Richard Abowitz's June 3rd cover story about trying to spend 24 hours in a gentlemen's club elicited this, um, passionate response:
I just read your "24 hours in a topless club story ..."
Topless clubs are boring. I work as a stagehand at Club Paradise a few times a month for extra cash for a friend, but that's not why I wrote.
"I like not owning a home."
You're the first Las Vegan I've heard say that outright. All I seem to hear from people living here is how their house just got appraised for $80,000 more than 18 months ago and how I need to get one and it's a solid financial investment and "you really need to stop paying rent ..."
F--k them.
Thank you.
The rate that a magazine is "picked up" had never occurred to me until I started reading the Las Vegas Weekly, which I think is a very worthwhile information source which happens to have a lot of very attractive covers.
I regularly pick up all the free papers laying around grocery stores, libraries and other outlets because I take advantage of the freebies often offered and also enjoy the articles and opinions on nightlife, restaurants and other things going on.
I admit I got started on this form of free entertainment because one of your covers caught my eye one day, and I took it home and eventually got around to the regular columns and then to others features. I probably never would have discovered the worthwhile contents if your cover had not attracted me. That's just the way I am. So it is plain to me that to inform myself, I must be grabbed and shaken into paying attention. But once led to water I do drink, and thirstily, too.
As I said, I now pick up all the free papers as they all have valuable information and features. But I eagerly await the new Las Vegas Weekly magazine because it also makes my heart beat just a little bit faster when I see the scantily clad babes on the cover. It's like a breath of fresh air. I enjoy the little blurb about how the covers are shot and designed and wish that it was a larger, longer and in more detail.
The following arrived, along with a link to a column by writer Stanley Bing in the June 28 issue of Fortune. Titled "15 Things I Love About Las Vegas," it does not, in fact, show the city much love. This letter-writer was rankled.
Do you not find it tiresome to regurgitate the same anti-Vegas bile published in every other magazine and news source? Being no doubt aware of the countless other articles written about this city in the past few years, could you not have looked for a slightly different angle? There are so many things wrong here, why do people focus on the airport, and the Strip resorts, and the buffets, and the fat tourists? And why do people refer to other cities as "real" cities, when 90 percent of the people you came into contact with here were from ... somewhere else? If you don't get away from the Strip, then you don't see "real" Las Vegas. You don't see the Downtown art galleries, the small play houses, the indie music venue(s), the eclectic restaurants. The kind of things you might find in a "real" city. Of course, you also miss out on the chain stores, the fast food franchises, the homeless day laborers, the lack of decent public transportation, the corrupt officials and greedy developers. Hmmm ... all also found in "real" cities.
In fact, the only thing fake about Vegas (stripper breasts not included) is all the moronic tourists who flock to town to give us their money and eat our swill, smiling and drooling all the while. (How do you know a tourist has been in your yard? Your garbage cans are empty, your dog is pregnant, and there are quarters in your mailbox.) What gets spent and lost in Vegas, stays in Vegas (unless it gets channeled overseas to finance a Southeast Asian resort) ... but what happens here will not stay here, because it will not even have been noticed. Just because some tourist fails to be impressed by the noise and neon that drew him here like a fly doesn't mean the real people here will change their daily routine of work, eat, play, sleep. We appreciate all the money your kind drops here, but since most of us are just saving up to put our kids through college, or to move somewhere with weather, we're too busy to actually see you at all.
But thanks for stopping by, even if it was only to become one cliché among many.
Editor's note:
We're sensing some unresolved anger issues here, Robert. Did a tourist once do something unspeakable to you?
Look, we deplore dingbat journalism as much as the next civic booster—except when we're perpetrating dingbat journalism ourselves, in which cases we're all for it—but it's important to recognize the distinction between Stanley Bing and Joe Sixpack. Joe, he's just coming here to have a good time and forget for a week the dismal truth that he's just a Speedee Mart manager in Crib Death, Iowa. What's gained by hating on him? He's probably telling his buddies about what a great town Vegas is. Nor is Vegas' image gap healed by objectifying and stereotyping tourists in exactly the manner you accuse the media of doing to Las Vegas.
My name is Jon'te Aycox. I just wanted to say, all of you (the whole crew) does a great job with the Las Vegas Weekly magazine. Every time the Weekly comes out, I always get an issue. There's a lot of interesting things in this magazine, a lot of information on different things, too. All of your magazine covers been amazing, pretty unique, different. Some of them are funny, too. I like your magazine covers.
What I notice, you mostly put women on your magazine covers. Don't get me wrong, of course, it's nice to see beautiful women on the cover, but what about us, the guys? I have seen guys on the cover before, but lately it's been the women models. There's so many male models dying for a chance to be a model on the cover, too.
Everything I'm saying, please don't take the wrong way, just speaking a point, not trying to be mean. I just think everyone deserves a chance, male and female. I totally understand, it's hard to give everybody a chance. So many people want to be on the cover. I think it would be nice if us (guys) had more of a chance, as well as the girls. I think the guys want attention, too. This picture is my zitcard. In 2003, I sent my pictures to your website; you probably recognize me. I hope I can be one of those guys on the cover one day. I will appreciate it.
Write back.