ABOUT THIS BOOK

On the Las Vegas Strip, blockbuster casinos burst out of the desert, billboards promise "hot babes," actual hot babes proffer complimentary drinks, and a million happy slot machines ring day and night. It’s loud and excessive, but, as the Project on Vegas demonstrates, the Strip is not a world apart. Combining written critique with more than one hundred photographs by Karen Klugman, Strip Cultures examines the politics of food and water, art and spectacle, entertainment and branding, body and sensory experience. In confronting the ordinary on America’s most famous four-mile stretch of pavement, the authors reveal how the Strip concentrates and magnifies the basic truths and practices of American culture where consumerism is the stuff of life, digital surveillance annuls the right to privacy, and nature—all but destroyed—is refashioned as an element of decor.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

The members of the Project on Vegas are Stacy M. Jameson, Instructor of Film/Media at the University of Rhode Island; Karen Klugman, photographer and Chair of the Art Department at the Hopkins School in New Haven, Connecticut; Jane Kuenz, Associate Professor of English at the University of Southern Maine; and Susan Willis, Associate Professor of Literature at Duke University.

REVIEWS

"[T]he chapter on surveillance and 'security aesthetics' is downright chilling. This study may not expose all of Las Vegas’s secrets, but it still feels like someone pulling back the curtain for a peek at the Wizard."

-- Publishers Weekly

"Strip Cultures explores all aspects of Vegas from the perspectives of art, photography and the visual, from the sensory experience to nature and technology, and brand and image. Every facet goes under the microscope, which makes for diverting reading in itself – viewing this city, its culture and its bizarre mix of inhabitants for the sheer theatre it is."

-- Sam Marsden Jackpot.co.uk

"[A] book of often startling richness and complexity, often very finely written. ...Strip Cultures is an admirably even-handed and non-judgemental account, for the most part, of a city whose openness allows its authors to experience it in some new ways. But as they make clear, it’s also a city whose pleasures come at a human cost. Without hectoring or harangue, but instead by steady accumulation of data and anecdote, that is the disturbing conclusion this book leaves."

-- Richard J. Williams Times Higher Education

"This book is an excellent travelogue with pictures and commentary of the experience that is Las Vegas and American culture."

-- Brad Eden Journal of American Culture

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction. Riding the Deuce 1

1. Framing Las Vegas "Reality" 23

2. Playing the Penny Slots 50

3. S.I.N. City 70

4. sH2Ow 110

5. Bread and Circuses 134

6. The Whole World on a Plate 160

7. Gaming the Senses 184

8. Nature in Vegas: Cultivating the Brand 215

9. The Shipping Container Capital of the World 243

10. Ghosts of Weddings Past, Present, and Yet to Come 290

11. Memories: Made in China 322

Epilogue. Sucker Bet 338

Bibliography 359

Index 367

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