PAUL BLART 3: THE TAX CREDIT SCHEME <= CLICK THIS LINK

Also, a little BTS for ya since you came all this way.

The original draft was like double the size. Once I start ranting…well.

I had a whole section wondering how they came up with the idea of a Paul Blart 2 and why they set it in Las Vegas at all, but it wasn’t really working. I did pontificate that the name Blart was perhaps a portmanteau of Bloody and Fart (in line with the level of humor of both the original and the dreadful sequel), but … yeah… it needed to be left out.

Also, in a near-final draft, I had a section explaining how the original tax credit fund was devastated when earmarked money was diverted into Elon Musk’s hands via the head of the GOED (Nevada Governor's Office of Economic Development). In fact, the original 80 million was reduced to 10 million after Steve Hill negotiated 70 million to Tesla’s GigaFactory up north. I then reminded everyone that when Steve Hill became the head of the LVCVA, he allocated about as much in public funds to the Boring Company Tunnels under Las Vegas. A project I referred to in the piece (before it was correctly cut) as the Paul Blart 2 of Transportation Projects. I then linked to this fun (and accurate) piece by my pal, Ray Delahanty, aka the City Nerd.

City Nerd on the Vegas Loop

The rest of the big cuts were about movies in Las Vegas, which is probably for the best and will likely be the inspiration for an upcoming survey/essay right here on this Substack. And with that said… Why not subscribe?!?!

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(Photo illustration by Rodolfo Martinez/The Nevada Independent)

In 1955, the French-ish themed resort took shape as a mid-century modern temple of rock and masonry. Strangely, no one seemed to notice the irony of it being built on an adjoining lot to a hotel called the Algiers. Either way, the town was positively abuzz about the opening of what was one of the first ten major resorts of Las Vegas. The original ingress was a porte-cochere right off the Las Vegas Strip. There were other Frenchy things too from fleur de lys wallpaper to the coffee shop called Café Noir to a terraced bistro for eating out by that nice enough pool imaginatively dubbed -- Le Bistro. Like all the themed places that preceded it and followed – facsimile was king. Still, desert sand is not ocean sand, and the façade of a luxurious seaside escape was never truly infused with the glamour it intended to emulate. The place almost didn’t open because the original investors had questionable reputations; at the last minute, new owners emerged, including Harpo and Gummo Marx. (GUMMO, for crying out loud)! The Riviera (or Riv) was born.

No expense was spared, including luring Liberace for the then unprecedented salary of 50,000 a week. Opening night must have been a hoot! Joan Crawford was the mistress of ceremonies. Liberace and his 31-piece orchestra jammed into the night. National media covered the event.

Within three months, the place declared bankruptcy.

Led by “businessman” Gus Greenbaum, the Riv mounted its first of many Hail Marys to stay afloat, and despite each successive desperate effort to survive, it exacted a toll like a passer enduring a fierce and unrelenting blitz to get forward movement. The lore has it that Greenbaum was somewhat reluctant to take on the job after finally getting the Flamingo Hotel back on track after the untimely demise of Bugsy Siegel. His sister-in-law was recruited by forces-whose-names-are-never-uttered to “convince” Greenbaum to take the job. When her efforts failed, she was found dead. Surely coincidentally, Greenbaum signed onto the Riv the next day. His group included a number of people with what is euphemistically referred to as “colorful” backgrounds in other cities. Most were bookmakers. Some worse. One guy whose name was on the list of Riv reorganizers was Ross Miller.

Years later, Miller’s son would go on to be both the District Attorney for the County and then Governor of Nevada; his namesake grandson would become Nevada Secretary of State. Indeed, many of the State’s modern-day leaders can be traced by their bloodlines to the so-called scoundrels of society who reinvented themselves in Las Vegas through philanthropy, charisma, and no shortage of support from their people back in their towns of origin.

But the Riv was Greenbaum’s ship to steer in 1955 until his own untimely death (and his wife’s) in 1958, both by spontaneous, kitchen-knife-induced decapitation. The Riv put up tens of thousands of dollars in reward money for the murder. However, not surprisingly, the reward was never claimed, and the crime was never solved, though there are still looming suggestions that Greenbaum may have been skimming, or perhaps he just became an unreliable keeper of secrets. Either way, the legacy of the Riviera, like so many local landmarks, had a blood connection.

Oh, blood. Blood on the sand. Bloodlines up and down. Magical blood. It can keep a vampire alive and Angelina Jolie freaky. Nevada, itself, was “Battle Born” from the bloodshed of both the Mexican American War (where our land was essentially carved out for the U.S.) and the Civil War (where we were granted statehood as a “free state” to give President Lincoln a little more leverage in keeping the Union together). Blood, it would seem, is in our blood. Perhaps it’s the reason the Riv still stands to this day, albeit a shell of its former self. The Riv is like a cagey wise guy who somehow ducks repeated contracts on his life. If it does ever go down, it’ll be penance for the sin of creeping lameness through the decades, though undeniably it remains because of those interesting Hail Marys – each causing great damage to the owners who take a hit.

I’m not an advocate of leveling the few remaining eyesores from yesteryear, though I understand the concept. I get the whole idea of “progress” and reinvention. Just look at the benefits of absolute sandblasting old facades for new ones on Times Square and Madonna. In fact, the Riv has been so bad at it, it only makes that special Vegas sense of nonsense that it lasted as long as it did.

After the demise of Gus Greenbaum, who by all accounts got the Riv at least running again, there was little significant about the Riv other than its curious resilience. Liberace couldn’t do it himself even with such hot opening acts as Barbra Streisand, who had her Las Vegas debut in 1964. Luckily, Shecky Greene caught fire when the Riv needed it the most. Shecky’s drunken, free-spirited antics are often credited with keeping the hotel an ongoing and competitive concern. This was dangling bow tie and shvitzy pleated shirt comedy of indelible impression. Well into the 1960s, “Vegas styled” (read: urban Catskills) comedy was a big draw. Usually, it was just a Jew, his tux, and a handy VO and soda. There were your Jack Carters, your Norm Crosbys, even your Don Rickleses, but Shecky was considered to be the omnipresent king among that Vegas set, and the Riv had him when they needed him to survive.

I interviewed Shecky years later, and all the questions about his past had been recast as punchlines. His actual exploits of the day turned into apocryphal anecdotes that get you nowhere. Shecky occasionally rolled out the shtick for an off-Strip casino until he died in 2023, but I can’t imagine it was anything but a literal whisper of its former greatness.

Ultimately, it’s just cool that, like the Riv, this artifact has survived into the 21st century. Shecky was the salve for almost a decade.

By 1969, the Riv was for the countless time on its supposed last leg. On one hand, they began taking risks. For example, the injection of hitherto unknown “talents” like Joan Rivers and John Davidson into the national bloodstream vis-à-vis the Riviera marquee. That worked so well that Rivers relocated to the city and for a while became a favorite daughter. Her own daughter, Melissa, went to Temple Beth Shalom preschool with me in 1971. In 1969, Dean Martin was also lured to the Riv as the main headliner for a purported exchange of 10 percent of the hotel. That lasted for three years, but it wasn’t enough. The place begged for another “game changer” (read: investor).

Israeli businessman Meshulam Riklis bought the place in 1973. At the time, he owned a major travel service agency, but he's better known as one of the creators of alternative financing structures like junk bonds and “holding your creditors at bay.” Essentially, the Riv trudged along during the recession 70s like all the other hotels; implosions and mega-resorts wouldn’t be part of the scene until the late 1980s.

In the very early 1970s, the first apartment my family moved into (Somerset) was directly behind the Riviera. In fact, we shared a block wall with the Riviera tennis courts. There was an opening in the wall which made it easy to get through… a shortcut for my bike once I was old enough to ride one outside my parents’ eye. I used to gather up the green fuzzy balls that often careened over the court walls and sold them back to the casino for a quarter a ball.

Ours was an indoor three-story complex filled with a variety of Vegas characters that I only wish I was old enough to chronicle. There were dealers (card) like my dad, musicians, beauticians, aspiring showgirls, various other hotel and casino workers, and old men who gambled a lot (you can call them creepy; I say colorful - and smelly). There were exactly ten other kids in the building for the nine years that we lived there. Sometimes we’d hang out at the complex pool; sometimes in the full metal playground (average summer surface temperature of slide: 135 degrees Fahrenheit). Not surprisingly, the Riv was the first hotel on my radar, and I’d go there often over the years, usually to sneak around the Riv’s pool. The smell of coconut. The fire pouring down from the sky. The relief of a cannonball. The look the other way of the lifeguards.

There isn’t much memorable about the 70s and the Riv except for the peculiar booking of Steve Martin for two weeks in 1978, which was the first to enforce a strict “no minors” rule. As a fan of Martin during his wild and/or crazy phase, but only 11 years old, I fell victim to the ban. It was quite a blow since my Uncle Izzy, who worked at the Riv, was able to get us comps. Turned away at the door, Uncle Izzy was able to get tickets for the next week’s headliner, Melissa Manchester, but it wasn’t the same. I had no choice; I cried out loud (there I said it). Curiously, I had no problem weeks earlier going to see the topless Lido de Paris at the Stardust hotel – proving fairly definitely where the real French experience and attitude existed. Viva Las Seins!

The next watershed year for the Riviera, literally, was 1985. Riklis became an impresario of sorts and made a number of entertainment decisions that shaped the Riv for the next twenty years. The first was an aquatic production show called SPLASH that involved a 20,000-gallon aquarium, synchronized swimmers, fireworks, and Frank Gorshin, who previously played the Riddler in the Batman TV show in the 60s. That show was immediately embraced by the local audiences (the ones who cared about casino production shows, anyway) as a fresh alternative to long-in-the-tooth stage shows like the Follies Bergere, Jubilee and the Lido De Paris.

In the pre-Cirque du Soleil invasion (man, Las Vegas is SO FRENCH), innovation of any sort was a commodity. Ultimately, SPLASH went through many incarnations, including the insertion of a motorcycle Globe of Death, ice dancers, gaucho click clack masters, and a bevy of impersonators including a faux Michael Jackson, Tom Jones, and Eminem – none of which had ANYTHING to do with water. It finally suffered an unceremonious death in 2006, having gathered more punchlines about it than audience lines to see it.

An Evening at La Cage was also introduced in 1985 and was the second, but arguably more successful, major female impersonator show on the Strip. (The first was Boylesque at the Silver Slipper). Of note was the star of that show, a 20-year-old named Frank Marino, who would make a name for himself as the preeminent (but likely only) professional Joan Rivers impersonator. Interestingly enough, both debuted at the Riv. So deep, however, is Marino’s devotion to the impression that he has undertaken many of the same plastic surgeries as his inspiration. In 1986, Rivers sued Marino for intellectual property infringement, presumably over the jokes and not her trademarked “stretchy face.” While seeking millions in damages, the two settled out of court and over the years would sporadically appear on talk shows together.

Shortly later, Riklis inserted two other shows into the same makeshift showroom area in the newly designed Riviera to make a synergistic triptych of low-cost shows. To do this, he removed the elegant porte-cochere and built a cylindrical obelisk with a black glass reflective façade, random neon, and ads for things inside the building. Where there was once a graceful ingress, there are now multiple casino entrances flush with the sidewalk. Think a giant tube of Death Star slammed down like a can of Raid to squash a beautiful neo-Modern classic façade. Along with La Cage and the two other shows (“Crazy Girls” and “Budd Friedman’s Improv”), the Riv also boasted a home for one of the first fast food restaurants inside a casino-- Burger King. Mmmm, un Royale au Fromage on the Riviera — c’est magnifique ! La Cage finally closed in 2009.

The topless musical review Crazy Girls (with its controversial billboard of the performers’ posteriors and the tag line “No If’s, Ands, or…”) and a generic Comedy Club rounded out the last days. And while the morality police and a clandestine group of PTA ladies who voluntarily raise their kids in a place known as Sin City were able to pull down the billboards in the name of the children, a bronze sculpture of said hineys of said Crazy Girls has been erected as the Riv’s contribution to “public art.” Today, the monstrosity monument lives on the 60th floor of the fancy Circa Hotel inches away from the exact spot where the City of Las Vegas was born in 1905.

In the mid-1980s, another sort of Hail Mary to bring in business came in the shape of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (G.L.O.W.), which was staged in one of the Riv ballrooms. One of the GLOW ladies was a high school friend, so I used to go to her “matches.” The draw was as straightforward as the title suggests and was a clear attempt to coattail on the then-emerging WWF. And thus, villains and beauties grappled amidst turnbuckles and high ropes. Signature moves, extremely loose and ever-shifting backstories of rivalry. It was all filmed for syndicated broadcast replete with “comedy bits” featuring the wrestlers. The jokes and delivery were not good. It was as if the Hee-Haw cornfield was mysteriously populated by drag queens auditioning for Solid Gold using cold readings of Dixie cups as dialogue. Now and again, the girls would get hurt during the matches, and everyone would freak out; the show would stop while serious apprehension hung in the air. Rounding out the cast of characters was the “manager” of some of the girls, played by Jackie Stallone. I was never really sure what she managed or if she merely had a piece of the profit pie, but there she was strutting around in a black unitard. At the time, she was well into her 60s –literally shaking her stuff to rev up the crowd and presumably to make her son, Sylvester, proud. In the distance, Frank Stallone wept. Frightfully, thankfully, it’s all captured on YouTube “from the fabulous Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada….”

As enjoyable as the TV show inspired by GLOW at the Riv was, it was never fully reflective of what it had, and culturally interesting, this blip of entertainment actually was at the time. That’s always my complaint, though, isn’t it? The potential of complex and reflective shows that honestly probe life in Las Vegas is rarely realized in the fullest sense when it goes through the edit blender of what makes good television. Or maybe better stated, what people want/expect to see out of Las Vegas. C’est la vie.

And now let’s go back to 1977. The actress/singer Pia Zadora married Riklis (he was 32 years her senior). Well-documented in the sometimes cruel popular press, it was Riklis who shelled out millions to make his young bride a bona fide “star.” Headlining on the Strip! What could go wrong? Her notoriously bad movie, Butterfly, aside (as well as the reported “bribe” Riklis gave the Foreign Press to name her “Upcoming Actress” at that year’s Golden Globes -- the critical panning of Pia at the time of her Las Vegas debut at the Riviera was merciless and was not -- as predicted -- the salvation of the Riv. Poor Pia. Even Glen Campbell at his hungriest peak famously refused to perform with her.

If only Riklis would have let Pia wrestle Mt. Fiji or Matilda the Hun in GLOW.

NOTE: Pia came out just fine and entertained for years on weekends to full houses in the little cocktail room of everyone’s favorite old-school “alleged mobster” restaurant, Pieros. Pieros sadly was purchased by the questionable weekly hotel overlords whose practices were once described by a subcommittee of the U.S. Congress as “uniquely egregious.”

Fast forward to 1989. The famous Mirage Hotel and Casino was born on the Strip, ushering in a new Las Vegas of get rid of the old and make way for the mega mega. Despite its clinging to life in any way it could, the Riv became decrepit and borderline moribund, though on any given night it could be packed. This wasn’t an oxymoron.

A beautiful kiwifruit can be teeming with maggots, too. Not to say patrons of the Riviera were vermin – they were probably nice people who simply don’t care where they laid their nest eggs.

The Riviera was the epitome of “just another joint.” And as out-of-touch and pedestrian as it was- it remained a Las Vegas Strip casino/hotel, and that is big time. It had the same themed slot machines and table games as most and followed the same general rules of dazzling sucker customer service. They even tried oddball shows like a “dream” concert that never was with a Barbra Streisand and Frank Sinatra impersonators. Sometimes, the Neil Diamond impersonator who also had a show in the same room at alternate times would drop in to do a duet with the not-Barbra. Interestingly enough, while the Riv was Barbra’s first Las Vegas show, it was also where Frank had his last. In a town accused of blowing up its history, sometimes little nuggets like that make it through. Heck, the Riv single-handedly kept Charo in spangly sequins for years.

Oh, the Riv. More like the beached whale than a sultry Mediterranean beach. But even as its days have to be numbered, it’s the remarkable story of avoiding the pitfalls that befell the others that is most interesting. The Riv was one of the last true vestiges of the “Old” and it tried so hard to stay part of the “Current.” It succeeded just enough despite its steady stream of miserable failures. It was our Pondicherry, India, and no one can erase that.

Of course, it was eventually imploded. That happened in the summer of 2016. The land went through some exchanges and remains reinvented as a paved lot outside a convention space owned by our quasi-governmental marketing agency, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. There’s no plan to build anything to replace the apparently irreplaceable. 10 years. 10 years ago. Wow. Time flies on the Strip.

The Mirage was demolished in the summer of 2024.

Viva La Riviera! C’est magnifique! Au Revoir, Riviera. Au Revoir.

• A version of this essay appeared in the lovely anthology CLARK on Zeitgeist Press.

I called the talk “Still Learning From Learning From Las Vegas.” And the reason I think they asked me was that despite having no background in architecture, I do have a deep-rooted love of all things Las Vegas. And here was a serious book about my hometown which, let’s admit it, is rarely taken seriously. Indeed, as I was to learn, it was even more radical in architectural circles because it used the cliché-ridden, bombastic Las Vegas Strip (and surrounding city) as the foundation of the ideas advanced.

My talk surrounded this idea. A glorified, non-fiction book review, not necessarily about the content as much as how it made a local kid feel when I first happened upon it. Despite not understanding a lot of it. In spite of not really (at the time of the first read) giving a whit about architecture. I became fascinated with this book even as many of the lessons of urban planning advanced in that era have long been abandoned by modern-day architects and Las Vegas, too.

But as I told the crowd, for me my continued fascination is premised on the fact that the book turns out to be the first major recognition that bold and brash Las Vegas – with all its unconventional beauty and design, quirks, scale, missteps and myths – was worth exploring.

And now, whatever shape Vegas presently is in, I believe the city sadly lacks in but should continue to warrant surveys, analysis, and distillation. For better or worse. Cementing the fact that there is value in studying this hotbed of tourist-driven decision-making. And by understanding how we create structures, and live and move through our spaces, we can gain insight into aspects of desire, diversion, determination, but maybe as more and more people flock to living in Las Vegas - we can figure out how the “two Las Vegases” I like to talk about can coexist through their systems, values, and even architecture.

Yet, asking questions and looking too closely at ourselves is not really our strong suit. I do like to ask questions, though, and this book was one of the major inspirations for that attitude about my city.

And so I gave my talk. I began with the same quote I use in every talk about any aspect of Las Vegas. It’s from my favorite Nevada-connected author, Claire Vaye Watkins. I find her assessment to be instructive. It’s an invaluable contextual clue to recall whenever we discuss the forces that shape the city inside and out. Whenever we dive into the myths that so easily take root, and the difficult conversations we scrupulously and adeptly redirect. It’s also a solid, versatile caution for all of us wandering the valley for whatever purpose. It is the epigraph of a collection of essays I’ve been working on for what seems like decades.

“You have to be careful in Las Vegas. The place will be whatever you need it to be.”

And then I made it clear that even though I was asked to speak on one of the most famous architecture books of the twentieth century, I did not have any specialized knowledge of the discipline or its theories.

Here’s the text of that opening day presentation:

“Good morning. Welcome to Duck, Duck, Shed. These are three words, um, two architectural words that I know how to pronounce. Spoiler: I will mispronounce almost every other, even basic architectural term, as it comes up. Same goes for well-known architects. In fact, I’m not convinced that Rem Koolhaas isn’t a made-up name - because c’mon. Too perfect. I also feel I should disclose that I’m not an expert at creating PowerPoint presentations, though that should become self-evident quickly, if not already. Finally, I AM a semi-retired criminal lawyer and a podcaster - which only further confuses my authority on the topic of this book and will probably make you double mistrust me before we even start because - yikes - what a combo.

So, why me? Only my lifelong obsession with all things Las Vegas can answer that. My parents randomly ran into each other, both as separate tourists from the same Midwestern city at the Stardust Hotel. Approximately nine months later, they brought me into the world for the first time, and shortly thereafter, we moved here, where I’ve been ever since. This is where I grew up. And I’m not being hyperbolic with a cheeky map of the Strip from 1971 - this is where I literally was raised until age 13 and then about two blocks away til about 1991. I call myself a Vegas kid or a casino kid, and for good reason. And as a Vegas kid, I was specifically cursed, or blessed, with a fascination with what it means to be of Vegas, or more broadly, what Vegas means to be of the world. As such, I developed a deep intrigue. All things Vegas. It’s history and evolution. It’s coming of age and arrested development. Petulant Vegas. Perplexing Vegas. Progressive Vegas.

I always knew it was someplace - unique - only reinforced in my seven years away for schooling before I returned home for good.

And as much as I stumbled around for answers to whatever available sources and stories could come my way, it was during my stint as a sophomore at the University of Arizona, and my work-study job in their Architecture library at the checkout counter, that I first encountered “Learning From Las Vegas.” In 1985, it was a book that I stamped in and out quite a few times. Once, I grabbed it for myself, hungry to learn what there might be to learn. Impressed with the fact, of course, that an Ivy League group found my city to be worthy of an academically rigorous study. That they spoke of the buildings and design that surrounded my everyday existence was invigorating. Impressive schematics, familiar images in photos being dissected, and lots of fancy words and comparisons to epic and mythic places like the gardens of Versailles. That this was an essential book, at least to the students and faculty, may have been my first source of real hometown pride. I’ve read and re-read this book countless times, and while it’s been rightfully described as a common-interest book - it isn’t the theory but the context that has stuck with me so long - and it’s that context, then and now - that i submit is the central idea to why we, especially those enamored with Las Vegas - can use it to learn things still today. And if at this point, you’re wondering why I’m still talking about MYSELF instead of this book - well, from my vantage – the more of this place that I am, the more appropriate it is for me to speak to how parts of this book are still worth discussing and debating so many years after its publication.

Apart from its place in the world of architecture, again to which I cannot speak with authority, I can say that not only is Learning from Las Vegas part of our city’s literary canon, but that general takeaways from the observations and findings of Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi and company are still part of the conversation and as the title of this talk suggests - we are still learning and ignoring lessons developed over 50 years ago from some smarties from Yale.

So as I understand it, the Yale crew was ready to blow the lid off of modernism and go after the concept of the architect as epic hero and create a study not as architects felt the public should experience the great buildings, but how the prevalent and undisciplined appearance of commercial developments across the country was vital to understanding the language of new architecture in a time of urbanism. That these roadside endeavors were communicating with symbols and signs, accommodations, and invitation. That the future of buildings was more about engagement than monument, and concluded that the granddaddy of all commercial strips was the Las Vegas Strip and that the 5 or so miles of hotels, casinos, retail, gas stations, wedding chapels, front-facing parking lots, porte-cochères, and BIG OL CRAZY SIGNS were ripe for review. So they came here for 10 days in 1968, took about a gazillion photos, filmed from their rental cars and a helicopter in the sky, and told the world that this city (and especially the main focal point - the LV Strip - although to a lesser extent, Fremont Street proper) was the epitome of what all architects should be mindful of as the world moved forward.

Now that might be the most non-architectury summary of this book, but indulge me as we talk about this book as a book and just a little more about my relationship with the city and this book.

Obviously, Las Vegas Boulevard isn’t the only commercial strip in Las Vegas; it was just the one since the 1950s that got all the action. Parallel, and only a block away, was a little commercial strip indistinguishable in design from maybe hundreds of others around the city. This Strip-adjacent center where I grew up in the 1970s had everything my family (and Strip performers and employees) needed in a set of connected storefronts. There was the barber shop and beauty shop, a Sicilian pizza joint, Tal, the cobbler to the stars. Raul, the tailor to the stars. Hudson Cleaners, Mr. E’s Supermarket (first sighting of Space Invaders), a florist, the Landmark pharmacy, a dark and foreboding bar called Archie’s Tavern that I would always peek into if the door opened - which it did an inordinate amount in daytime hours. There was a huge parking lot out front and a Googie-style, giant neon sign announcing “the Somerset Shopping Center.” It was called “Somerset,” and it was beautiful.

Recently, the whole shopping center was leveled and replaced by a giant deli that vibes like an airport hangar. The developers are notorious in Las Vegas for running a collective of weekly/monthly rentals at an aggregate fee that would make Oliver Twist’s Mr. Abbot blush. In 2022, a United States Congressional House Select Subcommittee found this company “particularly egregious” in their practices.

They “repurposed” the old Somerset sign to advertise their deli without any of the old flair or neon panache. They also named their deli after a storied, beloved, tiny one from 1989 that they acquired in 2018 in a different, but nearby strip mall. The new signage at the new location, in a new building with a totally different concept, touts that they’ve been around “since 1989.” Their website gives no tribute or mention by name of the original owners. I guess they paid for the historical marker - they get to exploit it.

This, by the way, is a great metaphor for where we’ve come and why we need more “learning” indeed.

But okay, so-long Somerset. Let’s go back to learning from the Strip with all its choices old and new!

The Strip was, from its origins, a hobbled-together collective of mostly unrelated properties with dozens of voices and architects working not in conjunction but in competition for the tourist eye from the highway - unburdened by real zoning laws, codes, city planning, or cohesion. And the Yale group wasn’t the first to notice. To fully understand the context of what Las Vegas had become that caught Denise Scott Brown’s attention - we should first take a brief journey down what other intellectuals had published prior to the arrival of the Yalies.

Starting in the 1950s, there was a steady onslaught of popular writing about our City in the journals of the day. Of course, there were handfuls of movies and even a few novels (and more than a few dime store potboilers) set in the city too. The public image of Las Vegas as an escapist land of tacky disguised as classy, and clever belying ridiculousness had already taken hold. Partly by the intention of the army of publicists bombarding popular media with staged images, partly from the word of mouth I’d imagine of the growing middle class of visitors heading back to wherever they came from with stories, some of which might even be true, and because of the growing roster of big name entertainers who made it a gathering of a lot in a place that was relatively small.

But perhaps the first real big-deal treatment of our city from a heavyweight writer was Tom Wolfe’s 1964 essay “Las Vegas (What?) LAS VEGAS (Can’t hear you! Too noisy) LAS VEGAS !!!!” that appeared in Esquire magazine. Call this a precursor to the book we’re talking about today. He wrote lines like:

“He had been rolling up and down the incredible electric-sign gauntlet of Las Vegas’ Strip, U.S. Route 91, where the neon and the par lamps - bubbling, spiraling, rocketing, and exploding in sunbursts ten stories high out in the middle of the desert - celebrate one-story casinos.”

AND

“Las Vegas is the only town in the world whose skyline is made up neither of buildings like New York, nor of trees, like Wilbraham, Massachusetts, but signs. One can look at Las Vegas from a mile away on Route 91 and see no buildings, no trees, only signs. But such signs! They tower. They revolve, oscillate, they soar in shapes before which the existing vocabulary of art history is helpless. I can only attempt to supply names - Boomerang Modern, Palette Curvilinear, Flash Gordon MIng-Alert Spiral… signs have become the architecture of Las Vegas and the most whimsical, Yale-seminar-frenzied devices of the two late geniuses of Baroque Modern, Frank Lloyd Wright and Eero Saarinen, seem rather stuffy business, like a jest at a faculty meeting compared to it.”

In 1967, Joan Didion added on with her short piece, Marrying Absurd, in the Saturday Evening Post.

“Almost everyone notes there is no ‘time’ in Las Vegas, no night and no day and no past and no future; neither is there any logical sense of where one is. One is standing on a highway in the middle of a vast hostile desert looking at an 80-foot sign that blinks STARDUST or CAESARS PALACE. Yes, but what does that explain? This geographical implausibility reinforces the sense that what happens there has no connection with ‘real’ life. Nevada cities like Reno and Carson are ranch towns, Western towns, places behind which there is some historical imperative, but Las Vegas seems to exist only in the eye of the beholder. All of which makes it a stimulating and interesting place….”

By the time Learning from Las Vegas was published, we also could add on Hunter S. Thompsons’ take in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) with its provocative subtitle: A savage journey into the Heart of the American Dream and the epitome of pop culture - arguably the biggest franchise of its time - James Bond arriving with Diamonds are Forever and even the biggest to that date TV movie in the guise of the Night Stalker (1972) which was all about how vampires terrorize our streets at night - in the city that makes the most sense for vampire to do so with so much action and post-modern streetscapes! Begrudgingly, I’ll mention Viva Las Vegas (1964), if for no other reason than its seeming popularity at the time and its Technicolor glory in some of the establishing shots of the Strip, and maybe also The Godfather, with its important references to Las Vegas, which only cemented the mystique. To put it another way, Vegas had become part of the popular conversation, and it hasn’t eased up on the gas since then.

So, the Learning From Las Vegas arrived (and was republished in 1977 with a second preface from Denise Scott Brown, alone). Now, however deep we are into this discussion, let’s finally talk about the book—and let’s start with those prefaces. (c’mon y’all really didn’t expect a straight architecture talk?).

Perhaps one of the most interesting things we learn from the original preface is that, just prior to the expedition, Venturi sent a letter to the then-mayor of Las Vegas, Oran Gragson. It was filled with flowery language and a plea for assistance:

“The main thrust of the work will be an analysis and evaluation of the physical form of Las Vegas. Particular emphasis will be on the Strip, but viewed in the context of the region and in relation to the city and especially the downtown. Our philosophical stance will be that the Las Vegas Strip is the example par excellence of a new city form which is emerging in America and which must be understood by architects and urbanists.”

And then this little zinger that, from a 2025 lens, is kind of remarkable: “If our urban potential is to be realized. Behind our decision to conduct a studio on Las Vegas lies one strong recommendation: You have something very good here. Be careful not to spoil it by using aesthetic controls which apply to more traditional cities. The Strip could be ruined by good taste.”

He then asked the Mayor of Las Vegas for about $9,000, which, in 2025 dollars, would have been about $82,000, to study the Strip. Luckily for Venturi, the letter found its way to the City of Las Vegas planner Don Saylor- who came off as a fanboy and brought the proposal to the Regional Planning Council, to whom he was the advisor, to see if they might have the dough. But it seemed like a fairly haphazard ask. Here’s how the Review Journal reported it.

In the preface, Venturi seems to take great offense that the request was never met, as if to say, do you know how important this is gonna be. And maybe emboldened by what was clearly Mr. Saylor’s enthusiasm, and undaunted, Venturi believed he had an inroad and made a second request for a little extra to do some filming too. Here’s how that was reported.

And while he didn’t get the dough from the government, and there is a not so subtle tone of bitterness against the RJ in the preface, it does turn out, they wound up with comps a plenty from the Stardust and deep discounts elsewhere - which is maybe the best learning from Las Vegas - you can’t just demand juice - you gotta work it a little in our town.

I honestly love how pissy he got about the RJ - and also, as we’ll see in a minute, how his warning to the alleged planners of the unplannable Las Vegas strip manifested in the text.

But before I get to book talk (and spoiler, it’s not going to be that deep or insightful, just some of my impressions), I want to mention the second preface from the second edition written by Denise Scott Brown, which rightfully establishes her equality in the project with an excellent call-out of the unfortunate domination of upper-class males in the profession and their obvious biases. She also gives the reader additional homework to better contextualize the book and respond to critics. Despite its revolutionary impact in critiquing the prevalent mode of modernism in architecture, my further reading suggested that other architects did not necessarily shun the authors, but rather did not fully embrace them, even as they continued to build and work on theory and inspiration. Because of my nerd-dom, I tracked down some of the referenced articles including one penned by Scott Brown called “On Architectural Formalism and Social Concern; a Discourse for Social Planners and Radical Chic Architects” a clever and thoughtful reflection on the social responsibility of all disciplines in creating things, objects and spaces for the masses that could spawn its own festival on holistic approaches to city building - but also Radical Chic Architects is a great band name up for grabs.

So what I love most about the book - and yes, after however long it’s been - here it is, but don’t blink; it won’t last too long - is the photos. At once nostalgic for me, as I probably traversed this Street on foot, on bicycle, by car (both soon to be asleep in the backseat and as driver) as much as any human has over a 50-some odd-year period, though it is not a competition. Like many people, the old Las Vegas is lovely and transcends whatever might have been thought of its gaudiness at the time. The photos, while obviously serving the purpose of the study, reveal a joy and lightness of that time that any visitors, even fancy Yale architects, couldn’t avert their deadpan, serious eyes from. It shows up in the images in the book and the ones collected in other forums from those trips as well (I highly recommend getting your hands on the Las Vegas Studio book, which has a bevy of unpublished photos).

And while a lot of the captions are great and instructive, one perhaps stuck the longest and provides me with the central takeaway as a Vegas observer, fanatic, and annoying critic - the caption simply read: “the order in this landscape is not obvious.”

The rest, as an observer of Vegas, I found fascinating even if it often was over my head. The text, in lots of places, sure, but so too with the various comparative analyses of directional spaces, symbol word architecture, pattern maps, elevations, etc. All fascinating. And as excited as the Las Vegas city planner was in his words that someone would be coming to Las Vegas to: “recognize the contribution we are making to city planning. Our ideas, he said, “are breaking away from hidebound and traditional concepts and allowing freedom of thought and design to develop urban areas that make for good living.” He continued, “I would jump in the air and click my heels with joy if someone from a place as prestigious as Yale were to come here and label the Las Vegas area as a good form of urban design.”

But is it? (Pause for laughter). I mean, I don’t think that was EVER the conclusion of anyone associated with this book. More so, what I got from Learning from Las Vegas is merely proof that cities could evolve and even become grand examples from “below,” if you will. That a place like the Las Vegas Strip in particular could arise as a product of abject popular culture and desire; that it could evolve in an unorganized way out of the necessity of getting attention over any intellectual pinings of architects or city planners. And in the car culture days of the 60s and 70s, our city unabashedly did all the things - all the time - making signs stars, and communication king to the travelers locked on the highways. No one at the time in our country did it bigger, and the authors found a connection to a very human, very ancient drive - hence the comparisons to Versailles, Rome, and Victorian England. I don’t think the authors ever thought living in Las Vegas based on this design was “good” per se, but that it was special and important to note.

I mean, it fit right into Venturi’s famous quote in response to other famous quotes!

They also, perhaps with a little chagrin, noted that change was a part of the ethic of our city and there was concern that it would change itself right out of relevance. Hence the warning in his letter to the Mayor. And change did come, and it came quickly.

Even as early as the 1977 edition of the book, Scott Brown noted there was already change afoot, not just in light of the well-documented oil crisis that had people traveling on the roads less, but in the structures and signs.

“In the nine years since our study was initiated, Las Vegas and the Strip have changed too. Some buildings have new wings and restyled facades. Some signs are no longer there. Delicate and intense neon high readers have given way to bland, white, plastic rear-illuminated message boards that alter the scale and vitality of Strip ornament. Portes cocheres now vie with signs as bearers of symbolic information.”

Little did she know the changes that would come. Actually, from my perspective, little changed on the Las Vegas Strip and even Fremont Street from 1969 until 1989. Sure, a tweak here and there. The MGM being the biggest entry. But who could have imagined the complete refashioning into our current era that began with small booms that made the Mirage - and all the big boom implosions that followed - making our cluttered by light series of unique populism into a caterwaul of heaviness, a blobification of the center - a marginalization of the weird - but also a place where more people would come and come than ever before.

Impressive, of course, but by 1997, on the 25th anniversary of “Learning from Las Vegas,” even Venturi was like - yeah, Vegas’ importance as an architectural landscape rich in inspiration is over. In that same interview, Denise Scott Brown extracted perhaps the lesson that resonates the most with me. She said, “We learned about symbolism in architecture. We re-established the fact that architecture does contain symbols, and these symbols can be read to have meaning. These iconographic parts of architecture are very important and have never been entirely lost from architecture, even though the modern architects thought they had obliterated them.

Those symbols remain in my mind on the Strip even as the structures that communicated them are gone. Call them ghosts, or myths, or a vortex - the mix-up of scale and seeming chaos in service of the tourist good remains. The grand buildings with their obvious purpose may not align with the joy of rebellion, but populism, taken to an extreme, remains. With the signs gone, Steven Izenour said, what we loved the most was gone. Scott pointed out the constraints and limitations of the LED signs, “though she predicted the tech might get better.”

And now where are we today….

Today, we aren’t the Las Vegas model; we’re compared to Times Square. We block our sights with scaffolding for a race. We move underground. You can’t see the Horseshoe Hotel from the street. We resist outside assessment or independent information. Will someone else barnstorm us to find our truth, or will we, for once, let down our guard and figure out for ourselves what makes our urban environment sustainable?

But I will disagree with Venturi and his crew that Vegas isn’t unique or worth learning from anymore. Not for them, perhaps, or architects of their ilk, but the development of Strip City (a term coined by the late UNLV history professor Eugene Moering) should be on any urbanist’s radar for a 100-thousand-dollar study! How all the oval around this street has become its own city-state. The insatiable drive for more, and bigger and new, to keep it fresh and allegedly relevant. The casting of any traditional planning model around stadiums to contain the big stadiums all in Strip City. To scoff at the traffic jams and the big boxy LEDs. To turn technology up to 11.

We are obscuring the bones even further with sometimes hairbrained, Hail Marys, but now again inspired madness - the sort of spontaneous weirdness the authors embraced, even if they too understood that corporations weren’t the best to sanction the lasting accidents that made Las Vegas what it was in the 1960s and 1970s, when it did, and in such a vastly interesting and important way.

Past architects would make buildings to last forever, then 50 years; now Vegas has shown it can be far less. That change of the scenery is a constant. Not without its real issues, impact on businesses, strains on public transit, three major tragedies, all of which arguably would have been preventable; all with some degree of nexus to the size and scale of Strip City. It’s all worth studying, and as Learning from Las Vegas showed and continues to show - understanding what people like and being thoughtful about how it influences what happens everywhere.

Before there was a me — my Mom — who had never been to Vegas was “dragged here” by her pals to “celebrate” her recent divorce becoming finalized. She acknowledged that she heard Las Vegas was a “fun place” to visit.

My Dad, who was a degenerate gambler and frequent Las Vegas visitor, was in town to execute a money-making scheme involving coupon books for tourists. He had one financial backer in the then-heir to the TV Guide publishing fortune. The game plan was to secure everything needed on the ground to launch a business, meet potential partners and investors, and lay the groundwork for a huge moneymaking opportunity.

Mom and her pals decided to go to the Stardust to see the topless review, Lido De Paris, and were in line to buy tickets.

Dad and the TV Guide guy, a fellow luck junkie, quickly burned through all the capital that had been earmarked for the project on the gambling tables. The TV Guide guy flew home, leaving Dad with the rental convertible they had driven together from Chicago. Dad had totally busted out, but since they had gambled at the Stardust, he had built up enough comp equity to get free meals and a room. Once he had a place to flop, his intention was to rebuild on the fumes of casino benevolence, get enough dough to get out of Las Vegas, and then…whatever happens next for a gambler.

Mom and Dad had gone on a blind date in Chicago six months earlier, but it didn’t lead to a love connection. They hadn’t talked since that date.

Dad saw Mom (16 years his junior) in line and played the big-shot card, getting them comps to the show (an indicator that he had lost a LOT of money). Great seats, too. Impressed by this faux high-roller with real charm in abundance, the night ended in my dad’s free room.

The next day, Dad asked if Mom wanted to go to California, where both had family to visit. Dad prepped the rental car (by then already overdue and likely reported stolen) and asked Mom if she was ready for an adventure. Mom was in. Dad asked Mom for gas money. She invested. They were off.

Three months later, they were married back in Chicago. Six months after that, I was born. When I was three years old, our small family returned, for good.

Much later, perhaps around the time of my bar mitzvah at Temple Beth Shalom in the Crestwood neighborhood, four miles east of the Strip, I remember the first of many times asking my folks, “Why Las Vegas?”

I never got a particularly straight answer. Invariably, it would start with the retelling of a lightly censored version of (sigh) my conception (yuck). Every subsequent ask tended to see new details emerge. Something about losing their little surprise baby in the snow more than once. The promise of sun and prosperity. A group of illegal bookmakers whom my dad allowed to set up shop in the living room of our tiny northside Chicago apartment. A near-miss raid. A midnight escape from said angry bookmakers in a station wagon “borrowed” from my dad’s workplace. A cross-country journey with only enough gas money to make it; no more possessions than what were hastily loaded in the car. My uncle Izzy, a year older than my dad, who had laid the groundwork in Las Vegas and bought a house a year earlier. The hype of money, glamour, and a new start. A job opportunity for my dad as a card dealer at the Sahara hotel. A cheap one-bedroom apartment for the family behind the Riviera hotel. An easy walk down the street from the Sahara. A future.

Unsurprisingly, I resented my parents for uprooting me from what seemed to my younger self as a much more nurturing environment. A major, storied American city like Chicago. Why drag me away from this real city with its long list of accomplished writers, creatives, captains of industry, and the like? Like any “normal” big city where people lived “normal lives.” A city where both my parents and even grandparents were born. Where long-gone relatives had legitimate professions. Where apparently there was once a bakery under the family name. Where my smart and accomplished cousins and a half-sister lived. Where maybe I could thrive in healthier and better ways than what was probably my fate as a kid of casinos.

Chicago was a place I had pegged as filled with substance, at least compared to how I cynically viewed Las Vegas at the time.

Las Vegas, as far as I knew and personally observed, was a city full of folly and unbridled hype. A flashy artifice where hometown kids, especially inquisitive and ambitious ones like me, were patently unwelcome. At best, tolerated. The casino kids were an annoyance to the gambling overlords, but an inevitable by-product of the vital worker base.

Locals were either somehow really rich or, like us, super poor. There didn't seem, at least to my kid eyes, to be many in the middle. But rich or poor, back in the days when it was a smaller town, everyone was expected in some level to contribute to the machine. The mission? Help get the tourists to come and spend, followed by a mental massage them to feel really good even as they were getting chewed up and spit out. Then, and this was the most important part, make sure by whatever means available to guarantee that they’ll not only want to come back and do it over again, but that they'll spread the gospel of the joy Las Vegas delivers. Proselytize to every person back in whatever normal place they came from. In perpetuity.

And if kids didn't buy into the company town, the town was outright hostile. A lot of us left. There's a whole diaspora. Some even made good. So good they forget they had a hometown like this. Their time growing up in Las Vegas relegated to an anecdote or “fun fact” that carries outsized weight in conversations. Like suddenly brandishing a haunted doll with straw hair and a missing eye. A viral non-sequitur. People want to know more, even as they think they already have it figured out. Soon the conversation veers away from, and even abandons, the topic. Then, the former Vegas person can go back to forgetting they ever had a hometown. Or being bothered with thoughts about what being from Las Vegas did to them. Because wherever they've landed, that's their new life and identity. They escaped.

Not me. I’m still trying to figure it all out, even as I'm one of the company town’s biggest critics. Also a cheerleader. And I’m no kid anymore. I’m a bitter old man. Hi.

And yet, to make sense of who I am, my connection to my hometown has been the recurring thread of most of my thoughts and pontifications, and then, what Las Vegas had to offer anyone who lived here. And so I asked, “Why Las Vegas?” I was relentless in asking my parents this question. It has become an early question for anyone I meet in a casual setting who has decided to live here. I haven’t found a particularly satisfying, let alone comprehensive answer. Usually, it’s for a job, or taking care of family, or following a mate (that lasted 6 months), or hearing there was opportunity, or now and again, “drawn to the vortex” without explaining what even that means in persuasive terms. Most of those folks will express a degree of regret or disappointment in the choice. Some will say, “we’ve done pretty good for ourselves here.” But what is it about Las Vegas that makes you want to be in Las Vegas? That’s the tough one; it needs more discourse.

And while Mom and Dad never fully answered the question, they would agree, through raucous laughter, that our move to Las Vegas was, at its core, a compulsive return to the “scene of the crime.”

* * *

How people wind up in Las Vegas, whether passing through or staying, is nonetheless likely the start of an interesting story if they’d dig deeper or at all. I think my story is interesting.

Obviously, others, even those who grew up along with me, have varied perspectives and different stories. They may come to very different conclusions about the meaning and importance of this city. About the truly good things. Even my conclusions are ever evolving. But one thing is for sure: any stories or accounts of events in Las Vegas get a degree of attention that dominates the moment they are invoked. That is to say, heads will turn in any space when Las Vegas is mentioned; a pitch with a Vegas angle doesn’t require a hard sell or a lot of explanation.

As I said, I try to engage with all of them that are put out in the world. Novels, essays, articles, songs, films, episodes of a beloved sitcom, a YouTube documentary, a skit on SNL, an anecdote on a podcast. Sometimes I’ll write reviews or celebrations. I do this with whatever I can get a hold of. It is worth noting right away that the overwhelming majority of work about Las Vegas gets created by people who haven’t lived here or, ultimately, were only passing through. Even fewer who were raised here. (Of course, there are wonderful exceptions). Almost no lifers, though, or people with a multi-generational legacy. But all the works, well, the good or serious ones anyhow, have one thing in common: recognition that the existence and operation of Las Vegas is both a source of endless salacious intrigue (like few other places) and the basis of “lessons” that supposedly explain huge swaths of the human condition. And by human condition, stuff like faith, hope and luck, greed, avarice, other various deadly sins, plucky perseverance in even the harshest environments, the depths of delusion, the art of dream-chasing and the allure of bright light indulgence.

And in doing my many dives, I have formed complex feelings about other people’s feelings about it. Beyond naked defensiveness and a smattering of proprietary indignation, I believe Las Vegas is far more complex, interesting, frustrating and worth understanding than most takes suggest.

Also, as much as any city gets described as a “character” in a creative work, Las Vegas instantly invokes something in the audience that seemingly needs no explanation to have its desired effect. A handy crutch for creators looking for a shortcut, quick cut, or avoidance of a lot of nuance or decoding when it comes to the crucible that characters in, or going to, Las Vegas will confront.

Indeed, Las Vegas is one of the most recognizable names in citydom, and likely, almost everyone who has heard of it has an opinion. Probably a strong one. It’s apparently hard to be neutral for the same reasons that drive so many to write about it. It’s possibly mythical. And I write about it a lot. I write and write in essays, poems, fiction, and a seemingly endless series of unfortunately defensive tweets, all of which acknowledge the surface others have covered and covered, but also more and more confidently dwell above and below. I feel like I’m really getting close.

* * *

It’s a lot harder for me to write about what’s great or valuable about Las Vegas than it is to criticize what people get wrong about Las Vegas. What they miss or fail to contextualize. How the real lessons from the existence of a place like this transcend the glut of the obvious. How it’s more than the clichés, but also the clichés. In a big way, of course, the obvious and clichés. But also the way the City operates and thrives. The challenges, successes, and failures of people who live here. Pursuing investing here. Raise kids here. Were kids, ourselves, here. How it has far too long believed its own marketing hype to the detriment of those looking to make this a healthy, flourishing, and liveable place.

Most people who pontificate about the city confidently “get it” with little effort. And why wouldn’t they? Since making the Depression-era, Faustian decision that tourism (mixed with new-fangled air-conditioning) would save a tiny railroad stop in the desert, a certain narrative and reality took hold in how the town was marketed to visitors. Maybe too well. A projection to the world that worked like gangbusters in the beginning days and endured changing tastes and social mores. Soon, it would glide on its own marketing magic and bum-rush into pop culture, which, of course, drew critical eyes and ears. And no matter the criticisms, the reported grotesqueries, the biased depictions, or the unrepentant, obvious follies of the hype, the city endures as our country’s one and only and forever “Las Vegas.” And you get that, right? More than an obvious geographic place, it has transcended into myth. A state of matter and mind. A vibe.

But to think you know Las Vegas as a write-offable bastion of kitsch, superficiality and irrelevance is imprudent when objectively the city, though all those things, is so much more. That “Strip City,” that area directly on and around the main tourist corridor, is really what most think about when they think about Las Vegas, but also that we all live around, in concert with and despite “Strip City.”

Las Vegas is a tale of two “cities” that are the same city. The greater metropolitan Las Vegas area, covering 1,600 square miles, has grown mind-bogglingly over the past century, from 2,300 people in 1920 to 2.3 million in 2020. The Strip is a mere 4.2 miles long, with no significant stock of residential housing along it. Las Vegas visitors and new residents keep on a-comin.’ Both “cities” are in perpetual terraform.

And the trick, perhaps the daily challenge, of living in a place that’s two cities in one, is accepting that the hyped part can’t help but shape the more provincial parts. Further, that at some point, we probably need to “get over” that our own destiny as a “real city” (I cringe even as I write that) will forever be overshadowed by people who only care about “Strip city” and outside perspectives that swirl well outside our borders.

So, in our “two cities” – is it the best of times and worst of times? Sure. Why not? One city of us; and the one for them. In the middle is the presumption all sides seem to embrace that, but for Strip City, there is no Las Vegas - even as it is a well-known irony that none of Strip City exists within the technical city limits of Las Vegas or the surrounding municipalities and suburbs that are also generically Las Vegas, even as they aren’t.

There are also conversations that should happen in both cities but don’t, especially in the city where we folks live. Ask us about our suicide rates. Cases in the local court system with ties to problem gambling. Bankruptcy, divorce, embezzlement. Well-reported upon, but fast forgotten, political corruption. Inept long-term policy. Double downing on double downing. Let me tell you, also, about boundless optimism. A pervasive sense of freedom. A lab for crazy that might just work. A new chance around the corner. A kaleidoscope of sense, style, and benevolent sophistry. The folly and fun of hype.

Two cities, entwined, even as each, by design, is clamoring for a very different sort of stability and legitimacy.

* * *

And so begins the true journey to “Why Las Vegas?” Why Las Vegas for a home? Why Las Vegas for a story? Why Las Vegas, for a lesson; also, what lesson? And above all, how well can we answer it without getting mired in cliches, gambling puns, and trash talk?

Spoiler: the details are in the devil-may-care. As the great Mojave Desert writer Claire Vaye Watkins wrote, “You have to be careful in Las Vegas. The place will be whatever you need it to be.”

Be careful in both cities. Theirs and ours. For better or worse.

Ask me what I love about this city, and I’ll start with a stock answer. One of many I’ve come to over the years. I call it an original, inauthentic place. A place of outrageous convenience. A town with such nuanced and layered superficiality that it is unquestionably deeper than any other city’s superficiality.

My next try at my favorite thing is “the characters.” And I don’t only mean the ones who show up in supporting roles or background players in fictions that mostly take place on the Strip. But yeah, them, too. But what I really mean are the places and faces, the defining archetypes, the expendable and replaceable ones. Then, new places and faces are always supplanting unsustainable ones.

The real fun is how fungible it all is.

Las Vegas is a rotating vision where those of us who lay anchor must always be recalibrating, only to basically see the same thing. Or versions of the same thing. Or something completely different with roots from a tree long disappeared and with only wispy pages of memorialization, if any at all. No time to lament the loss. And for all we know, we’re barely hanging on.

The sad goal is that this is where it will end. For the normies and the weirdos.

But as I said, I like the weirdos, too. The kind of folks everyone with an opinion on Las Vegas visualizes encountering if they showed up. If it was a family feud question, everything would be the number one answer.

Hair gel. Blue eye shadow. Loud polyester. Elvisness. Big hair. Fake tits. Feathers. Furs. McMansions. Indulgence. Cabana debauchery. Human lizards. Whoops and dice. Brides (and bridal parties) doing bad things. Sex workers and alcoholics doing good things. At least until the moment they don’t. Everyone pulling a handle. Everyone driving down the Strip all the time. Walking down the Strip all the time. A dumb Times Square in a million degrees. A huckster. A scam. A cult. Cheap. Tacky as shit, but oh, look how cool. Expensive without value. Phones out. Only in Vegas, amirite? It’s all just sad, amirite?

I can’t imagine how people live here with all this all the time.

The funny thing, if you warp just right, is that all these characters embracing or embodying all these things you see in film or show or book or article are going to be here. And when you come and see them, you will be validated. Your crappy take on this city will be validated. And you will be instantly relieved of the notion that this semi-mythical place is actually chockful of normies. You’ll get your surreal, silly, outrageous, stupid, bombastic characters.

You can’t help but wonder what root emotion sprang the “personalities” we encounter every minute outside a gracefully air-conditioned domicile. You know the sorts. Many show up as supporting characters. Some are from here, some are visiting (per usual), perhaps cosplaying what they think locals are or what the city wishes them to be.

And my beef is that, even though they ALL understandably get referenced time and time again, there isn’t much scholarly or literary work devoted to their plight. How did they get here? How did they wind up the way they are portrayed? What do they do when their scene is over?

* * *

So why Las Vegas for me?

One. The unique aspects of its weirdness.

Two. The characters.

And then, in no particular order, looking around and seeing vibrant, often pulsating colors, both real and artificial. Brown dirt to pink flamingos. Snowy mountain tops to gargantuan signs. The magical sunsets to the everyday night sky charged with multi-colored light pollution. How much I love people trying the worst stuff, failing, and sometimes failing forward. (It also makes me mad, and I love that, too). I love the seriousness of our intense replication of other places and how we make it our own. I love it when, though on very rare occasions, we muster together a protest - it means so much - no matter the side or the issue. I love when someone thinks of us enough to get mentioned, even in passing, in pop culture - even when it’s in the worst ways. I love that Noël Coward, Frank Sinatra, Celine Dion, Steve Martin, Jayne Mansfield, Neil Hamburger, Tom Jones, Don Rickles, Beyoncé, Nat King Cole and so many more, known and unknown, have recorded “live from Las Vegas” records. I love playing a rousing game while walking down Fremont Street with my significant other, of “character” (impersonator busking on the street) or “character” (a person just living their best life in a weird and unusual way on the street). I love eating delicious gourmet food that seems better suited to more sophisticated places, and pretending that cost doesn’t matter. I love strip malls with incongruous businesses that logically can’t be anything but fronts for money laundering, yet also have curious offerings worth exploring. Also, tanning salons in one of the sunniest environments in the world.

I swoon at our state flower, the sagebrush, even as I know the tumbleweed was a more apt candidate based on ubiquity and solid metaphor. I fawn over crowds buying merch from a traveling poet. I get off on asking hard questions and sometimes, just sometimes, getting a satisfying answer.

And maybe more than all of the above, I love how no matter how stupid we get, we’re still here, and people still wanna come to do some pretty messed up stuff. How people don’t give a lot of thought to the consequences until it’s too late. Look into our hole of hype, and what do you see? Is it a picture of you being happy? Is it a thrill that can’t compare to reality?

I see desperation and desire all at once, but also a mercenary machine threaded with surreal and irresistible flourishes.

There is a common, if unspoken, sense that if we stop being over-the-top, and if people stop coming or moving here, we will die quickly. In that sense, we’re a sort of Ponzi scheme of a city. As long as new money comes in, it doesn’t matter how we think about the long-term vitality of the place as a place for people to live versus a destination for people to visit.

All that said, every aspect of both versions of our city is a tale worth exploring and telling. There is good here. There is compelling intrigue. There is hope and opportunity to be and do better. There is beauty amongst all that other shit.

Maybe more than that, the way we have been shaped and act, why people come here, what people get out of this place, and how they talk about it is the story of America and likely the human condition, too. Americans, especially of late, are unencumbered by meekness, logic, humility or the burden of comparing our current selves to our past selves. And Las Vegas, as an etch-a-sketch City filled with the desert sands, is one where, if you shake hard enough, it gives a blank slate upon which to build. A dream. Or a completely derivative replication of someone’s dream. Either or. Matters not. Las Vegas is here to stay until it isn’t, and if it suddenly isn’t, how disappointed will so many people be?!?

So where does that leave me? A handful of puzzle pieces with no cover art or box to be found. Writing obsessively in a variety of styles about the city, sometimes for pay or stockpiled in overflowing drawers and cardboard containers. Trying to solve for X without fully knowing Y. Talking out loud, sometimes on the radio, or a podcast, or a little too frantic in a coffeehouse. Manic ponderings. Sometimes angry screeds. Also, love…but what kind of love?

Heartstring stuff for those who realize this is not a, urm, normal city. Unrequited or cruel to those who bail at the first chance or crisis. You know, our population basically doubled every ten years from 1970 until 2000, and that’s with all the comings and goings. My family, who came about the beginning of that cycle, never left. Mom and Dad are both buried here. Uncle Izzy’s dying wish, even after living here for more than a third of his life, was to be buried anywhere but this “godforsaken place.” We honored his wish.

There are stories to be told. I’ll share the ones I know as best I can.

As the sign says, “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas.” And on the other side, “Drive Carefully, Come Back Soon.”

📸: Images from the movie Aria (1987)

Suffice it to say, it’s an interesting case I’m second-chairing with an outstanding lawyer in my office, and, for obvious reasons, I can’t tell you much more than that.

What I can say is that both the mental health system and the criminal justice system in our community are so broken that the impact of failing to truly prioritize thoughtful reforms is going to continue to cause great strife. Las Vegas wants to be a “first-class city,” but outside the outsized attention to tourism, we’re really bad at the fundamentals of even good city-building. Verdant, we ain’t. And even less self-aware.

Anyhow, have a watch of this provocative TV broadcast on our local PBS. Fun being on the panel with Speaker of the Assembly Steve Yeager, with whom I sometimes disagree very publicly but here - not so much.

Check it out => WATCH THE TV SHOW HERE

Had the pleasure of talking EVEN MORE about the contours of protests and what keeps them from being a bigger part of our culture. Joined my old crew at the pod alongside the very insightful Naoka Foreman, with whom I couldn’t agree more, especially as she is a firm believer in more robust civic education for youth and the populace in general.

Here’s the podcast => CLICK TO LISTEN

Substack ya soon!

D.

At the time (and to this day), it got me thinking about why Las Vegas (a place I truly truly love), with its never-ending bad decision-making when it comes to everything from the careless regulation of utilities to foolish expenditures of public funds to being at the bottom of so many important lists when it comes to quality of life issues, doesn’t see more protests. Uprisings. Calls for action.

A lot of reasons swirled in my head, and many of them showed up in the article, including my ire at the sun for being so dang hot. Some got left out. I also tried to make a distinction between the big national-inspired protests we see over stuff basically out of D.C. and the need for more hometown stuff. The point being, I think we need to think differently about how spaces are created and how laws are enforced, with real mindfulness that protests should occur when politicians' responses are inadequate.

It’s not my intent here to bore you with the stuff that got cut from the article - in fact, I self-cut most of it, and my editor (and friend) Andrew Kiraly and his team did a great job of tightening up what I did submit - but I did want to give a little taste of what I had to leave out. The saddest cut for me (again self-inflicted) was the anecdote about my friend’s mom who calls me every time she wants to go out and protest. Here’s a taste of that…

I never mind. I view it as one of my benevolent obligations as a pro bono lawyer for the local hipster scene for decades. Most are good folks who have never been in trouble, and probably don’t know too many lawyers. But they do know enough to know that things can go sideways at a protest.

One resident who reliably hits me every single time is the 80-something mother of the captain of my junior high school bowling team. Invariably, I’ll get a pop-up notification on Facebook a night or two prior to the gathering. Like a few of my friends’ parents from way back, she has been passively following my “career” and “accomplishments” since I was a wee lad. I’ve never felt that I’ve lived up to any of their expectations, despite a strong start back when I was ten years old, but nonetheless, I’m still their go-to. Luckily, this specific group hasn’t ever gotten to the point of needing me to go downtown to get ‘em out. I’m always rewarded with a snap of the feisty oldies with their witty signs and selfie smiles, my telephone number written in a Sharpie (the data transmission method of choice in jail) on their forearms in the background.

Senior citizens aside, it’s not always a mere precaution. In the summer of 2020, when the overwhelmingly peaceful Black Lives Matter marches across the valley, like the main one from the Bellagio to the Las Vegas sign, were interrupted by a militarized riot force of LVMPD and adjacent law enforcement agencies, my phone was in perpetual buzz mode. It’s undisputed that chemical agents and pepper balls were deployed against the populace. Videos emerged of tank-like tactical vehicles on the Strip and snipers being posted. Individuals were allegedly being “kettled” into dead ends, which arguably made it improbable that they could escape arrest for violating dispersal orders. In fact, hundreds of people with little or no prior criminal history were arrested and taken into custody for mostly misdemeanor violations. Most of those cases were ultimately dismissed.

From my perspective, the arrest of and assault upon so many individuals, including legal observers, was both a ridiculous overreaction to the minor traffic offenses that were cited as justification and an intentional effort to chill speech both that day and for the future. That’s a controversial statement.

Controversial, or not, I was also quite perplexed that none of what happened in the summer of 2020 became an issue in the gubernatorial election in the fall of 2022. I sense (but have no actual knowledge) it’s because moderate (some might say conservative) Democrat Governor Steve Sisolak likely agreed with the tactics on display. Or maybe there was something else. Lord knows there were ample scandals and conduct within the LVMPD that reached a head when Lombardo took over the LVMPD after rising through the ranks and then getting elected Sheriff that would have been great fodder for debate in any actual blue state where activism and protests are more of a premium. Alas, the debates (as they were) were fairly innocuous, with neither contender taking off any gloves other than a round-and-round about the Gov’s COVID response, which I believe proved to be the incumbent’s ultimately undoing. Rumors abounded at the time that there was a gentleman’s agreement not to go hard on certain topics, and allegations of poor management, civil rights violations, and other internal/external investigations during Lombardo’s term (see also the VICE division) went undiscussed.

That all said, there was never really a loud public outcry about the way protestors were treated in 2020, and there was never really public pondering of why protesting seemed to drop off. That is, until we get to the modern No Kings rallies and some I.C.E. demonstrations (and a smattering of other issues of national and international concern), starting with the resurgence of MAGA/Trump and such. I alluded to a lawsuit about the BLM protests, which my old firm is STILL litigating, and didn’t get to mention new lawsuits that seem to be pending.

All of which to say, Las Vegas has a long way to go to really live up to its big city aspirations and being held accountable by the greater public outcry when things get weird - which here, they tend to do more than not. Same for the police responses both on the ground and in the media.

Finally, I had a lot to say about the very underwhelming option of presenting at public hearings. In the final cut, it was just a line, but in early drafts I did go off on the myopic interpretation of the open meeting laws that would allow for more engagement. Here’s how that looked.

Really, absent a public meeting or town hall expected to draw an unusually large turnout, you wouldn’t know how many people are dissatisfied with the lack of attention to the needs of the often fed-up public. Sure, there are some dramatic events that get the eyes. You know the sort of thing. A lot of folks in matching tee-shirts angry about something going up in their neighborhood that they think diminishes their “way of life” or less NIMBY-ish concerns about the implementation of a new law that may disproportionately affect those without a voice, or basically anything to do with the Clark County School District.

And even though I’ve sometimes participated in these sort of cattle calls of opinion that get reported upon, I’ve always found them in the end to be an endeavor of questionable impact. Take, for example, Las Vegas City Council meetings where citizens have to take time out of their weekday mornings, sit through all sorts of ceremonial pomp, and then get gifted about a minute to make their case about something on the agenda lest they have to wait through the interminable proceedings to make a more general statement at the end. I often wonder if the public officials, who, according to what I think is a questionable interpretation of open meeting laws, are instructed not to engage with responses, even pay attention. In the meantime, in the case of hot topics, it can devolve with lots of grumbling in the audience with calls for order from the dais.

Now, sometimes the ensuing votes (if there are any) on the issue may (or may not) include references to the “protest” presentation from earlier. It’s all a crapshoot, leaving the question of whether or not public input in this setting really makes a difference. Sure, you can also submit opinions in writing in advance, or maybe you really are a gifted and persuasive orator, but it all comes across as a sort of theater where out-of-sight lobbyists always appear to have more sway at the end of the day than any grassroots effort in this very controlled setting.

Ok. I said I wouldn’t bore you with stuff that didn’t make the cut, so I’ll stop here. Suffice it to say, I hope you enjoy the new NV INDY article, and, as always:

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The building was bought by J. Dapper. Dapper is the developer behind a handful of interesting projects throughout the Las Vegas Valley, many of which are noted for their mid-century throwback sensibilities and flourishes. The Huntridge Shopping Center (home of lots of good stuff like Yukon Pizza and the Huntridge Tavern) is probably the best-known of the lot. There’s also the old post office reimagine on Las Vegas Boulevard, which took FOREVER, but is a little star just a block shy of famous Fremont Street. Of course, not every project is going to be a home run. (Poor Huntridge Theater).

And when it was announced that the Mission Linen building, with its unique for the time architecture and its storied existence as THE place where the nascent Las Vegas Strip went for all its laundry needs from the 1950s, was being converted to the relocated home of the Evel Knievel, um, thingy, I sort of scratched my head. It had been housed in Topeka, Kansas (unsure why that location, since he was from Butte, Montana), since 2017. Anyhow, I’m obviously not unaware of the Knievel connection to Las Vegas, given his failed jump over the fountains of Caesars Palace is the epitome (and visual representation) of the agony of defeat. As a child of the 1970s, I’m also keenly connected to the zeitgeist of the time when Evel was iconic for his mixed representation of American foolishness, bravado, and, somehow, patriotism. The latter, probably coming from the dual components of flagish attire and daredevil-may-care projection of exceptionalism even upon (repeated) bone-crushing missteps.

Dude had swagger. Heck, the tannest lizard of them all played Evel in the 1971 biopic!

Anyhow, I haven’t been in the “experience” yet, and I’m not sure I ever need to. I’ve heard from a local museum professional who attended that her colleague felt the installation was solid. I’m sure it is. It has interactive stuff to do!

I appreciate that for a short time, Evel was at the epicenter of commerce and celebrity, and he remains, to some degree, a household name. Still, I’m not sure who this is for or how it will do in Las Vegas. Certainly, Evel is no more famous than Elvis, and the various attempts at an Elvis museum in Las Vegas have routinely crashed and burned! (You’re welcome). And while the unlikely events surrounding the Caesars jump are an inextricable part of the Las Vegas story (the John Derek film getting sold to ABC should have its own wing in this building), he wasn’t really a Las Vegas guy, though I’m sure before his purported Christian conversion, he was reported to be a big booze and broads kinda guy and he likely indulged in both whenever he’d visit.

Then again, we have a punk rock “museum” which seems to do alright, even though most of the artifacts in that building have little to do with Las Vegas or its longer history. Usually, Sometimes, it's going to be more about the tourists than the locals.

Would I have liked to see the space devoted to something far more Vegas-y? Sure. Perhaps the new home of the formerly fabulous Liberace museum that apparently sits in relative obscurity, or a Siegfried and Roy museum, or something broader like a Museum of Las Vegas Entertainment and Spectacle (there’d be room for Evel’s motorcycle there!), or who knows, the history of costumes, uniforms, and other general laundry in Las Vegas (it was right there!).

But I’m not a developer or someone needing tenants, so Evel wins this time.

I did a drive-by of the opening festivities, which seemed fairly underwhelming. A few tents, some food trucks, an exhibition ready to go, dozens of people, about as many motorcycles parked in the street, and ample overtime-paid police officers with their official vehicles on flashing light spin cycle. I’m sure it’s all a hoot for: (1) people who remember Evel; (2) stunt enthusiasts; and (3) motorcycle folk. But for me, a legendary sucker for nostalgia, this one seems like a wah-wah. Sure, I REALLY wanted an official Ideal Toys Evel Knievel stunt cycle (my parents could only afford a used knock-off), did log a lot of hours on his relatively lackluster pinball machine, and watched this old man with swagger throwdown with Johnny Carson with delight - but despite all the famous jumps and hype - wah-wah.

Then again, it’s Vegas, so whatever. I’m sure the hype around it will at least initially draw a steady attendance, and who knows, it might be one of those weird, anomalous things that famously works here more than anywhere else. I do wonder if the purported deep darkness of the man is a part of the exhibit. That could be pretty interesting, though I can’t imagine it. Heck, maybe I DO have to go.

All that said, I’m taking today’s official opening to repost one of my favorite poems. I can’t remember when or why I wrote this. It’s way more about Las Vegas in the 1960s than anything about Evel, but then again, perhaps it's EXACTLY why someone thought our city would be a good home for the museum dedicated to a Florida man born in Butte.

So if you made it this far… here’s the poem. Please tell me what you think about it in the comments. It’s on the bubble right now for my manuscript about Las Vegas…..

DECEMBER 31, 1967

I am Daddy’s little girl, but I am in love with Evel Knievel. I am standing outside Caesars Palace with my daddy. My whole hand is wrapped around his index finger. I am Daddy’s little girl, but I am in love with Evel Knievel. I used to ride a tricycle with red, white, and blue streamers.

I’ve kissed the poster on my wall. I am the little boy in the commercial kicking up a cloud of dirt with a slide stop of my big kid bike. Making vroom noises. Pretending to be the dare-devil. Silencing the world as my hand glides a toy high above my bed. Sticks the landing to cheers.

Out here, now, on the asphalt, with distant memories and future trepidations about the heat baked into its black, lumpy surface, I am big-eyed.

This was the moment I felt grown up for the first time.

This was the moment I felt for Las Vegas.

This was the moment I felt Las Vegas.

This was the moment of spectacle and spirit.

This was the moment I realized what hometown means.

This was the moment that connected Las Vegas to America and vice versa.

🏍️ 🇺🇸 🏍️

I am a patriot through and through in an audience with mittens and sunglasses. It is bright as we near the New Year. The air is filled with smells. Gasoline. Anxiety. Wild Turkey, in hindsight, or maybe V.O. The motorcycle revving so loud, it’s bouncing off the marble statues. I want to scream full throttle, but I just squeeze my daddy’s finger harder.

When Evel is in the air, my heart stops. Time stops.

🏍️ 🇺🇸 🏍️

Despite his name, he is pure goodness, but “Pure Goodness” Knievel doesn’t sell posters or T-shirts or inspire fans to French kiss the wall. Evel Knievel – Technicolor. Black & White & Red – all over. Evel wears a helmet. Evel is prepared to use a walking stick made from his own femur. Evel once scared an actual wild turkey. Evel jumps the fountain of vermouth…

and hits the skids.

Static blue & pink champagne on ice idols. Sprawling hot tub poodle shag, vaulted gold-mirrored ceiling, velvet beds ‘round the clock. Swirling marble hairpieces and medallions.

Can a hotel be pure sex and sexual energy?

Who wouldn’t want to jump Caesars?

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A lot of what I opined about still holds:

1. It’s weird that Las Vegas is considered a “sports town” now instead of a betting town.

2. Bill Foley, the VGK owner, never became one of us. A local. A Las Vegan.

3. Las Vegans (myself included) embrace the team, wear the gear and are highly invested.

Oh, and one other thing is still true from that old column.

HOCKEY IS A DUMB, DISABLING DISTRACTION AND I STILL DON’T GET WHY I’M ALL IN.

Well, not totally “dumb.” I’m not such an elitist or asshole that I can’t appreciate or even enjoy sports or root for the “home team” even if it’s still just a collection of folks who mostly had no connection to the city prior to being hired to wear the name, mascot, and colors. And in the past 9 years, I’ve seen a handful more VGK games in person, a shit-ton more on television, and even more on my phone - tracking the score and feeling my blood pressure rise up and down with every refresh. I own about half a dozen more pieces of VGK-branded merchandise as well. VGK is a thing, a hometown pride thing, an easy entry into a collective where everyone belongs, and we have something in common to talk about - even with people with whom small talk might otherwise be a task. And then there’s the whole concept of belonging in a place like Las Vegas, long known for its transiency and difficulty for newcomers to try (or want) to deeply root. Wearing a VGK hat or jersey or having the license plate - even a bumper sticker - is a fast solve to an otherwise elusive buy-in.

For lots of reasons (notably the emotional impact of the debut of the team and its pitch-perfect reaction to the largest, most deadly mass shooting in American history, which happened mere blocks from the T-Mobile Arena where they play), the VGK is a symbol of what’s right/cool/pride inspiring about the city. Wearing the logo is almost elevated to a sort of siboleth. Far more than the Raiders have conjured, the A’s hope to exploit, and even the Aces have engendered - though the winning heroines of the WNBA are a second-best, slightly more distant example of the positive side of the analysis. We’ve always had sports in town. Alternate leagues, minor leagues, national title-winning collegiates, and even high school standouts were commonplace. But there wasn’t really a sustained, communal “pride” about being from Las Vegas until the pro-level came in and, well, the intellectual in me hates that this is what it seems to have taken to get there. And there was a bonus: unlike other franchises, our hockey team didn’t even ask for public funds.

Then again, it might have been a low bar since before there was the VGK, the thing closest to consensus as a source of homegrown “pride” was the ever-changing, money-grabbing spectacle of the Strip. Maybe the Killers. Possibly the “mafia” presence or the great sunsets or something amorphous and obvious like “the people.” I always went with “the unbridled convenience at all hours,” or “the never-ending blank canvases upon which to build even the stupidest of concepts.” But yeah, not a lot of people could consistently articulate what made them proud of this hometown until… sports. Sad I ‘spose.

I guess that the real deal thing about professional “sports.” Sure, we appreciate the otherworldly athleticism, skills, and strategy. But whether by paycheck, loyalty, spirit, or whatever else drives them to accept a contract to a team, they wear the name of OUR city. A sort of vicarious self-worth that comes through being a “winner,” which is what the VGK is more than they are not.

So who cares if we’re hated because of our just-short of winning it all, again, hockey team? Isn’t it just jealousy, as one of our biggest, star players retorts?

Could be jealousy. But also, people REALLY seem to have an opinion about the Vegas hockey operation, and I think this is bigger (or at least more important to explore) than just about disliking a sports team.

From the get-go, I kind of predicted there would be backlash from our old status as a neutral town, where fans of all teams could lay down their fandom, and all bettors were ignorant of the hometown feels about anything other than the vig. But maybe that’s a little too esoteric to explain the phenomenon. The most recent to try to explain it was, of course, the New York Times (still obsessed), which honed in on how the team is viewed as “ruthless” in its efforts to manipulate the system, use loopholes to avoid the salary caps, fire and hire and fire coaches at a whim of immediate need over loyalty, maybe even how they (mis)treated Hall of Famer and former face of the franchise, Marc-Andre Fluery. The win-at-all-costs mentality is apparently at least one cause of disdain.

Sure, but being called “ruthless” in a sport where the majority of players are literally toothless (at least in part) for good reason? It can be brutal on the ice, so why not off?

I asked a LONG-time BIG-time hockey fan who lived in Las Vegas pre-VGK why HE hates VGK (which he does). I thought the answer would be obvious. Something about being raised in Las Vegas and having to find a team he loved to root for based on whatever criteria draws a fan when there are no hometown options. And then, not wanting to give up your dedication just because someone moved to town.

I was only sort of right. He admitted that when the first season-ticket commitments for VGK went up, he jumped at the chance and plopped down three hundred bucks, but mostly because he wanted to watch NHL teams play more than he wanted to jump on a new train. But as a hockey fan, he had a lot more feels which persist to this day.

He implied that from the start, the whole thing seemed manipulative, both of the league and of the locals. He took aim at billionaire owner Bill Foley:

“Bill Foley paid to rewrite the expansion rules in order to have a more competitive team out of the gate. But in reality, Vegas has never been a hockey market. Sure, they’ve hosted special exhibitions (and had relatively low-attended and less impactful minor league teams), but that town lacked (past tense) a real spirit and soul for hockey. Now, since they paid to win, they think they are Hockeytown, USA, but they didn’t earn it.

From outside markets, they are like a corporation (which most franchises are), but they lack authenticity. Also, there’s the speculation that they game the system any way they can. My experience is unique because I lived there and loved hockey long before they came to be. I routinely was treated like shit for asking if a hockey game could be turned on in a bar. For a town that prides itself on being able to find anything at any time and on customer service being the backbone of many jobs, people actively turned away from hockey before the Knights.”

I also read the pieces on ESPN, USA Today, and even the hometown R-J. It all really comes down to a bad vibe of the team and its decisions.

And one of those decisions that, depending on your perspective and priorities, either doesn’t get talked about enough or is talked about too much, is goalie Carter Hart. Here’s a link to a thoughtful conversation I had on City Cast Las Vegas with a Canadian journalist who talked about Hart’s past, arrests, sexual assault allegations, ultimate trial and acquittal, and why she thought it was both a big deal and maybe not so much for Las Vegas. I think that interview is a good summary of the tensions, challenges, and reasons for differing takes more than anything I can add here. I’m not gonna wade into a conversation over whether Carter Hart deserves to be banned from sports forever, or receive worse public punishment, or whether a person should be given a second chance upon showing genuine contrition, self-reflection and growth, or rehabilitation, irrespective of a technical acquittal. People are gonna have their own takes based on their own experiences.

What I will say is that one passage in a recent local Las Vegas column did take me aback. It read verbatim:

“The Golden Knights controversially signed Hart before the season after the former Flyers goalie had spent a season and a half out of the NHL, facing a highly publicized sexual assault trial in his native Canada. Hart was acquitted but suspended for the start of the year for violating the league’s code of conduct policy. He struggled in the first regular season action and looked not worth the criticism that came the Golden Knights’ way but has now locked in for the best stretch of his career….”

And even if a lot of people quietly used that same calculus and balancing, that “but” carries a lot of unpleasant and comfortable weight. And that’s without need for an analysis of Carter’s ultimate collapse in the final three games.

Tons of people across the hockeysphere, including vocal Carolina fans in the arenas during the finals, kept the heat on VGK about the hire from the start of the series, as well as from the initial announcement. I will say there were also lots of people in Las Vegas who took to social media to criticize the home team without concern for balancing the possibility of “winning.” And when the VGK did lose in the finals, my feeds seemed to be flooded with locals who reposted a lot of the negative memes, perhaps a little late if that was their true feeling all along.

And yet, wherever you fall on Hart and his hire, the final point I’ll make is that any business (and have no doubt about it - pro sports are a business more than a civic pride priority) is going to be open to criticism for individual choices. And without diminishing or supporting either side, I also want to say that in the case of a professional sports team that a city has so open-heartedly embraced, there will come the cold reality that it may reflect badly on the whole city. The “love” for a team should never be a panacea of hope and reflection of being a “first-class” city, even if so many have projected this on sports coming to Las Vegas.

Indeed, I think the lost thread in this whole idea of “why are the VGK so hated” may have to do with pre-conceived notions of Las Vegas in general, along with all the other things listed above. That people in the world at large don’t fully understand Las Vegas as a city because our marketing geniuses and local boosters would rather flash the world with spectacle than do the stuff of real city-building. That even locals and elected officials fall into this trap. That many people who already misunderstood Vegas as a “real city” have even more reason to pile on now that “sports” are forever on the table, and to say “typical Vegas” when weird sports things happen on a national level, in addition to all the other news stories that come out of here.

Make no mistake - even if the VGK won the Stanley Cup, there would be no Knicks-like love coming our way. People already disrespect us on the regular; now they have more reasons every season in almost every sport to indeed vilify us. Sports teams are great for cities for many reasons. I’ve identified some, and clearly, there are more that true sports love gives to its fans. But I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: it’s NOT without flaws or folly, and we must start contextualizing this clamor for more and more at any cost. Even mighty sports merit legitimate critique and thoughtful planning, despite our city being pretty sparse on both accounts.

That we give away billions to out-of-state billionaires for their stadiums or roadway shutdowns, and negotiate poorly for appropriate returns on investment. That we pretend sporting teams’ charitable giving isn’t simply a pass-through of locals’ money (galas, raffles, foundations, etc.) that would otherwise have gone directly to non-profits and charities. That we don’t have ways to acclimate players into the community, and too often (zero would be better), they wind up flaming out spectacularly or being forced to sever whatever goodwill they engendered when they get traded. That we ignore local concerns or direct attention solely to the Strip, even when other parts of the metro area may benefit from world-building of a pro sports team in a way that maximizes benefit to the whole community. All this is left out of any sports conversation, and that’s why generally I’m not impressed when “sports” gets the attention, and not surprised when Las Vegas gets hated.

I guess what I’m saying in closing is that even as a supporter of many local pro teams and specifically a VGK fan (and yeah, I swear I’m in all the way as a person who can’t get enough of my local hockey for reasons I don’t fully understand), I want people to take note that just because we say things like “now we’re a sports town” or “sports has been a real game changer for our community” doesn’t mean that it makes us better. Rooting for the “home team” isn’t the same as rooting for the hometown. A lesson that, sadly, I think is being lost more and more with each passing season.

It's fun coming back as a guest. Great convo w Jesse and Jacob. Only sadness is that the bit where I actually sing the praises of the Dems AG candidate Nicole Cannizzaro got cut for time. NO REALLY. While the Senate Majority leader wasn’t my preferred candidate in the primary, I wanted to be clear she is imminently qualified for the position. It’s also clear she’s the only candidate in the general election positioned to do what's needed as Nevadans suffer from abuses of various big corps and the current admininstration in Washington.

I also predict the nothing burger of an early release of results to a few media portals (seemingly unpublished) will be fodder for GOP candidate ads.

Finally, I look forward to The Pass (horrible name) on Water Street in Henderson falling into new/familiar hands. Appreciating the renovation from just a few years back…it never really said true Hendo!

Also, while you have to be a City Cast member (do it) to hear my Vegas loop rant offered as a bonus, I promise…it’s a doozy of a, urm, ride.

Otherwise a solid episode. Glad I can still play podcaster now and again. Looking forward to more.

Episode score: 8.6/10.

Enjoy!

And while I’m not an art guy, per se, I truly enjoy museum and gallery walkarounds and have enough knowledge from my formal general education to bullshit my way through an unlikely conversation referencing “art.” I know what I like, and I like more than Van Gogh or Monet. Or Manet. Whichever. But that’s about it. Also, every single one of the dozen or so Las Vegas-based or connected artists whose work hangs on the walls of my house, because of the Vegas connection, knew or knows about Dave Hickey.

I also know that by the time Dave, then in his early 50s, relocated to Las Vegas (sometime around 1990), he was already prolific on a wide range of topics, and regularly published in places from Rolling Stone (the trippy early years) and Artforum to Interview, Vanity Fair, The London Review of Books, and countless others. By 1993, a prominent, even seminal, collection of his critical essays titled The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty had been published. It got a lot of attention, spawning a flood of reviews and profiles in every major art journal and virtually every mainstream newspaper and magazine worldwide. This piqued my interest. I try to keep tabs on people doing significant things out of Las Vegas, especially writers. This was only a couple of years after I came back home from college and law school and began my more focused journey to understand this place.

I believe a deeper exploration of Las Vegas as a city holds great value.

I picked up his book before I ever met Dave with great hope of being enlightened. Sadly, I couldn’t get really into his art theories. Way too dense for my limited exposure. Also, to my eye, the insights gave little accessible perspective on my city. I did, however, revel in the book reviews and profiles on Dave. Here was an interesting guy who chose Las Vegas as his new hometown and seemed to see something of value in the comings and goings of the city. In an interview of that era, Dave said,

I’m a writer who lives in Las Vegas (laughter), which is the opposite of everything right and good and fashionable. Vegas is a permissive, unfashionable, commercial town and I’m a permissive, unfashionable commercial guy. I do retail. I write words, I get money, I buy Wheaties, I get calories, I write words, etcetera. That’s commerce. Also I am an art critic, which is the single unfundable, ungrantable, unendowable endeavor that is even vaguely connected with the arts. And justifiably so, in my case, since I am not with the program.

Later, when the same interviewer tried to lavish praise on Dave for his newfound status as an in-demand “rogue” art reviewer with revolutionary ideas about the connection of art to beauty, entertainment, commerce and in conflict with institutions where art is taught, Dave responded, “I don’t want to be the high priest of anything except video poker.”

It was clear to me that Dave was a “hometown” person worth knowing, even if he was relatively new to the City and, like most, probably ready to leave at any time if things didn’t work out. And honestly, knowing a guy like that might help me not only find my voice, but amplify it in the same fancy journals that were clamoring for Dave takes.

* * *

Regarded authors have written critically about Las Vegas since it firmly emerged in the pop culture scene in post-WWII America. Most point to Tom Wolfe’s 1964 Esquire magazine article with a title too silly to repeat as the first important, more-or-less canonical work about the city. Many followed. Pontificators with hot, lame, unique, hackneyed, and every other flavor of take. Popular takes (at least to the outside world) for sure.

But the list of those writers who lived here, like, truly lived here versus passing through (let’s say at least 3 years! - I know, not very long, right, but we are a transient society), is narrower. Book and magazine writers, who you may, or more likely, don’t know, or know well. Good folks. Smart folks. Folks I didn’t always agree with, or whose work I don’t always like. Sometimes love. Journalists, novelists, historians, poets, social commentators, and critics who thoughtfully and confidently pontificate on a national stage about the workings of the city. They are all worth checking out. Folks including (but not limited to): Jennifer Battisti, Charles Bock, Geoff Carter, Gregory Crosby, Sally Denton, Krista Diamond, Amanda Fortini, Scott Dickensheets, Tod Goldberg, Michael Green, Andrew Kiraly, Laura McBride, Eugene Moering, Hal Rothman, Nicholas Russell, Geoff Schumacher, David Schwartz, Kate Silver, John L. Smith, Claire Vaye Watkins, and Claytee White. (My personal “for additional reading” appendix - you’re welcome).

But as prolific, well-intentioned, or genius as some or all of those writers are, Dave is the stand-out. Dave’s essays, or quotes from Dave, or essays that incorporated quotes from his essays about Las Vegas, greatly overshadow all other locals, before or since.

The Vegas-based writer Scott Dickensheets reminded me that in his monograph on the artist Robert Gober, Dave dropped the opening line: “High art in low places - my specialty.” Yup, that was Dave’s Vegas, too.

Dickensheets went on, “the many media profiles of Dave over the years were gaga about the glamour of a maverick art critic swanning about a maverick city.” That is to say, a city that is maverick because it is not especially respected in the blue-chip art world. Dave messed with the status quo and he got branded a genius. Indeed, he remains Nevada’s only MacArthur Genius Fellow recipient to date. And since well over a thousand of these fellowships have been awarded, this is both impressive (for Dave) and depressing for the rest of us.

With his 1997 collection of critical essays, Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy (generally more accessible than the first), I finally got Dave, and was hooked. Here, amongst an array of solid pop ponderings, were intermittent Vegas takes gathered in one place. Dave’s take on Las Vegas quickly became important in my understanding of my own relationship with the city. A city, he said, with a “flat-line social hierarchy.” He summarized that America…

“...is a very poor lens through which to view Las Vegas, while Las Vegas is a wonderful lens through which to view America. What is hidden elsewhere exists here in quotidian visibility….the town has a quick, feral glamour that is hard to localize- and it arises, I think, out of the suppression of social differences rather than their exacerbation. The whole city floats on a sleek frisson of anxiety….”

So many resonant words that made me a fan. Then, maybe some time later, a friend. I once told Dave that, despite being about a decade into my seemingly blossoming career as a lawyer, I wanted to be better known for my writing about Las Vegas. At that point, I already had a modest, albeit forgettable, publication record on the topic, but I felt that, as someone raised in the shadow of the Strip and living an interesting Vegas life beyond it, I was poised to make bigger strides. Maybe a unique voice? Ready to offer interesting takes on a city where so many intrigued tourist-writers steadily produced shitty ones? I shared my overly esoteric essays with Dave. He was encouraging, but not as effusive as I wanted him to be. This was his wont. I solicited his advice. He was generous. I madly scribbled down his words. He cautioned that it was impossible to place a work set in Las Vegas, fiction or non-fiction, unless it had “a lot of sex or gambling or both.” He explained it’s what editors almost uniformly expect and demand.

Dave gave me this advice while we were both pressing the buttons, sitting side by side, staring straight ahead at the video poker machines at the dinky Eureka casino. Nothing sexy about this conversation; nothing sexy about the setting. Just the gambling, so in retelling this story, I probably only get half credit. And to be honest, I think that was advice for a nascent writer, not something he was particularly concerned about in his own work about the city. But perhaps he saw the clamor at his editorial alligator pond and passed it on as a hot tip.

* * *

To this day, the Eureka remains a small but vibrant slots-only gambling space. It’s in a well-maintained structure built in 1963, owned by a long-standing family of note in the community, the type of people who serve on local non-profit boards and do more of that noblesse oblige stuff than most local casino owners. Certainly, per capita, given the size of their endeavor compared to the bigger, better-known properties. In addition to the slots, there’s a destination-worthy café with an ambitious menu of scrumptious items like pork belly baos and short-rib grilled cheese sandwiches, as well as standard buffalo wings and burgers. There’s a 24-hour traditional horseshoe-shaped bar in the middle of the casino that plays nonstop sports on mounted television sets, and a cast of regular patrons who are familiar both with one another and the loyal, long-time staff. It’s the epitome of a “locals only” joint with an overstimulating abundance of varied slot devices: old school video poker and video keno; cartoony themed slots like Betti the Yeti and a classic machine that sporadically bellows Buffalooooooooo; and, lately, towering, trendy, kinetic, 7-foot high cabinet games with giant dystopian digital screen displays. The Eureka can be a loud and smoky place, but not as loud or smoky as a 250-plus machine establishment could be. Fortunately, they try to mitigate and mute it all a bit. Try.

Most Eureka customers come from the mixed-bag neighborhood immediately surrounding it, and by mixed-bag, I mean to say that it is smack dab at the center of real expensive condos, Las Vegas’ most established, gated country club and golf course and the oldest continuously residential neighborhood in the city where I bought a house in 2000. It also sits on Sherwood Street, whose other prominent features are a cluster of dilapidated apartments and the debris surrounding them. Sherwood has one of the highest 9-1-1 call rates in the Las Vegas valley. I’ve heard polite local law enforcement refer to the street as “the dirty forest.”

While it’s not outrageous to run into a lawyer, doctor, realtor, or other professional at the Eureka in the sneaky throes of slot machine immersion, it’s more likely you’ll see someone on the cusp, if not in the full-on struggle, of poverty. The Eureka’s building sits on Sahara Avenue, a busy arterial lined with businesses, literally the border between the unincorporated County (where the Strip lives) and the actual city of Las Vegas (where it does not). The structure could be mistaken for an auto parts store or a Denny’s knockoff if you don’t look closely enough to see the offers of player rewards and specials on the modest marquee.

I was never sure whether the Eureka appreciated Dave for his bona fides in the art and literary worlds as much as for his loyal and sustained patronage, but they treated him as well as any genius deserved. Then again, as rumor and Dave’s own bluster to me revealed, he did (poorly) invest a healthy chunk of his $500,000 MacArthur cash award in this modest building’s version of “entertainment.”

Around this time, he was quoted in Time magazine saying:

“This is the one place where you can come and everybody gets treated the same. Money doesn’t mean anything here, in the sense that money buys virtue everywhere else in America. All it is here is just shit you gamble with, and that really changes the tone of the city.”

***

More residents of Las Vegas come from somewhere else than are born here, and that’s a fact only folks who were born here tend to decry. I get it. It’s one of those places where there’s possibly less advantage being generational than a carpetbagger - so long as one lays those carpets hard, fast and fully. Carpet Diem!

Dave was born in Fort Worth and spent his formative years there. He went to grad school and beyond in Austin and relocated to Las Vegas with his wife, the art historian Libby Lumpkin, in 1990 because he saw something uniquely American in the city. In between, he did stints in New York, Nashville and Albuquerque. He proclaimed in an Air Guitar essay called “A Home in the Neon” that despite living in a lot of cities, he never considered any of them home until one random morning, he woke up in his condo in Las Vegas and decided it was home; he defined home as “a secular refuge and a source of comforts and reassurances that are unavailable elsewhere.” So sure, for Dave, Las Vegas was his “home.” And while I’m convinced he loved being “of here” for the two decades he was, I never heard him refer to himself as anything but a Texan.

This isn’t an uncommon irony. Most transplants consider themselves “locals” after even a short amount of time, but are more likely to claim some other place they’ve lived as where they’re “really from” when asked. I find this to be true for people who have lived here for decades, too.

Either way, Dave clearly appreciated the city as a good home base. Close enough to the important L.A. art scene to almost be a part of it. A cheap hub for flights to and from his international speaking gigs. Unmistakably, the absence of a state income tax was a draw. Also, there was his addiction to video poker. A high priest of it, if you will.

Early in their relocation, Dave and Libby became faculty in the Art department at UNLV, but eventually Dave moved to the English department. Call his first placement a poor cultural fit. It certainly was for a handful of the other Art faculty, whom he regularly, albeit hyperbolically, belittled in interviews. He also had a patron in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop alum cum long-time gambling titan, Glenn Schaeffer, who at the time was the president and CFO of the luxe Mandalay Bay resort on the Strip. Schaeffer endowed a chair for Dave in English. To my knowledge, he is the only person to hold the position of “Schaeffer Professor of Modern Letters.”

That’s where I first met Dave and inserted myself into the outer layer, at least, of his sphere. At the time, I was just wrapping up my short tenure as an interim Las Vegas municipal court judge and, at a community literary event, boldly asked him if I could audit his “creative non-fiction” class (a course Dave initially called “Intellectual Journalism”). He agreed, and I took a variation of that class three times. And by variation, I mean to say it was more or less the same class with a different title: always at least one story of his personal rock and roll excesses in the 1970s, one tale of life on the road with Bachman-Turner Overdrive, and time set aside for a deep analysis, line by line, of at least some section of Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon.

Dave called me “judge” long after that gig had ended. At one point, he offered me non-traditional “office hours” to discuss writing, politics, art, Las Vegas, really whatever I wanted (a friendship, right?) at a local taqueria near the Eureka, or the Eureka itself. The Eureka was roughly halfway between our residences. It was not far from the neighborhood where I grew up and, seemingly, continue to grow up.

Dave was easy to spot. His classic Cadillac convertible, another of the spoils of his MacArthur Fellowship payout, would be in the parking lot. He was usually at the same bank of slots against the eastern wall, in a satin jacket, a navy blue hat embroidered with the word “Navy” covering his balding head, a supersized, non-alcoholic beverage by his side, and a tarnished halo of smoke from his chain of cigarettes above it all. Dave was a little past the cusp of chubby, with remnants of a Texas accent, and he had a distinctive tic when he spoke, which made his neck abruptly swivel left and right and his bright eyes dart slightly as he pontificated. He was able to simultaneously hyper-focus on drawing electric cards on the screen in front of him and talk about whatever was on my mind – usually the folly of my writing career and a needy search for validation and advice. Sometimes the action would be interrupted by the time-out required for a jackpot, but more often the break would come when one of us busted out.

It was always my sense that neither one of us could afford the addictive behavior in the background stream of our conversations, though Dave certainly had more ammunition than I did. I should probably confess that my adventures with Dave at the video poker altar were not my first, nor last, foray into compulsive too-much-to-be-considered-healthy gambling in Las Vegas. It was a trait, perhaps unsurprisingly, handed down from my parents. It’s a different story. Las Vegas has lots of stories.

While highly paid for his own prose that would land in places like Vanity Fair, Playboy, Harpers and various fancy art journals, Dave reveled in having that fat genius grant money to fuel his compulsion “hobby,” presumably with an expiration date. But money just wasn’t an outward concern to Dave. He seemed to have all the contingencies in place to make sure he never “bottomed” out like so many hardcore gamblers. In fact, he once told me the main reason he taught at the university he openly disrespected was to secure good health insurance.

Dave also bragged/lamented on numerous occasions in my presence that, given the decadent lifestyle of drugs, rich food, sex, and other trappings of being a touring rock critic, songwriter, and gallery owner in the depraved 1970s, he was already on “golden” time. That is to say (a favorite transition in Dave’s conversations), he believed he should have died long before we met.

And while technically I could chalk up these glorious one-on-one interactions with the guru to our mutual immersion in gambling, that would be a justification that doesn’t pan out as a positive for gambling. In other words, while gambling led to good conversations with a cool dude, it otherwise really sucked. Gambling for locals in Las Vegas—even with its potential social engagement niceties, even with my personal jackpot as it indirectly supported my indulgences as an aspiring writer—is not a good thing. Not even a little. And while I appreciate Dave’s attention and support in and away from our “sessions” at the Eureka, I mostly loathe this part of my own story. I loathe myself in a gambling space. A space that consumed my parents, too. And others I espied who I know (and don’t know) in these spaces. And the stats. And the history.

***

Dave could have ridden out his years here for sure, but I sensed he was always ready to bail on Las Vegas the second it turned on him and his wife. That finally happened around 2010. It wasn’t unexpected, since beyond the small community of literati, intellectuals, and artists who also sought his attention, Dave Hickey was mostly ignored in Las Vegas. Oh, also, the owners of slot places. They always kept track of Dave’s comings and goings. Sure, Dave was protected with his “chair,” but when his wife, Libby, who was at the time a visiting professor at Yale, was denied tenure on a petty, pretextual rationale, it was time to go. It read more like a proxy attack on her oxygen-stealing superstar-critic husband than anything she deserved. There was also the fact that, despite being prolific, Dave’s insights were relatively undiscussed locally. His influence on decision-makers among hometown powerbrokers remained almost nonexistent. Of course, if I can be a little reductive about his vast body of work on Las Vegas, Dave’s main theory was that Las Vegas succeeded because it was an unabashedly audacious place that held space for bad decisions and rambunctious acting out. He reveled in its gaudy aesthetic and perverse honesty. A refuge from the mundane, filled with optimism, although grossly misplaced.

Perhaps, there’s a reason those in charge of keeping Las Vegas a viable “real city” weren’t so interested in Dave’s work.

In 2019, two years before he passed at 82, he told me that the only thing he really missed about Las Vegas in his new home of Santa Fe, New Mexico, was the slot machines. I both did and did not believe him. Then, selfishly, when he did pass, grieving for the man I really liked was compounded by a lament that I never felt confident enough to take up Dave’s offer to help me place creative work about Las Vegas. He said that as long as it met two conditions, he’d be my champion like so many art students before me. One - I had to feel it was brilliant. And two - he had to agree. And however buoyed I was by the offer, I never did give him anything to look at after that; self-doubt and a desire for elusive perfection were my curses in that era of my writing. And while I don’t kick myself for squandering an “opportunity,” Dave’s passing, like the original offer, reinvigorated my desire to continue to explore my hometown.

I intend to supplement it with as much intellectual journalism, erm creative non-fiction, as possible to give the res gestae of a curious land that people struggle to get their heads around. But a city that, people seem to convince themselves, is also easy to “get” from the get-go.

The challenge that Dave galvanized me to tackle, of course, is convincing anyone else that our tandem of darkness and light, unhinged hope and chance, normalcy with asterisks, and the solace of “break-even” all add up to a reflection on the human condition in ways perhaps unexamined or ignored. Ways that even Dave didn’t get because, in the end, he was a traveler, not a lifer. In ways that still titillate and provide catnip for the people who go “wow” when they think of Las Vegas, even as the conversation needs to leave the Strip.

And through a mishmash of genres and tales that aspire to transcend, or at least, festoon the obvious, I can muster the self-confidence to share. Convincingly present Las Vegas as a stardustian wonder of many parts. Imbuing it all with the hope that it’s enough to be considered, if not genius, then at least genius-inspired.

I haven’t thought about Ralph Pearl, well, in ever. Whatever popularity he arguably enjoyed during his creative glory years in Las Vegas, starting in 1953 and ending, well, hard to say, late-1970s? — long ago faded. He has disappeared as a point of reference in modern Las Vegas. Even a Google search for his obituary comes up empty. But I think his visage, both on TV and in the pages of the Las Vegas Sun during my childhood, triggered some recognition when I came across his 1973 memoir/essay collection book on a recent journey to the Vegas section of the wonderful Diamond Sutra Bookstore in the Arts Factory.

I was quickly hooked somewhere between scanning the immensely crowded and celebrity-name-flooded front of book (Mitzi Gaynor! Tony Newley!) and reading the self-deprecating back cover. (“While the Pulitzer Prize committee never recognized his talent…”). There’s also a very brief forward from Jack Benny (which seemed like it probably wasn’t written by Jack Benny) that’s more put-on than glowing endorsement, with lines like “As I opened that night at the Flamingo, I saw Pearl sitting owlishly at ringside, dabbling at the tablecloth with his pencil.” The preface also has Benny referring to Las Vegas showrooms as “cafés” - a weird little quirk that I had never seen before - that is, until I read the subsequent Pearl essays, which exclusively use that word swap.

Reading through “Las Vegas is My Beat” (1973) is like thumbing through an extensive collection of slightly blurry Polaroids around the LV Strip you’d find in an overflowing shoebox at someone’s grandmother’s estate sale. Sure, it’s shitty, but also, what a find. Also, spying little details about the workings on the Strip (the only street that matters to Pearl) that probably aren’t caught anywhere else is totally worth it.

But mostly, I’m a straight-up sucker for a self-aggrandized Vegas character who loves telling Vegas stories about Vegas characters. I mean, who amongst us Las Vegans doesn’t aspire to be that particular shade of so-and-so !?! (In case that was too subtle…it me).

And so, Ralph Pearl’s opus is now a rare, cherished prize on my Vegas-lit-heavy bookcase.

So how did Ralph Pearl become the “conscience of Las Vegas” as he claims one obscure Canadian broadcaster once called him? Sadly, it wasn’t for his compelling prose, or his keen insights (as you’ll see, he gets almost everything wrong), but mostly his close relationship to and loyal patronage of Las Vegas Sun founder and publisher, Hank Greenspun. According to a long essay in the book, Ralph and Hank met in their first year of law school in Brooklyn, but Ralph dropped out after that year and embarked on a clunky, mostly unsuccessful career in journalism. Clunky that is, until he landed in Las Vegas and began a high-profile job sharing salacious bits, backstage gossip, and general muckrackery about the burgeoning entertainment and hotel/casino scene. The column started out with the title, “Vegas Daze and Nights” and ultimately “My Beat.”

Admittedly, it’s hard to start this book review party. There are 75 overwritten pieces in the 251 adjective-packed pages of the book. Some are full-on essays, others short anecdotes; some wallow in what I’m sure Pearl thought were keen and important takes on the past and future of Las Vegas, and the rest are just name-drop upon name-drop, replete with occasional asides with strays that substitute for humor. And that’s how you wind up with gems like “getting a double payout was as hopeless as Twiggy’s tits.” Oh Ralph!

Most of the works fall into one of three themes:

1. Here’s another famous person and a very obscure bit of their life that I know about because I was there/am their close personal friend/maybe heard it second- or third-hand.

2. I went to a show, and it wasn’t to my liking, so I printed a column and now I swear I’m in a feud with that person/am banned from that property/ EVERYONE is talking about it.

3. Vegas is a troubled place filled with mob guys, problem gamblers, and sex workers - listen to my tale of how they all crap out. These stories explain how Vegas really operates.

Regarding the first two categories, the common thread is Ralph ensconsing himself as a major character, but also a revelation that he’s remarkably inept at achieving his goal as a great chronicler.

And I know this is already coming off as judgy, but trust me that I say this all with love.

The stories are wonderful and almost earnest in their aspiration to be top-notch. He compares himself to upper echelon of gritty but clever writers, like George Jessel or Damon Runyon, but comes off more like a braggart whose opinion probably held as much weight as Twiggy’s bra. (he-yo!)

On the last category, he does seem to dwell on how Las Vegas is not for the faint of heart, even if it is a pretty cool, weird space, where hijinks are plentiful. He’s the observer-in-chief and keeper of stories. He constantly pontificates on the city in pedestrian but somehow eternally keen ways.

“Las Vegas, A polygamous, orgiastic, and world-famous money machine constantly being threatened by a slim gathering of native Las Vegans, mostly Mormon, who vow one day to outlaw (legalized) gambling...but they’ll never do it. Evil or otherwise, this gaming economy has a death hold on everyone.”

What I do love, yes, love about this book is how Mr. Pearl genuinely offers up takes on the city he has adopted as his forever home, good or bad, right or wrong, and documents at least what he thinks is important for infamy in an evolving city.

And why not Ralph? After all, he was a columnist for the LV SUN. He get the comps. He saw the shows. He felt confident to give his takes - even if in the end, they were lame, like calling out Buddy Hackett for being “too dirty” or offering tall tales like his weekly telephone calls with Tallulah Bankhead, his life advice to Ann-Margaret, the time Wayne Newton begged him to be his manager, or his cheering up Barbra Streisand in her dressing room. Or maybe all that shit was true. Who knows! It was Las Vegas, and Ralph Pearl wrote a book to celebrate “the amazing cast of characters who have created this fantastic desert Mecca.”

I still can’t decide whether Mr. Pearl was aware of his own limitations as a writer, researcher, or thinker. I mostly think he was. He must have been. He admits as much. At one point, he tells the reader, “But don’t go by me. I predicted that Howard Hughes would never invest in Las Vegas.” At another, he recalls a joyous moment when he thought he had finally been recognized in public, only to be mistaken for Captain Kangaroo.

Indeed, this book reads like a series of confessions to being bad (but persistent) at his job, which he seems to celebrate as a badge of his personal uniqueness. On the back book cover, he touts his “fearless attacks on stars, managers, and hotel owners who got out of line.” But also, the book contains a multitude of epic bad takes and screw-ups, like his column on Elvis’ famous debut at the International Hotel (“a lad whose singing style is no longer popular”). And then the classic Ralph Pearl essay in which he recounts his review of Mario Lanza’s big comeback concert at the Last Frontier Hotel in 1958.

I hope you find the book and read it for yourself, but here’s my summary of that story. The quotes are from the essay, the rest is my commentary. I will say that very little of it appears in any formal accounts of the life and times of Mario Lanza, who died in 1959 of an embolism. It is also emblematic of Pearl inserting his remarkable “little birdie” network (because he’s as famous as anyone he covers!) to get the real stories.

Mario was apparently one of the biggest stars in the world by the early 1950s, which may very well have been true, given my Wikipedia-level research. According to Pearl, he was deeply struggling at the time with an alcohol addiction and had to think twice about appearing in Las Vegas with its temptations of “booze and broads and blackjack.” At the time, Lanza’s assets were “in a jumbled state. A couple of Hollywood pals, up for the show, told me he was at the point of bankruptcy.” He was set to receive 50K a week for a month-long run. The opening night show was sold out and “more than a hundred newsmen from all over America and some from England had checked in for Lanza’s debut.” Pearl said the stakes were high since he had alienated “all of his movie bosses” and that many famous people were in the audience ready to “gloat if he fell on his whiskey-soaked ass.” Pearl reports that according to Lanza’s wife, he was “petrified and had to unwind,” so he left the showroom for an hour.

It’s worth noting here that Pearl then takes a sojourn in the essay to make sure he was in the audience with his seemingly much, but gleefully, suffering wife at his “regular pew off ringside,” and then he regales us with a review (and trademark Pearl witicism) of the food at this dinner show. “The lamb chops tasted stringy. ‘Maybe you should first take off the paper panties on the chops,’ suggested my wife, Roz.”

Long essay (with many, many asides) short, the journalist is on deadline and the announcer keeps indicating one delay after another of the show, so Pearl decides to write a glowing, like monsterly glowing review of the opening night performance, and call it in to his editor. Of course, Lanza winds up canceling the performance, but not before “I jumped in a cab and headed for the Sun downtown. I got there just in time to see the Sun trucks pulling away with the first edition of the paper.”

And yes, the essay is replete with acknowledgments of embarrassment, but in what I now deem the unflappable Ralph Pearl swagger, he also seems to brag that the story of his fake story is repeated by famous people who tease him about it (including Jerry Lewis). He also takes pride in the fact that his guffaw shows up in other people’s actual reviews of what turned out to be a cancellation of the whole residency. He finally lets the reader in on the reason the entertainer was a no-show was that “he had taken many pills and enough booze in a nearby bar to launch a dreadnought” and “much chagrined and sporting a huge hangover, Lanza decided that nightclubs weren’t for him. He took off for L.A. and left behind enough tranquilizer pills for a thousand breakdowns.”

Pearl also includes an alleged letter from Lanza to him “months” before he died. He claims it read, “Thank you for the review in your widely read column. I shall treasure it always as something that could have been but never was. The next time you’re in L.A., please drop over to the house so we can have dinner and re-hash that horrible night at the New Frontier. Regards, Mario.”

I’m not sure how in this, or any other essay, Pearl landed on these, um, pearls, but it’s definitely…his beat!!!!

Look, I’m restraining myself from a “summary” of basically all 74 essays (and the epilogue). That would be less of a book review and more of a reimagining, so I’ll take my leave now after hopefully giving you enough of a taste. A taste that includes the flavors of random stories about Ralph Pearl asking the most assinine questions and allegedly pissing off Frank Sinatra, Pearl Bailey, Walter Winchell, Phyllis Diller, and countless other “names” of the past but still taking great joy in the whole process. Then again, he did have a column for a million years and even if its almost impossible to find (outside this book), it’s still a LOT of content.

Then again, one of my favorite bits in the book is when he admits to asking a question to Sammy Davis, Jr., and says he gets the following as a reply: “How long did it take you to come up with such a brilliant question, you stupid bastard!”

I mean, I want to give you more, so here’s a taste of Ralph NOT in the book - his painful interview of Andy Griffith and Jerry Van Dyke, the only archive I could find on the Internet from his television show.

So yeah, highly recommend taking a day with Ralph Pearl’s book. If nothing else, it lets you fall into what it must have been like as a day-to-day Las Vegas resident reading the glorious “high-life” on the Strip of a self-annointed truth-teller using a very stylized vernacular.

On that last point, I don’t know if it was common to the era, but he never refers to the famous “Rat Pack” as any other than the “Clan.” What’s that about? Oh, and in something that only matters to me, he never mentions Guy McAfee, who most modern historians attribute the coinage of “the Strip” (I strongly assert there is no proof of that), and loosely attributes it to the original El Rancho resort owner, Tommy Hull.

I’ve said it before (and before that), but it’s really hard to write well about Las Vegas because the truth of this place absolutely depends on your perspective; and your perspective can be genuine, manipulated, and provably tainted, all at the same time. That’s how this place broadly seems to thrive, or maybe just survive. You can’t ignore the cliches, you can’t rely on the cliches. And so any stab, even if it’s just a random collection of delusional, or possibly real moments - big or small - well, they fit into the stew. There may not be a lot to “learn” about the City from Mr. Pearl, but I can’t tell you how glad I am that someone saw fit to let him spin.

That’s wrong for a lot of reasons.

I get into some of those reasons in my article, linked here. I have often worked with that office over the years as an attorney, State board member and citizen. I always watch with careful eyes as a sometimes curmudgeonly cynic, and I know how to research things where there are gaps to my expertise. And so I have gotten utterly rankled by how certain candidates over the years have given it the shorthand of the State’s “Chief Law Enforcement Officer,” “Top Cop” or worse “the Prosecutor in Chief” when they think it serves their qualifications while running for office. I think the last person who won with this angle was the so-called “trainwreck” lawyer Adam Laxalt, who touted his experience as a “military prosecutor” going after “terrorists.” Suffice it to say, the one-term Mr. Laxalt rarely flexed his “prosecutorial” muscles because that’s one of the flimsiest of prerequisites for the job. Indeed, most of the attorneys who have become AGs over the past 50 years were NEVER county prosecutors. But they did prove to be good at leading that office. Folks like Brian Sandoval, Frankie Sue Del Papa, Brian McKay and former Public Defender Richard Bryan.

As such, the debate basically started off the other night between the Democratic candidates, former DA/Senate Majority leader Nicole Cannizzaro and State Treasurer/attorney Zach Conine. (I’ll get to the GOP candidates in the next post). Here’s the video of the whole night if you have the stomach for escalating nastiness and fundamental disagreement about what the job CLEARLY is about (and of course, each other’s skills and (gasp) integrity). Speaking of trainwrecks, buckle up - here it is.

Anyhow, I hope you read my article first and then see how it clearly impacted the conversation. My biggest takeaway is that perhaps candidate Cannizzaro didn't do a very good job at fully embracing what the job entails (or perhaps doesn’t care so long as she gets elected). I mean as former Senate Majority leader and just a regular old lawyer - does that give her the credentials to be elected? Sure. But so too does being the very successful State Treasurer and being just a regular old lawyer like Conine. The issue arises when Cannizzaro tries to claim a definitive edge with rhetoric that ONLY she is qualified because of the demands of the position. I mean that’s just not accurate.

Indeed, when asked about the FACTS and what I’d like to say was my thoughtful analysis of the AG role in Nevada in the linked article, she copped the worst of responses… I disagree with Mr. Figler about the "law.” Ugh. I hate when people avoid the details for general repudiations. Honestly, I don’t think there’s much to quibble with in the article in the assessment that a DA background is pretty much irrelevant. It would have been nice to hear what “law” she disagreed with. Very reminiscent of when LVCVA head Steve Hill dismissed my co-authored, extremely well-vetted, and document-heavy piece in ProPublica about the failings of Elon Musk's Boring Company in Las Vegas as “sometimes inaccurate and often misleading.” Really, and yet he couldn't come up with a single example because, in my belief, it was deflection and weaponized bluster in the face of a hard truth.

Perhaps what’s more frustrating is that EVEN if it were true that county prosecutor skill sets were valuable for the role of AG, why then does no one even ask whether Cannizzaro was a GOOD prosecutor with examples other than her general assignments? Also, as a dual legislator (who gets months-long leaves of absence as a DA), was she ever given any advantage because of her higher-profile role?

It’s probably late in the game to go case by case of her DA record (and most lay people aren’t hip to nuance in the world of criminal justice), but my personal experience as a criminal defense attorney (take with a grain of salt) is that she was eclipsed in reputation by many top-tier lawyers in that office during the same time frame. Not to say she was a bad lawyer…I'm not saying that. I simply don’t know how effective she was because it hasn’t come up or been looked at. I do know that in my last case with her back in 2020, I was disappointed to see gross and untenable overcharging. In that same case, I challenged her conflict of interest as a member of the executive and legislative branches (as did NPRI). Eventually, she resigned as the Nevada Supreme Court seemed to signal the issue was viable.

Sadly, this lack of judgment, operating as the head of the Senate legislators who COULD have played a role in true criminal justice reform (like curtailing gross overcharging), didn’t come up in this debate or in the election in general yet (though I bet it will if she wins the primary). Why is no one asking her why she didn’t recuse herself in votes her boss, Clark County DA Wolfson, had a vested interest in?

And here comes the cynical side of me again…bluster, denial and hype always beat facts and understanding in our State. Sigh.

All of which to say, while Cannizzaro is qualified for the job in general, I'm of the mind that there are plenty of disqualifiers against this candidate to consider as well.

Then again, I'm not in this race. I'm just a citizen who wants the new AG to shorten the 10-week wait an ordinary citizen faces before a return call about a complaint with a State agency or actor. I'm merely a Nevadan who wants a fighter for open meetings and transparency, and against Federal encroachment on our rights. I want a non-deflector with the goods to take on conflicts of interest and corruption with zealousness.

Of the Dems, I believe the one best suited to lead an executive office tasked with all these things is Zach Conine. Talk to him. Research him and his jobs in gaming, law, business, and helming the Treasurer's office with a steady hand and immense growth.

Both candidates are qualified, but only Zach seems to want to address what the job actually requires.

It’s a little off to quantify it as a “glut,” but there were a handful of books written about Las Vegas in the aughts. This was really the first heyday of folks from around the world (and some locally based, non-fiction-oriented academics and thinkers) gleefully pontificating about and explaining how Las Vegas works. The hook of many of them (especially those with a primary focus on the Strip and/or gambling) was a healthy dose of Las Vegas as a metaphor/example/caution/canary in the capitalist mine. Perhaps the best known of these books/authors, all of which are absolutely worth a perusal, include:

Resort City in the Sunbelt by Eugene Moering (2000)

The Money and the Power by Sally Denton and Roger Morris (2001)

Neon Metropolis by Hal Rothman (2002)

Suburban Xanadu by David Schwartz (2003)

Positively Fifth Street by James McManus (2003)

Sun, Sin and Suburbia by Geoff Shumacher (2004)

Winner Takes All by Christina Brinkley (2009)

Each contain delightful polaroids from what seems like a long ago (and perhaps somewhat forgotten) era of Las Vegas’ (d)evolution. Some points still hit home. Some questions asked back then still remain. Some predictions when they hit are so way off it’s laughable; others turn out to be unexpectedly poignant. Many characters featured or interviewed have either died or gone on to other settings. Some remain. Same for the buildings and institutions mentioned. It’s REALLY hard to write about a place like Las Vegas and not only get it right for the moment, but also make an enduring treatise about the city for the ages. It's just the vital parts that change so much, so quickly. Lord knows I’m struggling with that in my own collection of essays. Still, I’m glad these books exist, if for no other reason than to remind me of my own thoughts and dreams and disappointments experienced at the time. Also, it’s totally fun (for me) to hunt and peck all the debunked facts and theories! (I’ll die on the hill that there is no evidence that mobster/cop turned civic leader Guy McAfee coined the term “Las Vegas Strip”).

Of all the titles of that era, the ones that still grab my attention are those that lean into personal experiences as a guide through the by-now-obvious observations about tourism, gambling, and other vices and aspects of daily life, contrasted against those topics. And amongst those I was partial to, at the time, was L.A. Times writer Marc Cooper’s semi-loving overview of the city, “The Last Honest Place in America” (2004).

The premise of Cooper’s book is fairly straightforward. It’s a post-9/11 vibe check on a city he’s frequented (and ostensibly cherished) since regular family visits as a child in the 1950s. As the author explains in the introduction:

“This book attempts to understand what pull this city exercises over me, if not over the tens of millions of other people who increasingly stream into its casinos, clubs, and resorts. And if not to fully understand that appeal, my goal, at least, is to measure its dimensions. I found the period following the terrorist attacks…to be an opportune historic moment…Las Vegas, after all, was now supposed ot be everything we Americans were putting aside in this new chapter of history thrust so suddenly and rudely upon us.”

In retrospect, nothing particularly insightful that hasn’t by now become part of the common lore is developed in his journey. The Strip is still king, we grow very fast, the city has inconsistent, hypocritical approaches to sex work, gambling is insidious but profitable, politicians are influenced by money, homelessness is a shonda.

But to his credit, Cooper interviews and quotes most of the right people from that time, with familiar names and oft-cited takes through the present: Michael Green, John L. Smith, Bo Bernhard, David Schwartz, Sally Denton, Alan Feldman, and Geoff Schumacher. And folks that were local “characters” long out of the Vegas conversation in 2026, but with something to say at the time: Gary Peck of the ACLU, Bill Friedman, Nick Kallos, Dancer-Activist Andrea Hackett, Hal Rothman, Frank Wright, Gregory Crosby, Franciscan Brother David Bruer, and former councilman Steve Miller.

All in all, it holds up just fine as a time capsule of events unfolding in real time, held up against some of the challenges of keeping the city vibrant for tourists in a post-9/11 world. Cooper’s timing of reporting from 2002-2003 smacks him in the front row for the notorious G-Sting scandal (bribes for Strip club friendly agendas) that took down half of the County Commission with prison sentences; the ascent of Mayor Oscar Goodman and his plan to renovate downtown during his second term; the ACLU victories against the casinos on sidewalk access issues; and the growing concern with homelessness. He’s also there as the “What Happens in Vegas” campaign ascends to national pop culture legend status and Steve Wynn embarks on opening the “Wynn” (nee Le Reve) upon the ashes of the Desert Inn.

Cooper loves the Desert Inn. Without any citation (or awareness, perhaps, of the famous scene from Albert Brooks’ Lost in America), he truly believes the Desert Inn has heart! He spends the first part of his visit, reveling in the throwback (and perhaps last vestige) of Old Vegas class he recognizes at the D.I. and wagers (perhaps too much by his own assessment) most of his dough at the blackjack tables there. And then, when the D.I. shutters, he heads over to Binion’s then-Horseshoe to experience the thrills and chills of the gambling that he swears he only does when he comes to Vegas. There’s a lot of talk about Blackjack in this book - maybe too much. At one point, he painstakingly describes a single hand of the table game that escalates in his words into a “tsumami” of action with multiple splits and double downs. Spoiler: he wins the monster hand, but he clearly rues getting so hooked in the first place and risking so much. It’s a fairly pedestrian take on gambling addiction, erm, excitement. And yet, I think it’s meant to introduce us through his eyes into a fairly lengthy, and I’ll say (if you know me) important conversation about the complicated relationship the city has with problem gambling and gamblers. His sojourn into this addiction treatment space with the lauded Dr. Robert Hunter and UNLV’s Bo Bernhard (he gets a little shook at a GA meeting with all three in attendance) is solid reporting about the underbelly. He points out how little our government used to spend on problem gambling services and prevention (spoiler: it’s not much better today) and how the city seems to bypass any real data on the social costs in the community (and, 20+ years later, same). Cooper then expertly injects the all-rosy gambling view of the industry’s Frank Fahrenkoff (who comes off as one of a few villains in the book) and the takes of both a favorite D.I. dealer (everyman Ziggy with “gambling in his blood) and the then-new owner of the Gambling Book Store, Howard Schwartz. It’s all good fun, even if it merely sets a lovely table without serving up too much red meat.

The obligatory “sex work” angles gets its time, too, mostly through his interactions with dancer Andrea Hackett - at the time immersed in a quixotic battle to unionize strippers. Cooper unabashedly succumbs to the charms of Ms. Hackett (“forty-nine years old and looking at least a decade younger” and “a tall and lanky brunette, wearing only white boots…teasing the two guys seated at the foot of the stage with her ample breasts…”). To his credit, Cooper doesn’t sensationalize the personal backlash she endured stemming from her organizing campaign, with her getting fired (also by her account for being trans). But calling her the Norma Rae of Las Vegas may have been a little much! And while I’ve certainly come to peace with an obligatory strip club scene in most Vegas tales (check out my own novella set in a fictionalized Olympic Garden), Cooper may spend a little too much time amplifying the “war” between the casinos and the strip clubs. I mean, the hypocritical efforts by local politicians at the time to outlaw lap dancing were a quirky blip of the day, but I don’t know that it was a defining characteristic of the weirdness of Las Vegas. In the end, the Strip clubs did just fine and still do, even if they never did unionize, as Ms. Hackett and perhaps Cooper himself may have predicted they would. (Compare and contrast the recent dustup over brothel workers trying the same in nearby Pahrump).

The third prominent thread is the city’s then-fairly-new struggle with the growing issue of homelessness. Here’s where Cooper probably does the most short shrift of his grand overview. He points out that while he was in town, a national organization had named the city the meanest in Las Vegas toward the homeless. He talks to a clergyman who laments the city’s failures to provide housing (some issues never go away), laments the lack of transparency down in the soon-to-be-dubbed “corridor of hope,” and contrasts some of the harsher, well-repeated sentiments of then-Mayor Oscar Goodman. It’s not a real deep dive and serves only as a sort of marker to remind people that, whatever gets said to the contrary, the Las Vegas utopian marketing scheme has its plot holes. Then again, I do recall it being a hot topic of the day.

The rest of the book is peppered with fun insights and a thoughtful aggregation of solid quotes and observations that serve the notion, as the author intended, that Vegas is a city you just can’t and shouldn’t ignore. I did get a laugh as Cooper, by then probably in his fifties, assesses the club scene at the then-newish and allegedly hip Palms Casino ($225 dollars for bottle service!) and wonders about the impact of sex-forward shows and places about to open like Zumanity and the Bikini Bar at the Rio (as I said, things change fast in modern Las Vegas). It’s also a fun series of literary photos of other places long gone, like the Jaguar’s strip club and even the Mirage. Even Summerlin, as a boring suburb, catches some brief, but superb strays, as does a quickie sojourn through Primm!

Cooper is an excellent writer with mostly easy-to-digest prose. Excellent lines abound, like his observation after surveying the casino floors: “Maybe that’s why they say that the difference between praying here and praying anywhere else is that here you really mean it.”

And in Hunter S. Thompson-esque reportage on a convention of abstinence-touting virgins called the “Good Girls” and their subsequent field trip to hand out pamphlets (side by side with the escort leafleters) to tourists along the Strip, he gets a wee bit prolix but still fun…

“In the only American city where all the bare-knuckle rules are posted and agreed upon, where the house advantage is recognized and flaunted, a regular guy’s got almost even chance of winning something. Amidst the belching volcano, growling white tigers, the splashing dolphins, the boom of the pirate’s cannons, the roar of the animated F-16s streaking along the Fremont canopy, the splash of the New York New York harbor, the screech of the roller coaster atop the Stratosphere, and the rising resonant human hum of the always-present fanny-packers, sharpies, and hustlers, the high-rolling whales, the winners, losers, the lost and the dazed, well among them the Good Girl virgins couldn’t possibly be anything more than just one more part of the show.”

I mean, he certainly packs it all in and coins a memorable phrase in the title of the book that I often recite when the mood hits as a hat tip. In the end, The Last Honest Place in America, is a sadly forgotten but worthy entry into the non-fiction retelling of both old Vegas history and its contemporaneous emergence in the aughts as a friggin’ interesting place.

But here’s my cheeky chat with new host Jesse Merrick and Sonja Cho Swanson about merit badges you need to score to prove you’re a real Vegas “local.” Did we miss any? (Comment below).

https://lasvegas.citycast.fm/podcasts/how-to-prove-youre-a-real-las-vegas-local

And as much as I “like” Battista’s (bring back the strolling accordian, a highlight!) with its bottomless, free bad house wine, overdressed troughs of salad, and zinging, runny red sauce (comforts, I tell ya), I’ve never been a fan fan of Golden Steer. Sure, there are some tasty items on the menu - it’s a steakhouse with giant potatoes - but the pricy vibe doesn’t hit for me. A perfectly fine and fun place to go every now and again if someone else is paying. I mean, fine, but not value. Also, I barely suffer provably false backstories and disingenuous “class.” I’ve really become a hype-hater in my later-Vegas days. And so I reserve recommending the GS to visiting folks looking for feels over food. But that’s just me. I have a limited palate, I ‘spose.

All of which is to say, that it’s no surprise that now that the Golden Steer has decided, for whatever reason, to capitalize their brand and “back story” to New York, that New York food critics haven’t been as, let’s stay generous, as Vegas locals have been for a while.

I’ll start with the bad news. A food critic for the New York Times gave it ZERO stars. Like nary a star. I don’t know if I’ve ever been to a zero-star restaurant that wasn’t already shut down by the health district or… I mean, zero stars is ROUGH! It also seems hyperbolic and trying to make a point. Of course, my initial (defensive) posture was I bet it’s more Vegas-hating by elite New York critic than it being THAT BAD. So I went in, actually cheering for the Golden Steer, and at the ready to call it out as simply Anti-Vegas. And while there is (as expected) at least some underlying, between-the-lines thread of that - the critic just saw through the facade and eviscerated. A real call to perhaps some locals that the emperor (or here Chairman of the Board - aka the Sinatra heavy folklore) has no clothes.

“This Las Vegas import commands top dollar for wet-aged steaks, as mild as mortadella, but the restaurant’s true focus is trafficking in a Rat Pack sense of cool.”

And then, “Shrimp cocktail, textured like cardboard, exudes a whiff of low-tide funk. Bland steer sausage channels a 1990s ‘Healthy Choice’ vision of charcuterie. Fries with French onion soup seasoning taste fully unseasoned. And a bone-in rib-eye packs so little beefiness it’s as if an A.I. agent tried to imagine the taste of steak.”

Ouch.

The old Golden Steer does better in the New Yorker, but alas, way more emphasis by that writer on the marketing than the food. Their critic sorta kinda likes GS (again, I sorta kinda do too) but also concludes it’ not a good dollar value. Food gets reviewed like this => “Most disappointing are the steaks themselves: Golden Steer wet-ages its meat, which softens the fibers, perhaps too much: my sixteen-ounce Shorthorn (the menu’s term for a New York strip) was as yielding as a filet mignon—disconcerting, not delightful—and, upon slicing, left a puddle of diluted jus on the plate.” Not good news for, ahem, a, steakhouse.

Of course, the author gives away a little Vegas disdain, too, as evidenced by “In Las Vegas, a so-so steak at the Golden Steer might matter less, given the institution’s stature.”

Also, ouch.

In the end, the New Yorker, semi-recommends it as a fun night, but with the caveat - “Sure, it’s a little goofy, and more than a little over the top, and maybe I spent more money than I meant to in exchange for a little less than I was hoping to get—but it’s a Las Vegas steak house, baby. Isn’t that the point?”

Actually, it seems, per usual, that the point of most writing from outsiders about Las Vegas is that its really not a serious place. I’m not sure that the Golden Steer’s attempt to sell its hokey and possibly untrue history to the world helps the effort to reverse that trend. Look, I harbor no ill will towards the GS, but maybe they should have stayed in their lane here at home, where they thrive. One interesting note, and a common criticism of outsider writing (and some insider writing ) about our city is that very little research is done on the marketing stuff (ya, back to that) hoisted onto said journalists. And now a plea to anyone writing about Las Vegas: STOP BELIEVING THINGS WRITTEN BY PR PEOPLE.

Specific example. The New Yorker article starts out repeating the debunked date of the opening of the GS. And sure, maybe it’s a only a few years off, but there’s definitely a reason the GS picks 1958 versus their actual date of opening, and that, as the Corey Levitan article linked above (and h/t to Vintage Vegas’ research proved), is that the earlier date is necessary for the truly aprocryphal list of patrons from Elvis (of course! he slept everywhere too) to the full Rat Pack and Marilyn Monroe lovingly eating with Joe DiMaggio to even add up - which it never really has. Monroe and her baseball legend husband divorced years before the GS really opened. It also repeated the false claim that the GS allowed people of color when the Strip was still segregated when the desegregation, too, happened before the GS opened. I mean, the GS is selling something important and historic that just didn’t happen, and that’s fine-ish until you trade on it, right?

Indeed, my biggest (sorry) beef with the “review” in the New Yorker is that it repeats it ALL - hype, line and sinker. No independent research. And sadly, that’s sort of the basis why the writer actually liked the restaurant - the lore! Ugh.

Oh, one more. I didn’t like the lack of a better context when Mr. Mayor Goodman was mentioned. In the New Yorker, the writer correctly stated: “Booth No. 11 is dedicated to Oscar Goodman, the notorious mob attorney and eventual mayor of Las Vegas, whose Golden Steer dinners with Tony (the Ant) Spilotro were dramatized in Scorsese’s “Casino.” (Goodman, ever the showman, played himself.)” What it criminally (sorry) doesn’t mention is that Goodman far preferred Pierros as his restaurant of choice, and that the Casino scenes celebrating that mob-time were absolutely NOT filmed at the GS for good reason. A lost but interesting fact is that a pivotal steakhouse scene was filmed at the Plaza Hotel in a space that is now home to Oscar’s Steakhouse (part-owned and named after the Mayor). That’s a total miss, right, when you invoke the Mayor in explaining why the GS is worthy of a favorable review?

Though maybe not. It was a food review, not a thoughtful essay about hype, marketing, and food-loathing (sorry, Al Mancini) in Las Vegas. Then again, for whatever reason, the story left out the Golden Steer’s arguably number 1 fan and Vegas (again) local, Holly Madison, who may or may not be running for Mayor. Also, there’s a segment that talks about the novelty of a Vegas institution moving to NYC, and no mention at all of the Double Down NYC?

Wouldn’t it have been more fun to read a review of a Vegas institution where the export of Ass Juice was counterpointed against Au Jus? Just saying.

PHOTO CREDIT: Photographs by Dolly Faibyshev for The New Yorker

The Las Vegas Sun is possibly poised to stop operations after its Joint Operating Agreement with the LV RJ - entered into in 2005 - has been declared void by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Last week was the first time since its founding in 1950 by Hank Greenspun that no print edition was produced. They’re still fighting, and still online…but the once mighty LV SUN, even if they weather this new storm, will still be relegated to an insert that is widely unread by most. I think a lot of observers, like me, believe that if there is no legal means to keep the RJ publishing the LV SUN, it may simply fold up shop and focus its energies on either expanding, or solidifying, the presence of the still-excellent Las Vegas Weekly. (So glad they got past their unfettered nightclub fealty, which undoubtedly got them tons of ad money back in the day)!

Still, the LV SUN newsroom is operating with a talented but very sparse crew, and it seems the publisher will be forced to refocus its energy on innovating its digital presence. That is, if the court losses aren’t used as an excuse to shutter the whole thing. But I’m not Brian Greenspun, and I have no idea what his father’s print media legacy means to him, or how much it motivates this seemingly quixotic bit of litigation. Seems like a lot of work to hang on when the world has pretty much passed this sort of print media by.

All that said, it’s hard not to get nostalgic when thinking about the sometimes storied three-quarters of a century of the LV SUN, and so let me heap on to the pretty good stories already out there, what the legacy of the LV SUN means to the community. Also, check out today’s episode of City Cast Las Vegas with me and Dr. Michael Green. But mostly, here, some personal connections.

* * *

My first job was delivering the LV SUN as a paper boy. I was 12. Amongst my peer set, it was considered a prestigious job, but it was a grind. Back then, a stack of zip-bound newspapers and a bag of rubber bands would be dropped off at my apartment complex in the wee morning hours before school. My route was the four apartment complexes, the two motels, the three casinos, and a strip mall, all within 2 blocks of my house. It usually took me about an hour or so to rubber-band each paper (the art of tossing it so it lands on the doorstep) and deliver them on foot. We had a distributor named Mr. Ragsdale, who, to my memory, was a bit of a Fagan character, and we were his little army. There would be incentives to sign up new subscriptions and other little bonuses here and there. I made about 30 bucks a week, but was told all I had to do was hold out to Xmas for the big tips that made the year worthwhile. I started at the beginning of the 8th-grade school year. Some of my classmates were also delivery boys (never girls for some reason) and we’d share war stories, and gossip about old man Mr. Ragsdale and his weird beard. How sad it was, we shared, that he was still basically a paperboy, as old as he was (probably in his 40s!). Also, how mean he could be if you ever got a complaint. I rarely got complaints. Model paperboy. Priming the holiday tip pump. I remember doing well at Xmas. A couple of hundred total, with my 50 or so customers, but I was really hoping for the big score from the landlord of ALL the properties on the street (which was, in fact, named after him), who had an office in one of the buildings. Long story short (too late), he stiffed me, and my mom (longer story, another day) MF’ed him so much that the next year we had to move! It wasn’t the only reason, but it was a reason. Also, I broke my no-complaint streak that January when a Sunday paper in the cold morning shot off my fingers, and I smashed a large living room window in one of the apartments. Mr. Ragsdale was not amused.

Now here’s the funny, only-in-Vegas angle to the story. So my dad, at the time, was a card dealer at the Sahara hotel at a game called “Pan.” Pan doesn’t exist in Las Vegas anymore (the last holdout was the Plaza, and they ended it in the late 1990s). Not to belabor the ins and outs of Pan (you can look it up), but it’s sort of a cross between rummy and poker, favored by older Jewish ladies. There’s a lot of smack talk, small stakes, and sometimes aggressive player-on-player action. My dad’s task was to deal, keep track of the betting, keep civility as high as possible and then muck the cards in preparation for the next hand. He would often form situational friendships with his regulars. One of his favorite regulars was Barbara Greenspun, the matriarch of the LV SUN family ownership. My dad was very fond of Mrs. Greenspun. She would always make a point of coming over to say hello to him at High Holiday services at the then one-and-only synagogue in town, which always made my mom, k’vell. The Figlers and the Greenspuns couldn’t be further apart in economic and social strata, but my dad’s role as her “dealer” gave us a little cache! Still, that was the only time outside of the casino they ever interacted. She certainly wasn’t my dad’s “friend,” though she would spend hours, day in and day out, kibitzing and otherwise having very close interactions with him. So Vegas, right?

Anyhow, after the window incident, my mom pressed my dad to call Mrs. Greenspun to make things right. I’m not sure if that ever happened, but I do remember that while I wasn’t docked for the window, I didn’t have that job past February. Honestly, I don’t remember whether I quit, was fired, or there was some other arrangement, but I can say this is where my fascination with journalism started!

* * *

In my senior year of high school, many of my classmates in the then-new-to-Las-Vegas I.B. program participated in the “SUN YOUTH FORUM,” which goes on to this day. It is described on the Sun’s website as “an annual, day-long event created in 1955 by Sun founder Hank Greenspun to give Southern Nevada high school students a platform to discuss local, national, and global issues. Hundreds of students from across Clark County meet to debate topics, promoting civil discourse and sharing perspectives with community leaders.”

I remember having a good old time. Meeting other civic-minded kids from across the valley and getting into some good debates about the issues of the day. One of the speakers that year was Harry Reid, just elected to represent Nevada’s newly created 1st Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives. He invited the kids to reach out to him if they ever had questions about Federal issues or were interested in an internship at his office. Two years later, I ran into Reid at a political event at Lorenzi Park and told him how impressed I was with his talk at the SUN YOUTH FORUM and how interested I was in politics, especially Nevada politics. He gave me the number for his local office manager, and soon thereafter, I was accepted into my first of two internships (one in Vegas, one in D.C. with the future Senate Majority Leader. Harry also gave me a sweet recommendation letter to law school, which turned up in his archives, as found by journalist Jon Ralston in his research for his excellent bio of Reid. Thanks, LV SUN!

* * *

In 1998, the brilliant Scott Dickensheets did a glorious profile of me and my one-man show, “Dayvid Figler IS Jim Morrison in Hello, I Love You, Where You Folks From?” for the LV SUN. It was my first major news coverage of something I had done as a writer/creator. My mom and dad went all over town and collected dozens of copies of the print edition, replete with a half-page big photo of me being schticky! Near the start of a decades-long friendship (and eventual co-worker sitch at City Cast) with Scott, who I respect and admire deeply!

* * *

Around the same time as my show, I had started working at the Clark County Special Public Defender's office, representing people accused of murder in their criminal cases. This brought me into constant contact with the reporters from the LV SUN (at the time, the great Kim Smith and then too many others to even start to list - most of whom were quite brilliant) and the RJ (starting with now-editor Carri Geer-Thevnot, and again, a cast of really remarkable writers). I call the late 90s through the late 00s the “golden era” of Las Vegas reporting. It was really that good, and my wish for a long time (though unlikely to ever be realized) is to have the best of that work anthologized with some of those great writers. I also noticed that there was a lot of migration during this time of award-winning writers from the SUN to the RJ, but I’m too lazy to look up just how many - but it used to be a real thing. To that end, I think the RJ always recognized the LV SUN staff back then as a real, equal rival - and poaching wasn’t uncommon.

I could go on and on about the great LV SUN writers (this is a nostalgic look back after all), and maybe I’ll edit this later with THE LONG LIST of alumni who have gone on to great things in journalism and beyond. But for now, let me share this last anecdote.

Like I said, I’ve been a fan of Las Vegas journalists for a long while, and I've been interested in their writing since I was a kid. My stint as a public lawyer, getting cases covered, actually heightened my interest in all reporting. I would voraciously consume both print dailies in Las Vegas, and honestly, I always felt the SUN had a slight edge in heart - though talent really did pervade both newsrooms. Somewhere around 2007 or 2008, I was seriously dating one of the SUN journalists, and that got me an invite into the social world and, if not a front row seat, at least a good vantage, to some of the workings that led up to Ali Berzon and company’s remarkable piece on the lack of safety and oversight at the City Center project. It not only shed light on some pretty egregious and dangerous practices; not only changed the way OSHA did business; not only caught all the other journalists in town who had been doing mostly PR-ish work on the blessing of City Center to the community; but it is the basis of their Pulitzer Award for Public Service.

I have to admit, their work on the City Center was always at the front of my mind when I embarked on our coverage for City Cast with Daniel Rothberg and ProPublica on the Boring Company’s Tesla Tunnels. The parallels of the Tesla project with the fateful City Center project from just a decade earlier are eerie; the lessons are completely lost on current government officials tasked with oversight.

I visited the newsroom often to hang, kibbitz, and dream of somehow figuring out a way, maybe through the LV SUN, of scratching that itch to be a journalist. And while I wasn’t in the newsroom when the Pulitzer announcement was made, the photo depicting the moment Emily Richmond told Ali Berzon is amazing. It was a great metaphor for the sort of camaraderie these folks enjoyed, simply by putting out great reporting and having thoughtful editors. Mind you, Ali was maybe 2 years out of J-School when that happened. A perfect microcosm showing how great that newsroom was in 2009. It should also be noted that a couple of years later, the SUN was again a finalist for the Pulitzer for reporting by Marsh Allen (RIP) and Alex Richards on a failing health care system in Las Vegas. The LV SUN did really important work and held public officials and agencies accountable for their actions, many of which were only uncovered because of the reporters at the LV SUN and the resources and support they received back then.

Sadly, and unbeknownst to most of those reporters in 2009, half of the staff would be cut by December of the same year. And then, another big cut in 2011. By the time 2013 rolled around, the LV SUN publisher - apparently overflowing with capital ready to invest - made some bad calls hooking onto the Sam Zell train in his disastrous takeover of the Chicago Tribune and LA TIMES. And when that whole thing went belly up, it seemed the LV SUN’s day of being a force in the community became far more narrow. Indeed, it was reported at the time that the other Greenspun siblings were angling to end the JOA as early as 2013 through a possible negotiation with the RJ, but that was ultimately derailed. (So too, say many observers, a degree of family cordiality). I don’t know much about that, but I do know that Danny Greenspun found great pride and joy in stewarding the fabulous Las Vegas Weekly onto the media landscape, as well as his other ventures. It does ring true that rise, fall and litigation (now seemingly near its end phase) was mostly a Brian thing.

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Today, the LV SUN, pejoratively referred to by many as the “insert,” has a skeletal group of excellent journalists and editors, but the print edition has precious few column inches for original reporting. Far outnumbered in space were AP articles, stories from the LV WEEKLY and national commentary.

So if this is truly the “end” of the LV SUN as an outpost of journalism, I think it’s sad but not really cataclysmic. And as accomplished as the current, relatively tiny newsroom is, I don’t think I’m being mean saying it’s not like people will probably notice. I say that with dismay as a general fan of journalism, a longtime admirer of the LV SUN, and someone who appreciates a more liberal counterpoint to its rival. Of course, by liberal, I mean as liberal as a newspaper published by a one-time billionaire with ample business interests in the community can be. I mean, hey, the publisher was once Bill Clinton’s college roommate. He can still ride that as being a “liberal,” right? Harry Reid, liberal. Mike Bloomberg, liberal. Basically, left of Sheldon Aldeson, liberal.

Ugh.

The Court argument by the lead counsel for the LV SUN (Harry Reid’s son, Leif) seems to be that only the LV SUN offers a journalistic counterpart to the LV RJ and that it’s a public benefit to keep some form of the JOA alive. Well, that may have had more weight a decade ago, but now with the Nevada Independent, Nevada Current, City Cast Las Vegas, and probably a dozen other reputable news sources and outlets that regularly challenge the RJ-ish narratives- I’m not convinced that argument holds water.

What I can say is that in the 37 years since the original founder, Hank Greenspun, passed away, the LV SUN has been home to some of Las Vegas’ best journalists and has produced some remarkable stories. It’s absolutely worthy of reflection and even celebration. It’s a damn shame it has to fold up its paper with the ultimate rubber band. Despite its formal, legal moniker as “failing” since 1989 forward, it was certainly a valued part of the community for so long. We’ll see how this litigation winds down, but I have a feeling the LV SUN won’t ever truly set. I look forward to seeing what comes next from this family and their important legacy newspaper.

BONUS: If you ever get a chance to see the Greenspun family-produced documentary, WHERE I STAND, do it! It’s about the life and times of Hank Greenspun, where no expense seems to have been spared (they got Sir Anthony Hopkins to voice Hank!) and the hyperbole is so over-the-top in celebrating Grandpa Hank that’d you think we’re all fools to let the RJ stop publication of the LV SUN! But it does give an extremely sweet, if not saccharin, overview of the man's impact and his ragtag paper that’s now on the verge of forever closure. Worth a look for all the reasons.

There’s actually a healthy list. Besides Thompson, I’d put the John Gregory Dunne book, Mario Puzo’s non-fiction “history” of the city, Beth Raymer’s Lay the Favorite, John D’Agata’s About a Mountain, Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezrich, and maybe Marc Cooper’s Last Honest Place in America and a million magazine articles about “my wild time in Vegas.”

But on to the post. My book club (Veronica, Krista and me) jointly submitted a three part review of Fear and Loathing upon its 50th anniversary for Electric Lit. You can find that link here. Or, and again, a version of that review, even if this is just filler to keep the stack active (sorry)! But I promise new content soon. Or old content rewritten. You know how I am! Enjoy.*

NOSTALGIA (AND LOATHING) IN MY HOMETOWN

My family moved from Chicago to Las Vegas in the Spring of 1971. It was a cross-country trip in a rented station wagon that was decidedly drug-free beyond some industrial-strength Dramamine and copious amounts of Benson & Hedges hard-pack cigarettes. Once arrived, we temporarily stayed with my Uncle Izzy, a flamboyant gambler who worked days at Caesars’ Palace spinning the sucker-bet BIG 6 wheel. My dad got a job dealing a game favored by older, Jewish ladies called “Pan” at the Sahara Hotel. This is where my folks decided to live and raise their 3-year-old.

Around age 14 or 15, I remember picking up Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas at the main branch of the Clark County Library for the first of what would come to be at least a dozen reads. Had I kept a diary then, the review would have been concise:

“Lives up to the hype. Of course, the guys like it – so many drugs (boring)! I love it way more because he’s right about Vegas….it totally sucks! Also, Circus-Circus…YES!”

This would have been around the book’s tenth anniversary, but by then, it was already the most essential book about my hometown -- at least in my small circle of friends. Reading it was mandatory. In fact, some 40 years later, there are only limited new entries in the Las Vegas literary canon and Fear and Loathing still comfortably rests near or at the top of any serious list. Most of them (but thankfully not all) are by visitors who seemingly dropped in for little more than a bender or to confirm their presupposed notions. Hunter S. Thompson was no different– a tourist on a mission. Still, SOMEONE wrote about us and hit all the spots I knew well from my own adventures with my family. That’s awesome!

Now, 50 years after a station wagon came from the east and a red convertible came from the west (is it possible we both arrived in town the same day?), I don’t think Las Vegas totally sucks. Indeed, I’ve become a fierce defender of my city. And if you’d assume I’ve grown weary of the countless parachute journalists who choose to only write about the “reptilian” bombast and mostly stick to the tourist-laden Strip to support their pre-ordained narratives, you’d be right. But somehow, Thompson gets a pass even with his distracting, surreal hyperbole; details missed or chosen to be overlooked; and the shamelessly sparse mention of locals (apart from mocked casino workers).

I like to write about my hometown, but I also know Las Vegas as two cities. Ours and theirs, and they outnumber us manyfold. They are the visitors with every right to their take on a city that invites, lures and challenges them to find an experience worth their cash and repeat business. To that end, the creative, literary tourist's takeaway has great value.

In Fear and Loathing, I’ve come to find that the subtitle grounds the work: “A Savage Journey in the Heart of the American Dream.” As the text makes clear, Thompson likely feels the dream is already dead. Died at Altamont, or Vietnam, or pop music, or Spiro Agnew’s front pocket. He thinks Richard Nixon would make a good Mayor of Las Vegas. He stands on a steep hill in the city and laments, “You can almost see the high-water mark” of the failed revolution of the free-thinkers, the explanation of which is the core of this book. And he chooses to pontificate upon all this from Las Vegas while admittedly indulging in its many offerings. Thompson, as skillful fish-taler, looks for answers to a puzzle he already solved before hitting Barstow, but damn, if it doesn’t serve as a valuable glimpse of the world at an important time from an important vantage spot.

It’s a book still worth exploring.

When Thompson calls Las Vegas “the American Dream” he does it with a sardonic howl. He revels in his fellow visitors who, maybe more like him than he’d care to admit, come here and engage in what they think is hep but which is old and stale and exploitive and corporate and controlled. He thinks of himself, perhaps, as the last free spirit in the playland of the intellectually dead, but alas misses the point that Las Vegas made a space for him, too. (I still giggle when he puts a 2-dollar bill down on the Big 6 game). He’s savage, alright, in skewering heartless casino executives and their dutiful goons, patsies, and shills (including the cops). It’s verifiably a true thread of Las Vegas, yet not a fully-fashioned yarn. Obviously, there’s more to Las Vegas than what Thompson “reported” in his week-long journey, but he does a memorable job at taking some unflinching snapshots through a free-thinker’s lens.

The book has value because Thompson was spot-on in choosing Las Vegas to observe America as it transitioned out of the hopeful Sixties. Las Vegas as stuck in the Fifties. Las Vegas as place where Americans come to merely “hump the American Dream.” Intuitively, but not comprehensively, he catalogs Vegas’ sexiness as “bush-league,” its rebranding of hackneyed entertainment as hot, its promise of freedom coming with Draconian laws. In other words, he landed, like so many others from elsewhere, in the melting pot of our country’s Melting Pot. And like a Gonzo Jeremiah, he’s compelled to tell us that we should be very fearful (or is it loathing?) that we’re actually in a stew.

He hits the nail on the head that Las Vegas has somehow marketed its way into a genius compendium of artifice, hope, risk, opportunity, growth, disappointment, mundanity and resonance. And those are the keen and important insights this local Las Vegas lover needs in a book about Las Vegas. Because the two cities co-exist, the chronicle remains an entry in answering the important questions of how and why – even if it’s sometimes opaque through the comical haze of all those drugs (boring!).

I truly enjoyed speaking with Cheftimony host Graham MacLennan about eatin’ in our modest little town. He’s been a frequent guest on City Cast Las Vegas, and I’ve returned the favor, including this latest episode. Graham is a charming lawyer/chef who finds a clever way to mix his two passions. Add in his undying love (as a Canadian no less) for Las Vegas and ya get a fun podcast for sure. Join Graham as he converses with me, James Trees and others about our state of steak!

Listen here => https://www.cheftimony.com/episodes/079