AS OUR FLIGHT BANKED around the neon-speckled sprawl of Sin City I wondered once again if I was the only person arriving for the Las Vegas Grand Prix having not read (or pretended to read for social media grandstanding purposes) Hunter S Thompson’s ‘classic’ gonzo novel Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. I gather it concerns the author following a commission from Sports Illustrated magazine to cover the annual Mint 400 off-road motor race, but then blowing out the job in a blizzard of narcotics and booze. Apparently it’s “a savage dissection of the American dream”.
Well if there was anyone skiving in favour of “heinous chemicals” and mescal this weekend then I didn’t see it, although a handful of journos dutifully followed in Thompson’s wheeltracks by driving from Los Angeles… not that a tatty rental Chevy Spark would hit 100mph of course. And at least one of them got stuck in a random 5am traffic jam in the desert on the way back to LA, hardly the stuff of which great gonzo reportage is made.
Perhaps I was less excited than some because I’d been to Vegas before. But there were still a number of firsts here for me.
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold… And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas…
I’ve never photographed a wedding before, certainly not one officiated
