THE LATEST
@DougStanhope My mother committed suicide at 63 as well. But she wasn’t nearly as funny. So long, Robin Williams. Very fucking nice guy.
@Misnomer Going to see The Cult tonight. The band, I mean, not Zappos headquarters.
@neiltyson
Not-So-Fabulous Las Vegas Show closings, lawsuits about show closings and a reprehensible assault add up to one really bad week
July’s full moon is to August’s “Super Moon” what a 16.0-inch pizza is to a 16.1-inch pizza. I’m just saying.
@DamienFahey Do I need to show a medicinal marijuana ID card if I’m already wearing camouflage cargo shorts?
@KenJennings
August 14–20, 2014
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VegasSeven.com
THERE HAVE BEEN WORSE WEEKS IN THE
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world of Las Vegas entertainment and sports. It’s just that those ones tend to involve things like the MGM fre disrupting show schedules, or the NFL deciding once and for all that no one in the city could ever say “Super Bowl” in public ever again. Or Jeff Dunham signing a residency here. So yeah, things weren’t that bad. But they weren’t great, either. Like in the continuing saga of Vegas Nocturne, the former centerpiece show at Rose.Rabbit.Lie. that departed under what are turning out to be less-than-ideal circumstances. In a press release made out of equal parts napalm, kerosene and oily rags, Spiegelworld, the parent company of Nocturne, thundered from the rooftops that it was dropping a law bomb on the Cosmopolitan for allegedly sabotaging the show, failing to pay employees severance and trying to stop the show from moving to another venue. The suit, fled in Clark County District Court, claims that the Cosmo (or, specifcally, its management company, Nevada Property 1, LLC) was responsible for the early termination of Nocturne on July 13, took costumes and props, and didn’t stop misappropriation of funds, like when a contractor used show cash to pay for trips to strip clubs. Really? You charge seven or eight lap dances to the company account, and all of a sudden it’s a lawsuit? We
thought this was America. In a statement, the Cosmo shot back: ““While it is typically the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas’ policy not to comment on pending litigation, the plaintiff’s lawsuit is entirely without merit. We will vigorously defend our position and expect to prevail.” Meanwhile, Sydney After Dark, the lady answer to Thunder From Down Under’s all-Aussie revue, is getting ready for its as-yet-unannounced fnal performance, just a month after the show premiered at Planet Hollywood. In a statement, a spokeswoman for Sydney cites the fact that the PH Showroom was too big for the show, but that the production “will be announcing our new home soon.” If a lack of intimacy is a problem for the show, there’s allegedly a Cosmopolitan contractor with some thoughts on how to correct that. The Riviera’s Pawn Shop Live! The Lost Episode is also boarding it up. The stage parody of Pawn Stars will run its course August 21. The show relocated from the Golden Nugget to the Riv in April, and on July 14 it was retooled as
“The Lost Episode.” On the sporting side of the equation, the Cleveland Cavaliers denying UNLV fans the chance to see Anthony Bennett play alongside LeBron James—the Cavs are sending Bennett along with this year’s frst overall pick Andrew Wiggins to Minnesota for Kevin Love—was far and away the least depressing sports tidbit of the week. No, that comes courtesy of MMA fghter Jon “War Machine” Koppenhaver, who allegedly beat ex-girlfriend and porn star Christy Mack so badly on August 8 that she couldn’t speak. Among other things Koppenhaver tweeted after the incident, “I’m not a bad guy. I went to surprise my gf, help her set up her show and to give her an engagement ring, and ended up fghting for my life.” As of press time, Metro was still searching for Koppenhaver, who was arrested in 2009 for brawling with security at Krave. After this most recent incident, Koppenhaver made it sound like he was going to go on the lam when he tweeted, “The cops will never give me fair play, never believe me. Still deciding what to do.” Those are among the more scumbaggy tweets in Koppenhaver’s timeline. But if you’re interested in losing even more faith in humanity, by all means, check out the rest. Koppenhaver’s promoter, Bellator MMA, immediately dropped him as a spokesman August 8.
The thing I love about Vegas is there’s nothing to remind you that we are a decadent, corrupt society on the very brink of collapse lol
@OldHossRadbourn If we strike quickly we can stop this football nonsense while it is still in its preseason. Arm yourselves, lads.
@Jzellis Shockingly, it sounds like the diversity panel at DefCon had some controversy. I would not have seen that coming.
@PandaPhDminus Anybody leaving #defcon for California on Highway 15: IMPROMPTU ROADSIDE PARTY! DM me for details. Party ends when my tow truck arrives.
@PennJillette Robin -- you will be missed. So sad. So very very sad.
Share your Tweet! Add #V7.
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STYLE
Marek Bute
Commercial litigation partner at Snell & Wilmer and board president for AFAN (Aid for AIDS of Nevada)
MY NAME … is the Polish
version of Mark, and it stands for “war-like,” which is perhaps appropriate for a litigator. It wasn’t until I left for college that I really started appreciating it as part of my identity. OUR LAW FIRM ENCOUR AGES … a lot of
community involvement and pro bono work. After my fiancé, Rocco, took me to AFAN’s Black & White Party in 2009, I was so inspired I decided that’s what I would put my energy toward. I joined at the end of 2010. AFAN is celebrating its 30-year anniversary this year, but [August 23] is our 28th Black & White Party. AS I’VE GROWN UP …
and grown into my profession, my taste has gotten more refined. I appreciate a more classic and elegant look, rather than being so outrageous. But I still like to have my fun with little details in my ties or my shirts or wherever else I can. THERE ARE ELEMENTS OF THE SOUTH … that
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STITCHED XXXX Collection suit, shirt, tie bar (used as lapel pin). Leather Couture by Jessica Galindo bow tie. Knotty and Ice Swarovski pocket square. Hudson shoes.
PHOTO BY JON ESTRADA
August 14–20, 2014
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VegasSeven.com
have shaped my style. I was born in Poland, but grew up in the suburbs of Memphis, Tennessee. I love the culture and the manners of the South. – Jessi C. Acuña
VegasSeven.com
| August 14–20, 2014
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George Zier has been teaching science within the walls of the Clark County Juvenile Detention Center for 14 years. And he says he wouldn’t have it any other way.
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LOCKED UP AND LEARNING
Once you land in juvenile detention, is it too late for your education? Not if teachers like George Zier can help it.
class for less than a week, he excitedly engages the question as he fips around his laptop and begins clicking through a chain of directories and lesson plans, engaging me with the kind of educational esoterica that brushes away any vestiges of my, “Why bother?” attitude, and convinces me he is there to educate every student, even kids he may see for only one 40-minute class period. He leans in and effuses: “When you get a kid who frst comes in for that day, I don’t throw a big book at him. I’ve taken each one of my units and broken it down into three parts. Right now, for instance, I am working with fossilization: If the kid knows the difference between permineralized remains, original remains, and they know trace fossils, I know that I have given him enough. Kids can get credits all day long, but they need to pass the profciency test to graduate. And with 800 benchmarks in a 75-question test, you better know what you are doing.” Driving home the importance of permineralized remains to a teenager who came into his classroom in shackles can’t be easy. But Zier clearly lives for the challenge. And the challenge can seem almost insurmountable: Teachers at the Juvenile Detention Center can’t distribute textbooks and have to keep detailed track of all materials. “We’re teaching respect for property. I have built packets from PDF fles and supplemental materials, so each kid will have his own ‘book,’ and if that gets damaged or des-
ecrated with, I guess you could say, certain cultural markings, I can build another one. [That graffti] can cause disturbances in another classroom. I know everything that it is in my bag: 14 pencils, two erasers, two dry-erase markers, one folder with collected work, another with work that goes out. What I go into that unit with, I want to take out.” The staff has little turnover, and Henry says the stability is essential even if kids aren’t around for long. “You have teachers who are incredibly devoted to their profession and working with these kids,” he says. “Often, the kids are starving for some responsible adult attention—and they react very positively when they get it.” “Some of the kids who have come here have not ever read a book,” facility manager Banks says. “And they leave with books in hand and wanting more.” For all the bright spots, of course, there are less encouraging outcomes. But data show that there may be reason for hope. While Clark County’s population has started to grow again over the last few years, Juvenile Justice Department reports show a steady decrease in both overall cases and recidivism: In 2012, total referrals dropped 18 percent, and repeat referrals fell by 16 percent. That says a lot about the dedication of teachers such as George Zier, who, in the face of long odds, never forget the worth of the kids who wind up in their classrooms. Kurt Rice, a former high school English teacher, now teaches at Nevada State College.
VegasSeven.com
to foam mattresses on concrete slabs poured inside a series of single-bed cells. It is only when we strip education back to its essentials that we can see how much we do to show these young offenders that they are worthy of an education—even if those efforts are lost on the larger public, who see only the windowless walls and hear only the pejorative: “juvie.” On the day I looked in, the detention facility manager, Carolyn Banks, told me there were 141 minors being held, all between the ages of 11 and 18. Most of them were awaiting adjudication of their cases before moving on to probation or release or possibly to long-term incarceration. They don’t hang around long: The median stay in the center is just six to seven days, says Robert Henry, the Clark County School District’s director of adult education, adult corrections and adult English language learner programs who oversees the system’s 33 teachers and counselors. Many cases process through in just one or two days. Science teacher George Zier, a 14-year veteran of the detention center, has no illusions about the challenges he faces— but he says he wouldn’t teach anywhere else. “It’s triage,” he says. “We’re dealing with the airway, then we can get down to circulation. We’ve got to get them on task; we’ve got to get them on behavior; we’ve got to get them wanting to go back to school. There is a lot of cheerleading going on here.” When I ask Zier how he manages to get through to kids who are often in his
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when i taught high school, I posed this question to my students: “What if you could, without retribution, stay home and not be required to go to school, ever?” Predictably, students were excited by such a prospect, and the class always erupted in giddy speculation, like a group of adults discussing what they’d do with their nonexistent lotto winnings. “But hold on, hold on,” I would exclaim, pressing my palms toward the foor and pausing until the students fell silent. “What if I added, ‘because you are not worth educating?’” Brows furrowed as they parsed my words and the sentiment that lay behind them. Most often, I’d get a few angry voices from those who recognized the implied insult. I would go on to explain that while they might not think school is all that grand and getting up every morning sure can be a drag, the fact that we adults make them come to school is a clear sign that we do believe they are worth educating. This notion—that educating a child is a gesture of faith in the child’s worth— should be at top of mind for anyone who visits the Clark County Juvenile Detention Center on the corner of Pecos and Bonanza roads. The center also functions as a school: Middle- and high-schoolers live in 28-person pods, which consist of two dayrooms adorned with stainlesssteel seats on bolted-down benches, a reinforced glass monitoring station and two aquarium classrooms. After school, instead of heading home, these students walk a few paces from their classrooms
August 14–20, 2014
PHOTO BY JON ESTRADA
By Kurt C. Rice
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T H E
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I S S U E
GLOBAL VILLAGE
Clark County’s English language learners often struggle academically. At Global Community High School, principal Gerald Bustamante and his team of dedicated teachers are working hard to change that reality, one student at a time.
August 14–20, 2014
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VegasSeven.com
By Felicia Mello
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it’s a spring morning in melissa Gillespie’s U.S. History class at Global Community High School, a school for new immigrants and English language learners, and Johanna, a junior, is at the front of the room delivering a presentation on 1920s style icon Coco Chanel. She’s nervous but clearly a fashion plate and interested in Chanel’s story; her classmates listen quietly, tablets propped up so they can submit comments and questions, Facebook-style, using the educational app Edmodo. Seated at one side of the room, principal Gerald Bustamante waits until Johanna has fnished, then raises his hand. “You knew you were going to get questions with me in here,” he teases. He asks a question, then makes a comment of his own. “In the 1920s, people like Coco Chanel were facing a lot of adversity, but they also had dreams,” he says. “If you have goals, your dreams can become reality.” It’s not an idle point. Nevada’s 2012 graduation rate for English language learners was just 23 percent, and Bustamante understands all too well the challenges his students face in achieving their dreams. While at least a quarter of Nevada students speak a frst language other than English—one of the highest percentages in the nation— the state was until recently among only a handful that didn’t provide additional funding for English language learners. Though the state Legislature late last year allocated $50 million over two years to educate such students, the Clark County School District’s entire share was put toward elementary schools. That means older students
such as the roughly 200 that Global Community serves in a squat building on Washington Avenue near Pecos Road have been largely absent from the public discussion. (In fact, the 8-yearold school fies so low under the radar that when I called the district offce to inquire about its test scores, the receptionist there had never heard of it. “Is that in our district?” she asked.) With a short wait-list for admission, Global accepts students on a frst-come, frst-serve basis. Class sizes average about 20, signifcantly lower than in the district’s other high schools. It might be easy for an outsider to be awed by and even envious of the school’s unique, intimate environment—until you remember the problems these kids are dealing with. “I have kids who are living with aunts and uncles because their parents got deported,” Bustamante says. “I had a couple of kids last year who lost their mother and father in another country, and couldn’t go back for the funeral. I have undocumented kids [who think because of their status], ‘I can’t go to college.’ I have a lot of kids who work until 1 in the morning, then come in to school at 8.” An energetic 38-year-old who appears younger, Bustamante became principal in November 2012. Before he took the reins, 12 of Global’s 14 teachers lacked certifcation in teaching English as a second language. Also, non-immigrant students who were not English language learners were enrolled, teachers say, diluting the school’s focus. So Bustamante made an executive decision: All licensed staff, including himself, would be required to earn
TESL certifcation, a demanding process that required taking night and online classes. Some embraced the process, while others chose to transfer to different schools; Bustamante hired 10 replacement teachers in the frst year. “He said, ‘This is what we’re going to do, and if you don’t want to, you can teach somewhere else,’” recalls Rebecca DeYoung, a science teacher going through the program. Another change Bustamante implemented: With rare exceptions, new students would be accepted only if they had been in the country for less than two years or had limited English language skills. The school also began a series of in-home pláticas (“chats” in Spanish) to engage parents, the vast majority of whom speak Spanish and hail from a cross-section of Latin America, including Mexico, Cuba and Central America. Run by teachers and an outreach worker, the sessions provide a relaxed environment in which parents can ask questions and learn new ways to support their children’s education. The overall goal: to ensure that students not only learned English, but also received rigorous academic preparation for college or the workforce. And to help students and the community at large see their bilingual, bicultural background as a strength, not a weakness. “There’s kind of been a whole shift with the kids and their perception of school,” says DeYoung, comparing the 2013-14 school year with the previous one. “They want to be here and want to participate. There’s more structure.” A student of business philosophy
who is a member of the Latino Leadership Council and the Latin Chamber of Commerce, Bustamante cites excerpts of Tony Hsieh’s book Delivering Happiness as an infuence. Perhaps that’s why he pushed for what he calls a rebranding of the school. The school’s new motto (“We Are Global. We Are One”) and mascot (a gladiator) appear on everything from uniforms to email newsletters to the graduation cap and gown prominently displayed in the front offce. (“The old logo was a globe with children holding hands around it,” Bustamante says. “I was like, ‘Come on, this is a high school.’”) Not just an empty phrase, the slogan helps build unity among a student body that, while primarily Spanish-speaking, includes students from as far-fung lands as Syria and Thailand, and a staff that has been asked to take on new responsibilities. “I look at it as a business,” Bustamante says. “How do you maximize efforts among your employees? When you look at eBay, Google, Zappos, people love [working] there because they have core values.” While such details as logos and uniforms can be dismissed as window dressing—the history of school reform is littered with cosmetic changes that failed to make real impact—Global’s family-like atmosphere is evident from the moment you step on campus. As in many schools serving low-income students, teachers often pull double duty as informal social workers, helping to track down low-cost legal counsel or resolve family crises. When one student was kicked out of her house after having a baby, school staff say they talked to her parents and helped resolve the
Whether it’s through a community garden or a “heart attack” of thankyou notes, principal Gerald Bustamante (above) aims to foster a true community atmosphere for the 200 English language learners at Global Community High School.
principal of the adjacent Morris Behavioral Academy for students with disciplinary issues, is working with a smaller administrative staff than that of most comprehensive high schools. “I think Global will need additional resources to truly get it where it needs to be. I don’t know if one person can do it alone.” just after the close of this past school year, Bustamante calls with an update on the school’s progress. His teachers have all completed their TESL certifcation, and the school has recently renewed its accreditation with fying colors. Test results are in, and they are mixed. The Discovery exams show a 15 percent average gain in language arts for all students since the beginning of the year. Math scores, however, dropped by about 5 percent. (The district is expected to release its profciency results next month.) Still, Bustamante remains bullish. The community garden is up and running. At the state level, a movement is growing to change Nevada’s school-funding formula to provide more dollars for low-income students and English language learners at all grade levels, a shift Bustamante says is long overdue. And he has nearly 100 kids attending a third semester of summer classes to better prepare them for the coming year. While most high schools require students to take summer school only if they fail a class, at Global, anyone who receives a D or lower in English or math is asked to attend. “Our mission is to produce college-bound kids,” Bustamante says. “Ds aren’t going to cut it.”
VegasSeven.com
class time for the kinds of projects that would be classifed as homework in a traditional classroom. Graziano says the concept holds special promise for English language learners, who have been shown to beneft from interacting with multimedia that they can pause and rewind, and whose parents may not be equipped to assist them with homework. “We know from research that Latinos, among other groups, are underrepresented in the STEM felds,” says Graziano, referring to the disciplines of science, technology, engineering and math. “So this will be an opportunity for us to energize Latino students and get them interested in math, because we’re going to hopefully teach it from a more meaningful perspective.” Ultimately, Bustamante hopes to turn Global Community into a teaching laboratory for the district, where instructors from other schools can visit to learn the best practices for educating their immigrant students. It’s an ambitious goal— but then, Bustamante, too, is ambitious, driven by a personal connection to his students’ journeys. A frst-generation American whose parents are from Mexico, the Henderson native recalls hearing stories of his father hopping the border as a teenager to fnd work. Bustamante himself entered preschool speaking less English than the other kids, and says he sometimes felt out of place in elementary school, where there were few Latinos. “It’s impressive to see how much Global has accomplished in such a short period of time under Mr. Bustamante’s leadership with limited resources,” Graziano says. He also points out that Bustamante, who simultaneously serves as
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imagine you’re a recently arrived 16-year-old student from another country. You’ve spent the school year studying English, and you feel ready to take your writing profciency exam, required of all CCSD high school juniors. Then you read the essay prompt: “Choose a common saying and explain its meaning.” Would you be able to come up with an English-language idiom such as ‘A stitch in time saves nine’?
Or would you draw a blank? These are the questions that plague Global’s teachers and principal as they assess whether their new professional training has improved student outcomes. The reading and writing profciency assessments—on which Global students have historically done poorly—test cultural knowledge as well as language skills, Bustamante argues. Because of that, he says, students who are otherwise doing well in class can struggle on exams. Complicating matters further: While a U.S.-born 11th-grader typically has received the same amount of formal schooling here as his or her peers, at Global, a freshman with two years in the United States might be expected to test better than, say, a junior who just arrived from Mexico. To compensate, the school has developed its own testing regimen in addition to the profciency exams, using Discovery Education, a system employed by a number of school districts nationwide. At Global, Bustamante and his staff will track individual students’ progress annually, comparing their performance not just to their offcial grade level, but to the number of years spent at the school. Kevin Graziano, an associate professor of education at Nevada State College who helped lead the TESL classes for Global’s teachers, also plans to use the school as a venue to study whether “fipping” classrooms could improve math education for English language learners. A trendy topic in education, the fipped classroom involves having students absorb lectures on their own time via videos and other digital methods, leaving
August 14–20, 2014
situation. On the day I visit, the student is proudly showing off her baby daughter to students and staff. Other examples of a close-knit environment abound: One teacher’s door is plastered with pink construction-paper hearts bearing thank-you messages from students—a periodic tradition called a “heart attack.” There’s also an online fundraising campaign in the works to build a community garden where students can work together, a rare extracurricular activity in a learning environment that lacks the sports teams and clubs of typical high schools. Joceline Robles, 18, explains why she takes a city bus 90 minutes each way from her home at Desert Inn and Fort Apache roads to attend Global: “At the other school [I attended], teachers don’t explain [things] to you, they just tell you. Here, they explain as many times as you need to understand.” “You know everyone is the same [here],” continues Robles, who wants to be a nurse. “They don’t treat you like you’re nothing because you came from Mexico, and they [don’t] think they’re better than you.”
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NIGHTLIFE
Brody Jenner jumps on the DJ bandwagon in an unexpected way—and gives us a lesson in celeb-stalking etiquette By Laurel May Bond
VegasSeven.com
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Hey, Mister [Celebrity] DJ
IT’S HARDLY SURPRISING that Brody Jenner—reality-show hunk and stepsibling to pop culture’s most ubiquitous family (ugh, the K word)—would follow the footsteps of so many of his famous peers: right up to the decks. What does come as a shock, however, is that out of the herd of DJ dilettantes, it’s the dude who puts the “Bro” in Jenner who has taken it upon himself to actually learn the craft of dropping beats. Before a recent set at Hyde in Bellagio, the heartthrob revealed a deep respect for the art of DJing, along with a few pro tips for those interested in getting up close and personal with the celebrity spinners who grace our city’s turntables.
August 14–20, 2014
PHOTO BY DENISE TRUSCELLO/GETTY
Your city after dark, photos from the week’s hottest parties and dishing with Dash Berlin
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NIGHTLIFE
PARTIES
LAX Luxor
[ UPCOMING ]
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See more photos from this gallery at SPYONVegas.com
PHOTOS BY BOBBY JAMEIDAR
August 14–20, 2014
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VegasSeven.com
Aug. 14 Mike Bless and DJ Shred spin Aug. 15 DJ Wellman and Mike Bless spin Aug. 17 DJ Cass spins
NIGHTLIFE
PARTIES
PALMS POOL The Palms
[ UPCOMING ]
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See more photos from this gallery at SPYONVegas.com
PHOTOS BY TEDDY FUJIMOTO
August 14–20, 2014
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VegasSeven.com
Aug. 15 DJs Jazzy Jeff and Ace spin Aug. 22 Justin Caruso spins Aug. 23 Yolanda Be Cool spins
NIGHTLIFE
PARTIES
TRYST Wynn
[ UPCOMING ]
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See more photos from this gallery at SPYONVegas.com
PHOTOS BY DANNY MAHONEY
August 14–20, 2014
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VegasSeven.com
Aug. 14 Dave Fogg spins Aug. 15 Excel spins Aug. 16 Mike Carbonell spins
WIZARD WARS
August 14–20, 2014
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VegasSeven.com
Judges Christen Gerhart (holding an adorable magic “prop”) and Penn & Teller choose the best wizard; Flom and Lax (inset).
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getting a green light for a series can be more democratic, beginning on the cheap … really cheap. “Not counting the camera and the editing equipment I had, we went to the Dollar Tree Store with 15 bucks,” recalls fellow Vegas magician and Lax pal Justin Flom. Two years ago, Flom signed onto Lax’s idea to shoot a homemade video—in Lax’s apartment off the Strip—in which magic-maker friends would be asked to create new tricks on the spot, using randomly selected objects. “We picked up what we called ingredients,” Flom says—specifcally, beach balls, placemats, colored erasers and fake oranges—“and it really was like Iron Magicians. Actually, that was the working title. Because I have a presence on YouTube and do a lot of videos on magic, we put it on my YouTube channel. It went to 50,000 to 100,000 people. The production company said, ‘This is a TV show.’” Enter A. Smith & Co., the company behind shows such as American Ninja Warrior, which saw its potential. Now with professional backing, Lax and Flom shopped their pet project around, hoping to hook a big TV fsh, and Syfy—the channel that brought us two Sharknados—bit. “Being on Syfy was my dream,” says Lax, a fan of the channel’s reality series Face Off, which Wizard Wars can claim as a reality-show father fgure. “It’s this show about special effects and monster movie makeup. This was a topic I knew nothing about, cared nothing about, but I got hooked. I saw that this reality-show format can get people interested in an art form with which they had no prior knowledge. That gave me the idea for Wizard Wars.” After ordering a pilot, Syfy screened it for focus groups. When it scored well, Wizard Wars earned a series
commitment of a half-dozen episodes. “Most magicians are cover bands— there are good cover bands and bad cover bands, but what’s rare is the magician who creates and performs original routines,” says Lax, who invents illusion for magicians including David Copperfeld, and works for the Penguin Magic website. “If you go to a magic convention, they look the same—150 white dudes playing around with playing cards. It begins to feel very incestuous. But if you give somebody a fsh and a bouquet of fowers and an electrical
camera tricks.” However, another obstacle for Wizard Wars warriors to clear remains vague. When asked precisely how much time is allotted for competing magicians to develop an illusion—i.e., “on the spot”—Lax demurred, reiterating: “a very short amount of time.” Facing four judges—Penn & Teller, plus World Champion of Magic Jason Latimer and magic critic Christen Gerhart—a pair of two-magician teams square off. Contestants are culled
“MOST MAGICIANS ARE COVER BANDS— BUT WHAT’S RARE IS THE MAGICIAN WHO CREATES ORIGINAL ROUTINES.” – Rick Lax
cord and a bowling pin, you pretty much have to create something original. Then the odds of it being entertaining go way up.” Upgraded (to say the least) from Lax’s apartment, Wizard Wars was taped at L.A.’s Herald-Examiner Building, on a lushly constructed set of Greek-style columns and wall sculptures, gold-accented drapes and a winding staircase. Audience members are arranged like a showroom crowd, seated at tables. “The live studio audience is very important to the show,” Lax says. “I don’t want to name names, but there have been other magicians who have had shows that have used a lot of
from in-person and Skype casting, those drawn from Lax and Flom’s extended network of professional acquaintances, and word of mouth. Ideally, they’re young turks of the new school of magic. “Some people can’t get out of the mindset of the magician with the mullet and the sexy girl,” says Flom, who is a favorite guest on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. “That was big in the ’80s and ’90s, but we’re in a new era of magic where it’s a lot more organic and natural.” The winning twosome advance to a second round in which they must take on two of the four resident “wizards”— Flom, mentalist Angela Funovits, “con man” Gregory Wilson and Wynn Las
Vegas resident magician Shimshi—in pursuit of a 10-grand payout. Which the challengers might, or might not, vanish with, depending on whether they can out-pro the pros. Their challenge in each round: Create a routine that, among other items, must include certain mandatory knickknacks. Sometimes … more than knickknacks. “In one, they gave us a swing set,” Flom says. “Holy hell, what are we supposed to do with a swing set? I’m a sleight-of-hand guy, I do magic up close. It was a big step to do magic with swing sets and armoires and toddlers’ toy cars. That makes for good TV, to see us struggle.” In the opener’s frst round, they were smallerscale: playing cards, a Super Soaker and Spam (the food, not the email); in the second round: eyeglasses, a mannequin, a chalkboard and a fencing foil. Kyle Marlett of Las Vegas and Dalton Wayne of Columbus, Ohio, combined to take on a pair of Canadian illusionists, Chris Funk of Winnipeg and Ekatarina of Montreal. The winners? Sorry. You’ll have to saw us in half to make us turn informant. “Though we do show you a tiny snippet of what it looks like behind the curtain, you’re going to walk away from each episode fooled,” Lax says. And in fact, we’re only shown brief segments inside the “magic workshop” of tools, with its “magic pantry” of props. Mostly, the magicians cook up concepts and vaguely mull over a trick’s mechanics, without ever really spilling. “The greatest gift you can receive watching magic is wonder in a day where we can Google anything and the world is at our fngertips on our iPhones,” Flom says. “Wonder to me is priceless. I know that sounds cheesy, but I really believe that.” Only once—when Penn & Teller perform a small trick mid-show involving the switcheroo of breath-mint tins—is a method clearly revealed. And just a dab of demystifcation, a la Wizard Wars, is fne with Jillette. “It’s nice to have magic treated as a grown-up art form,” he says. “Eric Clapton never came out and said, ‘I can play this because I’m real magic.’ He didn’t mind people thinking he practiced a little. And I think it’s OK for magicians to say, ‘Yes, I can do this because I practiced a little.’ The surprise is that it’s taken this long for us to deal with magic that way.”
PHOTOS BY DALE BERMAN/SYFY
A&E
10 p.m. Tues beginning Aug. 19 for six weeks, on Syfy, Syfy.com/wizardwars.
A&E
MOVIES
TURTLE POWER
Megan Fox plays it straight as a TV reporter among CGI teen mutants.
Michael Bay’s remake is meaner, greener and more violent than ever before By Roger Moore McClatchy Newspapers
THE TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES
franchise earns a Michael Bayproduced 3-D reboot that spares no expense in special effects and spares no decibels in the volume that is the soundtrack to all their new mayhem. These digitally animated supersize turtles have real-world presence and weight, stomping onto the scene like teenagers who haven’t learned to do anything quietly. Their brawls with trigger-happy foes from the Foot Clan are a blur of body blows and bullets. Their wisecracks are up-to-date, their love of pizza unabated. Their human friend is a fuff-friendly TV reporter played by Megan Fox. So, yeah, Bay gave this production the full Transformers treatment. It’s entirely too violent, but the teenage turtles armed with ninja swords, knives and nunchucks have always been violent, from their origins in the 1980s comic books to assorted TV series and the movies of the ’90s and an animated flm in 2007. The new flm, directed by Jonathan Liebesman (Battle: Los Angeles), quickly and gracefully handles the back story— a lab experiment and a fre—and puts shapely TV reporter April O’Neil (Fox)
on their case right from the start. The Foot Clan, led by the mysterious megalomaniac Shredder (voiced by Danny Woodburn), is trying to take over New York. But these masked vigilantes keep foiling its plans. April starts to piece together a puzzle that points to her own past, the man her scientist father was in business with (William Fichtner) and the “mutagen” and other chemicals they were toying with. The heroes are masked ninjas, mutant turtles who grew huge, learned English and trained in martial arts with the inscrutable rat, Splinter (voiced by Tony Shalhoub). Michelangelo, Raphael, Donatello and Leonardo only occasionally act like teenagers, usually in their banter. “Did you tell her his name?” “Maybe she’s clairvoyant!” “Maybe she’s a Jedi!”
April cannot convince her boss (Whoopi Goldberg) that she’s not crazy. And her on-the-make cameraman (Will Arnett, toned down and not nearly funny enough) is also a hard sell regarding these “heroes on a half-shell.” “So, they’re aliens?” “No. That would be stupid.” The animated rat has a much bigger role in this flm than is usual for this series, and the animators give Splinter a few cute tricks to pull off, as well as an Asian martial arts master’s long, thin goatee. The action beats are bigger and better than they’ve ever been in a Ninja Turtle flm: brawls, shootouts, a snowy carand-truck chase with big explosions. But in between those scenes is an awful lot of chatter and exposition. For a flm that aims younger (save for the
August 14–20, 2014
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VegasSeven.com
SHORT REVIEWS
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What If (PG-13) ★★✩✩✩
What If brings up the distinctions among wit, jokes and robotic banter, and this romantic comedy has a bit of the first and a few of the second, but it’s largely a case of the third. The script, adapted from the play Toothpaste and Cigars, does a few things right. We sense potential in the early meeting, at a party, of a med-school dropout (Daniel Radcliffe) and an animator (Zoe Kazan). From there What If contrives the usual reasons for the leads to come together. Why did the film’s charms elude me? I felt arm-twisted by What If, for all its tossed-off verbiage and wisecracking.
Into The Storm (PG-13) ★★✩✩✩
In the spirit of Sharknado 2, Into the Storm goes into blender mode and mixes its elements of wind column terror, smoothiestyle. Top-billed Richard Armitage, an Englishman doing his best generic heartland dialect, plays a widower with two teenage boys struggling to connect with their father. But Into the Storm, directed with bland efficiency by Steven Quayle of Final Destination 5, reminds us that unless a movie establishes certain baseline levels of human interest, it runs the not-unentertaining risk of coming out squarely in favor of its own bad weather.
Get On Up (PG-13) ★★★★✩
Everything about Get On Up, a provocatively structured and unusually rich musical biopic, is a little better than the average specimen in this genre. What Tate Taylor (The Help) achieves in his James Brown story works as inventive showbiz mythology. Most moviegoers will simply want to know if Chadwick Boseman, who played Jackie Robinson in the biopic 42, has even a quarter of the fierce charisma and a tenth of the dance moves of the man he’s playing. And yet the actor, like the film, works in a stealthy way. Get On Up hits all these high points.
diehards who grew up with this franchise), that’s deadly dull. And Fox, emoting as if her “comeback” depended on this, plays it all straight, which tends to rob the flm of needed playfulness. The turtle brothers are somewhat less distinct as character “types”—the tech nerd, the angry rebel, the boy on the make, the leader. Among the voice actors playing the Project Renaissance turtle brothers, only Johnny Knoxville (as Leonardo) stands out: “Oh look, he’s doing his Batman voice!” So even though they did justice to this beloved franchise, there’s nothing here that won’t be forgotten by the time you’ve gotten home—after you stopped for pizza on the way. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (PG-13) ★★✩✩✩
By Tribune Media Services
Guardians of the Galaxy (PG-13) ★★★✩✩
Like the ’70s cassette mixtape so dear to its hero, Guardians of the Galaxy scavenges all sorts of “greatest hits” precedents to come up with its own summertime fling. It’s looser, scruffier and more overtly comic than the average Marvel action fantasy. And despite the usual load of violence, the film owes its relative buoyancy to Chris Pratt as the wisecracking space rogue at the helm. Pratt seems to be growing into a quirky action hero before our eyes, the way Robert Downey Jr. did in the first Iron Man.
Boyhood (R) ★★★★✩
A Most Wanted Man (R) ★★★✩✩
Lucy (R) ★★✩✩✩
Magic in the Moonlight (PG-13) ★★★✩✩
By the midpoint of writer-director Richard Linklater’s gentle marvel, the roundfaced Texas boy played by Ellar Coltrane has become a lanky, plaintive teenager. Linklater made the film with a group of actors over a 12-year period, starting with the kids played by Coltrane and Linklater’s daughter, Lorelei, at ages 6 and 9, respectively. The audience travels through the narrative with these characters. I love Boyhood. In completing this simple, beautiful project Linklater took his time. And he rewards ours.
In Taiwan, a hard-partying 25-year-old American studying abroad has just hooked up with a new boyfriend. He’s a delivery boy for a drug lord (Choi Min-sik), and Johansson’s Lucy is forced to deliver a briefcase to a hotel room. The briefcase contains a synthetic superdrug. After one of Lucy’s captors kicks her in the stomach, her bloodstream is suddenly flooded with the stuff. She becomes a kind of superwoman. She’s quite good in Lucy, working both sides of the street: plausibly terrified victim in one section, unfeeling bad-ass the next.
Sex Tape (R) ★✩✩✩✩
Like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Jake Kasdan’s Sex Tape is a grim cautionary fable about the evils of technology, in this case pitting its desperate protagonists against an unseen force people refer to as “the cloud.” Unlike 2001, it’s also a stupid, strenuous sex farce starring Cameron Diaz, Diaz’s dorsal-view body double and Jason Segel as a couple with a provocative solution to their current coital slump: Make a sex tape! If Sex Tape ends up making money, it’ll be on the backs of its valiant performers’ comic charm, but it’s stretched thin to the breaking point.
It’s impossible to watch the character anchoring Anton Corbijn’s cool, clear-eyed film version of A Most Wanted Man without forgetting the fate of the actor who plays him, the late Philip Seymour Hoffman. As Gunther Bachmann, the German intelligence expert created by novelist John le Carré, Hoffman is an unhealthy specimen, a drinker, out of shape, though his mind is needlesharp. Filmed largely in Germany, under gray skies, the movie is solid le Carré. It’s chilly yet humane, and human-scaled, uninterested in the lethal glories of technology.
This Woody Allen film is set in 1928 in the south of France. British illusionist Stanley, played with a tight grimace by Colin Firth, has been invited by a fellow magician (Simon McBurney) to debunk an American mystic working her way through the Cote d’Azur. Then something happens to persuade the skeptic Stanley that Sophie (Emma Stone) is the real deal. Magic in the Moonlight strolls along, muttering familiar axioms about the infernal inconvenience and bedevilment of romantic attraction.
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (PG-13) ★★★✩✩
Rise of the Planet of the Apes proved it’s possible to reboot a franchise while avoiding that sinking feeling of movie capitalism at its dumbest. The war between the ravaged species in Dawn has driven the surviving ape colony to the redwoods north of San Francisco. There the apes encounter a human survivor on a mission to determine if a dam can be restored to help desperate human city dwellers in the Bay Area. Gary Oldman is their leader, eager to take back the planet by any means necessary.
SEVEN QUESTIONS
epitomizes the diversity of our community. ... I’ve gotten to give out certifcates for our English as Second Language learners and workforce-preparation students—it’s a tremendous joy. We really do touch people with our services and make a difference in their lives. Why can’t I check out a popular book on the day of publication on my e-reader? The big publishers are making ebooks more available to libraries, but the issue is still in fux. ... Publishers are worried that the same thing will happen to them that happened to the music industry. They have the rights; they don’t have to sell them to us; and it is very frustrating. And it’s different for every publisher. Publisher A may not sell it to me at all. Publisher B may sell it to me, but only after it’s been out six or eight months. Publisher C may sell it to me after six months, but even though I’ve purchased it at a very hefty fee—much more than a hardcover—I can only have it for 26 circulations and then it disappears, and I have to buy it again. ... Libraries are oftentimes the places of discovery: I might check out a cookbook or a management book and decide, yeah, I want to own this.
The retiring Las Vegas-Clark County Library District executive director on how libraries have changed, her visit to the White House and your next must-read book
August 14–20, 2014
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VegasSeven.com
By Paul Szydelko
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What’s been your biggest accomplishment as chief for the past fve years? Collaborating more with other community groups and establishing partnerships—we’ve really taken it to a new level. I’ve worked closely with United Way, Boys & Girls Clubs, the school district and the City of Las Vegas. We’ve brought the district a higher profle. The other is steering the district through the shoals during the Great Recession—we had to cut back, lay some people off and yet we were able to maintain seven-day-aweek service, which is essential in a 24/7 three-shift economy. Must you still defend the library’s very existence in the digital age? We all use Google searches, and you get millions of responses. The librarian can help guide people to exactly what they’re looking for with stupendous online databases. It always has
to be one-on-one—you can talk about it, but until a librarian sits down with somebody and shows what we can do, the penny doesn’t quite drop. I think libraries have to continue to evolve to be comfortable spaces with the kinds of services, collections and amenities that people are looking for. What are they looking for? A theme in public librarianship right now is we’re moving from transactions to transformations. Every hourly job in this country requires an online application. The very people who don’t have a job and probably cannot afford broadband at home anymore are the very ones who are stuck. So we’ve set up [computers] for people preparing résumés, looking for and applying for jobs, taking classes. … We’re a lot more than just the circulation of materials. We’ve got the physical DVDs and CDs you can check out, as well as
great programs for streaming. On Freegle, you can download six tunes a week and keep them—they don’t expire. Through Hoopla, you can download videos—those do expire. We’ve got e-books and audio books. … We’re probably going to use the Mesquite Library as our laboratory to experiment with checking out laptops or tablets. It’s a big thing to roll out a new service at 25 locations, instead of prototyping it, seeing what works and what doesn’t work, and then roll it out bit by bit in other locations. How do you get outside the bubble to see how your work affects end-users. At the Windmill Library every day I get to see the kids and moms and the dads who are at the library for story time or people getting help. I peek into the computer room, and my favorite day is Monday when both the Mormon missionaries and Buddhist monks are in there using the computers. It just
Any last book to recommend? Rock Breaks Scissors: A Practical Guide to Outguessing and Outwitting Almost Everybody (Little, Brown and Company) by William Poundstone. We think things are random, but they’re not. Forensic accountants or the IRS, they can tell if people are cheating on their taxes by exaggerating their expenses, because people have a tendency to choose numbers that begin with lower digits rather than higher digits. If they see patterns like that, they’ll look into it further. What’s the status of the former Lied Discovery Children’s Museum space in the Downtown library? Find out in the full interview at VegasSeven.com/JeanneGoodrich.
PHOTO BY JON ESTRADA
Jeanne Goodrich
You visited the White House in May to accept the 2014 National Medal for Museum and Library Service on behalf of the district. What was that like? It was a joy to go with [community member] Avree Walker, who’s been very active in West Las Vegas and the performing and visual arts camp [sponsored by] the library and the city’s community center. We got to meet Mrs. Obama, and it was a thrill getting that kind of recognition for the district, because people don’t put reading and Las Vegas together. For the top 15 libraries in the country in terms of population served, we’re frst in circulation per capita, frst in circulation per registered borrower and frst in materials expenditure per registered borrower. … My goal was always to have more kids in summer reading programs than there were strippers in Las Vegas. It comes and goes, depending on which convention is in town.