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At NYR Daily (the blog of the New York Review of Books), the legendary travel writer Pico Iyer visits both Las Vegas and Pyongyang in the space of a week, and finds some strange yet revealing similarities between the two cities:
Yet both cities are products of a mid-twentieth-century spirit that saw what power and profit could be found in constructing mass fantasies ab nihilo—in the deserts of the West, out of the rubble of the Korean War. And both serve even now as billboards of a kind, “theoretical and practical weapons of the system,” as Kim Jong Il had it in a 180-page treatise on architecture, with buildings designed less to be lived in than to be marveled at by friends and enemies alike. Pyongyang is at once a playground for the local elite and a perpetual reminder to the 90 percent of North Koreans who are not permitted to visit of what awaits them if their talent or patriotism—or beauty—are strong enough. But both cities are haunted by a kind of lottery consciousness, which declares that power and glamour can be yours only if divine whim (or a throw of a dice) so decrees.
Image: Pyongyang, North Korea, September 19, 2013. Jonas Gratzer/LightRocket/Getty Images. Via NYR Daily.