In my way to the Tropicana, this was the first thing I heard (“is Johnny Mathis still alive?”) from the woman right beside me in the shuttle van from the airport to the hotel, in Las Vegas.

The little-close-to-nothing-that-I-know-and-saw in Las Vegas is a city of dead alive.

At the Tropicana, built in 1956, when Vegas looked just like the Warren Beatty film “Bugsy”*, decadence is all over. Bear in mind this hotel is far from being in the list of the most degrading hotels. Immense stages with some poor miserable gloomy lonely artists singing night and day long. A band of 50-yeard oldies dressing lousy old outfits and disgusting make-up, dancing and jumping up and down in a hopeless effort to look the athletic youngsters of the past. Horror!

But I’ve changed hotels, and now I am at the Bally’s. And guess what? It’s all the same. Not as much decadent but the same infernal noise. Fashion is a whole separate chapter: the hair-do (50’s are back!), mini-micro-dresses and amazing high hills!

The sound-noise-horror is ubiquitous. Crummy, 80’s trash, very loud, cacophonic and mixed together with sounds from all of the restaurants, hotels, casinos and even from the posts in the streets! Yes, the water fountains also have the sound-noise-horror. If you close you eyes, it’s like a trip to the very poor regions of the Northeast of Brazil.

Now and then you hear some hysterical-childish-creepy screams. They always come from a group of women in the casinos. I still don’t know what they mean. I’ll tell you when I found that out.

It’s cold in the morning and in the evening, because this is a desert. And it’s damn cold during the whole day because it seems they have to waist a lot of energy. The air in the Convention Center is so cold the Finnish and the Canadian girls confessed they had never before felt so cold in their lives as they did during the DMA Conference sessions.

Today was the last day of the Pre-Conference. It’s been already worthwhile to have come to Las Vegas and have listened to a pro such as Walker Smith, from Yankelovich, in his lecture about “What’s really going on in the Marketplace”.

But what’s more Direct Marketing than this T-shirts all over the strip: “Girls Direct To You in 20 Minutes”.

Believe or not, Barry Manilow is also alive! And here, in Vegas. www.manilow.com!

DMA Conference, Las Vegas 2008

* Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel was an American gangster, who was behind large-scale development of Las Vegas.