Felt of Dreams | Vegas Seven Magazine | November 6-12, 2014 by Vegas Seven

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14 | THE LATEST

“Meanwhile, in Henderson … ,” by Brian Sodoma. Lost in the hoopla surrounding Downtown Summerlin’s debut, Nevada’s second-largest city is enjoying a nice, quiet resurgence. Plus, recycling gets a boost, Three Questions with rising poker star Danielle Andersen, The Deal and Tweets of the Week.

16 | Green Felt Journal

“Betting on the Future,” by David G. Schwartz. For 150 years, Nevada and gambling have enjoyed a mostly blissful marriage. Could that relationship now be on the rocks?

20 | Character Study

“Beyond the Rhinestones,” by Lissa Townsend Rodgers. For costume designer Grant Philipo, the show lives on long after the curtain closes.

22 | Dispatch

“About That Banana Peel … ,” by Brooke Edwards Staggs. You know the agricultural checkpoint in Yermo is a pain in the ass. What you don’t know is it’s a necessary evil.

24 | COVER

“The Anatomy of the Final Table,” by Jason Scavone. When the World Series of Poker’s Main Event resumes, nine finalists will be vying for a garish bracelet, life-changing cash and poker immortality. But first they must battle their nerves and the unknown.

29 | NIGHTLIFE

“A Few Good Men,” by Jaymi Naciri. Honoring the real veterans of Las Vegas nightlife.

53 | DINING

Al Mancini on the Downtown’s Market and Perch. Plus, Emeril Lagasse unveils a new look for his New Orleans Fish House, and Cocktail Culture.

59 | A&E

“A Tale of Two Dreamers, by Steve Bornfeld. Discovered by Steve Wynn, singer Michael Monge is a Vegas success. His journey reminds the author of another singer who wasn’t as fortunate. Plus, The Hit List, Tour Buzz, and concert reviews of Phish and the Adicts.

72 | Going for Broke

Some season-long football trends show no signs of reversing field.

78 | Seven Questions

Writer Brian Koppelman on playing poker for ‘research,’ how the game teaches life lessons and the status of Rounders 2.

ON THE COVER Photos by Jayne Furman and Joe Giron

November 6–12, 2014

PHOTO BY JOE GIRON

11 15 18 34 64 65

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DIALOGUE CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE Knowing When to Fold ’Em ➜ It was the combination of Positively

Fifth Street, Rounders, World Poker Tour episodes, Chris Moneymaker’s stunning 2003 World Series of Poker victory and the ubiquity of PartyPoker.com that spurred Associate Editor Jason Scavone’s interest in the game. And when he relocated to Las Vegas from upstate New York, it also got him thinking he could earn a little extra pocket change by occasionally taking down some suckers in our city’s poker rooms. “When I landed here late in 2005, we were still firmly in the throes of the poker boom, and you could reasonably expect a night playing low-risk, low-stakes $4/$8 games at the Rio to net a couple hundred bucks against drunks, tourists and sunglasses-wearing wannabes,” says Scavone, who authored this week’s cover story, “Anatomy of the Final Table” (Page 24). “Plus, the free booze saved you beer money.” So why have we never seen Scavone’s name on an ESPN broadcast of the World Series of Poker’s Main Event? “I quickly learned that I didn’t have the stomach for big stakes. Or even slightly smaller ones.” Scavone did eventually muster up the nerve to take his game to the next level: One night during NBA All-Star Weekend in 2007, he settled into a seat in The Mirage poker room, figuring there would never be an easier time to spot easy marks. “I took a shot at a $10/$20 game. Less than two hours and more than $400 later, I was carved up. I still get heart palpitations thinking about four-betting ace-king on the turn, trying to push a weak pair out of the hand.” If nothing else, his low-stakes poker experiences have given Scavone great appreciation for the guts and skill on display each year at the Main Event’s final table: “After talking to the guys who’ve been there, I still can’t wrap my head around firing a huge bluff with a million or more at stake if it doesn’t work. But if anyone wants to stake me in next year’s event, I’ll do what I can to find out for you.”

THIS WEEK @ VEGASSEVEN.COM

BUYING DTLV

Have you been home shopping in the Downtown area lately? Are you thinking about doing so? Well, you’ll be happy to learn there are plenty of properties for sale listed near the somewhat reasonable median price of $200,000. Real estate columnist Pj Perez takes you on a tour of what’s on the market at DTLV.com/ UrbAppeal.

RUNNIN’ WITH THE REBELS

With UNLV football in the midst of yet another long, lost season, it’s time for local fans to turn their attention to the hardwood, as the Runnin’ Rebels tip off their 2014-15 season this week. In addition to his usual in-depth coverage, RunRebs.com writer Mike Grimala will provide up-tothe-minute game details, breaking news and more via our new push notifications. Launch Safari and visit RunRebs.com/WebPush to sign up.

ON THE DOWNLOAD

The weather might be getting cooler, but Las Vegas’ musicians artists are still bringing the heat. Stay up to date with our online music column Hear Now, where Zoneil Maharaj highlights some of the latest (and legal) downloads, streams and videos from local artists. VegasSeven.com/ HearNow.

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EVENT

SESQUICENTENNIAL

UPCOMING EVENTS • Nov. 13

Ethel M Cactus Garden Lighting Ceremony [EthelM.com.] • Nov. 15 Sunset Park’d Food Truck Festival [SunsetParkd.com]

PHOTOS BY TEDDY FUJIMOTO AND MONA SHIELD PAYNE/COX COMMUNICATIONS

November 6–12, 2014

VegasSeven.com

Nevada sure looks good for being 150 years old. On Oct. 31, the state concluded its yearlong sesquicentennial celebration with the Nevada Day Parade along Fourth Street. After a helicopter flyover by Nevada Army National Guard, Grand Marshals (and former Governors) Robert List, Richard Bryan and Bob Miller led more than 150 parade entries, including floats from Carolyn and Oscar Goodman, the Clark County School District, Three Square Food Bank and the UNLV marching band. Governor Brian Sandoval and Lt. Governor Brian Krolicki were also on hand to wish Nevada well on its big day.

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across from

“A girl answers the door in a g-string and nothing else. I look out the sliding-glass window to the pool, and there is this ocean of naked bodies.”

CHARACTER STUDY {PAGE 20}

News, gaming, gossip and the fruits of labor at the Yermo agricultural checkpoint

Meanwhile, in Henderson … Lost in the hoopla surrounding Downtown Summerlin’s debut, Nevada’s second-largest city is enjoying a nice, quiet resurgence By Brian Sodoma

November 6–12, 2014

VegasSeven.com

WITH THE RECENT OPENING OF DOWNTOWN

Summerlin, another recessionary skeleton has regrown its skin. The west-side shopping, dining and entertainment district has generated plenty of buzz, and throughout its build-out the chorus from analysts has been all about how the site fnally brings much-needed retail components to the area. But as many are breathing a deep sigh of relief for those retailneglected Summerlin residents, Henderson is experiencing a renaissance of its own, albeit on a much quieter scale. For starters, Valley Health System last month fnally put shovels to dirt on a 142-bed acute-care hospital, giving life to the once left-for-dead Union Village project. There were other happy-news nuggets surrounding that groundbreaking, too: Las Vegas Athletic Clubs purchased 10 acres on the Union Village site to develop a facility, and another agreement is in the works for a 350-unit townhome complex that should offer plenty of senior resident amenities. The ambitious $1.2 billion Union Village development is expected to take about a decade to fully build out, bring as many as 17,000 jobs to the area and provide billions of dollars in property-tax revenue for Henderson. This is welcome news for a city that’s trimmed $127 million from its budget in the past six years (according to Mayor Andy Hafen’s State of the City address in February) and yet still is searching for answers to a $19 million budget shortfall. Union Village’s groundbreaking comes at a time when other areas of Henderson are also showing signs of post-recessionary life. The Inspirada master-planned community is building out at a robust clip. Residential construction is also brewing around Horizon Ridge Parkway and Gibson Road,

When built out, the $1.2 billion Union Village complex is expected to bring as many as 17,000 jobs to Henderson.

highlighted by the recently completed Vantage Lofts. After years of sitting half-built, Vantage required about $15 million to fnish and switched from selling to leasing its units. Within a mile radius of Vantage are no fewer than fve other new-home developments. Throw in new businesses such as the long-anticipated Cowabunga Bay Water Park (which opened this past summer near Union Village) and Life Time Athletic (a 170,000-squarefoot ftness complex that debuts next week just west of Green Valley Ranch Resort, adding 300 jobs), and Henderson is indeed on a roll. Through September, the city’s building permit count hit 9,730, about 8 percent higher than last year. Perhaps more importantly,

says city spokesman Keith Paul, is the climb in permit revenue. In 2008, $20.4 million came into Henderson through permit fees. At the recession’s nadir, that number plummeted to $5.3 million. The last fscal year saw $8.2 million. “We’re still obviously below the peak, but it’s moving upward again,” Paul says. Stephen Brown, economist and director of UNLV’s Center for Business and Economic Research, sees parallels between Henderson’s rise and Summerlin. His observation is a bit simplistic but accurate: More affuent areas are faring better than other parts of the city. Brown says Union Village is unique for its integration of a hospital, residential development, specialty retail space and other health care

amenities. Its goal of catering to aging baby boomers with spending power is something other communities around the nation are also attempting—although Brown is hesitant to predict Union Village will be a smashing success from the start. “Because the development is a new concept, it remains to be seen how well it will do,” Brown says. “The project may require tweaking to become successful.” Union Village’s groundbreaking and other key construction projects are indeed positives for Nevada’s second-largest city—even if those projects aren’t generating the same kind of publicity as Downtown Summerlin. Maybe redefning Downtown Henderson, complete with a splashy and aggressive PR campaign, will do the trick.

But there is some travel. A year before “Black Friday,” when they shut down online poker in the U.S. in 2011, I didn’t have to travel at all. It can be stressful, too. Other people have [their] job and work “x” amount of hours and have a steady paycheck; as a poker player, that can vary greatly.

★

PROFESSIONAL POKER

★

As the November Nine prepare to square off next week in the World Series of Poker’s Main Event (see Page 24), another card player is making waves. Danielle Andersen,, who started playing poker in college as a way to spend more time with her then-boyfriend (now husband), went from anonymous competitor as her online moniker, dmoongirl, to starring in Bet Raise Fold,, a documentary about the evolution of online poker. We recently caught up with the 30-year-old Minnesota native, now an Ultimate Pokersponsored cash game specialist living in Henderson. How do you balance being a mom and a professional poker player?

Being a professional poker player is a perfect job for a mother, because I create my own schedule. I don’t have to miss big events. If I want to volunteer at my son’s school [or] if I want to make an appointment, I just don’t play that day—no big deal.

Has there been a transition from online to playing live?

It’s a huge transition. One of the biggest things is people can now see me [when I play live]. A lot of times men will play differently versus a female. There are people who think because I’m a woman, I’m completely incapable of bluffng. Then there are people who are like, “Screw this, I’m not getting beat by a girl. I’m never letting this girl bet me out of my hand.” They refuse to fold to you. If they’re never going to fold to me, then I don’t need to bother wasting my money trying to bluff them. Having to adapt to that has been interesting—enjoyable, but interesting. At one point you were considered one of the highest-earning online female poker players. Is that still the case?

I’m not fully up to speed on what’s going on with the online games, because you can only play a couple of sites here in Nevada, and I obviously just play on Ultimate. I would guess that if I’m not the top one, I am one of the top ones. I can tell you that I have both won and lost pots that were $40,000. That’s usually regarded as pretty high. – Jessi C. Acuña

ANDERSEN COURTESY OF ULTIMATE POKER; RECYCLING COURTESY OF REPUBLIC SERVICES

RECYCLING TO GET A BOOST FROM NEW FACILITY Come late next year, when the $34 million Southern Nevada Recycling Complex opens, residents can expect a number of changes—like being able to once again recycle milk cartons and juice boxes. But the biggest impact from the new facility, which broke ground November 6, is single-stream recycling, which Republic Services hopes to implement for the entire Valley by 2018. That means Valley residents who still use the three-bin system will no longer have to sort their recyclables into buckets. Republic Services anticipates the new facility, which will handle a greater capacity, will encourage more recycling because of the ease of using a single bin and an educational initiative that will launch simultaneously, says Len Christopher, Republic Services general manager. Republic officials say they’ve already seen an increase in recycling in some pilot neighborhoods, as well as in Henderson and North Las Vegas, where the single-bin system has been in place. Republic serves more than 535,000 households, as well as industrial and commercial businesses in North Las Vegas, Las Vegas, Henderson and Clark County. The current recycling center, which is adjacent to the future site off of Cheyenne Avenue and Commerce Street in North Las Vegas, can process about 25 tons of curbside material per hour. That’s expected to increase to roughly 70 tons per hour. “This year, we’ll do 140,000 tons,” Christopher says. “When this thing is online, we’ll be up to 250,000 tons.” The 110,000-square-foot Recycling Complex, which is

By Bob Whitby

THURSDAY, NOV. 6: Year 2 of the Las Vegas Burlesque Festival promises to be bigger, bouncier and naughtier than the 2013 debut. The four-day event at the Gold Coast opens today with a cocktail hour at 8 p.m. and a burlesque parade at 9. That’s our kind of entertainment. Tickets: $28-$59.25; LVBurlesqueFestival.com. FRIDAY, NOV. 7: Think MMA is exclusively a boys’ club? Well it isn’t. And in order to promote that fact, two MMA organizations are joining forces to award two female fighters a potentially lucrative contract at the Future Stars of MMA. The fights that will decide who gets the contract start at 8 p.m. at Cox Pavilion. Tickets: $28-$53; Tuffnuff.com. SATURDAY, NOV. 8: What are your plans for today?

Well, cancel them because the Brew’s Best Beer Festival is happening, and who among us wants to miss a beer festival? This one happens twice a year at the Village in Lake Las Vegas. There will be dozens of local and regional brews for quaffing and a lovely lake to stroll around. Tickets: $25-$40; BrewsBestLV.com.

SUNDAY, NOV. 9: Last call for Wicked, Wicked the Broadway smash that has spent the last month on the boards at The Smith Center. In case you don’t know, it’s the backstory of the two witches who are featured in The Wizard of Oz, and it’s really good. 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.; tickets: $45-$161; TheSmithCenter.com. MONDAY, NOV. 10: Mondays are good for taking in some art, and today is a good day for Unnatural Selection, an exhibition of alien curiosities that at first seems quite foreign but really speaks to very human qualities. Through Jan. 15 at Las Vegas City Hall’s Grand Gallery. ArtsLasVegas.org. TUESDAY, NOV. 11: According to the people who put

being touted as the largest in North America, will also employ technology that allows workers to help control optical sorters, which are used to assist in separating materials and make the system more efficient; currently, workers have to radio in and manually adjust the machines. “These computers have the ability to identify plastic by density, by the color, by the type,” Christopher says. “We can program it to hit fiber, hit paper, to pull the paper out of the line before the plastics continue through the process.” The Recycling Complex will also include the Learning Center, which will showcase the new building and host tours, including educational videos, visual displays and a second-level lookout of the entire process, starting with the truck tip (when the goods are dumped) and concluding with the materials being baled and shipped out. – Jessi C. Acuña

it on, the Las Vegas Veterans Day Parade is the second largest in the nation, behind the one held in New York City. And while we wait for that to be independently verified, there’s no need to check on the fact that this is a great event honoring all American veterans. It starts at 10 a.m. at Fourth Street and Gass Avenue. VeteransParade.com.

WEDNESDAY, NOV. 12: Now that cooking is a competitive sport, it’s only natural it culminates in the World Food Championships. And it’s only natural that said championships take place in Las Vegas, which they do, today through Nov. 18 at various locations Downtown. These contests pit amateurs against one another in categories from barbecue to bacon. Tickets: $25-$275; WorldFoodChampionships.com.

For 150 years, Nevada and gambling have enjoyed a mostly blissful marriage. Could that relationship now be on the rocks?

BAGGING A SEAT FOR THE BIG ONE

November 6–12, 2014

VegasSeven.com

NEVADA’S 150TH BIRTHDAY IS AS GOOD A

time as any to refect on how the relationship between the state and its highest-profle industry, gambling, has changed over time. The original match wasn’t exactly a marriage of convenience, but it wasn’t a forbidden romance, either. When Nevada joined the Union in 1864, it soberly criminalized the gambling that had been rampant— as it was virtually everywhere in the West—during its territorial days. Five years later, though, the state Legislature thought better of it and, over the governor’s veto, made gambling legal. Not that Nevada was all that much of a maverick. After all, commercial gambling remained legal in California until 1860, and the act of gambling itself wasn’t outlawed until 1885. Legal or not, gambling ran virtually unrestricted in the cow towns and mining camps west of the Mississippi, and gambling remained legal in Arizona and New Mexico territories until their statehood in 1912. Nevada’s legalization wasn’t an immediate unabashed love affair; gambling could be conducted, but not in the front room of an establishment. The impressionable public would have to walk past the whiskey and dancing girls to get to the poker and faro. As the Silver State moved into the 20th century, though, gambling came to be seen as, possibly, a youthful indiscretion; other states were certainly moving past their tolerance. A coalition of Nevada progressives convinced voters that legal

gambling was a relic of the past that was keeping the state from reaching its true potential, and in 1910 gambling became illegal once more. The ban was never absolute—social games such as poker were permitted almost immediately—but the offcial policy of Nevada remained antigambling for more than 20 years. The state’s “I wish I knew how to quit you” moment happened in the throes of the Great Depression when, out of desperation for any kind of economic stimulus, the Legislature approved “wide open” commercial gambling and “quickie” six-week, no-fault divorce. Over the next 30 years, several things happened to keep gambling and Nevada sleeping in the same bed. A wave of national antigambling sentiment following the Kefauver Committee’s early-1950s investigation soured other states on legalizing wagering, giving Nevada a monopoly. Also, other economic development options failed to pan out, leaving the state few avenues for different revenueproducing industries. And yet today, at 150 years old, there are signs that Nevada is looking past its longtime paramour. Since the turn of the millennium, non-gaming elements have pro-

duced the majority of revenue on the Strip, and competition from surrounding states has diminished the fortunes of markets such as Reno, Lake Tahoe and Laughlin. Two once-closed Las Vegas casinos have, in the past year, returned to life (Downtown Grand and SLS), but with far less focus on gambling than their predecessors. Similarly, other operators continue to invest heavily in their resorts, but in a non-gaming way. Indeed, one gets the sense that if a more attractive suitor approached—be it Tesla factories or festival concerts headlined by Metallica—Nevada wouldn’t think twice about moving on from gambling. To an extent, it’s already happening: Call it diversifcation if you like, but it’s as clear as ever that most Nevadans would prefer to see the economy tied to something else. And, with gambling nearly ubiquitous in the United States, even casino operators agree that other options are needed to keep the city’s resorts full. So, 150 years in, Nevada’s love for gambling might indeed be on the wane. And really, that’s not much of a change at all, because Nevada’s passion was never for gambling per se, but for the things it brings: tourists, jobs and money. As we look to the next 150 years, it likely won’t be gambling but the larger hospitality experience a city like Las Vegas offers that keeps the Silver State’s pulse racing.

The final table of the World Series of Poker’s Main Event begins November 10 at the Penn & Teller Theater in the Rio. I’ve attended a few of these, and they’re pretty cool to watch, as all of the players have rooting sections and it gets pretty rowdy. That atmosphere, along with the fact this is one of the richest events in the sporting world, makes for a fun spectator event. And you’re invited. Since it’s against state gaming regulations to charge to watch live gambling events, free tickets will be distributed on a first-come, first-served basis, beginning early November 10. The theater has 1,100 seats, but many will be reserved for the media, with many more dispersed among friends and families of the finalists. Hence, free tickets will be relatively limited, with lines forming by 8 or 9 a.m. The doors open at 3:30 p.m., while the cards go in the air at 4:48—making for a long day that most won’t want to sign up for. But there’s another play. Although the theater will be packed at the start, it will stay that way only for the first couple of hours. After that, and especially as players are eliminated, large blocks of seats open and new people are let in. If you want to be there from the start, plan on making a day of it. Otherwise, show up around 7 p.m. Depending on how much effort you’re prepared to exert, the best plan may be watching it on ESPN in the comfort of your home (there’s a 30-minute delay for the telecast). Regardless of how and where you watch, here are a few things to keep in mind: The champion will win an even $10 million this year to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the event being at the Rio. Those who finish between second and seventh place will win more than $1 million (8th pays $947,077 and 9th pays $730,725). This is obviously no tournament for old men, with six of the nine finalists in their 20s and the other three in their 30s. Since 2008, all Main Event winners have been under 25. Fitting that profile this year are Felix Stephensen (23) and Andoni Larrabe (the youngest at 22). The favorite based on betting lines (yes, there are odds at offshore sportsbooks) is chip leader Jorryt van Hoof. In fact, the betting market favors the players almost in the same order as their chip totals, which is normal. The lone exception is Martin Jacobson, who’s fifth on the betting line, despite being eighth in chips. FYI: The action on Day Two (November 11) starts at 5:48 p.m. Getting a seat near the rail that day should be much easier.

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

Anthony Curtis is the publisher of the Las Vegas Advisor and LasVegasAdvisor.com.

ILLUSTRATION BY JON ESTRADA

THE LATEST

Betting on the Future

THE LATEST

@JonHeymanCBS How is an idiot like Jose Canseco even allowed to own a gun?

@RGJRayHagar It’s like Clark County didn’t exist when “Home Means Nevada” was written. Time to give song a new verse for 80% of the state’s population.

@JimNorton Anyone ‘outraged’ over Ray Rice Halloween costumes should stop dressing their kids as pirates. Pirates were even more violent than Ray.

@JoeMande

Looney Tunes

Wrapping up on a cartoonish Halloween flled with the usual tricks (Snoop’s costume) and treats (Tyson speaks)

If you’re 12 years old, Mike Tyson is just a Broadway comedian and bird enthusiast.

@NateSilver538 What happens in Vegas may not stay there*. (*Given how poorly the CDC rates Nevada’s preparedness for an epidemic.)

@BetteMidler

many Mario and Luigi costumes you saw on Halloween night. Somewhere around 15 or 20, right? Then you were at a relatively small house party. Everyone loves to go as a two-dimensional character for Halloween. Which makes it a really tough week to stand out when you’re a human cartoon to begin with. Take, for example, Snoop Dogg, who’s already Shaggy from ScoobyDoo without all the subtext. He did a gig at Tao on Halloween night for the Snoopadelic Cabaret. Great chance for a super cool costume, right? He could’ve dressed like Shaft, or The Mack, Dolemite or Iggy Azalea—really, any of the great Blaxploitation heroes. Instead, he busted out Todd, the whiteface character he already does on his social media. Come on, Snoop. You’re the guy at the Halloween party who insists his costume is Peyton Manning because the only thing he could fnd in his closet an hour before leaving the house was a Denver Broncos jersey. You could’ve put some effort in, man. Then again, real-life Blaxploitation character Suge Knight spent his Halloween in jail, where “convict” is the most popular cos-

tume for the 150th straight year. Sugar Bear got popped in Vegas on October 29 stemming from a September 5 incident in Beverly Hills where he allegedly grabbed a photographer’s camera. Comedian Katt Williams was arrested at the same time for the same incident, making them the Super Friends of our times. Knight was reportedly taken to a hospital for a blood clot in his lung over the weekend after he fainted in his cell. If Suge and Williams are our modern Super Friends, then Deadmau5 and Paris Hilton are more like our Papa Smurf and Gargamel. Deadmau5 hopped on his Tumblr to trash Hilton for making so much money as a DJ. We guess he put her on blast, if you can count “stating the super obvious” as putting someone on blast: “No need to prove that you found someone stupid enough to consider paying you a million dollars for something the world knows

you aren’t. Because here’s what you actually are to everyone who knows better: ticket sales. Nothing more.” He did qualify that, though, telling TMZ he’d DJ with her for $2 million. Obviously. We’d DJ with Zombie Attila the Hun for two mil. Which would also make a great Halloween costume. Our native cartoon humans weren’t sleeping this week, either. Jose Canseco managed to shoot himself in the hand while cleaning a gun at his kitchen table October 28, nearly losing a fnger in the process. It’s just really, really irresponsible to keep guns in a house where twin Ozzie could get at them. What if he brought one to school? Finally, Mike Tyson—whose new cartoon series Mike Tyson Mysteries recently premiered on Adult Swim, making him both a fgurative and literal cartoon character—opened up on Sirius XM’s Opie Radio, telling hosts Opie Hughes and Jim Norton that he was snatched off the street and sexually abused at age 7. He seemed sanguine about the whole thing, saying he didn’t know if it changed him. Regardless, it at least explains why he ended up buying a tiger all those years later: Apex predators tend to stop sexual predators.

Jose Canseco accidentally shot off a finger while cleaning his gun. His right to bear arms got in the way of his right to have fingers.

@TokenBrotha I lost Suge Knight Bingo this week. I said he’d throw someone off a bridge.

@Benschwartzy SNL should just have Zach Galifianakis do the same Chris Rock monologue next week and all the angry white ppl will call it “edgy.”

@WolfSnap Samsung just announced that their next CEO will be gay! “Our gay CEO will be 25% gayer than Tim Cook,” said Samsung PR.

@JonahKeri This is the last time I’ll ever have to see Bud Selig on my television. #blessed.

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ILLUSTRATION BY CIERRA PEDRO

November 6–12, 2014

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QUICK—THINK BACK AND COUNT HOW

THE LATEST

CHARACTER STUDY

Beyond the Rhinestones For colorful costume designer Grant Philipo, the show lives on long afer the curtain closes

November 6–12, 2014

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LAS VEGAS HAS BEEN CALLED A CITY

of surface, where the glossy exterior conceals hard work and long hours. Under the sequins and spangles, there’s often safety pins and glue, something few people know better than designer Grant Philipo. Philipo has designed and/ or built costumes for such iconic divas as Dolly Parton and Ann-Margret, as well as rising starlets like Absinthe’s Melody Sweets and burlesque queen Kalani Kokonuts. For decades, he has been collecting and restoring show and movie costumes, which are contained in his Las Vegas Showgirl Museum. Since the museum is in his home, Philipo spends every day surrounded by mannequins in scarlet-feathered headdresses and hooded velvet gowns, chain-bedecked jumpsuits and mirror-studded codpieces. “Glitz and glamour,” he intones, “glitz and glamour.” It’s more than a description of his surroundings: It’s Grant Philipo’s philosophy of life. Philipo’s costume career came by accident. He grew up in Iowa but relocated to Las Vegas “trying to be a model, singer, dancer—typical of Vegas in the ’80s” and found himself at a house party. “A girl answers the door in a g-string and nothing else,” he continues. “I look out a sliding-glass window to the pool, and there is this ocean of naked bodies— this was back when dancers couldn’t have tan lines.” One of the dancers showed Philipo a bird costume she was making, and he cringed. “It looked like the worst Aztec war helmet—absolutely nothing like a bird. … She was using a little teeny stuffed toy duck as a model! I said, ‘I hate to tell you, but I believe I could do a better job.’” She asked if he could sew. “No. I knew art, I had

won art scholarships, had things in museums.” Philipo created an extravagant white feather costume. “When she saw it, she cried. … All she did was raise her head and open her wings [onstage], and she got a standing ovation from the audience.” Not that the success of that frst design turned Philipo’s head. “I said, ‘I will never make another costume. I do not want to be in the background.’” But when Puerto Rican sex bomb Iris Chacon saw the costume, she asked him to design production numbers for her new show at the Caribe Hilton, and Philipo couldn’t say no. “I was going to Puerto Rico,” he says, shaking his head. “I thought I was going to Europe! I thought I was fnally going to Paris!” The project had its obstacles—the glue on a dozen feathered headdresses melted en route to not-Europe; Chacon found her outfts insuffciently glitzy; and it took “a barrel of rhinestones” to overcome the language/taste barrier. But the show was a success, and Philipo fnally accepted that it was his destiny to make the stars shine. Philipo went on to perfect his craft with legendary Hollywood designers Bob Mackie and Bill Hargate, learning the fne arts of feathering and beading, draping and sculpting. He worked with such icons as Michael Jackson and Sylvester Stallone and bands from the Mandrell Sisters to KISS, thus adding the handling of major egos to his skill set. “The bigger they are, the sweeter they are,” he says of his dealings with celebs, “the less known they are, the more horrible they are.” Philipo also had his own experience inside the glitter: “I was Liberace’s ftting model. I was working in the

design house. … I got to wear all of those costumes.” Philipo is still creating big productions, albeit in a slightly different format. He has met with several casinos about a permanent, largeformat home for the Las Vegas Showgirl Museum—all

20,000 pieces, plus the sets and props as well. So if you were born too late for Lido de Paris at the Stardust, you can still catch the show. “We want people to see the sets exactly like they were if you were sitting in the showroom,” Philipo says. “You see

row after row of the showgirls in costumes.” What’s more glitz and glamour than that? Philipo offers tours of his in-home museum by appointment only. A $10 donation is requested. Sign up at LasVegasShowgirlMuseum.com.

PHOTO BY TOMO MUSCIONICO

By Lissa Townsend Rodgers

About That Banana Peel …

You know the agricultural checkpoint in Yermo is a pain in the ass. What you don’t know is it’s a necessary evil. By Brooke Edwards Staggs Photography by James Quigg

November 6–12, 2014

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THE LATEST

DISPATCH

WHETHER YOU’RE A LAS VEGAN HAULING

the family to Disneyland or a Californian heading home with a Sin City hangover, the agriculture inspection station in Yermo is anything but convenient. On a weekday, it means briefy slowing to a crawl as you kick that banana peel farther under your seat. On a Sun-

day afternoon, it means an extra hour or two behind the wheel as you curse and resolve—again—to leave early next time. But know what else isn’t convenient? Crazy ants. If crazy ants tag along in a Colorado family’s potted plant, they can eat away the wiring in your home, cautions Greg

Du Bose, manager of the California Department of Food and Agriculture checkpoint. If quagga mussels hitchhike on a boat from Lake Mead, they can choke local water supplies. And if Asian long-horned beetles commute from Chicago in a stack of frewood, they can devastate entire forests, further elevat-

ing California’s wildfre threat. Having worked for 17 years at the remote desert checkpoint just north of Barstow, Du Bose knows full well that few people understand why it’s there. Foreign visitors often fash their passports, he says, while East Coast visitors have tollbooth change handy. Com-

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ers don’t have to stop. Otherwise it can take hours to examine produce trucks, track livestock and complete paperwork. But what about those of us passing through in our Priuses and PT Cruisers? What if we have a couple of apples in the ice chest or bought a bag of cherries at a roadside stand? Contrary to what you probably believe, it’s not actually illegal to bring produce into California. Drivers simply have to pass through the checkpoint and, if asked, come clean about what they have and where it’s from. Inspectors may then want to take a closer look. If they fnd suspicious larvae in your orange or on those wildfowers you picked, you’ll have two choices: hand them over to be destroyed and continue on your merry way, or be banished back across the border. If you’re caught hiding produce or plants, inspectors can write citations that could result in fnes, but they aren’t law enforcement and they can’t detain anyone—even if they fnd a truck full of cocaine. That’s when they call the California Highway Patrol. In fact, CHP offcers and sheriff’s dog teams occasionally stand with inspectors. The San Bernardino County Fire Department also runs operations in Yermo, and a

November 6–12, 2014

menters on Yelp, who give the station one-and-a-half stars, complain of delays and report they’re always just “waved through.” One review reads, “A complete waste of time, manpower and taxpayer money.” The State of California disagrees. Although recent fnancial woes limited hours at some stations and temporarily shuttered others—in recent years, the Yermo checkpoint was manned mostly only during peak driving times—the 2014-15 budget included an extra $3.1 million to keep all 16 of California’s agriculture inspection stations open year-round. Supporters claim that’s a bargain compared with trying to get rid of invasive pests and offsetting damage to valuable crops or waterways. So long as there’s funding to staff the

station, Du Bose insists, “Every vehicle that comes through here gets some sort of inspection.” That could be a visual check, with workers noting whether the license plate is from a state that’s home to harmful species.(Generally, vehicles from Nevada or California are waved through, while those with plates from states east of the Continental Divide tend to raise a red fag.) It could be a verbal check, with inspectors asking drivers whether they have any produce. Or, in the case of slow days and high-risk vehicles, it could mean a physical inspection. Inspectors stand ready to search for everything from smuggled palm trees to out-of-state recyclables to illegal pet ferrets. On tables by their sides are blocks used to steady vehicles’ tires before inspectors peek under them. There are wrenches to pull plugs out of boats and bolt cutters in case a driver doesn’t have the key to a locked truck bed. There’s a pressure washer to knock mussels off boats. And in the nearby trailer, there’s a bee suit and digital microscope to quickly identify pests. Commercial trucks take up most of the inspectors’ time. Some companies, including Walmart and Target, have compliance agreements in place so driv-

Fourth of July sting this year resulted in $126,250 in fnes to drivers who tried to transport 10 tons of freworks, with three people getting arrested. And that’s not even the craziest of stories. There was the time a driver handed an inspector a bottle of vodka and said, “Can you hold this for a minute?” There was the time extreme winds blew the inspection station’s roof onto a Yukon rented by an Australian family. Then there was the man who told an inspector he had bombs in his truck speakers. No bombs were found, but the freeway was shut down, and the man was arrested for making terrorist threats. Those instances aside, the routine can get tedious, so inspectors occasionally try to lighten the mood. When drivers ask inspector Michael Percy how far the rain goes, he likes to respond, “All the way to the ground.” Once Du Bose greeted an elderly couple by saying, “Welcome to Mexico.” The wife promptly slapped her husband and said, “I told you you were going the wrong way!” The location of the checkpoint is a bit puzzling. Yermo is 102 miles from the California/Nevada border. Though drivers can be cited and potentially fned up to $2,500 if they bypass an inspection station, online forums offer up a number of alternative routes to avoid the delays. Consequently, a new dual port-of-entry checkpoint has been planned for six miles south of Primm for nearly 30 years. The station will include both a commercial vehicle weigh station run by the CHP and an agricultural inspection station. Funding questions have continually delayed the $71 million project, but the CHP launched construction of its portion in December. The weigh station is expected to open in late 2015, Caltrans spokeswoman Terri Kasinga says. As for the new agricultural checkpoint, it’s on the books, but there’s no time frame yet for when construction will begin. If and when it is completed, Du Bose says about a third of his staff will move there with him, while the rest will likely be hired out of Las Vegas. What will then become of the Yermo station, which has plagued drivers, safeguarded California crops and waterways, and marked the halfway point between Las Vegas and Los Angeles since it opened a half-century ago? It will return to the desert.

The Anatomy of the Final Table

When the World Series of Poker’s Main Event resumes next week, nine fnalists will vye for a garish bracelet, life-changing cash and poker immortality. But frst they must battle their nerves and the unknown. Here’s what the November Nine can expect. By J A S O N S C A V O N E

Luis Velador played his last hand in the 2014 World Series of Poker’s Main Event. Pocket fours, no good. That left nine men still kicking to scrap for the bracelet that has lit the wrist of every winner since Doyle Brunson collected the first one in 1976. It’s poker’s version of the Masters green jacket—ugly as hell, but prettier than Mila Kunis in a whiskey distillery. By the time the tournament resumes November 10 with its November Nine, it will have been 119 days since any of them set to disemboweling each other over India green felt. When they left, all nine collected checks for $730,725—the guaranteed minimum payout for this year’s fnal table. When they reconvene at the Rio’s Penn & Teller Theater, one of them will have spent months of worry, study, sweat and preparation for the privilege of going home without one more thin, measly, pissed-off-Roosevelt dime. Giddy-up. Most of them have never been to the final table. Some have cashed more than a dozen times in WSOP events. A couple never have. One has had more success in foosball tournaments than at poker. Just one, Mark Newhouse, who reached last year’s final table, has any idea what’s waiting for him inside that showroom—only he truly understands that the final table is more than just the end of another poker tournament. It’s a bitch of a beast that wraps you up, draws you in—a Faustian parasite that promises much in the way of reward, sure, but demands a hefty chunk of psychic currency for the privilege. For the winner, it will all dovetail perfectly, energy well spent. For the other eight, years of what-ifs are in store: What if

that four never fell? What if I never ran that bluff? What if I took up a less-stressful line of work, like Los Zetas informant, or Middle East dictator?

Study Long, Study Wrong. Maybe. forget the time in july spent amassing enough chips to build a credible replica of the Vatican; the real struggle began the second Velador’s forty-four came up just shy of Newhouse’s Sammy Hagar-blessed pair of fves. That kicked off the nearly four-month lull in action. It’s like the Super Bowl taking a break after the third quarter of a 21-21 game and coming back in May. All that focus, all that adrenaline shooting around like a ’55 Porsche just piled up against the oncoming Ford of a PR-mandated layoff. Ryan Riess, the 24-year-old curlyhaired 2013 champ whom ESPN’s Bill Simmons nicknamed “Megatron Nowitzki” for his Calvin Johnson jersey and more-than-slight resemblance to Dirk, says he initially didn’t know how he should spend the long layoff. He quickly realized he’d be better off getting his own game right instead of playing amateur Freud on the minds of his opponents. Riess played in the WSOP Europe that October. He didn’t fnish in the money, but he did keep his skills sharp rather than fret over what might happen come November. Hell, the 2013 Main Event runner-up and Las Vegas nightclub promoter, Jay Farber, was so committed to coming to the fnal table fresh he spent much of his downtime raging his way through Grey Goose and EDM in the clubs. If you want to convince the other eight guys that you’re not sweating the money, that’s the way to do it. The November Nine made-for-ESPN break has only been in effect since

2008. Dennis Phillips, the canny veteran who fnished third that year, went the other way. He tapped his inner J. Edgar Hoover and assembled dossiers on the other players—betting patterns, hand histories, tells, anything. He even played scout, traveling across the pond to get a look at Ivan Demidov, who would eventually fnish second, one spot ahead of Phillips. “Ivan was playing in the WSOP event over there. I went to watch him for a little while. I think he got very startled [when he] looked up in the crowd and saw my

WSOP MAIN EVENT PAYOUTS â

face there,” Phillips says. If nothing else, it doesn’t hurt to unnerve your foes by going all Fatal Attraction. After all that prep, or lack thereof, that felt-covered sonofabitch is going to tie on a bib and dig into your mind, whether you’re ready or not. Everyone is in for it one way or another: sleepless nights, restless mornings or pukey minutes right before wobbling onstage. In ’08, at least one of the fnalists booted twice before settling in. Better there than on the felt—though that wouldn’t have stopped anyone from

PHOTO BY JOE GIRON

November 6–12, 2014

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â just before 1 a.m. on july 15,

First place: $10,000,000 • Second place: $5,145,968 • Third place: $3,806,402

• Fourth place:

$2,848,833

• Fifth place:

some guys, the ones who don’t win that ugly bracelet, never manage to conquer their nerves. It might take a hand, it might take an hour, but the rest settle into the old familiar patterns: Bet, call, raise, fold, bluff, value bet, pot odds, trap, position, table image, range. The game’s theories and rhythms are a blessing. When your brain is juggling ironclad math and the subtle art of table feel, there’s only so much room for pants-shitting terror.

$2,143,174

• Sixth place:

$1,622,080

• Seventh place:

$1,235,862

• Eighth place:

as the final table grinds along— eight, nine, 10 hours or more—you start to dive into poker’s inherent paradox, the kind that would make Zeno proud. The goal of playing poker professionally is to—slow down and follow closely here; it might get complicated—win money. Yet the more you sweat the bills, the harder it is to perform. The phrase “healthy disregard for money” gets thrown around. A lot. So in order to get the cash, you have to forget about the cash. Buddhists would love this game if it weren’t for all the material-world considerations. “It plays on your mind leading up to it,” Phillips says of the jackpot. “When you’re actually down there playing, you really don’t think about the money. It’s probably one of the problems we have as poker players: We should be thinking about the money jumps more than we do. But when you sit there, you think of the angles, you think of the plays and you concentrate on playing good poker.” Easy enough in theory, but harder to do when drug lord-size bricks of cash are being piled on the table next to you. In his frst big tournament, Riess accepted a chop—where the last three players agree to divvy up the loot—and it made him play poorly the rest of the way. It clawed at him to the point that he vowed to never again play for anything less than frst—even if it came at the expense of a safe, guaranteed, pocket-lining deal. “I was just thinking of it as a poker game and I have to win. It starts with nine people, and the only option is to win. I wasn’t thinking about the money,” Riess says. “I just thought of it like we’re playing a game with me and eight of my friends, and if you lose, you die. All I thought about was winning.”

Only in T-Ball Is Everyone a Winner michael jordan has the kind of competitive streak that sportswriters slobber over the way Greeks yammered about golden feece. Jordan might be a famous gambler, but there’s no ego in blackjack. The math says you’ll lose, so lose you

$947,077

• Ninth place:

$730,725

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Shuffle Up, Deal and Hang On

It’s Sort of About the Benjamins

gladly dragging the pot, half-digested eggs and all. “I was extremely nervous the morning of,” Riess says. “I walked downstairs at the Rio to do something. As I was walking in the hallway back to my room I started getting really nervous. It was just a sense of being overwhelmed. All the time and energy I put into the fnal table all comes down to a couple of hours on the felt. It could essentially be one hand. It was nerve-wracking because the time was fnally there, and I didn’t want to blow my shot.”

ent Express’ mystique would have got to him. Similarly, Riess last year was less likely to defend his blinds against Tran than others at his table. If anything, this year’s table bears more resemblance to the one Phillips faced in ’08, when Chino Rheem hadn’t yet cemented his $7 million in career earnings. Aside from the returning Newhouse ($2.8 million in his career) and Martin Jacobson ($4.8 million), this isn’t a wildly accomplished feld. And isn’t building those earnings what the game’s all about?

November 6–12, 2014

Lights, camera, action: After a four-month layoff, the November Nine lay it all on the line.

Still, there are immutable realities to face once the cards are in the air. Phil Hellmuth, the ’89 Main Event champ and 2001 ffth-place fnisher, has won more WSOP bracelets than anyone (13), has more cashes than anyone (108) and made more overall fnal tables in WSOP events than anyone (53). Forget the reedy-voiced petulance that ESPN cameras fock to like deer around a salt lick—Hellmuth is a table-slaying conquistador. But he’s quick to point out that these things always start out tight. Yet, counterintuitively, losing that frst player can be as irrelevant as it is a boon. Everyone is aware of how much their payouts increase with each bustout, but players insist that in all but extreme cases—Kelly Kim entering action in ’08 with $2.6 million in chips, enough to pay the blinds and antes for just a couple of rounds—climbing the ladder isn’t the goal. “The difference between ninth-place [money] and eighth place was substantial,” Phillips says. “All you had to do was basically wait until Kelly busted out. Six of the people at the table realized that. The other two got in a heads-up match, and one of them wound up being eliminated in ninth place and bumped Kelly up to another level on a questionable poker move in my book. But once he left, everyone else looked around and said, ‘OK, now we get to play.’ … You did not want to be the frst person out.” Say you do survive that frst bust— you’re not the guy going home without a check. At the very least you have the pleasure of adding, at least this year, a minimum of $217,000 to your roll. Your reward? Facing down some 800-pound gorilla at the table; either a big stack, or one of the big-name players who usually fnds himself there at the end, the guy everyone else is secretly praying to the Baby Poker Jesus will run into a stack-killing cold deck. Last year, one of those stars was J.C. Tran, who arrived at the fnal table with about $11 million in career tournament winnings. In ’89, a young Hellmuth had to vanquish Johnny Chan, then the twotime defending champ and one of the most daunting players in pro poker. Jim McManus famously played in the Main Event, as he’d go on to write in Positively Fifth Street, while he was here covering the Ted Binion murder trial in 2000 for Harper’s. His fnal table featured T.J. Cloutier, the man whose book McManus studied in preparation for the tournament. “He was the winningest tournament player ever at that point. Intimidation, at least for me, was a factor. T.J. was a scary guy. He didn’t just raise; he sort of raised with physical and voiced aggression,” McManus says. If Hellmuth hadn’t come into the ’89 fnal table without having dusted up with Chan numerous times in the previous couple of years, he says the Ori-

3 5

8 9

7 6 4

1 Jorryt van Hoof

2 Felix Stephensen 3 Mark Newhouse

4 Andoni Larrabe

5 Dan Sindelar

$38,375,000 in chips

$32,775,000

$22,550,000

$21,200,000

Your chip leader, van Hoof had one of the 10 shortest stacks when he finished Day 4 before he came roaring back. Though van Hoof prefers pot-limit Omaha, Phil Hellmuth says the 31-year-old Dutchman is the one to watch at this year’s final table.

One of two players at the 2014 final table to never even cash in any WSOP event, the 23-yearold Norwegian entered this year’s tournament with only $22,118 in live career earnings (though he’s racked up more than $300,000 online). He once harbored dreams of playing pro soccer, but now lives in London, where he focuses, like van Hoof, on pot-limit Omaha.

$26,000,000

Last year, Newhouse came into the final table as the short stack and busted out first. The fact he’s part of the November Nine again should be absolutely terrifying to other players, given how insanely sharp your game has to be to navigate more than 6,000 competitors two years in a row. At 29, the Las Vegas resident has already amassed more than $2.8 million in career winnings.

If you’re sensing a trend, it’s because Larrabe is also impossibly young (22) and also lives in London, although he’s a native of Spain. Looking to become the second Spaniard to win the Main Event— Carlos Mortensen was the first in 2001—Larrabe has a couple of big online cashes on his résumé, including one for $229,212. He has $341,266 in live earnings.

Sindelar is our second Las Vegan—by way of Nebraska— and has cashed 17 times in WSOP events to the tune of nearly $150,000. Sindelar told PokerNews.com he’s been playing more golf than poker lately, though the 30-year-old will have plenty of ammo to swing that balance the other way after cashing.

6 William 7 William Tonking Pappaconstantinou $15,050,000 $17,500,000

Meet your fivetime world champion of foosball. Pappaconstantinou appears at the final table in between foosball tournaments, because poker suffers from a terrible dearth of tiny men to spin around. Along with Stephensen, the 29-year-old is the only other member of the November Nine with no WSOP cashes, though he does have $16,379 in career live earnings.

The 27-year-old New Jersey online pro comes in with three WSOP cashes to his name and a total of $93,306 in live tourney winnings. He also claims to be a Dallas Cowboys fan, so if you’re looking for somebody to root against at this final table ...

8 Martin Jacobson 9 Bruno Politano $14,900,000

$12,125,500

Like the other Europeans on this list, Jacobson also lives in London. But unlike anyone else in the field, the 27-year-old Swede has earned $1.2 million in various WSOP events. Jacobson, who has $4.8 million in total tourney winnings, doesn’t have much farther to go to eclipse two-time bracelet winner Chris Bjôrin’s $5.5 million in career tournament earnings as the all-time, top-earning Swede.

Politano, 32, is the first Brazilian to ever make the final table. He hit with a splash this year, cashing in three of 10 WSOP events, to the tune of $25,404. Odds are against Politano navigating his way to the top. Then again, the Main Event is held at the Rio, just in case you’re a believer in the stars lining up …

PHOTOS BY JOE GIRON

November 6–12, 2014

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2014 November Nine Lineup

Ryan Riess ponders his next move on his way to the 2013 WSOP Main Event title.

When your brain is juggling ironclad math and the subtle art of table feel, there’s only so much room for pants-shitting terror.

The Big Comedown either way, something worked. Riess beat Farber for the $8.36 million, for the bracelet, for poker immortality. Jimmy Kimmel invited Riess to appear on his late-night show, but he declined. It took him a month to settle down and realize he really won it all. Meanwhile, McManus might have taken a boot to the stones with that four on the river, but he’s philosophical about the fact that he got a book out of the deal. It doesn’t hurt, he muses, that winning wouldn’t have bumped sales any more than his ffth-place fnish did. But they all can recall, in bright, spectacular detail, the hands that defned their fnal table. None more so than Hellmuth, whose facility for recounting specifc cards, frankly, whistles on the edge of creepy. It was the hand that knocked him out in ’01 that comes back with a Chuck Bronson vengeance. He held queen-10 on a queen-high fop and got check-raised by eventual winner Carlos Mortensen. Hellmuth came back over the top all-in, fguring Mortensen had something strong, nothing at all or only a slightly better hand. In that spot, with the screws directly to him, it’s incredibly diffcult for Mortensen to decide to call. “[Mortensen] said ‘count’ and the dealer looked at me and said ‘call.’ Now I fip my hand up. Carlos swears he didn’t see my cards,” Hellmuth recalls. “It turned out to be the most important hand of my life at that point, or maybe one of the most important hands of my life since.” Hellmuth had a whole script ready to rattle off to dissuade Mortensen from calling, but that fub by the dealer scuttled that plan. Mortensen says he never saw what cards Hellmuth fashed, but he made the call to have his queen-jack stand up. “That hand haunted me for a couple of years afterward. I’ll never react that quickly again.” Hellmuth has every right to the confdence he espouses when he says he’ll be back at the fnal table. Newhouse aside, a repeat November Nine appearance is black-diamond rare with the big felds the WSOP Main Event sports today. Dan Harrington went back-to-back in ’03 and ’04, and those were felds of 839 and 2,576. The 2013 tourney drew 6,352 and this year brought 6,683 entrants. Most will admit winning the Main Event is a generational moonshot, but that doesn’t stop them from chasing No. 2. Phillips, at least, gave himself a chance to earn the favor of the Baby Poker Jesus. “I had 300 of my closest friends, and we had rented a restaurant,” he says of his post-tournament celebration in 2008, when his thirdplace fnish netted him $4.5 million. “On my way there I swung by the high limits. I played blackjack for a while. I won about $10,000. I walked out, I saw a kid sitting there by a slot machine and fipped him a $5,000 chip. Then I walked into the restaurant and partied for the rest of the night.”

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let’s say you have the guts of a Russian hacker and the luck of a Kardashian to survive several months’ worth of land mines, and you land heads-up—where the difference between frst and second place this year is $4.85 million, and not having to spend a lifetime of playing poker’s version of Schuyler Colfax. Heads-up strategy demands a different set of skills. You have to play more hands, often in worse position, than you’d ever consider at a full table. You also have to constantly maneuver to put the other guy in a bad spot before he has the chance to stick it to you, either by knocking you out or doubling up. You can have someone all the way on the ropes, but if they double through you once or twice, they can Jason Voorhees their way back into competition. It’s a proxy knife fght in ratty baseball caps and sunglasses. “[There’s] tremendous pressure, and you don’t even know how to deal with it,” Hellmuth says. “I remember at dinner the night before with my dad and a friend of mine. He said, ‘What happens If you pick up kings vs. aces tomorrow? I just remember thinking ‘What in the hell?’ You don’t even want that possibility to exist in the world. ... You’re in your own kind of world. You don’t want anybody interfering. You

don’t want people telling you to visualize this or positive-think that. You just want to be in the zone and just be thinking about poker, not really thinking about negative possibilities, because if you’re a professional poker player your dream is lying right in front of you.” Playing heads-up at the fnal table also opens the doors to get creative, to really get into the meta-game in a way that might not work so well when the variables of fve or six other guys at the table are in play. Riess went out with friends and family after Amir Lehavot was eliminated in third place and the table broke for the night. Then he summoned his advisers to talk heads-up strategy. He knew that with ESPN airing the fnal day on a half-hour tape delay, his opponent, Farber, would be able to go back and talk to his rail about what happened in certain hands after they learned Riess’ cards. So Riess immediately started playing erratically, fring big raises on medium-strength hands just so, half an hour later, Farber would chew on bum feedback. Sun Tzu and fencing masters would be proud of such feint. “I don’t know if it helped much, but he was probably shocked when he went over the hand. ‘OK, he’s raising me with top pair there.’ The next time I raise him there, he thinks I have it again when normally I won’t,” Riess says.

But Someone’s Gotta Do It

November 6–12, 2014

shall. Poker, on the other hand—poker’s got swag. If you ever sat down at a $1/$2 game and watched grown men lose their damn minds over a bad call, a bad beat, a bad run of cards, you can see the spidery edges of an ego fracturing into a crystal constellation of failure and regret. Eight out of the November Nine are going to bust out, and those eight are going to have hands to think about in every shadowy little moment of self-doubt and 4 a.m. anxiety for the rest of their years. Phillips simply called it a “huge letdown” when he busted, taking some measure of comfort when friends reminded him that he still fnished third out of 6,844 entrants. In fairness, that’s like being happy to fnish most of your steak in the middle of a pack of wild dogs. McManus—who was crippled in one hand when Hasan Habib’s ace-four somehow found a miracle four on the river to beat McManus’ ace-queen, then was eliminated a few hands later when ace-queen held up against him— lays it all out in Fifth Street: “[Bob] Thompson and [Andy] Glazer and Hellmuth and all the other commentators are telling the assembled and far-fung poker universe that I just won $247,760 by fnishing ffth out of 512. What it feels like, lemme tell ya, is ffth out of six. As I stagger away from the action, it hits me how alive I had felt since last Wednesday and how dead I feel now. A swift rigor mortis of soul overtook me when that four hit the table. My head feels constructed of Styrofoam.”

NIGHTLIFE Your city after dark, photos from the week’s hottest parties and the DJ willing to kidnap you to get you to his party

Honoring the real veterans of Las Vegas nightlife By Jaymi Naciri

| November 6–12, 2014

A Few Good Men

YOU MIGHT NOT THINK the Las Vegas nightlife scene and the armed f orces would have a lot in common, but it turns out the two are intrinsically tied by the many men and women who now work in the industry, but were trained on a bigger battleground. ¶ In honor of Veterans Day, we pay our respects to those who’ve risked their life for freedom and who now make these Las Vegas nights shine bright. The military has graced Las Vegas nightlife with some of its top talent; meet four men whose two careers share similar qualifers for success—among them dedication, persistence and loyalty.

VegasSeven.com

Clockwise from top left: Sean Dunn (on right), Jason Craig (center), Alex Minuto and Luis Lucido.

NIGHTLIFE Corporal Sean Dunn

Corporal Jason “JROC” Craig

SERVED IN: U.S. Marine Corps, 2000-04; deployed to Iraq in 2003 as a scout/sniper.

SERVED IN: U.S. Marine Corps, 2001-04; deployed to Baghdad as an E4 convoy

Former marketing director, 1 Oak in The Mirage

November 6–12, 2014

VegasSeven.com

NIGHTLIFE CAREER: Started in brand development at the Cosmopolitan, then moved

Co-owner, JRLC1, an independent nightlife-marking consultancy

to The Act, where he was director of marketing and special events. When that closed, he joined Light Group. HOW THE SERVICE HELPED: “In the military, you learn to deal with not-so-nice conditions, so it’s all ‘up’ from there,” Dunn says. “You also deal with long hours, which prepares you for Vegas nightlife, where you have to be ready to go for a long time without a lot of rest. Guys who have had military service and are now in hospitality also understand leadership better than a lot of people. They want to get stuff done—mission accomplished—but do a good job and motivate others.”

control specialist. NIGHTLIFE CAREER: After the Marines, Craig looked to nightlife, taking “any job I could to get a foot in the door,” he says. “I started out picking up glasses and taking out the trash at Hard Rock Hotel, worked my way up and have never looked back.” HOW THE SERVICE HELPED: For Craig, it’s all about hard work and open doors. “We’re drawn to nightlife for the same reason anyone else is: opportunity,” says the nightlife exec and Vegas socialite. “The opportunities afforded here in Las Vegas are extremely unique. And love it or hate it, there’s no place like it in the world.”

Specialist Luis Lucido

Sergeant Alex Minuto

SERVED IN: 221st Cavalry, Nevada Army National Guard, 2005-13; 1-121 Field

SERVED IN: U.S. Marine Corps, 2003–07; deployed to Iraq in 2004 and 2006 with a C-130 aircraft and attached to an anti-terrorist protection unit. NIGHTLIFE CAREER: Sought fexible employment while attending UNLV, and found in nightlife “the perfect match,” Minuto says. He started as a busser and rose through the ranks to become a manager. HOW THE SERVICE HELPED: “At Light Group, customer service is the highest priority, and attention to detail is imperative,” he says. “These principles mirror the lessons I learned while serving my country as a U.S. Marine. Additionally, Marines live by the motto ‘Never give up’—it’s almost like we are tailored for this feld, as it can be very demanding at times. But it’s also rewarding, and similar to the military, hard work yields high rewards.”

Senior VIP host, Hyde Bellagio

Artillery Battalion for Convoy Security Missions in Iraq, 2006–07; and Provincial Reconstruction Team Missions in Afghanistan, 2009-10. NIGHTLIFE CAREER: Started at age 21 in security at Pure, LAX and Coyote Ugly. Moved on to promotions host at Privé, “Girl Guy” (host who seats comped tables of females) and then senior host at Blush before “fnding my home” with SBE. HOW THE SERVICE HELPED: “The never-quit, always-on, always-focused mentality, the required organization and the ability to respond to anything quickly are absolutely all traits learned in the service,” Lucido says. “You have to be good and driven in the military to make it—even to simply come out alive—and that’s not unlike Las Vegas.”

Assistant general manager, Gold Boutique Nightclub & Lounge in Aria

NIGHTLIFE

Camille Cannon

acts are itching to be associated with the up-and-coming trap duo. The two have previously opened for Dillon Francis and Madeon, among others. Tonight, resident DJ Dave Fogg provides support. (In Encore, 10:30 p.m., XSLasVegas.com.)

Andrew Rayel.

MON 10 While we’re partial to the classic Coca-Cola variety, we’d be remiss not to suggest you see Futuristic Polar Bears at Marquee. The British house trio has been praised by Hardwell and signed to John Dahlback’s Mutants music label. Plus, they’re opening for emerging Moldovan trance artist Andrew Rayel. Go to there! (In the Cosmopolitan, 10 p.m., MarqueeLasVegas.com.)

TUE 11 In honor of the men and women who’ve served our country, Nickel F---n Beer Night gets classy with a craft beer night at Beauty Bar. Veterans enjoy discounted $5 entry with military I.D., while civilians pay $10. Once inside, you can sample six beers from three breweries for … yep, a nickel each. DJs Aurajin, Biz:E and Byra Tanks man the decks. (517 Fremont St., 9 p.m., TheBeautyBar.com.) For more pounce

Paul Oakenfold.

There’s no shortage of ladies' nights in Las Vegas. Men’s nights, on the other hand, are a little harder to fnd. But on Thursday’s Bro Country Nights at Revolver, dudes can enjoy $3 Jack Daniel's and Jägermeister, $2 well drinks, $1 drafts, $20 domestic beer buckets and no cover. And, yes, women are welcome, too. (In Santa Fe Station, 8 p.m., SantaFeStation.SCLV.com.) Dutch EDM duo W&W has been crazy busy lately, performing with Steve Aoki and Dash Berlin, recording with Blasterjaxx, releasing new tracks and dropping fresh episodes of their Mainstage podcast. Watch them catch

their breath at Hakkasan. (In MGM Grand, 10:30 p.m., HakkasanLV.com.)

FRI 7 Even if you never saw Paul Oakenfold’s pioneering Perfecto residency at the now-defunct Rain in the Palms, you’ve no doubt heard his biggest hit, 2002’s “Starry Eyed Surprise.” And you may have heard that his upcoming album, Pop Killer—which he’s been teasing for the last couple of years—could drop any day now. We’ll keep our fngers crossed for a preview when he makes his premiere appearance at Life. (In SLS, 10:30 p.m., SLSLasVegas.com.)

SAT 8

WED 12 Dutch trio Yellow Claw will scratch right out of any genre box you force them into. In any given song, the group might switch from dubstep beats to trap breakdowns to rap verses and piercing vocals. You can hear it all when they make their Las Vegas nightclub debut at Surrender. (In Encore, 10:30 p.m., SurrenderNightclub.com.)

Yellow Claw.

In anticipation of Veterans Day on Nov. 11, this week’s Party Brunch at Lavo is military-themed. And since we’re only in early November, you can probably still fnd apropos Halloween costumes at a steep discount. Stock up for next year while you’re at it, sexy soldier. (In the Venetian, 2 p.m., LavoLV.com.)

SUN 9 Southern California’s Slander (a.k.a. Derek Andersen and Scott Land) takes the reins at XS. Unlike the criminal offense of the same name, plenty of big-name

ILLUSTRATIONS BY JON ESTRADA

November 6–12, 2014

VegasSeven.com

THU 6

to the ounce, swing over to Brooklyn Bowl for the latest installment of Vegas Nightlife Fights. Hosts, bar staff and more will duke it out to beneft Wounded Warriors Project. Nieve Malandra handles ring-girl duties; singer Sierra Black performs. (At the Linq, 6 p.m., Vegas.BrooklynBowl.com.)

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NIGHTLIFE

Knee Deep in Life Hot Since 82 takes on the town with a debut at Underground Sundays at Life By Kat Boehrer

DALEY PADLEY, better known as Hot Since 82, will make his Las Vegas debut November 9 at Life Nightclub’s Underground Sundays. The U.K.-based DJ is known to put on groovy house sets with a deeper vibe featuring music from his label, Knee Deep in Sound. Padley has also created parties to match his underground style. To coincide with his Knee Deep in Sound mix album release on November 17, he plans to invite a handful of guests to a live-streamed house party he’s calling Knee Deep at Home. Don’t despair if you miss Padley’s living-room party: He also schedules kidnappings of his fans. That’s right. During Padley’s rave series, Taken, which premiered in London in August, he transports blindfolded ravers to an undisclosed venue in their city for fresh thrills and deep sounds. That’s commitment. Where do you find your music?

I always like to do my own record shopping. I come from going to the record store and buying all vinyl. You’d remember each record from the colorful sleeve. I have that same type of mentality with shopping on Beatport. I actually want to go out and buy everything myself because it registers more. So much music is disposable now. I get 200-300 emails a day of just promo [tracks]. It’s very hard and time consuming to get through them all, so I like to shop. What are your pre- and post-set routines?

If you had asked me last year, I would have said, “Hook up with some friends, go out in the city, have some dinner and casual drinks.” Then afterward I would almost 99 percent have told you that I’d go to an after-party and die. [Laughs]. But this year, I’ve been chilling out a little bit more. I’ve been going back to the hotel, and a couple of hours later I’m fying to the next destination.

We’re gonna run a nice competition and have some random fans come to my house and get down with me and the boys. It’s going to be a very intimate thing. I’m not sure how many people are gonna get a chance to come to the show, but it’s gonna be at my house or in my best friend’s living room. And we’re gonna stream it live worldwide. Wanna come?

November 6–12, 2014

The first one in London looked awesome. Where else are you bringing Taken?

manager. I’ll have a little look around and get a little gamble on. I’d love to see the Grand Canyon.

Yeah, I do! Or maybe I’ll just wait to be kidnapped as part of the Taken series.

We have some lined up in New York, Berlin and Ibiza. The reaction has been amazing. It’s just about working with really good promoters who know the city really well and know these weird, abstract venues or warehouses where nobody’s ever been. That’s quite exciting for me.

What’s your drink of choice?

No, it seemed like fun! Tell me about it.

Maybe Las Vegas will eventually end up on that list. You’ll make your turntable debut here this month, but have you ever visited as a tourist?

Do you have big plans for your time here outside of the booth?

And how’s that working out for you?

Were you quite frightened when you watched the video? It’s quite scary.

VegasSeven.com

Who are you inviting to your upcoming house party, Knee Deep at Home?

It’s a little project we’ve got going on, as well. I just wanted to turn the old club night on its head, so to speak. We were like, “Let’s do something like in the old-school days of England, where you’d go to an illegal rave somewhere and you’d only fnd out where the rave was a few hours before.” We’ve taken that inspiration and implemented it into Taken.

I’ve never actually been to Vegas! I’m the only one among all of my friends that hasn’t been yet. I’m curious. Super curious.

We’re gonna drive down from L.A., me and my

Gonna fit any partying into that itinerary?

I’m out [in the U.S.] for three whole weeks. Vegas is one of the shows where I’m gonna let my hair down and rave up a little bit. It’s gonna be a special one for me and I expect to put a good performance on. I’ve been a very keen whiskey drinker—maybe a Scotch or bourbon. But I’ve been trying to chill out a little bit. This is how I see it: The more clear the liquor, the less [severe] the hangover. So I’m drinking Grey Goose with soda water and fresh lime. The hangovers are just exactly the same, there’s no difference. I might as well go back to whiskey.

NIGHTLIFE

PARTIES

HYDE Bellagio

[ UPCOMING ]

See more photos from this gallery at SPYONVegas.com

PHOTOS BY TONY TRAN

November 6â&#x20AC;&#x201C;12, 2014

VegasSeven.com

Nov. 6 Live Music Thursdays with Mahi Nov. 7 DJ Five spins Nov. 8 Dijital spins

NIGHTLIFE

PARTIES

TAO

The Venetian [ UPCOMING ]

See more photos from this gallery at SPYONVegas.com

PHOTOS BY TOBY ACUNA, JOE FURY AND BOBBY JAMEIDAR

November 6–12, 2014

VegasSeven.com

Nov. 6 DJ Five spins Nov. 7 Politik spins Nov. 8 Justin Credible spins

Dinner at Our Place 5 p m D a i ly

DINING

“Vegas, there’s no question, has turned into one of—if not the— dining meccas of the world.” {PAGE 56}

Restaurant reviews, news and here comes Harvey! Wallbanger, that is ...

The Market may be mediocre, but the Perch is sitting pretty By Al Mancini

VegasSeven.com

Downtown Project’s New Duo

DESPITE RECENT LAYOFFS and the drama that ensued, the Downtown Project has been busy on the food front, opening a pair of spots in the Fremont East district. The Market is a café and grocery store— something desperately needed in the area, especially in the wake of Resnicks’ closure in Soho Lofts. The Perch is most notable for bringing more sophisticated dining to the otherwise casual Container Park. Both are overseen by chef Sonia El-Nawal, with Dillon Wheeler managing the Market’s kitchen and Jennifer Borowitz (formerly of Downtown Grand) serving as the Perch’s executive chef. Curious, I dropped by for a frst look at each before Life Is Beautiful overtook Downtown.

November 6–12, 2014

PHOTO BY JON ESTRADA

Inside the Market on East Fremont Street.

DINING November 6–12, 2014

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Clockwise from top left: Lucia flatbread, seafood pasta, the dining room at the Perch and Bianca flatbread.

Eddie Murphy once said (in a very raunchy comedy routine) that if you’re starving, and somebody throws you a cracker, you’re going to think it’s the best cracker you’ve ever eaten in your life. I couldn’t help thinking about that as I walked through the Market. In the weeks and months leading up to its opening, I repeatedly heard talk of a “gourmet” grocery store. I believe comparisons to Trader Joe’s were tossed around. That, I’m sorry to report, was something of an exaggeration. The Market is a relatively small grocery, just a bit larger than a typical corner bodega in other big cities. Like those, it has a little of everything, so you can stock up on staples: meat, produce, frozen foods, laundry detergent, etc. But there’s not much of a selection. And while there are some organic and other high-end products, they sit alongside Kraft Lunchables and Hostess Twinkies. The inventory at the Market is a fraction of what you’ll fnd at a suburban Fresh & Easy, and the overall quality of the products isn’t as good. But the people in this neighborhood were starving for a grocer, and these guys offer more than just a cracker. Hopefully, as they fgure out the needs of their customers, the offerings will evolve. The Market’s café, on the other hand, needs serious, immediate improvements. I tried three sandwiches and was disappointed by each of them. The meat on my bres-

aola sandwich was applied so sparingly that I was basically just eating goat cheese spread on thick focaccia and sprinkled with arugula. Whoever slow-cooked the pork in my collard-green wrap clearly forgot to season it; even the addition of bacon, avocado, cucumber and scallions failed to give it any real personality. And the bread on my Monkey Fluff-n-Stuff (made with a delicious amalgam of marshmallow fuff, chocolate ganache, bananas, pretzels and nuts) was a bit past its prime and literally falling apart. I’ve yet to try the salad bar or any of the cold prepared salads, however, so I can’t weigh in on them. A block away, on the second foor toward the back of Container Park, the Perch offers considerably more

THE MARKET

611 Fremont Street, 702-586-3401. Open for breakfast, lunch and dinner 7 a.m.-10 p.m. Sun-Thu, 7 a.m.midnight Fri-Sat. Lunch for two $15-$25. THE PERCH

Downtown Container Park, 702-854-1418. Open for lunch and dinner 11 a.m.-11 p.m. SunThu, 11 a.m.-1 a.m. Fri-Sat. Dinner for two $20-$50.

ambitious cuisine. There are salads and fatbreads, shareable plates such as tuna and beef tartare, and entrées such as pasta, salmon and steak frites, and most of what I’ve tried has been good. The fatbreads, for example, have a thin, slightly chewy crust still frm enough that you can pick it up without it collapsing. Both the Lucia (sausage and peppers) and the Bianca (mozzarella, ricotta, Parmesan, a touch of truffe oil and a mountain of arugula) are delicious. The seafood pasta with spicy red sauce is loaded with fresh mussels, calamari and shrimp. And the salmon tiradito (carpaccio topped with cucumber and mango salsa) has just the right amount of heat to complement, but not overpower, the delicate fsh. I did, however, fnd a scale in my salmon and some grit in my mussels, so they may want to take a bit more care while prepping the seafood. But since I ate there while the staff was packing up the bar to turn the space over to the Life Is Beautiful chefs, I’m willing to cut them a little slack. As to the décor, there’s not much to it: It’s bright and cheery, with huge windows and a great deck for people-watching. (How much can you expect to accomplish in those containers anyway?) Overall, I was much more impressed with the Perch than the Market. But then, I’m not the audience the latter is there to serve.

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Oprah Winfrey has too much money. She now brings her own white truffles (that she’s hunted herself, of course) to restaurants just in case the truffles there are not up to par, as she recently demonstrated in Florida. (Oprah also, by the way, had them shaved over a Kobe burger. What’s next? $100 bills standing in for lettuce?). But well before the fragrant fungus was ever one of Oprah’s favorite things, Guy Savoy marked the few months when they’re available as his favorite season. The Caesars Palace restaurant (702731-7110) has its own stash of Italian white truffles that even Oprah might covet. You can opt for the six-course truffle-ful prix-fixe menu ($420), where white-gloved servers and chefs shave the pricey tuber tableside over already decadent dishes. They’re making it snow over items such as scallops served two ways: carpaccio with cauliflower mousse in a vegetable crust, and roasted in the shell; and creamy Parmesan risotto. If six courses seem like too much truffle (never!), you can opt for several items a la carte without breaking the bank. And Oprah can leave hers at home—Guy Savoy’s pass muster. Occasionally, when you’re not craving truffles, have you ever thought to yourself, “Man, I could go for a badass burger today? And have it handed to me by a good-looking lady from a truck?” The power of intention works, my friend, as Baby’s Badass Burgers have landed in Las Vegas. Originally based in Los Angeles, this is the fifth food truck for the franchise and the first in town. As is standard for locating food trucks these days, you can follow them on Twitter @BabysBBSLV to track down lunch and dinner, as they plan on hitting everywhere from corporate parks to festivals to apartment complexes. The made-to-order burgers are served by one of the “babes” on board the truck, and they’re not shy with their offerings. The Original Beauty makes you swoon with Swiss cheese, grilled onions, mushrooms and Baby’s special sauce, while spice addicts get their fix with the Hot Mama, a burger with cream cheese-stuffed jalapeño poppers, all served “maneater” style on soft, sweet, King’s Hawaiian buns. The girls on the truck—a.k.a. the Pink Ladies—can also guide you to other signatures, such the Bombshell, a half-pound burger sandwiched between two bacon grilled cheese melts. Watch out, boy, she’ll chew you up. Grace Bascos eats, sleeps, raves and repeats. Read more from Grace at VegasSeven.com/ DishingWithGrace, as well as on her diningand-music blog, FoodPlusTechno.com.

PHOTOS BY JON ESTRADA, PERCH INTERIOR BY JESSE J SUTHERL AND

WHITE TRUFFLES ARE YOUR NEW FAVORITE THINGS, PLUS BABY’S BURGERS ARE BADASS

DINING

The renovaton of Emeril’s New Orleans Fish House includes a more open design and a return of Lagasse’s famous oyster bar.

Still Fishin’

A few words (none of them being “Bam!”) with Emeril Lagasse as one of Las Vegas’ frst celebrity chefs looks back on nearly 20 years at MGM Grand

AMONG THE GREAT CHEFS who changed the city’s dining scene over the years, Emeril Lagasse is inevitably near the top of the list. His frst local restaurant, Emeril’s New Orleans Fish House, is approaching 20 years at the MGM Grand. Lagasse was there recently to unveil a recent remodeling and some new menu items, and I had the chance to chat one-on-one with him about those changes and how dining in Las Vegas has changed over the past two decades. How do you describe the remodel?

We modernized it from a very New Orleans perspective. We’ve opened up the front of the restaurant. But more importantly, we’ve added back the oyster bar that we used to have years ago. So if people are by themselves or they just want to hang out and have some oysters or shrimp or other cold seafood, maybe have a glass of wine or an artisanal

beer—no problem. If they don’t want to sit in the restaurant in that white-tablecloth environment, no problem.

break that barrier down [here] was really tough to do. But we did it.

Your $1.50 oysters during happy hour are one of the best deals in town. Will you bring that back as well?

It’s not necessarily cheap, but the availability is awesome. I tell people all the time that we can get [great] products here in Las Vegas. Vegas, there’s no question, has turned into one of—if not the— dining meccas of the world. What I can get delivered on a daily basis from San Francisco or Los Angeles is incredible. It literally was caught the day before.

Yes. You know we’re just trying to still be a great restaurant for locals. And that was the philosophy from Day One. Yes, there’s a lot of traffc, and yes, we’re in MGM Grand. But the local people still matter to us. And that’s who we’re focusing on with those things. As we progress, you’re gonna see a lot more things happening that are aimed at locals. When the restaurant opened nearly 20 years ago, was it difficult to get fresh seafood here in Las Vegas?

Wow, holy smokes. I was relying a lot on my guys from New Orleans. To

How is it different today?

If Las Vegas is a dining mecca, you, Wolfgang Puck and a handful of other pioneers helped create it.

[Puck] was here with Spago frst. And then he came to do his café here [in MGM Grand]. I can’t get enough of Wolf. He’s a great guy and a great chef. Then there was Mark Miller— he had Coyote Café right down the

hall. And then we took over this restaurant and turned it into Emeril’s New Orleans Fish House. Then came Charlie [Trotter]. And—what can I say, then it started. MGM Grand is responsible, really and truly. Danny Wade, who was a longtime general manager and president way back then, and Lou Silvestri—those two guys, combined with their team, changed how Las Vegas eats. Could anyone then have predicted the dining scene we have in Las Vegas today?

No way. Nooooo way. I mean, I still remember when you’d go to a restaurant, and instead of [staff] saying “Thank you for coming in. Did you have a nice dinner?” when you would leave, it was like “Good luck!” [Laughs.] That’s just the way it was. The mentality has completely changed. The hospitality industry in Las Vegas now is amazing.

INTERIOR BY ANTHONY MAIR, EMERIL BY JACOB ANDRZEJCZAK

November 6–12, 2014

VegasSeven.com

By Al Mancini

DRINKING [ SCENE STIRS ]

THIS HOLIDAY SEASON, REACH FOR THE TOP SHELF On a recent Thursday afternoon, I found myself in a suite in the Mandarin Oriental, surrounded by two kinds of decision makers: luxury resort beverage buyers and local bartenders. And for the task at hand, they were equally matched. On the agenda, a sky-high-level tasting of Johnnie Walker products, This time of year, interest in ultra luxury spirits— both for gift-giving and consuming in celebration— skyrockets, leading to one-off showcases such as this one led by Dr. Tom Turner, Master of Whisky (and the Indiana Jones of it, too) for Diageo brands. That afternoon, in the sprawling suite’s splendor, we began with Blue Label ($350 retail)—yes, that’s where we started—and proceeding through Odyssey ($1,000) and King George V ($570) before finishing with The John Walker ($3,300). Dr. Tom routinely proclaims King George to be “the Hugh Jackman” of whiskies (think muscular). Of The John Walker he says, “This is Sofia Vergara.” So, how can you get into the lap of luxury this gift-giving season? Start with the Johnnie Walker Blue Label—even self-proclaimed single-malt die-hards can’t resist it. And if you’ve got the dough, here are three more ways to put on the Ritz. The Rare Spirits Cabinet at Bound

Renowned barman Salvatore Calabrese has amassed one of the finest spirits collections in the world—1,000 bottles!—at the Playboy Club in London. And the rare spirits cabinet at Bound in the Cromwell now holds his boutique collection. The bar’s third entrance has been converted into a cabinet, the shelves of which boast The Macallan M; Highland Park Freya; Frapin Cuvée 1888, which spins like a top; and the Dalmore Constellation Collection, the 1979 being the most expensive at $1,100 per pour. A year ago, Calabrese broke the world record for the Most Expensive Cocktail, but Calabrese’s signature Breakfast Martini—will set you back just $16. TheCromwell.com. Louis XIII Black Pearl Anniversary Edition Cognac

PHOTO BY JON ESTRADA

banger, both of which went global, making Harvey’s eponymous drink the “it” cocktail of the ’60s and ’70s, featured in frst class on transatlantic TWA fights. Harvey was even a write-in candidate in the 1972 presidential election! The Wallbanger’s popularity, however, also contributed to its demise, with Galliano’s recipe being altered for a time. The formula has since been restored to its original glory; just look for “L’Autentico” on the label. November 8 is Harvey Wallbanger Day, so pop into Herbs & Rye, Atomic Liquors, the Peppermill, Echo & Rig or anywhere with fresh orange juice—other than Galliano, that’s the make-or-break element. Get the recipe at VegasSeven.com/CocktailCulture.

Hardy Perfection Cognac

At a recent dinner at Sage in Aria, fifth-generation Cognac maker Bénédicte Hardy was on hand to guide lucky diners through an opulent Cognac and Champagne dinner featuring Hardy’s ultra-luxury marques. After a tasting that included Cognacs aged a minimum of 30, 50 and 60 years, we got a pour of Hardy Perfection, distilled by Antoine Hardy in the 1860s from 100 percent pre-Phylloxera Colombard. Perfection out of reach? Aged 25 years, Hardy XO Rare is an ideal “beginner’s Cognac,” selling for about $130. HardyCognac.fr. – X.W.

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➜ It’s been a long time since anyone has reached for a Galliano bottle for anything other than to break up a bar fght. But there was a time when it was all the rage, and it was owed almost entirely to one drink. A screwdriver with a kiss of that unnervingly yellow Italian artisanal herbal liqueur, the Harvey Wallbanger was, according to Galliano rep Anthony Pullen, created by renowned bartender Donato “Duke” Antone and branding mastermind George Bednar. Heard the one about 1950s pro surf legend Tom Harvey allegedly downing them to soothe a loss, then banging into walls? Yeah, it didn’t happen. Bednar cooked up the legend, and later a cartoon character, Harvey Wall-

Retro Done Right

November 6–12, 2014

A classic Harvey Wallbanger at Herbs & Rye.

There’s one bottle you won’t find in Calabrese’s cabinet—well, yet. The second release of Rémy Martin’s Louis XIII Black Pearl since 2007 is an anniversary edition, just 775 bottles from a single tierçon (blending barrel) belonging to the Hériard Dubreuil family, owners of the house of Rémy Martin. It’s somewhat similar to a single-barrel whiskey, but instead, this is a single lot of blended, 40-100-year-old eaux-de-vie. The bottle retails for $16,000 and is headed for the Mansion at MGM Grand, Aria and the Venetian. The draw here is really the prestige, so for a more affordable luxury (and nearly identical juice), a serving of Louis XIII will run you between $350-$550. RemyMartin.com.

A&E

“When he promises a Tuesday night audience a Saturday night show, it’s no hyperbole.”

SHOWSTOPPER {PAGE 64}

Movies, music, stage and a new kind of superhero THIS IS THE STORY of two men, born singers and showmen. One, here and now. One, dead and buried. One, in a sweet twist of fate, captured a dream. One, in a sad quirk of life, didn’t. One—once just a part-time singer and former Bronx car repair shop owner—was recently discovered by Steve Wynn and is now a late-in-life success on the Las Vegas Strip. One— also a part-time singer who made a living selling liquor, candy and roach repellent to stores in New York’s downtrodden neighborhoods—was never discovered, a star only to his family, for whom he sacrifced pursuing his passion to be a good provider. One is Michael Monge. One was my dad. Admirable men, both. As I watched the former perform, memories of the latter fooded my heart.

Discovered by Steve Wynn, singer Michael Monge is a Vegas success. His journey reminds the author of another singer who wasn’t as fortunate. By Steve Bornfeld

A Tale of Two Dreamers

November 6–12, 2014

PHOTO BY JASON OGULNIK

Daydream receiver: Monge croons at the Wynn.

dapper, he is, in his charcoalgray suit, red tie and spiffy pocket square. Old-school sophistication is the signature of Michael Monge—he generalizes his maturity as “north of 60”—as he wanders through the couch-and-table décor in the sunken living room-style Eastside Lounge at the Wynn before his set. He’s synchronized with his surroundings. Subtle class informs this open venue, with a generously sized center window framing the still waters of the softly illuminated pool area and palm trees that will double as the bandstand backdrop. “Thanks so much for coming. Got any favorite songs?” he asks in a preshow schmooze with early arrivals for his 9 p.m. gig that he earned—and, frankly, lucked into—when he was discovered by the Wynn’s owner/namesake while crooning at a Florida eatery earlier this year. (More on that later.) As the house jazz trio swings into toe-tappin’ action, so does he, launching into a repertoire anchored in Sinatra-esque classics and sprinkled with contemporary surprises. In a voice that could be made out of fne wine and silk, he delivers the expected goods—“Come Fly With Me,” “Quando, Quando, Quando,” “Fly Me to the Moon,” “The Lady Is a Tramp”— then moves the timeline up to Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind,” then further, to John Legend’s “All of Me.”

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*****

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Older patrons in the lounge—plus some younger ones gathering at the railing above—subtly sway and casually snap fngers. One woman simply whispers “wow” as Monge cradles the fnishing notes like delicate china. “It makes me feel good that the younger generation enjoys what I’m doing, that they’ll sit down and wind up staying instead of going to the clubs,” Monge, a widower, father and grandfather, says, settling at my table in between sets. “I love to sing to people. It releases something in me. When there’s energy around me and I see I’m touching people, it does something to me.” It’s in his face—lined, but handsome, still fush with the adrenaline rush of performing—and I know he means it. Because I know that look. My dad’s look.

November 6–12, 2014

VegasSeven.com

*****

dapper, my dad was, in his sleek, black tuxedo as he wheeled his bulky stand-up bass fddle through the narrow foyer of our frst-foor apartment. Nearly every Saturday night. After he’d spend a typical week awash in the seamy backwaters of New York City during its ’60s/’70s decline, peddling cheap wine to liquor stores, and candy and bug spray to supermarkets— exhaustion etched into his weary face every evening—Saturday was a miracle. Saturday was when, as a bona fde member of the Associated Musicians of Greater New York, Local 802, he would go wherever the gigs took him through New York’s fve boroughs, plus swatches of New Jersey and Connecticut. (With that stand-up bass jammed and angled awkwardly into our old Chevy Impala, its wooden neck ridiculously protruding out an open rear window, it was just begging to be sheared off while doing 70 on the Long Island Expressway.) Wherever there was a bar mitzvah, wedding or anniversary party (waaay pre-DJs) that needed a singer to front a band (and nominally pluck the bass), my dad was there. Wherever he could sing “Bésame Mucho” or “The Shadow of Your Smile” or “You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You”—or, if he had to, “The Hokey Pokey”—he was there. Yes, he was paid. And yes, if he could pay them for the privilege—if we could’ve afforded it—I think he would have. Always wearing that I’m-in-heavenand-you’ll-have-to-carry-me-out-kickingand-screaming look. That look on Michael Monge’s face. ***** he grew up singing. couldn’t help himself. Monge sang in an all-boys choir. “I was never the type who needed to be encouraged. I just went out and did things,” Monge says, recalling one night when, at 19, he dropped in at Manhattan’s famed Rainbow Room and caught the act of Paul Anka, whose music was embedded in his childhood soundtrack (and in his own act now).

“I guess I was singing a little too loud on the sidelines, and he wound up right next to me. Instead of saying, ‘Hey, could you shut up?’ he said, ‘You seem to know all of my songs, why don’t you get up and do the next one?’” He did. Plus the next three. (For the record: “It’s Time to Cry,” “Puppy Love,” “Put Your Head On My Shoulder” and “Times of Your Life,” a.k.a., the Kodak camera song.) “I had true acknowledgement that maybe there is something I’m doing that’s pretty good, for someone like Paul Anka to recognize it,” Monge says. “I’ve also sung in front of Engelbert Humperdinck and Tom Jones. I regularly did a

and fat-out mean. At Hanukkah, he’d give my dad presents. After the eight days of the holiday were over, he’d take them back. Then he—and the Great Depression— took his future, when his stepfather yanked him out of high school to get a job and help support the family, his education never to be resumed. So he sang. To himself, to lift his spirits. On the street, to entertain pals. On menial jobs, to stave off boredom. And—if he could persuade the owners—at restaurants that needed a singer, cheap. Then he got married. Had a kid. Understood the deal: Reality comes

The writer’s father was happiest playing music.

“I guess,” he once sighed, “it wasn’t meant to happen.” ***** then it happened. michael monge was discovered—preceded by tragedy. In 2010, his wife passed away. Retired from his car repair business, and with his children grown, he fnally attempted that daunting full-time leap, performing at parties, private events and clubs. Eventually, he broke free of his Northeast comfort zone and turned south toward Florida, where a fateful engagement last February at a Palm Beach restaurant called Bice—where he coaxed the reluctant manager into agreeing to an unpaid tryout—set fate in motion. “I did a set, people were loving it, and I see Steve Wynn walking toward me—I didn’t know he was in the restaurant,” Monge recalls. “He said to me, ‘Do you know who I am?’ I said, ‘Yes, I do.’ He said, ‘I’d like very much if you would come back to my table and talk with me.’ He introduced me to [Wynn’s wife] Andrea. He said he had no idea it was live singing, he thought he was listening to Sinatra and Dean Martin. I said to him, ‘I grew up listening to all the greats in Vegas, and I’ve never had the opportunity to go there. Do you know anyone who might be able to help me get into Vegas?’ He did a little smirk and laugh and said, ‘I would like you to work for me.’” Five months later, in July, Monge hit the downbeat at the Wynn. “I still to this day, pinch myself,” he says. “It’s surreal.” (Wynn, by the way, did not respond to requests for comment.) Monge is booked through late next year, which coincidentally will mark what would have been Sinatra’s 100th birthday. And my dad’s. *****

gig at this place called Gregory’s, where all these singers would go. They would hear me, and some would call me over and I’d sit down with them.” Life’s predictable rhythms intervened. Monge got married, began a family, and his wife, while a fan of his singing, was not a fan of the traveling and late nights required to pursue stage fame. So he turned his time and effort toward the car repair business, relegating singing to a sidelight. “I was making so much money with my business,” Monge says. “And I said, there are so many great singers out there, what are the chances I’m gonna make it?” He didn’t try. Then. ***** he grew up singing. couldn’t help himself. Dad did it because he loved it. Because in the melody of his own voice, he could escape the childhood misery of a son-of-a-bitch stepfather—abusive

before dreams. Responsibility comes before everything. Singing was reassigned to the margins of his life. But Saturdays saved his life—as did nearly every spare moment. He’d burst into song for any reason. Or no reason. Gershwin. Porter. Broadway. Sinatra. Dino. Bing Crosby (his idol). And in some of my favorite memories, accompanying himself on that damn, dorky accordion he loved to play in his bedroom with the door shut—voice booming throughout the thin-walled apartment anyway, letting go in a way that showed me what joy looked like. But those joys never amounted to more than feeting snatches of happiness. On no Saturday, as he crisscrossed three states with his rolling bass, was anyone of infuence in any audience. Ruefully, he’d think of being a kid from New Jersey and of another kid from New Jersey named Sinatra— born just two months after him—and wonder why fate was so capricious in whom it kissed and whom it slapped.

michael monge now entertains appreciative audiences on the Las Vegas Strip. He is happy, grateful and most certainly humble. Dad worked as a clerk, taking inventory in the basement of a bookstore, when he was hit by a car and killed in 1994 at age 79. He rests back East, beneath a headstone on which I had inscribed, “Music in His Soul.” And I choose to believe that, in a sweet quirk of the afterlife, he is giving an eternal performance, awash in joy. So, Michael: Five nights every week, in the service of your own joy and good fortune—and, if you’d be so kind, in the name of my dad—pick up a microphone and croon it, belt it, sell it, love it. And forgive me if, when I watch you sing solo, I hear a duet. MICHAEL MONGE

9 p.m.-1 a.m. Wed-Sun, Eastside Lounge at the Wynn, $10 cover charge, one-drink minimum, 702-777-9966, WynnLasVegas.com/Shows/ MichaelMonge.

Experience Extraordinary Across from the Hard Rock

702-736-6166

The Adicts Give Vegas One Hell of A ‘Horrorshow’ Hard Rock Live, Nov. 2

Halloween had already passed, but that didn’t stop English punk band the Adicts from dressing up in their signature black-and-white “droog” costumes and continuing the festivities. “I know you are all barely getting over the Halloween hangovers,” singer Keith “Monkey” Warren said. “Well, so are we.” Warren—appearing as a mix between a droog, a pimp and a healthier Iggy Pop—led the band in a night that was equal parts performance

Debbie Reynolds, Princess Leia and the Family Band

WHEN WE GO TO A SHOW, we know what to expect. Sure, we may not know the exact set list or the precise patter or have spoiler-ed the big fnish, but we’ve got an idea. Not so with Debbie Reynolds’ upcoming gig at South Point (7:30 p.m. Nov. 7-9, $45 and up). Not only will the longtime Vegas headliner be onstage, but performing with her will be daughter Carrie Fisher, son Todd Fisher and granddaughter Billie Lourd. This is not entirely unprecedented: Carrie sang in mom’s nightclub act when she was a teenager, and Billie is developing a performing career of her own (including an appearance with mom in the upcoming Star Wars: Episode VII). Sure, Debbie was a perky ingénue and is now a lovable Disney grandma, but she also used to own a casino and once gave her mother and Carrie vibrators for Christmas. Sure, Carrie will always be laser guns and Danish hair, but she’s also a fne writer with a top-level grasp of black humor. So, really, anything could happen. Maybe Carrie will sing the theme song from The Star Wars Holiday Special, an ahead-of-its-time piece of profound kitsch and weirdness that would take 100 hipsters working for 100 years to replicate. Maybe Debbie will don a silver afro wig and cover “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” as she is accused of doing in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. We can only hope … – Lissa Townsend Rodgers

and theater, while parading through “Chinese Takeaway,” “Horror Show” and “Steamroller.” He used what seemed like an endless amount of confetti and enough props to match any magic show on the Strip. He fired confetti cannons, broke a paper tambourine and, despite changing outfits twice, gave almost everything he wore to the audience. Lead guitarist Pete “Dee” Davidson shared the microphone with him during the crowd favorite “You’ll Never Walk

November 6–12, 2014

VegasSeven.com

Alone,”—ending the band’s 24-song set on a

note of friendship and camaraderie. ★★★★✩ – Ian Caramanzana

THEY GIVE YOU “FEVER” The Black Keys didn’t invent blues-rock, but when Dan Auerbach plays guitar and Patrick Carney bangs the drums, magic happens. The Black Keys bring their rowdy, raucous Turn Blue World Tour to the Chelsea on Nov. 8 ($75-$125).

BE TRUE TO YOUR KOOL After 45 years, Kool & the Gang still make every night “Ladies Night,” every show a “Celebration.” Kool & the Gang play two shows at The Orleans on Nov. 9 ($66-$88). You don't want to miss your chance to "Get Down on It."

ON SALE NOW Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett will usher in 2015 with a special New Year’s Eve concert at the Chelsea at the Cosmopolitan, showcasing duets from Cheek to Cheek, their collection of jazz standards. Tickets start at $125.

THE ADICTS BY GLENN BROGAN; FISHER, REYNOLDS AND LOURD BY HELGA ESTEB/SHUTTERSTOCK

A&E

CONCERT

The

CONCERT

HIT LIST TARGETING THIS WEEK'S MOST-WANTED EVENTS

By Camille Cannon

Phish Got 'Chilling' and 'Thrilling' for Halloween MGM Grand Garden Arena, Oct. 31-Nov. 2

It was the first time Phish had returned to Las Vegas in almost 10 years and the first time back on the Las Vegas Strip since 1996. To say the shows were highly anticipated is an understatement. Tickets to all three nights sold out within an hour. But the most coveted ticket was the Halloween concert, where Phish has traditionally performed three sets. For the middle set, they usually don a musical costume, i.e., they cover a full album of another artist. Past “costumes” include the Beatles’ White Album, The Who’s Quadrophenia, The Talking Heads’ Remain in Light and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. ¶ This time, they took a creative leap and performed Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House, which was produced in 1964 by Walt Disney Studios. Phish played their own original instrumentals and jams over the album’s spooky narration and sound effects … while dressed as zombies. An elaborate haunted house and monstrous performers completed the experience. ¶ It was a courageous and risky choice. And it seemed to work. The entire venue was on its feet—dancing, singing along and cheering. There is little waning from Phish fans, and they stayed right there, engaged with the band, hanging on note for note throughout extended instrumental improvisations, almost coaxing the jam out of the band through the journey of each song. ★★★★★ – Erik Kabik

ALBUM REVIEWS

By Pj Perez

TIME FLIES WHEN YOU’RE BREAKING UP: To quote 500 Days of Summer, The Last Five Years is “a story of boy meets girl, but you should know up front, [it] is not a love story.” Protagonists Cathy Hiatt and Jamie Wellerstein recount their broken affair in reverse orders, interacting directly only in the middle. The original off-Broadway cast performs Nov. 6-9 in UNLV’s Judy Bayley Theatre. UNLV.edu.

Finally, the pop star doesn’t have to worry as much about previous transgressions as he does pleasing his fans. But his sixth studio album is uneven and bloated: The good is great and the bad is an uninspiring drag. “Loyal” allows Brown’s personality to shine for a catchy radio smash. “Autumn Leaves” and “Drunk Texting” are smooth grooves that work. Unfortunately, Brown overstays his welcome and attempts to appease all audiences. Rudimentary songwriting rears its ugly head on “Add Me In,” while the R. Kelly-assisted carnal romp “Drown In It” feels creepy. Brown has talent, but in this case, less is more. ★★✩✩✩

What separates Tinashe from every other R&B singer? To be honest, nothing at all. That’s the problem with the 21-year-old’s debut album: There’s nothing here that hasn’t been done by her peers Ciara, Jhené Aiko and the late Aaliyah. Tinashe is good at what she does— as exemplified on the fun club frolicker “2 On”—but she simply doesn’t excel next to her contemporaries. A stellar list of producers, which includes DJ Mustard and Boi-1da, certainly helps out, but you’ll be hard pressed to pick her out of a musical lineup. ★✩✩✩✩

(Squid Ink Squad) After spending the past year in a Love & Hip Hop reality TV wasteland, Saigon is back to prove his worth as an MC. He’s always been exceptional on the mic, but the potent messages in “Street Gospel” and “Best Mistake” are drowned out by overproduced instrumentation. However, when paired with DJ Premier on “Let’s Get Smart,” the gritty production is the perfect backdrop for Saigon to lament on industry ignorance. Questionable choices aside, the lyrical content is a cut above the rest and makes GSNT 3 worth a listen. ★★★✩✩

Aquarius, (RCA)

Greatest Story Never Told 3: The Troubled Times Of Brian Carenard

STILL TASTY, FOR NOW: Sadly, Tastyspace Gallery in Emergency Arts will close Dec. 1. That means its latest exhibition, photography by Massachusetts artist Olivia Gatti, will be the last. See it on display beginning Nov. 9, or join for the exhibition reception on Nov. 15. TastyspaceLV.com. MUM’S THE WORD: Swiss theater troupe Mummenschanz sets up at The Smith Center on Nov. 11. Imagine mime-style movement (no words, no music) from big, colorful props. It’s both silly and super-successful; the troupe’s been performing around the world for more than 40 years. TheSmithCenter.com.

HIP-HOP

Saigon

X, (RCA)

PHISH BY ERIK K ABIK/ERIKK ABIK.COM

R&B

Tinashe

November 6–12, 2014

POP

Chris Brown

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CHEKHOV YOUR LIST: Winner of the 2013 Tony Award for Best Play, Christopher Durang’s Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike revolves around dysfunctional siblings who mirror the themes explored in Anton Chekhov’s short stories. Rest assured, you’ll laugh even if you don’t get the references. See it at Las Vegas Little Theatre on select dates Nov. 7-23. LVLT.org.

STAGE

NEW NAME, SEMI-SAME GAME Tinkering doesn’t alter Scinta show’s heart

tweets are referred to as “twats.” Somewhere in all this, Frankie takes a breath or two. Prizes should be awarded to anyone who can identify those feeting moments. Contributing his deadpan/wiseguy persona—interrupting with sarcastic one-liners in the band behind Frankie, and moving center stage with Mick Jagger, Neil Diamond and Joe Cocker impressions— Joey remains a vital element. Together, the brothers create a live-wire vaudevillian vibe. Multiple music highlights include Valentine polevaulting up the octaves on “I’m Your Baby, Tonight”; Motown and Michael Jackson medleys by her and Frankie; and their lush duet on “The Prayer,” echoing Celine Dion and Andrea Bocelli. Sentimentality and patriotism still power show segments, including journeys through the family’s upbringing in Buffalo, New York (with Frankie’s yearning for old-time values) and pride in America he suggests is declining. Though it plays like generational kvetching by the 50-plus crowd, it’s also endearing in its utter sincerity. Plus a frenetic fnale with Frankie on the 88s, pinballing through pop classics, sends the crowd out on an adrenaline high. However you change the wrapping, a Scinta show is still a damn good gift. Got an entertainment tip? Email Steve.Bornfeld@VegasSeven.com.

PHOTO BY DAVID TINGEY

SEARCH FRANKIE SCINTA THOROUGHLY

and you might discover a secret battery compartment. Battery size? Ds, natch. When an entertainer runs on this much juice (at, yes, The D), an artifcial energy source is plausible, yet the Vegas vet has an organic ebullience. He had it as the heart of The Scintas, as the family act was once titled. He’s no less the Italian Tasmanian devil of local entertainers now that he’s just Frankie Scinta, as the act’s now billed, even with the same personnel—bro Joey, vocalist Janien Valentine (who succeeded sister Chrissi) and “adopted” brother Peter O’Donnell, the backup band’s drummer. Re-branded as a headliner show after market research confrmed what was ever-evident—Frankie’s the guts of the act—the production has been modestly freshened to blend Old Vegas style with a New Vegas ethos. Remixing a repertoire that now spikes Ray Charles and Dean Martin (which Frankie clearly adores) with spritzes of Coldplay and Avicii (which he sings with conviction, but inevitably feels like capitulation to the cause of youth-inizing the demographics) isn’t entirely convincing. Coldplay doesn’t come naturally to a Scinta—like Dad trying to be hip for the kids, only making him seem more Dad-like. Still, the urge to attempt musical relevance is understandable. However he’s billed, Scinta is a showman down to his toenails. When he promises a Tuesday night audience a Saturday night show, it’s no hyperbole. Not when he relentlessly kibitzes with the crowd; bangs out a drum solo with spoons on his knee; plays a mandolin till it’s nearly on fre; trades playful insults with his brother; duets with Valentine; sprinkles songs with shtick and exaggerated facial expressions; impersonates Tom Jones, including caressing his nipples; and attacks a piano like Jerry Lee Lewis on a caffeine surge. Token naughtiness gets tossed in, as when an ad-lib lyric in Dean Martin’s “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head” alludes to blowjobs, and

MOVIES

Edward Snowden documentary works whether you like him or not By Michael Phillips Tribune Media Services A COOL, STEADY STREAM OF ANXIETY,

Laura Poitras’ documentary Citizenfour draws from the visual language and buggy paranoia of the bestknown 1970s political thrillers: The Conversation, The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor, All the President’s Men. Each of the cities flmed in Citizenfour gets its own quiet yet sinister establishing shot, so that Rio de Janeiro, Hong Kong and London each look like twinkly beehives of undisclosed activity. The movie’s completely in the bag for its subject, Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked classifed documents in spring 2013. On camera, Snowden resembles a cross between Seth Rogen’s betterbehaved cousin and the lean, owly flm director Steven Soderbergh, an executive producer of Citizenfour. The NSA documents revealed the known knowns regarding the U.S. government’s secret collection of Verizon customer information and the extent to which the NSA yanked user data out of the allegedly secure realms of Google, Facebook, YouTube and other informationaggregating time-sucks. Poitras is not a fulminator or spewer of agitprop. She lets the agitation simmer and tones down the obvious propaganda in both directions. Many call Snowden a traitor;

by current laws, he’s certainly a criminal. Others hail his actions as heroic correctives to the surveillance abuses perpetrated in the name of national security. “I already know how this will end for me,” Snowden mutters early on, suggesting the forces he’s up against. (For now, he’s in Russia with his girlfriend.) Citizenfour uses this free-foating dread, all the encryptions and clandestine meetings, as the background for a narrowly focused you-are-there video account of how Snowden met with Rio-based investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald; how he began a correspondence with Poitras; and how months later Poitras and Greenwald met Snowden in Hong Kong to map out the next momentous steps. Much of Citizenfour takes place in a Hong Kong hotel room. It feels weirdly like a one-set, one-act play about a justifably paranoid whistleblower and two committed journalists—one with a camera, one without. Poitras remains off-screen, though occasionally we hear her questions and comments. Initially fnding a secure, private mode of communication between Snowden and Poitras was no easy thing in a world of nonsecure security. “Assume one trillion guesses per second,” Snowden reminds Poitras regarding the safety of her email password. Greenwald is joined in Hong

Kong by Guardian correspondent Ewen MacAskill. After interviewing Snowden about the NSA’s collection of Verizon customer data, their frst story breaks in MacAskill’s paper in London. Poitras and Barton Gellman share bylines in The Washington Post for their account of the secret U.S. program known as PRISM. Snowden strategizes about the timing of his coming-out party, when to reveal himself as the whistleblower/traitor/hero/villain of a story the Obama administration wishes would go away. The flm works, whatever your ethical stance on Snowden, because it’s more procedural than polemic. Filming one conversation, Poitras captures Snowden reacting to an apparently routine hotel fre alarm. Real? A test? What? The timing, he says, seems fshy. Why an alarm at that moment, when he was naming names to journalists in a room that may or may not be bugged? The questions are right out of a studio thriller made in the pre-Steve Jobs era. The scene’s a bit funny and a bit frightening. And that’s the movie all over, though funny sounds like a funny word to use, in the context of unchecked government surveillance and those who believe too much is too much. Citizenfour (R) ★★★★✩

The Sound of a Whistleblower

November 6–12, 2014

Hero or traitor? In cinema, it doesn’t really matter.

Another movie based on a comic book. Yawn, right? However, the latest film news from Marvel and D.C. film have provoked wide-eyed interest: Both comic giants recently announced projects featuring a female superhero as the central character. Historically, female-led superhero movies flop: Remember Catwoman and Elektra? But box office history from this decade shows that The Hunger Games and Maleficent were massively successful and, really, aren’t Katniss and Evil Jolie superheroes in all but name? Last week, Marvel’s president presented their new Captain Marvel movie. Captain Marvel, as in Carol Danvers. She was once known as Ms. Marvel but someone whose background includes the Air Force, CIA and NASA and who has superstrength as well as the ability to fly, breathe in space and sense the future … you should probably just call her Captain. And salute. On the D.C. tip, Wonder Woman will appear in the upcoming Batman vs. Superman and Warner Bros. revealed that she will (finally) get her own feature film. In the new book, The Secret History of Wonder Woman, author Jill Lepore traces Wonder Woman’s history as badass and pinup but perhaps the most interesting part of Wonder Woman’s story is the man who created her, William Moulton Marston. Marston was a psychologist who invented the lie detector (So that’s where the lasso of truth came from!). He was also a polygamist whose mistress was a magazine writer and the niece of women’s rights/ birth control activist Margaret Sanger. Marston saw the debut of Superman as simultaneous with the rise of Nazism and feared that children would confuse all-powerful superheroes with fascist Übermenschen. In 1943, he said that, “Not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength and power” and declared his intent to “create a feminine character with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman.” And Marston’s vision is still alive in today’s superheroes. Marvel just released Thor No. 1 with a new Thor. There’s been other Thors, but the hammer of Mjölnir has always read: “‘Whosoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor.” We see a hand grasp the hammer as the “he” becomes a “she,” and the first female Thor rises up in winged helmet and silver armor. No bulging biceps, but no 4-inch heels either. It ain’t Ms. Thor or Mr. Thor: It’s just Thor. And that may be the most powerful statement yet. – Lissa Townsend Rodgers

VegasSeven.com

SHE’S WORTHY OF THE HAMMER

MOVIES

A&E

NEWS NOIR Jake Gyllenhaal plays the scariest ambulance chaser you’ll ever meet By Michael Phillips Tribune Media Services

JAKE GYLLENHAAL LOST 30 POUNDS FOR HIS

new movie, Nightcrawler, and the result is simple and eerie, much like the flm itself. He appears to be wearing a Jake Gyllenhaal mask—all cheekbones, sallow complexion and unblinking laser-beam eyes. His character is Lou Bloom, a freelance L.A. crime scene videographer. Is this man human, exactly? Lou’s small talk leans heavy on the self-help axioms and self-directed pep rallies; it’s as if he were an alien learning to pass for earthling by watching one too many TED Talks. We know Lou’s a criminal; in the frst scene, he beats up a security guard and steals his watch, which dangles awkwardly off his skinny wrist the rest of the movie. Lou is just another L.A. casualty of anonymity—lost and searching for work, an identity of some kind, something he can “learn and grow into.” He fnds what he’s looking for, thanks to the needs of a ratings-starved morning news producer played by Rene Russo. Even if Lou’s social skills are on par with Travis Bickle’s in Taxi Driver, L.A. always makes room for its ambitious sociopaths, especially if they can pass for normal when necessary.

Gyllenhaal’s Lou would do anything for a scoop.

Photographed by Robert Elswit, whose images of California in the flms of Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood) are among the indelible sights of contemporary moviemaking, Nightcrawler comes from the writer-director Dan Gilroy, who is married to Russo in real life and whose brother, Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton), is one of the flm’s producers. The protagonist’s rise in his newly adopted feld is rooted in pain, suffering and attractively gory news footage. At frst Lou works alone, going up against a veteran crime-scene videographer played, with extra relish, by Bill Paxton. Arriving second to a blazing house fre or a fatal crash on the 110 freeway— this means Lou does not eat.

But he’s a quick study. Lou hires a so-called intern, streetwise and apparently homeless Rick (Riz Ahmed), to monitor the police scanner and try to stay alive as Lou screams across town to get to the latest home invasion. Just as Lou evokes memories of Taxi Driver, the news producer played by Russo recalls Faye Dunaway in Network. She’s stuck at the lowestrated outlet in the L.A. morningshow clutter. Lou provides her with one juicy bit of footage after another. Then we learn what Gilroy’s protagonist is willing to do in the name of advancement. So many character studies pretend to take chances but end up making easy decisions for the sake of audi-

November 6–12, 2014

VegasSeven.com

SHORT REVIEWS

Horns (R) ★★✩✩✩

Ignatius “Ig” Perrish has a hangover, and the morning after a night of unspecified “terrible things,” he puts his hands to his temples and realizes he has a “pair of knobby pointed protuberances” where none used to be. A murder mystery, Horns concerns a young man who turns his back on the Lord and is both punished and rewarded. It’s hard to jerk tears a beat or two after gleeful rounds of brutality, even if it happens to, or because of, Daniel Radcliffe. As Ig, the Harry Potter alum labors valiantly to stay on course with a role, and material, that goes every which way.

Birdman (R) ★★★✩✩

Birdman proves that a movie—the grabbiest, most kinetic film ever made about putting on a play—can soar on the wings of its own technical prowess, even as the banality of its ideas threatens to drag it down. Its star, Michael Keaton, is a beloved actor who made millions on Batman and settled for a smaller level of fame. Keaton plays Riggan Thomson, a fictionalized version of Keaton himself, right down to the shared number of syllables in both names. The viewer can take Birdman as capital-M Meaningful or else as pleasantly devoid of deep thoughts.

Dear White People (R) ★★★★✩

Dear White People is equipped with narrative invention, visual instincts and a story with something on its mind. It’s a slyly provocative achievement and a serious calling card for its writer-director, Justin Simien. He sets his ensemble affair on the campus of the fictional Ivy League enclave Winchester University, where AfricanAmerican student life is marginalized yet marked by sharp personality distinctions. Simien deals in archetypes and stereotypes, but they’re freshly observed. This is the best film about college life in a long time.

ence comfort. Nightcrawler stays pretty tough throughout. The street scenes, lonely canyon roads and shadowy interiors come from both the movies and from peculiar corners of the real L.A., so mundane in its capacity for everyday evil. Gyllenhaal clearly enjoys fnding the voices and impulses for this composite human being, this not-quite-human human. Despite the familiarity of its themes—the bottomfeeding news media; the pathology born of extreme isolation and a little too much online time; the American can-do spirit, perverted into something poisonous—Gilroy’s clever, skeezy little noir is worth a prowl. Nightcrawler (R) ★★★✩✩

By Tribune Media Services

The Book of Life (PG) ★★★ ✩

Endlessly inventive, warm and traditional, this film serves up Mexican culture in a riot of colors and mariachi-flavored music. A museum tour guide (Christina Applegate) recounts a love story built around Dia de los Muertos. Producer Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth touch is felt throughout. The film is adorned with all manner of clever jokes, gorgeous sight gags and little flourishes. This sometimes riotous, always charming film suggests the studio has taken its own movie’s message to heart. You can “write your own story” and have it pay off.

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BETTING

THE NUMBERS DON’T LIE Some season-long football trends show no signs of reversing feld FUNNY THING ABOUT TRENDS: THEY ONLY

last for a fnite time. Just check out that fannel shirt that’s been hanging in your closet since 1993. Or that cassette deck in your four-door Saturn. Or the poll results from the justconcluded election (cut to U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and his liberal buds sobbing uncontrollably). Of course, in sports-betting circles, trends are an important component to the handicapping process, but you have to be careful not to become paralyzed by them—again, the whole fnite thing. Still, there’s no denying that as this football season begins to slide down the backside of the mountain, several eye-popping tendencies have taken root—and in many cases, there’s zero indication that we’re headed for a regression to the mean anytime soon. If you’ve been smart (and lucky) enough to get out in front of and ride these trends for the past two months, please drop me a line and tell me what it feels like to be walking around with Kardashian money. If you’ve been reluctant to buy in, well, better late than never (probably … hopefully …). Dolphin Tales: The Dolphins are coming off a 37-0 whitewash of the Chargers. Forget about the fact that San Diego has now lost eight straight games in Miami dating to January 1982 (hence the reason the Dolphins were my Best Bet last week); the bigger takeaway is that all fve of the Dolphins’ victories this season have been double-digit blowouts. In fact, only once—a 27-24 home loss to Green Bay—has Miami played a game decided by fewer than 10 points. Scoring Frenzy (Part 1): Given that NFL defensive backs can’t breathe on receivers anymore without the offcials throwing a yellow hanky, it should come as no surprise that there have been a furry of shootouts this season. That many of those shootouts have involved the Patriots, Broncos, Colts, Saints and Packers—whose quarterbacks are, respectively, Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, Andrew Luck, Drew Brees and Aaron Rodgers—is also unsurprising. What is startling, particularly to bookmakers: Those fve very public franchises have gone “over” the total in 78.6 percent of their games (33 “overs”; nine “unders”). Scoring Frenzy (Part 2): If you think that last stat has bookies hitting the bottle with Oscar Goodmanon-New-Year’s-Eve-like frequency, get a load of this: Through the NFL’s frst 28 prime-time games—Monday,

MATT JACOB

LUCKY SEVEN

Saints -4.5 vs. 49ers (Best Bet) Dolphins +3 at Lions Falcons -1 at Bucs Packers-Bears OVER 53.5 Baylor +5.5 at Oklahoma Auburn -21.5 vs. Texas A&M Utah +9 vs. Oregon

Thursday and Sunday nights—22 have gone “over” the total. Not only that, but favorites are 18-10 against the spread in those contests. Translation: Joe Square Public, who loves favoriteand-over parlays in prime-time games, has been crushing it. Total Rewards: More notable over/under trends, this time from the college gridiron: The 13 teams in Conference USA are a combined 6641-4 “over” the total. Conversely, the 14-member ACC is 72-42-5 “under” the total. As for individual teams, Michigan State and Ohio State— two of the squads in the normally defensive-minded Big Ten—head into their November 8 showdown having each gone “over” the total in seven of their eight games. Final score of their meeting in last year’s Big Ten championship game: 34-24, which crept over the total of 53½. Meanwhile, if you’ve played all eight of San Diego State’s games “under” the number, you’re riding an eightgame winning streak. Out of 124 Division I-A teams, the Aztecs are the only one not to have topped the total. Then again, they’re hardly alone, as the normally high-fying Mountain West Conference has seen nearly 60 percent of its games (61 of 103) stay “under.” Speaking of the MWC … No Mountain of Cash: Only three of the league’s dozen teams having winning records against the spread— Colorado State (6-3 ATS), Nevada (6-3) Boise State (5-3). The other nine teams: 32-39 ATS. Unfortunately, with the conference involved in head-to-head play the rest of the way, it’s tough to proft off this trend—at least until bowl season begins. Last Week: 6-1 (4-0 NFL; 2-1 college; 1-0 Best Bet). Season Record: 31-32 (16-17 NFL; 15-15 college; 4-5 Best Bets).

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SEVEN QUESTIONS

Event. I just couldn’t justify the time away from my family. But part of me now wishes that I had done it. I’m planning on being out there to watch. I want to come out and really watch and talk to the young poker players, and see how this thing works now. Are there any lessons from the game itself that are applicable to the rest of your career?

David Sklansky’s fundamental theorem of poker is pretty effective in all walks, or any kind of adversarial situation that could occur in business. You want to find a way to make your opponent act in the opposite way they would if he knew what you were really holding. Then the whole idea that comes out of Herbert Yardley’s book of figuring out how many steps away from the idiot your opponent is. That stuff’s useful in all areas of life. And being rigorously honest with yourself, which is an enormously important part of poker. Being rigorously aware of your own proclivities, your own weaknesses, your own leaks, and trying to make sure that your fortification is strong. With the Six-Second Screenwriting Vines and Grantland’s “The Moment” podcast, you’ve established yourself as a creative guru of sorts. How do you feel about that position?

One half of the writing duo behind Rounders and Ocean’s Thirteen on playing poker for ‘research,’ how the game teaches life lessons and the status of Rounders 2. By Jason Scavone

November 6–12, 2014

VegasSeven.com

You believe that Rounders and the holecam were two of the key ingredients in the poker boom. How do you feel about the rise and leveling of the game’s popularity since 1998?

Even if there’s been some calming down of the frenetic exponential growth, it still permeates society in a way far, far greater than it did when we were writing that movie and before the World Poker Tour and before Internet poker. The fact that it’s hard to gamble online now if you don’t live in New Jersey or in Nevada has defnitely spoiled the growth, but I don’t think it’s really eroded the game’s place in the culture. Do you feel any sense of ownership over the game’s explosion?

Ownership’s a big word. Rounders is absolutely a part of the language of poker. It is sort of a compulsory step along the way to being serious about the game, because it’s the modern movie that captures what’s romantic about being a poker player.

night. Let’s say there was a band playing a rehearsal hall at 7, and then I had something I had to see at 10 and then I had something I had to see at 1:30. My way station, the place I’d use as my home base during that stuff, as often as not, was the Mayfair Club.

You spent a lot of time researching the movie. How often were you in those underground New York poker clubs?

How’s your game these days?

When I say I was in the poker rooms researching the movie, that’s true, but you could also put quotes around the word “research.” What I was doing was playing a lot of poker, and then it became research. There was a period of time where I was in there most days. I had a job in the music business. Part of my responsibility was seeing bands at

I played the other night, and I lost straight-over-straight early; I got stacked. Then I did fne the rest of the night. It’s certainly not the sharpest it’s ever been. But, that said, if you want to invite me into your game, I’ll happily come and do the best I can. I only played in the World Series of Poker Main Event once. I lost on Day One. A couple of years ago, two poker sites offered to put me into the Main

What can you tell us about Rounders 2? Or will it be a 25-year wait like Walter Tevis going back for The Color of Money?

We’re all engaged in trying to fgure that out. That’s the most I can say right now. How was writing for Ocean’s Thirteen different than Koppelman’s other projects? Read the whole interview at VegasSeven.com/Koppelman.

PHOTO BY BEN L AZAR

Brian Koppelman

I’m defnitely nobody’s guru. I don’t think anybody would hold themselves out in that way. What I am is someone who’s had experience in trying to be creative—in staring down the impediments to working at the highest level. The podcast is about me trying to dig in with people who have accomplished remarkable things and fguring out how and why they did what they did. And so, yes, I stand in for all the other creative people who are interested in that. In no way am I holding myself out as having these answers. I’m trying to engage in a conversation that might produce some answers, but hopefully answers that some really smart person I’m talking to has from hard-won experience. The Six-Second Screenwriting Vines are absolutely me sharing what I’ve learned, what my questions are. If that’s of value to somebody, that’s awesome. I’m really glad for it. But I defnitely don’t hold myself out as someone with all the answers. I’m searching. I’m engaged in this search just like you are. Maybe by having the conversation, we could get some answers together.