Star City Sydney

Last month I was in Sydney for five days with my family. Family holidays used to be high-octane roadtrips in New Zealand, catamaran adventures in Pattaya, castle and manor-trekking in England. Nowadays the parents aren't in such hardy shape anymore, so we're rarely able to tear ourselves away from the cities. Last year our daily itinerary in Japan read something like: 9am wake up, 10am breakfast in hotel, 11am step out of hotel for a walk, 12 noon lunch, 2pm parents and brother head back to hotel in taxi for afternoon nap, leaving me to amble through hours and hours of synthetic concrete Tokyo glamor until about 7pm when we'd arrange to meet somewhere for more food. The experienced has never thinned so far, though, at least for me. If anything, it's made me more of a flaneur than ever. Every new city throws me a challenge I rarely decline - to suss out the soul of the place, to divine its "thereness", how its people, buildings, transport arrange themselves. Usually, this involves quite a bit of fanciful extrapolation of my fragmentary impressions, but of course that's precisely the point. The flaneur's amateur anthropology is never meant to be a measure of the new city, but merely the measure of his city in relief, chalked up against a matrix of all the ones he's ever visited. Spending a semester in Paris this year taught me more about Singapore than Paris; every arrondissement that grew familiar to me, as I walked its streets daily and committed their pattern to memory, was a liminal mental map in magic tracing paper which, viewed against the light, turns out actually to be just another ititeration of a blueprint for Singapore.

We stayed at the Star City hotel, which in fact is just the "housing" element in a monstrous mixed-use complex that includes casino, international cuisine, two theaters, and quite a bit of shopping. In other words, the nightmarish sort of Integrated Resort that will soon materialize on these shores. As with all corporate commercial developments, it's terribly difficult to make these things look good. They sprawl this way and that, you're obliged to stuff some peripheral retail into the mix so that "trapped" consumers might throw a little bit more of their money away on a neck massage or a chocolate selection. There's never any sense of human scale; corporateness wants you to feel the awesome moniedness of their operation, and so they go in for double, triple-height ceilings coated in sparkly acetates, or maybe those low-cost high-gloss laminates in weird color schemes like turquoise and ochre. The flooring is usually some odd tint of marble, the railings and balusters usually mismatched and in burlesque styles. In keeping with themes, there might be a large Roman centurion statue somewhere. I'm not sure what effect all this has on the average (Asian) destination tourist. I suppose it's all rather impressive and "grand" in a facile sort of way, or maybe it all really doesn't matter. This is just the window dressing, the characterless Junkspace that has to be there, passageways of transit that connect casino to restaurant to toilet, so who gives a fuck about what it actually looks like.

The casino itself is a fascinating cross-section of most of Southeast and subtropical Asia, although there are some Koreans and Mainland Chinese as well. In an inner-city suburb of one of the finest harbor cities in the world, a culture of sunshine and slacker surfdom, here we find the clearing-house of the game-mad holidaying Asians of the world (usually wearing those soft sun-hats, even indoors).

We may have something going, actually. People who doubt the soundness of building a casino here in Singapore, like me, think we know what will really pull the tourists, but maybe we don't. "We" think the perfect holiday is going truffle-hunting in Emilia-Romagna, skiing at Courchevel, trawling the shabby chic restaurants and dive bars of the Lower East Side, but I'll bet the bigspenders who really make up the tourist figures want nothing more than precisely this sort of low-exertion, protected, culturally synthetic experience. It's only the liberally-educated poncy people like you and me, who think too much about these things, formulating elaborate leftist critiques of median tourism and poshly theorizing about it, that really think we'll get anywhere with this Renaissance Arty City tosh.