Barst

Barst is a commune in the Moselle department in Alsace-Champagne-Ardenne-Lorraine in northeastern France.

The village is situated on the N56 road.

Population

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References

The Western

Coordinates: 36°10′0.5″N 115°8′12.4″W / 36.166806°N 115.136778°W / 36.166806; -115.136778

The Western Hotel and Casino was a hotel and casino in downtown Las Vegas, Nevada. The 8,925 sq ft (829.2 m²) casino is owned by the Barrick Gaming and operated by Navegante and The Tamares Group.

The Western was the lowest rung of Jackie Gaughan's low-roller casino empire that included the Las Vegas Club, The Plaza, the Gold Spike and El Cortez.

History

The Western opened in 1970 as the Western Hotel & Bingo Parlor and was owned by Jackie Gaughan and Mel Exber. At its opening, The Western was the world's largest bingo parlor with 1,020 seats.

Jackie Gaughan sold the hotel to Barrick Gaming in March 2004. The plans called for redeveloping the Western Hotel as a Latino destination resort. At the time, the AP said about the property, "On a stretch of despair that tourists in Las Vegas seldom see, the Western Hotel-Casino stands out as a beacon for the broke and nearly broken".

In 2005, The Tamares Group acquired total control of the hotel and casino through a lease from Barrick. In 2010 the hotel portion completely closed and redevelopment still remains uncertain to this day.

The Western Lands

The Western Lands is a 1987 novel by William S. Burroughs, the final book of the trilogy that begins with Cities of the Red Night (1981) and continues with The Place of Dead Roads (1983). The title refers to the western bank of the Nile River, which in Egyptian mythology is the Land of the Dead. Inspired by the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Burroughs explores the after-death state by means of dream scenarios, hallucinatory passages, talismanic magic, occultism, superstition, and his characteristic view of the nature of reality.

The prose is notable in that it shifts back and forth between Burroughs' characters and episodes clearly drawn from his own life. Scenes that are unmistakably auto-biographical include vignettes where Burroughs takes out evidence of amphetamine prescription bottles his mother gave him to sink with a large stone at the bottom of Lake Worth, Florida. The bottles were evidence his mother found in her grandson’s, Burroughs' own son's, bedroom. While Burroughs is ankle deep in the water, his aged mother is stalling police investigators in her home. Yet the novel also dives backwards into ancient history, giving the plot a perspective on death that attempts to transcend Christian theology. Burroughs acknowledges being inspired by Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings, an expansive novel published in 1983 about ancient Egypt set a thousand years before Christianity. Nevertheless, there are unmistakable references to contemporary culture, for instance Mick Jagger appears in some episodes.