Hear no evil. See no evil. Film no evil.

August 12-18, 2010

Hear no evil. See no evil.

Film no evil.

It's been more than 20 years since animal trainer Bobby Berosini was ushered off the Strip, but the story lives on.

PluS: Are Metro cops trigger-happy?

Jenny McCarthy's Dream party Libby Lumpkin's last smile

702-369-5000 • www.harrahslasvegas.com V 50 0 Must be 21 or older to gamble. Know When To Stop Before You Start.® Gambling Problem? Call 1-800-522-4700. ©2010, Harrah’s License Company, LLC. HV0-

TIMAugust ALLEN 13

For tickets, please visit mirage.com or call

702.792.7777.

Performing in the Terry Fator Theatre.

Contents

This Week in Your CiTY 13

sEvEN Days

A production of Damm Yankees, the Green Jazz Festival and the Bullhead City river regatta are among the reasons to flee city life this weekend.

By Patrick Moulin

37

LocaL NEwsroom

69

What to reid into rory’s campaign strategy, and how Metro is dealing with the string of high-profile officer-involved shootings. Plus: David G. Schwartz’s Green Felt Journal and Michael Green on Politics.

NatioNaL NEwsroom

reports on culture, politics and business from The New York Observer. Plus: The NYO crossword puzzle and the weekly column by personal finance guru Kathy Kristof.

14

arts & ENtErtaiNmENt

A quirky film set in a cemetery gains new life, and Rex Reed says The Disappearance of Alice Creed is a stark thriller.

93 DiNiNg

Why steak lovers cannot ignore the remodeled Twin Creeks at silverton.

By Max Jacobson Plus: Max Jacobson’s Diner’s notebook and cooking with the chef of Table 34.

thE LatEst

holographic entertainment debuts in a tequila bar, and a local resident launches a website to help people find new friends.

Plus: trends, Tweets, tech and gossip.

100

20

travEL

sociEty

A group dedicated to enhancing Jewish culture celebrates at the Venetian, and Lolita’s Cantina opens at Town square.

stirring new sights, fascinating old neighborhoods and great cuisine make Macau a unique destination.

By Max Jacobson

25

102

styLE

sports & LEisurE

This week’s Look, a few choice enviables, great men’s shoes and what to consider when shopping for effective sunscreens.

Joseph Benavidez looks to avenge his 2009 loss to Dominick Cruz at WeC 50.

By Andreas Hale Plus: in Going for Broke, bet the eagles and Falcons to soar this season.

By Matt Jacob

45

110

NightLifE

seven nights ahead, fabulous parties past and Jenny McCarthy gets ready for a Midsummer night’s Dream.

Photo courtesy of the Las Vegas News Bureau

77

sEvEN QuEstioNs

Above: Bobby Berosini and friend perform in Lido de Paris at the stardust in 1984.

On the cover: Illustration by Val Bochkov

Libby Lumpkin on culture, her new home and the city she’s leaving behind.

By Elizabeth Sewell

Feature 30

hEar No EviL. sEE No EviL. fiLm No EviL.

More than 20 years after his inglorious exit from the strip, Bobby Berosini’s story endures.

By C. Moon Reed August 12-18, 2010 Vegas Seven 9

Vegas seVen Publishers

Ryan T. Doherty | Justin Weniger AssociAte Publisher, Michael Skenandore

Editorial editoriAl director, Phil Hagen MAnAging editor, Bob Whitby senior editor, Greg Blake Miller AssociAte editor, Melissa Arseniuk A&e editor, Cindi Reed stAff writer, Sean DeFrank coPY editor, Paul Szydelko contributing editors

MJ Elstein, style; Michael Green, politics; Matt Jacob, betting; Max Jacobson, food; Jarret Keene, music; David G. Schwartz, gaming/hospitality; Xania Woodman, nightlife/drinking contributing writers

Richard Abowitz, Molly Ball, Eric Benderoff, Geoff Carter, Laura Coronado, Gregory Crosby, Brooke Edwards, Elizabeth Foyt, Andreas Hale, Damon Hodge, Patrick Moulin, Rex Reed, Christoper Rosen, Jens Rushing, Jason Scavone, Elizabeth Sewell, Cole Smithey, T.R. Witcher interns

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Vegas Seven August 12-18, 2010

CoNTribuTors

LETTErs

Expand the Brand

Thomas Speak Graphic designer Speak is a native of Hawaii and a graduate of UNLV with a passion for design.

While going to school, he co-founded the Student Association of Graphic Arts (SAGA) and was honored as the Outstanding Graphics Student in his graduating class. He started his design career at Freeman Co. as an exhibition designer, and is now exploring the world of magazine design at Vegas Seven. When he’s not toiling over type, he’s frequently sliding down a mountain on a snowboard or jamming on his bongo drums.

Molly Ball “Rory Reid’s Dilemma,” Page 39 After six years here writing for the Las Vegas Review-Journal and Las Vegas Sun, Ball spent a year studying economic policy at the University of Michigan as a recipient of the Knight-Wallace Fellowship for journalists. She is now a Washington, D.C.-based freelance writer whose work has appeared in Slate, New York and The American Prospect. Ball grew up in Denver, received an English degree from Yale University, survived cancer and won $100,000 on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

What I find fascinating about this article [“We Don’t Need New, We Need Next,” July 1] is that T.R. Witcher touts the integrity of other cities and their ability to capitalize on their histories, yet doesn’t give Las Vegas the same credit. If McDonald’s started only selling pizza, people would be wondering what the hell the fast-food chain was doing! Likewise, if Las Vegas stopped catering to tourists, people would be scratching their heads. Las Vegas is known for its charm in areas other cities might deem impractical. What our city doesn’t need is negativity. It’s the same negativity you often find in politics and in large companies with people in closed-door meetings. It’s the people who say “we can’t” or “we shouldn’t.” What you don’t often hear is people talking about how “we can.” Let’s build on what we have, which is a lot of creative thinking behind those giant, quirky hotels that are oddly decorated inside. Let’s build up the stripper-mobile type advertising that only Vegas could allow. Let’s continue creating nightclubs that only Vegas could dream up. The “next” in our city is “new,” and it’s in the form of slot machines, hotels, pools, etc. If we become corporate America full of suits and skirts, who the hell is going to want to come visit? – Mike Doria Send feedback on stories in this week’s issue to comments@weeklyseven.com.

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Seven DayS The highlights of this week in your city.

Compiled by Patrick Moulin

Sun. 15 Thur. 12 The Super Summer Theatre Series at Spring Mountain Park has been entertaining guests since 1976. After a successful run of July’s Ain’t Misbehavin’, the series continues with Damn Yankees, a 1955 Broadway musical comedy about a baseball fanatic who learns to be careful what he wishes for. Performances are at 8 p.m. Tickets are $12 in advance, $15 at the door; children under 5 get in free. Pack your blankets and a picnic dinner, and come early because seating begins at 6 p.m. Call 256-5441 or visit supersummertheatre.com.

Fri. 13

Mars photo courtesy NASA/ JPL-Caltech/ Cornell University

The hills are alive with the sound of music as the Green Jazz Festival plays at the Resort at Mount Charleston. The three-day, eco-friendly festival features contemporary jazz and a weekend of lovin’ on Mother Earth. Organizers will be using recyclable goods, vendors will be selling eco-friendly wares and there’s even a bus to get people around without so many cars. Enjoy the cool hills of HumboldtToiyabe National Forest from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m.

Visit greenjazzfestivals.com, or call 642-2628 for information.

Sat. 14 Need a weekend getaway? Cruise down to Bullhead City, Ariz., to participate in one of the craziest events you’ll see in these parts: the Bullhead City River Regatta.

Most participants in this parade on water make their way downriver via inner tube or a kayak, but the real show is with the larger floats. This year’s theme is “Rockin’ the River.”

Tickets are $20 and include a T-shirt, drink, hot dog and shuttle back to your vehicle after the nine-mile float down river, which takes three to four hours.

Check bullheadregatta.com for information.

If you enjoy a home-cooked meal and the feel of cold steel, the Red Rock Fencing Center’s “Stab-N-Grab” potluck tournament sounds about right. Held every Sunday, the free, shotgunstyle tournament is open to fencers of all levels, although some level of experience is recommended.

After the swords are sheathed, break bread with your fellow competitors and enjoy a potluck buffet.

Warm-ups begin at 1 p.m. at the center, 5275 S. Arville St., Suite 332, redrockfencingcenter.com, while fencing starts 2 p.m.

Mon. 16 The Women of Color Conference at Mandalay Bay has become a can’t-miss event for professional women from all walks of life. In its fourth year, the conference is hosted by four local ethnic chambers of commerce as an opportunity for women to participate in lectures and workshops that teach leadership skills, career development, health, self-esteem and more. For tickets and events, visit lvwomenofcolor.com.

Tues. 17 Hey, parents: Wanna beat the summer heat and get out of the house? Bring the offspring to free movies at Regal Colonnade Stadium 14, 8880 S. Eastern Ave., and Village Square Stadium 18, 9400 W. Sahara Ave. The Regal Entertainment Group has sponsored the Free Family Film Festival since 1991, offering a cool way to enjoy a weekday afternoon. Jimmy Neutron Boy Genius is the feature this week at Village Square, while Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything is showing at Colonnade. Both start at 10 a.m. You might want to show up an hour early as the seats fill fast.

Wed. 18 Are there little green men on Mars? Probably not, but Dr. Henry Sun, microbiologist and Desert Research Institute professor, will be discussing the possibility in this talk on the big red planet. “The Search for Life on Mars” is part of the ongoing Henderson Space and Science Center Lecture Series and will touch on NASA’s plans to get there, what we have learned so far and why our closest neighbor in the Milky Way is so fascinating. The talk begins at 7 p.m. at the Galleria at Sunset mall, and admission is free.

August 12-18, 2010 Vegas Seven 13

The LaTesT

What’s hip, what’s happening, what’s going on—and what you need to know right now.

Dancing Machine

Virtual entertainers are here, when they work correctly Being the first in with a new technology requires a leap of faith. And it usually requires working out some bugs, as well. But give Lolita’s Cantina and Tequila Bar owner Eric DeBlasi credit for bringing the latest innovation in entertainment to his Town Square venture.

Lolita’s bills itself as the first nightclub in the U.S. with holographic entertainment, and while the technology has potential, its capabilities are limited for now.

And it doesn’t always work as planned. On a recent visit, the dancer fizzled out after about 30 seconds.

However, Ann DeVilbiss, owner and creative director of Digital Illusions, the Cleveland-based company behind the hologram, says that will soon change.

“Within a few months it’s going to be pretty kickass,” she says. “But now they’re still figuring it out.”

One big drawback is lack of content, and DeVilbiss is working to develop more. Lolita’s has holograms for five dancers, a Mariachi band and a DJ. She recently shot video of break dancers, tango dancers and Flamenco dancers.

“We’re building a holographic content library so in a year, two years from now, anybody in any nightclub around the country or around the world can literally buy packages of content so they don’t have to build it like Lolita’s is doing it at this point,” she says. “And that’s going to be the real key. You know, the screens are really great and everybody loves the effect and

stuff, but there’s no content out there. And that’s what I’m doing.”

The technology also requires DJs at Lolita’s to add another skill to their job: Incorporate visual content into their sets. In order to accommodate that, Digital Illusions is creating footage of dancers moving to different beats so DJs will have complete control.

“We’re developing this as we go, and we have some of the best DJs in Vegas helping us. It’s going to be big,” DeVilbiss says.

The large-format holographic project is based on the Pepper’s ghost technique, the same principle behind the 40-year-old illusions at Disney’s Haunted Mansion.

The image is projected from the ceiling to the floor, DeVilbiss says, then reflected back onto “a piece of optically perfect clear plastic at a 45-degree angle.”

“You’re looking at a reflection, but you will never be able to see that reflection on that clear screen, ever,” DeVilbiss says. “I’ve tried a million times. Your eyes literally see it stand up onstage.” – Sean DeFrank

Invention

How Big Is Your Frucle?

Tired of the same faces on Facebook? Meet Las Vegas resident—and website entrepreneur—Ryan Alarid. Months ago, he and a friend were looking for new people to hang out with but came up empty.

Now, Alarid is ready to launch a website geared toward finding new friends, named Frucle.com, an amalgamation of “friend” and “circle.” Get it?

“In today’s world, people do everything online,” says Alarid, CEO of Frucle. “I figured in our technology-dependant age, there must be a website to simply meet new friends. After searching, I never found one, so I created Frucle.”

Unlike Facebook, where people often “friend” people they already know, Frucle offers a search

engine to find people by interests, hobbies, etc. It’s like Match.com, but without the monthly fees, or Craigslist without the weirdos.

And Frucle takes the cake for its creative use of advertisers. It encourages members to expand their online relationships into the real world with incentive-based advertising. When you connect with a new friend on Frucle, you’ll receive coupons to meet your new friend at public meeting places, such as Borders or Buffalo Wild Wings.

It launches Aug. 15, and it’s free to use. “I see it becoming a major site and the premier destination to meet new friends that share your interests,” Alarid says. – Sharon Kehoe Get by with a little help from your newfound friends.

14

Vegas Seven August 12-18, 2010

This week in your ciTy Opening

Noteworthy

Good eats

Tech

Overachievers Under 45

TV in Your Lap

The search is on for the 45 most stylish, successful and influential men in Las Vegas. The “45 Under 45 Men That Matter” poll was created last year by Elliot & Co. barber lounge owner Elliott Chester and is presented in conjunction with Esquire. The event was designed to celebrate Las Vegas men who are leaders in both their industry and their community, and last year honored Al G. Gourrier (president of First Commerce Bank), Alex Berejnoi (executive with Station Casinos) and Alex Cordova (vice president of marketing for Angel Management Group).

The annual contest kicked off its 2010 edition on July 22 with a cocktail reception at Nu Sanctuary that benefited Big Brothers Big Sisters of Southern Nevada. The inaugural 45 Under 45 were selected by the event organizers, but this year the public is being asked to suggest and vote for candidates—or themselves—online at 45under 45.com. Voting continues though Sept. 30, and winners will be announced in November. – Chaz Holmes

I’m not an advocate of replacing a proper TV with watching shows on a computer, but sometimes watching TV on a computer is useful. Many options exist, including network programming— old and new—on Hulu.com, or live sports on ESPN3.com.

I’ve been playing with a third option, and it is pretty sweet and flexible, if somewhat flawed. This TV-watching gadget is called EyeTV Hybrid, and it’s a USB device that plugs into your computer and lets users tune in over-the-air channels and cable fare. For standard TV you need to attach an antenna— sadly, it doesn’t ship with one—and to get cable you need to connect the EyeTV Hybrid to your cable hook-up.

I’ve used it with an antenna hook-up and cable, and the picture quality that came into my laptop was great. I attached a $10 antenna from RadioShack to the EyeTV Hybrid and I received very sharp digital pictures from 39 overthe-air channels, more than expected.

(That’s largely due to the number of stations that are now multi-cast programming over the same channel, a wonderful benefit of the recent digital TV conversion.)

With cable, the channel selection was disappointing. I get only the very basic EyeTV Hybrid channels and none of the premium channels for which I pay. I suspect the reason is because I’m bypassing the cable box. Further, attaching EyeTV Hybrid to your TV is cumbersome, as you need to unhook it from your cable box (or TV) and plug it into your PC. “What’s the point of doing that?,” you may wonder. The answer is that EyeTV Hybrid also acts like a DVR, allowing you to record programs, schedule recordings and even import shows to an iThing—iPad, iPhone or iPod touch.

If you don’t have a DVR, this is a great product. Software that can access program schedules and provide available channels in your area is included.

Considering the free video options the Internet has brought us, EyeTV Hybrid from Elgato is pricey at $150. But if you’re a TV junkie, and want to record your favorite network shows to watch later, it’s appealing.

– Eric Benderoff, Bendable Media.com

“Organic” used to be synonymous with “expensive,” but that is changing. Similarly, the days of an “organic café” being little more than a salad and juice bar for pasty-skinned vegetarians are also in the past.

Case in point: Elixir Organic Café & Lounge, 9550 S. Eastern Ave., Suite 180. Most of the items on Elixir’s organic menu are less than $10, and there is plenty of meat available. Salads, sandwiches and wraps made with chili-scented spicy beef are crowdpleasers, while the lemongrass chicken (which is available in vegetarian form as a seitan-based chicken substitute) is also popular.

There are several vegetarian and even vegan options on the menu, too, and sandwiches come on a choice of seven different breads (including a glutenfree variety), salads are served with house-made dressings and fresh-brewed iced teas and a range of smoothies are available.

About 95 percent of ingredients used at the café are certified organic, while Applegate Farms supplies hormone-, antibiotic- and nitrate-free meats.

General manager Charissa Thai says fresh and natural products deliver more vitamins and nutrients than conventionally grown produce.

“I’ve always loved food,” says Thai, who worked in fashion, then as a cosmetologist and ran five salons in Las Vegas before opening Elixir. She says that while the hard work, long hours and considerable risk involved in opening a restaurant didn’t appeal to her, sharing her secret recipes was the hardest part.

“My recipes!” she says. “I didn’t want to give them up!” – Melissa Arseniuk

Elliott Chester, the man behind the Men That Matter.

Ranking

Chester photo by Derrick Treadwell

yeah, But we’re cool

Elixir: Meat free if that’s your thing.

So Las Vegas didn’t crack CNNMoney.com’s annual list of “100 Best Places to Live,” with Eden Prairie, Minn., taking the title. But our city outranked desirable hometowns in several categories, with homes that average half the price, twice the sunny days and more jobs added over the last decade than in the top five “best” cities combined. (Of course some of those jobs have since been lost, but let’s not quibble.)

It doesn’t take Las Vegans who still have a job long to get to work, according to the survey: Our 22-minute average commute is on par with CNN’s top cities. Happy hour comes early here too, with twice as many bars and a third more restaurants nearby. (Forbes used that statistic, and others, to rank us as “America’s Coolest City” recently.

We tied with New York for the top spot.)

Las Vegans are also younger, more likely to be single and more racially diverse than residents from the average town on CNN’s list.

And all Nevada cities started the survey with an advantage over their counterparts in, say, California, with low sales tax and no income tax.

On the minus side of the ledger, Las Vegas has fewer libraries and museums. The city’s education and crime stats also didn’t help its standing. We have fewer colleges, test scores well below the “best places” average, and residents here are 11 times more likely to be victims of personal crime. – Brooke Edwards

August 12-18, 2010 Vegas Seven 15

THE LaTEsT THougHT Places and Pasts How Vegas looks from an old Polish town

I am writing this in the garden of my home in Torun, a medieval walled Polish city on the Vistula River. Oaks and willows are above me, bees and butterflies drift among the flowers. I can hear the whine of an electrical saw from a carpenter’s workshop, the sound of my neighbor’s table being laid for lunch, birdsong, speech, radios, laughter, invective, the passing of car tires over the cobbled street. A student up in a garret is playing Jean Michel Jarre. There is a tremendous profusion of color, green above all. I see the worn leather briefcase of a passing elderly man through the slats of our wooden fence. Has he had it since he first got a job? Did it belong to his father? It may, I think, be older than anything in Las Vegas.

I am in Torun thinking about Las Vegas, where I was for 10 months of the past year because of a fellowship at the Black Mountain Institute. There seems to be not a single thing that is similar between the two cities—roads, colors, buildings, diversions, the way people talk, move, laugh, spend, eat, relate. In the late spring, when we arrived, rains in the south had produced a surge up the Vistula, sending water over the banks and nearly into the old center where the great astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus grew up and where there are buildings that are eight centuries old. The streets are cacophonous and dense with walkers. People lean out of their windows and watch the social rituals they know well, everyone a participant in a pageant. Many still drive the tiny Fiats that were all one could get in the communist era. Their engines would power, at most, a golf course lawn mower in Las Vegas. The whole car is the size of a Hummer’s door.

I think of the wide roads of Las Vegas, the tinted glass of the giant vehicles, which makes them look anonymous and predatory, like pilotless drones. I think of the billboards with ads for bail bondsmen and bankruptcy lawyers and comedians with sinister smiles and glittering teeth. I think of all its surface dazzle and electronic color superimposed on the desert beige and leading you deeper and deeper into caverns that are only more surface. You never quite arrive anywhere. I think mostly of its eerie silence, just the soft hum of freeway traffic and air-conditioning. You see 16 Vegas Seven August 12-18, 2010

almost no one on the streets, just that peculiar Las Vegas subculture of people selling their household goods in empty lots, teenagers coming back from school, joggers with iPods. The sidewalks look unused. Usually all you can see from them are walls.

Las Vegas is the most radically anticommunal place I’ve ever been. Most people like to feel part of something, at least some of the time. In Las Vegas I could not find that feeling. There is no central business district, with people moving among offices, restaurants and bars on real streets, no major league sports team to cheer for. Legislatively, it’s fragmented, with the Strip, its central feature, not even a part of the city. In Polish villages the houses face out toward the cobbled street, the statue of the Virgin, the other houses. Everything, everyone, is proximate. In Las Vegas there is a general turning away. The windows of the houses, like those of the cars, are usually opaque. You can’t tell

if anyone is living in them or not. People pass in malls and know nothing of one another. Everyone seems far away from everyone else.

Las Vegas, like other western cities, came into being more or less in an instant. It was built for the comfort of vacationers and for those willing to give up their lives elsewhere for year-round sunshine. It is predicated on transience.

Though it has acquired a mythology and an attitude during its century in the sun, Las Vegas hasn’t and never will have the chance to develop the kinds of cultural rituals older, more homogenous societies create over millennia. In the absence of any other visible means of support it has sustained itself through what are elsewhere considered vices. It has to sparkle and bedazzle and find new ways to allure or, like Petra, be returned to the desert. It would be pointless to accuse it of superficiality, for that is what it strives for. As the writer Eric Schlosser said in Fast Food Nation (Houghton Mifflin

Co., 2001), Las Vegas’ embrace of the artificial has been so thorough and exuberant that it has created its own kind of authenticity.

The city dazzled me from afar long before I ever visited it. When I was 15 and assigned for a school essay to write about the place I would most like to visit, I chose Las Vegas. It was the danger, the glamour, the suave rakishness I imagined there—the long cars with the high fins, the Sammy Davis Jr. suits, the diamantine eyes of the women around the roulette tables. As I later learned Simone de Beauvoir said of Las Vegas, “No bourgeoisie, no bourgeois morality.” I finally saw Las Vegas firsthand more than 30 years later, when I passed through for a few hours on a long drive around the country. The city rose from the desert floor in a phantasmagoria of turrets, golden lions and Egyptian tombs. It thoroughly demoralized me—all those vast acres of slot machines where thousands gambled industrially and without joy, some with a cancer-ward look, with ringed eyes and a jailhouse pallor. It seemed a place that was earnest and managed rather than amusingly kitsch or louche, more Disneyland than Sin City.

Then, unexpectedly, I came to live there. I can’t say I came to love the city—it would be too difficult to find its heart—but I loved being in it, so much so that I’m going back to teach at UNLV. It was its western ease, its big skies, its sudden outbreaks into wilderness, the fantastical Dali-like dreamworld that extends outward from its borders. Culturally, socially, Europe is so acutely defined, so closely stitched.

Here in Torun you have a feeling of a long social evolution over time, of people closely bonded. But after an experience of the American West, it can also feel claustrophobic. When we came back to Poland last Christmas we longed at times for the openness and looseness of Las Vegas, a large canvas on which you can make up your own life. Psychologically, physically, it gives you room.

Timothy O’Grady is a non-fiction writer, novelist, and recent fellow at the Black Mountain Institute. He will be teaching this year in UNLV’s creative writing program. His most recent book is Divine Magnetic Lands: A Journey in America (Random House UK, 2009).

Illustration by Jerry Miller

By Timothy O’Grady

“THE STRIP HAS ANOTHER KING NOW!” – TIME Magazine

WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY VINCENT PATERSON

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THE LaTEsT Gossip Star-studded parties, celebrity sightings, juicy rumors and other glitter.

Got a juicy tip? gossip@weeklyseven.com

Cougars Run Wild

High society, Low standards

an “independent club promoter.” yeah, I’m unemployed too, pal.

@vegaspr Words of wisdom: Just because they make clothes in your size, doesn’t mean you should wear them. #justsayin. @VegasAnonymous I’m parking in the Rio parking lot. I have great and multiple memories in this garage. has the worst morning breath.

Like Guinness Book of Records bad. #JerseyShore

@sarahfeldberg Found 2 bullets in my jewelry bag this morning. Oh Israel, I miss you. @albertamayne “If you don’t like gay marriage, blame straight people. They are the ones that keep having gay babies.”

@IowaGirlBeth Watching “Teen Mom” makes me feel so better about myself!

@TrishelleC Me “Tell me you’re at least 18.” Boy: “Yeah.” Me: “Well, how old are you?” Boy: “18.” Perfect!

@JasonMercier I’m just a simple man with a complex mind.

Zarin makes no secret of the sweet treats at the Sugar Factory.

The Greene Way to Fitness Ashley Greene’s fitness tips revealed! “Just be healthy, eat right, work out and be happy with your body,” she says.

Good thing they have all those “be happy with your body” machines at the gym instead of all those “physically torture yourself in the hopes of one day being able to overcome your deep-seated self-loathing” devices. That’s why she’s Ashley Greene, the Twilight actress, and not Ashley Greene, international trainer.

Greene was at MGM Grand’s Wet Republic on Aug. 7 where she rolled into a bungalow with a crew more than a dozen strong. There are now only two extras, a sound editor and a key grip from Twilight who haven’t hosted a party in Vegas.

Greene showed up in a white sundress but got to the good stuff when she stripped down to a blue bikini once she made it to her bungalow. The corresponding Twilight key-grip bikini party has not yet been scheduled.

18 Vegas Seven August 12-18, 2010

@stephanieweedin Just met

@PhutureLaFait I bet JWow

Proving that socialites can have reality shows before they’ve reached cougar age, Tinsley Mortimer and sister Dabney Mercer were in town to celebrate the High Society star’s 34th birthday.

The sisters, whose names make them sound like they should be played in movies by Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, were at Tao Aug. 6 for dinner (though Mortimer turned in early), then at Tao Beach for the day on Aug. 7.

That night the New York socialite and handbag designer had her birthday party where the sisters both turned up in matching green dresses. Good God, next thing you know they’ll both be wearing white after Labor Day. There’s a reason the economy is in ruins and this country is a shambles. If the purse makers don’t even care anymore, what chance do the rest of us have?

Greene vamps it up at Wet Republic.

Compiled by @marseniuk

@KyleZabelny Sometimes I wish I had a GF so I could put all my stuff into her purse. Granted I’d be the one carrying the purse, but I’m OK with that.

@preciousweapons @ ladygaga just watched our whole show, then made out w/ Justin and then stage dove!! Rock ’n roll is BACK! @MilesDevin PLEASE STAY SINGLE. I don’t want to hear you bitch about your significant other that you have no chance of a long-term future with anymore.

Mortimer and Mercer photo by Tony Tran; Green photo by Erik Kabik/Retna

Mortimer and Mercer preen green.

It’s been “housewives gone wild” for the whole week. By which we mean book tours and jewelry flashing.

Kelly Bensimon from The Real Housewives of New York City had a fashion show at Lavo inside Palazzo on Aug. 4 for her jewelry line, Kelly, which leans heavily on feathers. That’s all well and good, but the only bird in abundance in New York is the pigeon. If you had to, could you tell an eagle feather from a pigeon feather? Of course not. That’s how you wind up with $100 earrings made out of whatever they plucked out of Central Park.

Fellow housewife Jill Zarin was in town with husband Bobby and daughter Ally as well. She came over to surprise Bensimon before going on to dole out gelato and brownies to fans at the Sugar Factory in the Miracle Mile Shops on Aug. 7.

Zarin is promoting her book, Secrets of a Jewish Mother (Dutton Adult, 2010), and said she could see Las Vegas supporting a Real Housewives franchise of its own. To show everyone how it’s done, Bensimon spent three straight days hitting Tao Beach.

Zarin was also spotted at Surrender the night of Aug. 7 where she was with friend and Rao’s executive chef Carla Pellegrino.

Tweets of the Week

Society

For more photos from society events in and around Las Vegas, visit weeklyseven.com/society.

time to J.U.M.P. Jewish young professionals who formed J.U.M.P. celebrated their launch on July 22 in the Chairman’s Suite at the Venetian.

J.U.M.P. is dedicated to providing unique experiences, sports leagues and philanthropic opportunities to enrich Jewish culture and strengthen the Las Vegas community. Visit myjewishvegas.com/ JUMP to learn more.

Photography by Beverly Oanes

20  Vegas Seven August 12-18, 2010

Society

For more photos from society events in and around Las Vegas, visit weeklyseven.com/society.

infatuation Begins Lolita’s Cantina opened at Town Square with festivities hosted by owner Eric DeBlasi and partner Carlo Cavallo. Notables at the party included Matt Stone of the Las Vegas Development Co., Ann DeVilbiss of Digital Illusions, Phil Boeckle, the former owner of PT’s Pubs, and Playboy Radio hostess Jessica Hall. They sampled from the contemporary Mexican menu and sipped tequila speciality drinks.

Photography by Jessica Blair

22 Vegas Seven August 12-18, 2010

ENVIABLES

Style

DécOr-IffIc

A leader in modern, functional design since 1935, Finnish company Artek celebrates 75 years with a range of understated products such as Stool 60, which comes in a flat box for easy transporting. $210 plus shipping, artek.fi.

HIp tO HeMp

Elements at Aria now carries Hemp Oil Lotion by the Bubble Roome, a company known for its organic bath products.

Hemp Oil comes in five scents and blends hemp seed oil, coconut oil, aloe juice and oatmeal. $18 for 8 ounces.

The Look

Photographed by Tomas Muscionico

JAdE KELSALL, 24

VIP waitress, XS Nightclub Style icons: Alexander McQueen, Patricia Field and Coco Chanel.

Philosophy: “I feel the people I surround myself with all have distinct and unique interpretations of their own style and I gain inspiration from them.”

pretty face

L Makeup Institute & Agency, now open at Holsum Lofts, offers a range of classes for aspiring professional makeup artists, such as Airbrush Makeup, Becoming a Makeup Artist and High Fashion. lmakeupinstitute.com.

As a server at one of the hottest nightclubs in the world, Kelsall doesn’t mind the uniform so much, but she does sometimes long for feet relief. “The club tries to be very fashion conscious with what they put us in,” she says. “I wish I could wear flats; heels get pretty cruel after eight hours on my feet.”

August 12-18, 2010 Vegas Seven 25

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Sun Shield

The deďŹ nitive guide to protecting your skin from the harmful effects of the sun

By Whitney Urichuk

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PRODUCTS CONTAINING ZINC OXIDE AND TITANIUM DIOXIDE FOR UVA/UVB PROTECTION: Solbar Zinc SPF 38 by Solbar, coolibar.com, $14.

Dermalogica Super Sensitive FaceBlock SPF 30, $45.

Blue Lizard for Sensitive Skin SPF 30, $17.

Elta MD UV Daily SPF 40, eltamd.com, $24.

Skin Ceuticals Sheer Physical UV Defense SPF 50, amazon.com, $30.

Badger Unscented Natural Sunscreen SPF 30, badgerbalm.com, $16.

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Style

Fashion RX

1

2

Man Can Live

By Shoe Alone

3

By Sean Dunn If a picture is worth a thousand words, I am already way over my word limit for this column. So let’s get right to the point: Spend good money on good shoes and you will thank yourself today, tomorrow and five years from now. And so will your date.

The shoes shown here are George Esquivel’s babies, and yes, they are without a doubt the greatest pieces of footwear on the planet. These are like a G5 for the your feet. And that’s what a great shoe does—it elevates you and your look.

You can Google George and read about all his exploits in Vogue as well CFDA (it’s like the Jedi Council of Fashion) recognizing him as the biggest thing in American footwear design.

And yes, they have women’s shoes, too.

See for yourself at esquivelshoes.com

4

Fashion expert Sean Dunn delivers style-starved Las Vegas men their marching orders. He can be reached at sdunn360@gmail.com.

5 1. Monaco black patent-leather with contrast trim. 2. Razor in brown and black. 3. Construction boot in blue. 4. Forum loafer in black.

5. Weekend white and brown. 6. The boot in brown and with scabbed sleeve.

28 Vegas Seven August 12-18, 2010

6

at the edge of fash io n in the heart of vegas The art of fashion is on permanent display at Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, Macy’s, Dillard’s, Bloomingdale’s Home, Nordstrom, Forever 21 and over 200 fine stores, restaurants and cafés.

Located on The Strip across from Wynn Las Vegas. ggp.com

702.369.8382

www.thefashionshow.com

Hear no evil.

Top of the world: Bobby Berosini performs in Jubilee! in 1981.

See no evil. Film no evil.

Rewinding to the front-page days of Bobby Berosini, his orangutans and the dancer who made them infamous

Photos courtesy of the Las Vegas News Bureau

By C. Moon Reed

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Ottavio Gesmundo as an infant (left) being trained by his father to eventually perform, and at a dance rehearsal in 1992.

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Portrait by Francis + Francis

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Berosini performs in Lido de Paris at the Stardust in 1984 (below); the now-39-year-old organutan, Popi (right) in 2008 when she arrived at her new home, Great Ape Trust; Linda Faso (below, in lion suit) protesting with PETA on the opening night of a new Berosini show at the Dunes on Oct. 16, 1992.

Berosini photo courtesy of the Las Vegas News Bureau

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THe LocaL Newsroom

Taking Fire What’s behind the high number of officer-involved shootings this year?

By Damon Hodge It used to be that society gave officers the benefit of the doubt when they shot people, absolving them in the court of public opinion long before Internal Affairs or the courts got the chance to study the facts. But if reams of stinging online rebukes following a series of local officer-involved shootings are any indication, that time has passed.

Much of the vitriol revolves around two cases: the July 10 fatal shooting by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department of 38-year-old Erik Scott, a West Point graduate, outside a Summerlin Costco; and the death of Trevon Cole, who was killed June 11 by an officer. In Scott’s case, police say he pointed a gun he was carrying at an officer, but his family disputes that. In Cole’s case, an officer confused the 21-year-old with a violent criminal with the same first and last name, even though Cole was younger, shorter, weighed less and only had a misdemeanor California conviction for the unlawful taking of a vehicle.

To date this year, Metro officers have shot 18 people, including three people during an eight-day span in June. Metro cops had shot 15 people by this time in 2009, on their way to a total of 21 for that year. There were 14 officer-involved shootings in 2008, 15 in 2007, 27 in 2006 and 12 in 2005. At the current pace, Metro could top its 2006 figure.

So what’s behind the recent shootings?

An influx of inexperienced cops? Increasingly brazen criminals? Recession-fueled angst? Experts say it could be one, or a combination of all three.

Nearly 1,000 officers have joined the force since voters in 2005 passed the More Cops initiative, the first of two quarter-cent sales tax hikes designed to add 1,700 officers to Valley police forces and boost Metro to about 1.7 officers per 1,000 residents, still far below the national average of 2.24 officers per 1,000 residents.

In the push to put new officers on the street, the department hasn’t sacrificed public safety for speed, Metro spokesman Bill Cassell says. “We never cut corners when it comes to training. We did restructure the academy to handle the influx of additional recruits. We

had more trainers and more classes to accommodate the additional bodies. But the 19 weeks of training that everyone goes through was the same.”

Included in that training, Cassell says, are scenario-based drills mimicking “everything the cadets will face as cops,” such as standard operating procedures in an officer-involved shooting.

“There’s also lots of training on shootand-don’t-shoot decisions,” Cassell says.

“And there’s training to prevent being involved in a shooting, such as using alternative methods of force. Sometimes using weapons is unavoidable. We are noticing that there are more people out there carrying weapons who are willing to use them against the police. Our officers are being faced with more and more situations on use of deadly force.”

Although some incidents have involved veteran officers, UNLV criminologist William Sousa says research shows that less-experienced officers are more likely to be involved in shootings because they have less know-how on using nonlethal force and assessing dangerous situations.

The three officers involved in the Scott shooting each have five years experience or less on the force: Joshua Stark joined the department in September 2008, officer Thomas Mendiola joined in March 2009 and William Mosher joined in June 2005.

“What we do know is that police shootings are rare events considering that departments have millions of interactions with the public each year,” says Sousa, who declined to comment on local cases because they are still under investigation. “What we also know is that younger officers are involved in more shootings because they tend to be quicker to use their weapons, that police firearm use is more likely if a suspect has a firearm and that most officerinvolved shootings are categorized by the degree of ambiguity and surprise.

Departments are really looking at the decisions that officers make prior to shooting. They are exploring types of training they can implement to reduce ambiguity, to reduce surprise factor and to reduce the likelihood officers will

have to fire their weapons.”

UNLV sociology professor Andrew Spivak says assessing the factors behind officer-involved shootings is tricky because there’s scant data on the subject.

Crimes like domestic violence can be tracked over time and have bodies of research available for meaningful study, Spivak says, but the same isn’t true for incidents that end in gunfire. “The numbers of shootings aren’t large enough to get a good handle on what influences them, whether it’s the economy or something else entirely.”

The small numbers make year-to-year comparisons difficult, Sousa says.

“When you have 20 in one year, 15 in another year and 10 in another year, an

increase or a drop of five to 10 is huge. … But it doesn’t mean that the shootings are any less of a concern.”

Former state Assemblyman Wendell Williams, head of the newly formed civil rights group League of Action, agreed.

Williams’ group has accused Metro of harassment, racial profiling and using undue force in urban neighborhoods.

The group gathered last month to demand changes to the coroner’s inquest system, the way police treat females they are questioning or arresting, and for officers to give people more information on why they are being handcuffed.

“There’s a concern among many minorities that cops tend to shoot first and ask questions later,” Williams says.

August 12-18, 2010 Vegas Seven

37

The Local Newsroom

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38 Vegas Seven August 12-18, 2010

Anthony and Deidre Flood Jenkins are about to have the moment of a lifetime.

Pavilion Room 4 at the Las Vegas Hilton might seem a funny place for this, but that’s where George Takei and Walter Koenig—who played Sulu and Chekov, respectively, in the original Star Trek— are taking pictures with fans. Anthony, who watched the show in its original run, is a bookseller; Deidre is a schoolteacher.

Takei’s unmistakable baritone carries all the way through the line. The Jenkinses are about to meet their heroes.

The process is efficient but personal.

Takei and Koenig are friendly, shaking hands and hugging before snapping the photo. Even though the process takes only about six seconds, it doesn’t feel like an assembly line.

For the Jenkinses, it is worth every penny. “For a second there, I became a little kid again,” Deidre says.

There was a lot of that at the Hilton from Aug. 5-8. Like everything else in Las Vegas, the Official Star Trek Convention was a mix of imagination, show business and commerce.

Down the hall in the vendors’ room, fans could find something for every budget. A small tribble cost $4; a Star Trek: Enterprise jumpsuit actually worn

by Connor “Trip Tucker” Trinneer went for $4,000, with plenty of tricorders and replica uniforms in between.

There was also a Vegas connection.

Lisa Geczi’s Intergalactic Bartender is a local start-up rising out of the shadow of Quark’s Bar at the Hilton’s former attraction Star Trek: The Experience.

As director of special events for the Experience until its 2008 closure, she put together a recipe book featuring drinks such as the Final Frontier Frost and Maximum Warp, as well as a line of oversize glassware for drinking these cosmic concoctions. With Chase Masterson, who played the effervescent dabo girl Leeta on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as her spokesperson, the sky’s the limit.

That personal touch is important.

Several actors who have appeared in the shows over the years were there, chatting with fans and selling autographs, pictures and CDs. Max Grodénchik, for example, who portrayed the Ferengi Rom on Deep Space Nine, sat next to Grace Lee Whitney, who played Yeoman Rand on

the original series. In addition to signing autographs during the day, Grodénchik joined several of his co-stars in a group called “the Rat Pack,” which performed at a special dinner at the Stratosphere, mixing comedy with music.

When he first auditioned for a role on Star Trek, Grodénchik couldn’t have imagined that one day he’d be working Vegas on the strength of his performance.

“If I had known the stakes were so high,” he admits, “I would have been too nervous to audition.”

Gary Lockwood, who was prominent in both 2001: A Space Odyssey and the original series pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” has done five or six Star Trek conventions a year since 1975.

For other actors, working conventions still has surprises. Scott MacDonald and Randy Oglesby have worked together on the stage—including a run on Broadway—and were delighted when they were cast as adversaries in the third season of Star Trek: Enterprise. They’re just as happy sitting on a Xindi Council panel with fellow Trek actors Tucker Smallwood and Rick Worthy, taking questions and sharing reminiscences.

As accomplished stage actors, MacDonald and Oglesby hadn’t anticipated appearing in a science-fiction TV show and working Vegas. But now they embrace it.

“It’s a form of applause,” MacDonald says of meeting fans. “I watched Star Trek as a kid. It’s very flattering.”

Says Oglesby, who has played seven different Star Trek characters: “It’s a great, strange thing that I’d never dreamed would happen when I was doing O’Neill and Chekhov.”

Listening to these actors talk about their time with Star Trek and beyond, it’s clear that we need to be willing to reinvent ourselves and find joy in it, even if it’s not what we were doing three years ago. Just as stage actors can discover Shakespearean undertones in television roles, Las Vegas can find meaning in catering to visitors on a budget, even though it’s been built for luxury. A trip to Vegas should mean “feel like a kid again” moments for everyone. The Star Trek Convention provided just that.

David G. Schwartz is the director of UNLV’s Center for Gaming Research.

Rory Reid’s Dilemma Is the gubernatorial candidate’s connection to Dad hurting him?

By Molly Ball If only Rory Reid were somebody else’s son. The Democratic gubernatorial nominee can’t seem to escape his father’s unpopularity, and that, the conventional wisdom goes, is why he’s down by double digits in the polls.

He tried dropping his last name from his campaign materials, but that just made it worse. National media outlets took notice and wrote about how Sen. Harry Reid’s son was attempting to escape the burden of his parentage. A Bloomberg headline shouted, “Reid So Toxic His Son Campaigns Without Last Name.”

The Los Angeles Times noted that Rory has plenty of ideas and plenty of money; the problem was “that last name, Reid.”

If the campaign had hoped the “ just Rory” gambit would establish the candidate as his own man, it appeared to have exactly the opposite effect, tying him inextricably to his father while highlighting their uncomfortable political relationship.

But rather than an explanation, the name issue may be a convenient scapegoat for the campaign’s ailing fortunes, political observers say. There are plenty of other possible reasons Rory Reid finds himself so far behind.

First of all, there’s the message. Reid’s one-note hammering on the education issue, which has been the subject of most of his television ads, mystifies some Democratic political operatives. “They’ll tell you that education is people’s top issue, but it’s just not true,” says one consultant, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Everybody knows the budget, jobs and this recession-slash-depression is what people are thinking about right now.”

It’s easy to stand on the sidelines and second-guess someone else’s campaign strategy, of course. Reid’s campaign hasn’t wasted time in aggressively going after his Republican opponent, former federal judge Brian Sandoval, claiming Sandoval would lay off thousands of teachers and challenging him to debate. But another Democratic campaign veteran wondered when Reid’s campaign plans to bring up Sandoval’s record. “He’s got a record in the Assembly, a record as attorney general. He was on the gaming commission; did they give a license to somebody sleazy? He’s got a judicial record; there’s got to be someone who’s not happy with one of his rulings.”

Meanwhile, some supporters wish Reid would take bolder stands to draw a contrast with Sandoval. Like his opponent, he won’t say exactly how he would balance the budget in the face of the state’s enormous looming budget gap.

Reid spokesman Mike Trask defended the campaign’s strategy, saying Reid believes education is the key to economic development and recovery. Sandoval, he says, benefited from his competitive primary, which put him in front of voters early and contrasted him with unpopular Gov. Jim Gibbons. “[Reid’s] campaign is really just getting started,” Trask says.

Some of Reid’s problems aren’t his fault. For example, no matter what he does, it’s hard for him to get noticed when his father’s Senate contest is a bigger

story. “How does anyone running for governor get any traction or momentum when you can’t get anybody to pay attention to anything except the Senate race?” says Democratic consultant Jim Ferrence, who is not involved in either Reid campaign. In a sense, this is Harry Reid’s presence on the ballot hurting Rory Reid, but the overshadowing effect would be the same no matter who the Democratic nominee was.

Another factor that would be hurting any Democratic nominee is this year’s electoral climate. Across the country, a Republican storm appears to be brewing. It’s normal to see a backlash in the election following a historic sweep like the one Democrats pulled off in 2008.

Forecasters expect the GOP to make large gains in the U.S. Senate, House of Representatives and on down the ticket.

All of these factors were things Rory Reid could have anticipated when he got into the campaign, and in fact, he did.

Two years ago, when he was first conHe tried dropping his last name, but it didn’t work. sidering the race, Reid commissioned a poll to test the waters, as political analyst Jon Ralston reported at the time. One of the questions asked voters whether they’d prejudge Reid based on his family ties or evaluate him on his own merits. Naturally, when phrased that way, a large majority said they’d judge the man, not the name.

What Reid couldn’t have anticipated two years ago A local author says Facebook is a valuable tool was that Sandoval would quit his lifetime appointfor keeping tabs on your kids ment on the federal bench to run for governor. In that long-ago poll, Reid hoped he might have the luxury of

By Kate Silver running against Gibbons; and even if Gibbons lost, the alternatives were the relatively unknown former Three years ago, Valley state Sen. Joe Heck (who is running for Congress resident Linda Fogg instead) and former North Las Vegas Mayor Mike Phillips forbade her Montandon (who, along with Gibbons, lost in the eight children to join primary to Sandoval). any social networking Harry Reid has the seemingly good fortune to be up websites. She didn’t want against Republican Sharron Angle, who’s coming to her kids to be exposed, be viewed as negatively as he is. Sandoval, on the other and she thought she was hand, is viewed far more favorably than Rory Reid, protecting according to polls. their privacy.

Unfortunately for Rory Reid, his opponent may be his Today, her kids call biggest problem. Even Democrats concede that, on paher “queen of Facebook” per at least, Sandoval is “the whole package”—moderand she’s “friends” ate, Hispanic, gubernatorial-looking and with a record with all of them. She’s of winning statewide elections. It’s not clear if Sandoval also working on her is much of a campaigner, but with his campaign mostly second book about Facebook. Her first book, Facebook keeping him under wraps, he can sit on his lead and not for Parents: Answers to the Top 25 Questions (Captology worry about making gaffes.

Media), coauthored by her brother, BJ Fogg, director of “In the gubernatorial race, you’ve got two candidates Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab, was who are both well-qualified, smart and likable enough,” published this year.

Republican consultant Ryan Erwin says. “Voters are It’s a big change in just a few years. It all started going to elect the candidate they like and trust the most. when her brother mentioned to Fogg Phillips that her In the Senate race, on the other hand, people are going 17-year-old daughter had a new boyfriend. She knew to vote for the candidate they hate less.” nothing of this.

Cyber-snooping

Continued on Page 40 August 12-18, 2010 Vegas Seven 39

The Local Newsroom

Continued from Page 39

“I said, ‘What? What do you mean a new boyfriend?’”

Fogg Phillips says. “‘I didn’t even know she had an old boyfriend. What are you talking about? She lives here in my home. You’re out in California, how do you know that?”

He said Fogg Phillips’ daughter posted it on Facebook.

That, too, came as a surprise. She didn’t know her daughter even had a Facebook account.

“That’s when it hit me that to be a parent who’s really plugged into my kids’ lives and what they were doing, I also needed to be plugged into the virtual world, as opposed to just ignoring it, or thinking I can restrict it or I can control it,” she says.

So Fogg Phillips, a horse trainer by trade, immersed herself in the world of Facebook and began learning everything she could. After just a couple of months, her brother asked if she would help teach a series of classes at Stanford about the social networking site, aimed at busy parents with kids younger than 18. She agreed, and before she knew it she’d become an expert. That’s when she began the book.

Once Fogg Phillips started to understand Facebook, she began seeing it as a parenting tool, a way of staying in tune with her kids. She said that her own children regularly posted feelings on their walls that they wouldn’t or couldn’t express verbally.

One day, her 16-year-old daughter wrote a post about how much she missed her brother, who had died two years

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earlier. That gave Fogg Phillips a window into what her daughter was going through. She used it as an opportunity to initiate a conversation and discuss her daughter’s feelings. Other days, her kids will post that they’re having a rough day at school. When they get home, she knows to tread lightly, and she has a point of entry as she tries to find out what’s going on.

But in addition to using Facebook to communicate with her kids, Fogg Phillips sees her role as that of a teacher. It’s her duty to impart wisdom about the realities of Facebook—namely, the value of being discreet. She constantly reminds her children and others that college admission officers, school faculty, police, judges, job recruiters and many others use Facebook. And what may seem like a momentary comment or random photo could actually leave a lifelong footprint.

“The No. 1 thing parents need to know about Facebook is Facebook is not a private bedroom; it’s more like a front lawn. It’s a public space,” Fogg Phillips says.

“Kids continue to try to tell their parents they don’t want them there because it’s their private space. It doesn’t matter what privacy settings you have; tighten them down as much as you want, but it’s still a very public space.”

Fogg Phillips is searching for 1,000 local parents and teens to join her Facebook advisory council. To learn more, contact her at lindafoggphillips@gmail.com or go to facebookforparents.org.

From horse trainer to Facebook queen: Fogg Phillips.

The Local Newsroom

Politics

The R-word that needs to be discussed

By Michael Green

The e-mail sent late last month seemed to have nothing to do with Nevada.

But actually, it had everything to do with Nevada.

“Why is the NAACP and the Liberal Media Accusing Tea Party Patriots of Being Racist?” the Tea Party Patriots asked in an e-mail blast to their online subscribers—not only ungrammatically but also inaccurately. The NAACP passed a resolution at its national convention, urging the Tea Party movement to disassociate itself from racists in its midst—just as any group should do if it claims, as Tea Partiers do, to believe in equality.

Thus, when the Tea Party Patriots say, “A few offensive posters or obnoxious remarks of one person do not represent the feelings or behaviors of the Tea Party movement,” they are agreeing with the NAACP’s position, just after lying about it.

In turn, Tea Party Patriots distributed a petition claiming similarities to the NAACP in wanting freedom and independence. The group also said, “Ironically, the NAACP has a long history of racism,” which shows its dissimilarity and dissembling. The NAACP formed in part due to anti-black riots, especially in Springfield, Ill., the one-time home of some guy named Lincoln. Also from the petition, “According to liberals, if you disagree with their thinking or with the current administration, you are not only wrong; you are a ‘racist.’”

Some liberals say those things, and are wrong: Racism motivates some opposition to President Obama; so does a lack of patriotism and so does principle—and liberals should disown them as soon as the Tea Party disowns its link to a video about Obama’s plan to assassinate American citizens, and a blog that mentions “the likelihood our president illegally thugged his way into the Oval Office.” That the Tea Partiers would misrepresent the NAACP, even after finally disavowing one of their own only after considerable heat generated in the media for his latest racially incendiary statement, says a great deal—not just about that movement. It also ties in with what we must address as Nevadans.

In the 1950s, Nevada and especially Las Vegas became known as the “Mississippi of the West.” This was unfair only in the sense that Los Angeles should have

42 Vegas Seven August 12-18, 2010

been called the “Georgia of the West,” Salt Lake City the “Alabama,” Phoenix the “Arkansas,” and so on. But Las Vegas African-Americans—and some white allies—had to fight for rights that the Constitution had long since guaranteed.

For example, Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman is not a racist, and describing him as such would be wrong. But the city should have done more to revive the Moulin Rouge property and redevelop it by appealing to its historical and cultural past, not simply availing itself of the opportunity to tear down its facade after another fire on its premises.

The city also closed off F Street, a route into once-segregated West Las Vegas. Its intent wasn’t evil. But tell that to those who live and work in the area and know its history. Tell that to an African-American middle class that always teeters closer to the brink of decline and suffers from a higher rate of unemployment while living in a state that continues to deny its economic and social failings.

When Obama spoke about his minister, it was to begin a national conversation on race (a good conversation opener would have been why his opponents thought he had to agree with everything his minister said). When he had beers with a black Harvard professor and the white Cambridge, Mass., policeman who handcuffed him, it was to begin a national conversation on race.

Unquestionably, we need a national conversation on race, partly because we find it so difficult to have one. We also need one locally. And those conversations should be broadly defined, because race is more than African-Americans.

When Tea Partiers cannot or will not figure out what the NAACP said by simply reading and repeating what it said, when Arizona passes a blatantly racist immigration law that a majority of Nevadans polled agree with, and when the city talks about the need to tear down the Moulin Rouge for the sake of a West Las Vegas redevelopment that has been developing almost as long as the community has existed, we need to talk, and we need leaders willing to lead both the conversation and the response to it.

Michael Green is a professor of history at the College of Southern Nevada and author of several books and articles on Nevada history and politics.

Nightlife

Entertaining options for a week of nonstop fun and excitement.

Compiled by Melissa Arseniuk

Thur. 12 Although she may be known for sweetly singing supporting vocals in “Ghetto Superstar” and vamping it up alongside the likes of Pink and Christina Aguilera in the “Lady Marmalade” video, Mya’s next album is said to serve electro-dance, on the rocks. She recently recorded the song “Love Is the Answer” with DJ Cedric Gervais, and tonight the songstress comes to the Strip’s home of house, Haze, for a special threesong performance. At Aria, doors at 10:30 p.m., $30 for men, $20 for women.

Fri. 13 The 944 weekend takeover of Wynn and Encore in honor of the magazine’s fifth anniversary begins at 9 p.m. with a bash at Blush featuring DJ Jace One (RSVP and complete itinerary at 944.com).

There are three more options to get your weekend started. Los Lonely Boys are at the Hard Rock Hotel to give a poolside concert as part of the Friday Night Live series (doors at 8 p.m., show at 9 p.m., $25), and Beauty Bar hosts a handsome collection of bands as the Las Vegas Shakedown Rock & Roll Weekend gets under way (517 E. Fremont St., doors at 7 p.m., $20). And don’t miss Lavo’s two-year anniversary party, with DJ Vice, DJ Eye and a host of celebs.

In the Palazzo, doors at 10 p.m., locals free.

Sat. 14 A little black dress is every girl’s secret weapon, and tonight the guns are blazin’ as Blue Martini hosts its annual Little Black Dress Party.

Ladies who wear them receive a free Ultimat vodka cocktail. Meanwhile, prizes valued at more than $2,000 are up for grabs. The event supports Kaleidoscope Family Solutions’ equine therapy program. (Ladies free, $10 for men after 11:30 p.m., doors at 4 p.m.) Also tonight, Jenny McCarthy hosts the fourth annual Midsummer Night’s Dream party at the Palms. The poolside event adopts a “Gods and Goddesses” theme this year, so grab your toga—or body paint, if you dare— and check your inhibitions at the door. Tickets are priced from $140, including an open bar from 9-11 p.m., and good lookin’ ladies can RSVP for a chance to win their way in. (Doors at 9 p.m., n9negroup.com/mnd to RSVP.) Another option: DJ Politik plays Pure at Caesars Palace. Doors at 10 p.m., $40 for men, $30 for women.

SeveN NIghtS Sun. 15 Sunday is pool day, so spend this one high atop the Venetian, as Tao Beach welcomes Manufactured Superstars for a sun-drenched set. (Doors at 10 a.m., $20 for out-of-town men, free for everyone else.) Afterward, towel off and get ready to laugh as former Full House actor and America’s Funniest Home Videos host Bob Saget performs a second night of stand-up at the Orleans. 8 p.m., $44-$71.50.

Mon. 16 The king is back! No, not Elvis— B.B. King. The living legend takes to the stage at his namesake blues club at The Mirage tonight and tomorrow, making good on a pair of previously planned (but subsequently postponed) performances. Openers the Grant Garland Trio get things started with two dinnertime shows, at 6 and 8 p.m., and King goes on at 9:30 p.m. $75-$125.

Tues. 17 The world’s flashiest bartenders show off as Rock & Rita’s at Circus Circus hosts the finale of the Nations flair bartending competition. (9 p.m., no cover.) Also, Blush hosts a fashion-conscious crowd as label Frankie B throws a PROJECT party featuring a set by DJ Steve Aoki. (At the Wynn, doors at 9 p.m., $30 cover, locals free.) Another PROJECT party goes down at Eve, where Billionaire Mafia clothing presents rappers Rick Ross, Birdman and BG. In Crystals, doors at 10 p.m., $30 for men, $20 for women.

Wed. 18 MAGIC festivities continue with an extra-fashionable edition of Snitch at Ghostbar featuring regulars DJ88 and Dave Fogg, plus guest DJs Jrocc from L.A. and Stretch Armstrong from NYC. (At the Palms, doors at 10 p.m., $20 cover, local ladies free.) Another option: The Jabbawockeez headline at Haze. Although the all-male dance troupe’s demo will be shorter than its full-length performance, cover is about half the price of the usual show ticket. (At Aria, doors at 10:30 p.m., $40 for men, $20 for women.) Or, if you are more classic rock than hip-hop, head to Caesars Palace, as iconic Bob Dylan and John Mellencamp play the Colosseum. Two legends for the price of one! 7 p.m., tickets from $59.50, all ages.

August 12-18, 2010 Vegas Seven 45

Nightlife

surrender | encore

Photography by Tony Tran

Upcoming AUG. 13 | AOKI’S HOUSE AUG. 14 | 944’S FIVE-YEAR ANNIVERSARY PARTY AUG. 18 | SURRENDER YOUR WEDNESDAY

46 Vegas Seven August 12-18, 2010

Nightlife

Wet Republic | MGM GRand

Upcoming AUG.15 | DAYLIFE SUNDAYS PRESENTS AVICII

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Photography by Tony Tran

Nightlife

Vanity | Hard rock Hotel

Photography by Jessica Blair

Upcoming AUG. 13 | FRIDAYS WITH ERIK D-LUX AUG. 15 | SIN ON SUNDAY

50 Vegas Seven August 12-18, 2010

Nightlife

cadillac Ranch | Town SquaRe

Photography by Jessica Blair

Upcoming AUG. 16 | JAMIOKEE AUG. 18 | LOCALS LIVE BATTLE OF THE BANDS

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Nightlife

Events

Midsummer Night’s Dream Girl Jenny McCarthy gets in shape to host the first Vegas version of Playboy’s biggest party

By Melissa Arseniuk More than 15 years after being named Playmate of the Year, Jenny McCarthy has yet to ditch her Playboy past. “I don’t think it ever will,” she says. “I’m really proud of it.”

She hasn’t had the “mommy used to take her clothes off and let people take pictures of her” talk with her 8-year-old son, but she’s actually looking forward to it.

“I can’t wait to have that conversation one day, but I’m really not going to make a big deal about it,” she says. “I think a lot of girls look a lot more undressed and sultry in FHM or Maxim than they do sometimes in Playboy now. I think the brand is pretty respected in terms of what people think of it now, so hopefully my son will understand what Mommy did.”

The 37-year-old also remains centerfold-worthy, despite what she calls “baby damage.”

“I work really, really, really hard to stay in shape, but, you know, there’s no such thing as perfect,” she says.

McCarthy will still dress appropriately when she hosts a Playboy-themed party at the Palms on Aug. 14.

“Why not be part of it still?” she figures. “Let’s face it: I’m 37, I’m not going to be able to wear lingerie much longer at these parties.”

The blond bombshell has attended more than a dozen Midsummer Night’s Dream events at the Playboy Mansion, but this will be her first time at a Las Vegas version of Hugh Hefner’s most popular party.

“It’s one of Hef’s best parties,” she says.

“It is legendary.”

Following in the footsteps of the 2009 “Pirate’s Guilty Pleasure”-themed party, this year’s version has adopted a “Gods and Goddesses” format. Still, the hostess plans forgo a toga in favor of sexy lingerie—and she is doing lots of yoga to prepare.

“I’m trying to find the healthy side of Vegas,” she says. “I’ll get healthy, and then I’ll blow it out that night.”

McCarthy is renting a house here while her home in L.A. is being renovated.

“I needed a place to move for a month so I figured, why not go to Vegas?” she says. “I love it here, and it’s affordable.”

Jenny McCarthy gets carried away at last year’s Midsummer Night’s Dream.

McCarthy’s son is autistic, and she has been a leading advocate of that cause.

Her Midsummer Night’s Dream party will help support her autism organization of choice, Generation Rescue.

The recently single former Singled Out host has given her team of donation-collectors simple yet important instructions: “Look hot, and wear as little as possible.”

The army of scantily clad collections officers will gather donations throughout the evening.

Meanwhile, McCarthy has a message for prospective philanthropists: “If you’re going to make a donation, if you’re pullin’ out your credit card, get in my cabana. Absolutely, come and hang with me.”

McCarthy hopes the party will blend sexually charged fun with fundraising.

“It’s not only just about having a good time and trying to get as many Playmates to fly in from Los Angeles for it,” she says, “It’s also about taking some money from some high-rollers and putting it to a good cause—besides strippers later on that evening.”

Tickets for Midsummer Night’s Dream start at $140, but ladies can RSVP for complimentary drinks and admission—or, rather, a chance to win their way in—via n9negroup.com/mnd.

(Just be ready to drop the name of a VIP host who can vouch for your hotness, upload a droolworthy photo, and answer whether or not you’re willing to be body-painted.)

Flair Play Style still counts in bartending, as the revived Nations challenge proves

On Aug. 16, 50 internationally ranked flair bartenders will go tin-to-tin for $25,000 as new arrival Rock & Rita’s revives the Nations International Flair Challenge from its one-year, recession-induced hiatus.

Yes, flair is still going strong, despite the long rift over the merits of this flamboyant bartending style.

Mixologists and cocktailians curl their lips at the mere mention of those on other side. No one understands this chasm better than Ken Hall, who, along with colleagues such as Tobin Ellis of BarMagic of Las Vegas, has spent his career straddling that chasm.

The six-time world flair champion bartends and develops cocktails for Light Group, but he also has been successfully running flair bartending competitions since 1993.

Hall attributes the negativity toward flair to the early 2000s, when the Strip was saturated with flair bars and the mandate to put on a good show overtook good service and quality drinks.

Danilo Oribe: this year’s Legends of Bartending champ.

60 Vegas Seven August 12-18, 2010

“There’s a time and place,” argued Ellis at a recent seminar on the “Flair of Mixology.” The Flair Bartenders Association co-founder, Ellis explained that flair, in the hands of an unsavvy bartender, can sour guests to the entire notion. It takes “discipline and maturity” to know when to break out the moves.

In an effort to bridge the gap, this year’s Nations challenge will feature a round allowing contestants no more than two items in their hands at any given moment; and the freestyle round has been cut to just three minutes, making it more like the typical guest interaction at a bar.

And if you’re wondering whether flair is still relevant, Mark Green invites you to witness a flair showcase at Kahunaville or Rock & Rita’s. Green, co-owner of both places, says no one in the cheering crowd appears to give a hoot that service stops for four and half minutes.

In Circus Circus, 9 p.m. Aug. 17, no cover. Flair for the Cure, a charitable exhibition and cocktail auction, 7 p.m. Aug. 18, no cover.

Oribe photo by Andrea Tedesco

By Xania Woodman

Nightlife

Cocktail Culture

By Xania Woodman

Matt Myers shaking his Crush (below) and Patricia Richards’ Magnolia (bottom).

Kristen Schaefer’s Inspired effort.

The Don Harlow As created by Kristen Schaefer of Rhumbar at The Mirage

¾ ounce fresh lemon juice 1 ounce Earl Grey tea-infused simple syrup (details at weeklyseven.com) 2 ounces Bombay Sapphire gin 1 ounce bitter orange espuma (details at weeklyseven.com) Pinch of loose, whole, white Earl Grey tea and an orange spice rock candy stirrer for garnish.

Combine the first four ingredients in a tin.

Add ice, shake well and strain into a teacup.

Top with espuma, a pinch of loose tea and serve with a rock candy stirrer.

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In Good Company

Bitter SweetS Sadly, the delectable orangespice rock candy stick served with the Don Harlow has been discontinued by Teavana. But after an exhaustive search, we are happy to report that you can find this perfect cocktail complement (that slightly spicy bite comes from turmeric) at Dryden & Palmer (item No. 25802 at RockCandy.com) or get a similar product from OldTimeConfection.com.

Matt Myers looked every bit the professional, full-time bartender as he presented his Oaxaqueño (wa-ha-KEN-yo) Crush, the second place-winning cocktail of the evening (see recipe at weeklyseven.com). But the assistant general manager of Bellagio’s Michael Mina—who also designed the restaurant’s cocktail program—only occasionally sneaks behind the wood himself these days. Myers, a trained chef who bartended his way through New England Culinary Institute, says he sort of “fell into” mixology, studying under David “Mr. Mojito” Nepove as well as with San Francisco’s Future Bars. But it was in Mexico City where he perfected his personal style, haggling with street vendors for hibiscus flowers and tamarind, and further established his culinary bent toward California cuisine. His cocktail’s rich, smoky agave undertones coexist well with Bombay Sapphire’s botanicals and get a satisfying heat from the Serrano chilies and ginger beer.

It has also been a triumphant year for Wynn-Encore property mixologist Patricia Richards, who took third place in the Bombay Sapphire competition. In February, she placed first in the 12th annual Finlandia World Cup nationals (not to mention later placing fourth in the world). Just a week after her Bombay win, she took first place in the USBG Milagro Tequila Margarita competition at the 2010 Tales of the Cocktail spirits conference in New Orleans. Her Bombay Sapphire cocktail, the Magnolia (see recipe at weeklyseven.com), combined the featured gin with tea she carried back from a recent trip to Wynn Macau. “There is a rich history of tea consumption in Asian culture,” Richards says, “but not in a cocktail! This is something new and perhaps a little scandalous.” With hints of hibiscus, cranberry and raspberry, the sweeter cherry blossom notes are rounded out by the sweet-tart grapefruit.

The Don Harlow photo by Anthony Mair; event photos by Brenton Ho

Bombay Sapphire and GQ presented the fourth annual Nation’s Most Inspired Bartender Search’s Las Vegas regional competition recently at Noir Bar. Ten finalists were chosen from 26 entrants to compete for a chance to represent Sin City in the finals to be held here later this month. “I think that we are doing a great job developing our underground mixology market,” says Vegas-based Team Enterprises special events manager Katie Dodd, on behalf of Bombay Sapphire. “We have some of the best in the nation in Vegas.”

The 10 cocktails were judged on practicality, taste and aroma, appearance and the judges’ overall impressions. Rhumbar lead bartender Kristen Schaefer dazzled the judges with her unique take on a White Lady, a classic cocktail consisting of gin, lemon juice, Cointreau and sometimes egg white. Named for her late uncle Don—an Englishman from Harlow in Essex known to dose his tea with gin—Schaefer’s presentation is a nod to both British and American history. “I thought it would be nostalgic to serve it in an English teacup, and that also correlates to Prohibition,” a time when liquor was often secreted in teacups. In honor of Don from Harlow, enjoy the Don Harlow in your home speakeasy.

The NaTioNal Newsroom This week in the New York Observer

ward Cleaver makes a Playdate What would Betty Friedan say about all the unemployed men surfing the Internet, cooking and watching sports while their wives swish off to the office?

Illustration by Lou Beach

By Alexandria Symonds On a recent sunny morning, Norm Elrod was standing in front of the freezer case of a little market near the New York apartment he shares with his wife, Amanda, a graphic designer, and their two cats. He was having trouble deciding between two bags of frozen edamame: one 40 cents cheaper, the other an ounce heavier. He surmised, correctly, that the smaller bag was a better deal, then repeated the process with tortilla chips.

Elrod, 38, a former marketing manager who is currently unemployed, now does most of the grocery shopping and other household stuff. It just makes more sense, he explained.

When Norm returned to his apartment, Amanda quietly explained he got the wrong kind of edamame—these are shelled, and she wanted the whole kind.

Not to worry, he told her. He was planning on going to get an iced coffee soon, and he can pick up the right kind. It’s no big deal. He has time.

Pretty soon after this, Amanda bustled off to her office in Manhattan. Norm had mentioned earlier that he sometimes waits, June Cleaver–style, for her to get home. “I don’t lack for things to do, but I do notice when it’s, like, 7:15 and she’s not here yet,” he said. “I’m like, ‘Oh, let’s go on IM, is she still at work, oh, she logged off, I wonder when she logged off …’”

Welcome to the Problem That Has No Job: a kind of upside-down Mad Men meets Mr. Mom where wives and girlfriends are out all day making money while the city’s unemployed guys mop floors, cook dinner and experience all the attendant ennui. In The Feminine Mystique (Dell, 1964), Betty Friedan’s germinal study of the restless American housewife, the author singled out 1960 as the year when women began to realize in droves that something was wrong with their domestic lives; she called it “the year American women’s discontent boiled over.” A half-century later, three years into the most recent recession, the tables seem to have turned. Men have been disproportionately affected by layoffs; they make up anywhere from 70 percent to 82 percent of those laid off, according to government statistics. The average length of unemployment is more than seven months, which Congress acknowledged recently by passing a benefits extension allowing those who have been out of work for more than six months to

continue to receive unemployment pay.

Meaning that Norm, and guys like him, have had a lot of time to settle into a new kind of routine.

Robert Barr, a 47-year-old in a black V-neck who was carrying a baguette and some leafy greens at the Lower East Side Whole Foods the other day, proudly told The Observer that he’s learned to poach eggs. “When I was in New York and I was overemployed—really, really busy—I definitely ate a lot more takeout food. And if I did shop, it was always specifically for that night,” he said. “I’d say now, I think a little bit more ahead.

And I probably will end up buying stuff that’s going to take longer to prepare, because I’ve got more time.”

Barr, who has worked in publishing and public relations, added that he also cleans more thoroughly than he did when he had a job: “There is a weird little sense of accomplishment that you get, cleaning up the space around you.

For example, today, I got up and—I have a lot of shiny surfaces in my apartment, and they really show any kind of smudges and stuff like that. They don’t even have to be that dirty to look kind of bad. At one point, I was just like, ‘OK, I don’t like this, I want to clean the space around my computer and I want to clean off that countertop.’ And I felt good. I felt very organized.”

To quote from Friedan’s chapter “Housewifery Expands to Fill the Time Available”: “The more a woman is deprived of function in society at the level of her own ability, the more her housework, mother-work, wife-work, will expand—and the more she will resist finishing her housework or mother-work, and being without any function at all.”

It’s true of unemployed men, too, for whom the little chores they’d normally get done in 15 minutes on a Saturday afternoon become all-consuming tasks.

“I’m a compulsive cleaner anyway … and when I was home all day, that’s basically what I did,” said Brad, a 28-year-old lawyer who was out of work for six months before finding a job earlier this year, and who requested his name be changed for this article. “If someone called me and said, ‘What are you doing right now?’ I would be like, ‘Oh, I have so many chores to do today.’ You make something out of nothing.”

Escaping the Rut One housewife in The Feminine Mystique cites “times of anger, bitterness and general frustration too numerous to even mention,” and concludes, “I felt so completely alone.” Friedan’s subjects are also listless, sad and anxious. She called it “the problem that has no name.”

Elrod, who has been laid off four times in the past nine years, definitely understands irritability: “I find myself very—I get angry much more quickly.

Little nothing things trigger it. I’ll get pissed off about something that honestly doesn’t make a damn bit of difference, who cares?” he said. “But it’s because I’m feeling bad about myself.”

He rattled off his routine: Get up, go to the gym, have lunch, take a shower, surf job sites. “The one thing I didn’t include,” he said, “is the lying in bed,

staring at the ceiling for a half-hour, going, ‘Dear God, do I have to get up again and do this again?’”

Howard Young, 57, a purchasing manager who had been at his company for 13 years before being laid off last year, was out of work for six months before finding a new job in January. “I know that my mother was home a lot during the ’50s, and she was the type of person who liked to work a lot. She would watch TV … sort of get into a rut, get very depressed.

I found myself getting into a rut, too,” he said. “The only thing that saved me from getting into a worse rut is the fact that I consumingly hate morning television.

That absolutely helped.”

What was before a warm and welcoming place to look forward to going at the end of the day is now a prison. “I want to think of my home as a relaxing place Continued on Page 72 August 12-18, 2010 Vegas Seven 69

The National Newsroom

Style & Culture

Couture and Consequences

Incidents such as demonstrators being beaten at the 1968 Democratic National Convention helped create the culture for WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks and the Mutated Media: Taking It to the Tweets Website has become a clearinghouse for the divulgence of secret documents

By Lee Siegel Remember Three Days of the Condor, the paranoid political thriller with Robert Redford that came out in 1975, just four years after The New York Times published the Pentagon Papers? Redford played Joseph Turner, a low-level CIA agent who stumbles upon a rogue element in the CIA that is planning to invade a Middle Eastern country to protect American oil interests there. At the end of the film, Redford is confronted by a top CIA agent (Cliff Robertson) who is one of the chief malefactors. They are standing outside the Times building, and Redford declares to Robertson that he has told the newspaper the whole story. Outraged at first, Robertson smiles sardonically. “How do you know they’ll print it?” he says. “They’ll print it,” Redford replies with confidence as he starts to move away into the crowd.

Robertson taunts him: “You can take a walk, but how far if they don’t print it?” Redford freezes, and the film ends with a close-up of his panicked face.

You can draw a straight line from this frantic expression to WikiLeaks, a new kind of clearinghouse or Craigslist for the divulgence of secret documents.

Our interactive, participatory age is the fulfillment of Joseph Turner’s sudden doubts about the media as a potent, autonomous institution. We have to start taking things into our own hands. This rising interactivity and participatory-ness defines us more and more. As artists such as Marina Abramovic make art that offers an interactive experience to a single person, as theaters offer plays for a participating audience of one, as the

worlds of art, entertainment and even politics seems to offer direct relationships in participatory environments, fewer people seem to have a use for the mediating media. In 2010, Deep Throat would not only brush right past The Washington Post and publish his revelations on the Internet through WikiLeaks or some other similar venue; he’d have his own reality show.

The truth is that the authority of print media was already foundering by the time The New York Times published the Pentagon Papers. When antiwar demonstrators chanted “the whole world is watching” at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, they set electronic media on the path toward today’s interactivity. Americans sat stunned before their television sets as they watched Mayor Daley’s cops beat the protesters bloody in the streets. One year before, Americans had sat stunned before their television sets as tens of thousands of antiwar protestors descended on Washington. In 1970, Americans once again sat helpless and outraged in their living rooms as the evening news showed images of the dead students at Kent State. Compared to the despair induced by TV’s turbulent images, the print media resembled agents of history—the feeling of impotency induced by watching baleful events unfold on TV while being unable to do anything about them was what gave the Pentagon Papers their sensational impact. Finally, someone is striking back from a position of power! But at the same time as television was making newspapers more relevant as levers of change, Continued on Page 74

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Vegas Seven August 12-18, 2010

Newton’s third law of motion goes as follows: To every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. I can’t help but feel it’s time to blow away the cobwebs and give Granny Newton a makeover. I propose the following: To every action, there is invariably a totally gnarly and hideously unstylish avalanche of reactions.

I often feel as if all my waking energy is spent dealing with the horrid consequences of some seemingly innocuous choice. Life seems to be riddled with gruesome repercussions and squalid domino effects.

As regular readers may recall, I switched to a messenger bag after my Goyard tote gave me bicep tendonitis.

Update: I now find that the right ass cheek of my Naked and Famous jeans is becoming worn, courtesy of the rubbing, dangling, no-name replacement bag.

Earlier this summer, I switched to multi-functional tinted bifocals—a fetching pair of Anne Slater–blue Ray-Bans—so that I could read my phone on a hot street corner when the necessity arose. The naff consequence? I keep stepping in dog poop because the sidewalk is now a blur.

After a recent and thankfully uneventful colonoscopy, I switched, on the advice of the attending physician, from oatmeal to a higher-fiber cereal. The reaction?

Three months later, my cholesterol went up 30 points.

As a reaction to this reaction, I started chomping down red-yeast rice pills. (The lesbian organic crunchy alternative to pharmaceutical statins.) One large rubbery capsule got lodged in my throat while I was watching Hoarders last week. When I coughed, the tracheal convulsion broke the pill in half, releasing a cloud of red powder that rushed out of my nose and stained my new Archive 1887 Iggy Pop T-shirt. Quel désastre!

More hair-raising potentialities: If you allow yourself to become addicted to opiates, you will get high as a kite, but you will also become horribly constipated.

Wearing really high Celine clogs makes you chic and model-tall, but your resulting inability to run fast can make you a sitting duck for butt-pinchers.

Looking luxe and über-glam in your black Givenchy entrance-maker can snag you a high-powered date, but it can also get you jacked on the subway.

Wearing a corset can render you deliciously svelte in your Victoria Beckham organ-mangling cocktail dress, but that same constricting foundation garment will leave bizarre indentations on your body that take hours and gallons of lotion to erase. Overdo the lotion application and zits will result.

Re: Hoarders. I have become totally addicted to this disturbing and cringe-making A&E documentary series about ordinary people who cannot part with their belongings. The reaction? I have developed a deranged and extreme de-accessioning impulse. After every episode, I feel compelled to prove to myself that I am not a hoarder by dragging bags of clothes and piles of magazines to the trash chute in our apartment building. The consequence: My neighbors think I’m insane.

Toodles!

Photo by APA/Getty Images

By Simon Doonan

Hollyworld

Mr. Hollywood and Barnes & Noble

Photo by Duffy-Marie Arnoult/WireImage

By Richard Siklos sued years ago, but claimed the present As business capitals go, Los Angeles dispute was not personal. In Yucaipa’s is an oddity. There are few corporate filings with the court, Burkle accused headquarters here—after Disney, can Riggio and his brother, Stephen, who you name one?—which makes a finanuntil March was the company’s CEO, of cier such as Ron Burkle a quintessential using the company as a “personal piggy L.A. power figure: peripatetic, elusive, bank,” saying that the Riggios were canny and demonstrably rich. involved in “self-dealing” when they sold He’s invariably described as low-key a college bookshop operation they held and publicity shy, and articles about separately to B&N last year.

Burkle usually also mention his private On Aug. 4, Riggio effectively threw 757, his $30 million Hollywood mansion down a gauntlet by announcing that and his political and social ties to Barnes & Noble is for sale, and said that P. Diddy and Leo DiCaprio. he is considering putting together an To New Yorkers, Burkle is perhaps investment group to take the company best known for his once-closeness to Bill private. Even after a bump in its stock Clinton and embroilment in the weird sagas of incarcerated Ann Hathaway ex, price, its market capitalization is less than $900 million. In 2001, it was $2.2 Raffaello Follieri, and Jared Paul Stern, billion. Over the same the former Page Six period, Amazon’s reporter whom Burkle market cap has gone accused of trying to from $3.6 billion to $57 extort him. billion. The advent of But his Yucaipa the eBook and the iPad Companies is a serious and the Kindle have wheeler-dealer that has only served to spook done some $30 billion in investors further about transactions, on behalf B&N’s prospects durof pension funds that ing a three-year period provide it with capital, in which its profits have on everything from buyplummeted by $100 ing and selling grocery million, to $35 million. chains to owning a What could Burkle piece of the Pittsburgh do better than Riggio Penguins. In the past and the current B&N year, Burkle has circled crew? Riggio claimed Barneys and backed Burkle wanted to comHarvey Weinstein’s Ron Burkle bine the company with unsuccessful bid for Borders, its struggling rival, but Burkle Miramax. Now, he has a genuine denies this. A smarter move might be to East Coast–West Coast showdown on sell the company to Amazon, or at least his hands with Barnes & Noble. do a deal where Amazon ( Jeff Bezos and Like Burkle, B&N founder and antitrust watchdogs permitting) takes chairman Leonard Riggio is a college over its fast-growing but loss-making dropout and a self-made man, and he BN.com. This would be similar to is as singularly New York as Burkle is the deal Microsoft struck to take over Hollywood. There is no evident mutual Internet search for Yahoo, where Burkle admiration between the two men, howrecently left the board of directors. But ever, as Burkle has taken a big stake in it would undoubtedly be anathema to the company—19 percent—and sued to Riggio, digital being the future and all. be able to buy up to 37 percent, which In some ways, Riggio reminds me of would supersede the 30 percent Riggio Martha Stewart—hard-driving and owns. He has also threatened a proxy self-serving, to be sure, but also somefight to put directors on B&N’s board, one who has built something distinctive and has legally challenged a “poison and tangible and culture-shaping. If a pill” defense the bookseller put in place.

Left Coast moneyman such as Burkle On the witness stand recently in a wants to write the next chapter for Delaware courtroom, Riggio described Riggio’s creation, he is going to have to Burkle as having left a sour taste in his pay up for it. mouth over a business venture they pur-

August 12-18, 2010 Vegas Seven 71

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34 Road map 36 Miracle-___ 37 Old home-movie format 40 Cone-bearing tree 41 Pig/poke filler 42 Brother, to Brigitte 43 Part of a hosp.

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45 Pub’r of an influential journal, with “the” 46 Magna/laude center 47 “___ with a spoon!”

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70 Rolls up, as a flag 72 Part of an act 75 Excavates 76 Biol. or chem.

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78 Will Smith role 80 First name in guitar music 81 Grate stuff 82 Reb, to a Yank 83 Extension-cord length, perhaps 85 “Dinner ___” 87 Young ___ 88 So far 89 Guards check them 90 Wide, as some highways 91 Dance step 92 Zodiac sign

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101 Bandidos’ targets 102 Comic-page Viking 105 Dr. of rap 107 1960s boxer 108 Sans assistance 109 1970s sitcom 113 Cereal box info 117 Two 4s, in craps 118 Klinger’s hoped-for discharge on “M*A*S*H” 119 Because of 120 Sailing 121 Boil 122 Practice-boxes DOWN 1 Four hours before noon 2 Fed. stipend 3 Night bird 4 Mozambique neighbor 5 Like sitcoms 6 Howard, Paul, and others 7 South addition 8 Greek letter 9 Clumsy one 10 Arcade game, ___-ball 11 Upper body

12 Steak choice 13 Hogwarts accessory 14 Chorus member 15 Whole bunch 17 Composer Jerome 18 Power sources 19 Film about the Black Sox scandal 21 Cigarette character 24 Countdown terminology 27 2002 Adam Sandler comedy 28 Cassette alter-natives, once 29 Giant spider flick starring David Arquette 30 Octopus trait 32 Some whales 33 Treat as a target 34 Jalalabad’s loc.

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76 Kin of “me too” 77 Black piano key 79 “___ Neces-sarily So” 82 Ice maneuver 83 Half-mile run 84 Prop for Annika 86 Bronc rider’s duration 97 Get firm 98 Interview format 99 Makes an effort 101 Cornhuskers’ conference, once 102 “Oh, very funny” 103 “Sadly ...”

104 “It’s My Party” singer 106 Evan ending 107 “Clair de ___” 110 Hot saison 111 Wit’s intro 112 “I’ll bet that hurt!”

114 Party drink 115 Author: abbr.

116 High temper-ature range 8/12/2010 © M. Reagle

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Unemployed men Continued from Page 69

where I’m not subject to … stresses,” Elrod said. “Since I don’t have a job, a lot of the stresses about finding a job—I suffer that at home.”

When he was still in college, Sam Biddle, an unemployed 23-year-old Johns Hopkins graduate, used to regard coming home as something of a reward. “Now it’s an endless plain of getting out of my bed, sitting on the couch. And we don’t have any chairs, really, so it’s always a constant state of like, reclining. There’s nowhere to be, like, upright and uncomfortable. So yeah, it’s a lethargic daze all the time.”

The void created by unemployment is easily filled by the Internet, and unemployed men seem to devour blogs in much the same way as ’50s housewives devoured Redbook and Ladies’ Home Journal. Young said he spent quite a bit of time reading blogs about depression and anxiety.

“They were almost in a way self-fulfilling,” he said.

Making the Most of the Situation There are ways that men make domestic malaise feel a little more masculine. Nearly all the unemployed men we talked to made sure to emphasize their regular workouts. For some men, child care is apparently still a pleasant novelty: The Observer encountered John Harvey, a 35-year-old surgeon who’s between jobs, having a water-balloon fight in Central Park with his 5-year-old son, Somers. Both were eager to tell us that Dad’s time not working has been a “lovely summer holiday.” “We’ve been spending a lot of time together,” John said. “It’s been really nice.” Somers agreed: “It’s been really good, yeah!”

And then there are the spectator sports! “World Cup pretty much dominated my life for about a month,” Barr said. “So there was someplace to go every day in the middle of the afternoon, and I pretty much hit half the bars/restaurants on the Lower East Side during that period. When World Cup ended, I kind of looked around and was like, ‘All right, I’ve got to come up with things to do.’”

In the final chapter of The Feminine Mystique, Friedan suggested an elegant way to end housewife malaise for good: Women ought to work. “One sees the human significance of work—not merely as the means of biological survival, but as the giver of self and the transcender of self, as the creator of human identity and human evolution,” she wrote.

Unemployed men know their feelings of depression and anxiety are caused by not working, and they want nothing more than to work, but the economic obstacle is obvious and always present.

Emily Bazelon, a senior editor at Slate who knew Friedan (their grandmothers were cousins), had an idea.

“Men could wake up and retrain themselves—they could become teachers and nurses,” she said tartly. “And this whole notion we have that once a profession turns pink, it can never turn back, I mean, that’s a choice that people make. Nowhere is it written in stone that, like, men shalt not be nurses in large numbers.”

There’s a teacher shortage in math, reading and science, too. “We now know that the same range of potential ability exists for women as for men,” Friedan wrote in 1963. In 2010, if they’re dissatisfied, maybe men need to work like women.

“Obviously, I’m not communing with her ghost,” Bazelon said of Friedan, “but I imagine she might just get a chuckle out of this recent discussion that the era of men is over and that they’re in trouble.”

The National Newsroom

Personal Finance WikiLeaks Continued from Page 70

it was leaving them behind as it presented the possibility that someday technology might make it possible for the whole world to watch you, the viewer, too.

Once the war cry of a special historic occasion, “the whole world is watching” has become an everyday fact of social and cultural life. We are not content to sit passively before our televisions watching events that we cannot experience or influence. We now want the whole world to watch us as we merge into what we ourselves have just been watching, or as we act out the spectacle of ourselves.

The media is called the media because it “mediates” events for us. It sifts among, selects from, analyzes and explains events; it stands between events and us. But now, from retail to health care to art and entertainment, the drive is to cut out the mediating “middleman” from the process. We are fed up with being passive.

The irony to all this is that it was precisely passivity—the feeling of rage and helplessness people felt as they watched the carnage overseas and at home on TV—that made protesting crowds take to the streets during the Vietnam War. They needed direct action. Nowadays, the Internet and its myriad resources extend to us the mirage of direct action in the form of, among other things, “wikiing” and venting on our Twitter and Tumblr accounts and on all manner of blogs. Nobody is taking to the streets. And so nothing changes. A mighty newspaper publishes an alarming exposé about the war in Afghanistan? Let’s link to it.

As the serious business of exposing official falsehood mutates into the entertaining shtick of embarrassing isolated public personalities, we seem numb to the fact that the Internet itself is one of the greatest mediators of all time. It turns every grisly truth into a satisfying spectacle that is illusorily tailored to an audience of one. It offers an unparalleled catharsis to political rage. Yet although catharsis is liberating in the realm of art, it is stultifying in the realm of politics. The war machine grinds away in Afghanistan, the official deceits have been fastidiously and heroically documented by The New York Times and the Guardian for years, the Afghan War Diary put it all together in a staggering narrative, yet the campuses are as quiet as the clicks of a trillion mouses.

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by Merl Reagle

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Vegas Seven August 12-18, 2010

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How to keep a handle on college costs

By Kathy Kristof, Tribune Media Services

About 19 million kids head to college this month, which is likely to have their parents in a mild panic about how to pay the bills. Even if you saved religiously from the time your child was a toddler, the stock market has worked against you over the last decade, leaving many families short.

Worse, college isn’t a one-time expense. One of my friends likens it to buying a luxury car, then driving it off a cliff. “Repeat that four times,” he said. “Then you can imagine what it’s like to pay for college.”

Of course, the hope is that college will pay off in increased earnings for your child. But that’s only if your child goes to the right school and manages to graduate and get a job. What can you and your child do to boost that chance and reduce out-of-pocket costs in the meantime?

Check the school’s record. Colleges demand detailed records about students before they’re accepted. Before you write your first tuition check, check on the school’s performance, too. How many people who start at that school continue for a second year?

How many graduate in four years? What about six?

The dirtiest secret in higher education is how poorly some colleges perform when it comes to retaining and graduating their students, said Ali R. Malekzadeh, dean of the Williams College of Business at Xavier University in Cincinnati. Paying tuition to a school with rotten retention and graduation statistics is probably a huge waste of money. The National Center for Education Statistics offers a great Web-based tool called College Navigator that gives the essential statistics.

Get credit for Advanced Placement classes.

A lot of students take advanced placement classes but fail to take the tests that determine whether they get college credit for the courses. It’s worth it to study and take the test. Many colleges accept these courses as transfer units, but only if the student gets high marks. The tests cost $86 per subject; that’s a fraction of the cost of even a single unit at a public or private university. Each class that’s accepted by a college reduces the number of units a student needs to take, ultimately reducing tuition costs.

Consider junior college. If your child has already been accepted to a four-year university, he or she may not want to delay admission for a year or two to complete general-education requirements at a junior college. But the difference in costs is astounding. A typical 12-unit course load is going to cost a little more than $600 a year in tuition and fees at a California community college; roughly $4,800 at a California State University; $9,200 at the University of California; and roughly $30,000 at a private university, according to CaliforniaColleges.edu.

A possible compromise? Your child can attend the university but arrange to take summer classes at the community college in your hometown. (Make

sure your child talks to a college counselor and picks only courses that can be transferred.) Combining a few AP classes with units earned in summer school at the community college can make it possible to shave a year off the four that are normally required to graduate. That not only saves a year of tuition and living expenses, but it could also allow your child to start work a year earlier. That could be worth tens of thousands of dollars.

Rent or borrow books. Textbooks can be insanely costly, but with some advance planning, a student can rent or borrow them for a fraction of the cost at the campus bookstore. Several sites, including BigWords.com, allow users to check on the most affordable options for assigned texts.

Work for food. Ever heard of “hashers”? They’re the people who show up at a sorority for meal times and help serve and clean up. In return, they get free meals and sometimes get paid a nominal sum. A student can work for a restaurant or school cafeteria and probably get either free or discounted meals, too.

This won’t pay for everything, but it can help supplement a basic meal plan without eating up cash.

Pack a lunch. Cooking may not be allowed in a dorm room, but a mini-fridge can hold sodas and the makings of a decent sandwich. Packing a sack lunch is more healthful and far less expensive than heading to the cafeteria for the mystery meat du jour.

Pay as you go. Can’t pay the tuition all at once without borrowing, but think you could handle it if the cost were spread into 12 monthly payments? Call the school and ask whether you can set up a payment plan. Thousands of schools allow parents to spread their payments out, without paying interest.

Use care with loans. There are two types of student loans—those offered through the federal government, which are low-rate and loaded with borrower protections; and those offered by private lenders, which are not. If you must borrow, seek federally guaranteed student loans, which have a maximum interest rate of 6.8 percent. Most private loans have variable rates, and those rates can run into the high double digits, which can double the cost of your education in no time.

Host a garage sale. While your student is packing up for school, it could be a great time to clear out the closet (and the garage and attic) and put things up for sale. Hosting a garage sale can add a few hundred dollars of spending money to your child’s pocket to handle some of those college expenses.

Every dollar saved and earned is one you won’t have to borrow.

Kathy Kristof’s column is syndicated by Tribune Media Services. She welcomes comments and suggestions but regrets that she cannot respond to each one. E-mail her at kathykristof24@gmail.com.

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On guard: a young Matt McGrath, William H. Macy and Andy Fowle.

movies

One Indie Movie’s Hollywood Ending Discover what happens to festival darlings that don’t find distribution

By Christopher Rosen Blame Kevin Smith, or perhaps Edward Burns. They took their little indie films (Clerks and The Brothers McMullen, respectively) to the festival circuit in the mid-’90s, grabbed distribution deals and went on to fame and fortune. “The popular story that got everyone’s attention at the time was the young filmmaker who put the entire film on his credit card,” actor William H. Macy says. “His parents mortgaged their house and he sold his car, and it went to Sundance and Harvey Weinstein bought it for $8 million and everybody got healthy.

“But for every one of those stories, there’s a Colin Fitz. There are a lot of very

expensive home movies out there.”

The long road for Colin Fitz, in which Macy co-stars, ended Aug. 4, when the film was resurrected as Colin Fitz Lives! and available on demand via Sundance Selects, a video-on-demand film label.

For those keeping score, that’s more than 13 years after it premiered in competition at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival.

Colin Fitz is a witty film about two security guards (Matt McGrath and Andy Fowle) guarding the grave of rock star Colin Fitz on the anniversary of his death. Over the course of the evening, beers are chugged, epiphanies are had and a bunch of very familiar faces show

up in supporting roles—in addition to Macy, there’s Martha Plimpton, John C. McGinley, Julianne Philips, Mary McCormack and Chris Bauer.

Shot over two weeks at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx for $150,000— and completed for an additional $100,000—Colin Fitz went from table reads to film festivals in six months. “It was pretty crazy how fast it happened,” says Fitz screenwriter Tom Morrissey.

But that was just about the only thing that went quickly: Despite the positive reception the film received at festivals—New York Times critic Caryn James called it a “deftly amusing dark comedy,” and it was named “Best of the Fest” at the Austin Film Festival—finding an acceptable distribution deal proved difficult. “Deals were offered,” director Robert Bella says in an e-mail to The New York Observer, “but unfortunately none of them would cover all of our finishing costs. … I tried for over a year after Sundance to try and secure a deal that would allow me to pay everyone back and get the film, as well as myself, out of hock.”

For Morrissey, it was a hurdle he never expected: “It was terribly disappointing.

It started to feel that it was easier to write and make a movie than it is to get it distributed. You have to answer the question from your aunts and uncles and everyone you know: When am I going to get to see your movie? It was very frustrating.”

“There can be bit of shame attached to [not getting a deal],” Macy says. “We went to Sundance and didn’t sell. It’s like when someone goes into rehab, you don’t want to go, ‘Hey, I heard you’re a drunk!’”

While the general public wasn’t able to watch Colin Fitz, the film had a loyal following. “There was a cult status that it went into—people writing about it online, scenes went onto YouTube,” McGrath says. “People were carrying this torch for this thing.”

Those fans and Bella’s persistence kept Colin Fitz alive. “For nearly a decade, I slowly paid down the debts and bought back the pieces,” Bella says. “Little by little, the total amount owed got smaller and the finishing costs were reduced, which ultimately made it much easier to sell the film.”

That and some never-before-seen talking-head interviews, which fleshed out the film. “IFC (Independent Film ChanContinued on Page 79 August 12-18, 2010 Vegas Seven 77

Arts & Entertainment

Movies

Stockholm Syndrome

Exciting Brit-noir crime drama shows viewers the dark joys of kidnapping

By Rex Reed The Disappearance of Alice Creed, unveiled a year ago in Toronto, is a grim, toxic, psychological British thriller, brimming with surprises, that always manages to be quite a bit more than it appears on the surface.

Two men—one hard and middleaged, the other soft and dangerously appealing, barely into his 20s—elaborately plan and meticulously execute the kidnapping of the girl in the title, a millionaire’s daughter, dragging her into a van with a bag over her head on a street in broad daylight.

From the tightly staged opening setup (a shopping spree, buying a drill, a mattress and other supplies; assembling a makeshift bed in a dark, abandoned, soundproof flat that will be their victim’s jail cell) to the final harrowing payoff, the film is at first reminiscent of the old “rich girl falls in love with the thug who exploits and degrades her” theme in everything from William Faulkner’s lurid Sanctuary (filmed twice, with both Miriam Hopkins and Lee Remick as the victims) to the vastly sleazier 1948 scandal No Orchids for Miss Blandish, and culminating in the reallife saga of Patty Hearst.

The difference is that this one doesn’t just explore the desperate, terrifying and punishing circumstances that often lead kidnap victims of both sexes to become emotionally and physically drawn to their captors in bizarre ways society cannot understand. It also examines the psychological terrain of the eccentric kidnappers more than the girl they abduct—a pretty hysterical piece of work herself.

The older man is Vic (Eddie Marsan, fresh from his success in Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky)—slick, professional and ruthless, covering every track. His boyish accomplice is Danny (Martin Compston), who thinks too much, worries about the girl, throws up from fear and stress and drinks too much to steady his nerves. They met in prison, where the older man provided protection, and Gemma Arterton (Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time) as the disappeared title character.

78

Vegas Seven August 12-18, 2010

the disappearance of Alice Creed is their master plan that leads to Easy Street.

Alice (Gemma Arterton)—bound, gagged and tied like a hog headed for the slaughterhouse—is a damsel in dire distress, but hardly the innocent we’ve been led to believe. Her humiliation and terror pale compared to the way she erupts when Danny removes her blindfold and she discovers the intricate sham behind the masquerade: Danny is her boyfriend, who is planning to use the ransom money to finance their future together. Like someone in a dark room groping to see in sudden sunlight, Alice barely has time to adjust to one shock when it’s time for another twist: Danny may be the one she loves, but he and Vic are lovers, too!

Thinking fast, Alice conjures up her own plan—to double-cross them both and keep her own ransom money. Grabbing an opportunity to turn the tables on Danny while he’s stark naked and vulnerable, she almost succeeds, but this tightly wound, carefully made “Brit noir” has more detours ahead.

I won’t reveal how it all ends, but I will tell you how powerless we are to stop the violence that ensues when three twisted power players hell-bent on survival make the fatal mistake of underestimating each other.

Director J Blakeson, in an exciting feature film debut, assembles the details of his own screenplay like the pieces of a complex jigsaw puzzle. Even after the three characters reveal their secrets, he keeps the audience guessing.

The timing of each scene is perfect, the actors splendid. Eddie Marsan eschews his talent for comedy in a nasty role that is rigid, remorseless yet sympathetic.

Arterton, a rising star of the London stage, has as many keys to her personality as expressions. And Compston delivers a compelling portrait of unstable frailty lurking behind seductive charm. A pulsating revelation on many levels at once.

Rex Reed is the movie critic for the New York Observer.

Defying gravity yet again: The cast of Step Up 3D amazes but doesn’t surprise.

Shut up and dance … please Step Up 3D succeeds in dance but fails miserably in dialogue

By Sharon Kehoe Very few movies have made me feel embarrassed to be in the theater watching them. Except for the dancing, during Step Up 3D that’s exactly how I felt. Obviously this movie isn’t expected to be a cinematic masterpiece, but this is the third time around for the cliché franchise and they keep telling the same awful story with another slew of bad actors using lines like, “The World Jam is all I’ve got.”

The story follows Moose (Adam G. Sevani), a cool nerd who makes a pact with his girl BFF to study engineering at NYU. But—surprise, surprise—within five minutes he meets the leader and recruiter of the Pirates dance crew, Luke (Rick Malambri). Luke lures Moose into his secret lair where a bunch of talented, outcast dancers hang out. Another new recruit, Natalie (Sharni Vinson), falls for Luke but she’s got a family secret that breaks the crew apart.

Yet none of it really matters because the previous two movies make it painstakingly clear that they’re all going to come together for the finale and take first prize.

The acting is bad—really bad. The writing is even worse. They tried to throw

in a plot twist but it fails because we don’t care a lick about these characters.

However there is a silver lining: About half the film is spent showcasing absolutely, positively, fantastically awesome dancing. And the 3-D ain’t so bad, either. In fact, the movie would be better on mute because the amount of emotion and passion seen and felt in the dancing is so much greater than any line these characters attempt to deliver.

Director Jon Chu paints spectacular, gritty dance battles. The costuming and props teams stole the show (think finger lasers). And the choreographers bring moves that have never been seen, making the dancing from the previous films look ancient. No doubt, dancing has never looked like this on screen.

If you love So You Think You Can Dance, you’ll love the dancing in this movie. But sadly, there is no fast-forward button in theaters to skip the rest. So unless the makers of this franchise plan on making a dance-only flick next time, they should just step down already.

Step Up 3D (PG-13)

★★✩✩✩

Indie Movies Continued from Page 77

nel) felt that the new footage helped frame the original story ... while allowing them to release a new film,” Bella says. Arianna Bocco, IFC/Sundance Select’s vice president of acquisitions and distribution, purchased this version of the film, newly titled Colin Fitz Lives!, from Bella over drinks.

“It just sounded like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ After 14 years—we made it in 1996—I didn’t even think Robert was still plugging away at this,” McGrath says. “I’m curious to see it, especially this version.”

Bella hoped that they would release both versions eventually. As for Morrissey, forgive him for still having a bit of trepidation. “Honestly, I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. I think after 13 years, I was entitled to think that. But now that it’s finally here … will I tell my aunts and uncles to go watch it? Definitely.”

A version of Christopher Rosen’s story previously appeared in the New York Observer.

August 12-18, 2010 Vegas Seven 79

Arts & Entertainment

Movies

Class Reunion

A nostalgic and likable action-star medley plays the hits

By Cole Smithey During the closing seconds of The Expendables, Thin Lizzy’s 1976 iconic single “The Boys Are Back in Town” provides a send-off for Sylvester Stallone and his crew as they ride off into the moonlight on their chrome-polished hogs. It’s a ceremonial toast to a boy’s club of the biggest action stars of the last 35 years, and it appropriately sums up the film’s spirit of camaraderie that is its raison d’être. Coming on the heels of this summer’s other action blast-fests The Losers and The A-Team, this Stallone-directed tale of mercenary justice gets everything right that those inferior movies never had a clue about how to deliver.

Judging from its frequent conversational scenes of macho charisma, Stallone and his co-writer (David Callaham) have learned a thing or two from Quentin Tarantino’s talky cinema of character disclosure.

When one character reminds another of his motto that “A man who gets along with women is the man who gets along without them,” it’s the kind of streamlined logic that speaks volumes about a specific generation of male identity.

Barney Ross (Stallone) and his team (including Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Terry Crews and Randy Couture) kick things off with a hostage-rescue mission aboard a pirate vessel. Night-vision visuals press the laser-dot-guided sniper gun play into a video game style of violence that includes decapitation and bodysplitting. Gunner Jensen (Lundgren) goes beyond the pale of the group’s ethical code when he tries to “hang a pirate.” Going off the deep-end is viewed as an inevitable certainty among the group. Jensen gets apprehended by his own men and kicked out of the squad because of his loss of focus. It’s these kinds of colorful details that help give a modicum of meaning to the obligatory chase sequences and complex battles

that come at regular intervals.

Yin Yang (Li) has a complex about his height that he tries to compensate for by perpetually asking for a raise. A brutal hand-to-hand fight between Yang and Jensen proves to be a tougher competition than you might imagine for such a martial arts master as Li. It’s just one example of how the filmmakers resist One last time before they go: Jason Statham, Sylvester Stallone and Randy Couture. clichés by planting dictator General Garza (David Zayas), whose freelittle surprises of combat intrigue. thinking daughter, Sandra (Giselle Itie), thaws Ross’ Mickey Rourke gobbles up his chance to add thematic frosty heart. subtext as Tool, a womanizing tattoo artist whose shop Lean, mean, funny and chockablock with fast-twitch plays clubhouse for the gang of misfit mercenaries. demolition spectacle, The Expendables represents a grand Rourke’s earnest monologue about a defining moment finale for several generations of action cinema stars. of crisis decision in Bosnia gives the movie a dramatic Although there are obvious political influences at play, anchor that works in spite of its conspicuous nature. the film walks a fine generic line of idealism that errs Keeping with the fashionable trope of rogue CIA on the side of graphic novel cartoonishness without agents, the narrative is set on the fictional South succumbing entirely to style. When Ross and Lee American island of Vilena. Mystery man “Church” Christmas (Statham) do a recon mission on the island, (Bruce Willis) offers Ross $5 million for his team to their war plane is camouflaged as a “Global Wildlife break up Vilena’s dictatorial government. The meeting Conservancy” vehicle. You don’t get much wilder than with Church affords an uncredited cameo from Arnold this particular crew of big-screen badasses.

Schwarzenegger whose presidential aspirations are comically alluded to. On Vilena CIA bad apple James Monroe (Eric Roberts) is the local puppet master for the expendables (r) ★★★✩✩

By Cole Smithey

Short reviewS

Movie tiMeS

Middle Men (r)

★★✩✩✩

Packed with too much voice-over narration, Middle Men is formulaic to a fault. Luke Wilson is a businessman who manages the cash flow for an early online porn company. The ’90s-era story involves Russian mobsters, nude beauties, the FBI and a corrupt attorney ( James Caan). Based on a true story, Middle Men is forgettable because there’s never enough at stake. You’ll be entertained, but you won’t know why.

80 Vegas Seven August 12-18, 2010

Cats & Dogs: the revenge of Kitty Galore (PG) ★★✩✩✩

In this sequel to the 2001 original, Kitty Galore (voiced by Bette Midler) is the hairless feline mastermind who plans to enslave the world. For a mediocre brand of children’s action/comedy, Cats & Dogs accomplishes its not-so-lofty goal with honors. The best part of the movie is the James Bond-homage credit sequence over Shirley Bassey singing “Get the Party Started.”

Dinner for Schmucks (PG-13)

★★★✩✩

Steve Carell and Paul Rudd strike a snappy chemistry as straight man Tim Conrad (Rudd) to funnyman Barry Speck (Carell). Company president Lance Fender (Bruce Greenwood) invites Tim to the company’s monthly parlor game dinner. Guests compete to bring the most idiotic person they can find. Tim brings Barry. Hilarity ensues.

Here’s one Hollywood comedy that actually makes you laugh.

Scan here for up-to-the-minute movie listings delivered directly to your mobile device.

GRIPPING. SPINE -TINGLING.

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Arts & Entertainment

Reading

A Whale of a Tale

Super-writer China Miéville brings fantasy to the mainstream with this hefty page-turner

By Jens Rushing

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When the Darwin Centre’s prize exhibit, an eight-meter giant squid, goes missing, biologist Billy Harrow is drawn into an other-London of battling cults and competing Armageddonim. In Kraken (Del Ray, 2010), the world is hurtling to some kind of apocalypse—but which one?

China Miéville is a Dungeons & Dragons super-nerd, but with an Oxford and Harvard education and a failed run for Parliament. Miéville combines that impressive background with a love of pulp horror and its monsters.

Miéville broke out with Perdido Street Station (Del Ray, 2000), the flawed yet majestic dark fantasy that hauled the genre out of its Tolkienesque quagmire.

He quickly established himself as a unique voice in the growing “New Weird” subgenre, then branched out into children’s literature (Un Lun Dun, Del Ray, 2007) and noir (The City & The City, Del Ray, 2009); next year’s Embassytown will be hard science fiction.

Regardless of genre, Miéville is marked by his expressive, baroque style and his inventiveness.

Those attributes are on brilliant display in Kraken. Miéville tosses off great ideas as if they come 10 to a dollar: origamists who fold reality, spectral cops, a shabti strike leader, a sentient ocean and dog-headed Chaos Nazis. But while his imagination is dazzling, the book eventually sags under the accumulated weight of tangled plot lines.

Plotting has never been Miéville’s strong suit; he favors complex and uncon-

ventional story structures, and his plots tend to run away from him. Big reveals and climaxes succeed one another for the final hundred pages as curtains behind curtains are ripped away. It’s intoxicating, perhaps too much so.

But this mess is never boring. The book is read-500-pages-in-two-sittings gripping. As such, Miéville dials his style back a bit, retreating from the Faulknerian density of his previous works. (He only switches to concrete poetry once, for example.) This streamlining serves the plot well, whisking the reader from one masterstroke to the next, making it seem like Miéville’s take on the summer blockbuster.

Funny, disturbing, bizarre and terrifying, often all on one page, Kraken only occasionally seems overstuffed with ideas. But this is a book that forces you to forgive its faults. It can reference H.P. Lovecraft, Farscape and Carl Linnaeus without stretching. It achieves the weight of the greatest urban fantasies without their torpor (Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, William Morrow, 2001) or self-importance (Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Vintage, 1998).

The title of the book, referring to its tentacled MacGuffin, could just as easily refer to the storytelling, which thrashes about haphazardly, yet is still breathtakingly badass. It takes a mercurial, stomachpunching genius to stir such reactions.

And with Miéville, we have one.

Kraken

★★★★✩

The LIbrarIan Loves ...

Selected by Jeanne Goodrich, executive director for the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District.

Described in a Library Journal review as “rambunctiously entertaining,” Thomas Perry’s new novel, Strip (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), is a fast-paced L.A. crime novel by an Edgarwinning writer who consistently provides unique characters and plot twists. Strip club owner Manco Kapak is robbed as he attempts to deposit his cash receipts (substantial, since he has a nice money-laundering business going). Thus begins a wild ride of pursuing the wrong guy, the real thief making a very bad girlfriend choice, an oddly bent police detective, a triple murder no one really wanted … and a neat wrap-up at the end.

82 Vegas Seven August 12-18, 2010

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Arts & Entertainment

Art

Window seat: artist Popi Cotrell in his home studio.

Like Comfort Food for the Eyes Henderson artist Popi Cotrell paints familiar pop cultural icons … on glass Popi Cotrell had a successful go as a hairdresser in Beverly Hills, Calif., in the ’70s and ’80s—even now, at 60, his hair looks perfect. Then he developed an allergy to peroxide, a key ingredient to bleaching hair, and had to find a new line of work.

In frustration he turned to an earlier love, painting. He “splattered the crap” out of a canvas and sold it for an easy $700. “I thought I could retire.”

If only …

Instead, Cotrell has been plying his trade through good times and bad for the last 30 years. His ranch-style home in the far reaches of Henderson is awash with colors and paints, and his unusual canvasses—mostly glass windows—crowd virtually every room. He paints in a room that triples as his TV room and his bedroom. Paint is splattered about the carpeting.

Cotrell’s paintings and collages are a pop culture hodgepodge: The Beatles, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, Mickey Mouse, James Bond, Coca-Cola, superheroes. He also constructs crazy collages inside boxes: like a painting of an In-N-Out burger joint with actual straws stuffed inside, or a collage of cereal labels, partially filled with Trix and Cocoa Puffs.

“Who the fuck would think of that but me?”

86 Vegas Seven August 12-18, 2010

His art is equal parts daft and exuberant. The trick to his work is what he calls “reverse art”—he paints on the backside of the glass, in reverse. A few years ago he discovered that if he dropped the glass paintings into his pool and left them there for a week, the acrylic painting could be pulled off the glass in one piece, then reapplied to the front of another canvas (likely out of wood).

“I cannot draw,” he confesses. “I still can’t. I am no Rembrandt, brother. But I created a style people like. It’s fun. They put it in their game room. They put it in their garage.”

But taste is fickle. Cotrell says the most acclaimed art shows, such as Denver’s Cherry Creek Arts Festival, don’t consider his paintings art. And even customers are apt to look at his collages and think, “I can do that.”

Nonetheless, Cotrell’s window paintings sell. He believes that’s because a reflective glass canvas is shiny and bright. But what really sells are not the kitschy pop art pieces but instead windows painted with edgy-yet-serene hearts.

Cotrell paints lots and lots of hearts. Multicolored hearts entwined with barbed wire, with exaggerated forms that look like they’ve been crossbred

with lollipops. “If I never paint another fucking heart in my whole life, I’d be just fine with that. But that’s what sells. … Women buy art. Men do not.”

Since his art sells cheap (most range from $100 to $300, but larger canvases can go as high as several thousand dollars)—it’s an impulse buy—he has to sell about 20 paintings a show to break even. He has to do two shows a month. It adds up to a lot of hearts. And getting the windows isn’t cheap, either.

A new window costs $400; an antique window costs $40. He’s constantly hunting for lower cost windows.

Business has picked up a bit lately, but it’s still a grind. When asked him if he ever thought of doing something else, he responds with a mixture of resignation and defiance. A natural outsider, he says he doesn’t know how to do anything else. He ran a gallery at Holsum Lofts downtown a few years ago, but he couldn’t get anything to sell. So he makes ready to hit the road once more. “I thought by now I’d be successful,” he says. “I still have to work at selling art.”

See Cotrell’s art at planetpopi.net or catch him on the road at the Summer Festival of Fine Arts & Crafts on Aug. 14-15 in Prescott, Ariz., and at the Boulder City Festival on Nov. 1-3.

Photo by Anthony Mair

By T.R. Witcher

Arts & Entertainment

Music Soundscraper

Enjoying a little Shakedown on Fremont Street

By Jarret Keene

From left: drummer Jay Lane, guitarist Larry LaLonde and bassist/vocalist Les Claypool.

Primed for More

Veteran alt-rockers Primus regroup for tour, anticipated new album

By Sean DeFrank Les Claypool is a man who doesn’t stay idle for long, and is constantly moving forward. After fronting Primus for more than a decade, he has spent most of the last 10 years tending to a variety of musical, literary and cinematic projects. So when weighing his options following his most recent solo tour, he surprised even himself when a rekindling with Primus guitarist Larry LaLonde began to develop into something more.

“I wasn’t really that interested in Primus, to tell you the truth,” Claypool says. “It was just a nostalgic thing for me. But when the notion of [original drummer] Jay Lane coming back entered into the picture, it became very exciting.”

That excitement spurred the band to schedule three months’ worth of tour dates—including a midnight show at the Joint inside the Hard Rock Hotel on Aug. 14—for the band’s longest stint on the road since 2004. This will be their first local appearance since performing at the Vegoose music festival in 2005.

About a dozen shows into this tour, Primus has been filling their set lists with old favorites such as “Jerry Was a Race Car Driver” and “Harold of the Rocks,” while also dipping deeply into the Brown Album and sprinkling in the occasional cover tune, most notably the Police’s “Behind My Camel.”

“We’re just oozing with goodies,” Claypool says.

“We’re playing a lot of old stuff that nobody’s heard before. There’s some songs that haven’t seen the light of day ever.”

While Primus largely attracted a metal and alternative crowd in its heyday, Claypool’s work in his Fearless Flying Frog Brigade and Oysterhead in the 88 Vegas Seven August 12-18, 2010

early 2000s endeared him to the hippie scene. And that experience now has opened up Primus to more experimentation and improvisation.

“As we got to the end of Primus in the latter ’90s, I felt very stagnant as a player, as a musician, as a writer. It was a stalemate,” he says. “And personally none of us were getting along; it just was time to stop.

Then doing Oysterhead, it just opened my eyes to the notion of taking more chances musically.”

It is that sense of adventure that has fueled the band’s renewed enthusiasm, and has even led to early plans for a new album, the first full-length Primus release since 1999’s Antipop, which Claypool hopes to have out by spring.

“I’m not big on deadlines,” he says. “I think it needs to come as naturally as it should come, but we’re excited, which is the main thing. That’s what’s going to get us in the studio.”

In the meantime, Primus will take a look back as it moves forward, diving into its rich, eclectic catalog of songs on this tour. And since Primus plans to attend the Rush concert at the MGM Grand earlier in the evening, Claypool and his bandmates will be primed by the time they take the stage.

“We’re all going to go over and see the Rush guys, so we’ll probably be all fired up,” Claypool says.

“I’ve done a few late-night shows in Vegas over the years, and they’re always pretty damn fun. We’ve got a lot of friends in that region, so we’ll see who sneaks out that night. You never know who’s going to pop up in Vegas.”

The Joint, Aug. 14, midnight, $31-$81, 693-5583.

Fremont Street is about to get all shook up by Las Vegas Shakedown, a supercharged, three-day (Aug. 13-15, $75, lasvegasshakedown.com) “rock ’n’ roll weekend” involving more than 50 punk, rockabilly and roots music acts performing at Beauty Bar and Las Vegas Country Saloon, plus burlesque performances and an art show.

I urge you to go for four reasons: The Warlocks (dark psyche rock), Spindrift (cinematic spaghetti western), Electric Frankenstein (monster-themed punk) and, my personal favorite, Andre Williams, the 74-year-old R&B/ blues-punk singer known for his raunchy ’50s songs— “Bacon Fat,” “Jail Bait” and “Shake a Tail Feather” (made famous by The Blues Brothers movie).

Williams (a.k.a. The Black Godfather) has enjoyed a long, legendary career—from his hit LPs for Fortune Records, to discovering and co-writing songs for Stevie Wonder at Motown, to signing with Chess Records in the ’60s. After success writing songs for funk groups such as Parliament, Williams descended into poverty and addiction.

Norton Records tracked down Williams and got him to re-release and re-record his classic works, and to produce new material with Jon Spencer. Williams’ psychedelic soul album, That’s All I Need, is out on Bloodshot Records. Catch him at Las Vegas Country Saloon (Aug. 15, $25).

If a weekend on Fremont sounds too “street” for you, there’s a variety of other cool shows to consider, especially for Aug. 13. Acclaimed British prog-rockers Porcupine Tree play The Joint at the Hard Rock with Coheed and Cambria, veteran death-metal act Malevolent Creation crush Cheyenne Saloon (3103 N. Rancho Dr.), and the world’s most annoying vampire-emocore group Vampires Everywhere! sink Auto-Tuned fangs into Area 702 (3040 Simmons St. in North Las Vegas) with Black Veil Brides. How’s that for variety?

Buy tickets for this show now! Texas electro-dance soul rock duo Ghostland Observatory brings the intergalactic funk to House of Blues Aug. 19 (9 p.m., $21-26).

This show’s going to kick so much ass I’m going to wear my jockstrap backward!

Got an extra Bob Dylan ticket? Contact jarret_keene@yahoo.com.

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Art & Entertainment

CD Reviews

By Jarret Keene

electric folk

Richard Thompson Dream Attic (Shout! Factory) In a perfect world, British singer, songwriter and guitarist Richard Thompson would be selling out arenas and Eric Clapton would be shining shoes. His pyrotechnical six-string work is revered by musicians and still sells copies of Guitar Player magazine, but his songwriting is actually better. With Dream Attic, his 14th album of original material, Thompson made the choice to record the new songs live, performances culled from three shows at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco with minimal rehearsals beforehand. The musicianship is incredible, the energy raucous—from the stomping, sax-fueled (courtesy of Pete Zorn) Wall Street takedown of “The Money Shuffle” to the bluesy, bittersweet, greasy-fretboard strut of “Demons in Her Dancing Shoes.” There are ballads, too, such as “A Brother Slips Away,” which contains Thompson’s best solo and lyrics to date: “That old poet’s vision still coursing through your veins/It breaks my heart to know/I’ll never see your face again.” Dream Attic is crammed full of musical treasures. ★★★★★

late-night indie

Kelli Scarr Piece (Silence Breaks) Moonraker guitarist, Moby collaborator and Emmynominated HBO documentary composer Kelli Scarr specializes in lush yet intimate indie-pop arrangements that fall somewhere between Cat Power and New Buffalo, but with more of a late-night/early-morning ambient eeriness. Much as I don’t have time for what currently seems like a deluge of quiet indie-folk, Scarr’s full-length debut shouldn’t be glossed over. “Salt to the Sea,” with its simple, majestic piano chords and Scarr’s layered, wordless vocal harmonies are borderline psychedelic and will compel you to step outside after dark and stare up at the stars, pondering your insignificance. The jaunty, mandolin-strummed march of “Driftwood” floats dangerously and delightfully close to the children’s music genre, while “The Wonder,” a song about Scarr’s baby son sleeping and waking in his crib, tugs at the heartstrings.

Spare without being minimalist, Piece is content to let the mysteries of life be, and to instead cherish its beautiful incompleteness. ★★★★✩

singer-songwriter

David Dondero #Zero With a Bullet (Team Love) Rowdy, ragged, literate, punk-tinged alt-country rock sounds a helluva easier than it is, because so few bands get it right. For every Lucero, there’s a whole parade of flawed impostors, but not Austin, Texas’ David Dondero. His latest album revels in loose, upbeat, guitar-strummed rock with an outlaw bent. “Neighborhood’s cleaning up/I guess that means the rent’s on the rise,” he sings in the anti-gentrification anthem “Just a Baby in Your Momma’s Eyes,” full of downtrodden characters increasingly pushed to the margins of the American dream. “Jesus From 12 to 6” sketches the desperate existence of a junkie clawing his way toward salvation or oblivion or both. The only weak moment here is the too-personal (yet very funny upon first listen) country-sounding indie-rock lament of the title track, which bemoans the impossible existence of a music man in today’s pernicious industry, a song so miserable it almost sounds like a veiled suicide threat. Stay strong, Dondero.

Your gorgeous songs will save you in the end. ★★★✩✩ 90 Vegas Seven August 12-18, 2010

with Corinne Bailey Rae

AUGUST 22

AUGUST 18

AUGUST 21

SePTemBer 10

SePTemBer 11

with Tift Merritt

SePTemBer 3

SePTemBer 4

with Beach House & The Very Best with Neon Indian

SePTemBer 16

SePTemBer 17

SePTemBer 22

with Anthrax

SePTemBer 29

october 20

shaGGy Thursday, auGusT 12 FrIday, sEPTEMBEr 24 Tickets available at ticketmaster.com 1.800.745.3000 The Pearl Box Office 702.944.3200 4321 W. Flamingo Road, Las Vegas, NV 89103 | 702.942.7777 | palms.com

©2010 Fiesta Palms LLC. All Rights Reserved.

{ MEAT FOR A LATE NIGHT AFFAIR }

STEAKS • COCKTAILS

A D O LC E GRO U P REST AU RAN T BRO U GH T T O Y O U BY T H E N IGH T LIF E GRO U P AT T HE H ARD RO C K H O T EL & C ASIN O

HARD ROCK HOTEL & CASINO,

4455 PARADISE ROAD, LAS VEGAS, NV 89169 (702) 693 / 5500

Dining Have You Been Missing Out? Discover one of the best steak deals in town, at the newly revamped Twin Creeks

By Max Jacobson There is a lot to cheer about at the Silverton these days. CEO Craig Cavileer recently announced that he would restore part of employees’ slashed salaries, and a new menu and thorough renovation have made its steak house, Twin Creeks, a compelling off-Strip destination.

Mains from the “Classics” portion of the menu may be—no kidding—the best deal in Las Vegas. How about a bone-in rib-eye with blue cheese and bourbon barbecue sauce, plus a choice of salads and two side dishes—such as the terrific house creamed corn, a fully dressed baked potato or tender steamed asparagus—all for $27?

The $3 million makeover included a “wave wall” at the back of the restaurant, plus lushly upholstered booths into which you can

sink while enjoying one of the boutique bourbons from an impressive list. Cocktails, furthermore, are terrific here. Try the Blackberry Crush, an icy, refreshing drink that’s like a mojito.

I dined here on a Wednesday evening and was disappointed to find the room only half full. All I could think of was that locals don’t know what they are missing. From 6-8 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday the restaurant serves a half-price, wide-ranging menu of tapas, including stuffed mushrooms, bacon-wrapped dates, goat-cheese-filled piquillo peppers and (my personal favorite here) roasted new potatoes with chipotle mayonnaise.

Executive chef Jason Bradley has quite an imagination. I ate my way through seven small plates, including springy meatballs and

Photo by Anthony Mair

Continued on Page 94

August 12-18, 2010 Vegas Seven 93

Dining

Diner’s Notebook

fragrant smoked salmon on toast points, before attacking an excellent salt-and-pepper-crusted prime rib, beautifully pink in the center.

The potato and creamed corn were both exemplary, but I do have a bone to pick with the Chop Chop Salad included with the dinner. I recently had an amazing chopped salad at Society at the Wynn Encore made with organic turkey and avocado, tomatoes, bacon and a touch of lettuce. Now that’s what I call a chopped salad.

The Twin Creeks’ version is 80 percent iceberg, the most boring vegetable on earth. The salad’s bacon lardoons, however, are as good as bacon gets.

You’ll pay slightly more for the a la carte menu, but the prices are still well under those in steak houses a few miles north on Las Vegas Boulevard. What’s more, this menu is filled with arresting choices: lobster bisque, enormous panroasted scallops, sesamecrusted ahi, rack of lamb and good prime steaks, all done with expert skill.

The only thing the restaurant lacks, actually, is a pastry chef. At the moment, it is looking for one, so you’ll have to be

mollified by the desserts the restaurant gets from local purveyors.

I was not. The chocolate Oreo cake I ordered had freezer burn. It always baffles me that a restaurant will sink millions of dollars into a place and overlook such a critical element of the experience.

On the other hand, I’m also baffled as to why anyone would pay $40 for a bare hunk of beef, minus the salad and sides, when one that is every bit as good is available for a third less.

In the Silverton hotel-casino, 3333 Blue Diamond Road, 914-8594. Hours: 5-9 p.m. Tuesday-Thursday, 5-10 p.m.

Friday-Saturday. Dinner for two, $60-$85.

Twin Creeks’ newly remodeled dining room is tasty, too.

The Grape Nut

How Clos Pegase Changed My Life (Well, my opinion of California chardonnay at least)

By Xania Woodman “I love where chardonnays are going today,” Napa Valley (Calif.) winemaker Florencia Palmaz says.

The Amalia chard (named for her mother) started as a mere side project at the Palmaz winery; now, you’re lucky if you can wrestle a bottle away from her wine club members. The California chardonnay pendulum is swinging back toward center, she explained to me, returning from the overly rich, über-oaked ‘80s and ‘90s. And the steely, flinty, sternly un-oaked Chablis-style chards I fell for in the early aughts were a rough antithesis. But this emerging middle explains the revelation I’d had the day before I talked with her in Napa. Until recently, when I thought of California Chardonnay my shell-shocked taste buds would conjure up images of oak chips, imitation vanilla extract, and butter and toast. I’d wince and whiz by that aisle in the wine store to get to the citrusy sauvignon blancs. So imagine my surprise when, on that recent trip, I found myself enjoying—nay, utterly delighting—in a bright and lively California chardonnay. Cultivated in cool little patch of Carneros that mirrors Burgundian chard country, Clos Pegase Winery’s Mitsuko Vineyard consists of 365 acres, one for every day of the year owner Jan Shrem loved his wife, the late Mitsuko Shrem. The 2008 Mitsuko’s Vineyard Chardonnay offers peach, pear, nectarine and other stone fruits on the nose and a hint of lemon zest and smoky oak. It is oaked (eight months in 31 percent new French oak) only so as to complement the estate fruit, Clos Pegase winemaker Richard Sowalsky says. Mitsuko’s Vineyard also puts forth great pinot noir, too, but this drinkable gem is really the bread and butter.

2008 Mitsuko’s Vineyard Chardonnay is available at Eiffel Tower at Paris ($64) and Total Wine & More ($16).

94

Vegas Seven August 12-18, 2010

High-end vegan, a happy cocktail and Lolita’s surprise

By Max Jacobson Alex Stratta, the double threat at Wynn who runs the Alex and Stratta restaurants, has lost 80 pounds and looks incredible. What he hasn’t lost is his worldclass technique, which he recently showed off in a dinner at Alex celebrating his Grand Award from Wine Spectator for the restaurant’s wine list.

Stratta prepared waves of bite-size appetizers such as Peruvian-style ceviche subtly flavored with cumin, then dazzled our table with spiced duck breast with Black Mission figs and American Wagyu short ribs.

In honor of his boss Steve Wynn’s recent commitment to veganism, Stratta tells me he is working on a vegan menu. For a vegan, this must be as good as it gets—and may be as expensive.

I caught up with Francesco Lafranconi, the globe-trotting Southern Wine & Spirits director of spirits education, in his mixology laboratory between trips to New York and Shanghai so he could show me one of his new drinks, the Sorriso. The drink is super simple to make. Mix 1¼ ounces of Plymouth Gin, a half ounce each of Absolut Pear, Luxardo Cherry and Harveys Bristol Cream sherry, and a dash of bitters, preferably Angostura. Shake over ice and strain, then garnish with lemon or orange peel. It’s guaranteed to make you smile, because that’s what sorriso means in Italian. Look for the drink to surface soon in bars around the city.

Meanwhile, in Town Square, big things continue to happen. I enjoyed a wonderful family dinner at Nu Sanctuary, cooked by chef Brian Howard with assistance from Andre’s Gary LaMorte and RM Upstairs’ Adam Sobel, and checked out the new Miller’s Ale House, which features an eclectic menu, including a lobster clam bake, and 64-ounce pitchers of brews. (I’ll tell you more about that soon.)

But the real surprise came at Lolita’s Cantina and Tequila Bar, located in the space that housed the very good but ill-timed Louis’ Fish Camp. Owner Carlo Cavallo has a place in Sonoma, Calif., called Meritage Martini Oyster Bar & Grille and has been a chef for several prestigious wineries there. Chef Tacho Kneeland has translated the farm-to-table aesthetic that makes Northern California restaurants so good and does wonderful versions of street tacos, chiles rellenos and seviche, as well as a killer spice rubbed, spitroasted chicken and amazing carnitas.

Hungry, yet?

Follow Max Jacobson’s latest epicurean observations, reviews and tips at foodwinekitchen.com.

Photography by Anthony Mair

Twin Creeks Continued from Page 93

Dining

Dishing

Pork Siciliana at Nora’s Wine Bar

The house specialty will transport you to Palermo, Sicily, where this dish originated. The pork is tender, and the breading allows the juices to accumulate. Served with roasted tomatoes, arugula and a lemon vinaigrette, the dish is great to share with friends and family over a bottle of wine from Nora’s extensive wine list. $17 for 8-ounce portion and $29 for 16-ounce portion, 1031 S. Rampart Blvd., 940-6672.

96 Vegas Seven August 12-18, 2010

The Count at Dad’s Grilled Cheese

This family-owned restaurant claims to serve the world’s most delicious comfort food. The array of grilled delights here features a sandwich whose name plays off that classic lunch treat, the Monte Cristo. It consists of Texas toast dipped in egg and grilled, with melted Swiss cheese and lightly grilled ham and turkey. A sprinkle of powdered sugar adds a touch more comfort. $7, 5255 S. Decatur Blvd., 247-6640.

Steakhouse Salad at T-Bones Chophouse

A great start to a meaty meal here is this refreshing combination of romaine lettuce, Gorgonzola cheese, bacon, avocado and beefsteak tomatoes. And it tastes best when you’re eating out on the restaurant’s swanky patio. $12, in Red Rock hotel-casino, 797-7576.

Ripped Potatoes at Strip House

The steak house, seen in reality shows such as Bravo’s Millionaire Matchmaker and E!’s Kendra, features the perfect side to any steak or seafood entrée. Large Idaho potatoes are “ripped” into small pieces, fried until crisp, tossed with Parmesan cheese and sprinkled with parsley. $10, in Planet Hollywood, 737-5200.

Pork Siciliana and The Count photos by Anthony Mair

Got a favorite dish? Tell us at comments@weeklyseven.com.

Dining

Cooking With …

Wes Kendrick

After a wild ride early on, the chef and his sister have settled in at Table 34, which has become a Las Vegas classic

By Patrick Moulin She worked at Postrio in San Francisco under the tutelage of Wolfgang Puck and soon was chosen to help open Spago in Las Vegas in 1992.

As the ’90s ended, Wes had become an executive chef—and exactly whom Laurie needed to help run a restaurant of their own. He jumped at the chance to work with his sister, and Wild Sage was born.

As a family-run restaurant, Table 34 has found success in a town dominated by absentee chefs. The refined American contemporary eatery has become a hidden gem nestled in the shadow of a large office complex next to a Starbucks, a nail salon and a day-care center. Like a truffle pig, local foodies have sniffed out Wes’ dedication to interesting takes on old favorite dishes, quality ingredients and his insistence on making nearly everything on the menu from scratch.

“It’s a melting pot,” Wes says. “There is a French flair, and I do a lot of grill work, but I tend to stick with the comfort food. We really pride ourselves on the quality that we’re producing here. You start with the best ingredients and it shows when the plate hits the table.”

Fresh ingredients are the key to Chef Kendrick’s Chilled Summer Gazpacho with Shrimp and Avocado Salad—a light, cool dish sure to be a hit with temperatures in the triple digits.

Chilled Summer Gazpacho With Shrimp and Avocado Salad Serves 6-8

The Gazpacho 2 12-ounce cans of peeled diced tomatoes 1 5-ounce can tomato juice 1 medium yellow tomato (ripe) 1 large carrot (peeled and chopped) 1 English cucumber (seeded and chopped) 4 cloves of garlic (peeled) 1 lemon (juice only)

Suggested Pairing Laurie Kendrick recommends the 2008 J. Lohr Carol’s Vineyard Sauvignon Blanc ($18 retail) from Napa Valley, Calif. The wine is “light, crisp and fresh with citrus flavors and herbal undertones.” It augments the dish, highlighting its subtle flavors without upstaging it.

Wes Kendrick

98 Vegas Seven August 12-18, 2010

6 fresh mint leaves 6 fresh basil leaves ¼ cup red onion (chopped) 2½ tablespoons lemon oil 2 / cup sherry 3 3 tablespoons sherry vinegar 1 teaspoons kosher salt ¼ teaspoons black pepper (table grind) 2 tablespoons sugar 4 shakes Tabasco

Prepare all the ingredients above and combine and blend in a food processor or blender. Chill well, preferably overnight.

The Salad 1 pound shrimp (peeled, deveined, cooked, chopped and chilled) 3 green onions (chopped) 1 avocado (diced) ¼ cup fennel (diced)

Juice of 1 lemon Pinch of salt and pepper ¼ cup mayonaise ¼ cup sour cream 6 to 8 fried tortilla cups

Combine ingredients in a mixing bowl, chill before serving.

Day of serving, ladle the gazpacho into soup bowls, fill the tortilla cup with the chilled shrimp and avocado mixture, place the tortilla cup on top of the soup and serve. If you cannot find the cups, put the shrimp in the soup bowl and pour soup around it.

Photography by Anthony Mair

In 1999, the brother and sister team of Wes and Laurie Kendrick opened a small restaurant in an office park along Warm Springs Road. Within months, thanks to Wes’ new-American cooking and Laurie’s management and charm, Wild Sage Café became one of the Valley’s hottest lunch spots. In fact, it became so popular that they decided to open a second restaurant in The Lakes neighborhood. It was the classic restaurant gamble, and it left the Kendricks overextended. The new restaurant folded, and in 2003, it took the original Wild Sage down with it.

But there was nothing wrong with original model, and it wasn’t long before the Kendricks made their comeback. About a year later, as managing partners this time, they renamed the place after a lucky tabletop inside the first restaurant, added a bar, remodeled the interior and reopened as Table 34.

They’ve been a hit ever since.

Wes got his culinary education working alongside regimented, oldschool Italian chefs in his hometown of Redlands, Calif. “I just went to school in the kitchen. I placed myself with the best chefs in the area,” Wes says. “I called it ‘paid college,’ with a daily beating.”

Big sister Laurie, meantime, was moving up in the restaurant world.

Travel Macau at night (left), the Ruins of St. Paul’s (below) and Senado Square (bottom).

Brash Vision, Quaint Charm Cuisine one of many reasons for a Las Vegan to visit Macau

By Max Jacobson One of my friends called my trip to Macau a busman’s holiday. He couldn’t have been more wrong. Macau, joined at the hip to China’s mainland, is largely thought of as the Asian Las Vegas, but it is also really a fascinating place with a long history and deep culture.

Portuguese traders first settled in Macau in the 16th century and administered the region until it reverted back to China in 1999. However, the Macanese retain autonomy, separate passports and freedom of movement not enjoyed by mainland Chinese.

Many of the locals still speak Portuguese, in fact, and the Caucasian population here is fluent in Cantonese, the local dialect. I speak some Cantonese, and if I do so in Hong Kong, it startles the natives. That’s not the case in Macau, where my attempts barely merit a shrug.

So why would someone from Las Vegas want to visit here?

First and foremost, it is a unique 21st-century destination with incredible cuisine, great hotel deals and a variety of sights.

This is more than a booming casino town; there are museums, churches and grand gardens. There are interesting old neighborhoods such as Taipa, graced with Portuguese tiles (calcatas) that line the streets in place of cobblestone. There’s a fascinating shopping district called Senado Square, where anything from anywhere is sold, and it looks like a walking street in any European city.

My favorite cultural amenity in Macau is cuisine, which includes Chinese, Portuguese and Macanese—the last is a fusion combining the first two. It’s cooking you don’t get across the channel in Hong Kong, and it’s laughably cheap.

My first night in Taipa, which retains a Portuguese character, I dined at O Manel on garlic bread, grilled sardines, broiled lamb chops and Portuguese wines from the Douro 100 Vegas Seven August 12-18, 2010

River. The meal at the tiny neighborhood restaurant was rustic and satisfying, and I slept off the jet lag efficiently.

I had lunch the next day at O Porto Interior, my first Macanese meal. It started with tempura (really a Portuguese dish adapted in Japan during the shogun period, and commonly considered Japanese) and finished with serradura, a pudding of ground crackers, cream and condensed milk that one can make in a blender in two minutes. In between, there were enormous garlic prawns eight inches long, a mild chicken curry, and Portuguese fried rice, an amalgam of Chinese sausage, egg, garlic, peppers and rice—irresistible.

The second reason to visit Macau is that it’s interesting to see a Through the Looking Glass view of Vegas. The casino culture is different here, and certainly livelier. The tables are more crowded, the patrons louder.

I first visited Macau before the handover and experienced a rundown city. It’s different today. Construction cranes rise everywhere you look, helping build more hotels, casinos and shopping malls, and gaming tables at casinos are often three-deep with bettors.

The new Venetian, a part of the City of Dreams built on a landfill, has a gaming area four times the size of the one in Vegas. Wynn and MGM Grand are showplace casinos that rival their Vegas mother ships both in grandeur and luxury.

Galaxy, a $14 billion resort scheduled to open its doors in 2011, looks to out-do any resort on Earth.

Gaming executives in Vegas may be scratching their heads about lost revenue, but all they need do is look across the Pacific. Macau gets at least 30 million visitors a year, half of whom drive in for the day from a place on the Chinese mainland. It’s a little further from here, but as the Governator says, I’ll be back.

Doing Macau

When to go: The weather is cool and beautiful from mid-October to mid-March.

Getting there: Restricted fares from Las Vegas to Hong Kong begin at about $1,100. The best connection is probably Cathay Pacific’s nonstop flight from Los Angeles. Hourly hydrofoil service to Macau is available at Chek Lap Kok Airport.

The trip takes 50 minutes, and the ticket prices begin at $15 for Tourist Class seats.

Where to stay: The Wynn Encore Macau, where the flower-filled lobby leads to a variety of beautiful rooms designed by Las Vegas’ Roger Thomas. Room prices begin at around $160. The Grand Hyatt, a new hotel in the City of Dreams that is about half the price of the Hyatt in Hong Kong, with lush appointments such as a spa and upscale chocolate shop. Rooms from $145.

Where to eat: O Manel (Rua Fernão Mendes Pinto 90, Taipa, 853-2882-7571), which has Portuguese cuisine such as grilled sardines, and leitao, succulent roast pork. It’s about $15 per person.

O Porto Interior (Rua do Almirante Sergio 259-B, 853-2896-7770), a place for Macanese specialties such as tempura, curry chicken and Portuguese fried rice.

About $20 per person.

SportS & LeiSure Still a Score to Settle

Dominick Cruz (left) will put his WEC bantamweight title on the line against Joseph Benavidez on Aug. 18 at the Palms.

WEC rematch between bantamweights Cruz, Benavidez has a tough act to follow

By Andreas Hale World Extreme Cagefighting has stood in the shadow of the Ultimate Fighting Championship since Zuffa, which owns the UFC, purchased the WEC in 2006. But the WEC has started to stand out on its own this year, and the organization, which focuses on lighter weight classes, will look to further grow its reputation at WEC 50. The Aug. 18 card in the Pearl at the Palms will be headlined by a rematch between Joseph Benavidez and newly crowned bantamweight champion Dominick Cruz.

Cruz and Benavidez met at WEC 42 last August in an action-packed fight that ended with Cruz handing Benavidez his first loss and the bout receiving the Fight of the Night award. The rematch features higher stakes as Cruz will defend the bantamweight title for the first time since defeating Brian Bowles on March 6. And what better opponent than one who wants to avenge his lone loss?

“I’m very excited to have my first title shot be against the guy who gave me my only loss,” Benavidez says.

“The fact that I get to do both in one night is a dream come true.”

Since the defeat, Benavidez (12-1) refocused his training and scored two resounding victories: a technical knockout of Rani Yahya on Dec. 19 and a dominating performance against former bantamweight champion Miguel Torres, who was choked out in the second round on the same night when Cruz won his title.

“I had a much different philosophy about training [before losing],” Benavidez says. “I wouldn’t study any tape and thought I could just beat people with my instincts.” The 26-year-old now prepares specifically for each opponent and looks for weaknesses to exploit. “I’m doing everything different now,” he says. “You can see the difference in my last two fights, which I feel were my most impressive. I became a different fighter.”

Cruz, 24, knows that Benavidez will come into the cage well prepared for their rematch.

“What I see this time around is Benavidez not under-

estimating me,” Cruz says. “When we first fought he assumed I couldn’t wrestle at his caliber and I wasn’t as athletic as him. It was kind of foolish and I think that’s why I won the fight. I’m sure he will be more than ready for me this time.”

Cruz (15-1) began his mixed martial arts career by winning nine consecutive fights before dropping his WEC debut against Urijah Faber in a featherweight bout in March 2007. Realizing that 145 pounds wasn’t a comfortable fit for him, Cruz dropped to the 135-pound division and has reeled off six straight wins while showcasing his hyperactive style, which combines sound footwork with solid wrestling skills.

“I kind of pieced [my style] together,” Cruz says. “I didn’t start out boxing or kickboxing. My striking came from a wrestling base. You can’t call it anything but MMA fighting.”

Benavidez echoes the sentiments of many in the MMA world. “I can’t think too much about what Cruz may do,” the former high school wrestling champion says. “He’s already a confusing fighter. He’s a freaking

jigsaw puzzle that moves around like nobody else.”

Although they differ on who will come out on top in the rematch, both fighters believe their bout will be the highlight of the card. “It will definitely be the fight of the night,” Benavidez says. “Neither of us have ever been in a boring fight, and we’ll be coming out with new tricks.”

Says Cruz: “If it goes five rounds there’s just no way we won’t win the award; I can almost guarantee it. The fans are in for a treat whether the fight ends early or goes the distance.”

WEC 50 also will have three Las Vegas-based fighters: Shane Roller, Anthony Njokuani and Fredson Paixao. Njokuani (13-3) will face WEC newcomer Maciej Jewtuszko in a lightweight bout; Paixao (9-3) will face Bryan Caraway (14-4) in a featherweight bout, and Roller (8-2) will be featured in the main undercard event against fellow lightweight Anthony Pettis (9-1).

Tickets for WEC 50 are available at the Pearl box office or ticketmaster.com, and the main event and much of the undercard can be seen live on Versus at 6 p.m.

Looking to blow off some steam? Or maybe you’re just seeking some indoor recreation to escape the heat. Here is a two-word solution: batting cages.

While the number of facilities has dwindled in recent years, there are still a few places throughout the Valley to come inside and hone your swing.

Bat-R-Up (3040 Simmons St. in North 102 Vegas Seven August 12-18, 2010

Las Vegas; 647-3844), has 15 cages with machines ranging in speed from 35 to 85 mph, and counts Philadelphia Phillies All-Star outfielder Shane Victorino as one of its clients.

On Deck Baseball Academy (4145 N. Rancho Dr., Suite 110; 629-3325), offers hitting and pitching opportunities within its 11,000-square-foot facility, with instruction

available from former major league hitting coach Mike “The Hitman” Easler.

The Dugout (6231 McLeod Dr., Suite L; 478-5125), has 10 cages available to take hacks at pitches ranging in speed from 50 to 85 mph, with four-time National League batting champion Bill Madlock on the property nearly every day to provide hitting tips.

– Sean DeFrank

WEC photo by Josh Hedges

Get your swings in this summer at indoor batting cages

New Insalata AOC.- Arugula, Cool Orange Slices, Cranberries Toasted Almonds and Goat Cheese topped with Tangy lo-cal Citrus Dressing

Going for Broke

Eagles, Falcons should fly over projected win totals

By Matt Jacob Did you hear that Brett Favre finally retired? No, really! Err, wait a second, no he didn’t. Or maybe he did. Honestly, how the Soap Opera Network hasn’t paid for the rights to this annual midsummer saga is beyond me.

Because the NFL’s reigning drama queen once again is up to his “will-he-orwon’t-he” antics, I’ll bypass the Vikings and the NFC North with this week’s continued breakdown of NFL over/under season win totals and focus instead on the NFC East and South. Perhaps by October, when Favre has made a final decision, I’ll be able to get to the Vikings.

Just a reminder that my recommendations are rated from a 1 ( just flip a coin) to 5 (hello, college fund for the kids!).

Note: My bankroll remains at $5,605.

NFC EAST COWBOYS (over/under 10): The last time we saw QB Tony Romo, well, we didn’t see him, as he was buried under an avalanche of purple jerseys throughout Dallas’ 34-3 playoff loss to Minnesota.

For whatever reason, the Cowboys did little in the offseason to address their biggest weakness, meaning Romo (42 sacks last year) could be running for his life again. However, if he gets any time to throw, Romo has an arsenal of dangerous weapons. He also has a defense that gave up the second-fewest points in the league in 2009. Dallas does have a daunting road schedule (Minnesota, Green Bay, Indianapolis) plus a Thanksgiving Day home tilt against the Saints. Still, this franchise has won at least nine games in each of the last five years. Plus, the Cowboys, who are just 12-30 in December since 1994, catch a late-season break by finishing with four winnable games (Eagles twice, Redskins, Cardinals).

Recommendation: OVER (1).

EAGLES (over/under 8): From 200009, the Eagles delivered double-digit victories seven times, and that doesn’t include 2008 when they went 9-6-1 then won two playoff contests to get to the NFC Championship Game. But that was Donovan McNabb’s team. Now McNabb is in Washington and Kevin Kolb is at the controls of Andy Reid’s offense, and while most believe that single move is

going to send Philadelphia sliding down the standings, I believe otherwise. Kolb’s only two NFL starts came in Weeks 2 and 3 last year in relief of an injured McNabb, and the kid completed 64.7 percent of his passes for 718 yards and four TDs with three interceptions, and he was sacked only once in 85 pass attempts.

Finally, Kolb has an advantageous early schedule (home games vs. Green Bay and Washington; road games at Detroit and Jacksonville) that should leave Philly no worse than 3-1 heading into October.

Recommendation: OVER (4).

GIANTS (over/under 8.5): The only thing in New Jersey easier to score on than the 2009 Giants was the cast of Jersey Shore. Only the Lions and Rams gave up more points than the Giants, who yielded 26.7 points per game (including 40 or more in five of their final 11 games). Smartly, New York landed two key free-agent safeties in the offseason before using its first four draft picks to take defensive players. Will it be enough to push the Giants over .500 this year? Looking at the schedule and seeing six divisional games against pass-happy teams, plus games against the Bears, Texans, Vikings and Packers, I say no. The good news: New York hasn’t had consecutive nonwinning seasons under coach Tom Coughlin (now in his eighth year). The bad news: Only three times since 2003 have the Giants finished with more than eight victories.

Recommendation: UNDER (2).

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REDSKINS (over/under 8): Obviously, going from the QB/coach combo of Jason Campbell/Jim Zorn to McNabb/Mike Shanahan is like going from Big Mac/fries to steak/lobster. And yes, Shanahan’s roster overhaul includes nearly a dozen free agents and an aboveaverage draft class. However, I wouldn’t expect any overnight miracles in D.C. this season, and for this team (4-12 last year) to more than double its victory total from a year ago would definitely qualify as a miracle. Interesting note: In his first season in Denver in 1995 with a veteran named Elway as his QB, Shanahan went 8-8, producing exactly one more win than the Broncos had the previous year.

Recommendation: UNDER (3).

Continued on Page 104 August 12-18, 2010 Vegas Seven 103

Sports & Leisure

NFC SOUTH BUCCANEERS (over/under 6): When a team has a 34-year-old rookie coach and a rookie quarterback, and onethird of the roster is comprised of rookie free agents, it’s probably going to be a long season. Sure enough, Tampa Bay’s 3-13 campaign last year was its worst since 1991. On the bright side, Tampa never quit, as two of its wins came in the final three weeks (both on the road).

The Bucs will have a legitimate shot at winning five home games (Browns, Rams, Panthers, Lions and Seahawks), and road victories at Arizona and Washington are hardly out of the question. Also, they end the season at New Orleans, and it’s very possible the Saints will be resting their starters, which is what happened in Week 16 last year when Tampa went to the Superdome and won as a 14-point underdog.

Recommendation: OVER (2).

FALCONS (over/under 9): The wise guys can’t get enough of the FalconsOVER this summer (some properties

104

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Drew Brees and the Saints have a couple of trends working against them this season.

have raised Atlanta’s number to 9½). This is easy to understand when you consider former No. 1 pick Matt Ryan is in his third year at quarterback and RB Michael Turner is healthy. Last year, injuries robbed Ryan of two games (Atlanta lost

PANTHERS (over/under 7): Trivia question: How many times since John Fox took over as Carolina’s coach in 2003 have the Panthers finished with fewer than seven victories? If you answered zero, get yourself a beer. So why is Carolina’s win total so low in 2010? It’s mostly because Fox has virtually no experience at quarterback. Matt Moore has a total of eight starts in his NFL career, with five of them coming at the end of last season.

The other three passers on the roster have never taken a snap in the league. The good news: Moore went 4-1 as a starter last year with an 8-1 TD-to-interception ratio. The bad news: Carolina faces just five teams that are clearly inferior in the Bucs (twice), Rams, Seahawks and

Browns, and four of those games are on the road. Recommendation: UNDER (2).

SAINTS (over/under 10½): Fact No. 1: New Orleans rolled to the NFC South title last year with a 13-3 record, then went on to win the Super Bowl. Fact No. 2: Five of the last 11 Super Bowl winners failed to even make the playoffs the next season, and not once since the NFL adopted eight four-team divisions has the NFC South champ finished higher than third the following year. Those are some scary odds that Drew Brees and Co. will be trying to buck this year. And they’ll have to do it while facing five opponents that are projected to finish above .500 (Atlanta twice, Minnesota, Dallas and Baltimore). I learned my lesson in the Super Bowl to never bet against Brees or the Saints. But I’m not about to bet against the Super Bowl/NFC South trends, either. Recommendation: UNDER (1).

Matt Jacob is a former local sports writer who has been in the sports handicapping business for more than four years. For his weekly column, Vegas Seven has granted Matt a “$7,000” bankroll. If he blows it all, we’ll fire him and replace him with a monkey.

Photo by Warren Wimmer / Icon SMI / Retna

both) and Turner missed five, and yet the Falcons still finished 9-7, posting back-toback winning seasons for the first time in franchise history. I’m betting that Atlanta makes it three straight. The Falcons’ toughest nondivisional games (Baltimore, Green Bay, Cincinnati) are at home, and with the exception of a Week 3 contest at New Orleans, Atlanta could be favored in the remainder of its road contests.

Recommendation: OVER (4).

Going for Broke Continued from Page 103

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seven questions Do you think the art museum will come back?

I hope it comes back. I know that the board intends for it to come back, and I don’t know exactly what form that will take. I know it will be a challenge to get that back and going in this economy, so I don’t see it coming back in the near future.

But I do think there will be a groundswell for an art museum at some point down the road.

“You got my last smile,” Lumpkin told the photographer.

Libby Lumpkin

Do you have a favorite Las Vegas moment?

The day we arrived was pretty special, actually. We had driven into town to look for a place to stay and we got here in the afternoon and checked into some hotel somewhere, I can’t remember, and then we decided to drive down the Strip. But there was a huge rainstorm, one of those that just dumps water on the Strip, and the streets were flooding and the neon was reflected in the light. It was dusk and the neon was beautiful in the deluge and it was very apocalyptic. I remember we were playing Pink Floyd on the radio, and we both kind of looked at each other and said, “Oh, this is the place for us.”

How should Las Vegas change?

I think it’s fine for Las Vegas to be what it wants to be.

Maybe not every city needs to After 20 years in Las Vegas, the former art museum director is leaving for New Mexico. also be a cultural destination.

While packing, she talked to us about art and culture in a tourist mecca.

Of course it was my thought that this would be an excellent

By Elizabeth Sewell place to have a cultural destination because high-end tourists do like to come here. Over Steve Wynn’s Bellagio Gallery of Fine From the moment Libby Lumpkin and the last 10 years, you have enormous Art and later his gallery at the Wynn. her husband, Dave Hickey, arrived here, amenities for the cultural tourist in In 2006 she became director of the Las many of the hopes and dreams of Las the form of things like fine wine, good Vegas Art Museum, determined to bring Vegas’ fledgling arts community came cigars, great restaurants and upscale art to the forefront of the city’s culture. to rest on their shoulders. And rightly shopping, so making this also a cultural Lumpkin left that post in late 2008, and so. Hickey is an art critic (featured in destination seemed like just putting in the museum closed in early 2009. And the May 20 Vegas Seven), and Lumpkin is that extra peg that was missing. But it’s now she and Hickey are leaving town for an art historian and curator. They both hard to get these community investments good. Lumpkin has taken a position as are nationally renowned, and together going in this town because everyone is in tenured professor in the art department they became the power couple of the Las the same business. In this town, all the at the University of New Mexico, where Vegas art scene. Lumpkin helped put the major businesses are invested in having Hickey will also teach. We caught up city on the art map when she curated 110

Vegas Seven August 12-18, 2010

feet walk in their door and not the other guy’s door, so it’s a little harder to get it together to create an entertainment destination that doesn’t benefit your business. It fails.

What does New Mexico have that we don’t?

The arts are a very high priority because their tourism is grounded in huge part on the arts—Native American art, all kinds of art. In fact, the art department at the University of New Mexico is one of the biggest departments in the university. That’s a good thing. So, the cultural aspect of life has been exploited in New Mexico to also be an economic engine for the state.

Why is that so different from Nevada?

They had a long tradition of artists going to New Mexico. It’s a beautiful state and they had their Georgia O’Keefes and their Paul Strands and their John Marins and the modernists who went there, and many lived there and made their lives there, so they laid groundwork for a cultural tradition that was missing in Las Vegas.

Where will Las Vegas be in 2020?

Las Vegas will recover and it will continue to be a destination, but I predict a slow recovery. It’s just so overbuilt at this point it’s hard to predict exactly what will happen in this city. The world is changing, there are more gaming destinations, but Las Vegas has always found a way to shine brightly in the area of creating an entertainment destination.

If I had to predict in the next 10 years, I think we’re going to see more live entertainment and I think it’ll be more of a mid-market town than an upscale town in the immediate future. I don’t know if upscale will ever come back in the way it has been, but there’s nothing wrong with a mid-market town. It was a mid-market town when we got here, and it was a lot of fun.

What will you miss most about Las Vegas?

Las Vegas, with a population of around two million, has a very disproportionate quantity of glamour. So, I suppose, that really adds to the life in this city. You have huge movie stars all the time and huge music stars, performers of all kinds; you have glamorous parties going on all over the Strip all the time. You just don’t find that level of glamour in other cities of comparable size.

Photo by Francis + Francis

with her as she packed to leave the city she spent 20 years trying to improve.