Story for performance #726
webcast from Paris at 09:56PM, 16 Jun 07

I reach back and give him my phone, so he can listen to ‘Ooh Las Vegas’. I remind him that it’s the greatest song ever written about a city. Pure hyperbole, but he takes the phone and listens.

I can hear the chords from my seat, and hope that they’re not going to seem completely gawky. I haven’t got a full sense of what he listens to, but it occurs to me just then that Gram Parsons and his twangy chords will not make all that much sense. He looks at the phone and scrolls down the track listing. ‘In my hour of darkness’ is next, and I don’t want him to hear it; the harmonies of that duet won’t make any sense at all.

John twists his face and brow in a performance of complete disapproval. ‘Dude, this is shit.’ ‘Hey’, I say, in a performance of being offended. It’s not entirely performed, because I do think this is one of the great songs about a city, one that we are soon to hit.

I have been there before, for all of 36 hours, and I spent a lot of that time reading Larry McMurtry’s Desert Rose and listening to Gram Parsons in our hotel room, mainly because it was scorchingly hot outside. But it was long enough to have given me a certain confidence that I was going to get off the plane and lead like I really knew what I was doing.

John clearly doesn’t get ‘Ooh Las Vegas’. He awkwardly plays with the phone, and it’s pretty clear he’s now only listening to the song to save offending the ‘old guy’. But he is playing with my phone in a funny way all the same. Running his thumb up and down its side, as he looks across the aisle to Chris and Karen. He’s still nervous about being taken aside before boarding the plane, as I think we all are. If he was a relative or a friend I’d hug him, or hold his hand, or something like that.

The chords fade off and he looks back and takes the earphones from his ears. He gives me back the phone. I am a bit embarrassed and look into the back of the next seat, listening to ‘In my hour of darkness’. There’s no point closing my eyes because we’ve just started descending, so I just listen and stare and think about what a short flight this is. I wish we had caught a bus, since we are missing out on the effect of travelling through the desert landscape and hitting the city.

I can hear Karen saying something to Chris about the city as she points out her window. She has just read Venturi, and is more excited than any of us about this part of our trip. I hear the word ‘Luxor’, which must be perceptible from her side of the plane. I can’t see it, but I can see the suburbs.

John leans forward and he starts telling me about crystals he once found washed up at the beach at Point Lonsdale. I wonder if he’s been thinking about Gram Parsons’ description of Las Vegas’ ‘Crystal City’, and can’t wait to take him down into those airless, mirrored gaming rooms. It’s a perfect description of those spaces. It’s like being inside a crystal.

I can see the pyramid of the Luxor now, and point it out to John. One side of it is made pure white by the sun. John asks me about the casino. ‘It’s not one of my favourites. The pyramid is great, but there are much better places on the Strip. When I was here last, the Aladdin and Paris Paris were the really extraordinary places. But the thing about Las Vegas is that everything moves really quickly. Visual effects become obsolete so quickly here, so the casinos are constantly upping the ante and becoming more and more fantastic.’

It looks hot outside. ‘There is this passageway through the Aladdin that is constructed like a Middle Eastern port town. You walk down streets lined with stores dressed as buildings that evoke everything between Morocco and India, behind which you can hear conversations in Arabic. Every hour or so a thunder storm hits the port, and the smell of rain mixes with incense and other spices. The concave roof, which is the most extraordinary trompe l’oeil I have ever seen, lights up in places as if hit by lightening. And then a wave of port-town aroma hits you, and you are on the Arabian Sea.’

‘Wow, fantasies of home’, John wags, as he sits back into his seat. John’s father was Egyptian and his mother is Iranian, and so I laugh.

The plane has now circled around the pyramid and is approaching the runway. A haze covers the entire city, parts of which now seem to be moving and flashing as if to catch our attention from the plane. I can’t wait to be in it again.

Adapted for performance by Barbara Campbell from a story by Shaune Lakin.