T.R. Witcher
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Story Archive
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Film
The would-be ultimate edition Blu-ray vs. DVD smackdown
Thursday, Oct. 9, 2008 The TV was 52 inches. A big, bad-ass Sony flat-screen. This past weekend, the editorial staff of Las Vegas Weekly got together to compare DVDs to their upstart replacement, the super-high-resolution discs known as Blu-ray.
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Film
It’s the talking heads, stupid!
Thursday, Oct. 9, 2008 In the roughly 10 years that the DVD has been with us, one thing has become clear. What makes the DVD is the commentary.
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Mandalay Bay
Impressionist concrete
Thursday, Oct. 9, 2008 “How do you bring the desert into the casino?” asks architect Drew Gregory, of the firm assemblageSTUDIO, led by Eric Strain. The answer? One thin piece at a time.
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television
High and dry
Thursday, Oct. 2, 2008 As if the high price of oil weren’t enough, next week PBS is airing a documentary on that other critical natural resource, water, and it focuses on the most water-starved region in America: ours.
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Film
Appaloosa
Thursday, Oct. 2, 2008 Virgil Cole (Harris) and Everett Hitch (Mortensen) are freelance lawmen, plying their trade—what they call “gun work”—to towns with no laws.
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Reviews
I Served the King of England
Thursday, Sept. 25, 2008 In 1930s Czechoslovakia, short, penniless waiter Jan Díte (Barnev) dreams of becoming a millionaire and opening a hotel. He knows that the way to a woman’s heart is to decorate her body with flowers or fruit.
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Music
Tickling the ivories
Thursday, Sept. 18, 2008 We Las Vegans know that Liberace is still with us—his exuberant personality is writ large in the soul of the city. This Sunday it gets a bit bigger. . .
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2008 Presidential Election
The Road to Denver (and every place on the way)
Thursday, Sept. 4, 2008 With a fully loaded Mazda 6 and no guarantee of getting into the Democratic National Convention, John Katsilometes and T.R. Witcher drive toward a date with history, sampling the political landscape along the way.
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Radio Woes
Thursday, Aug. 28, 2008 -
Almost Underway
Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2008 -
Art
The young and the restless
Thursday, Aug. 21, 2008 Dust Gallery, on the ground floor of Downtown’s Soho Lofts, is used to being on the edge of the next big thing. Next week, the gallery is trying something new, launching a series of exhibitions called Downtown Dust. The series is designed to create a dialogue between the youth culture in Las Vegas and the up-and-coming young artists on the international contemporary-art scene.
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Art
A journey of forgiveness
Thursday, Aug. 21, 2008 While the Atomic Testing Museum is thin on details about the human costs of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, the center does have the good sense to feature an exhibit of collage art from Takashi Tanemori, a Hiroshima survivor who came to the U.S. vowing revenge on the country that had wiped out his family and his town in one instant.
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Film
Roman de Gare
Thursday, Aug. 21, 2008 At a gas station one night, Pierre (Pinon), the slaving ghost writer to a famous trash novelist, watches Huguette (Dana) get stranded after her fiancé dumps her and drives off. Pierre offers to give her a lift, and before long Huguette pleads with the man to impersonate her fiancé as she takes him to meet the parents. Oh, did I mention that a serial killer’s on the loose—who may be the man who’s just picked her up?
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Reviews
Star Wars: The Clone Wars
Thursday, Aug. 14, 2008 With Star Wars, it appears more obvious than ever that you can’t go back again. The glory days of 1977-1980 are from a galaxy far, far away. But George Lucas can’t stop trying.
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Print
If Kinky called the shots
Thursday, July 31, 2008 Richard “Kinky” Friedman has certainly had a hell of a career: Peace Corps do-gooder in Borneo; singer-songwriter and leader of the band Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys; later a mystery novelist and columnist for Texas Monthly.
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Entertainment
Tenth time a charm?
Thursday, July 31, 2008 Dancers—long-legged, festooned in sequins and feathers or little at all—are a Vegas staple. But, quiet as it’s kept, there is an alternative dance tradition in Las Vegas, one that embraces modern and contemporary dance, one that believes dance can be art, not just acrobatics (or merely titliation)
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Film
The power principle
Thursday, July 31, 2008 Actors like playing the villain, the wisdom goes, because the villains get to be bad and the heroes must remain steadfast and dull. The villains enjoy their villainy; the heroes carry on like they’re wearing an uncomfortably itchy suit. Titanically crazed characters like Daniel Plainview and Anton Chigurh mesmerize audiences—and so it is not surprising that much of the focus on the new Batman film, The Dark Knight, centers on the late Heath Ledger’s bravura turn as the Joker.
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Water
In water, who matters?
Thursday, July 17, 2008 When it comes to water in the desert, a few local players have a whole lot of juice.
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Water
Water wise
Wednesday, July 16, 2008 The foreclosure crisis. The shaky national economy. The shaky local economy. The state budget crisis. The steady climb of gas above $4 a gallon—great in a town built for driving. Hot enough for you this year? Obviously, we’ve got a lot on our minds as is, but let’s not forget that the fate of Las Vegas is dependent on water. And water has made the news a lot in 2008.
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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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Music
Early start
Thursday, July 3, 2008 Nobody said being a jazz musician was easy, but local trumpeter Kevin Early is off to an auspicious start.
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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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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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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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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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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.