NYE '10: The Great, Godly & Claire Nolastname

What a classic Vegas night! Happy New Year, everyone!

My 18-year-old niece, Courtney, is in from ASU for a few days, so she tagged along with me as I covered my perennial Vegas New Year's Eve feature, the street-preachers-on-the-Strip piece. In years past, I've done versions of this for Las Vegas Weekly, The New York Times, the podcast and this blog, so it stood to reason I'd do it once more for my favorite new client, the AOL news site Sphere.Com. I also was supposed to contribute to AFP's coverage but that was ruined by Claire Nolastname, but we'll get to that shortly.

This go-around, Miles was at the KVBC Mother Ship directing the coverage, so Courtney and I were left to our own devices. We saw Mystere earlier in the day (4:30 p.m. show) in preparation for a big Cirque du Soleil piece I've got planned for later this month, and I was glad I saw it again because I was reminded just how wonderfully the Hershey Bar of Cirque shows holds up. It's classic and beautiful and has one of Cirque's two best scores ever -- Alegria has great music, too -- and was created at a time before the comedy aspects of Cirque shows started to feel forced and contrived.

We made some goodies for Miles and his peeps...

...and brought it by the KVBC ranch after "Mystere" and after dinner at the critically raved Chinese restaurant China Mama. It was a good ride because I hadn't yet seen the restored neon signs on the islands on Las Vegas Boulevard north of downtown and U.S. 95. Check that out:


Then we headed to Panorama Towers, where my father and I have an investment condo, and parked there to walk the Harmon overpass to Vdara, then Bellagio and then out to the Strip. Vdara seemed like an utter ghost town at 10 pm on New Year's Eve. Here's Silk Road's bar:


Our destination was the KVBC set in front of Caesars Palace where Jim Snyder and Sophia Choi were anchoring the sprawling coverage that included folks at Town Square and on Fremont Street. It was nice to have a sane retreat. Here they are on the couch with reporter Dan Ball and doing stand-ups.


Alas, I was on assignment, so Courtney and I made our way north to the lineup of itinerant preachers for whom New Year's is prime time. Between Vegas on New Year's Eve and Pasadena's Rose Bowl Parade on New Year's Day, these are the two largest scheduled public gatherings within a few hours of one another and within a 12-hour period in America.

Some people tried to reason and debate the fire-and-brimstone set, which in this image includes Petar Keseljevic (black jacket, from Oslo, Norway) and Ruben Israel (sandwich board, is proprietor of OfficialStreetPreachers.com).


But it is hard to reason with folks carrying signs like these...


...so most mocked them and took posed like this:


In years past, the preachers have spread out around the Strip but this time they stuck together near the barricades where the cops were. For my Sphere piece, Israel said: "We've been told tonight that if it were not for the police, they would punch us, beat us and stab us. We've been beat up more times than I can remember." Regardless of your beliefs, it's simply shameful they should deal with such abuse.

I turned the camera over to Courtney while I did interviews and she shot something that I rarely see, pictures of me doing my work:


When the clock came close to striking midnight, we raced back to the KVBC pen, shooting some colorful photos along the way:



And finally, Vegas made up for the pathetic fireworks show that ushered in 2009 -- fitting, really, given what a crappy year it was -- with a fantastic display off the top of the Stratosphere, TI, Venetian, Aria, MGM Grand, Planet Hollywood and...


Caesars Palace! Here's some YouTube video of the fireworks I just found:

The amount of fireworks smoke was something I did not recall from years past but it reminded me of the Strip after an implosion, less the hazardous flying gunk:


I also was unfamiliar with the utterly failed people-moving efforts of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department after the fireworks ended. When Miles worked on the Strip in years past, we had a special media parking spot at Caesars that made the getaway easy. This time, I was in a rush to file my Sphere piece as well as some "color" for an Agence France-Presse piece but cell service on the Strip was completely nonexistent. So I tried to get back to my car at Panorama.

We tried walking up the Strip to CityCenter so we could take the Harmon overpass but the cops had barricades up in all sorts of inexplicable places, leading to stampede conditions because nobody could move and folks became increasingly angry and upset. I saw many people fall down, get knocked around and desperately try to climb over barricades to get out. It was actually impossible to walk south from Caesars Palace past Flamingo Road, let alone to Bellagio. Not because there wasn't any room but because there were barricades that penned people in for no apparent reason.

So we leaped a barricade along with everyone else -- I actually didn't have a choice because we were shoved by the crowd until we were pressed up against it -- and went west on Flamingo Road. My hope was to go through Bellagio from the North Entrance, then to Vdara, out to the Harmon overpass and back to Panorama.

Yet the hotel was not allowing non-guests in. I begged the self-proclaimed "head of security" Claire Nolastname -- that's what she said! -- to let me get through, explaining I was not a partier but a working reporter on a tight deadline trying to get to my vehicle to file a story I could not file there because of the cell signal failure. She could not have been more dismissive. I showed her my press badge, even the CityCenter notebook I was using. Rules were rules. Screw me.

Instead, Courtney and I had to walk over I-15 on Flamingo then south on Hotel Rio Drive to Dean Martin to Panorama Towers. It was a circuitous and rather dangerous extra three miles of walking that cost me more than an hour and my AFP gig. My AFP editor, you see, ultimately decided to move the national story on the wire without any Vegas input because he couldn't reach me. Shame, too, because I had a ton of stuff in my notebook from my walk-through the Bellagio earlier, in fact. But beyond the loss of income for me, I also could not have been more furious or dumbfounded. In all my years in Vegas, folks like valet car-parkers and security officers have always had great respect for other people who were trying to do their jobs. But not Claire Nolastname!

It was an ugly ending to an otherwise wonderful, very fun night. And I'd rather not conclude this post on this kind of note or else the terrorists, or at least Claire Nolastname, will have won!

So here's my favorite image from the night gussied up by Courtney on some photo editing site called Picnik.

CityCenter Three Ways, So Far

Consistent blogging has been curtailed for the past few weeks by mammoth amount of coverage I've had to prepare in a relatively short period of time about, of course, CityCenter. As I told CEO Jim Murren during our interview last month, I don't know if this thing will save Vegas but it's sure as sugar saved my fourth quarter.

So far, three of my pieces are already up and available. They include two for the newly constituted Portfolio.Com, a 1,300-word profile of CityCenter president Bobby Baldwin and a 900-word piece on the financial woes that preceded these openings. Both are full of fun, new information, such as when Steve Wynn talks about why Baldwin, not Lanni or Murren, ought to have become MGM Mirage CEO. Scour the Web and you're unlikely to find any real profiles of Baldwin, so I'm honored to bring to you a look at one of those figures whose career from WSOP champ to Wynn lieutenant to CityCenter guru threads modern Vegas history in a unique way.

The other is a standard-issue piece overviewing the project and reporting that it's opening for Agence France-Presse. It's fine, nothing special, typical wire-service stuff.

Coming soon: My 4,100-word L.A. Weekly cover story, my LV Weekly column and at least one Sphere.Com story. Don't know if the New York Times is going to want anything or not; they don't seem to have a freelance budget anymore. Hope that changes early next year, but in the meantime I'm thrilled to be making headway in all of these new markets as I'd never written for the LA Weekly or Portfolio before.

Meanwhile, I offer up this sensational dusk view of CityCenter from the 22nd floor of my now-vacant Panorama condo. (Looking to rent? Email me!)

I love this view so much, it's now my phone wallpaper.

WSOP On The Brink...Of A Problem

One of the charms of the World Series of Poker in recent years has been how international the final tables have been. A Dane won the thing last year, a Laotian immigrant won the year before, of the last 18 final tablists, half resided outside the U.S. They included three Canadians (one Vietnamese-born), two Danes, a Russian, a South African and a Brit.

This year, not so much. As I type, the field of 6,494 is now down to 14. Of those, only two are not Americans, James Akenhead of England and Antione Saout of France.

Now, there's nothing anyone can do about how the cards go and there were more than 100 nations represented. That number was down some from last year, but still.

At the same time, an All-American Final Table kind of throws a kink in the plan. Once they get down to nine finalists, they will pause play until November. The idea there is to create buzz for the players, most of them unknown. The real growth markets for the World Series of Poker are outside of the U.S., in places not already saturated by poker rooms and TV poker shows. Last year's Danish winner Peter Eastgate, for instance, set off a new poker frenzy in Denmark.

Personally, I'm rooting right now for the French guy because I've spent all day trying to get editors of newspapers all over the world interested in letting me write about today's action and the 27 folks left when they began at noon. All were assured to win at least $352,000, so it seemed like any of them making it this far should be a local story in their cities. Yet my only nibble is with the French wire service Agence France-Presse, and ONLY if the French guy makes it. Times are tough in the media biz.

Now, all this is moot if pro Phil Ivey can hang on. He's a major poker star and having that kind of star power will help propel interest during the break. Just look at him. He's got the style of Tiger Woods and Barack Obama. He makes it to November and the WSOP folks will be ecstatic.

Adelson Wishes He'd Fired Weidner Sooner

I had an extremely brief -- maybe 10-minute -- interview Friday evening with Las Vegas Sands CEO Sheldon Adelson as I prepared my New York Times piece on the opening of the Sands Casino Resort Bethlehem. But gosh, what a 10-minute interview. He talked up the Bethlehem property, of course, but he also wandered into areas I hadn't even planned to discuss.

Most importantly, he was fresh off the plane from Macau and said he believes he may have the financing in place to restart construction of the resorts on the Cotai Strip and the hotel and shopping at the Bethlehem site by the end of 2009. With the Times' blessing -- owing to a shrinking business-section freelance budget -- I did an Agence France-Presse wire service story about this development.

Ah, but there was more. In March, longtime top lieutenant William Weidner, the chief operating officer, left the company. He says he quit; Adelson has said he fired him. This culminated an epic internal struggle against the backdrop of LVS' stock freefalling from an October 2007 high of $148 to a low of less than $2 earlier this year.

I asked Adelson whether he would have done anything differently in the past year or so and this was his wallop of an answer:

"Would I have done anything different? Yes, I would’ve fired Bill Weidner a long time ago. He created a financing situation that was completely inappropriate. Now we’re getting financing that’s more appropriate. What I’d like to say, unequivocally, is it’s not a matter of the [Macau] market. The market is good, very good. You cannot change the culture of Chinese people and their love to challenge luck. If there’s some bumps in the road in terms of everything going 100 percent perfect. Our numbers have been going up and the [Macau peninsula, where casinos have long clustered and now include Sands Macao, Wynn Macau and MGM Mirage Macau] have been going down. [The Cotai Strip is] standing out as a separate must-see attraction in the city of Macau."

Before I could even ask another question, Adelson was off and running again. Steve Wynn has lambasted LVS in Asia and MGM Mirage on the Strip, particularly on Jon Ralston's TV show, for overambitious plans that lacked proper financing. Adelson battled back on that one:

"I wish I had accelerated the construction [in Macau], not cut down on it. I hear that our competitors like Steve Wynn fault us by saying, 'Oh they went too far, too fast, and they never should have built so much.' In the meantime, what’s the bottom line of our company versus other companies? Even in the economic tsunami that we’re experiencing, we’re still doing better than other companies on a proportional basis. Much better."

It's hard to know exactly what he means here, but thanks to Hunter Hillegas at RateVegas.Com for providing me with some data from recent SEC filings for comparison's sake. He found that the Wynn Macau and Sands Macao had average daily room rates in the first quarter of 2009 of $268, higher than the $216 garnered by the Venetian Macao, which is Cotai. As for the revenue per room in the same period, Sands Macao got $260, Wynn Macau got $223 and Venetian Macao got $216. So on both measures, Adelson's own property on the Macau peninsula was doing better than his property on Cotai. In Vegas, Wynn-Encore got an average rate of $222, higher than Venetian's $209 and Palazzo's $221. So it's pretty close on that front but it's hard to see how Adelson claims a clear victory in any of these markets.

Adelson did say that the one project he does not expect to restart by year's end are the St. Regis luxury condos on the Strip that now stand half-built. Yet he said that could happen, too, if he can create a situation where the developer is also the lender so the buyers can get the credit to close that banks are reluctant to provide. (Photo left by Isaac Brekken for my NYT piece in March on the Vegas condo market.)

I asked Bill Lerner, the ex-Deutsche Bank gaming analyst who now has his own firm called Union Gaming Group, about this notion. He said it's not farfetched and he expects MGM Mirage to do the same with some of their condos at CityCenter.

"I think we’ll see that with some of the residential development in the Strip corridor where the protects are built or nearly built. The operator/developer will structure seller financing. Where’s the downside? If they move ahead and do something like that, it allows them to close and collect interest payments. It’s the best alternative given the current set of circumstances."

Lerner, incidentally, is quoted in my AFP piece speculating that LVS will sell off some assets or take on equity-sharing partners to finish the stalled projects.

Finally, Adelson again defended his approach and he brought up the fact that he put $1 billion of his own money into the company to keep it afloat.

"Unless somebody thinks completely ignorant of the facts, I think I made an educated and informed investment decision that was a good decision on our part that saved our company and now we live to fight another day. I took $1 billion out of my family’s piggy bank. How many people would do that?"

Not ever having that kind of wealth, I honestly cannot say.

This week's LVW Col: Danny Gans Understood

Here's this week's Weekly column. Off to lunch with my mom in Florida. -sf

Danny Gans: 1956-2009
Apart from Vegas, most of the country had no idea who Gans was -- and odds are he ws just fine with that
By STEVE FRIESS

Miles shook me awake last Friday at about 7:30 a.m.

“I need you to wake up,” he said. “You need to get up. Now.”

I was confused. I’d told him I didn’t need to be up until 8. But he looked grave.

“Danny Gans died in his sleep this morning,” he said.

My bleary look gave way to a puzzled one. It was the only reaction to such strange and awful news. How does a 52-year-old health nut die in his sleep?

Here are my first and second comments, in this order: “Oh, that’s so sad.” Then, after a long pause: “But I wonder who’s going to care.”

Yes, that sounds cold. But I meant—and Miles got it immediately—who in the national media will recognize this passing as a significant story? That’s my job and to some extent my function in this community, to determine what of the local news rises to the level of broader significance and interest, and which publication is going to want me to document it.

And so it was that I was brought immediately back around to the central conundrum that was always the most baffling part of the Danny Gans story: How does someone become such a mammoth, wealthy star, entertain untold millions and grin for years from the largest billboard along the most-traveled American tourist thoroughfare and still remain largely anonymous in the broader popular culture? Just seven years ago, a Los Angeles Times profile of the impressionist was topped by a headline that summed it up perfectly: “Las Vegas Loves Who?” Heck, the Wall Street Journal scribe Christina Binkley, writing an exhaustive book on recent Vegas history last year, misspelled Gans’ name!

Indeed, none of the East Coast-based papers or magazines I regularly write for took an interest in this startling passing as a news event. The New York Times, which furnishes a large part of my meal ticket, shunted the matter to a staff obit writer who aptly referred to Gans as “a show business anomaly, virtually unknown outside Las Vegas but a superstar on the Strip.” The Agence France-Presse, a Paris-based wire service read largely in Europe and Asia, let me write just 200 words because, “I’m afraid if he’s not that well-known outside Las Vegas, it’s not going to make waves,” my LA-based editor wrote me. And a CNN anchor actually said—on the air—something to the effect of, “You ever hear of Danny Gans, the Vegas headliner? He died today.”

Share

• del.icio.us
• digg
• Facebook

E-mail this to a friend »

URL:

Download

• 1080p
• 720p
• iPod

Share

• del.icio.us
• digg
• Facebook

E-mail this to a friend »

URL:

http://www.lasvegasweekly.com/videos/2009/may/05/503/

I wasn’t surprised, per my mental calculation, upon hearing the news. The coastal media don’t take much interest in Vegas entertainment unless Hollywood somehow infiltrates it—see Hilton, Paris or Lohan, Lindsay—or unless there’s something that fits a wacky Vegas stereotype. The onstage tiger attack on illusionist Roy Horn was sensational news because there was blood and animals and traumatized fans and bizarre costumes. Even then, though, I had to remind photo editors repeatedly which one was Siegfried and which one was Roy.

Danny Gans wasn’t Vegas in that sense. When I saw Gov. Jim Gibbons on the news referring to Gans as another “Mr. Las Vegas” it sounded really odd. He wasn’t ostentatious or outlandish like Liberace, dramatic and tragic and campy like Elvis, schlocky like Wayne Newton. Gans just got on stage night after night, did a bunch of impressions that Middle America loved to see and went home.

Read the rest at LasVegasWeekly.Com.

An Exclusive SARMOTI Encore Pictorial

[UPDATE: For backstage coverage and lots of photos, visit Robin Leach's LuxeLife blog.]


Tonight at the Bellagio, Siegfried and Roy made their triumphant return/final performance in a massive ballroom as the focal point of a benefit for a $70 million brain research institute opening in downtown Las Vegas later this year. Also on stage -- or so they tell us -- was Montecore, the 380-pound white tiger who mauled Roy on stage at the Mirage in October 2003 and ended their 13-year headlining run there.

You can read my piece for Agence France Presse or you can read my pal Kathleen Hennessey's version for the Associated Press, which includes a lot more detail than mine on the performance. It was quite a moving event, as we'll discuss in greater detail on the next episode of "The Strip" and, hopefully, in my Weekly column.

For the moment, the photo above of me and Kathleen is one of the few I took at the event that actually has Siegfried & Roy in the image. No photography was permitted during their 10-minute performance and a promised image courtesy of ABC, which is doing an exclusive report on the duo on this Friday's "20/20," has not yet materialized.

We were actually not supposed to take any photos at all beyond the red carpet. Stars in attendance: Teri Hatcher, Hilary Duff and Danny DeVito. Here's a clevage shot of Duff for those of you who like that sort of thing:


Anyhow, I begged and cajoled and annoyed the organizers until finally S&R Manager Bernie Yuman gave me permission to shoot inside the ballroom, although not the S&R appearance itself.

Now, I've been to lots of big Vegas thingies and this was some event, at least for a charity dinner during a decession. Here's what the ballroom itself looked like:


It was a massive expanse with about 100 tables, a stage, a pair of large screens, several very fancy vehicles for live auction (including a $509,000 Rolls Royce with "over $42,000 in custom and unique features) emcee'd by Robin Leach. Our table included me, Hennessey, People Magazine writer Mark Grey, the R-J's Norm Clarke and his "leggy blonde" Cara, Las Vegas Sun medical writer Marshall Allen, Greenspun Media editor/writer/blogger/etc John Katsilometes and some German reporters.

This was what the table looked like:


This was perhaps the most over-set table I've ever sat at. Each place had about seven glasses of pre-poured wine to go with a three-course meal that included a chilled Maryland blue crab salad by Wolfgang Puck, a braised Kobe short rib by Todd English and a dessert by the Jean-Phillippe Maury that we'll get to in a moment.

But first, about those centerpieces. Each table had a slice of a tree trunk decorated with flowers and a red metal heart framing a plastic white tiger glued to a disco ball. I was among the last one to leave because I was filing my story, so I took a bunch. Here's what it looks like up closer:


Cool, huh? Not real sure what I'm going to do with three of them, but I figured they'd end up in the garbage if I didn't take them.

There were also costumed entertainers wandering about. Here are two images of that:


Hey! That last one's not of the entertainment although there was this one particular moment when I (a.k.a. Shecky Friess) cracked up Mayor Oscar Goodman on the red carpet.

Hizzoner was bloviating about how great it is that S&R were performing and how amazing the Frank Gehry-designed brain center's going to be. The world will be trumpeting it, it'll be like a clarion call, it'll be like the shofar sounding on Passover. He was clearly losing his mind, and I jumped in to note that, in fact, we Jews don't blow the shofar on Passover. The mayor was stunned silent -- not an easy task -- and he looked at me with a mock-hateful glare. His wife, Carolyn, jumped in to say, "You're absolutely right!" Much laughter ensued among those members of The Tribe present. (I've told this story twice now and it doesn't quite work, so I thin ya hadda be there.)

Back to the party. As elaborate as this event looks, it was not a black-tie affair. In fact, Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., didn't even wear a tie and often doffed his jacket and he had the duty of announcing big donations from Vegas notables. (Steve & Elaine Wynn gave $1 million, IGT ex-CEO Charles Mathewson gave $5 million.) Ensign seemed to me like a strange choice for this deal considering that all the leading brain-disease researchers are champing at the bit to get going on embryonic stem-cell research and Ensign has always been a stalwart against it. Also, it was odd that Ensign was involved with honoring Siegfried & Roy even though he's also never supported anything remotely akin to gay rights.

But I digress. We reporters on the red carpet didn't have time to take in the cocktail reception with all the silent auction bidding, but here are some images from that and the red walkway into the ballroom:


The second image above was a rack of S&R's ornate coats for display. I don't believe they were being sold. And the last image is not a nod the "Love," the Cirque show that replaced S&R at the Mirage, but to the theme of the benefit, "Power of Love." That also explains the red heart on the table centerpiece.

The annual benefit for the brain center is called Keep Memory Alive. That brings us to dessert. Here's what it looked like.


According to information on the table, what you see there is a peanut gelato lollipop with dulce de leche caramel and crunchy brittle, a raspberry French Macaroon atop a rose petal-infused chibouste and a chocolate tiramisu with guanaja pearls and espresso cake. I'm just copying what the table card said. I'm not sure what most of that is.

Most interestingly, though, that oval plate that all of that was on was solid chocolate. Here is evidence that Norm tried to eat it with a fork:

I, of course, did it the easy way:


Good night, everyone!

TOUR ENCORE WITH STEVE WYNN

OK, folks. I've worked long and hard on this one. My profile of Steve Wynn is out on the AFP wire. In the process of that work, Wynn gave me this hour-long personal tour of Encore. You can:

• Download the audio by right-clicking here
• Find the map here
• Follow along with an annotated written guide here

We'll have much more on the next two proper episodes of "The Strip" as well as in my Las Vegas Weekly column next week. All I ask is that, if you haven't already and feel compelled to, please donate to this blog and podcast to support this work. It takes a lot of time and life is expensive. Click on the DONATE button at upper-right.

Prepping for Cirque du O.J.

Tomorrow, jury selection begins for the O.J. Simpson robbery case here in Las Vegas. I've already done two somewhat different previews, this one for Newsweek and this one a few days later for the Agence France Presse. They're kind of a case study in the differences in tone, style and substance demanded from different media outlets. So far I can't gauge whether the public even cares, but the Newsweek piece has been up for three days and there's been just one comment. That's saying -- or not saying -- something. I suspect the politics-obsessed nation will largely tune out until the verdict unless O.J. takes the stand.

Indeed, what did draw a ton of reaction for Newsweek, much of it irrelevant to the story itself, was my exclusive sit-in at a focus group in Las Vegas on Wednesday night as they viewed the Palin address. The two groups of swing-state undecided voters, one married women and one unmarried women, had a lot of interesting things to say about Palin and politics, much of which no man could possible get away with. I even heard New Yorker editor Dorothy Wickenden on the magazine's Campaign Trail podcast misrepresent the findings; she said that the participants overall had lower opinions of Palin after the speech when, in fact, even the most critical people had at least some improved view, improved in many cases from a zero rating. You can find my piece here. It's the second part of a women-react package, so scroll down a little bit. It's always nice to scoop the local media on a story of national significance in their own backyards.

So today I've got to read the papers, finish a travel story and get going on watching my DVD sets of Criss Angel's "Mindfreak." And that's all I'm gonna say about that.