Day: April 21, 2009

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Roman Gods

I’m working my way through Plutarch’s Lives (or Parallel Lives, if you like). I decided not to challenge myself to blog about it, the way I did with Montaigne, because I didn’t like the way that made me rush through some of the essays in an attempt to compress/distill them. I’m still glad I made my way through his work, but I need to revisit many of them. With Plutarch, I’ll share what I can, but I make no promises.

Anyway, while reading the life of Numa Pompilius, the successor to Romulus as king of Rome, I came across this wonderful passage:

To the god Terminus, or Boundary, they offer to this day both public and private sacrifices, upon the borders and stone-marks of their land; living victims now, though anciently those sacrifices were solemnized without blood; for Numa reasoned that the god of boundaries, who watched over peace, and testified to fair dealing, should have no concern with blood.

It is very clear that it was this king who first prescribed bounds to the territory of Rome; for Romulus would but have openly betrayed how much he had encroached on his neighbors’ lands, had he ever set limits to his own; for boundaries are, indeed, a defense to those who choose to observe them, but are only a testimony against the dishonesty of those who break them.

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Notes from Vegas: White Stripes

Last night, I took my car out to the In-N-Out Burger on Tropicana Blvd. Rather than return via I-15, I decided to drive down the strip, starting around Circus Circus and the MGM Grand. My hotel is at the far end of the strip, near the Space Needle building, the Stratosphere, and my conference is nowhere near the strip, so this was likely the only opportunity I’d get to drive through and try to pick up some impressions. I’m still working on processing it all, but I’m having a tough time of it.

I arrived in Vegas on a Saturday evening once, and the cab ride to my hotel was impossible due to strip-traffic. This time, there wasn’t much volume. I chalk it up to Monday night slowdown, rather than fiscalpocalypse.

The funny thing about having a car on this trip is that I never drove in Vegas before, so I never noticed that the streets don’t have stripes painted to demarcate the lanes. They have little raised reflectors, but no white lines. (This made my drive in from the airport — in which I had a blinding headache and the sun was just a few minutes from descending behind the mountains — kinda frightening.)

Anyway, the reason I’m writing is because I passed the City Center project during this trip. It consists of a bunch of sleek towers and a big-ass mall. I saw it around 18 months earlier during this trip. It’s been in the news lately because of financing problems; a fund in Dubai doesn’t want to cover to giant cost overruns in order to finish a luxury hotel/condo/casino/mall complex at a time when no one has money.

After seeing the silly jagged multi-planar design for the front (mall) of the Center, I’m hoping they pulled out after developing taste. Here’s an interview with the architect of this grotesquerie, Daniel Liebeskind, on how to rethink a mall or something.