While Las Vegas Sleeps…

I just saw this article in my news feed and it really pisses me off:

Sexual Assault At A Strip Hotel: Metro Searches For Suspect

Now if you open and read that article you see a bunch of completely useless information.

Metro needs your help tracking down a sexual assault suspect.
They say a man attacked someone at a Strip hotel early Saturday morning.
Investigators say the man is armed and dangerous.
They describe him as a white male, in his mid-30s with brown hair and a goatee.
If you have any information, call Crime Stoppers at 385-5555.

Wow. Thanks for giving us all that information so we can actually help find this sorry son of a bitch and put him behind bars where he belongs. Why even bother publishing such a useless news release? They say he’s considered armed and dangerous. Okay. What does he look like? “White male, in his mid-30s with brown hair and a goatee.” I think we might need a little more to go on. Tell us where this took place and maybe we can narrow it down a little bit - of douche bags that visit here each year, you just described 50% of them…

Where did this happen? “…at a Strip hotel…” That’s just bullshit. I understand the hotels’ desire to not get bad publicity at any time, and particularly when things are as slow as they have been recently, but justice comes first. This could have been happened anywhere from the Stratosphere Hotel to the South Point Hotel - a distance of ten miles - and the description of this perpetrator is “average guy” at best… This will net absolutely nothing. At a time when Metro and Henderson Police seem to be preoccupied with harassing innocent citizens, running license plates non-stop, pulling them over for nothing and asking them an endless barrage of rude questions for no reason, they clearly do not have as much time on their hands as they think they do. Fight crime, Metro, not good citizens.

This “news release” to catch this violent sexual criminal makes me sick.

Tags: cover-ups, crime, Hotels, Las Vegas Metro, police

First off: Great marketing! I just love the name… So much so, in fact, that today I thought to myself, “Self, you should go get a last minute pedicure before you leave on your summer trip to Texas,” having seen their very memorable sign dozens of times.

See, the thing is, on Sundays nail salons, hair salons, and those sorts of service-oriented businesses tend to close early, usually by five or six p.m. I’m leaving on Tuesday and tomorrow is going to be crazy enough already, and, well, my feet need to be all they can be. I can’t be drinking and debauching myself all over Austin, Texas, with my junk all junked up.

Get Nailed Salon, across the street from the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino near Starbucks, has a unique thing going because it is a spa nail and pedicure place that’s open twenty-four hours a day. Yep, you can get fake nails or a spa pedicure, complete with paraffin treatment and a leg mask at 4am if you want (after 3am they ask for you to call and make an appointment.) Guys, this means you too. I’m trying to spread the word that pedicures for guys is okay because I’ve finally discovered what it is that women have been trying to keep for themselves all these years! Luxury, baby, luxury. Maybe finish off your drunken evening and round of lap dances with a nice relaxing pedicure, is all I’m saying…. I’m somehow comforted knowing that it is at least possible.

[Editor's Note: Pardon the crappy cell phone pics... didn't have a good camera with us at the time.]

Tags: acrylic nails, beauty, health, Las Vegas, manicures, nail salons, nails, pedicures, spa, spa treatment, waxing

Since it opened, I’ve somehow managed to not go to a show at The Pearl, the live concert venue at The Palms. I’ve heard so much about how there aren’t really any bad seats in the house, as the layout makes the most of its relatively small size. After tonight’s show featuring one of my favorite comedians, Eddie Izzard, I have to say that I can’t imagine that there are any really good seats in the house. Okay, you can see well from pretty much anywhere, sure, but you won’t be enjoying the view in comfort, let’s put it that way. I understand that they had to make the most of the space they had to work with, but I was left wondering if the seats were designed by Japanese engineers, like some roller coaster rides that just don’t fit guys my size - six feet, three inches tall. I kind of sat sideways and back in my chair and made the most of it. I’ve digressed…

I enjoyed the show. It has to be a difficult spot to be in when you’re your own hard act to follow. Eddie Izzard’s HBO special performance show Dress to Kill just absolutely killed ‘em. I still laugh my ass off each and every time I see it. It really doesn’t get old. He had a sense a pacing and timing that was amazing. He tied earlier segments back into later parts of his performance and tossed out those “hand grenade” type of jokes - the kind that take a few moments for the audience to get - every so often throughout the show. Everything just seemed to be perfectly executed and the best part of it was that it was all very, very smart comedy. I remember the first time I saw Dress to Kill, I said,”this is probably the most brilliant comedian alive today.” If he’s not the most brilliant he certainly is right up there among them.

It was almost ten years ago - 1999 - that Eddie Izzard did that performance that’s such a huge HBO classic. I didn’t see it for the first time until several many years after that, perhaps 2003. To me, it’s as fresh today as I am sure it is tired to him doing “that thing,” which of course, is being a grown man, who happens to love women, dressing in drag and going on stage to perform and entertain crowds of hundreds of people. Yep, he’s a transvestite - an action transvestite. Google it.

He said right off in the show tonight that the transvestite thing was fun and people wanted him to do it, and then it was like, he had to do it and so now he’s saying,”No! I don’t have to,” so this tour he’s dressing like a regular guy. Call me crazy, I guess, but I actually prefer him in drag. Being pigeonholed as an actor is never a good thing, so I get why he’s not, plus there’s the whole “Dance, monkey!” angle that’s just retarded - the way that some people want the same sorts of jokes and performances over and over. Some idiot even yelled out lines from a previous stand-up act from the crowd and he said,”Don’t recite my stand-up lines to me!”

I was thinking that his two tour dates in Las Vegas - last night and tonight - were earlier on in this tour. He’s actually been going for a couple of months now, apparently - I looked at his schedule tonight after the show. There were some things about his performance that just underscored that idea in my head that he had just started the tour, as well. It just wasn’t as polished as I’d hoped for. It was smart comedy but was not one of his best performances. He seemed to make fun of his process of learning what’s working for audiences, mimicking a movement of writing notes to the crowd’s reactions in the air - a lot. Maybe it’s just been a while since he’s been doing a lot of stand-up… He’s definitely had his hands full with other things like his television show “The Riches” and a string of movies, from Ocean’s Thirteen, on down. In the end, though, I think he’s just one hell of a hard act to follow… and he’s the only person he can be compared to. No one else does anything even remotely similar to him. Eddie, you’ll always be one of my favorites… Cheers!

Tags: action transvestite, comedians, comedy, Eddie Izzard, Las Vegas Entertainment, Las Vegas shows, Palms Hotel, stand-up, stand-up comedy, The Pearl, transvestite

Okay, sure, I’m just playing into the general perspective people have about Las Vegas’ architectural heritage (or lack thereof,) but it is true that things tend to get built, used, aged, and torn down around here. It’s nice to see other cities repurposing older buildings for new, more modern uses. We’re definitely an anomaly as far as the primary reason for growth goes and that will, of course, cause things to be developed and redeveloped in rather conspicuous ways, but surely everything need not be demolished entirely, right? That sure seems reasonable to me, and when the buildings in question happen to be owned by the City of Las Vegas, Clark County, or are local Federally-owned property, I think it’s a lot easier for them to justify redevelopment, as individual real estate owners don’t have to eek out every single imaginable dollar from their investments. It belongs to the public for the common good.

A few years back the building in question just really seemed old and out of place downtown. With Spanish mission style, adobe-esque architecture and roofing, it looked like a throwback to a time in Las Vegas when air conditioning was a serious luxury, not a necessity. When I’d seen it in the past, I have to admit, I was thinking “when are they going to tear that down and build something useful in its place?” Yes, I too, succumb to the tear-it-down-and-build-something-else mentality. This is Las Vegas, baby! We have to have the biggest and the best and the brightest - it’s why you come here, after all…

So the old 5th Street school building, formerly the Las Vegas Grammar School, which was closed for school in the 1960’s and used as an annex to the courthouse, got a commuted sentence from Las Vegas’ architectural “history,” also known as the wrecking ball. Instead of a revamping and reuse in some half-hearted sense, though, the building actually seems to have a better future in front of it than what it has had as its past.

Around 9.5 million dollars have been spent to redevelop the building and property around the school and its new occupants are what makes the project so special: the Downtown Design Center of UNLV’s School of Architecture. This is a group of students within the University of Nevada Las Vegas’ architecture school who are focused on redeveloping and planning the future look and feel of our city. Rather than the normal cylce of going to school, graduating, beginning to work and learning the ropes of their professions over time, they are going to be studying and interacting right in the epicenter of what is going on in Las Vegas. They’ll be right near the decision makers, the governmental buildings, the places and spaces in question, and will be actively learning how to get things done while also contributing to the creative process. While Mayor Goodman (who really has done a lot to get our city on a much better track, regardless of how you feel about him) might be seeing this new learning institution in a bit too lofty a fashion, with his comparisons to the schools of Plato and Socrates and all, I “get” what he’s saying: The educational process is far too distant from the practical education of learning to apply what you were taught to your ultimate professional life. This will give these students a great chance to have a more interactive education, affecting in a positive way the city they call home. I wish more of our educational system had goals along these lines.

There will be other culturally-significant residents in the remodeled building, as well, including UNLV’s Fine Arts Program, Nevada School of the Arts, the American Institute of Architects, and the City of Las Vegas Cultural Affairs Division. That sort of line-up with this type of project, along with the other arts initiatives and things going on make me think “Well, alright. Now we’re starting to get somewhere!”

Tags: career, City of Las Vegas, Downtown Las Vegas, education, Las Vegas architecture, Las Vegas arts, Las Vegas buildings, Las Vegas culture, Las Vegas redevelopment, Las Vegas schools, Plato, professions, Socrates, the arts, University of Nevada Las Vegas, UNLV