12\13 - Las Vegas is Still a Desert / McDonalds isn't a Restaurant

Las Vegas is still a desert.

Everyone began to make signs larger and larger in grand tackiness and eventually they began to design their signs and flashing lightbulb-laden trim before their own businesses or even a concept of advertisement. It is pure image of signage over and over in endless strips of synthetic material and environment. Las Vegas is still a desert as the signs do not point to anything but themselves.

Las Vegas is a conglomerate commodity and product, stuffed with an architecture which makes itself around the goal of attraction solely. As capitalism goes on long enough to see its production use start to dwindle, signs can replace the products and the value can continue to be artificially created upon itself, losing reality far behind it. Las Vegas in every single sense but the people is this: a dizzying maze of signs and everything eye-catching by the lowest threshold, built on a desert and sustained as a superfluous city of experience.

'The big sign and the little building' - it's like the casino doesn't actually exist, since the materials and textures of everything are synthetically applied (and likely produced) in forms of copying/reusing, but in the same manner as the sign out front. McDonalds recently forced remodels of most of its locations into identical interior and exterior design elements, a boring choice when you remember what it erases (1990's beautiful colorful plastic). It got me thinking about the "Golden Arches", which originally were a element of the building's architecture (two golden arches 'supporting' the building - very nice looking), but in 1962 were incorporated into the logo, which in the same decade later were further (d)evolved into a yellow "M" for McDonald's. The arches have survived in the sign (literal sign) as an M, but in the recent design the arches have become a yellow swoop added to the building. The sign of the arches has made multiple circles and not all complete, but I hate where it is now and I want the arches of the old back. At least it was the architecture which attracted us, now it is just the eviscerated shell of a symbol which attracts us. Shame.

Maybe I'm just opinionated about it, but I hate it. I want what I never knew back.