Vegas Scream

Posted on by Thor

Where do the unvaccinated go to gamble? You guessed right, that would be Las Vegas. COVID-19 emergency declarations for Nevada ended on May 20, 2022 as the public health agency for metro Las Vegas noted that the pandemic isn’t over.

While most of the state’s pandemic measures, including business restrictions and mask mandates, have already been lifted, the Southern Nevada Health District said it was important to remind the public that the virus that causes COVID-19 continued to circulate.

“Cases are currently increasing, and new variants are emerging,” said Dr. Fermin Leguen, chief medical officer for the district. “It is as important as ever to protect yourself and others by getting fully vaccinated and boosted if you are eligible.”

CES a tech convention was held in Las Vegas marking a return to in person conventions. The show reported attendance of over 40,000 people, with 30% of those attendees traveling from outside the U.S. Immediately afterward, about 70 show goers from Korea who attended  tested positive for COVID-19. “Many people who attended the CES international electronic product fair in Las Vegas, last week are testing positive for COVID-19,” said Son Young-rae, a South Korean senior health official. It is, of course, impossible to say exactly whether the people were infected on the show floor or in some other part of Las Vegas, such as casinos, where mask wearing is much less common.

Nevada has had over 10,909 deaths attributed to COVID-19 and over 744,000 reported infections. It is a great place to get infected and then return to your home state and infect friends and family.

All Bets are Off

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Las Vegas saw a record number of infections two weeks after the casinos re-opened June 4, 2020. Nevada Governor Steve Sisolak said the state is “not ready” to advance to Phase 3 of reopening as Covid-19 infections and hospitalizations continue to spike.

Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas all reported their highest single-day increases in cases over the past week, according to Newsweek.

Donald Trump has been rushing the states to re-open while trying to ignoring that the virus exists or that it will “Magically” go away and never wearing a mask.

The Joe Biden campaign said this in response to the pandemic…

The American people deserve an urgent, robust, and professional response to the growing public health and economic crisis caused by the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. That is why Joe Biden is outlining a plan to mount:

  • A decisive public health response that ensures the wide availability of free testing; the elimination of all cost barriers to preventive care and treatment for COVID-19; the development of a vaccine; and the full deployment and operation of necessary supplies, personnel, and facilities.
  • A decisive economic response that starts with emergency paid leave for all those affected by the outbreak and gives all necessary help to workers, families, and small businesses that are hit hard by this crisis. Make no mistake: this will require an immediate set of ambitious and progressive economic measures, and further decisive action to address the larger macro-economic shock from this outbreak.

 

Las Vegas

Posted on by Thor

With sketchbook in hand I walked down the Las Vegas Strip towards the Mandalay Bay Hotel. Across the street a large Statue of Liberty wore a Golden Nights sports jersey and I had to sketch. The jersey took 4 straight days to make, weighs 600 pounds and is 28 feet tall. It took six hours to get her dressed. The back dons the number 17 and the name Budweiser. It is a bit sad that she has been turned into an advertising billboard for beer.

Also in the scene was Ellis Island and the Empire State Building. I used to work in the Empire State building and the large windows could be opened and I liked to sit on the ledge of the window looking out and straight down. I liked to watch the window washers at work. They would snap a restraining harness to a latch on the outside of the window frame and then lean out to squeegee the window. No that is a job that took some real guts.

This replica decorates the New York, New York Casino. The United States Post Office decided to print a postage stamp using the face of the statue of Liberty. In stead of using the face of the statue in New York, they used the face of this Las Vegas statue created by artist Robert S Davidson.

Davidson, born and raised in Las Vegas, completed the Statue of Liberty replica in 1996 for MGM Resorts International, when the casino operator opened its latest theme casino New York-New York. Davidson said in court documents that he
wanted to give his replica a face that was “a little more modern, a
little more feminine” and looked for inspiration from a photograph of
his mother-in-law, Lucille Schwartz.

 

Davidson sued the post office for copyright infringement. The stamp was first issued in December of 2010. About 4 billion copies of the stamp were printed by USPS.  The post office mistook
the face for the statue that has stood in New York Harbor since 1886. Getty images was paid $1200 for the right to use the photo on the stamp. The stamp generated about $2.1 billion in sales for the Postal Service, according to court filings. The artist was awarded nearly $3.6 million in 2018 by a federal
court that ruled the U.S. Postal Service infringed his copyright when it
mistakenly used an image of his statue on the stamp.

The only thing that keeps this scene from looking like it could be NYC is that large palm tree to the right of Lady Liberty. The tree looks about as tall as she is. This statue is about half the size of the original in New York Harbor. This replica took 11 months to complete. Hopefully I will be safe for having turned my eye towards Lady Liberty. To date I have made $0 for having sketched her.

Bus to the Grand Canyon

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While in Las Vegas, Pam Schwartz and I decided to take a bus to the Grand Canyon. The drive was about four hours. The driver gave us an epic and comedic account of the history of sites along the way. 46 minutes into the trip we passed the Hoover Dam.

The Hoover Dam has been generating power for the past 80 years. The 5000 man workforce had to reside in the middle of the desert and Bolder City was constructed rather than rely on Sin City 46 minutes away. If all the concrete used to build the dam was instead used to build a full sized highway, that highway could stretch from coast to coast. Work on the dam began in 1931 which was a year of record breaking heat. Daily, the temperatures rose to up to 119 degrees Fahrenheit. For much of the rest of the trip a movie played on the bus’s overhead screens. We couldn’t see the screens from our front row seats, so I kept sketching.

About half way through the trip the entire bus poured out and ate at an all you can eat buffet. The food was not memorable and there was plenty of it. When we poured back into the bus, the restaurant grew dead silent. With a four hour ride I probably had time to do a second sketch, but instead I watched the scenery fly by as we approached the vast Grand Canyon.

Las Vegas Rememberance Wall and Healing Garden

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October 2, 2017 the day after the mass shooting in Las Vegas, Brad Jerbic a city attorney, one of his friends and an employee of the city, Cameron Robinson was attending the concert where the shooting happened. His friend did not show up to work. At 7:15 that morning they got the call that confirmed that Cameron was one of the 58 who were killed that night. One of the attorneys advised that they should go and take a walk to stop and reflect. But where? At that moment he got a call from Stonerose Landscapes principal, Jay Pleggenkuhl, who advised that the city find a piece of land not to sell or donate but just loan so that a memorial garden would be created immediately. By 10 am they had agreed on a piece of property which is away from the strip at 1015 S. Casino Center Blvd. By 4 pm Jay and Daniel Perez had drawn up a plan for the garden on a napkin. The city decided to step aside and let Jay and his volunteers create the garden.

By Tuesday morning all 58 trees were donated by Boon Valley Nursery and all the shrubs were donated by Star Nursery. Along with the 58 trees there is one more tree called the tree of life. When searching for the spot to plant the tree of life, the soil was kicked and and a medallion just happened to be buried ch was medallion of the tree of life buried in that spot for who knows how many years. Siegfried and Roy donated the Tree of Life tot he garden. In just 4 days the volunteers managed to open the garden. The original Wall of Remembrance which I sketched was made from pallets covered in photos and memorial items. One year later it was removed and stored in the Clark County Museum to be replaced with a more permanent wall of remembrance. The names of the 58 souls lost that night are on the wall.

The community came together in an amazing way to make the garden a reality. The number of volunteers swelled over the days. One man came with coffee for the volunteers and a pizza shop next door donated pizzas. The garden became a path back to life and creation.

KNPR Radio Interview in Las Vegas

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Pam Schwartz and I took a trip to Las Vegas where she was attending a National Council on Public History conference. This scheduling coincidence brought memorial experts to Las Vegas as their museums are continuing to collect and catalogued the items of remembrance that people left after the October 1, 2017 shooting that took 58 lives and had over 500 injured treated at area hospitals. With breakout segments like  “Documenting Resilience: Condolence
Collection Projects in the Wake of Violence,” the national gathering of
academics plans to discuss how communities such as Orlando, Newtown, Connecticut, and Isla Vista, California responded to mass casualty trauma.

KNPR Radio interviewed a panel of individuals who have had to collect in the wake of tragedy. Melissa Barthelemy is a graduate student at UC Santa Barbara who worked on efforts there. Pam Schwartz is chief curator of the Orange County Regional
History Center in Orlando, Florida and created and led the effort to manage the collection of items left at the scene of
the Pulse Nightclub Massacre. Cynthia Sanford is the registrar at the Clark County Museum. She is
heading up the effort to collect and catalog many of the items left at some of the
memorials in Las Vegas.

I sketched as the three fielded questions. Producer Doug Puppel set the tone of the interview. Barthelemy said the collection, archiving and exhibition of items from pop-up memorials are a new area of history research. These
kinds of memorials really only started to appear in the last few
decades. She said people point to the many impromptu memorials left
in the wake of Princess Diana’s death as a contributor to the rise of
spontaneous memorials. The fact that these mass memorials are visible on TV and social media contribute to the rise in items left in the wake of tragedy.

Schwartz said not every community is impacted the same way by a mass
casualty event and therefore not every community reacts in the same way. Those differences change what is collected and how it is exhibited. “The
biggest thing for people to understand, especially people who have not
been through a similar sort of situation, is that one size doesn’t fit
all,” she said. The focus of any exhibition should be on what will help the community with its healing process.

Sanford explained that her museum already has between 15,000 and 20,000 artifacts from the memorials. “Our
role as a museum is to preserve the history of Southern Nevada,” she
said, “Unfortunately, this event is now part of our history.” She
said the museum is planning an exhibit for the one year anniversary of
the shooting, but there is not a plan for a permanent home for the
items. 5,000 items have been catalogued so far. 50 years from now, 100 years from now those items will be in storage. Every item you work on is someone’s story. Sometimes when you get home, that is when it hits you. The three interviewees all explained that they are honored to be able to collect these events for their communities. You have to find a way to get through it.

Jill’s Cash Box at the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts

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Jill’s Cash Box is a Country Band that performed on the lawn in front of the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts from 5 p.m.to 7 p.m. on  Saturday night in April. The lawn was surrounded by a temporary metal fence for the occasion. To get inside this free concert, I had to go through a metal detector and bag search. My art supplied always raise suspicions so it takes me a bit longer to get through. This concert was two months prior to the June 12, 2916 attack on the Pulse Nightclub that left 49 people dead and forever changed our city.

AT the time of this country concert I thought all the heightened security was crazy since less that 24 people attended the concert in their folding chairs. However now looking back after Pulse and the mass shooting in Las Vegas I see that this is the new reality. Perhaps this amount of security wasn’t actually enough. I am in Las Vegas right now and once I finish this article I will be going to sketch the makeshift memorial set up by the Mandalay Bay Hotel. At that mass shooting the set up was very similar to this concert. There were security fences and bag checks to get into the concert but the entire field was exposed to the elevated rooms of the hotel across the street. This lawn in Orlando is also exposed to the Grand Bohemian hotel right across the street.

At the vigil held for victims of the Pulse Nightclub shooting in this same grass field, there were no fences, no bag checks and no metal detectors. Concerns that a copycat shooter might attack the candle light vigil must have been a very real concern but inclusion, acceptance and trusting love were far more over riding themes that night. I  found myself scanning roof tops and there were police snipers to be found. The new reality is that we can be shot by a gun toting lunatic at any time, and stripping down and being searched is not really any form of protection. In the Federal Courthouse, covering the Noor Salman Trial, I walked through the building holding my shoes, belt and possessions since I had to go through a second metal detector and search right outside the courtroom. Going to the bathroom required its own search. Security footage showed the gunman entered Pulse with his assault riffle up and ready to shoot . He walked right past security, entered the club and started immediately shooting people at point blank range.

Was Jill’s Cash Box a good concert? I honestly don’t remember. But it was certainly a more innocent time. One of the memorial phrases to come from the Las Vegas mass shooting is “Country Strong.”

An Orphan’s Christmas Eve Party.

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Wendy Wallenberg invited Terry and myself to an orphans Christmas Eve party at Denise Sudler‘s house in the Mills 50 neighborhood. Candles inside paper bags illuminated her block and others. The curbside bags were spaced about 5 feet apart and had sand in them to keep them grounded. This was an effort of the entire neighborhood and several sentries strolled the streets to be sure no fires broke out. I believe the candles act as a runway for Santa’s sleigh. It must be a rough landing when the sleigh lands, sending sparks off the  metal runners as they grind against the asphalt.

The Christmas tree was illuminated with simple white lights which offered a tasteful display. Terry and I had made a Christmas Tree appetizer made of cream cheese.  The cream cheese was cut diagonally in half and then a slice was rotated so that the halves combined to create a tree shaped triangle. The top was covered in pesto and then sun dried tomatoes were sliced and rolled into balls to create the ornaments. A yellow pepper was sliced, and a cross section was used to create the star on top. It ended up looking very much like Denise’s tree an was a hit.

Wendy had been traveling in Kyrgyzstan and the young woman she traveled with, was at the party. I settled in on the couch and did a quick digital sketch. Carl Knickerbocker, let me know that he has an exhibit entitled Suburban Twilight at the Florida School of Art and Art History in Gainesville Florida. Carl’s art which he calls Suburban primitive, is colorful, bold and primal often poking fun at America consumerism. He also has created an amazing number of short films which incorporate his primitive art, puppets and music that he composed himself. I am a big fan of his work. The exhibit is up through February 12, 2016

A conversation with Wendy Wallenberg is like sparing. She has a sharp wit and is always poking fun. Within a minute of entering the party, she glanced down at my crotch and said, “What’s happening there darling?” I fumbled for my zipper, but it wasn’t down. I looked down and saw that there was a dark stain that made it look like I had wet myself on the drive over. I had carried the pesto Christmas Tree in my lap on the drive to the party. The oil from the pesto must have leaked out onto my lap. I untucked my Hawaiian shirt an kept it untucked for the duration of the party to hide the stain. Others might have noticed the stain and said nothing. But Wendy was right on top of it.

Dulcineah Tsambiras is a friend of Wendy’s and the two of them are hilarious together. Apparently Wendy has a habit of meeting men near dumpsters. She and Dulcineah met someone they now refer to as Dumpster Dan. They theorized the he might live near the dumpster, or he might have been going to a restaurant near the dumpster. They also had and enticing conversation about the Green Door in Las Vegas which is an unsavory place that I am not old enough to know about. The unthinkable happens behind the green door but I wasn’t able to get any firm information about what that might mean.

I had way too much wine to drink. Someone said, “We need to cut you off mister.” I responded, “But I’m just starting to make sense!” As it approached midnight, I looked at the Santa Tracker app on Terry’s iPhone. Most of the worlds presents had been delivered and he was delivering presents in Canada. He hadn’t even reached the United States yet. My thought was that he would likely travel  East to West in Canada and then he would likely finally start delivering presents in the United states going from West to East. The tiny peninsula of Florida must be his last stop.