Bruce Bégout

It's worse than I had thought: Not just cheesy has-been singers performing for huge adulatory audiences, not just zombies sitting for hours at the slot machines, but a street whose length is arcaded with neon lights; a roof-top sprinkler that sprays pedestrians reduced to a 'floppy relaxation' by the night time heat; crowds gathering to watch an unconvincing phoney volcano that erupts every 15 minutes. Begout has a lot to say about Las Vegas. He's sometimes scathing, but the tone is overall one of thoughtfulness and the content is always thought-provoking. The book is a series of essays or meditations (some chapters are 'The Transfiguration of Banality', 'The Conspiracy of Chance,' and 'Offerings to the Fun God') that I suspect I'll be dipping into often.

Like the other Topographics books I've read this one is pretty much unclassifiable. Like the others it's a very personal take on a place and wanders here and there rather than travelling from A to B--and is all the better for that.

Begout sometimes over-generalises to the point of unfairness--how can he possibly know what all those passers-by are thinking, or how they passed the bus journey to the city?--and reaches some conclusions that are arguable: The appeal of gambling may indeed as he says lie in that moment of 'pure possibility' before the outcome is known, but does it follow that the secondary goal is to lose? But it scarcely matters, and he makes excellent points about fun and the spectacle. 'Fun' here is the puerile as opposed to the youthful, the fleeting thrill that leaves no trace as opposed to recreation, which heightens vitality. In Las Vegas, one can have all the fun one desires because all desires are fulfilled there. Because these desires are surveilled, as it were, they are controlled and the spectacle of fun is all one does desire even while it sucks out the essence of and replaces real life. Begout's solution: High-tail it outta that place, boy, while you still can.

One other thing about Reaktion publications--the books themselves are often very nice things, with end-flaps, thick pages, and a good feel. And this one has many gorgeous photographs of the grotesque.For me, it would be well worth buying Zeropolis new rather than slightly battered.… (lisätietoja)

This author’s project (“Our goal is to completely anatomize the motel . . . .”) strikes me as quaint, as if his choice of the American motel as a site of investigation is already passé, its burden of cultural significance already drained of interest. I had to look twice at the original publication date, surprised that is was 2003 and not 1973 or 1983. Generally, I am intrigued by the perspective of European and other non-American writers/ filmmakers, etc. on the American landscape and mores. For example, Philippe Labro’s 1986 novel, L’étudiant étranger and Percy Adlon’s 1987 film, Bagdad Café. However,what more can a European say about an American cultural/ architectural/ economic icon, such as the motel? Although the author mentions the chain motel, at first he seems to be talking solely about a motel out of a Hopper painting, independent, individual yet devoid of individuality, all significance summed up in its sign and in its desolate yet disconnected location. He seems to conflate the pre-1960s motel, and the Motor Inn, the Hideaway with Howard Johnson’s, until quite late in his discussion (Chapter 9) when he notes the demise of the “the old family motel” that “would progressively give way to hotel chains.” Interestingly he never comments on the socio-economic phenomenon of ethnic franchisees. So many motels are now owned or managed by Indian immigrants
The Motor Inn and the classic motel, to a certain extent, share elements of blandness, anomie, nondescript and reiterated architecture and decor. However, those older motels, isolated on back roads and less-traveled highways, have now taken on an aura of nostalgia, distinctiveness of location, and personality just from having been in the same place so long.
Some of the author’s observations are interesting (for example, "Register’s paintings are not still lives. Rather, they belong to what we might call the genre of still culture" and "The hotel has turned into a supermarket of sleep."), while many of his generalizations overreach(for example, his contrasting of the 19th and early 20th century flâneur and the contemporary “wanderer’ or his characterization of the mass killer as “a part of our mass consumer and communication society”). There is also, I think, a certain maleness to his vision. When he analyzes the motives of those who stay in motels, I don’t picture any female travelers.
Perhaps, finally, the author simply doesn't make the sale, doesn't convince me that the American motel is "a determinant part in all the most erratic and provisional aspects of day-to-day life in the West."
… (lisätietoja)