After returning from France in mid-December and before heading out to Las Vegas early in January, I realized that all of the Anthony Bourdain shows from his stints at various networks were available on Max. We had done a cheap temporary Max subscription at some point earlier in the Fall. So I began going about my business with him in the background for a few weeks. Somewhere along the way a show on Lyon followed one on Las Vegas. Interesting.
To be clear I was a fan, and still am. His loss was to me similar I think to the loss of Jerry Garcia for others. I also like to think that I understood him and took him generally with a grain of salt. I tended to agree with his globalist politics and manifested his passion for travel, food, people from other places, and vague and free spirituality. I was raised to respect people’s attitudes as something they learned one way or another along the way, right or wrong, and I have tried hard to never judge or cancel a person. Because to do otherwise would be closed-minded.
Because I was busy exclusively doing things that I have done since the ’90s while enjoying Bourdain it was a bit of a time travel experience. Taking photos, editing them using either Lightroom or Photoshop, and making a large and complex national-parks style poster in Illustrator using the same methods I used when I did much of that type of work back in the 90’s and the naughts. It was fun. It was also a little weird because I hadn’t stopped to think about how much I had changed over the years. I still take and edit a lot of photos but the tools and methods have changed a lot. And I had forgotten how to do certain things in an old Illustrator/Photoshop workflow for creating vector illustrations and had to take a few steps back here and there to review what my old way of doing things had actually been. I even started listening to music from the era.
I do like where I am now. New stuff in the intervening years has included serious attempts to learn video and video editing and processing, the Spanish language, motion graphics, Python, cooking and desert gardening; also adding to my lists of places visited and places where I spend a lot of time, and living in Southern Nevada for part of the year. It’s all good. Just keep learning and growing.
In the middle of this, Bourdain landed on Las Vegas followed immediately by Lyon, both from his Travel Channel era.
His take on Las Vegas was overly harsh. I think he got a few things right. Water availability and its effects on the past, present and future of the city. The severe realities of the desert, a harsh and unforgiving place for humans. The almost cruel tolerance and encouragement of vices and their consequences. The socioeconomic breakdown with a predominance of both the very rich and the very poor. The constant construction and demolition. The vagueness of the history. The luxury and the tackiness.
But he also missed a bunch of things as well. Primary of these is the pleasant, cheerful and well-meaning nature of most of the people. The Las Vegans that I have come to know are generally friendly, helpful and kind. Maybe because the city can be so harsh, they tend to look out for one another. Also the weather in the Spring and the Fall. It is usually perfect and the place is a paradise. Then there is the variety of things to do and see.
Related to personal stuff, house-related construction follow-up and the Valley of Fire wedding of my youngest daughter and downtown Vegas / arts district wedding reception, I’ve spent much time in Las Vegas in the last six or so months. In particular around Thanksgiving and then for most of January. The town certainly has changed with the Raiders, Allegiant Stadium and the Superbowl, the Sphere, the Formula 1 race and reconstruction of the city’s roads to accommodate the temporary Formula 1 racetrack.
I spent some time on the Strip for the first time since the beginning of the Pandemic in January. During that intervening time I had been most often either at our place in Boulder City, in the Downtown Vegas and Arts District areas, or in the natural parks near the city: Red Rock Canyon and Valley of Fire. There are two or three new casinos on the strip, and maybe three or four others that have changed hands and rebranded or are in the process of rebranding. I only visited the central part of the strip between Cesear’s Palace and the complex which includes the Aria. When my kids were young we spent a lot of long Spring weekends at the Flamingo because of the kid-oriented pools at the time. So that part of the Strip is the most familiar to me. My main impression of that area several years later is that it really hasn’t changed much. In fact I was surprised that so much was exactly the same. The one casino that had changed hands had kept the same layout and felt pretty much the same. Most of the others hadn’t changed at all.
Another impression was how much the Strip has gone upscale. I read an article recently that referred to the Strip as a tourist trap and suggested downtown as a preferable alternative. I am not in a position to judge. I can say that costs were quite high when I visited and the new parking rules and costs are an annoyance to those of us who were used to the park-anywhere-for-free Strip of old. At the same time the folks walking the Strip appear to be of a higher demographic than those from before the Pandemic. It is kind of difficult to guess where all of this goes. If the elevated prices and various fees stick then the new Las Vegas will be considered a success. If not, who knows?
I’ve done some reorganizing of the Nevada related pages in my photography galleries. I’ve created two new sets of pages. One set is called southern nevada usa and the other is northern nevada usa. I’ve moved several pages to the southern Nevada pages including all that were boulder city nevada usa and non-urban southern Nevada locations in the nevada usa pages before. I’ve kept las vegas nevada usa pages but have moved non-urban locations to the southern nevada usa pages. Pages which are dedicated to northern Nevada have been moved from nevada usa to northern nevada usa. Boulder city nevada usa and nevada usa are no more. I hope all that makes sense. The intent of it all is because, now that the Pandemic is over, I expect to generate a large number of urban Las Vegas images and fewer from Boulder City and similar places. Also there could be some Las Vegas video coming to my video and motion graphics page. As always each geographic category in my photography galleries contains one or more pages and each page contains around 250 images unless it is the last page in the group. In total now there are 182 pages totaling somewhere shy of 45,000 images.
There are several new images from Boulder City, a few hundred other new images from the Red Rock Canyon Area, and many others from Valley of Fire State Park in my southern nevada usa galleries. And there are a hundred or so new images from the Las Vegas Strip in my las vegas nevada usa galleries.
Providing a study in contrast Bourdain moved from Las Vegas to Lyon, France. His take on Lyon was along the lines of Lyon being the greatest place on earth. The episode was an homage to the gastronomic personalities and history of the second largest metropolitan area in France, a university town also considered to be the gastronomic capitol of the country.
I spent the better part of this past December in France, largely in Paris but also for a few days in Lyon. In fact the main purpose of the trip was to visit the Fête des Lumières which is a city-wide display of light installations including animation projected on historic buildings and large free-standing installations featuring light. It takes place around December 8th of every year. I tend to agree with Bourdain about Lyon. It is one of my happiest places. I’m not a huge fan of gastronomic history, actually quite ignorant when it comes to the subject, but I do agree with the concept of Lyon presented by Bourdain as a wonderful place that doesn’t really care if it is recognized as a wonderful place. In fact recognition on a wide-scale would probably make it less wonderful. Sort of like south county Rhode Island in the eighties where I lived for a few years while in graduate school.
A few hundred photographs of Lyon, in particular the festival of lights, from this past December are present in the lyon france galleries of my photography galleries. I am still unable to locate over a thousand older photographs from Lyon. Whenever I find them they will be added to the lyon france galleries. If not I guess I will have to go back for a couple, maybe three weeks in the Spring or Summer some time soon. Darn.
The Fête des Lumières was, as expected, fantastic. It isn’t a very large city center, think Salt Lake City. And around three-million people were in attendance. So it was crowded and the police and security presence was high. The subway system was crowded to the extreme. We somehow ended up staying in an airbnb right behind the Opera House which is across the street from the Hotel de Ville and so were at the epicenter of the festival. Long walks involved walking around streets blocked by police for security reasons after long evenings visiting the festival installations. We managed to see all of the installations excluding one that was indoors and around three that were located far outside of the main core of the festival.
We also fit in some walks around town, the old Visigoth part of town reminiscent of Barri Gotic in Barcelona, in particular. We hit up several Bouchons, Lyon’s signature restaurants. These are small, comfortable but crowded spots which feature typical Lyonaise dishes, the French comfort food to which American comfort food aspires. Often not very good for you. Even the signature salad for the area contains a substantial layer of bacon. Always consumed with abundant French wine, usually Cotes du Rhone, the wine of the region. And sometimes involving seating of heretofore disparate parties at common large tables which allows for lovely and interesting conversation with folks from elsewhere in France and often from all over the world. Reminiscent of my experiences at language schools in Mexico and Barcelona. Our last Bouchon lunch stop involved parties from Brazil, Finland, the United States, and Strasbourg in France. Portuguese, French, English, German, Finnish, Spanish, and Greek were just a few of the languages spoken by the folks at our one table. I, as is the case with Bourdain, love Lyon, perhaps most of all.
I will follow-up with more on Paris, Lyon and Las Vegas sooner rather than later in this journal. I am falling behind. It is back to new things and revisiting different old things for the next few months. Studying up on branding and marketing again. I last read a ton on the subject as well as UX maybe five or so years ago. Also coming up are fitness and wellness, French cooking and Spanish language, becoming familiar with Indian cuisine, and expansion of my urban Las Vegas photography and maybe video.
I’ve also found, in the process of looking for the old Lyon photos, around 1,500 old images of Barcelona that have not been posted. I should get around to curating, editing and posting those to my barcelona catalunya espana galleries some time soon.
Also for personal reasons I expect to be visiting India for an extended stay toward the end of 2025. I should for the most part be in and around Delhi, but am making preliminary plans for visits to Shimla and Kalpa in the Himalaya and a national park known for its tigers south of Delhi. Photographing a tiger would be of course a long shot. No pun intended.