The Bellagio Story:

Just before New Year's last year after camping and painting in Death Valley and being almost totally non-commercial...visiting places like Mc Girk's cabin, a free place where visitors care for and maintain the place with experiences recorded in most interesting log book...

many miles from any habitation...

I went to pick up one of my artist friends at the Las Vegas Airport. It is about a two-hour drive from Death Valley. The transition from the open primordial desert to the urban landscape is abrupt. Suddenly you are surrounded by orthogonal and other straight-line sharp edge structures in a crowed economic money-grubbing jungle that overwhelms and deadens the highly tuned senses of the plein air painter. Activity, noise, extravagant visuals and exhaust complicate the complexity of driving with urgent rushing swishing and sometimes swerving vehicles crowed together ...

a yellow jacket nest entrance...

through freeways, one way streets...

mazes cued by signals, signs and eye whopping interruptions (attractions?). After such maniacal navigation I finally find a proper place for my truck in the right area of the airport parking lot and turn off the engine almost overcome by the sensation of tension diminishing the body. Whewwwwwwww...

A few deep breathes...

On time, actually early, to meet my friend. A glance finds a parking meter appearing with dutiful confrontation through the windshield of the Ford Ranger Sport Pickup...

A quarter for fifteen minutes...

Three hours equals 12 quarters...

Scrounging around my truck...

pockets...

parking cache...

I come up with seven quarters, (four of which had been repeatedly fondled in my pocket with jackpot visions attached...

five short of the expected interval to return...

so after looking around, the concrete layered garage...

a sandwich that hopely bites with you not biting back...

I find a change machine and appease the duty calling...

engaging the ticking iron parking sentinel. Whiggy, crazy, arbitrary...

pervasive modalities of being demanding an appropriate response that is not always easy to figure out even for a traveled, problem solving, urbane savvy 62 year old who has spent most of his live living in the S.F. Bay Area...

go with the flow and everything will be alright...?

Are we in the Matrix?...

Reminding self to go numb to the claws of urban American Civilization at the turn of the millennium...

Don't get crazed...

be cool...

run the maze with like a rat and if you wear a smile on your face...

Why not...

are we not responsible for our responses and perceptions...

some one may even think their is a glimmer of intelligence in a smile and twinkle in the eye...

aw nuts...

get on with Meeting your friend at the airport gate...

Yes she is there on time and its good to exchange smiles and hugs...

And so the machinations of airport life conclude leaving the patient sentinel with 37 minutes extra time...

God if I had only used those two extra quarters in the one armed bandit who knows my fate...

My friend a travel agent convinces us to go to Belagio...

the new Venetian, Florentine, Tuscanesque Las Vegas (what happened to the cattle?) wonder replete with an expansive lagoon...

tracking floating almost authentic looking gondolas...

surrounded by colossal antiqued columns and walls hued to look weathered and old designed to look much more impressive and massive. My friend Bud Moore, a hot shot building crane trouble shooter who had been called to Las Vegas many times helping to keep the building boom abloom, told me on a Hat Creek fishing trip...

The facades of the buildings in Las Vegas are mostly made of Styrofoam...

does that stuff really effect the atmosphere...

Employing brilliant finishers to create fantastic forms...

roaring lions, cascading waterfalls, Twenty-foot hotdogs and with movie set splendor...

Well anyway...

after finding the right parking entrance...

Parking this time free with a contingency waiting...

An elevator door transforms space from the stark cemented geometry vehicular designed ...

into Italinate opulence with the ding of a closing door...