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December 8, 2022
Erin Langner's Playlist for Her Essay Collection "Souvenirs from Paradise"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
The essays in Erin Langner's collection Souvenirs from Paradise brilliantly explore loss and love and Las Vegas.
Paul Lisicky wrote of the book:
"Erin Langner's Souvenirs from Paradise is on one hand a book about Las Vegas, but just as much a brilliant, extended meditation on the menacing allure of the extravagant in a voice that's never cool or pompous, but participatory--always awake to the senses and their mysterious craving. It's not like any other place-based book I've ever read, and it both fed and unsettled me in all the best ways."
In her own words, here is Erin Langner's Book Notes music playlist for her essay collection Souvenirs from Paradise:
There is a particular arc that shapes the typical tourist’s Vegas weekend. The rush of the arrival at the airport. The fierce brightness of that first drive up the Strip (sun-blazed during the day, bedazzled with lights and LED signs at night). The adrenaline of getting ready for one’s vice of choice. The blurred overwhelm of consumption. And the inevitable fallout that accompanies you back to the airport, where you witness the next round of people starting their version of the same journey.
I know this cycle well. I took more than twenty trips to the Strip over a period of around ten years to write Souvenirs from Paradise, an essay collection in which I use familiar tropes–the themed architecture, a bachelorette party, an impersonator show–to confront the grief I experienced around my mother’s death when I was nine. Most of my travel took place in three- or four-day chunks that followed the Vegas-weekend arc, which I aimed to capture through the selections as well as the order of my playlist: the songs start out hard and fast, then drift to deeper, more unexpected places over time. Many of them are discussed in my book. The handful below are not referenced explicitly; while they vary widely, each speaks to a version of Vegas–and a version of myself–that I connected with as I was writing.
“A Little Less Conversation,” by Elvis Presley
Give the people what they want. The Vegas Strip will do this—give you what you think you want, that is. Especially in the beginning. The first time I went, I did what I thought were the quintessential Vegas things. I stayed at the Mirage and watched the mechanized volcano erupt. I ate at celebrity chef restaurants, drank frozen daiquiris in the pool, danced to Paul Okenfeld at a club, and was enchanted by the Bellagio fountains at night. Of course, all of these conceptions of what I should be doing in Vegas were shaped by the images fed to me in movies and in television shows and the Vegas-themed parties I experienced in the decades before I ever visited.
Elvis of course has a lingering presence in Las Vegas, mostly through costumed buskers on the Strip and drive-through weddings farther north. As opposed to the more obvious selection (the campy “Viva Las Vegas”), “A Little Less Conversation” has the speed, the cadence, and the debauchery I knew I could find there; or maybe I just thought this, because the song was so aptly chosen for the opening theme to the NBC show “Las Vegas.” This song sounds like getting lost in the image of Las Vegas, which is so easy to do the first time you go. It was by going back, peeling back the layers of what I thought I knew not only about the Strip, but about myself and the reasons I wanted to go there, that I started to question those images.
“Poker Face,” by Lady Gaga; “Super Bass” by Nicki Minaj
These songs floated in the Vegas air like anthems during the glittery, blown-out zeitgeist of the early aughts. In 2010, when I was in my late 20s, one year out of grad school, “Poker Face” blared through the airport’s baggage claim as we began the kind of group trip that embodied the excess of that time—except on the cheap, since we had just earned Museum Studies degrees. Six of us piled into a room of the MGM Grand: three in the king bed, two in the pullout couch, one on the floor. It was the middle of January, and we were desperate to find a pool that was open—because what were six Seattleites doing in Vegas if we couldn’t get some sun and swim; never mind that it was sixty degrees outside.
We drove downtown in our rented white minivan to the Golden Nugget’s shark tank aquarium pool, where, to our delight, we had the place to ourselves. We drank margaritas in the hot tub, shivered in round, red daybeds without paying a cent, and meandered over to the now-defunct Mermaids for deep fried oreos and mudslide slushies that someone described as tasting “like battery acid.” When we returned to the Strip, we spent the rest of the night drifting between casinos, on a grand quest for the Sex and the City slot machine at each one, where we would wait for the cocktail waitresses to come around with our free well drinks that never failed to sting the back of my throat. It was the kind of trip many people have to Vegas: one in which you’re so immersed in the presentness of the experience and the people you’re with, it feels like it could never happen to anyone else the same way.
“A Shot in the Arm” by Wilco; “Is there a Ghost” by Band of Horses
By 2011, I was several years into my repeated travels to the Strip, past the initial overwhelm and sheen in a way that drove me much closer to the version of Souvenirs from Paradise that now exists; the strained exuberance and underlying despair that rings through the opening line of Wilco’s “Shot in the Arm” was how I felt on the second day of a weeklong trip I took to the Strip alone, searching for something deeper than my surface level fascination–my own “ghosts,” as it turned out. The yearning that stretches through these songs was how I felt, floating down the sidewalks and casino corridors between masses of people who were there for reasons that felt so distinct from my own that it fostered a strange sensation of loneliness–one that I not long thereafter realized echoed with my experiences with grief while growing up in the Chicago suburbs; Wilco is also a band that connects me to that past and to my high school self. One night while I was staying at the Sahara, I called one of my mentors, and he advised me not to write anything, but to simply document the things that felt potent, which proved to be essential advice. Nearly all of the photos and videos I took have proven invaluable to building the sense of place I needed for my essays.
“Love is Blue” by Liberace, “Pleasures and Palaces” by Lena Horne
While I can’t say I ever came around to Wayne Newton (even after writing about him), I’ve found much to mine among Vegas’s deep history that is evoked by some of the musicians who defined the Strip of earlier eras, like Lena Horne and Liberace. One place I returned to repeatedly for stories of the city’s past was the Neon Museum–a place that went against almost everything I experienced in major museums, including the one where I was working around the time of my first visit, in 2006. Back then, it was still known as the Neon Boneyard and was comprised of two open lots, where hundreds of massive, rusting signs were piled and leaning against one another, with a small path carved out to sneak between them; it didn’t even have a building, which made it all the more alluring. In stark contrast to the idea that the city was disinterested in its history, the signs offered portals into the backstories of cultural icons I thought I knew–Scorsese’s portrayals of the Mob, the evolution of casino themes–and stories I hadn’t heard, about segregation on the Strip and the cultural legacies of the signs’ fonts. As much as I loved digging into the depths of Las Vegas’s history, it was most important in leading me to bore into my own history, and to bring them together in my book in order to better understand them both.
1. “A Little Less Conversation” by Elvis Presley
2. “Poker Face” by Lady Gaga
3. “Super Bass” by Nicki Minaj
4. “A Shot in the Arm” by Wilco
5. “Runaway” by Kanye West
6. “Honey” by Robyn
7. “Is there a Ghost” by Band of Horses
8. “Love is Blue” by Liberace
9. “Pleasures and Palaces” by Lena Horne
10. “Coney Island” by Death Cab for Cutie
11. “Come Sail Away” by Styx
12. “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson
13. “Don’t Tell Me” by Madonna
14. “Young Americans” by David Bowie
Erin Langner writes about art, architecture and identity. She is a regular contributor to Hyperallergic and METROPOLIS magazines. Her writing has also appeared or is forthcoming in publications including Fourth Genre, December, The Offing, The Normal School, Hobart, The Brooklyn Rail and Pidgeonholes. Langner is the recipient of a Jack Straw Writers fellowship (2022) and the Good Hart Artist Residency (2023). She earned her MA in Museology from the University of Washington and her BA in Humanities from the University of Colorado. She lives in Seattle with her husband and daughter and works on exhibitions and publications at the Frye Art Museum
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