EDITOR'S NOTE

Our audience is English-speaking and international. We cover the world. Therefore, I must explain our current focus on Las Vegas, Nevada.

To speak plainly, if I were a war correspondent, I would be in Las Vegas. That's where the action and the stories are.

In sports, the town's hopeful search for a basketball team is slamming into the epic headlines of the Lakers' drama.

In business, there will no longer be any Las Vegas folks with a stake in their hometown. Two very different investor titans are about to change Las Vegas fundamentally. Barry Diller and Tilman Fertitta both possess jaw-dropping accomplishments. What's the end game? When you lay out that chess board, the options will shake today's hospitality industry to the earth beneath its foundations. The current operational model of the hospitality resort group is untenable.

In our culture wars, today's dispatch will introduce you to one Vegas-wise and leery podcast host, and, a new stranger in town, a sociologist, who may defy the transient drift, stick around and impact the culture of this desert.

~ Gordy Grundy

Art Report Today .com

LEARNING FROM LAS VEGAS (1972)

Must Read. Las Vegas podcast host Dayvid Figler writes "In honor of the imminent return of the Neon Museum's Duck Duck Shed Conference, here's the keynote I delivered last year." Click Here. Thanks Dayvid.

His topic, "Still Learning from Las Vegas" presents a valuable capsule and timeline into the history of Las Vegas. Since the Sixties, Las Vegas has become a point of periodic interest and study with our cultural leaders. The Yale book was swell and got the right people talking, like the Eastern Seaboard literati. The architecture book “Learning from Las Vegas” may have changed everything.

Most fun, Figler shares his young life growing up in Las Vegas. You just can't make it up. There is no place like Vegas.

~ Gordy Grundy
Art Report Today .com

THE SOCIOLOGIST

We don't need to form a posse. But keep the horses saddled, just in case. There's been rumor of a sociologist snooping around Las Vegas.

Over the decades, Las Vegas has attracted Yale architects, Eastern Seaboard culture writers and Dave Hickey. But never before a sociologist. From the east coast, no less. Las Vegas doesn't need any silly high-mindedness in these dark economic times.

I had some of the gang rough him up. And now I gotta say, it has been a pleasure to meet Isaac Reed. He loves Las Vegas. He's the real deal. He's got Southern Nevada sand in his sensibilities.

When we were still thinking of running him out of town, I told him to write his own Wanted Poster. And this is what he scribed:

Some facts: Born 1978. My grandmother ran a radio show called “Top of the Bookshelf with Helen Reed” on Milwaukee public radio after fleeing Europe (I still have some of the tapes but no machine to play them on). I like Kafka because he’s funny. I love Walter Benjamin but I’m not a Marxist. I grew up in Durham, North Carolina. I once drove the anthropologist Clifford Geertz to a conference in my piece of shit car and asked him a bunch of annoying questions. I defend Cubism. I’m obsessed with the French Revolution and I think Marie Antoinette is Sofia Coppola’s best movie and A Place of Greater Safety is Hilary Mantel’s best book. I watch the Steelers every Sunday in the fall. I used to listen to Operation Ivy and Parliament Funkadelic and now I listen to a lot of ambient. I like Japanese whisky. My favorite casino is El Cortez. In college I tried to write theater inspired by Arthur Kopit and Eugene Ionesco and put up two shows that failed. I’m married (to Jennifer Bair), with one kid (Hannah Bair, 24 yrs old). My sister Hannah Barco is a performance artist. What else do you want to know? ~ Isaac Ariail Reed

I don't think we could've asked for a better sociologist. I never bet heavy on divine intervention, but I believe we got lucky.

You'd think Las Vegas would have been overrun by hordes of sociologists. I'm beginning to think, this academic study has overlooked this wild town, not out of academic snoot, but sheer terror.

We're rooting for you, Isaac.

~ Gordy Grundy

Art Report Today .com