Although late writings depict him as a god, the earliest texts depict him as a king (The Palermo Stone versus The Coffin Texts Faulkner, 1974).
Ata time when meaningful urban citizenship struggles to find footing in a culture increasingly defined by spectacle, hedonism, and consumerism, the hope for this study is to suggest a way out of the impasse imposed by the crises of social urban identity formation.Scattered though they may be, an interesting picture emerges from the numerous references to Thoth in the earliest writings of the ancient Egyptians-and that picture fits the theory of an Atlantean origin for this intriguing character. Breaking ranks with popular dismissive critiques of the Las Vegas prototype, this study argues that if hyperkitsch is here to stay, we need to explore its pedagogical, liberating, and redemptive potential. The latter two case studies are the urban microcosms of the Venetian and Aladdin, which among the newer hotels feature the perfected "naturalized" city scape ever more prominently. The first two are Rome and New York at Caesar's Palace and the New York-New York Hotel/Casinos respectively, which established the new prototype of the hotel-casino complex. Through four case studies, this paper suggests that the iconographies of hyperkitsch allow visitors to enact fantasy lives that ease the estrangement that is the result of conflicted urban identities and impoverished citizenship in todays alienating cities. Building upon the concepts of hyperreality and kitsch, this study proposes the framework of hyperkitsch to understand Las Vegas's contribution to contemporary urbanization. This suspension of real time and space is aimed at both facilitating the production of a simulated environment as "natural" and producing ideal sites for pleasure and consumption. In these environments, visual imagery is manipulated for the creation of spectacle and a sense of alienation from time and reality. This study investigates the production of hyperreality and kitsch in the latest generation of hotel-casino developments in Las Vegas.
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