A dark sun waits at the desert’s edge. The Sphere’s pictures on its outer skin are visible from miles away, that’s how clear and perfect they are, how good the resolution is. As you approach, it’s like sitting before a giant digital snow-globe, 16,000 pixels by 16,000 pixels, which is far higher resolution than your home TV set, with your favorite band strumming their instruments at many hundreds of times human size while flying through space. A monstrous jukebox.

Do I hear $7,500 for a front-row ticket to see the Eagles, those who are still alive, and remain in the band — being the greatest home-grown fairgrounds attraction of the 1970s? You can charge it to your credit card, or withdraw it from the nearest ATM. Either way, your money will never leave this place. So why not be amazed? The Sphere is powered by one-hundred-and-fifty Nvidia RTX A6000 GPUs, each of which has over 10,752 cores, consuming 28 megawatts of power, allowing you to personally experience the bright desert daylight of 268,435,456 pixels that cover both the inner and the outer surface area of a sphere, whose radius is 258 feet. It’s a man-made-sun, lit up from the inside and outside both, the cynosure of all eyes. Once seen, you will never be able to unsee it. 

Long ago, there was another sphere out here in the desert, code named Gadget, which contained enough high explosives to compress the 13 pounds of plutonium at its core into a critical mass. When they exploded Gadget at Almogordo, it released 18.6 kilotons of power, melting the sand around the tower into glass. Our dreams were never the same after that, just as they will never be the same after being reshaped by a quarter of a billion pixels powered by AI. Faced with the release of a certain amount of energy, the human mind just melts. 

Remember, it’s the Eagles we’re talking about here. Soon they’ll be gone. America, so alive, so big, so multifarious, so capacious, so full of hopes and dreams, so full of aching loneliness, so full of shit! Eventually, we’ll all be gone, laid to spiritual rest in this vast illuminated desert necropolis offering moments of fleeting pleasure, perhaps never to be repeated in our lifetimes: in this case, two hours of the Eagles’ Greatest Hits sung under artificial indoor desert skies, plus an encore. All hail King Death!

At its core, that’s what America is all about. It will look you straight in the eye, say one thing and then deliver its opposite. The one sure bet is that it will eat you alive, you and your children, and your children’s children, unto the fourth generation and probably well beyond that. No matter how much money you invest in your retirement funds or in real estate, your entire fucking lineage is fucked. America is Moloch. You can socialize, and be kind to your neighbors, and pay your taxes on time, and pick up trash from the sidewalks, or you can hole up somewhere with a cabin full of shotguns and raise your own chickens, and ride your trusty horse out onto the mesa. It’s all up to you. In the long run, however, and often well before that, the American Moloch will eat you alive, because that’s what it was born to do. It specializes in tequila sunrises and sunsets, before whose heavenly majesty you are nothing more than a quivering ant. 

America is a monster. America eats people. Aside from that, it defies generalization, because it’s way too large to ever wrap your arms around. Those who believe that they run the place are therefore routinely headed for a fall, victims of the myth that there is a world of solid objects out there that corresponds with the fleeting phantasms that make up the true American reality, which is forever changing its shape in correspondence with the demands of the marketplace. 

Anyone who claims to love Las Vegas or find romance in the reflective surfaces of its glass towers or in the length of its buffet tables is therefore talking pure, unadulterated horseshit. Las Vegas is about only one thing, and it’s not poker tables or roulette wheels or buffet dinners or celebrity chefs or fancy shows or limo drivers who charge drunk passengers $150 on Friday and Saturday nights to drive less than a mile down the Strip or the ladies in little black dresses waiting at the bar to separate you from your money and from your girlfriend or your wife back home. That’s all flash. Games for children.

I’m here to see the Sphere. A dark sun in the desert, attached to the edge of the Venetian, waiting to blow the remaining portion of my sanity sky-high. The Sphere is the mad construction of a New York City billionaire scion named Jim Dolan, a lazy, do-nothing rich man’s son with a pussy-eating beard that frames his flabby facial features, who is definitely one of the worst people on earth. After emerging from youthful battles with alcohol and drug addiction, Dolan imagined making the world a better place by playing lousy bar-band music and endlessly indulging himself in whatever pleasures he could purchase, drugs aside, becoming a case study in how one manifestly insecure billionaire can ruin and destroy an entire organization of dedicated, hard-working people: the New York Knicks. Dolan used his father’s money, gained from the family’s price-gouging Cablevision monopoly, to buy the legendary Madison Square Garden, along with the Knicks, who had once served as a symbol of hard-work and togetherness for all New Yorkers. The Knicks even sent their Princeton-educated forward Bill Bradley to serve in the US Senate. Clyde Frazier, the team’s point guard, who had an even better vocabulary than Bradley, inspired countless numbers of children to revel in the English language as the team’s erudite play-by-play man. Clyde also lent his name and joyful sense of style to the best sports sneaker of the 1970s and 80s, Puma’s Clyde — the predecessor to Nike’s dour success-obsessed Air Jordans. Repeatedly falling short to Jordan’s Bulls only showed the city that the Knicks were mortal, like the rest of us. 

Dolan bought the team, and by making it over in his own lazy, do-nothing, entitled, celebrity-obsessed image, he turned them into unwatchable losers for the next twenty years. Meanwhile, the team’s front office became a haven for accused rapists and greasy yes-men who brought Dolan endless rounds of ginger ale at the courtside seats where he perched like the Penguin in the old Batman TV show. What appeared on the court every night was no longer a basketball team. It was an aimless collection of out-of-shape millionaires, each one of whom was more selfish than the next, and none of whom, including the benchwarmers, could be bothered to get back on defense. Watching them play was the torture New Yorkers deserved for continuing to live in a city built for the Jim Dolans of the world. The only answer was to leave the Garden.

Not if you were rich, though. If Dolan’s Garden was no longer a place to watch the Knicks teach lessons about teamwork and smart play, it did offer the chance to watch the other team’s stars while rubbing shoulders with superfan Spike Lee and other celebrities, whose faces were broadcast on the Jumbotron to assure the suckers that they were in Phat City. Courtside tickets cost thousands of dollars a night, meaning that they were paid for by corporate shareholders, and public employees unions, and others fortunate enough to mingle among the elect while oogling the cream of the uptown booty clubs, who graced the floor every night during breaks in the action as the Knicks City Dancers. 

Knicks basketball became a farce. The Garden’s sound system, done over by Dolan, was incredible, though. His investment in state-of-the-art speakers, arranged and tuned just so, made concerts at the arena a delight, if you could forget who owned it. 

In Vegas, Dolan planned to take what he had learned from Garden and make every seat in the Sphere an arena in itself. Haptic systems would shake and vibrate the seats in unison with the action on stage, just like Disney rides, with 167,000 separate individual speakers shaping carefully engineered sound waves for your ears to surf. Control over the spectator’s visual field would be maintained by a mammoth screen that curves around their view-plane, helping to produce the illusion that you were moving sideways, up or down, or rocketing through the cosmos. Everyone would thank him, and have fun.

The Sphere sat on the edge of the Strip for over a year, only half-realized, like the Death Star, while broadcasting the occasional happenings inside on its outer skin: A film by Darren Aronofsky, residencies by U2 and Dead and Company, a four-day run of Phish shows. None of them was enough to convince me to overcome the inherent nausea-inducing nature of the set-up, until the Eagles announced a residency that would begin in 2024 and stretch well into 2025, or until one or more of the remaining band members dropped dead on stage, or Led Zeppelin or Paul McCartney and Wings came to town and chased them away. 

Until that future date, the Eagles would be playing their tunes in the Sphere, imprisoned within a giant ball of digital dystopia. On one hand, the mythic dimensions of this spectacle were plain. On the other, the pulsating Sphere with its 167,000 tiny speakers… the playland of a fat rich kid who broke his toys, secure in the knowledge that he could always buy himself better ones, and who had now borrowed enough money from his bankers to bring to life the greatest playroom on the planet, which would redeem Jim Dolan from the hell on earth that he had no doubt created for himself. Well, it was something. 

The Eagles were a fitting match for the set-up, the mega-rock-band equivalent of Jim Dolan, but with talent. They got ungodly rich off the Laurel Canyon songwriting boom thanks to the machinations of their manager, Irving Azoff — a.k.a. the Poison Dwarf — a human piranha with enough sense to allow the boys of summer enough cash to buy big mansions, though Irving’s mansion was always the biggest. Irving understood what family meant. His mother kept the band’s money in a shoebox. Starting out with an Illinois fairgrounds act called REO Speedwagon, Azoff eventually started managing Joe Walsh, a gig more or less akin to a death sentence. 

Walsh’s capacity for self-indulgence was matched by his penchant for crunching guitar riffs and an appealing sincerity about rock star clichés that led him to do stuff like cutting a passage between two hotel rooms with a chain saw, in order to obtain the hotel suite that had been promised to him in a contract. Stevie Nicks also claimed Joe Walsh was the love of her life, after putting more than a million dollars worth of coke up her nose. Azoff knew he needed an offramp if he was to truly profit from the seventies rock boom that saw lesser men like David Geffen get far richer. 

The original Eagles were a quartet composed of Glenn Frey, Don Henley, Bernie Leadon, and Randy Meisner. Leadon and Meisner quit in the 1970s, to be replaced by Timothy B. Schmidt, Don Felder, and Joe Walsh — providing Irving with his entre. Using Walsh as a wedge, Azoff took control of the Eagles, and turned them into North America’s biggest cash machine south of the Las Vegas Strip. Today’s value of the Eagles’ publishing catalog is equal to that of the Rolling Stones or the Beatles. It is so valuable, Azoff once told me, that he threatened Steve Jobs that he would pull the Eagles off iTunes unless Jobs markedly increased their share of the royalties. 

Did Jobs give in? Irving never answered that question for me, exactly. Perhaps a clue can be found in the fact that the Eagles are still on iTunes. Still, Irving remained resolute in his devotion to the boys of the summer, each of whom, in Irving’s mind, was a legitimate genius and a rightful companion to Irving Berlin and George Gershwin in the American song-book. 

In 2017 — after hell had frozen over, thawed, and frozen over again — the group’s best songwriter, Glenn Frey, died and no doubt ascended to heaven. He was then replaced in the band by his son, Deacon. Late last summer, J.D. Souther, who was never formally an Eagle but had singing and songwriting credits on some of the band’s biggest hits, also died. Walsh appears to have suffered a stroke. 

It seems fair to surmise that Irving Azoff became desperate, as his nearly fifty year run with the Eagles appeared to be reaching an end. Desperation makes men like Azoff especially dangerous. Understanding the Eagles — the greatest living American songwriters, hell, the greatest American songwriters in history — to be worth many times the fortunes they had earned, he knew people would rightly pawn their family heirlooms and give up their mortgages in order to see them again.

God knows how much Jim Dolan paid the Poison Dwarf to put the Eagles in the Sphere. I hope Irving took him for every penny he could squeeze. The advantages of the deal both ways were real enough: Azoff would provide Dolan with the big name act he needed, while the techno-wizardry of the Sphere would provide enough in the way of AI graphics-powered haptic life support for the boys to do two or three shows a week, for as long as they could continue standing upright.

Las Vegas is about death, American-style. It’s a place that all Americans are drawn to, in order to experience what our own deaths will look like and feel like. We hope that it won’t hurt too bad, and will be over soon, which is how the city makes its money. It’s a giant necropolis in the desert for the tens of millions of living souls who fly in here per annum, not knowing what they are looking for, or rather knowing exactly what they are looking for, and not being able to admit it. Which makes them easy prey for the showmen, gangsters, limo drivers, and whores who profit off the churn of self-punishing behaviors. Hell, there’s even a bookstore.

Las Vegas relies on two major styles of period iconography to get visitors in the mood. The first is Egypt, land of the pyramids which is also famous for its deserts. The second is Italy, with Caesar’s Palace vying with the Venetians and the Bellagio. As it turns out, most Americans would rather imagine themselves being torn apart by lions or opening their veins in a warm bath than risking a spooky journey down the Nile. It is Rome, not Cairo, that reigns supreme here. 

Seen from the perspective of the gigantic sums of capital that are deployed here, the Vegas Strip is a like a giant cattle chute in which the tourists are separated from every last dime of their meager savings by floors of blackjack tables, slot machines, margarita slushies, wax museums, magic acts, fake French bistros, strip joints, automated sushi makers, UFC matches, girls in cages, giant chocolate-chip cookies, and Beatles cover bands. There is virtually no way to emerge from the end of the chute without at least one of your credit cards maxed out. Through cunning arrangements of lighting, carpets and mirrors, it lightens your attachment to your money by thinning out the veil that separates this world from the next.

The billionaires who run the big casinos have the system figured out, on an industrial scale, with their kingdoms returning 50 percent or more per year, bringing in $10 million or so in profit per day. The unchallenged Queen of the Strip is Miriam Adelson, whose Venetian Hotel hosts the Sphere, in addition to Vegas’ best selection of high-end chefs, from Thomas Keller to Eyal Shani. As far as distinctions of taste have any relevance here, the Venetian is the most tasteful hotel on the Strip — meaning that it is the least stressful on the eye. It encompasses a shopping mall with artificial indoor canals and real gondola rides through skies painted blue in the style of Canaletto, along with acres of venetian marble corridors lined with high-end dark wood paneling. Across the street is Steve Wynn, whose Wynn and Mirage casino hotels use modern paintings and stunning floral arrangements the way Adelson uses a 19th-century robber baron’s idea of Venice. 

Adelson is the daughter of Holocaust survivors. Wynn is blind. With their flagship hotels standing on opposite sides of the Boulevard, they are the King and Queen of the Strip. Wynn also owns the Bellagio. Before she married her husband, Sheldon, a trade show operator, with whom she built one of the world’s most successful casino businesses, Miriam was an emergency room physician and then a research scientist who helped to pioneer the treatment of heroin addicts with methadone. In addition to the Venetian, Adelson also owns the city’s newspaper, the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Adelson and Wynn also both own casinos in Macau, where gaming revenues are triple what they are here in Vegas, the key being higher volume. In Macau, no one cares about James Beard Award-winning chefs, or shows at the Sphere, or making the fun last by playing low-end slots. Instead, they get right to the act itself, of losing big at the tables. Ninety-five percent of the casino revenue in Macau is from gaming. A whole country of people who know that they are losers, and who have been educated by the state to give up their money on command. That Americans have become dependent on refinements of the pain of losing to feel something, anything, is a privilege of wealth. You think of lost love, of the pleasures of the needle, of waking up in the morning after getting punched in the face… and poof, your money is gone. 

But wait. Up ahead of me is an oasis, with no casino, no chefs, and only a single open bar. By comparison with the rest of this place, it is not a come-on for death, but simply bad taste. The lobby is full of bull-riders and their wives and girlfriends who are here for rodeo week, and to party with Donald Trump. 

Donald is here too, of course, on the Strip, even if compared to Steve and Miriam, he is a piker. To truly be the President of the United States, which means becoming both the Alpha and the Omega, you should have a place in Vegas. 

As distinct from the digs of Wynn and Adelson, the Trump International Hotel isn’t gaudy or high-tech. You might just as easily be in a luxury marble-floored high-rise in Dallas or Miami. The rooms are tastefully decorated, with a hint of thrift provided by the mini-fridges and the two-burner stoves set into the counters, letting you stay in and cook your spaghetti. There are no visible invitations to excess, aside from the Jacuzzi bathtub with room for two. The selection of movies on the large-screen TV includes The Klumps, the remake of The Nutty Professor with Eddie Murphy, Old School, Roman Holiday, and the 1939 production of Huckleberry Finn, a classic which is surely due for a remake. It all feels surprisingly sane, circa 2010, courtesy of Donald Trump, whose name is everywhere, in lordly solitude. 

In reality, there have been Four Trumps, each of whom is connected from a unique angle to a particular power center of 21st-century Gilded Age America. At first, there was NYC Trump, heir of one of the city’s second-tier real estate families. Playing a particular role in New York City’s social and financial hierarchy, the real estate families have always had a stake in the city’s health. This role required a close acquaintance with both the aspirational fantasies and street-level realities that get large office towers and apartments built on hotly-contested pieces of land. 

Trump was never a builder, like the Tishmans, or an owner and developer of inner-circle real estate, like the Roses. Nor was he an aimless lay-about, like Jim Dolan. Rather, he was an outer-borough owner-developer with a father in the business, a business degree from Wharton, and an elaborate multi-tiered pompadour hairstyle, who paid attention to what made his customers tick. Trump made his money by branding glitzy condos for outer-borough success-chasers like himself. Grandiosity was the heart of the sell. Trump gave them permission to be themselves, by being himself. No matter where they came from, they all deserved a gold “T” on their doors and marble on every inch of the bathroom. This aspirational mantra made NYC Trump very much a man of the people, even as the city’s more uptight social doyennes despised him as a vulgar arriviste who enjoyed seeing his name in Page Six and routinely exaggerated the prices at which he bought and sold properties. What could be more New York City than that? 

Then, Donald used his salesman’s flair to launch The Apprentice, which, insanely enough, became the most successful reality show in America. If Trump’s life was a stage for his business, then why not offer the vast numbers of the unwashed without a spare $5 million to drop on a condo their way to buy in? Corporations would then buy ads, using Trump to sell medications and cereal. And so, Hollywood Trump was born. 

The Apprentice also served as a giant ad for Trump’s expanding network of world-class golf courses, including the Doral in Miami, Turnberry in Scotland, and the Trump International Golf Club at Mar-a-Lago. Talk about playing the high-low game to perfection! Viewers who wanted to live Trump’s own life, rather than buy Tylenol, could stay overnight and then play a few rounds, like real members of the club, at a tiny fraction of the cost of joining a true world-class golf club. Thus, Mar-a-Lago Trump was born.

The Apprentice ran for 15 seasons on NBC, from 2004 until 2017, which was plenty of time for Hollywood Trump to make Mar-a-Lago Trump rich. Then Trump became President, giving birth to DC Trump — who by now no doubt regrets selling the Old Post Office near the White House, which he turned into a Trump Hotel (and sold after it dug a $70,000,000 hole during his first term). 

Those were the Four Trumps — NYC Trump, Hollywood Trump, Mar-a-Lago Trump, and DC Trump — each of whom gained access to coveted sections of America’s elite and gladhanded the puppet-masters, the men behind the curtain, along with their wives. Which is one of the things that made the whole anti-Trump campaign that captured the country’s elite so off-putting. The richest, most powerful people in the country, who funded the anti-Trump campaign, warning of his deranged incipient fascism, and who claimed to be working day and night to fight climate change from the bellies of their private jets, they knew from the beginning that the campaign against Trump was bullshit. They had hobnobbed with Trump for decades. They had gone to his parties and played golf at his courses. They asked him to write checks to politicians and to their wives’ favorite charities. 

Was Trump obnoxious? Sure. A pussy-hound? A jumped-up salesman with a spray-on tan? Sure, sure. But the idea that there was anything foreign or particularly mysterious about him, let alone that he was an agent of the Kremlin, c’mon man. Trump was the biggest known quantity on earth, especially for other rich Americans. They knew exactly where his money came from. They also knew that Trump was funny, and a soft touch. He bought into all that old school crap, like writing checks to the widows and orphans of hero firefighters and cops. The lie was theirs, not his. Trump’s problem was that, unlike them, he sided with the underdog. He was smart to take pride in being from the outer boroughs, in part because he understood it as an advantage.

Trump became the master of the classic 20th-century American sell, which allowed you to sell anything to anyone, as long as you let them into the club, which meant letting them in on the joke — something that the 21st-century American elite could no longer tolerate. Why? Because now there was too much money at stake. The new American oligarchy is twenty, if not forty times richer than any of its predecessors since the wonders of the late 19th-century Gilded Age. 

Trump himself remembered quite well when Michael Bloomberg was said to be the richest man in New York with a fortune of over $4 billion. Now Elon Musk is worth $400 billion. What does a personal fortune of $400 billion even mean, in the context of a mass democracy? We’re about to find out, right? Whatever the answer, it’s clear that the work of the American class system no longer revolves around exerting social authority over successful Toyota dealers or guys who build tract homes. It now means figuring out a way to exert authority over men like Elon Musk, whose private networks of rockets, satellites, and sophisticated data tools give them more power than national spy agencies and mid-sized countries.

It’s now clear that the American elite underestimated Trump at their peril. It’s also clear that Trump underestimated them. Now, thanks to a divinely-inspired head-tilt and the hubris of his foes — who confused their control of social media with the favor of the Gods before stupidly selling Twitter to Elon Musk and allowing him to become the JP Morgan of Trump’s second term — I am back on the 31st floor of Trump’s home away from home in Sin City, trying to stave off my own demons in a city I know all too well. 

As it happens, I once worked a job packing dynamite into the old Sands Hotel, to make way for the Venetian, and pressed the real button to blow it up. Another time, I came back from a visit to the Nevada Test Site, where the US government once set off two or three nuclear bombs a week, to wander inside the Venetian, which replaced the Sands, and wound up trapped inside a magic shop with Michael Jackson and his children, who wordlessly enclosed me in their private security bubble. We then spent the next hour and a half shopping together, for magic tricks and Swarovski crystal handbags. Life here is strange. As Gram Parsons put it:

“On the 31st floor, a gold-plated door

Won’t keep out the Lord’s burning rain.” 

Now the ads on the towering billboards up and down the strip are for AI solutions and AI security, promising a future version of Las Vegas that will be run by a God-like hive mind, maybe housed within the Sphere.

In the lobby, an attractive blonde woman, maybe 30, is standing by a sleek European baby carriage. The baby inside isn’t older than six months. The woman, who gladly acknowledges being the infant’s mother, is wearing a short black dress, which ends just shy of being slutty. She is fit-looking, and clearly ready for a night on the town, her sleeveless dress showing off her tattoos — seven or eight quality examples of the tattooist’s art on each arm, representing an investment of some serious dollars, paid for with money earned. 

Earned by whom? Who knows. Frankly, that’s none of your business. The point is, she’s free to stand in a little black dress next to a baby carriage in the lobby of the Trump Hotel, ready for a big night out. God bless both her and her child. The truth is that you only get one life. 

I arrive at the Venetian, which I blew up decades ago, feeling faintly nauseous, after indulging myself with an 11-course meal costing slightly more than $300. Fuck it, what else am I supposed to do here? I’m 57 years old. I swore off hard drugs, and have zero desire to cheat on my wife. I’d rather go out quick, courtesy of an 11-course meal consumed at the counter at the late Joël Robuchon’s Atelier, the cheaper of the genius French chef’s two Vegas clip joints. Sadly, though, to finish every last bite of my supper would induce an immobilizing food coma. I have two hours of the Eagles ahead of me. 

Extra-long escalators move extra-slow as they elevate me to level 300 of the Sphere, which is said to offer the perfect balance between the screen-view and what happens on-stage. After less than a year of use, the inside of the Sphere is already beginning to have that future-past look. It’s like the mise-en-scène of a sixties French futurist movie by Jean Luc Goddard, where the promise of the designer-future has already come and gone. What’s left is some disaffected mec smoking his cigarette by a dirty white wall, doing his best to hide his face from the surveillance cameras. 

Taking my seat, though, I am offered a vision of the Sunset Strip imagined in shorthand by Disney. Rising up to Mulholland, it takes a dive towards the old Capitol Records building near Santa Monica, behind which I can see the sparkle of the Pacific. Above Hollywood Boulevard, the Goodyear Blimp is counting down — two minutes, fifty-eight seconds until showtime. Every second and a half, a car drives by in a simulated blur on the Sunset Strip. Frank Sinatra plays on the speakers. Yes, I am ready and eager to have a good time. 

Even as the weather starts changing within the Sphere, from a cool summer breeze to a full on rainstorm, I am still eager to have a good time. The rain stops, and I am driving down a dark highway, in the desert. Up ahead in the distance, I see a shimmering light. My thoughts grow dim. The heavy hacienda doors open.

The Eagles have been on stage for at least a minute, and I’m already feeling weird about my adventure into digitized Vegas nightlife. What should be happening inside my head is happening outside. It’s like being at Harry Potter World, with the illusion made even more complete by stunning wrap-around imagery. Faceless AI bots are now feasting on nameless dishes, which for all I know contain human flesh. Joe Walsh is creeping around the stage like the Cryptmaster.

Yes, other people’s acid trips are inherently boring. Except I haven’t done acid more than three or four times over the past twenty-five years, and certainly never inside an AI-powered mind-screen made up of one-hundred-and-fifty Nvidia RTX A6000 GPUs with 10,752 cores each. As the screen transitions from one image-set to another, everyone cheers. They cheer the redwood forests; they cheer the life-like movement around the bend in the road. We are entering a dark tunnel now, which takes us to an inner space, where the band makes music. Weird magical rays are shooting off their instruments, like they are warlocks. Now the inner space has become outer space, with the musicians posed among the constellations, consisting of tens of thousands of individual stars. The haptics vibrate, giving me a weird feeling in my privates. 

You could do this with porn, I am thinking. Imagine 10,000 people, sitting here, inside the Sphere, watching the action unfold on the screen, at impossible degrees of resolution, everything perfectly lit, with haptic devices inserted into their nether-regions, prisoners of the one true vision of our age, which is a machine designed to make everyone cum in unison. Horrifying. Disgusting. But isn’t that what our tech monopolies are aiming at, fueled by porn and advertising dreams of togetherness and sensory overload? Getting to whatever that meeting point is faster will most likely reduce the sum total of suffering in the world. So let’s get to it, right? 

“Who said, ‘Fuck yeah?’” someone in the row behind me exclaims, when the song is over. 

“We all did!” the entire row answers.

Below us, the band launches into “One of These Nights,” which is a perfectly passable 80s ballad of barroom disappointment, back when the idea of disappointment was more tolerable to larger numbers of people, who were known as adults. The song is sung by Don Henley, who played the cynical-Hollywood ying to Glenn Frey’s gentler, more-countrified yang. My problem with Don Henley is not that he isn’t an adult, or that he lacks a capacity for disappointment, but that he is so clearly the type of person who confuses being an adult with being a prick. On the other hand, when you read accounts of the band’s travails, the one who drove his fellow band-mates crazy was Frey, whose persona was much softer.

“Lyin’ Eyes,” a Glenn Frey special, is one of the best soft-rock songs of the 1970s. It’s a simple country story that comes across as much or more like a put-down of a cheating lover, until it becomes something larger. Everyone sings along, because it’s a song about everyone. The universal reach of the sentiment is what makes the song more lasting than say “Ruby,” a song from the same period, written in the same accusatory vein, in which the singer, Kenny Rogers, lies in bed paralyzed from the waist down as the result of his war injuries, begging his lady not to step out on him. Talk about stacking the deck. Why shouldn’t Ruby take her love to town? Should she invite the guy over for a good fucking at home instead? Who told you to go be a war hero, and come back from Vietnam without legs? Leave poor Ruby the fuck alone. Let her push a baby carriage in the lobby of the Trump International Hotel, and be happy. 

“Lyin’ Eyes,” on the other hand, holds up all these years, because we know that no one is simply innocent. The singer could also be the liar. It takes me a moment to recognize that tonight’s singer is Deacon Frey, Glenn’s son. He has a gorgeous voice, plays guitar like his father. Singing his father’s songs on stage with his father’s old bandmates gives the audience a sense of the wisdom of the elders being passed down through the generations. 

The fact that Deacon is clearly feeling it too takes some of the edge off the stench of formaldehyde and bad faith inside the Sphere. It’s a dream for him to be up there, on a gorgeous night inside the dome. The night sky is velvet-soft and deep, a night sky on steroids. Someone got paid good money for creating that. Or maybe the Sphere generated this brand new shade of ultra-darkness by itself, and is now letting it sink in, to prepare the audience for the next chapter of their journey. 

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” Don Henley begins. 

“We love you!” the audience roars back. 

“You know those white lights bug the shit out of me,” he continues, shielding his eyes from the glare. He is telling the truth. The lights are bothering him. Someone is filming tonight’s show, and the lights are making him cranky. It takes him a moment to recover. 

“You know at this stage of the game we’re pretty glad to be anywhere,” Henley offers. The crowd cheers again. “Anyway, we’re got a lot of pretty pictures. Hope you brought your Dramamine. We’ve been playing these songs for you for 52 years now.”

Deacon Frey and Vince Gill combine on “Take It to the Limit,” a song from the days before sex was overtaken by porn. As it turns out, the human imagination is just another processing unit. Crank it up strong enough, and loud enough, and I can short-circuit the imagery in your head, and replace it with whatever I want. The Sistine Chapel ceiling visuals on the bulbous screen — opening up into images of shooting stars, solar systems, and the Milky Way — no longer feels remarkable. It’s just sex, folks. It all got demystified a half-century ago, when they started showing close-ups in movie theaters. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still nice to watch a pretty girl cross the street, or swim across the pool. But shooting stars accompanied by coy talk about taking it to “the limit” is strictly D.H. Lawrence territory. We’re all in the Sphere now. 

The primeval forest now covering the walls is home to the Eagles “Witchy Woman.” As far as I can tell the effects were lifted from Disneyworld’s Blue Bayou ride. Joe Walsh does his Cryptkeeper act again, which again makes me wonder again if he has suffered a stroke — and how one might tell. Deacon Frey follows with “Peaceful Easy Feeling,” which is a lovely song, his father’s song, a song that any son would be happy to imagine his father writing about his mother. There’s no reason why Deacon Frey shouldn’t think so. His gorgeous vocal is followed by a group effort on “Tequila Sunrise,” a crowd favorite which I’ve always loathed. There is nothing on earth worse than a romantic alcoholic ready to whisper sweet nothings in your ear at sunrise. This is their anthem. At least with heroin addicts, you know they’re lying. 

The Sphere’s ultimate purpose won’t be mass live orgasms, I realize. Vegas is about the final act. You’ll pay ten grand or whatever for the Eagles, or their audio-animatronic avatars, to usher you into heavens. A choir of gorgeously pixelated angels will sing on the curved sky of your own personal digital death-pod. For those who scratch or claw at the inside in last-minute paroxysms of remorse, the attendants will amp up the morphine before cutting off the oxygen.

Where do such thoughts come from? They are being generated at least in part by AI, which is shaping and massaging my innermost thoughts through the combined pressure of one-quarter-of-a-billion pixels bearing down on my unstable brain inside the vastness of the Sphere. The Sphere represents over $2.3 billion in electronic hardware and processing cores, along with good old-fashioned cement and iron beams. Me? I represent only a handful or two of fragile wetware, containing maybe a few dozen really good books I still remember reading, along with my collection of CDs and stray life experiences, along with the genetically-encoded wisdom of my species. Time will tell if this contest is equal, but my guess is no, it’s not. 

Right now, I am trapped in a dizzying cylinder of Lower East Side-style tenement buildings with no streets or parks. I am going up and up, like on a rocket ship, or an open-air elevator, as Joe Walsh madly solos, missing notes all over the place, on “In the City.” At the top of the cylinder of misery, a distant patch of sky is visible, blue sky. Maybe the Allman Brothers or Issac Hayes will swoop in on a white carpet and rescue us all.

Do these amazing technologies, capable of generating these illusions, and setting them in motion, at angles that are currently making me sick, make us more human? Or do they diminish us? The answer clearly is “less human.” Still, the effects are amazing — and you can tell the designers are itching to show what this rocket ship can really do. Imagine what it would be like if we really let the drum and bass rip, with mechanized ketamine snooters extending from the headrests of each seat to shoot bumps up the noses of attendees every fifteen minutes, or at the click of a button. Holy shit, right? 

Near the top of the cylinder, the whole room starts to tilt, at least that’s what it feels like, for real. I am now experiencing a Dramamine moment. We’ve blasted off from the foul physical reality of the matrix-like city to our new home in the sky, leaving behind the misery of our earthly attachments.

“Oh shit, where’s the Tylenol,” someone hollers. 

Paul McCartney will play the Sphere for $250 million. The Stones will do it for $350 million. Everyone has their price. On stage, the Eagles are now enclosed in an animated dome of old film strips, consisting of thousands of individual stills, which show them young, handsome and virile, having fun. Soon, all that will be left of the Eagles will be the Memory Palace of film strips above our heads, the Eagles’ lost Library of Alexandria. Meanwhile, here on earth, AI is writing Eagles songs about death administered by robots, with a few helpful prompts from my phone:

“In the glow of a silver dawn,

Gentle robots hum their tune,

With soft hands, they carry on,

Guiding us beneath the moon.

We’ll embrace the light, we’ll dance through the night,

In a world so kind, it feels just right.

With whispers of love and dreams in our minds,

We'll sail through the stars, leaving troubles behind.”

Maybe someday. For now, we’re trapped together in the ultimate rich kid’s toy, with 164,000 speakers, the brainchild of James Dolan, who frankly doesn’t seem as freakishly awful here in Las Vegas as he does back in New York. Here, the entire town is poison. 

Even Joe Walsh knows it. At his age, ratcheting his jaw from side to side in order to talk, which accounts in part for the Cryptkeeper effect, he has little time for pretense. “If I knew I’d have to play this gong for the rest of my life I probably would have written something else,” he adds, before launching into “Life’s Been Good.” 

“I live in hotels, tear out the walls

I have accountants pay for it all.”

Even the stroked-out hick version of the Joe Walsh-defining classic is authentic-sounding enough here, opening the door to a new universe of film clips from the vaults of Irving Azoff, where the Eagles remain forever young, competing to see who gets the girl along with the copyright on the band’s latest hit. The band’s incarnation in the Sphere is surely hell, of a kind, even for the Eagles. But there are bills to pay, and getting up in the morning can be a hell of an achievement when Walsh might be just as easily frozen by the fear of death, which truthfully could arrive at any moment — a blocked artery or a sudden stroke being positive scenarios that don’t involve radiation treatments followed by a slow, lingering death from cancer. So far be it from me to piss on Joe Walsh for singing his songs to 12,000 adoring fans every night.

Now it’s Duncan Frey’s turn. “Already Gone” happens to be my favorite Eagles song, in part because it sounds like the title of a Denis Johnson novel, and in part because it contains the classic county hick yearbook put-down, “You can see the stars but still not see the light.” That’s right. Lyin’ Eyes, Peaceful Easy Feeling, Take It Easy, Already Gone… what more do you need to successfully negotiate life? Still, it’s plain that despite the tenderness of Duncan Frey returning the gift of his father’s songs, as Glenn no doubt looks down proudly from heaven, the Sphere is no place for children, or grown-ups, either. I’ve had enough. 

Don Henley is even crankier than I am. “We have to play with these things in our ears,” he complains. “You notice there are no amplifiers on stage. Guitar players hate that.” Henley isn’t even a guitar player, not really. He’s a drummer. But he’s a rock star, and all rock stars want to be guitar players, just like we want to be them, in which case we’d probably chainsaw tunnels through our hotel room walls, too. They can put on airs because they are us. That’s what was written in the contract. I hope they never do Jimi Hendrix or Kurt Cobain like this, though. 

 “Boys of Summer” features a weird underwater ballet, part Nuremberg Olympics and part Soviet, as imagined by AI once again. Healthy, weirdly asexual young bodies swim and float, with bubbles everywhere, like in an Alka-Seltzer commercial. I would rather watch a girl in wet blue jeans shorts snorting coke. 

The hits are coming fast and furious now. “Life in the Fast Lane” is like an F1 racing game from 2005, with smooth, up-to-the-moment movements combined with dated, clunky graphics. A period driving game, essentially. It’s Don Henley’s best song, lyrics-wise, untainted by alcoholic romanticism or the pretense of ever having been an attentive lover or otherwise a decent person. “He had a nasty reputation as a cru-el dude,” the drummer recites, over Walsh’s snarling lick. The characters in the song are selfish and delusional, and therefore instantly believable. “He was too tired to make it / She was too tired to fight about it.” That line, with the equal weight given to the woman’s feelings, sounds like Glenn Frey and not Don Henley, though at this late date there’s no way to know for sure. 

It’s 10:18 PM, and since time is money, baby, you know they have this show timed to the minute. Irving Azoff doesn’t fuck around. On the other hand, this might be the last show the Eagles ever play, or the last show that most of the audience members ever see in their lives. Either way, the boys themselves are in serious need of some oxygen. Which means a few minutes in the backstage oxygen chamber before “Take It Easy.” 

“We may lose and we may win

Though we will never be here again”

Sing it, Deacon. Of all the lines your daddy wrote, I feel sure that he would have wanted you to internalize that couplet of truck-stop wisdom. There’s wisdom there, as well as a fortune in publishing rights. “Rocky Mountain Way,” with its astounding chain-saw riff, gets us to 10:30, at which point the roof comes off the Sphere. We’re flying high over the Rockies with Joe Walsh wailing away on guitar, which is surely a bucket-list type of event. “Desperado,” another Eagles song by Don Henley that makes me want to hurt someone, is followed by Somebody’s going to hurt someone, the first line of “Heartache Tonight,” which tracks. It’s a song with some of the sharp-edged cruelty and truth-telling of “Life in the Fast Lane,” but sung in a more inclusive, celebratory vein, being the come-on for the crowd to lose the money that they didn’t spend on tickets in the casino after the encore. Slot machines rocket through the sky, followed by dice tumbling down the table, all leading you onwards to the place of your heart’s desire, which is to lose, as a prelude for it all being over.

It’s not over, though. Not yet. Every time I think we’ve reached the end, the infernal machine in the sky keeps on turning, with pin-up girls riding giant red lip-sticks through the air and AI-generated hearts exploding, until we arrive at the great jukebox in the sky. What else can you ask for? Nothing. It’s got to be over. I want to go back to the Trump Hotel, and take a bath. 

There’s one more song to go. It’s a Christmas song, from Don Henley, who appears inside a giant wreath in the heavens, bringing the night to a close.

“Ooh, there’ll be no more sorrow

No grief or pain

And I’ll be happy

Christmas once again.”

It’s nowhere near Christmas yet, though. Instead, I wander the Strip, before finally reaching the Jacuzzi in my room at the Trump International Hotel at 3:24 in the morning. The Eagles are no doubt happily asleep in their beds, on downy pillows. It’s the rest of us who are on life support. The places in our brains where the music once was are now occupied by powerful computer-generated effects which our brains naturally arrange into patterns in which we try our best to find meaning. But that kind of activity is already gone. As Joe Walsh put it earlier in the evening: All we have left to Sphere, is Sphere itself.