Goodbye To All That
Goodbye to all that
I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later — because I did not belong there, did not come from there — but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month. […] All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom windows, because I had some idea that the gold light would make me feel better, but I did not bother to weight the curtains correctly and all that summer the long panels of transparent golden silk would blow out the windows and get tangled and drenched in the afternoon thunderstorms. That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it. […] All I know is that it was very bad when I was twenty-eight. Everything that was said to me I seemed to have heard before, and I could no longer listen. I could no longer sit in little bars near Grand Central and listen to someone complaining of his wife’s inability to cope with the help while he missed another train to Connecticut. I no longer had any interest in hearing about the advances other people had received from their publishers, about plays which were having second-act trouble in Philadelphia, or about people I would like very much if only I would come out and meet them. I had already met them, always. Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1969, Joan Didion.
More Posts from Slim-k-d and Others
Social scientists spent almost a decade observing MAGA, trying to figure out what makes them follow the Orange Pus Knot. In the end they finally conceded that the answer presented itself vividly and without question.
Howard Johnson Hotel – Spring '74. The hotel at 115 E. Tropicana Ave, Las Vegas, has had nine names since opening in 1973.
Timeline
'73: Howard Johnson Motor Lodge Hotel. Corrao Construction began the work in Fall '72. Oesterle Nevada Corp opened the 340-room hotel in Fall '73. Partners include Sala & Ruthe Realty and Harley Harmon. (Ground breaking for new Howard Johnson's held. Review-Journal, 9/10/72)
'75: Paradise Hotel & Casino. New sign was built in '76.
'77: 20th Century Hotel & Casino.
'79: The Treasury Hotel & Casino. Operated by Herb Pastor.
'82: The Treasury bought by O'Donnel & Philbin, closed in Jul.
'85: Pacifica Hotel, opens without a casino in Jul. serving gay customers. Pacific uses a stripped-down version of the Treasury sign.
'85: Polynesian Hotel, in Oct. “Officials of the Pacifica Resort near the Las Vegas Strip recently announced the name of the hotel is being changed to the Polynesian Hotel in order to divorce itself from gay clientele” - Reno Gazette Journal, 10/8/85. Polynesian closes Oct. ’86.
'89: Hotel San Remo. Operated by Sukeaki Izumi.
'91: Second tower addition.
2006: Hooters Hotel & Casino
2019: Oyo Hotel & Casino.
'72 – Rendering of Howard Johnson Motor Lodge Hotel
'74 – Lounge at the Howard Johnson’s Hotel. Classiclasvegas
'75 – Paradise Hotel & Casino. Construction of a new sign is seen in this photo taken 1/15/76.
'77 – 20th Century Hotel & Casino
'79 – The Treasury Hotel. The sign was built out to this size, with various showgirl statues on the sign and around the parking area, by YESCO. Classiclasvegas
'85 – Reporters covering the opening of Pacific Hotel. Images from Tom Hawley’s Video Vault at News 3.
'85 – Polynesian. New sign by YESCO.
After all, good old Xi said he might consider not sending the US all the components they are so heavily dependent on anymore… so…
Kate Chopin, from The Awakening
To ravish
It is easy to make light of this kind of “writing,” and I mention it specifically because I do not make light of it all: it was at Vogue that I learned a kind of ease with words (as well as with people who hung Stellas in their kitchens and went to Mexico for buys in oilcloth), a way of regarding words not as mirrors of my own inadequacy but as tools, toys, weapons to be deployed strategically on a page. In a caption of, say, eight lines, each line to run no more or less than twenty-seven characters, not only every word but every letter counted. At Vogue one learned fast, or one did not stay, how to play games with words, how to put a couple of unwieldy dependent clauses through the typewriter and roll them out transformed into one simple sentence composed of precisely thirty-nine characters. We were connoisseurs of synonyms. We were collectors of verbs. (I recall “to ravish” as a highly favored verb for a number of issues, and I also recall it, for a number of issues more, as the source of a highly favored noun: “ravishments,” as in tables cluttered with porcelain tulips, Faberge eggs, other ravishments.) We learned as reflex the grammatical tricks we had learned only as marginal corrections in school (“there are two oranges and an apple” read better than “there were an apple and two oranges,” passive verbs slowed down sentences, “it” needed a reference within the scan of the eye), learned to rely on the OED, learned to write and rewrite and rewrite again. “Run it through again, sweetie, it’s not quite there.” “Give me a shock verb two lines in.” “Prune it out, clean it up, make the point.” Less was more, smooth was better, and absolute precision essential to the monthly grand illusion. Going to work for Vogue was, in the late nineteen-fifties, not unlike training with the Rockettes. Telling Stories, Let Me Tell You What I Mean, Joan Didion.
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