Weekly art critic Chuck Twardy stopped by Fremont Street to take in the revamped light show: Seriously, $17 million for the new Fremont Street Experience canopy show, and this is what you came up with—a cheesy alien invasion? The Star Warsy mini-drama colors the usual, frog-eyed, Spielbergian alien a ghastly green, presumably to render it an enemy to be blasted to pixels by our good guys in their fighter-spaceships. Granted, the new LED display is more fluid than the old format. And the alternating show, The Drop, an underwater whimsy by the Hollywood design firm Imaginary Forces, is more visually engaging. But really … go shoot Red Rocks. Commission some art.
Las Vegan Frank Mir, profiled in these pages on May 15, 2003, trounced Tim Sylvia in 50 seconds—breaking Sylvia's arm in two places—Saturday at Mandalay Bay to win the Ultimate Fighting Championship's heavyweight title.
You predicted becoming world champ. Why were you so confident?
There's not millions of us. There's a small percentage of guys who are marital artists and well-rounded. I get to see them. I looked at the pool of other martial artists and knew I could compete.
Who's next? I hear Mike Tyson's available.
Yeah, if he wants to visit the chiropractor. ... My goal is to better a martial artist. I'm not taking this victory as I've arrived. It's just a step to becoming the world's best martial artist.
What is the sound of an arm breaking?
It's a cracking noise, the same as breaking a twig ... it's like grabbing a stick on a tree and pulling it down until it makes a popping sound.
Probity from a Las Vegas lawyer? In what might be a first for the profession, Mark Fiorentino, an attorney for Treasures (the strip club that thinks it's a brothel) admitted being out of his mind when he promised city leaders that club owners and perennial targets of the Houston police, the Davari Brothers, would surrender their temporary license if any dancers were convicted of solicitation of prostitution. As local police investigations wind down, Fiorentino is getting antsy, telling the City Council last Wednesday: "I never should have made a promise our firm cannot live up to. I was an idiot. I had no idea what I was saying."
Nevada's hate-affair with important numbers strikes again. Ours was one of four states (with Arizona, Illinois and Tennessee) with incomplete data on students in the federal free and reduced lunch program. A USA Today study into whether rich high schools win more sports titles than poor ones—they do, the top 25 percent doubling up on the bottom quarter—used free and reduced data and median incomes to determine who won most of the 5,071 titles won from 1999 to 2003 in soccer, outdoor track, football, girls volleyball, girls softball and baseball.
Add Time to the growing list of respected inkwells examining our city, but separate James Poniewozik from previous proselytizing scribes. In his June 28 piece on Vegas' boob-tube infiltration—more than a half-dozen shows, from reality programming to gambling-sex-drugs-crime fare to a cartoon about lions—Poniewozik cuts through the trees so he can see through the neon forest.
Poniewozik correctly opines that "the Vegas trend is an old story—mindless escapism in the mold of Aaron Spelling's Fantasy Island and, yes, Robert Ulrich's Vega$"—and, without sounding contrarian, notes that the Vegas programs reflect an America that's simultaneously more progressive and more conservative, the shows offering both "titillation and retribution." "On CSI, we get the stripper who puts murderers in jail; on Dr. Vegas, the hot singer whose drug problem nearly kills her ..."
In all, Poniewozik's commentary is temperate, neither broad-brushing Vegas nor arguing that to live here is to live in a conundrum. "Las Vegas, after all, is about sin, but also about limits." (Ask the Hard Rock). It's not until the second-to-last paragraph—"no one goes to Vegas to think about geopolitics"—where he slips up. The proposed nuclear dump at Yucca Mountain is a great case study on geopolitical (in this case, congressional) shaft jobs.
It was a thumbs up for local movie critic Jeffrey Howard, one of The Movie Guys, as he recently won his second Pacific Southwest Emmy Award for his hour-long special, The Movie Guys Presents ... The Lord of the Rings—The Return of the King.