Kind of a boring year overall, but there were a few small highlights worth noting, I guess
Well, if there’s one nice thing about an election season unprecedented in its shrillness, vitriol and liberal use of caps lock in Facebook posts for BREATHLESS APOCALYPTIC EMPHASIS!!!, it sure makes the year go by fast. It seems like only yesterday that the infamous Twitter video emerged in which a primally angry BernieBro at the Nevada Democratic state party convention Donkey Kongs up the Paris hotel-casino’s Eiffel Tower and hurls a chair into the sun.
But that was in May. Also, Chairgate never actually quite, er, happened — another figment of the imagination of a fevered media that was on as much of a freakout hairtrigger as the rest of us, watching, waiting, obsessively clicking our mental “refresh” buttons for the next pearl-clawing outrage in an election year on emotional overdrive. And for good reason: 2016 was the year when the expected and plausible became received truth, only to be displaced by the unthinkable and outrageous becoming real. We believed in polls; we got trolls. It’s all so crazy. Did 2016 itself actually happen?
It did. I saw the video on Twitter. Here are the highlights, lowlights and WTF?lights from our own corner of the yuge-iverse.
Flavor of the year
The year began promisingly enough. The cosmos did placidly abide, etc. It should be considered a sort of reassuring normalcy litmus test: If there are celebs and sports stars spankin’ dranks in Vegas on the downlow, phew, that means the universe isn’t going to rip apart in a screaming froth of gamma rays. And look! On January 2, Cleveland Browns quarterback Johnny Manziel was revealed by the tabloid press to be at a nightclub in Vegas doing just that (spankin’ dranks, not frothing gamma rays), disguised in a wig and fake mustache to avoid said tabloid press. So far, so good. And yet, how did the universe repay the man nicknamed Johnny Football? He was unceremoniously punted by his team and his agents! According to news reports, today Manziel suffers the risible indignity of, yuck, returning to college.
Well! You have to wonder whether Manziel’s dismissal sent some kind of vengeful bad-mojo dark-matter time-ripple through future history, giving 2016 its distinctly sour taint of a withering force unleashed. Or maybe I’m just desperately overreaching for a connection to these next unrelated news items: That same month, solar energy companies in Nevada laid off more than 600 employees, and state auditors accused the taxi industry of fleecing riders to the tune of $47 million a year. For the sake of karmic balance, I hope those out-of-work solar installers started driving for Uber. Regardless, Bad News was officially Nevada’s Ramen flavor powder substrate packet for 2016.
Even realizations of collective fantasy took on the grainy, cheapened, gotcha quality of TMZ footage. Remember those clever “What happens in Vegas” ads that reveled in sly suggestion and coyly concealed vice? Measure ye here the yawning gulf between marketing and reality: On February 5, police arrested tourists Chloe Scordianos and Philip Frank Panzica III on felony charges after they were caught having sex on the High Roller observation wheel. “They both said they were just having a good time and didn’t think anyone would notice,” said the police report. How … uninspired. Even the couple’s fleshy, sickly looking mugshots bespeak less erotic intrigue than harried Craigslist hookup.
But it’s not just the tourists chasing the Cinemax version of bad behavior. On March 9, Pawn Stars star Chumlee — he’s the one who looks like Dom DeLuise if he’d been raised by Limp Bizkit — was arrested in Las Vegas on drug and weapons charges. While searching his house, officers found marijuana, methamphetamine, drug pipes and, most troublingly, a “Chum Chum Room with Dancing Pole.” Yeep! Less embarrassing would have been police finding a human-flesh notebook filled with tiny, spidery serial-killer handwriting. However, I do counsel a politic compassion toward his lapses in morals and taste: Given the nation’s prevailing winds, you can reasonably expect Chumlee to become Nevada’s governor in 2018.
The yikes of spring
Vegas marked spring as it usually does, with a ziplining teen ritually baptizing Fremont Street revelers with an insouciant stream of urine. March saw Vegas get dumped on in other ways, too: MGM hotel-casinos began their long-threatened practice of charging for parking at their resorts. Las Vegas, which considers free parking a timeless verity, lost — and is still in the process of losing — its shit. However, blessed consumerist distraction arrived in the nick of time: IKEA opened, mesmerizing us with sofas, tables and meatballs swaddled in generously umlauted Swenglish. (Trivia: The IKEA word for Las Vegas is Brokkenass.) Another promising sign the recession was over: The opening of T-Mobile Arena, an arena. In addition to hosting concerts and sports events, it should prove a fine venue for the gladiatorial monster-truck battles that will surely be demanded by the nation’s newly emerging moral majority.
Angry judge Conrad Hafen
And why not a real-life Hunger Games arena? After all, it’s not as if our current system of resolving disputes, the courts, is in great shape. Case in point: On May 27, after a testy courtroom exchange, Las Vegas Justice of the Peace Conrad Hafen went nuclear, ordering Clark County Public Defender Zohra Bakhtary to be placed in handcuffs and seated next to the inmates. The episode was like a mouth-stinging Altoids of sexism, authoritarianism and plain old overreacting-mean-jerkism. But at least it was followed by a fruity, equally preciously metaphorical Jolly Rancher of comeuppance: Voters bounced Hafen out of office in June. [Swooping graphic in gleaming metal font pounds the screen in a two-beat thrum: FINAL. JUSTICE.]
Oh: Also, Lake Mead plunged to a record low at 1,074 feet. This is startling. As the Water Authority so often reminds us, the water level dropping any lower runs the dire risk of waking the dormant layer of orcs, carp-men and C.H.U.D. who sleep fitfully in the lake’s hateful black mud.
Storm warning
While our courts took a cue from the cage match, the cage match took a quantum leap. In July, Las Vegas’ own UFC was sold for $4 billion to an ownership conglomerate, marking mixed martial arts’ continuing evolution from grim bloodsport to grim bloodsport commanding major television, licensing and advertising capital. Hmm: shouty smashmouth political campaigns, courts descending into angry lunacy, a multibillion-dollar MMA giant turning the street brawl into mainstream entertainment. The bellicose theme inspires me to double down on my earlier prediction: After Chumlee is elected governor, he will commission the construction of a new governor’s mansion, which will be a giant pair of truck nuts.
But let’s reassure ourselves that not everything that happened this year represents a descent into coarseness and violence. The arts are alive and well. To wit, Sharknado: The 4th Awakens, set largely in Las Vegas, was released in July to rave reviews by seven bloggers. Move over, showgirl: Chippendales hunks battling flying sharks may indeed be the new Sin City icon, what with 22 Vegas shows closing or set to close this year, including Jersey Boys at Paris, Jubilee! at Bally’s, Zarkana at Aria and Million Dollar Quartet at Harrah’s. Go ahead, think of a show. GUESS WHAT, IT’S CLOSED.
“I feel like this is the abyss,” Travis Cloer of Jersey Boys told R-J columnist Mike Weatherford. To which I say, turn that abyss upside down — into the towering entertainment cyclone that Sharknado: The Vegas Musical could be! Or, for those with more rarefied tastes: Jaws of Life: Cirque du Soleil Presents Sharknàdo. (And surely someone out there is working on Hella Spiders: Web of Hypno-Comedy, right?)
Ammon Bundy and folksy entourage
If only the story of two disaffected brothers leading the armed takeover of an Oregon wildlife refuge office was a musical farce. In September, brothers Ammon and Ryan Bundy — sons of Bunkerville rancher Cliven Bundy, whose 2014 standoff with the BLM likely emboldened the pair — and five others stood trial for the armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, an inspired, principled stand against federal aggression ... or maybe just some spoiled white man-children playing fort. Evidence for the latter: After they finally surrendered, they left behind footie pajamas and Finding Dory Gummy Snacks.
Raiders Owner Mark Davis
Meanwhile, back in Nevada, the ever-simmering rhetorical question, “Who run Bartertown?” was answered with a resounding: “Sheldie run Bartertown!” Meeting in an October special session, the Nevada Legislature voted to approve a controversial room-tax hike to fund $750 million of a $1.9 billion NFL stadium pushed by Sands Corp.’s Sheldon Adelson. Finally, a Thunderdome to call our very own! Will the stadium be a scammy drain on public coffers or a vitalizing piece of badly needed tourism infrastructure? Answer: Adelson is probably building Sinistar. (Note: An informal poll among my colleagues suggested the Sinistar reference might be a bit too obscure, but I’m keeping it in, at the risk of murfing the joke and ruining this essay’s effervescent comic pacing as I now explain that Sinistar was an ’80s arcade game featuring a gigantic talking sentient skull spaceship named Sinistar.)
But when Adelson’s gigantic talking sentient skull spaceship is gnashing away on City Hall and all seems lost, at least we can give ourselves the dubious consolation of remembering that on October 19, Las Vegas hosted the third presidential debate at UNLV, a night that will go down in history as the memetic birthplace of #badhombres, #yourethepuppet and, of course, #nastywoman.
But they don’t seem so funny now, do they? And from the perch of retrospection, the hard truth of November looms, yuge and inescapable, a swirling Jupiter of history. Here we all thought Trump’s campaign was just him having a good time, not thinking anyone would notice. Now we know better: It feels like the abyss.
And yes, I say that with BREATHLESS APOCALYPTIC EMPHASIS!!!