of my way to not use basic phone apps; I snapped back that at least I wasn't a slave to my gadget 24/7. We fumed over the situation for a while before exiting into a rest area.
It was a big rest stop, more of a public park really, and every traveler on the road seemed to have stopped there. I was thrilled to see what appeared to be a very colorful large taco truck set up near the parking lot. Turned out it was one of those Mexican fruit juice stands. I had been craving tacos all day, ever since passing no less than three Del Tacos during the first hour of the drive. What I was really craving was my lost childhood Paradise. Del Taco was a shitty fast food chain that only lasted a few years in Texas; it was better than Taco Bell but decidedly inferior to Taco Bueno. Del Taco put it's own personal spin on the traditional fast food Taco by placing a full thick tomato Slice on top of their tacos, which was actually kind of gross. Um, can I have my my tomato cut up, please? Anyways, California was the only place I knew of that still had Del Tacos and every time I am here I always intend to hit a Del Taco but never seem to do so. So I was caught in a vicious triad of 1) Melancholy nostalgia, 2) The desire to complete a long-term mission, and 3) Just jonesing for a taco in California, no matter the tomato treatment. I had also looked forward to grabbing some fresh California fruit along the way but for some reason all the little roadside stands, pickup trucks and pop-up farmers markets that you normally see everywhere within the vicinity of Los Angeles were nowhere to be found on this trip. There must have been some agriculture scare or disaster we were unaware of. The times were strange.
Here at the rest stop with no tacos, the sun was putting out serious heat, I could hear the hair on my arm sizzling. It seemed like we were in a nuclear blast site and that the air was radioactive; I've never quite had this particular feeling before. The strange leaden atmosphere had me recontextualizing the apocalyptic desertscapes we had been driving through, with the debris and remnants of some vanished civilization. I was spooked a bit. I knew for a fact that they did once test nuclear bombs here, this area was in fact a blast site, a ground zero. I was getting a bit depressed. Atomic city was one of Las Vegas's nicknames because of its proximity to the Mojave detonation sites. It's also the title of the new U2 single celebrating their residency at Las Vegas’ The Sphere, a show we would be attending in a few hours, God willing and there's no creek going to rise in these here parts, although you certainly might acquire radiation poisoning. I was studying the damaged and shriveled middle-aged skin on my arm and marveling at the ruination of the pigment when Sherry emerged from the restroom and I showed her how appalling the skin of my arm looked in the mutant blaze of the fiery nuclear sun. She agreed my arm was “very ashy” and said she would call me “Ash” from now on. And it wouldn't be because of my Bruce Campbell chin. It was pretty funny if not very encouraging.
A little further up the highway, off in the distance there was a brightly colored building with the word “EAT” painted in big letters on the front, so I exited quickly and headed up the hill toward it. Alas, it was a big tease; just another abandoned desert business repurposed as land art. We finally landed a bite to EAT at a roadside gas station/souvenir shop /restaurant called The Birdhouse. $: Of course, Sherry D. is known as “The Bird” for obvious reasons. This was pretty much the las-chance stop for anything before reaching Las Vegas and the place sold all manner of exotic jerky, alligator and the like, and featured an old west open air museum in front with ancient wagons and rusty mining tools. I ordered us a couple of spicy chicken sandwiches which were huge and delicious with some sort of cream sauce that was so viscous that when I tried to wipe up some that had dropped on the table it just spread around and made a huge oil spill and refused to be cleaned away. I used the men's room and was very confused by it; it was something of a theme park attraction with an ornate tile fountain taking up the space beside the stalls surrounded by synthetic tropical plants. I figured out this was just a highly decorative urinal; at least I used it as such, figuring if it wasn't in fact an elaborate Disneyesque pissoir then it would be a common enough mistake on my part. Sitting outside and waiting for Sherry, I gazed about at my fellow travelers; there was a lot of activity with people gassing up, working on cars, checking fluids, etc. What was strange is that there were a whole lot of punk rockers around in a wide variety of species - skate punks, rockabillies, even a couple of trans queercores. I decided that there was either a skate ramp nearby or that some underground SRL-type concert out in the desert was attracting the crowd, but I would only learn the real reason for the presence of all the punks once we arrived in Vegas. On our way once more, there were more strange sci-fi landscapes to behold; this was real UFO land here and somebody in some underground bunker nearby definitely knew where all the extraterrestrial bodies were buried.
There was some sort of possibly man-made mountain that had very neat very concentric lines carved into it, an alien landing site or a weird obscure piece of land art perhaps; more likely the site for some sinister governmental scientific experiment. Then most remarkable of all, strange bright lights off in the distance, glaring even in the broad daylight; they changed the appearance of the sands they stood in and transformed the Navajo colored mountain range beyond them. I eventually figured out that the place was some sort of massive solar power field and that the glaring lights were in fact enormous solar panels. Knowing this didn't make the phenomenon any less weird or the immense blazing panels any less threatening.
We got a big kick out of a billboard advertising a place called Terrible’s which promoted its “Clean Restrooms” despite the name, as we crossed over into Nevada. $: A remarkable coincidence: The image on the billboard for Terrible’s was almost an exact reproduction of one of Bizzarro's Acts at the Magic Castle the previous night. The strange magician had held up a table of sorts with a white tablecloth and peered over it at the audience a la “Kilroy was here,” and now here the image was repeated; the similarity was remarkable even down to the wide-brimmed hats worn by both the illusionist and the Terrible's outlaw mascot. Soon we were seeing huge casinos and hotels, amusement parks, and the first glittery vestiges of Atomic City, billboards for Penn and Teller and the like as we hit Vegas's rush hour traffic. Sherry actually spotted The Sphere as we crept through downtown; it was in the shadow of some phallic Trump Tower affair. She sent Wendy a photo of the situation which prompted a profane response from the latter. But Sherry then assured her that it was probably just another example of the weird space and distance effect of Las Vegas architecture, the Curious Mirage of Distance…
“Everything You Know is Wrong.” ~U2
After battling the fierce rush hour traffic in downtown Las Vegas, we exited for our first stop: the recently opened Punk Rock Museum. Although we were running a bit behind schedule- it was going on 4:00- we figured it was still probably not a very busy time to tour the place before the U2 show. Were we ever wrong. The Museum was an appropriately imposing huge black bunker of a building emblazoned with its name in puke green in the distinctive friz quadrata font of Black Flag and Bad Religion album covers. But far from appearing abandoned at this time of day, the parking lot was not only filled with punk rockers of every stripe. but there was even a sprawling pop-up market set up. A hired security guard directed us to a big parking lot on the next block, the home to a number of live-nude-girls bars and striptease joints, so we headed over there and parked. As we walked back towards the museum, I stopped a foursome of, to me, young punks in their 30s or early 40s and asked what all the fuss was about. They were very cool and friendly and explained that there was a huge punk rock festival in Vegas that weekend. I knew all about the annual Punk Rock Bowling and Music festival in Vegas, but this was a newer one called When We Were Young, headlined this year by Green Day, Blink 182 and the Offspring, bands I cared little for and hesitated to even call “Punk.” While I do love a number of latter-day punk acts- Chumbawumba, Dropkick Murphys, The Strokes, - the mainstreaming pop-punk of the 1990s never set well with me after the incredible innovations and transformations of the genre I had come of age with in the '80s. The 90s was mostly a shit time for music on all counts and the “Punk” acts the decade bred struck me as little more than cutesy bubblegum pop for teenagers with tattoos; soundtrack music for skateboarding events and frat parties. I dug it not, but I did respect this next generation of punks and I generally liked the smart buttoned-up way some of them looked. So we had a nice little chat with these boys and girls about the festival and the awesomeness of the Punk Rock Museum and they seemed to regard me, in my Flesheaters shirt and Samhain cap, as an elder statesman of sorts. Bidding the young turks adieu, we continued walking back toward the museum. Ah ha, this When We Were Young Fest explained the presence of all the young punks at The Birdhouse back in the desert. There were a lot of booths and vendors at the parking lot punk rock marketplace and everyone was drinking, smoking, talking, having fun while it lasted. The line to get into the museum stretched down the block, and checking the website we saw that the museum was booked well into the evening. We browsed the marketplace and Sherry scored a wonderful pair of little silver tumbling dice earrings. Green Day had their own stall and a cute punkette done up like a zombie- it was after all Halloween Time- ushered me over to it then proceeded to load me up with flyers, keychains, a zine-like brochure for the band's latest release and other swag; I did not have the heart to tell her I was no fan of Armstrong and Company. She said nothing but grunted at me several times; I could not discern whether she was a mute girl or if this was part of her zombie routine. The Punk Museum itself had a stall as well and I bought some buttons and stuff from the girls there and made some inquiries about getting into the museum. They said that because of the music festival, the museum was actually going to be open until the wee hours of the morning, so it looked like we could either come back that night after U2 or tomorrow morning before heading back to LA.
So now we headed toward our Airbnb off the Old Vegas Rat Pack Strip and stopped for gas at a sketchy convenience store where a motormouth speed freak chick working the register really chatted me up a mile-a-minute. Back out at the gas pumps, a weird Mexican man was cleaning my windows as Sherry looked on from the safety of the Equinox’s interior; I wasn't sure whether he was a homeless person or a full- service attendant. I got a buck or two from Sherry and gave it to him after I filled up. Our accommodations ended up being off of a street called Flamingo, $: as in John Waters’ “Pink Flamingos” no less. We pulled into an old slightly worn down working class apartment complex and located our host’s unit. She opened the door and appeared sleepy-eyed, saying she had been napping and that she had sent me a text a while earlier (which I had failed to see) providing me with the entry code to get in. For this I apologized and she said no worries, she needed to get ready for work anyway. Our host Mary was not at all what I expected. Her Airbnb photo made her appear to be some young Latina party girl but instead she was a middle-aged Asian lady, from either Indonesia or the Philippines. Her apartment or condo or whatever it was was decorated Catholic with a lot of crucifixes and religious art, but the prevailing motif was one of elephants: There were pictures and statues of pachyderms throughout the place, our bathroom even had an elephant shower curtain while our bedroom had an impressive collection of wooden statues throughout, some of which were exact replicas of my mother's own vast elephant collection. $: I immediately texted Mom: “Our room in Vegas has a full-on elephant theme. It's like you're here watching over us. Even some little wooden ones just like you have!.” The next morning when we left, I sent our host Mary a text thanking her for our lovely and comfortable room and letting her know “We love elephants.” She responded: “It was very lovely having you both. :) Glad you love elephants, gives you wealth and happiness. Stay safe and healthy! Earth blessed!” Mary was a classy and mystical lady.
We took a quick cat nap and then got dressed for the U2 show and called a rideshare. Our driver was a very sweet man named Lou no less, $: sharing the designation with both my older sibling and my great rock and roll hero Mister Reed, the 10th anniversary of whose death was exactly one week away. But our driver was not a Lou Reed type at all; he was a gentle and kind middle-aged man who was tuned into the local contemporary Christian radio station, remarkably fitting for the ride to see U2 I suppose. We talked a bit about what we knew of the band’s series of concerts at The Sphere and how they were guaranteed a million dollars a night and I remarked that “Despite his Christian faith, Bono is clearly not chasing the money-lenders from the temple!” I thought it was pretty witty but Lou said nothing and I worried that I might have offended my good Christian brother. Between songs on the radio, the DJ was responding to a message from a grieving woman who could not seem to cease mourning the passing of her husband of several decades and this seemed to cast a kind of pall over the exciting evening. As we sat completely stalled in downtown Vegas traffic, I ruminated that despite our own great love of almost a quarter of a century, Sherry and I were doomed to one day part and one of us would die first and the other would be left behind to get on however we could, with no children to help us through the long dark night. It was all too horrible. But a new emergency in hand jostled me out of my depressive ponderings: We were simply no longer moving toward our destination at all and sitting through one revolution of lights after another as the minutes ticked away. As Sherry and I each checked the navs on our phones repeatedly to find we were seemingly getting further and further away from The Sphere rather than closer, she was having a sort of anxiety attack was on the verge of tears as I assured her we would make it, not to worry. Finally we cleared one intersection only to arrive at another bumper to bumper standstill. We were now at least skirting the side of the massive Venetian Resort, which included The Sphere and which seemed to take up an entire square mile of Las Vegas real estate. According to our navs and Lou’s, we were still over a half mile from the venue and obviously getting nowhere and Sherry was dangerously suffering from the hypertension of it all, so we thanked Lou, jumped out of the car and continued toward The Sphere on foot at a speedy trot, moving through and past the crowds of pedestrians. My beloved wife would not miss the opening of the show even if I had to kill us both in order to make it happen...
I had a long and loving if often estranged history with U2 to be sure. The band had captured my imagination as a teenager in the early '80s with their stirring music videos for “I Will Follow” and “Gloria,” incredibly innovative and dramatic songs with an ethereal post-punk edge (!). They were foreign and exotic, like Old World poets from a strange and troubled punk rock land. Their third LP War was even more experimental and otherworldly than Boy and October and further cemented their haunted soundscape style and themes of religious faith, conflict, loss and love, as did the videos for songs like “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and the live concert EP documenting an American stop on their Warpath. Then came the majesty, the glory and sonic and poetic perfection of The Unforgettable Fire in 1984, the band's first collaboration with producer genius Brian Eno. This spellbinding, deeply spiritual, and gorgeously melancholy record hit me in a way precious few before had and it inadvertently provided a soundtrack of salvation for me while I was hospitalized my senior year. U2 was likely the first band that literally saved my life or at least helped me through a major health crisis. Along with London's The Clash, Belfast's Stiff Little Fingers, and Welsh cohorts The Alarm, we considered the early U2 to be “Peace Punks,” and their hopeful anthems and positive energy offset some of the angry nihilism of much of the punk and post-punk music I was enamored with at the time. Within weeks of being discharged from the hospital and returning to high school I went to see U2 on their Unforgettable Fire tour stop in Dallas at Reunion Arena, one of the great concerts of my young life. I went to the show with a whole gang of punk and New Wave friends, and one of them, John Hawkins, helped the crowd-surfing Bono back onto the stage at one point. John said Bono told him “Thank you, mate!” and that the saintly singer's breath smelled strongly of Irish whiskey.
After the the power and glory of their first four astonishing albums, U2 began to lose me. I found The Joshua Tree very disappointing and felt the band had lost its punk credibility and transformed into something of a mainstream radio pop band that betrayed their fiery punk roots. Their next album Rattle and Hum edged U2 firmly off my radar for a few years; I found the group’s Dylanesque Native American and old west trappings contrived, distinctly hippified, and rather distasteful. By the time Achtung Baby arrived in 1991 followed by their extravagant cutting edge Zoo TV tour, U2 was arguably the biggest pop group in the world and I deemed them traitors to the punk cause and tuned them out completely. Two decades later, I became enamored of U2 once again while studying media and culture in Ireland; my particular focus of study was the cultural revolution of Ireland's Punk era and I found my love and admiration for Bono and the lads blossoming anew and was transported back to the youthful joy and ardor I had experienced with their early works, The Unforgettable Fire tour, and their star-making turn on the worldwide broadcast of Live Aid the summer after high school graduation, a performance for the ages , mullets and all, which also signaled the group’s intention, along with that of Live Aid co-founder Bob Geldof, to be in lineage to the ancient Saints and charitable monks of Ireland. But even before that first Irish semester in 2002 the Unforgettable Fire had in fact been rekindled. By the time I joined the Navy in 1993, I was already deeply invested in Irish identity and culture, listening to The Pogues and the Clancy Brothers and compilation tapes from Green Linnet Records, reading James Joyce, attending local Celtic festivals, marveling over the early films of Jim Sheridan and Neil Jordan along with Irish-American gangster films like Miller’s Crossing, Ash Wednesday and State of Grace. U2 was always there on the periphery. While in the Navy I became obsessed with the song “Miss Sarajevo” and its haunting music video, a warzone dispatch that recalled the political yearnings and experimentation of classic U2. The song was from an album by The Passengers, which was simply U2 with Brian Eno, and it marked a sort of homecoming to the ethereal beauty of the group's Unforgettable Fire era.
When I returned for a second summer semester in Ireland in 2005, this time with Sherry, I learned that U2 would be playing a sold-out show at the mythical Croke Park Gaelic Games Stadium in Dublin, so Sherry, another classmate, and I made our way there to check out the scene. To our utter amazement, we hopped a few barricades and made our way down an alley where we had a perfect view of the entire show which was better than most of the seats inside the actual park. “Where the Streets Have No Name” was one of many transcendent moments and I had to admit then that The Joshua Tree was in fact a pretty badass album after all. That was the last time I had been blessed to see U2 live; however I did manage to score a highly overpriced ticket to Bono's last-minute stop in Austin at the Paramount Theater on November 10th, 2022. I was reading his newly published memoir Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story at the time and his lengthy broad-ranging discussion with moderator Brene Brown was very, very inspiring. $: I never imagined that less than a year later I'd be seeing U2 again at The Sphere in Las Vegas, much less that I would have driven through atomic blast zones to get there, apocalyptic desertscapes in close proximity to the Joshua Tree National Park itself, but also sand-blazed forlorn spaces that called to mind the eerie photos of their Unforgettable Fire album - the titular fire being that which eviscerated Hiroshima and which now also invoked the terrifying Liberty Sculpture Park in Yermo. The Band had also released a new single to commemorate their Vegas residency at The Sphere called “Atomic City” no less. It's a strange world of synchronicities for sure, especially in the sunstroke nuclear hallucination of the Mojave Desert.
Now, as we made our way on foot through the stalled automobiles and frantic pedestrians toward the awesome new Sphere, the mirage of nearness continued to play tricks with time and space; we seemed to be on a metaphysical treadmill going nowhere and drawing no closer to our destination. We were practically running while trying not to knock down and trample our much slower moving fellow concert goers. A woman shouted at us “You guys are dressed like VIPs! Can we come with you?” Then were finally inside the immensity of The Sphere, the multi-level lobbies of which were sheer spectacle in and of themselves, all color and lights and sprawling surreal chandeliers. What was strangest of all was the fact that we never showed our tickets to anyone, we just marched right into the vast venue. We had made it on time as I had sworn we would to the panic-stricken Sherry before we abandoned Lou’s car, but before we could ascend the escalator to the upper levels, I heard the music inside shift to the that of U2 and I feared that the show had started; however, this turned out to be part of the opening DJ set by DJ Pauly the PSN.
The Vegas residency concerts were being billed as U2:UV: Achtung Baby Live at The Sphere and the series was a rebooted self-tribute to the band’s groundbreaking Zoo TV tour of the early 90s in support of Achtung Baby. That tour was the innovative and extremely high-tech rock spectacle of its day and while Baby is far from my favorite U2 record, it was highly appropriate to align the shows at the cutting edge Sphere venue with those of the earlier sensory overload of the Zoo TV tour. In addition to playing the entirety of the album, the show was very much in keeping with the innovation and technology of their tour 30 years before, Zoo TV 2.0 if you will (Now that I think about it, I have attended a U2 concert approximately every 20 years: 1985, 2005, 2023. Which means that I will be around 76 years old next time I see them). While back in the early '90s I looked with disdain on the bloated pop star excess of the Zoo TV tour, it was the ground breaking high-tech rock and roll extravaganza of its decade and I have since come to regard Achtung Baby as a pretty solid album (along with The Joshua Tree and other more recent U2 works). Back in the Zoo TV days, the concerts would open with an extensive DJ set by BP Fallon, renaissance man and all around scenemaker of both the 1960s Swinging London and 1970s-80s Irish Punk era. Fallon would spin his records from inside a car which was lowered amid the audience then moved through the crowd, and as we finally found our seats- on the very highest back row of The Sphere but strategically centerstage - we found the same ritual being enacted by DJ Polly aka the Atomic MC from inside his own roving automobile.
The turntablist rocked a steady stream of blissful jams before the band took the stage: Bowie, The Clash, Irish punk, Krautrock, Beastie Boys, Vangelis soundtracks, post-punk classics and Madchester electro-industrial beats, and of course, suiting song to action, Gary Numan’s “Cars.” The sound was absolutely incredible, loud as war but not painful; clear clean pristine audio like I had never heard before. Meanwhile The sphere itself was awe-inspiring; the interior at this point appeared to be that of some otherworldly stone cathedral, from Alien or Dune perhaps, and it was impossible to tell whether it was actually constructed in such a manner or if this was some trickery of digital effects and lighting. The stage was in the form of a giant turntable, apparently an invention of Brian Eno.
Then the band sauntered casually on to the stage to dramatic effect and wild applause. Bono, sporting a Lou Reed-style leather jacket, was now spinning on the mammoth record player saying he's ready. So were we. A large rosary and crucifix hung around his neck as he slowly rotated, clutching his mic and belting out “Zoo Station.” It was the real thing, or even better than the real thing. The high vaulted wall behind the stage suddenly split asunder, blinding the audience with sunlight as dust fell from the rift, forming the shape of a cross. Things were getting spiritual and intense from the get-go.
The miracles of The Sphere did not cease. We were surrounded by a staggering panorama of Vegas-related imagery: iconic casino-hotel signs, showgirls, wedding chapels, etc.- all in jaw-dropping color palettes, better than the real thing and swirling and coalescing into a kind of intergalactic 3D collage that formed various Indian mandala-like mystical artworks composed of not only the Vegas motifs, but also the likes of Marilyn Monroe and Gene Kelly as a sailor in On the Town; images from the films of David Lynch; thousands of brightly colored moving pictures constantly morphing into others including live feeds of the band on stage encased in floating bubbles; it was like some ecstatic vision undergone at the feet of a powerful mystical Guru.
The overarching theme here was Elvis Presley and every iteration of the King was represented - including Nicholas Cage in Lynch's Wild at Heart - until what appeared to be a mammoth Granite bust of the rockabilly cat seemed to float in space at some distant point before hovering toward the back of the arena and moving over the audience to disappear from sight. It very much reminded me of the strange spacecraft head in John Boorman’s film Zardoz and was an epic early moment in the U2 UV experience. Bono proclaimed The Sphere to be an “Elvis Chapel” but more like “a cathedral” as he broke into abbreviated renditions of both “Love Me Tender” and “My Way,” giving the latter the Sid Vicious rather than Presley or Sinatra treatment.
When The Sphere wasn't altering everyone's consciousness to such a dramatic degree, the band were simply projected as they played, but they appeared absolutely enormous, giving the entire audience a rare perspective better than any front row seats. Indeed, while Sherry and I were high up in the very back row it seemed like we had the best seats in the house and it looked like being on the floor would actually have been something of a drag and a far less immersive experience; in fact the stage was so high there seemed to be no point in being on the floor since it would be difficult to actually see the band from there and you would miss a lot of the magic happening on the dome of The Sphere.
It was often difficult to tell whether the objects floating through space were actual or digital; it was dizzying. At one point, streams of data code flickered around us everywhere as if we were stuck inside some Matrix-style hard drive. The first half of the show grew ever more transcendental and beautiful, dreamlike. Suddenly we were transported out of doors and back into the nuclear sunlight of the desert again; $: an enormously tall flagpole stood before us, but rather than a banner waving atop the pole there was instead a weird emission of smoke and steam that floated into the blue sky as it was immediately replenished, it was a kind of surreal mirroring of the apocalyptic yet somehow hopeful radical artwork we had passed at the Liberty Sculpture Park. Bono spoke of the beauty of American landscapes and the wonder of passing through them, asking the audience “Who doesn't love a road trip?” I pointed to Sherry.
The singer then declared that having performed side one of the album, it was now time to “take the Achtung Baby off the turntable,” and that the band would now play a selection of songs from Rattle and Hum, the album that really lost me and led to me to turn completely away from U2 for a number of years. Still, it was great to see the band play a stripped-down near acoustic set without all the consciousness-expanding bells and whistles of the UV multimedia spectacle. Bono then introduced the group, saying of bassist Adam Clayton (ever the coolest member of U2 in my opinion, and still looks and acts like the slickest guy in the Clash), “At a U2 show, we notice the bass player!” Next, the charismatic front man honored The Edge, who was adorned in black leather and studs like the true rock god he is: "In a town full of magicians, he is more of an alchemist, turning our shite into gold!" Probably the only major disappointment of the show was that it wasn't the full U2 line-up, drummer Larry Mullen Junior was supposedly undergoing medical treatment for percussionist-related wear and tear (oddly enough, when I last saw U2 in Ireland, Larry was the one member of the group who I could not see from my alleyway vantage point, so I guess I only have really seen him pound the skins on the Unforgettable Fire tour back in high school). Bono introduced Mullen's replacement, Brom van Berg from some Dutch band called Krezip I had never heard of. Bono declared that Bram had "both the confidence and the humility" to sit at Larry's drumkit, then scolded him for being "very confident." Bram gave a shout out to his own bandmates who were in the audience that night and Bono promised to return the drummer to his band, although he couldn't promise what shape he would be in. I got the feeling that a lot of Bono's banter was heavily scripted and rehearsed, but the elaborate mind-blowing technology had to flow on a strict timeline I would imagine, so the band's performance had to be timed to the millisecond, there was no room for improvisation or taking one's time for a digression. This was a heavily choreographed techno-epic Broadway show in a way (similar in spirit to David Byrne's recent American Utopia shows). Plus, it was a proper Vegas residency, like when Sinatra and Martin used to throw out the same zingers night after night.
Continuing the quasi-unplugged and intimate mini-set, Bono talked of "the Three Kings of Memphis": Elvis Presley (again), Martin Luther King, and B. B. King, who actually made his home in Las Vegas. Bono launched into B.B.’s “Love Comes to Town” then asked the audience, "Shall we wake the Baby up?" before laying it all out with "So Cruel", one of the most beautiful and haunting airs ever recorded in my opinion. I have to say again, I have never heard such wonderful live acoustics in my life, it was something like hearing music for the first time. After the remainder of Achtung Baby was performed, U2 rocked The Sphere further, blasting out the searing Edge-driven postpunk of "Vertigo" and "Where the Streets Have No Name." Then came the gorgeous "With or Without you", accompanied by another ethereal Sphere moment, a swirl of images, all of vanishing or extinct animal life moving around the dome and transforming one into another; it had the quality of one of Stan Brakhage's experimental films or perhaps the feeling you were seeing it all through some huge telescope. It was intense. Spiritual. Very emotional.
This U2 UV production at The Sphere was state of the art, art with a capital A. This was the beginning of a new age of epic spectacle, this was the post-postmodern digital circus, the greatest technological show on Earth. U2 has made of this Sphere something truly consciousness- altering, perhaps even permanently so like a strong hallucinogenic trip. But beyond the psychedelic experience, this was something holy, a ceremonial prayer, a call for world peace and transcendence, a Blakean religious experience, an Elvis cathedral indeed, a "church of Song" as Bono also called it," a palace of music." An ecstatic vision. Sherry and I both actually wept a bit at a point near the end of the show, we were overcome by the majesty of what we were seeing and hearing, the unrelenting beauty we were experiencing.
There was a moment when we traveled backward in time as all the buildings in downtown Las Vegas were removed from the skyline in reverse order of when they were built, ultimately leaving a pristine humanity-free desert. In some other band's hands, The Sphere’s awesome multimedia potential might have been pure spectacle without substance, but in the warm embrace of the almost-four Irish do-gooder secular saints (two Prods and two Catholics no less), it was nothing less than a ritual of healing after some long and difficult years.
It was insanely crowded and even a bit rough trying to out of this Sphere after the show. We eventually made our way back onto the street and tried to get through the crowds and stalled traffic. I bought a bootleg concert shirt from an African-American entrepreneur, and Sherry and I stopped several times to gape back at the illuminated dome of The Sphere, alive and pulsing with transforming images from and relating to the U2 UV residency, the most startling of which was the Achtung Baby itself, which seemed to be sleeping in the womb of the Sphere, a visitation from the Starchild in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. We were simply trying to get clear of the crowd now and had no idea where we going as we crossed Venetian bridges and streets of traffic jams and people jams, Vegas on a Friday night.
I was thinking that if some heavy metal band created a Sphere show, it might conceivably be so overwhelming and mind-melting as to freak the audience out for life, a practical act of black magic, some evil trip you could not come back from. I heard The Sphere wants the Eagles next. The Eagles? What the hell the Eagles gonna do with a damn Sphere, son? Let’s just turn the Baby over again, shall we? There can be only one Unforgettable Fire.
What a perfect piece to relive such a wonderful trip. Every time I think of the Sphere and that show I get goose bumps. I think driving from hectic L.A.through the desert was the perfect way to start our Vegas adventure. It was a great way to ease into sensory overload. You’ve captured it all in your poetic words.