California is Spanish for Condo

Here's something interesting about Sin Citizens: they treat southern California the way people in the Twin Cities treat northern Minnesota. Ask around on a Friday afternoon to see what people are doing over the weekend, and at least half of them will be headed for golf in Palm Springs, swimming in San Diego, or to a particularly recommended restaurant specializing in west-African cuisine in Laguna Beach. As one of my co-workers at the music store -- a straggly-haired, Lithium-popping guitar dude named Rich (who is certainly in his mid-forties) -- said: "Man, I just gotta get out of the desert."

I'm not criticizing this behavior; after all, one day I hope to keep one of these in a place like this. I guess the thing that strikes me about it is the fact that they're all going to California. Me, I've been to California twice in my life, and, coming from the Midwest like I do, California is just one of those places. It's far away. People eat large quantities of tofu there. The climate is absurdly temperate. Multiple entertainment personalities have served there in elected offices. It's never been the sort of place you just nip out to on the weekends.

I'm guessing that I'll get over all this right around the first time The Madame and I head off to Laguna Beach ourselves; another of my co-workers has advised me that there is a Hawaiian shirt emporium there that bears a closer look. But in the mean time, I'll just have to keep being surprised. After all, there's something much cooler about saying "I'm going out to Laguna to look at the Ocean and sip sake" than "I'm going up to Alexandria to look at the lake and sip PBR." I don't know, though. Maybe it's just me.

You Wynn Some, You Lose Some

My new profession is counter help at a local music store here in cinSity. It turns out that this job is really the only thing I'm qualified to do (which is both kind of sad and kind of funny all at once), so, while I'm caught in limbo between now and when I get back to school in the spring, I'm a retail man, and so far, these two things have happened....

Yesterday, a woman came up to the counter to pay for her son's guitar lessons. We have a computerized database that tracks this sort of account, and in order to correctly place the payment, I had to do this: "Great. What's your last name?"

"Wynn."

"Okay... and your first name?"

"Elaine. Or it might be under my husband's name... Steve."

Those amongst you who watch LVTV (the bastard child of the Discovery Channel that some call the Travel Channel) might recognize the name Steve Wynn. I'm sure you know who he is. No? Oh, all right. Well, first he owned the Golden Nugget, then the Mirage (and, of course, TI), then Bellagio, and, most recently, Wynn Las Vegas. All these, and also a half-sized kiddie guitar.

Then, today, this guy came in looking for a job. I'm sympathetic to this sort of thing (having recently been there myself), so I talked to him. Turns out he was one of those guys who just really likes to talk to the people behind the counters in stores, and he proceeded to say essentially nothing to me very completely over the course of the next forty-five minutes or so. At one point, he was talking to me about how he would like to learn how to give music lessons, because he thinks it's a good way to make money. "Can you recommend a good book that would go through, you know, step-by-step how to teach somebody something like music?"

"You mean a book that says how to teach?"

"Yeah, you know. Sort of a step-by-step kind of thing. Can you recommend one?"

"Well, not really off the top of my head, no. It's kind of a complicated thing to get down in just a book... if you really wanted to learn, they have music education classes over at the University."

"Yeah, yeah, I've seen those. Like, I've seen them advertised as like a way to learn how to teach music. Do you know what book they use over there? It's gotta be like a step-by-step kind of thing."

"You know, I don't. You could go over to the bookstore, though, I guess." And all the while, I'm thinking to myself: they don't even really tell you how to teach in education classes... I can't imagine that there's a book. We finally got rid of the guy, but he was really sure that somebody would be able to turn him on to a step-by-step guide that reveals the secrets of teaching people music.

The shop is actually a pretty interesting place. Like, for another example, there's this guy Ed Grell who likes to talk about all the time he spent at the Fillmore Auditorium listening to Jefferson Airplane and Led Zeppelin during the Acid Wave in the Sixties, about what it was like to tour with The Righteous Brothers for five years, about what a great gig it was being in the house band at The Plaza for nine years, and about how crazy it is that he was Will Ferrell's babysitter. Yeah, he did all that stuff. But that's a story for another time.

The Victoria

Deep, impenetrable fog at dusk. A big man in a dark cloak muscles past you to light the next in a long line of gaslights. Somewhere above you and to the right, you hear muffled bells tolling the hour. You stop halfway across the bridge to look at the imposing facade on the other side, but you don't linger for too long; you have to be at The Crown in twenty minutes or your reservation will go to someone else. After dinner, you descend five flights of cobblestoned stairs, deep underground, and claim your reserved table in the VIP at J. Ripper's. You dance decadently and drink excessively. At five in the morning, as the sun rises on the high windows of the club, you climb those same five flights of stairs and sit down at a $500 roulette table.

You're a guest at The Victoria hotel and casino in Las Vegas.

I feel like Victorian London has really captured the collective imagination of our country for some reason. London circa 1870 is the "it" time and the "it" place, and besides that, London is conspicuously absent on the Strip. You've got New York, Paris, and (sort of) Rome represented; where is London? It must be done well, and it must not be at all campy. In the casino, it should be perpetual night, not the twilight of Paris and New York New York. It must be dark, inky night, and it must be lit by the bright white light of gas-burning streetlamps. We are not recreating the late-Victorian world of Gilbert & Sullivan; we are creating the London of Jack the Ripper during the High Victorian.

The shopfronts that line the walls of the casino are gritty, dirty. The windows that look in on pubs, bars, and high-end shopping are filthy. The people are fabulous; the scene is happening; but the city is not clean. Victorian London was a cesspit, and that's what we need to create on the Strip. This fine new property will occupy the southeast corner of Tropicana and Las Vegas Blvd, where the venerable old (and somewhat run-down) Tropicana stands today. It's a huge piece of real-estate, and will do nicely to recreate Victorian London. And besides acquiring the land on which the Tropicana stands, the investors will also buy up the massive parking lot which lies directly to the Tropicana's south. In five years or so, provided The Victoria is doing well, ground will be broken on a second resort, Treasure-Island-at-the-Mirage-style.

This second resort will be called Empire at the Victoria, and will have, as its theme, the greater glory of the British Empire at its height. What all that entails is material for a separate post, but let me give you just this one taste: visitors will enter through The Gateway of India.

Now, if only I can scratch together a few hundred million to make this all a reality....

Trade Maples for Joshua Trees

You have to respect any institution of higher learning which, in addition to having a department devoted entirely to the science and administration of gambling, has an entire college devoted to the management of hotels named after the Harrah's guy. In Nevada, you also have to respect it, because it represents half of the colleges in the state.

That's right: I'm flowing futuristic about my new beloved mother (Latin, anyone?), the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. True to every other academic acceptance experience in my life, the official letter inviting me to learn with the institution was preceded by some other sort of contact from the school itself. Apparently registrar's offices operate without the consent of colleges themselves.

So yes, for those of you who have been following the saga of Buckwalter becoming a Runnin' Rebel, I am now fully accepted and ready to begin my studies with the start of spring semester. Happily, they took all my St. Thomas credits (including giving me credit for a class I didn't take... I bet Marathon Man can guess which one...), so I can pick up right where I left off. I will be a licensed teacher in June of 2007, and a Master of the Universe... er, sorry... of Education in December of the same year. Really good, excellent stuff.

The campus of UNLV is very different from the colleges back in Minnesota; for one thing -- like everywhere else in Las Vegas -- there's no shade. Anywhere. If you're looking to walk out of the sun, you have to find the shadow of a building, because there are no massive maple trees to challenge the supremacy of Don Sol. In fact, the only trees you'll find at all are joshua trees and some scrubby pines. Otherwise, it's all cactus and rocks. But it's weird, because it's still obviously a college campus, and even though it's very different from any campus I've ever seen, it's still easy to call it home. I guess that's what growing up on five separate campuses can do for you. The smell in the education building reminded me of root beer, because that's what I always drank when I visited my dad's office at Concordia when I was a little kid.

And, as a side note, anybody interested in the experiences of a young gaijin teaching with the JET program should really check out White Guy in Japan, the new link over to the right. B-San has provided us with a witty, sharply written account of his time in the land of my birth, and everybody who has ever been curious about the Mysterious East should give it a read.

Adventures in Rear-Wheel Drive Land

Well, here I am at last. After all the packing and driving (giant hat tip to Marathon Man for heaving the truck up and over the Vail pass) and tearful good-byes, after all the teensy cuts on my hands and fingers from boxes and scissors, after all the fast food and nervous searches for rural Utah gas stations, here I am. And I've even managed to find the time to turn twenty dollars into forty dollars with a cunning mixture of roulette and Hexbreaker. Life in Las Vegas is very fine indeed.

Our local casino -- a fine establishment called Suncoast -- has Fifty-Cent Roulette, which means that twenty bucks goes longer than Ice Man's johnson. A master of the conservative betting style, I used the Schaffer System to play the colors, and swiftly turned twenty dollars into thirty. Then, The Madame and I tracked down one of only two Hexbreaker slot machines in the casino, and rocked it two-cent style, turning our new ten dollars from roulette into twenty via a series of outstanding bonuses. Then, we cashed out and came home. Sweet, sweet Hexbreaker. I found myself fantasizing about a time when Nip-Nip, Marathon Man, and Muffin will come here to cinSity, and we can take over a fifty-cent table... and then we will play until the sun comes up, all the while doubling our money every twenty minutes. Glorious.

But that's not what I came here to discuss with you. What I came here to discuss is the preponderance of outrageously en fuego cars that you see just driving around town. Here's list of what I've seen so far; keep in mind that I've only lived here for seven days and that none of these cars were sighted anywhere near The Strip. Ready? Here you go: two Ferrari 360 Spiders (one yellow, one silver); two Lotus Esprit V8s (both yellow); two Rolls Royce Phantoms (one silver, one white); one Bentley GT (silver... not terribly inspiring); and, the absolute king of what I've seen to date, a pearl yellow Lamborghini Gallardo. Marathon Man, before he left, asked me how long he thought it would take for me to get jaded about this kind of rolling wealth, before I only showed interest in truly obscure automobiles. I'm wondering that too. It turns out that if you live somewhere with no winter and no rain, it doesn't really matter to you if your car is unable to handle the weather. What you care about is whether your car can handle the turns in the Virgin River Gorge at high speed.

So. The real question here is this: can the Lancer and the MINI hug the road as it snakes through the canyon shaped by the Virgin River at top speed beyond the watchful eyes of both the Utah and the Nevada Highway Patrols? That remains to be seen.