Showing posts with label terry wilsey. Show all posts
Showing posts with label terry wilsey. Show all posts

Thursday, December 30, 2010

This Week's LVW Col: The Olds Do Cosmo

Hope everyone has been having a terrific holiday week. Enjoy. -sf

Cosmo...harrumph!
The Olds do the newest Strip property

By STEVE FRIESS


As we made our way past the tri-level chandelier that is the signature of Vegas’ newest playground, two grouches provided decidedly different reactions. Terry, eyes agog, stepped back several paces to marvel. And Walt?

“All they need in this fucking thing is a fortune teller,” he harrumphed. “Now come on, Terry, I’m hungry.”

The ritual was off to a roaring start. Terry and Walt are The Olds, a couple for 35 years, locals for 30 years and, most important, doting adoptive gay grandparents to me since 1996. They’re generous, wise, nosy and maddening, devotees of the Gore Vidal era of cutting gay wit.

The Olds do this endearing thing: They eat at every new casino on the first Saturday it is open. Only this explains why I rode in a minivan with The Olds, their neighbor Frank and The Olds’ two poodles to the Cosmopolitan at 7:30 a.m. on the Jewish God’s blessed day of rest.

Read the rest at LasVegasWeekly.Com

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Cosmo Conclusions, A Week Late


By now, everybody has said pretty much everything that's important to say about The Cosmopolitan and, in a very rare occurrence, I find myself in agreement with the consensus. As I discussed or concurred with on KNPR and on The Vegas Gang, The Cosmo:

* Is elegant and pretty in an accessible way that doesn't leave middle America feeling out of place.
* Took advantage of its peculiar, narrow footprint to enhance its urbanistic concept.
* Is what CityCenter claimed it would be -- a metropolitan-esque Vegas resort -- but is not.
* Has all sorts of nifty artistic and design details that make it worthy of exploration.
* Is going to have a murderous problem with ingress and egress because of its narrow porte cochere and garage ramps
* Will be bought by either a large casino conglomerate or someone aching to be on The Strip in a year or so.
* Has some major service problems that are likely to be worked out over time but people might want to wait a few months before booking.

You can peruse my Flickr set on the Cosmo opening here, by the way. It includes about 90 pictures and five short videos taken by my gala companion, Trevor.

Of all the assessments I've read, I find those by David McKee of Stiffs & Georges and Mike E on VegasTripping.Com to be the most insightful. McKee has a round-up post in which he points to several reviews and commentaries and chides me for not having issued my verdict in the milliseconds after Opening Night. Sorry, I was tired after talking about it on those shows and then, as of this weekend, was felled by a heckuva cold. (Good news! In a moment of unusual restraint and decency, I opted not to Tweet the image of a bunny made of phlegm in a tissue yesterday. Growth!)

On Saturday, I took The Olds to Cosmo for an upcoming Las Vegas Weekly column, so I'll hold my fire on that experience so as to not scoop the people who actually pay me to write such things.

However, this should give you some idea what The Olds thought:


I've got some fun, quirky images to share in another forthcoming post. I also will be posting to the podcast feed the audio tour provided by David Rockwell of Cosmo, along with photos from my visit to his studio in New York. So stay tuned, now that I'm back to some vague semblance of health.

Friday, March 13, 2009

Friday Foto Fun: Inside the M With The Olds


As promised, here are some of the more interesting photos shot during my walk-about of the M Resort with the Olds, as documented in my Las Vegas Weekly column this week. That's them in that overly sunny shot at breakfast at the Red Cup Cafe.

First off, let's officially kick off a Blue Tape Watch on the M. Just as Palazzo left that piece of tape on a dome window for many months much to the delight of we bloggers, there's still lots of it all over the M. See?


I have to believe that will be gone soon enough since those were doors to the pool area and are fairly obvious. But we shall see!

Evidently, a week on there were still some problems with various fixtures...


...and I can't even begin to imagine how the room number was torn off here but wow.


I won't bother you with interior shots of the main areas because both Dave McKee at Stiffs & Georges and Hunter Hillegas at RateVegas.Com provided lots of that.

However, as documented in the column, Terry and I went to the 15th floor and managed to talk our way into checking out one of the end-unit "flat" suites, of which this is the floor plan (click on image to enlarge to readable size):


So here's the bed...


...and living room space...


...and my personal favorite, the tub-with-a-view...


That speck you see in the offing is the Strip, which is really sort of hard to see and not nearly as impressive in terms of vistas as the M has advertised. It reminds me of the time I took my mom to see Bette Midler at the MGM Grand Garden and we sat in the nosebleed seats. We knew we could see little Bette, but barely and it was quite unsatisfying. Here's a zoomed-in-view of the Strip or, perhaps, what you'd see if you brought binoculars:

The housekeeping lady who let us in to look at the flat suite insisted to me that the pool, too, is in an M shape. Do you see it? Because I don't, unless we're talking in cursive writing.


The southerly view is even more bleak than the Strip view...


...but I was fascinated by this pyramid tent thing across the street from M that Terry says is somebody's home. Paging the Sun's Brendan Buhler. Find out who this guy is! Stat! (And apologies if someone already has in the media; I've not seen it but would love to read about it.)



Speaking of media, it was nice to see SOMEONE still offers the local newspaper to hotel guests in this town.


Terry insightfully wondered to me why the M didn't tile the top of its southerly-facing porte-cochere with solar panels, and it's a good question, right?


And, finally, someone's bill was sticking out from under their door so I couldn't help myself. That (below) says $50 plus tax for a stay on the first Friday night the place was open. That's a pretty good deal.


Oh, don't look at me like that. You know you would've, too. Or that you're glad I did.

Thursday, March 12, 2009

LVW Col: M is for Minutiae

Those of you who follow me on Twitter caught a steady stream of tweets on Saturday that were my notes for this column. Enjoy. There'll be more photos -- including interior shots of the fancy suite we invaded in this column -- and comments from this visit posted here later today. -sf

M is for Minutiae

'The Olds' review the Valley's newest casino-resort

By STEVE FRIESS

To introduce Walt and Terry, I must tell the ending first.

“So, what’d you think?” I asked as we drove away from M Resort.

“Oh, I think it’s quite lovely,” crowed an upbeat Terry, at the wheel and returning us to our east-side homes not via Interstate 15 north but rather by swinging east by Seven Hills and then north on roads where you hit every light. “I’d really like to see the inside of that bar that overlooks the pool. That looks very interesting.”

“Walt?”

“Oh, it was all right, but I didn’t leave anything there I feel the need to go back for,” he harrumphed, poodles Cocoa and Cognac on his lap. Then, to Terry he asked, “Where the hell are you taking us, and do I need a fucking passport?"

Ah, marital bliss. No, really. They snark at each other to no end, but it’s been that way for at least the 12 years I’ve known them, and I’m strangely endeared by it. Somehow, this couple has become my Las Vegas family, always present for holidays and birthdays, available to lend us tools or drive us to the airport, holding a dinner-table setting at their place for me at least once a week. I call them my fairy godparents and sometimes when I’m texting Miles, “The Olds.”

No, I did not drag them to M just to manufacture column fodder. For the nearly 30 years Walt, an 83-year-old retired doctor, and Terry, a 65-year-old travel agent, have lived in Vegas, they’ve had a charming tradition: They eat breakfast at every new hotel-casino on the first Saturday it’s open.

Read the rest at LasVegasWeekly.Com