✦Weekender✦ Sidewalk sale | Flower dancers | Hair friends | Trombone silk | OG blues jam | Blood rave | Brutalist folk 🪗

FROM CINEMATIC classical concerts to spooky goth markets to time-traveling brunch gut-busters, here's what made The List this weekend. Cheers! – Andrew Kiraly 🤍

🕯️ Friday March 7

• Catch a veritable anthology of very Vegas sounds at First Friday's Indie Stage tonight, from the Sandbox Bullies (blues rockin' since '99) to The X Flowers (spooky-sad indie) to The Red Seduction (Latin psychedelia) to The Hideaway (garage surfabilly) to No Surprises (shoegaze). There's also apparently art. 5p, Arts District
• When film score superstar Hans Zimmer meets a sea of flickering LED flames, your eardrums sink into the cinematic equivalent of a candlelit bubble bath. At Candlelight: The Best of Hans Zimmer, the Listeso String Quartet transforms The Industrial into a black-draped, wax-dripping temple of blockbuster compositions, where you can close your eyes and imagine yourself dodging Joker's minions, sailing with Jack Sparrow, and traveling through a wormhole with Matthew McConaughey. (Not all at once, don't worry.) 6p, The Industrial
• Get an aerosol blast of Southern fried feels at Steel Magnolias, in which six Louisiana ladies trade barbs and bond through everything from weddings to wakes, proving that the best foundation in life is friendship (and maybe some industrial-strength mascara). Bring tissues for both the belly laughs and the ugly cries. 7p, Las Vegas Little Theatre
• It says something that Li Qingzhao is still considered one of China's greatest poets – she was quillin' up her sharply concise, often strikingly direct verse way back in the '10s – as in the 1100s. UNLV creative writing prof Wendy Chen has successfully brought Li Qingzhao's singular, arresting style into English with the publication of The Magpie at Night: The Complete Poems of Li Qingzhao, and Chen, a poet herself, will discuss the life and work of this wholly original artist. 7p, The Writer's Block
• Slide into some serious brass virtuosity when rising trombone titan Altin Sencalar makes his Vegas debut. The young slidemeister has blown alongside legends from DeeDee Bridgewater to Michael Bublé. Expect him to dip into selections from his 2024 album Discover the Present, a silk confection of complex phrasing, confident chops, and delicate textures. 7:30p, Vic's Las Vegas
• Bust out yr choppy bangs, Maybelline Unstoppable eyeliner, and stovepipe jeans for one glorious Emo Night, when you can pretend the last 15 years never happened and that your knees can still handle a proper screamo pit. 8p, 24 Oxford
• The great thing about open blues jams isn't just the variety, authenticity, and spontaneity of performers filing through the stage. It's also the satisfaction of knowing that if some awky greenhorn gets up there trying to wring some soul out of his suspiciously shiny PRS Black Limba, the cringe won't last long. Given that this is a Blues Society Open Jam, though, you're definitely in for legit talent. 9p, Sand Dollar Downtown

🎻 Hella more weekend here, which may contain tech whiz violin psychos and hella people inexplicably running:

🕺 Flamenco disco | Murder she LOLed | Dirt race | Juggalo fight | Mimosa strippers | Mexican ballet | Crazy quartet

The coolest things to do in Las Vegas this week, ever.

The ListAndrew Kiraly

🌳 Saturday March 8

• The Paradise Mall is taking "brick and mortar" to heart by literally spilling its antique treasures onto the concrete at its Sidewalk Sale. Come rummage through vintage curiosities while experiencing the authentic charm of shopping outdoors like our primeval hunter-gatherer ancestors. 8a, Paradise Valley Antique Mall
• Time to branch out yr arboreal trivia with the City of Las Vegas' top tree whisperer, Steve Glimp, who'll be dropping some serious knowledge about what woody perennials deserve real estate in your yard this spring in Summer Survivors. I can personally vouch for Glimp, an old-school eastside skatebro of mine who, no kidding, once took me on an arduous Red Rock hike at the terminus of which we silently communed with an ancient mesquite he had deep cosmic regard for. 10a, Mojave Bloom Nursery
• You won't have to raid yr closet too hard for the Eras Brunch. DW Bistro is making it easy with a buckshot spread of decades for this dress-up mimosa fest, so you'll be equally on point with grungy flannel, disco shorts, XXL mom jorts, or those parachute pants from your brief but still regrettable Thriller phase. 10a, DW Bistro
• The Spring Craft Spectacular has all your suburboid decorator dreams covered with three days of handmade treasures that'll transform your home into an Instagram-worthy shrine to total Pinterest industrial complex domination. Even better, right next door is the Home Improvement Expo to carry all this aspirational domestic fantasia into erotic overdrive. 10a, The Expo at World Market Center

• Support AAPI makers and score sweet locally made goods at Fergusons Downtown staple Holoholo Market, with plenty of street food to keep you fueled up. 10a, Fergusons Downtown
• Consider Big League Weekend Bash an awkward first date with our city's newest sports franchise, the Oakland Athletics. Before the A's and Diamondbacks square off at Las Vegas Ballpark, Downtown Summerlin transforms into a baseballer carnival where you can meet former players, snap selfies with mascot Stomper, and test your noodly throwing arm in the speed pitch cage. 10a, Downtown Summerlin
• It's all in the wrists at the North American Armwrestling Championship, where competitive limb-benders from Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. will engage in the most testosterone-fueled form of hand-holding outside a high school dance. This internationally sanctioned contest of forearm fortitude offers separate divisions for righties, lefties, ladies, even Popeye-flexored seniors. Free to watch, too, so this might make for a fun day of alco-fueled subcultural spelunking. 12p, Binion's Casino
• This event ain't playin' around. Actually, it is: Scientific Controversies and Board Games features UNLV professor Emma Frances Bloomfield bringing her academic prowess to bear on tabletop games as a medium of science education, turning Catan's familiar resource-hoarding into a lesson on energy politics, and transforming Darwin's Journey into an actual journey through evolutionary controversies. Also the only time you'll ever get to hear, "I'll trade you two sheep for some climate change mitigation strategies." 1p, Meepleville Board Game Cafe

▼ Saturday cont'd

• Take a twirl through the annals of dance when Nevada Ballet Theatre brings their historical pirouettes to Summerlin Library in the very denotatively titled Celebrate Women's History Month. Director Don Bellamy and his troupe of tutu time-benders will pair elegant leaps with edifying convo about women who've grande jeté'd their way through barriers in both dance and society. 3p, Summerlin Library
• Audio Bar is a new oonsta-oonsta emporium Downtown, and it's kicking off grand opening weekend with some First Friday-aligned fun, including live mural painting, pizza and wings, and plenty of viscera-quaking, trance-inducing bass. 5p, Audio Bar
• Vegas author, musician, and all-around gothbilly centaur John Wayne Comunale is basically like a living personification of the grindhouse ethos with a grown-out mohawk. Now he's extruded a suitably strange novel from his weirdo soul, and he's having a party to celebrate. The book is Game Face, and it's about a guy trying to avenge his dead uncle through spectral TV game show transmissions from beyond. Of course. 6p, SPCKRFT
• Gleaming low-riders purring in the parking lot outside, deep, dank street funk spinning inside. Funk Freaks sounds like the perfect urban confection for the eyes and ears. 8p, The Usual Place

🏬 Sunday March 9

• A head-kicking Mothership machiatto, the lusty verve of exotic cars you're far too reasonable to buy yourself, and you're wide awake at Espresso & Exotics. Good morning!!! 7a, The Bend
• Just stroll with it: Market in the Alley is bringing the lazy weekend vibes to its sub-themed Sunday Stroll, which is like standard Market in the Alley with an extra dash of curation for discriminating Summerlin shoppers. 10a, Downtown Summerlin
• Whether your eyes have an appetite for soft nerdy dommes (Miss Ricky Rush), rodeo muscle daddies (Elvis Rose), or ginger leather pinup vixens (Abby Dandy), the visual goodies on offer at Savour: A Champagne Burlesque Brunch easily rival the food menu, which itself respectably runs the high-calorie gamut from loco moco to banana pancakes. 12p, Jackpot Bar & Grill
• When Palaver Strings combines the forces of jazz vocalist Vuyo Sotashe and piano virtuoso Chris Pattishall, expect a transcontinental sonic voyage. This multicultural musical mashup explores South Africa's rich tapestry of sound – Sotashe's home country – weaving traditional Zulu, Sepedi, and Xhosa folk songs with European classical strings and American jazz sensibilities – so, basically what would happen if Nelson Mandela, Mozart, and Duke Ellington started a band. 3p, Summerlin Library
• Heard lotsa good things about the Balkan Bar & Grill, sitting there so improbably in Commercial Center, ensconced all postwar-mysterious-grim in its brutalist rectangle building. Tonight might be a good night to peek behind the stucco curtain, inhale a foot or three of karnache, and check out this sweet Balkan folk band. 7p, Balkan Bar & Grill

🙏 Hope you have the raddest weekend. Thanks for your support! – Andrew Kiraly 🤍