WITH BRYAN BERG
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SFR: You've spent the last month building a replica of the "Welcome to Las Vegas" sign out of playing cards to be displayed at the World Series of Poker. Has this been any easier considering it's the first project where you've used glue to hold the cards together?
BB:
People assume that using glue would make it easier but it actually makes it more difficult because the process is a lot slower. The irony is that glue as a function of a legitimate, free-standing house of cards is not really a requirement at all. Most people don't realize how strong a house of cards is even when it's not glued.
So…how strong is it?
Everything I build is very structurally regimented. There's an extreme amount of order and rigor and repetitive geometry. Plus, every seven decks of cards you use equals a pound and I can accumulate anywhere from 20 to 30 pounds of cards in a day. You do that for a week and you suddenly have a very heavy house of cards, one that is solid enough that you can lightly push on it and nothing will happen.
What materials have gone into making the Las Vegas sign?
We've probably gone through close to 1,300 bottles of Super Glue. I've probably used about 400 decks of cards, which actually isn't as many as I usually do for a project of this size. And then we've used maybe 700 poker chips and between 300 and 400 dice.
How does this compare to other projects in terms of difficulty?
I did a replica of Cinderella's Castle for Disney that was similar to this in that it required a whole different level of skill and thought. With this project, there were just so many unknowns in terms of what it would take to get it done. Also bear in mind that we still have to load this thing in a truck and drive it all the way to Las Vegas without it getting maimed.
I recall you had some snags with Cinderella's Castle as well.
[Laughs] Yeah, I was building the replica inside a tent that sat in front of the real Cinderella's Castle. The tent was designed to withstand 80 mph winds but not even Disney was able to forecast that wildlife would try to get inside. A squirrel jumped up on one of the walls and almost caused a massive collapse, but I was able to get in there and salvage it. It wasn't a laughing matter at the time but now it's one of my favorite stories.
And you have another Guinness World Record to show for it.
Yeah, actually Guinness created a whole new record category for that project because until then the only Guinness Record pertaining to cards was the World's Tallest House of Cards [which Berg has held for 13 years running].
You earned your first Guinness World Record in…
1992. I was a senior in high school.
I imagine there weren't any other Guinness World Record holders at your 10-year high school reunion.
[Laughs] No, but everyone knew that I was a creative nut so I don't think it was surprising to anybody. The thing that I couldn't have anticipated was how much this has totally derailed my life, in a good way. My whole life has been sustained by commissions to build weird stuff in weird places for weird people and I'm very proud of that.
So it's only natural that you ended up in Santa Fe?
I came through the area en route to one of my projects and I was just struck by the beauty. Every day when I was living in New York City, the subway was either on fire, delayed or on strike. So we'd be standing there waiting for the train and it was like, 'I wonder what's going on in Santa Fe today?' And then I decided to get serious about it and flew to Albuquerque and rented a car and spent a week checking it out. Unfortunately, the first part of town we saw was Cerrillos Road and we were like 'This is Santa Fe?'
You're not the first person to exit the freeway and have a rude awakening.
Oh yeah. But I think for us it was the people that we met that made us realize why Santa Fe is such a neat place. Everyone we met was moving and shaking in some incredibly interesting way and we decided we wanted to be a part of that. So here we are, adding to the density problem.
So do you have a lot of fans?
I get a lot of e-mails from kids who bought my book [
Stacking the Deck
] and are doing card-stacking now, but, no, I don't have any groupies. And that's OK.
What's been the most memorable celebrity moment for you?
I've met a lot of interesting people. Ellen DeGeneres is the greatest person. She's totally the real deal…I remember when I shook Martha Stewart's hand I felt like she could stare right through me. She was nice, but my hair wasn't good enough for Martha. So when I went on her show, her producers grabbed me and took my shirt off and were ironing it frantically and then they gave me this nasty comb-over…I was on
Good Morning America
every day for two weeks in Times Square. I literally lived, showered, ate and slept in the studio. When you're around those people that much you figure out that they're just normal people who happen to have weird jobs.
