@NewYorkMag's #Twitter Crossword Goof

Ever do a crossword puzzle and decide that the clue just MUST be incorrect? About 9,999 out of 10,000, you're wrong.

How precious, then, that the one exception I've ever found would happen to come on the heels of the national media's ridiculous infatuation with Twitter. I do the New York magazine crossword each week because it's always fun and clever, so I'm a bit in shock that Maura B. Jacobson would let this one, from the April 20, 2009 issue, slide.

The answer is TWITTER, as shown above by the fact that I've solved the rest of the puzzle.

But here's the clue:


Oops. It couldn't happen to a dumber techno-fad.

Design Problems at CityCenter Shopping Center?

New York Magazine had a very long, largely pretty dull, piece on super-architect Daniel Libeskind. Among his upcoming projects is the shopping center at CityCenter. Before I get to the good stuff, here's an example of how obtuse the piece is:

"It’s harder to know what sort of philosophical underpinning Libeskind has in mind when he’s dealing with a luxury condominium or a Las Vegas shopping mall. “I don’t look at an apartment building and think, How can I subvert it?” Libeskind says. “With a shopping center, I can’t touch the machinery of shopping, but I do want to make it more successful.” His demonstrated ability to steer crowds through an awesome interior landscape can of course be very useful when the subject is shopping rather than the history of German Jews. But meaning is something else."

You know, because there must be MEANING to a mall. But I digress, because the actual interesting stuff buried in this hifalutin blather is that it seems there's been some design problems with the project. Read on:

Next up is Las Vegas, a retail center with public spaces that is the centerpiece of MGM Mirage CityCenter, a huge new development on the Strip involving half a dozen architectural teams. Swickerath has just come back from Nevada with photos of a full-scale mock-up of the entrance canopy, a scaly metal skin like a dragon’s hide. The diagonally pitched titanium panels aren’t behaving as they had on paper. Seams aren’t aligning properly, and one side has developed an unsightly crimp.

“Instead of trying to get them to build something they can’t build, let’s make a design change,” Swickerath suggests. Libeskind is willing to change the angle of the panels, but he wonders how visible the problem will be from 100 feet below. “This is a handmade object, like a woven basket. I’d almost be willing to accept it the way it is.”

“Don’t,” says Swickerath. “I won’t let you.”

In the late seventies and early eighties, Libeskind taught at the bucolic architecture school at Cranbrook Academy, in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. There, he took his graduate students into the woods, gave them a hammer and some wood, and instructed them to build something wonderful with their hands. “We were trying to get away from just theoretical drawings and retrieve a sense of the wonder of construction using medieval methods, using simple means to get very complex results,” he says. “That was in another lifetime.”

When I press Libeskind on how he can reconcile the idealism of the Cranbrook days with the task of building a luxury Las Vegas mall, he says that the restrictions have changed, but the goal is still the same: to give a world of simulacra something original and real. Just down the street from his site is the Venetian, where visitors can cross fake canals to pseudo-piazzas beneath programmable sunset skies. Libeskind describes his own contribution as a “rich, urbane, cosmopolitan scheme, one you could find in New York or in Paris.” Rather than sit far back from the street in the manner of other local pleasure domes, such as the Bellagio, this mall hugs the sidewalk the way buildings do in Manhattan. His gallery is high and topped with glass, letting in natural light, which casino developers generally treat as if it were a poisonous substance.

To Libeskind, the project signals Las Vegas’s evolution from a desert encampment of vice into a modern metropolis. The old Vegas of gaudy billboards and cinder-block shacks was “just the beginning,” he says. “That’s how Rome looked when it was just a few settlers: a wall, some signs, and a couple of brothels.”

Whether Libeskind can help coax Las Vegas, or any city, into another Rome will depend in part on how many projects he takes on. An architect who wants to leave his mark needs developers just as much as they need him."

What a shame that, as profound as Libeskind wishes to be, the Forum Shops at Caesars already did an expansion that "hugs" the sidewalk of the Strip. But this insight did intrigue me and I wonder how they'll be fixing this problem.

Read the whole thing, if you must, here.

My New York Magazine Debut!

After I was shut out of getting to do any major pieces on "Spamalot" by the show's NY-based PR folks on account of my admitting I wasn't in love with the production, I decided to go ahead and find someone to let me write the piece that had been stirring in my mind for a long time, the denouement on why Broadway fails in Vegas.

Our podcast listeners will recognize many of these themes because Miles and I have been working them out orally for more than a year now and on this blog since it began in March. It is a piece that likely would've emerged sooner or later as it'd been on my mind for a while. Being treated badly didn't create this piece; it just accelerated my willingness to write it sooner rather than later.

So go here and see my first New York Magazine piece, a snappy look at the topic.

Apologies in advance for the WHHSH violation atop the story: "What Opens in Vegas Closes in Vegas." I didn't write it. But I did, as I mentioned on last week's podcast, pen a violation of my own in the body of the story, something I felt was suitably clever to be forgivable. Alas, they cut mine out of the piece so they could commit their own. All in all, though, it's less noxious than many of the examples I cite in my new Las Vegas Weekly column, the first one of which you can read here on the topic of WHHSH abuse.