I saw my first 3D movie when I was about 12, when Palm Springs was playground for the rich and hyper-famous. It was a soft-porn flick at a so-called “art house.” A pal of mine snuck in and propped open a door so the rest of us innocents could revel in 12 foot breasts protruding from the screen like Titan Missiles. Last week, in the spirit of James Cameron, I rigged up a homemade 3D contraption consisting of two HDTV-capable digital cameras and hit the road in search of depth. Palm Springs was perfect, as it is sooo 50s as I had to process the video in the sooo 50s anaglyph 3D (red and cyan glasses) which works on YouTube, is passable in black and white, but which in color looks like some chimp-created watercolor. I stuck the camera out the car window as Pat and I drove through the Palm Canyon area of Palm Springs, the former haunts of Elvis (his honeymoon cottage is the odd roundish house in the video), Marilyn and, oh dear, Liberace. One of his houses is for sale, along with its statuary. Just think Liberace  and statuary and you’ll get the picture.

So reach back into a drawer and dig out those old Red-Cyan glasses (there’s probably a pair stuffed in your comic book collection) an see Palm Springs 50s-style.

A happy 90th birthday to K. Chattu Kuttan, the doorman at Sri Lanka’s Galle Face Hotel. He has worked there since 1942 when he witnessed a Japanese Zero crash land on the hotel grounds. I have stayed in the grand but musty old hotel a couple of times. In its days of  glory The Galle Face hosted kings, presidents, movie stars and assorted high-profile scoundrels. Kuttan posed for me a couple of years ago. The hotel may be a bit tired, but K. Chattu Kuttan assuredly is not.

A bit much, I think, meeting J. Edgar Hoover and Madeline Albright on the same day. OK, Hoover was quite dead, the late FBI boss a statue bending over assertively, as if ready to pounce, in the the main foyer of the Newseum in Washington DC, but the former Secretary of State/UN Ambassador looked quite pink and healthy as she showed off her collection of brooches in a TV studio upstairs.

The Newseum is a monument to journalism, the so-called “fourth-estate,” which in its finest form has kept kings, presidents, politicians, scammers and mobs in check and at its worst pumped up wars, spread tyranny, “live shots” of car chases and celebity DUIs.
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I had a dream that the Grand Lisboa tower, a hotel-casino that now dominates the skyline of Macau, came alive one night, pulled itself from its mooring, marched across China’s Pearl River Delta and, like Godzilla, tossed trolley cars around Hong Kong.

Ka-Ching? (a Chinese expression?)

Like Vegas in the 90s, this former Portuguese backwater colony, now called East Las Vegas, has gone over-the-top.

I think about my week in Macau last year as I walk the strip in Las Vegas, past rubble-strewn lots that look like some lizard of mass destruction had just swung through. Past construction cranes that have not moved an inch since my last visit a year ago. Past women stuffed in short tight skirts like shrimp in sushi rolls, alone or in pairs, peering at their mobiles. This is not the Las Vegas of the mid-century when Mo Dalitz and his pals ruled and in the words of a longtime restaurateur, “knew how to take care of people.” This is not the Vegas of the 90s when the Steve Winns and corporate poobahs built palaces and faux New Yorks and Venices and “family values” was the motto. This is the Now Las Vegas: down and a bit dirtier, but not out.

Oceans Apart: Las Vegas and East Las Vegas on connectedtraveler.com