Story Archive

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  Reviews

  Priceless

  Thursday, July 3, 2008

  Here’s the best bit of insider wisdom that the new Audrey Tautou rom-com Priceless offers us about the art of being a professional gold digger: The key is to pepper your mark with halting, incomplete sentences that suggest unfathomable depths of mystery and desire, until they welcome you into their beds and open their checkbooks.

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  CineVegas 2008

  The Juche Idea

  Wednesday, June 18, 2008

  Jim Finn’s strange new film plays as a sort of mockumentary about a South Korean activist (Lee) who joins an artists’ commune in North Korea, where she spends her days doing farm work and making revolutionary propaganda films based on, and in accordance with, Juche, that country’s state ideology.

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  CineVegas 2008

  Lost in the Fog

  Wednesday, June 18, 2008

  It’s impossible not to like cantankerous Harry Aleo, a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge and dyed-in-the-wool Reaganite who loves to tweak the “loony liberals” in his San Francisco neighborhood.

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  Literature

  How the West was won

  Thursday, June 12, 2008

  Cowboys are, of course, a mainstay of American culture. So it’s curious that more attention isn’t paid to the animals that kept them off their feet. Deanne Stillman’s entertaining new book elucidates the perhaps obvious but still compelling story of just how significant the horse was in the history of the nation.

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  CityCenter

  Battle of the Titans

  Thursday, June 12, 2008

  With the recent death of a sixth construction worker at the CityCenter construction site, the comparisons between the enormous project and its spiritual brother, the Hoover Dam—where construction fatalities were also a fact of life—come into further relief. They are, after all, the two most dynamic construction projects in the history of Nevada.

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  A&E

  Bring the Heat

  Thursday, June 12, 2008

  “Crimp and release,” instructs glass blower Jim Sammarco, of the Hot Glass Works studio.

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  A&E

  Let there be light

  Thursday, June 5, 2008

  Sadly, it’s no longer enough for hotels to have hip boutiques and ultralounges—and, even worse, we may be at the point where fancy-pants homeowners need more than Viking ranges and granite countertops to impress their neighbors. The new news, then, is light, one of the fastest growing sectors in the world of design and home furnishings.

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  Art

  Outside in

  Thursday, May 29, 2008

  Art can be such a game for insiders. All those fancy words and theories. Those imposing museums. All those impenetrable masterpieces. But ours is a town that loves outsiders, and so it’s a perfect place for so-called outsider art, where art is created not by professional “artists” but by outsiders—the untrained, the marginalized.

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  Literature

  Crimes and misdemeanors

  Thursday, May 22, 2008

  Midway through the introduction to Las Vegas Noir, a collection of crime stories, many of which were written by current or one-time locals, the book’s editors, Jarret Keene and Todd James Pierce, promise that the stories to follow are “cliché-free” and “full of flesh and blood characters trapped in dire circumstances …” Sounds like trouble.