Journey to the Center of the Newsstand

No, oh god, no! It can't be true!

Not content merely to question the existence of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, the Powers That Be are now besmirching the most cherished American icon of them all—Wayne Newton!

Entertainment Weekly has the unmitigated chutzpah to suggest that The Tuxedoed One's show at the Stardust is (hold onto yer cummerbunds, kids!) not as spontaneous—or honest—as he'd like audiences to believe! Mr. Las Vegas, some out-of-town philistine claims, is as wildly unpredictable as the U.S. Atomic Clock!

That's the incredible, incomprehensible, absolutely unimaginable theory put forth in the November 21 issue by writer Tim Carvell, who subjected himself to 11 shows by the Newton-Meister over two weeks.

"I know his set list better than I know the liturgy of the Catholic mass," Carvell writes. "I know when he will commence the First Telling of Lies, when he will identify the Designated Recipient of Abuse, and when he will commence the Giving of Additional Abuse to the Designated Recipient of Abuse. I know when he will pretend to surprise the orchestra with the Song We Didn't Rehearse, and when he will pretend to surprise them with the Song We Don't Usually Do. I know when he will drink half a Miller Lite (during the Walk of Approximately 45 Kisses) and which table he will pretend has bought it for him (C-6). I know all the words to the Medley Not Everyone Gets to Hear, which just about everyone gets to hear."

Tim, please: Say it ain't so, bro! Not about our Waynsie!

"As for his nightly claim that he's had ‘17 No. 1 or Top 10 songs, and over 50 Top 20 songs,' when according to Billboard, he's had 17 Top 100 songs—only one of them Top 10 and one Top 20—well, where's the harm in making the crowd think that they're witnessing a bigger recording star than they are."

No, no, we don't wanna hear any more! We're covering our ears now.
La-la-la-la-la-la-la!-danke-schoen-darling-danke-schoen-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-red-roses-for-a-blue-lady-la-la-la-la-la …

"Wayne's voice is shot. It's raspy and ragged and frayed, and while he can hold a note on a slow song, on an up-tempo one, whole phrases can get blurry, or even lost in a gravelly haze."

Sorry, Timmy, we still can't hear …
la-la-la-la-la-daddy-don't-you-walk-so-fast-daddy-don't-you-walk-so-fast-daddy-slow-down-some-'cause-you're-makin'-me-la-la-la-la-la-la … Take it back, Timmy! YOU TAKE IT BACK!

"More than we want the truth, more than we want a singer in great voice, we want to feel we've witnessed something extraordinary. … We want to believe we're seeing a big star (over 50 Top 20 songs!) knocking himself out for us and performing great acts of human kindness. We want to feel special. Which is exactly what Wayne wants as well. All Wayne Newton wants is for all of us, each of us, every last one of us, to feel special."

Awwwwwwww.

10 Number of letters to the editor in December Vanity Fair regarding writer A.A. Gill's sarcastic trouncing of Las Vegas.

1 Number of those letters from Mayor Oscar Goodman that included a pitch for Bombay Sapphire Gin.

2 Number of those letters from Las Vegans, including the mayor's.

5 Number of those letters that took issue with Mr. Gill's dislike of Vegas.

1 Number of those letters that took issue with Mr. Gill's dislike of "large-sized people."

Since it was the Cartoon Issue and not the Smart Observations About Other Cities issue, it's OK that cartoonist Roz Chast used her two-page doodle in the November 17 edition—a piece she titled "Viva Las Vegas"—to say absolutely nothing interesting about the city. It's enough to know that she left a lot of money behind.

Subtitled "All too true, unfortunately," and "hideously on the level," the 24-panel cartoon chronicles a visit to Las Vegas by what we can presume is her family.

"This is going to be the best vacation ever!" she shrieks, almost desperately, in Panel 2. By Panel 6, the kids are spending worrisome amounts of money in the casino arcade. In Panel 8, they're ordering expensive in-room pay-per-view before falling asleep two minutes into the movie in Panel 9.

Panel 11 finds the kids fighting embarrassingly in a restaurant. Panel 13 is where the vacay really starts going haywire: The family decides to use hotel laundry service. Four hundred bucks! By Panel 18, Mom's in a "spending coma," and for the next few panels loses her mind—and "nearly a hundred quarters"!—before regaining her senses and, in Panel 21, cashing out her quarters for folding money. Panel 24 finds the family safely back in New York, "back to reality."

Any article that starts with the word "Symbolicalness" had better get better. And, in this month's 20th anniversary of the Sophisticated Traveler, a reprinted 1994 article on Las Vegas does get better, and more dense, and yet better, and still more dense, until finally author Michael Chabon is writing sentences about Vegas such as "Torrents, rivulets, rills and geysers, fountains, jets and cataracts of light, light spilling, trickling, gushing, dripping, bubbling, falling in sheets, bursting, breaking like waves into fingers and spume, drizzling, spraying, pouring across the invisible storefronts of Glitter Gulch, drowning the heart of the city nightly under a hundred million cubic tons of light." And even though it's nothing we don't know, there's something in the way he says it that's worth the read, and the reconsideration of our city.

He says, "There are sequins, music, bugle beads, fabulousness, limousines, hot pants, diamonds and dollar chips, pianos made of 10,000 toothpicks and cowboys made of neon, pirates, sphinxes, Romans, knights, Munchkins and hula girls; but the secret theme of all of it is Emptiness, the heart of all that brilliance is a weedy desert lot; and all of it is almost poignant, almost moving, almost worth the trip."

He decides that Vegas is a wonderful atrocity, something that, in 1994, was a "colony" of the future: "I would look around and wonder: Is this place, this human buffet, this meta-theme park—the whole world and all of its history replicated, distilled, wired, air-conditioned, scaled down, juiced up and served at high speed, with maximum efficiency, in obscene amounts on a vast steaming desert under the heat-lamp sun—is this what it's all going to be like for my little girl? If we built a colony on Mars, tomorrow, would it look very different from La Vegas? Will it look very different when we colonize the future?"

And it's something of a wonder that Chabon wrote it about 10 years ago and concluded that "(F)or better or worse, this, Las Vegas, (is) what we are good at, now."

Makes you wish Chabon would revisit the city and opine on what we're good at now.