AS A CHILD of television aka Gen X aka an Old, I will never not think it’s cool to Be on Live TV, which I was on Jan. 5, to chat with the consummately super-nice Krystal Allan on “Wake Up with the CW” about this thang TheList.Vegas I’m tryna make happen. It was fun. Life’s panoptical these days, screens everywhere. We’re looking at them, and they’re increasingly looking at us. Old-school TV is still, it seems to me, monodirectional. There’s probably nostalgia embedded in that eroding simplicity somewhere.
I guess the thrill of being on live broadcast television has to do with the fact that all the infrastructure around it makes it feel so potently legitimizing: All this … for me? To launch my personality into the air? Okay! I must exist on some level of higher import.
AT THE KSNV Channel 3 studios you’re chaperoned down a lushly carpeted, murmurous, sound-absorbent hallway lined with framed movie posters — you’re guided by a receptionist, an expert in that very guiding — into the green room, which isn’t green, but is small and confessionally quiet1, and then, when it’s your turn, a headgeared production tech reassuringly waves you in through the weighty studio door — emergence! — into the light-slashed studio itself with its swiveling cameras and squares of screens, medusoid tubing and wires tentacling the floor like some alien surgical theater.
All of this for you, pyramidally arranged to launch your face in real time into the ether of a thousand unknown living rooms, bedrooms, waiting rooms. It’s exhilarating. Highly recommend. It’s the realest I’ve felt in a while.
Anyway, here are some cool things going on this weekend and beyond.
6p Friday Jan. 6: Full Moon in Cancer Ceremony & Soundbath at Rooted Lounge in Fergusons Downtown. Get your cleansing waves on at this ceremonial update on lunar magic. Sound, movement, breath, all elemental good things.
6p Friday Jan. 6: “Reaching Out, Reaching In” reception at Priscilla Fowler Fine Art Gallery. Priscilla Fowler, Joanna Michalowicz, and Linda Shaffer team up to show their abstract work. Gives: disciplined whimsy, expressive exhilaration.
8p Friday Jan. 6: The Buttertones at Fremont Country Club. Almost broke the thesaurus trying to describe this cosmic doo-wop band, but someone else’s “cinematic rock” really nails it. Songs evoke figures such as Orpheus and Dionysus, so some level of longing, astral soul going on.
Friday-Saturday Jan. 6-7: Vegan Wonderland keeps coming on strong with its vegan street fair that seems to be filling a food-market void in the DTLV puzzle.
6p Saturday Jan. 7 @ at Taverna Costera: If you want to bulk-nosh local sounds at a reasonable volume, this Taverna Acoustic Series show features Taber Shy, Tanna Marie, Scotty Dub, Chalmer, Aspen Birchfield, and The Maybe Four.
2p Sunday Jan. 8 at Clark County Library: “Lido de Paris” at the Stardust Hotel & Casino: Pioneering French Production Show in Las Vegas. When the topless “Lido” debuted at the Stardust in 1958, it was a little oo la la!, and a little bit of, wha?, prim shock & dismay. The OG dancers discuss the show’s impact, moderated by Su Kim Chung of UNLV Special Collections and Archives.
Monday Jan. 9: Vegas doesn’t have seasons. We got something better: a perennial post-modern themed terrarium we can control! The Bellagio Conservatory & Botanical Gardens opens its Lunar New Year display, rich with red lanterns, gold coins, pink blossoms, all redolent of good new year’s fortune.
Pictured: The Buttertones
If you really want to heave into getting philosophical about it, I’d also observe that the station is located just across the street from Woodlawn Cemetery, which adds an auric strata of ultimate, eschatalogical quiet. Ooh.
