Scott Dickensheets

Las Vegas

Newsletter Editor, Las Vegas at City Cast

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Articles

Should I Stay or Should I Go

3 weeks ago | knpr.org | Scott Dickensheets

After a year of loss, anxiety, and unwelcome change, I’d love a spring getaway — as philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote in his book America, “Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia.” Sounds like he’s advising me to take a road trip, right? To Flagstaff, maybe, then up along Colorado’s Western Slope and over to Salt Lake City before bending toward home. A long, rolling mindwipe through the healing beauty of the West would be good for me mentally, emotionally, even spiritually. Perhaps for you, too.
Road Lessons

1 month ago | knpr.org | Scott Dickensheets

Author Madeleine Watts’ latest novel, Elegy, Southwest, passes its first truth test on page one: “There’s something f*****-up about Vegas streets, you said.” So far so good! As the novel’s protagonists, married couple Eloise and Lewis, putter around town, Watts enshrouds their movements in a murmuration of smartly deployed Vegas deets and references: strategic name drops (Frenchman Mountain, Dave Hickey) and real places slyly depicted — for random example, the downtown watering hole ReBAR,...
When We Went Viral

2 months ago | knpr.org | Anne Davis |Scott Dickensheets
Shut Up, Cupid, and Reload

Feb 11, 2025 | knpr.org | Scott Dickensheets

If love was in the air in Chicago on February 14, 1929, it was likely the love of booze. After nine years of Prohibition, America’s inveterate fondness for drink had turned bootlegging into a huge, cutthroat business for mobsters. Thus, at 10:30 that morning, four members of Al Capone’s outfit lined up seven men against the wall of a Chicago garage — five members of Bugs Moran’s rival gang, plus two unlucky hangers-on — and killed them with Tommy gun fire and shotgun blasts.
Writer in Residence: The Art of the Museum

May 24, 2024 | knpr.org | Scott Dickensheets

I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for a major standalone art museum in this burg — as ready as I was in the 1990s, when the Nevada Institute of Contemporary Art was trying to establish one. As ready as I was in the early 2000s, when the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum in the Venetian tried valiantly to fill that role. As ready as I was later in the 2000s, when the Las Vegas Art Museum, led by Libby Lumpkin, was gamely angling for its own place apart from the Sahara West Library.
Jet Dream

Apr 1, 2024 | knpr.org | Scott Dickensheets

Air travel is a downer these days — a leaden, bureaucratic process optimized for its own convenience rather than the travelers’. The romance of jetting off to somewhere else has given way to an experience more akin to a DMV visit that deposits you in another city. But for a traveler with a more, let’s say, flexible budget, there’s an alternative: boutique aviation companies that ferry commercial passengers on private jets. JSX is the one we’ve tried.
Writer in Residence: Resurrecting the Record

Mar 31, 2024 | knpr.org | Scott Dickensheets

I've lately been racking what’s left of my brain for details of an old exhibit — a show by local artists who created work to protest Steve Wynn’s implosion of the Dunes. So, this would’ve been sometime in 1993, maybe? Organized by the then-newish Contemporary Arts Collective, it took place in a storefront on Maryland Parkway near UNLV. I think. I mean, it’s been a few years. To be clear, I didn’t set out to ponder my leaky memory.
Writer in Residence: The Adulation of Idiots

Jan 29, 2024 | knpr.org | Scott Dickensheets

During a panel talk at the 2012 Las Vegas Book Festival — I forget the nominal topic — the late art critic Dave Hickey, in full-tilt quote-machine mode, uncorked this doozy: “I don’t give a shit about local artists.
The Power of the Pen

Sep 21, 2023 | knpr.org | Scott Dickensheets

I can’t think of any literary genre that lies as habitually about its subject, or is as artistically lazy while claiming authenticity, as prison literature.” This critique of Egyptian prison memoirs is the bar Ahmed Naji sets for himself — and clears — in Rotten Evidence, his own memoir of Egyptian prison.
Getting Away with It

Sep 11, 2023 | altaonline.com | Scott Dickensheets

Having a rabbi hit man is a crazy, stupid idea,” Tod Goldberg is saying about the basic concept of the Gangsterland trilogy, which comes to a close with his new novel, Gangsters Don’t Die. Much of what makes such a premise work is that Goldberg embeds his antihero, Sal Cupertine—a Chicago Mob killer masquerading as Rabbi David Cohen in the upscale Las Vegas community of Summerlin—in an accurately realized version of a place where very few things are truly implausible.