LET THEM TAKE YOU THERE … LAS VEGAS

The Nevada metropolis is a temple to sensory overload — a gleaming oasis in the desert where visitors eat well, gamble and party late. Of course, it’s best to see it in the flesh, but “Sin City” has also been the subject of many works of cinema, music, literature and art — so even if you cannot bet it all on black in person, you can still sample some of its ambience from the comfort of your home.

MOVIES Ocean’s Eleven (1960/2001)

You have a choice: the initial incarnation of this classic heist movie, with the Rat Pack (including Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr) in their pomp, or the 21st-century reboot with George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and Julia Roberts. The latter is a rare case of a remake improving on the original, although the gist is much the same — a salute to Vegas’s capacity to be sophisticated and seedy at the same time, in a variety of sharp suits.

● Watch: Google Play (R35); Netflix

Casino (1995)

Vegas has worked hard to transform its image from “mafia playground” to “fun for all the family”, but it is hard to escape the former entirely when movies as compelling as Martin Scorsese’s 1995 masterpiece exist. It features star turns from Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Sharon Stone — who earned an Oscar nomination for her performance as a dancer turned mob wife. Set in the city of the mid’70s, this tour de force depicts the violence and corruption of the era so completely that cigarette smoke all but pours from the screen.

● Watch: Google Play (R18); on DVD via Amazon

TV Vega$

Vega$ ran for three seasons in the late ’70s and early ’80s, and revolved around a Vietnam veteran turned private detective (Robert Urich, pictured) solving crimes on and around The Strip — while driving his red 1957 Thunderbird convertible. Obviously.

● Buy: On DVD via Amazon

Las Vegas

This comedy-drama about the comings and goings at a fictional casino did a fair job of approximating working life in the city. It ran for five seasons, from 2003 to 2008. It starred James Caan as a former CIA officer turned president of the “Montecito” complex — but was also notable for its cameo appearances, with the likes of Jean-Claude Van Damme and Alec Baldwin popping in.

● Buy: On DVD via Amazon

MUSIC Hot Fuss

Vegas upstarts The Killers were very much young pups when they wrote and released this 11-track slice of alternative rock sparkle — their debut album — in 2004. Hot Fuss has aged well. It is not directly about the city, but it is certainly of it in its energy and ambition. The five-minute All These Things That I’ve Done dreamed of stadiums even as it played small clubs; Mr Brightside is still a festival anthem over a decade and a half after it burst into the world.

● Download/stream: Spotify, YouTube Music, Google Play, Deezer, Apple Music

Sinatra At The Sands

Ol’ Blue Eyes’s association with LV went far beyond smirking in Ocean’s Eleven. The city was the launchpad for a career revival that began in the early ’50s and slowly rebuilt his profile. By the mid-’60s he was playing to adoring crowds in the glitziest casino-resorts. This was a landmark LP of his rebirth and captured the soul of the Old Vegas in which the Rat Pack crooned and punters swooned.

● Download/stream: Amazon; Apple Music; Spotify; YouTube Music

BOOKS Leaving Las Vegas (John O’Brien)

There are very few laughs in John O’Brien’s semi-autobiographical 1990 novel about an alcoholic writer who moves from Los Angeles to Vegas with the intention of drinking himself to death — and its sense of tragedy was hardly lessened when its author killed himself four years after it was published. Nonetheless, it sketches out the underbelly of the city in grimy detail. If wading through its claustrophobia page by page sounds too much, the Oscar-winning 1995 movie adaptation — with Nicolas Cage and Elisabeth Shue — tells the same unflinching story, but in two hours.

● Read it: Amazon ($9.99 for the Kindle edition) Watch it: Apple TV

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Hunter S Thompson)

Thompson’s “gonzo journalism” tends to divide opinion — being either hailed as the words of a genius reporting back from astral plains far beyond sobriety or decried as the self-indulgent ramblings of a man who absorbed far too many narcotic substances and felt the need to brag about his experiences in print. Sitting down with a copy of Fear and Loathing won’t change your opinion — but it is the classic example of his trademark style. And it skewers the decadence of Sin City nicely, finding the city lolling in the sun in 1971 — just as the hippy movement seems to be running out of steam and patchouli oil.

● Read it: Amazon ($10.10 for the Kindle edition). Watch it: Google Play (R18)

ART Crossroads of Humanity

Urban artist Doze

Green, pictured right, crafted one city’s most intriguing murals in 2010. Daubed onto the walls of an underpass at the city centre tram station, Crossroads of Humanity lays out a sprawling crowd scene of faces and torsos in a sea of swirling blue. What does it all mean? Well, you can watch a video of its creation on YouTube and decide for yourself.

(VIRTUAL) MUSEUM The Neon Museum

Few cities have Vegas’s instinct for ripping down and rebuilding; a demand for “bigger, better, faster, more” that has seen many of its casinos and hotels condemned to rubble in the last half-century. Some of them, though, live on in the Neon Museum, which since 1996 has made a habit of gathering up old signs and fluorescent relics and keeping them as ghosts of decades past. Its Neon Boneyard area — some of which can be seen online — is fascinating; a vast memento mori asleep in the dust.

● neonmuseum.org

FOOD Meatballs

You can find just about any style of cuisine in Vegas but the city has long had an affinity for Italian-American dishes. The unashamedly gaudy Caesars Palace has a branch of Rao’s — a pasta-and-parmesan specialist that opened its first restaurant in New York in 1896. It sells a bowl of “Traditional Meatballs” which wraps up chunks of ground veal, pork and beef in breadcrumbs and marinara sauce. It’ll cost you $21.99 (about R409) in situ — but you’ll be able to make it for a lot less if you get creative cooking at home.