When Tweeting Makes You A Twit

Here's this past week's LVW col. Enjoy. -sf

When Tweeting Makes You A Twit
By STEVE FRIESS

As Garth Brooks took to the Wynn Las Vegas stage this past weekend for the first three shows of his planned 300-performance stint, I laid on my couch under two small dogs and three fluffy blankets wondering when the medicine my doctor had prescribed for the chills and aches was going to kick in.

I couldn’t be there, but I was entertaining myself by following the evening’s exploits on Twitter. But when the lights went down, several of my colleagues sent out whiny tweets of a similar vein informing the world that—gasp!—the Wynn folks were cracking down on “surreptitious tweeting.”

Maybe it was my fever-induced stupor, but I had a moment of clarity. Had I been there, I probably would have felt just as compelled as my pals to spend the show spitting out blurbs to my tweeps telling them what was being played, what Garth was wearing, when his wife popped onstage.

Instead, I was at home and not in the rat race, and it suddenly became very clear to me that what we have all become accustomed to doing in the past several months is wrong. Also, outrageous, rude and disrespectful.

And it must stop.

This concept of journalists tweeting during performances is, so far as I can tell, largely a Vegas thing. I’ve looked long and hard all over the nation and I can’t find a single instance of any respectable journalist tweeting during the openings of, say, Broadway shows. Certainly no movie reviewer or scribe would ever even think to try tweeting the play-by-play of a film he was reviewing. It just doesn’t happen, with perhaps the vague exception of maybe at big rock concerts where there’s lots of lights and noise and it’s customary to let the audience do whatever they want.

But to go into a small, darkened theater where people are on stage commanding the attention of the audience and where you’ve been told not to use your handheld devices during the show? That is an appropriate moment for journalists to ignore both good manners and the house rules and go ahead anyway and tap away on a glowing screen that is undeniably disturbing the intended setting?

How did we come to this? When did such insolence become okay, part of the job assignment? When did we journalists become such special people that we have the right to flout the rules?

Read the rest at LasVegasWeekly.Com.

This week's LVW col: Beer Summit West

OK, folks. Here's the new Las Vegas Weekly column, in which I attempt to diffuse the most legendary feuds in modern Vegas. I kinda was hoping they would photoshop my head on Obama and Wynn and Adelson on Crowley and Gates, but they didn't. If anyone knows how to do that, it would be so awesome! Anyhow, read on and enjoy!

Beer Summit West
Vegas' best feuds need to be settled, Obama-like, over a beverage
By STEVE FRIESS

It’s been a couple of weeks now, but I still can’t get that White House beer-summit image out of my mind. There they all were, the leader of the free world playing genial host to the black professor arrested at his home by a white cop in that symbol of racial conflict, the Ivy League city.

President Obama viewed the gathering as political damage control, er, I mean, a “teachable moment.” Yet none of those erudite cable-news pundits have divined what lesson we were all supposed to glean from this ham-handed photo op. (Or, for that matter, why Joe Biden was there.)

I think I know. The three of them weren’t modeling a way to diffuse tension between blacks and whites but, much more generally, between people who feud in the public square.

(Biden? He’s just a mooch.)

Which brought me back to Las Vegas. Believe it or not, we have lots of prominent people who dislike one another, too. I’ve picked the five most ripe for beer-or-whatever summits. Consider this a Road Map to Peace.

Read the rest at LasVegasWeekly.Com

This week's LVW col: When The Fun Stops

Here's this week's LVW col. Yes, it's a downer. Sorry. Hopefully it's a thoughtful downer, though. -sf

When The Fun Stops
Somewhere along the way, all the reasons to love living in Sin City went bye-bye
By STEVE FRIESS

For a brief bit of time earlier this month, I was reminded of how it used to be around here. Confident business leaders and politicians grazed on a sumptuous breakfast buffet at the Four Seasons, exchanging business cards and chatting about new deals they expected to come through. Then they settled down at tableclothed tables set with fancy china and watched as their leader, Nevada Development Authority CEO Somer Hollingsworth, talked up the land of opportunity that Las Vegas represents.

Hollingsworth, a man never accused of understatement, exhibited some brazen hubris in his talk, titled, “California Has Lost Its Mind and Las Vegas Is Providing Psychoanalysis,” running through the litany of challenges facing our neighbor to the west. He even—and I’m not kidding—donned a tinfoil hat as he mercilessly mocked California policymakers for their high taxes and generous state-sponsored services before explaining why the Golden State’s budget misery would lead to robust job growth here.

As weird as it was to see a grown man wearing a tinfoil hat, and as unseemly as it felt to hear people cackle at the prospect of exploiting someone else’s misery, it also was nice to hear some roundabout good news about the Las Vegas economy for a change.

Except dwelling in an alternative universe where the eastbound stampede of Californians was in effect didn’t last long. The next day we learned that Nevada, already the nation’s foreclosures champ, had hit an all-time record for unemployment, 12.3 percent. The nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation released a study shortly thereafter that indicated that the Silver State’s economy is “the most distressed” in the United States. And CNBC did an analysis that showed that Nevada can expect the nation’s largest budget gap in 2010 by percentage of the general fund. Presumably, Mr. Hollingsworth, Kaiser and CNBC included California in their research.

By the weekend, I was exhausted from not just another week of lousy economic data but also from working my ass off to make mortgage payments on property unlikely for years to be worth even close to what we paid. When a journalist friend in New York who used to cover Vegas called to chitchat, he could hear my weariness.

“It’s just no fun anymore,” I said.

“What isn’t?”

“Vegas,” I said. “Vegas isn’t fun anymore.”

It was an epiphany of sorts. Oh, sure, Vegas is still a blast for tourists. In fact, it’s never been a bigger one. The resorts are so desperate, they’re giving away rooms, meals, flights, show tickets, whatever.

So who’s the sucker now? Wasn’t that sort of the premise of our economy, that we build all these fantastical, lovely experiences to make up for the fact that we’re relieving the masses of their cash at the tables or machines while convincing them that it’s fun? I’ve never quite believed that; I don’t think there’s anything more insidious about spending money playing games of chance than spending it on an outing at a professional sports game. But the premise sure wasn’t that this is where the world comes to rip us off.

Read the rest at LasVegasWeekly.Com.

The latest LVW Col: Three Lousy Ideas

With all the MJ Concert stuff and my car woes, I forgot to post this past week's Las Vegas Weekly column. Enjoy. -sf

Bad Things Do Come In Threes
By STEVE FRIESS

There are so many great thinkers in Vegas producing so many great ideas. More than in any place else I’ve lived or traveled, the ingenuity and experimentation never ceases. But every once or twice in a while, you see something that makes you go “WTF?” or, at least, “Enough already!” It’s been nearly two years since I’ve done this, so it’s time to take to task the folks behind the worst ideas gripping our fair city.

1. Hetero-homosexuality for fun

Years ago, when I came out to a particularly straight male friend of mine, his first reaction was to ask whether I knew any lesbians who might want to get it on with him. And certainly, to an awful lot of hetero guys, that’s what lesbianism is good for, their own peculiar entertainment. So I shouldn’t have been surprised—and yet somehow I was—when about six months ago a certain breed of Vegas nightclub promotions started proliferating: the girl-on-girl kissing contests.

You can almost hear Beavis and Butt-Head in the meeting when they came up with this idea. “We’ll get some hot babes together, huh-huh, and get ’em to go all lesbolicious on each other, and then we’ll pick the best one, huh-huh, and give ’em a prize. It’ll be, like, awesome, huh-huh!”

Nice. Vegas clubs are now in the business of baiting their prey with live gay-for-pay action.

Read the rest at LasVegasWeekly.Com.

This Week's LVW col: Be grateful, Bethlehem

Here's this week's Strip Sesne column from the Las Vegas Weekly, a defense of -- apologia for? -- the idea of gaming as an economic revival tool. Which is funny because I don't even gamble. Much. -sf

An east target, a misguided notion

Why the people of Bethlehem, Pa., should be grateful for, not suspicious of, their new casino

By STEVE FRIESS

The day after the May 22 opening of the quite lovely Las Vegas Sands casino in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the local newspaper, the Express-News, ran with a news bulletin on its website: “Easy ways to stay safe at Sands Casino Resort Bethlehem; two patrons report missing wallets.”

We then met Nancy Miller, 61, of New Joisey, who bought a snack at the food court and “shortly thereafter noticed her wallet missing,” and 25-year-old Dominique Alexander of Philadelphia, who left her wallet on a slot machine and “found it had been taken” when she returned.

Stop the presses! People lose shit! The intrepid journalist on the case turned to About.com for news-you-can-use tips on how not to let “loss, theft and other problems spoil your Memorial Day weekend fun at the casino,” which essentially boiled down to: Keep track of your shit.

Yes, this is an example of ridiculous journalism. There’s no chance any serious newspaper would have done a story on these careless people if they had misplaced their wallets at, say, a new Starbucks. Nor would they have drawn the inference that people need tips on how to stay safe at all coffeehouses.

But to me, it was more than that; it was the culmination of a couple of days focusing on a foreign land where a casino was a new and troublesome presence to many. As I covered the Sands opening, I was reminded yet again of how ridiculous the nation’s love-hate affair with Las Vegas and the gambling business has become.

Read the rest at LasVegasWeekly.Com

This week's LVW col: Come Hither, Adam Lambert

Y'all saw the vague first draft of this one last week, but now I've got input from Strip execs, including one who says that they've been pondering the Strip potential of...Susan Boyle! Enjoy. -sf

Larger than life, perfect for Vegas

Someone here needs to sign American Idol runner-up Adam Lambert right now

BY STEVE FRIESS

Until last Thursday, I had never watched an entire episode of American Idol. Yes, I’m one of the six.

As any halfway-conscious consumer of celebrity news would, I generally keep up with the Fox mega-competition in a vague enough way such that by May each year I’m usually able to identify the two finalists the same way I know the teams in the Super Bowl every February. I don’t actually care in either case, but nor do I clamp my ears and squeeze shut my eyes and actively avoid what will inevitably climb into my brain via any available pore or passage anyway.

I wouldn’t have watched this finale, either, except that my 9-year-old nephew and 14-year-old niece, whom I was visiting in Pennsylvania, are nuts for the thing. It struck me as an opportunity to see how the folks who love this phenomenon interact with it.

Plus, I admit, I was curious this cycle because of all the lip about whether the nation was ready for its first probably gay American Idol in one flamboyant Adam Lambert. Lambert had been crowned the favorite months ago and already appeared on the cover of Entertainment Weekly.

So I subjected myself to two bloated hours and did my best to explain to the young’uns who cameo stars Cyndi Lauper, Lionel Richie, Queen Latifah, Santana, Kiss (“What’s with the makeup?” 9-year-old Daniel wondered) and Queen are. And for the first time, I watched Lambert and co-finalist Kris Allen perform and interact with host Ryan Seacrest.

Knowing nothing of any of the other performances to date, it nonetheless seemed fairly obvious to me who would win. When America was allegedly stunned that a handsome, sweet-natured balladeer from the Deep South bested the big-voiced, costuming-prone, guylinered reincarnation of Freddie Mercury, my sole surprise was that anyone expected a different outcome.

I mulled this with a gay AI–devoted friend in Chicago via Facebook later that night wondering what is typically next for these folks. Geoff recited the drill: summer concerts with the rest of the AI top 10-ish, a likely record deal with 19 Entertainment, a solo tour perhaps.

“He should get a show in Vegas,” I wrote.

“That is … brilliant,” Geoff responded.

Read the rest at LasVegasWeekly.Com

LVW Col: My 10 Favorite Shows

Here's this week's "Strip Sense" column in the Las Vegas Weekly. Agree or disagree in the comments section or e-mail me your lists! -sf

Ten Shows You Absolutely Have To See...
...or send visitors to see

By STEVE FRIESS

"All right, very quickly, before we go, Steve Friess,” KNPR’s Dave Berns intoned in his dulcet voice, “one entertainment tip you have right now. Something you’ve seen recently on the Strip or off the Strip that you think people should go to?”

On that particular day last week, I blurted out Jersey Boys, because at the moment, I’m a little obsessed with the show. But that was a quick-fire answer to a question that seems simple and is, in fact, quite complex.

I get this question a lot. I get it from Facebook friends when they’re about to visit, you readers ask about once a week by e-mail, and it comes up often among colleagues over drinks at media events.

Well, the next time someone asks, I can just forward them the link to this here article. Granted, the list below will change; three shows that would’ve been on the list a year ago—The Red Piano, Mamma Mia! and Stomp Out Loud—are gone. If Peepshow jells well and Terry Fator forsakes the unnecessary political snark that was present when the show opened, both are serious candidates down the line.

Every selection here has one thing in common: If a friend called asking me to go with them to see any of these, I’d go, assuming (a) I wasn’t busy or (b) no new episode of Lost or Mad Men was on.

See the rest at LasVegasWeekly.Com

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.”

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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.

This week's LVW Col: When The Fun Stops

Here's this week's Strip Sense column, trying to make sense of last week's MGM-related events. Enjoy, and hat tip to Hunter at RateVegas.Com for letting me poach this headline.

When The Fun Stops
Is MGM Mirage Nevada's AIG or GM?

By STEVE FRIESS

“Pardon me for asking, but if a company is too big to fail, maybe—just maybe—it’s too big, period.” –Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich

Having evidently learned a little something from the hundreds of acrobats who perform astonishing death-defying feats nightly in its Vegas resorts, MGM Mirage last week leaped headlong into the open air, held the world in terrified suspense as it twisted and turned to avoid a hail of fiery spears and then, at the last possible moment, grabbed the bar and swung to relative, if momentary, safety.

Yet rather than supplying the raucous applause that greets such moments in the theater, the world just heaved a sigh of relief. Unlike the safe distance we feel watching, say, a Kà aerialist, where we know it’s only his neck that will be broken should he fall, the experience of last week wasn’t a mere spectator sport.

No, that wasn’t just a large casino company flying without a net in the face of oncoming doom, it was each and every Nevadan.

We came to realize with sobering clarity this week, in fact, that MGM Mirage in general and its $8.7 billion CityCenter development in particular are the closest things for this state to entities that are “too big to fail.” Nobody from MGM Mirage would use those four specific words because companies that are TBTF—AIG and GM are usually the ones mentioned—are so important that their significance is what justifies taxpayer-funded bailouts.

But just because a company’s not TBTF on a national level doesn’t mean it’s not TBTF in a local sense. And last week’s events were so frightening precisely because we were told repeatedly that CityCenter’s collapse would reverberate in the worst possible ways throughout the entire Silver State economy.

Read the rest at LasVegasWeekly.Com.

This Week's LVW Col: Hispanics and Vegas

Here's this week's Strip Sense installment, a look at the one population that appears to be coming to Las Vegas more often these days and the interesting things the casinos are doing to cater to/appeal to them.

Si, Vamanos
Casinos are finally learning to appreciate how much Hispanics corazón Vegas

By STEVE FRIESS

"You know,” Michael Weaver says to me at the tail end of a lunch appointment that has been filled largely with gloom about the state of the Vegas economy, “there actually is one segment of the population that is actually up over the year before.”

Uh, what?

“Yeah, it’s the strangest thing,” the Harrah’s marketing veep for Paris, Bally’s and Rio continues. “It might surprise you who.”

Hmm. Let’s see. We’re in the worst downturn in decades. Gaming and traveler figures have plummeted by numbers so shocking that even the biggest pessimist does a double take. Mammoth hotel structures stand along the Strip stuck mid-construction to taunt a greedy, overreaching industry that didn’t plan for the possibility that the boom would ever slow. And me? I had to travel to godforsaken Battle Mountain, crowned by the Washington Post in 2001 as the Armpit of America but thriving now as the price of gold soars, to find a story on anyone benefiting from this misery.

Yeah, Michael. I’d be surprised. Not just about who but by the very concept of good economic news. Hit me with it.

“Hispanics,” he says. “The Asians, the gays, the general market, customers in every age, geography and gender category are all down. The one consistent demo where you see increases are Latinos.”

We’ll get around to why this may be in a moment. But first, an answer to my—and likely your—first question: How do they even know?

Read the rest HERE

LVW Column: Is Adelson a closet lib?

Here's this week's Weekly column...

Not (quite) so right?

Sheldon Adelson has -- gasp! -- a little bit of liberal in him

By STEVE FRIESS

As the election cycle heats up and money flies in every direction for the political parties and their causes, several members of the media have branded our own Vegas billionaire Sheldon Adelson the right-wing version of financier George Soros.

The comparison is an easy one to make when you don’t dig much deeper than the superficial similarities. The Hungarian-born Soros is a known lefty billionaire who hands over shocking amounts of cash to MoveOn.org, to the Center for American Progress, to groups pushing marijuana legalization, physician-assisted suicide, abortion rights and gun control. Adelson, too, gives away eye-popping amounts of cash to certain conservative groups and is known to vehemently support many Republicans, including President George W. Bush and Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons.

Except here’s the big flaw in the analogy: Adelson is actually a liberal. No, really. He said so. I know because, last January while I was interviewing the CEO of the Las Vegas Sands Corp. in advance of the opening of the Palazzo, he said so. We were talking about his efforts to build a casino in Massachusetts, and he spoke highly of his interactions with Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick. When I remarked that the Democratic governor with strong ties to Barack Obama seemed an unlikely bedfellow for a man like Adelson, he pushed back.

“I’m a social liberal,” he told me. “I’m socially very liberal. Too liberal.”

Read the rest HERE

The Punctuation of the Strip

After two weeks of the serious business of analyzing Christina Binkley's messy Steve Wynn bio, I went a a little whimsical this week. You can hear Wynn's reaction to the Encore-punctuation question on this week's upcoming episode of the Strip as well as more news on his plans for redeveloping the golf course. Join us live on Tuesday, 7-8 pm PT, at LVRocks.Com, or grab the podcast on Thursday.

Now, here's this week's Weekly col...

What's in a Dot: The Punctuation of the Strip
by Steve Friess

At some point when I wasn’t looking, they slapped the word “Encore” atop the new building that stands beside the tower for which Encore is the, uh, encore. The original, of course, is Wynn Las Vegas, or “Wynn.” (heretofore written as “Wynn Period”) as it reads in script on it and on bottles of water and God only knows what else.

It kind of disappointed me, that “Encore” sign did. There was no punctuation to chew over. In the process, it seemed to be undermining the very notion that this new building was a continuation of some sort of thought or concept begun by Wynn Period.

You probably think I’m a grammar geek. Guilty. But punctuation is very, very important in Las Vegas. Almost nothing, not even a dot after a name, is done without a great deal of thought. When Steve Wynn decided to make his building read Wynn Period, he was making a point. This was his big comeback after Kirk Kerkorian and the MGM crowd snapped up Mirage Resorts and, with it, the Bellagio, which had been seen up till then as Wynn’s crowning masterpiece.

In 2005, his new building screamed Wynn Period as if to say, “This is the Wynn. Period.” Wynn once told me as much, explaining it was a subtle way of saying that this is the definition of his embodiment as a resort, the ultimate. As subtle, that is, as you can be on top of a 42-story building and so many bottles of water.

There are other ways up and down the Strip that punctuation comes into play in an important way.

READ THE REST HERE