August 17
Clark County Library
So you bop into Quickee Mart for a Diet Coke, cat food and the Sunday Times; 45 minutes later you’re still there, vainly cajoling a few bucks from a video-poker machine. Ever wonder how those damn things got entrenched in our stores, bars and restaurants? Schwartz, director of UNLV’s Center for Gaming Research, tells you in this discussion, "Welcome to the Neighborhood." Free, 702-507-3458
August 1
Sin City Gallery
You don’t have to be Holly from Miami FLA to get all het up by the premise of Jo Russ’s exhibit Walk on the Wild Side: Her exotic, edgy, sexy collages meet the “themes of fantasy, seduction, illusion and transformation” found in Lou Reed’s landmark 1972 album Transformer. And the Take 5 writer goes, “Doo do doo do doo do do doo ...” Through Aug. 24, Sin City Gallery,
sincitygallery.com
The Hold Steady
The Joint
Erudite and narrative, “lyrically dense” according to the music critics at Wikipedia, and often dealing with knotty topics — religion, addiction — the songs of The Hold Steady are aural stories, with a rock soundtrack. $20-$25, hardrockhotel.com
August 23
Magical Dances of Peru
West Las Vegas Library
If we learned anything from the World Cup it’s that this globe of ours is large and varied — full of toothy Uruguayans, flopping Dutch, laser-guided Germans and Leo Messi. But of Peruvians, we learned nothing; team didn’t qualify. Now you can fill that gap in your worldliness with this performance of Peruvian folkloric dance, presented by Fundacion Cultural Peruana. $15, 702-683-9520
Seven Homeless Mammoths Wander New England
Art Square Theater
Madeline George’s comedy — “about jealousy … and death and rebirth and … transformations” — is set amid the closing of a “weird, inappropriate natural history museum” in a college town. Relationships! Laughter! Fossilized bones! Sounds like much ado about something. $25, cockroachtheatre.com