Of Consequence to the Signified
[Black Mountain Radio theme]
ERICA VITALE-LAZARE: Welcome to Black Mountain Radio! I’m Erica Vital-Lazare, writer, curator, and Thelma to your Louise, Sara.
SARA ORTIZ: And I’m Sara Ortiz, a curator, literary dynamo, and the founder of Black Mountain Radio. Erica! Can you believe it? We’re back for a season 2!
VITAL-LAZARE: Yes. Let’s consider it a sign that we made it...
ORTIZ: As you know, we spent the fall of last year working on another season of Black Mountain Radio, which is a collaboration between the Believer magazine and the Black Mountain Institute here in Las Vegas, a place known for its towering neon signs, and a place whose signifers are really well known. The one that's perhaps the most iconic is that "Welcome to Las Vegas" sign which used to just be this blinking beacon in the middle of the desert.
VITALE-LAZARE: I love the idea of beacons. Beckoning… and the welcoming nature of signs. When I think about signs I think about the book Flash of the Spirit, one of my favorite books by historian Robert Farris Thompson. Thompson is known for his writing about African art, in particular, and in that book, he takes an African-centered approach to symbology and the use of signs in the creation of the African cosmology.
Thompson’s work asks: Who gets to decide what signs are worth studying? Who gets to decide what signs we keep? And he also points out that those that made the signs also have significance and value.
ORTIZ: Signs are the subject of our first segment this season.
In the summer of 2021, the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art here at UNLV was home to an exhibition called Spin (After Sol LeWitt), it was an exhibition of sculpture, video, photography, and performance by Colorado-based artist Yumi Janairo Roth.
In Yumi’s installation work, she uses objects in such a way that the object is both familiar and new -- something that you recognize, but in the context of her work, takes on a new meaning. For the exhibit at the Barrick, she collaborated with a group of professional sign spinners -- and displayed the signs they carry.
Erica, Sign spinners are a pretty familiar sight -- but do you ever pay attention to what they're actually doing when they're standing out on those street corners?
VITALE-LAZARE: Well, I had the honor and opportunity to meet one of the sign spinners featured in that exhibit and the educator in me came out somewhat crassly and I asked if he had other plans, like going to college, taking classes. I was essentially asking, “So what else will you do?” And someone, on the museum staff I believe, said so graciously, “This is what he does.”
So, yes Sara, we’ve all seen sign spinners at a distance, and sometimes up close but what assumptions do we make when we see them? And do we take the time to recognize the artfulness?
ORTIZ: Gosh, thank you so much for sharing that example, Erica. What I love about that is that’s actually one of the things that Yumi points to in this exhibit. What happens when someone like a Sign Spinner is signified as an artist by someone like Yumi, who is an artist herself, and what happens when that art form is taken from the street into the museum space and then back out into the street.
Here’s Yumi.
SIGN SPINNERS
[“PLAY WITH ME” instrumental synths, whooshing wind layered rhythmically under Yumi’s opening dialogue]
YUMI ROTH: It's like a silent world of movement. When you see a sign spinner, what you see is a six-foot sign, weighs five pounds and you see somebody who's really skilled, who's taking that sign and they're throwing it in the air 10, 15 feet above their head, spinning it above their head. They're spinning it around their body. Again, all to catch your attention so they can direct you towards the thing that they're advertising.
[Electronic bright sounds in semi-vibrato movement]
ROTH: Sign spinning is basically an analog method of advertising. These amazing athletic and dance-like movements: like a dancer's moves. Like an interpretive dance. And they would be all in, all in.
[Drumbeats scatting for “Infatuation” house music fades in / Man on street saying “he pretty good, huh?”while a crosswalk beeps plays underneath Evan James speaking]
EVAN JAMES: I’m Evan James. I am a career sign spinner of about 6 years. The point of sign spinning - it’s a guy on a corner with a sign in his hands - it's art, it's advertising. It's all of those things and more. It's really what you put into it.
[Funky beat from house music as car honking sounds play]
JAMES: I have spun in below 30 degree weather, in extreme humidity, 110, 115 degrees. I’ve spun in the rain with 15 miles per hour winds, I’ve spun in no rain with 20 miles per hour winds. In some states we have a lightning policy.
[Doppler effect of the whirl of an emergency vehicle driving by]
JAMES: Commercial break. We got an ambulance and what not.
[House music continues then fades out ]
ROTH: I'm Yumi Janairo Roth and I'm a professor of sculpture and post studio practice at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and I'm also the artist behind the exhibit Spin after Sol LeWitt at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Spin after Sol Lewitt combines conceptual art language with art and culture of sign spinning.
ROTH: I became really fascinated with sign spinners when I started seeing them in the early 2000s in Southern California. And I was so amazed at seeing these individuals performing these incredible sort of acrobatic, athletic, balletic movements, but really in kind of solitary car culture situations. Boulevard wide streets, cars whizzing by in both directions. How do you catch somebody's gaze at going 50 miles an hour? Well, maybe it's a sign spinner.
ROTH: It was clear, especially when I would see really good sign spinners, that they were completely immersed in the performative action of what they were doing, even though they were selling a product. They were an advertising company. And so I just kind of carried it around with me for a long time.
ROTH: And I was like, “OK, well, if I work with sign spinners, what are they going to spin?” Because I didn't have a product to sell.
ROTH: So I started thinking about Sol LeWitt and these particular sentences on conceptual art that he wrote in the late 60s, thirty five sentences that describe basically this new role of the artist.
ROTH: The artist is a person who generates ideas as opposed to somebody who makes things. And I wondered what would happen if you took those texts and replaced where advertising normally goes with conceptual art language?
[Drums from “Play With Me” fade in and out]
ROTH: The first sign spinner who I met was Laramie Rosenfeld.
ROTH: I met Laramie Rosenfeld because I called AArrow Sign Spinning in Denver when I was first trying to figure out the project. And I happened to get the general manager who happened to be Laramie, on the phone.
LARAMIE ROSENFELD: I am Laramie Rosenfeld, the 2- time sign spinning champion that’s featured in the project.
ROSENFELD: Anybody who excelled in sign spinning was usually some type of dancer, skateboarder, or musician. I mean, I met lots of people who were good at the flow arts who were very good at sign spinning. I always knew there was a correlation that sign spinners and art were all very hand-in-hand.
ROTH: You know, it’s employment. It's a job. The reality is he was also an artist, a creative person who could see the possibility of a project like this. Or, how it'd be meaningful for him to be participating in it.
ROTH: The first thing you see when you see the exhibition are 18 signs. Each sign is 6-feet long by two and a half feet tall, and they're arranged in three rows of six. It occupies sixty feet of a wall. It's a huge wall of signs.
[Archival tape from World Competition plays: A speaker in a room with background noise speaks into a mic, “These sentences comment on art, but are not art. Ideas can be works of art. Banal ideas cannot be rescued by beautiful execution.”]
ROTH: When the museum opens and a sign spinner comes, they come into the museum. They are greeted with signs on the wall. They get a chance, they read them, they touch them, they select a sign, they spin it in the museum.
ROTH: And once they've had their time in the museum, they take that sign and they bring it to a corner and they spin it for a few hours.
[Song “Play With Me” under Laramie, while synthetic instrumental fade in]
ROSENFELD: It is very much a dream client for a spinner. Don't gotta worry about where your sign ends up because you're not directing anybody. You're just really showing off. And I think people immediately notice a difference as they read the sign and I'm not pointing towards the storefront or anything. They're just like, ‘oh, do it again, run it back back.’ I'll do that trick again.
[Synthetic instrumental fades out and ambient street noise fade in]
JAMES: We have a sign spinner’s creed that states that every second we spend on the corner is dedicated to our clients until we clock out. So, I think about how great the client feels that I overcame my adversity to make sure I got the best advertisement service for them.
[Street noise fades out]
ROSENFELD: And so that's what I liked about it. I know the sign spinners here locally enjoyed it. I did the first day as well. ‘Cause it was just, you don't get that type of experience on a normal client.
[“Play With Me” synth fade out]
[Archival tape from World Competition plays. A person speaks into a microphone over crowd noise and rap music, “Some of these spinners are working hard all year long, and being creative, representing Arrow, Arrow”]
ROSENFELD: Yeah I mean the competition, as a young kid, that was the goal. Just off the bat, you know, we have at least a hundred spinners, just as talented as me coming in from all across the world and not just the country. And as you arrive, you know, you start just hearing these random people far away yelling “AARROW” like that.
[Competition tape plays: Man speaks into a mic and the crowd does a call and response: AARROW! AARROW!]
ROSENFELD: The culture of sign spinning, which a lot of people look over it, but it is very much like a, like a brotherhood skateboarding style type of bond. You could go to any market, show them a trick and them get excited about it and they show you a trick.
[Archival tape from World Competition plays - Man speaks into the mic,“Grab your seat. If you signed up for the trick of the year competition make sure to be on the bleachers right now]
ROSENFELD: I think I started in 2006, 2007. Come 2010 I was really gunning for it. I was like this is my year. I’m going to win.
ROSENFELD: I trained very hard. I was working every weekend, every weekday, as much as I could. I just kept getting a little bit better. I was like top 25, top 11 and I got seven one year or something like that. And then finally the competition was coming up in California
ROSENFELD:I was sick. I had a fever of 110. I had to get in the car, load full of people, six guys going to compete for a competition. I have a fever. I'm like resting between rounds. And I don't know if that calmed me down, but I was in the zone that year. That was 2011.
ROSENFELD:And I ended up winning that year, when I was about 17 turning 18. So after that I really started competing a lot more and I was like, alright, well now I gotta win again.
ROTH: Coming in as somebody who was so outside of it. I just thought there was a sign spinning and there was like, really good sign spinning. And I never understood the variety that really existed. Maybe their movements are more dance oriented versus more technical versus more about height or speed - the competition provides it because all the best people are right there.
[Ambient street noise fades in]
JAMES: Why do I compete? Well for two reasons, one I love the art and the challenge of being able to come up with something new and wanted to do something I’ve never done before and put something inside sign spinning that’s never been here before. So I compete to express my creativity along with challenging myself to be better. I’m there to beat the person I was before I showed up to the competition.
JAMES: Also, money helps. [laugh]
[Techno house music starts playing. Breathing, sounds from bodies moving while sign spinners name tricks or instruct people in a room]
JAMES: New trick coming in….
CHRIS SICUSO: World premiere.
SICUSO: We’re going to do the suitcase position. Just like holding a suitcase. Okay, so right arm over. It’s just going to be called a basic spin, ok?. You’re going to flare your sign out like that. Hold it above. That’s called thunder and lightning. This one’s a little more advanced. You got the cartwheel.
JAMES: Catching a sign where your balls are?
ROSENFELD: Yeah. Yeah.
[Techno house music fades]
[PLAY WITH ME synth / Yumi: “Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists / they leap to conclusions that logic can not reach”]
ROTH: You know, what were the reasons that I wanted to combine sign spinning and conceptual art language? I mean, that's, that's a great question, because it's not necessarily immediately apparent when you encounter the project.
ROTH: As an artist, I think I've always been interested in conceptual art the mid 60s when all these artists, including the artist Sol Lewitt, start really exploring this idea of sort of dematerialization of art.
ROTH: So art not being painted by the artist anymore, art not being sculpted by the artist anymore, that the artist could theoretically just come up with a list of instructions that could be executed by somebody else.
ROTH: And so I started thinking about Sol LeWitt and these particular sentences on conceptual art that he wrote in the late 60s, 35 sentences that describe this new role of the artist. The artist is a person who generates ideas as opposed to somebody who makes things. And I wondered what would happen if you took those text and replaced where advertising normally goes with conceptual art language.
[Pulsating synth music plays in the background]
RAYEN JONES: And that's kind of, that's what we are like, we are artists.
JONES: I’m Rayen Jones the general manager of the Aarrow sign spinners Las Vegas.
ROTH: He was willing to kind of jump into the deep end with this project without necessarily fully understanding all the pieces of it from the beginning and commit sign spinners to the project.
ROTH: I'm not the same client that he might have for an apartment building or a retail space or whatever. I'm an artist.
JONES: And that's what made this campaign so awesome, because when we did it, we got to express that side as sign spinners. And entertainers.
JONES: You're trained to sell. You're like always trying to sell, but giving them the opportunity to pick their own sign and to actually make it about them. That's when I was like, okay, we’re going to have a sign spinner that goes in there and just does them.
[Quick, pulsating synth music plays in the background]
ROTH: Spinners, even if they're doing this thing that they love, they want to increase sales or, foot traffic or any number of things. But in this case, they're getting text that in some ways is they're finding some kind of sort of reflection of themselves in the text.
[Sound of rubber-soled shoes scuffling on a court]
SICUSO: It’s my third time doing this and it’s like a different mood every time you walk in. It says it should run its course. I feel like a lot of people are struggling going through some different struggles right now, economically all these different things. I’m just feeling a little worn. I feel like I'm in a hamster wheel. It will run its course. It will be over. It’s not gonna be miserable forever. [laughs]
ROTH: And there becomes a mirroring that goes on that I think that's really interesting. In some ways, it’s a bit of a transformation because they identify with this text. This text that was supposed to be all fancy conceptual art language that was really meant for the rarefied audience of, you know, people in the art world. They own it and they own it literally by, like, moving the signs around. They own it figuratively because they start to embody it.
[Street ambience fades in]
JAMES: Right. This sign says “This sign says the most important are the most obvious” and the other side says “there are many elements involved in a work of art.”
JONES: That's when it clicked. She cares about the culture aspect. She cares about us.
ROSENFELD: It’s like being asked to strip off a layer of professionalism.
Rayen [laughing] that’s what I’m saying! Exactly.
ROTH: There's the job that you do for the client. And then there's all the personal spending that they do. And there's a different quality to that.
ROTH: And that's the piece that I was trying to bring to the foreground.
JONES: A lot of people don't get that. A lot of people don't understand that. Hey we're not just a sign spinning company, like, we do have an art form and we do have a culture behind it.
JONES: Everybody's like, oh, you guys just spin signs. No, there's a lot more to it than just spinning signs.
[Sound of performance in The Barrick, flipping, stomping, people clapping]
ORTIZ: Yumi Janairo Roth lives and works in Boulder, Colorado where she is a professor of sculpture and post studio practice at the University of Colorado.
[BMR theme]
ORTIZ: In 2020, the Believer published an essay called The People of Las Vegas, and it went rather viral. It was written by Amanda Fortini while she was both a Shearing Fellow and a visiting lecturer at the School of Journalism at UNLV.
VITAL-LAZARE: Much of what Amanda writes often goes viral. She once wrote that infamous profile of Kim Kardashian and it broke the internet. But I’m wondering, what is it about this essay on Las Vegas that resonated with so many people?
ORTIZ: That’s such a sharp question, Erica. I think what people responded to was that it was, in some ways, directly debunking the mythos of Vegas. Vegas, to me, is like New Orleans, it exists in the mythos of people’s minds.
And so now, Amanda is building upon the work she did in that essay, with a book-length project about Las Vegas. She came back to town last fall to work on a chapter for that book, about the strip malls of Vegas, in particular.
VITAL-LAZARE: Well in many ways Las Vegas is the strip mall of the nation.
ORTIZ: That is how people interact with it, isn’t it? Amanda also went to a very particular strip mall here in town, with producer Layla Muhammad, and that strip mall is the Historic Commercial Center.
VITAL-LAZARE: A side note here, I hope I won’t scandalize you, Sara. But the minister who married me once invited me to the Green Door.
ORTIZ: And for those who don’t know, that’s one of the iconic businesses in that strip mall. For swingers.
[laughing]
VITAL-LAZARE: Yes, yes it is. It's interesting that the Green Door and other such pockets of life are contained within this Historic Commercial Center. Where the gaze of the onlooker matters. Either seedy, danger, and adventure, or the relative safety of a latte. It all might depend on who you are, where you might prefer to position yourself or the language you would use to describe where you’re going and where you comfortably find community.
ORTIZ: Here’s Amanda.
A MALL’S RENAISSANCE ON SAHARA
[subtle, playful score]
AMANDA FORTINI: Some years ago, around 2011 to be sort of exact, my husband and I found ourselves in Las Vegas, because I was reporting a story about how a certain luxury mall built in the wake of the financial crisis was faring. Weary of “the world’s most splendid ghost mall,” as I called it at the time, we decided to leave the snow globe of the Strip casino where we were staying, in search of an experience altogether less manufactured. We got in our car and drove to an acclaimed Thai restaurant a friend of ours was always raving about. It was Lotus of Siam, of course, and though we enjoyed our garlic black pepper chicken wings immensely, what really captivated us was the strip mall in which the restaurant was located.
From the street, the place was unassuming, and possibly neglected. Unlike most strip malls, in which multiple storefronts face the road, these businesses turned inward to form a makeshift town square of sorts, like an Italian piazza. As we pulled in, we weren’t prepared for anything out of the ordinary. Architecturally, aesthetically, the mall was unremarkable, even ugly: a collection of low-slung stucco buildings, most of them painted in that pale clay color you see all over the Southwest. What was remarkable was the variety of establishments found there—the oddest, most unexpected menagerie we had ever seen, all of them arranged on the edge of a parking lot as big as a lake.
There was a billiards room, a place to buy trophies, a theater where a show called “Evil Dead: The Musical” was playing, a jewelry store, a uniform outlet, a tactical shop where cops, firefighters, and security guards could purchase their gear, and a gay bar whose exterior made it look like a saloon straight out of a Western movie. There was a fetish boutique, a multi-level marketing company whose peeled-off ghost lettering seemed to bode ill for its future, and an adult daycare that felt, to me, like the saddest place in the world, especially as clubgoers pulled up to neighboring nightspots in limos. Across the way, sat a Pentecostal church.
How on earth could all of these exist in the same complex? There wasn’t a big corporate “anchor” store like there is in most strip malls, no Sears or Kohls, Target or Albertsons, to bring in regular customers, but there was a liquor store that probably served a similar purpose. Still, the whole place felt like a solar system without its sun.
We were at the Commercial Center, the collection of stores located a mile east of the Strip and roughly two miles south of Downtown Las Vegas. We circled the enormous asphalt parking lot in our car, laughing in delight. It was dark out, but the mall was surprisingly lit up, full of life and activity. We watched a young woman wearing only a red bra and a placemat-sized miniskirt enter an adult swingers club called “Fantasy,” and drove past a bright green façade with a gold-lettered sign that read “The Green Door,” yet another swingers club, this one infamous, which we didn’t know until we called it up on Yelp. “It’s just one of those Vegas things that you have to experience firsthand,” one review read, “and then go home and shower in bleach.” Nothing that goes on in this strip mall is anyone else’s business, we decided. It was like a theme park for the right to privacy.
We drove back out onto Sahara Boulevard. Most towns do not have quite so much to offer the fetishist or the swinger, we joked, but in Las Vegas, the id is free to roam.
Like any avid student of Las Vegas, I’d read what architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and their student, Steven Izenour, had written almost 50 years before, in their seminal 1972 work, Learning from Las Vegas—that “learning from the existing landscape is a way of being revolutionary for an architect.” True. But learning from what exists, without imposing one’s aesthetic or moral values on it, is also a way of being revolutionary as a human being. Venturi, Brown, and Izenour were writing about an entirely different, far more illustrious Strip, the strip of casinos for which the city is famous. In doing so, they were asserting “the validity of the commercial vernacular” at a time when their peers were interested in Modern architecture and its purist or utopian aims.
Las Vegas strip malls, so common that they are often seen as beneath intellectual or aesthetic contemplation, certainly qualify as the commercial vernacular. I wanted to look at one strip mall in particular, really look at it, without judgment, to see what I might find. As Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour said, “The familiar that is a little off has a strange and revealing power,” and “There is a way of learning from everything.”
FORTINI: And so, a decade after that first joyride around the parking lot, I found myself back at the Commercial Center to visit with Paula Sadler, the owner of A Harmony Nail Spa. When you research the Commercial Center, all roads lead to Paula. Google the mall, up comes Paula. Ask people about it, they’ll tell you to talk to Paula. That’s because in 2006, Paula started the Commercial Center Business Association, a consortium of business owners in the strip mall who have charged themselves with its security, care, and upkeep. In her role as president of the association, she has become something of an amateur scholar of “the Historic Commercial Center District,” as she has rechristened the mall on the website she created, as well as its informal publicist.
PAULA SADLER: Well for me, personally, I pretty much grew up in Las Vegas. I’m from Los Angeles. And I was actually introduced to Commercial Center way back between 92 and 94 with my choir at Green Valley High School.
FORTINI: On the sweltering August day we met, Paula, a polished, self-possessed woman, was wearing a silky green blouse and bejeweled flip-flops; a giant quartz crystal hung around her neck, reflecting the pastel colors around her.
Paula moved A Harmony Nail Spa into the Commercial Center 17 years ago, in 2004.
Behind A Harmony’s rather innocuous storefront is a sprawling spa oasis; with its purple decor, vine-like overhead greenery, and faux trees, it feels like an enchanted forest in which you can get a pedicure.
SADLER: We focus on the natural and holistic. So, we have a lot of holistic and wellness services like ion detox, foot soaks, detox foot baths. We do massage, of course, aromatherapy, working with crystals and gems.
[50s style music swells, then fades under]
FORTINI: The Commercial Center, which opened in August 1963, was the first—and now, after nearly 60 years, the oldest—open-air shopping center in Las Vegas. The development of the 28-acre outdoor mall was made possible when E. Parry Thomas, a banker who bought hotels and other properties for Howard Hughes, and his longtime business partner, a real estate developer named Jerry Mack, sold the land to the county. (Clark County still owns the massive 18-acre parking lot, which has more than 1000 parking spots.) The shopping center was meant to serve the rather upscale surrounding residential areas, especially Paradise Palms, a planned mid-century community developed between 1960 and 1965, where celebrities like Johnny Carson, Donald Sutherland, and Phyllis Diller had homes. The first businesses in the Commercial Center were rather traditional strip mall fare: a beauty college, a dress shop, a Dinty Moore Restaurant, and Vegas Village, the local Wal-Mart of its day.
FORTINI: A friend who has lived in Las Vegas since the early 60s recalls ice skating weekly at the Ice Palace, with its NHL-sized rink and high-rise bleachers. Rock concerts were often held there as well…
SADLER: including The Grateful Dead, The Doors, Bob Marley, the Steve Miller Band, and the list just goes on.
FORTINI: It was, for instance, the only venue Led Zeppelin ever played in Las Vegas, in 1969. By the late 70s, the ice rink was a roller rink; it’s now the Las Vegas Roller Hockey Center, and will once again be a venue for concerts and events.
I have heard many other stories, as one does in Las Vegas—maybe apocryphal, possibly true—that the Rat Pack ate late night at the Commercial Deli, and that Liberace had his campy rhinestone costumes dry-cleaned at Tiffany Couture Cleaners, neither of which is still in the Commercial Center. It’s also said that Elvis bought a ring at John Fish Jewelers.
JOHN FISH: He did. I think it was about 1968 or 69, right in there. He shopped in our store over on Sahara and Las Vegas Boulevard and he came in and dad sold him a ring. I remember the story.
FORTINI: John Fish is a lanky sixty-something man with a gentle manner.
John Fish Jewelers was started in 1955 by John’s late father, John Fish the Third. He was a high school math and history teacher who, with a $10,000 loan from his brother-in-law, decided to make a career change and go into the jewelry business.
FISH: Over the years we've had a lot of celebrity clients. Elvis, Dean Martin, Lola Falana, Neil Sedaka, Tom Jones, Jerry Lewis. I waited on Jerry Lewis when he came in one time. Fats Domino was a huge customer. A lot of the younger generation don't know him, but he was a headliner, a Black headliner at the Flamingo Hotel.
FORTINI: Up through the 80s at least, The Commercial Center continued to be a busy, thriving shopping center. But like any mall of the moment, its luster eventually began to fade. The 80s-era fad for indoor malls certainly played a role in its decline, as did the rise of stores and boutiques in mega-casinos; the outdoor strip mall became temporarily passe, a relic of a supposedly less sophisticated time. The changing map of Las Vegas was also a factor: builders were pushing further and further out, south and west into the Vegas Valley; residents began moving to those locales, so retailers followed.
[ambient sounds of Vickie’ diner, Layla and Amanda pulling up chairs for an interview]
FORTINI: One morning over breakfast at Vickie’s Diner –
WENDELL JACKSON: My given name is Wendell Jackson, my stage name is Lawanda Jackson…
FORTINI: Wendell Jackson told me that she used to perform at both Badlands, the Western-themed gay bar still located in the shopping center, and at the Las Vegas Lounge, the only bar in the city that catered to transgender patrons.
JACKSON: I’m a female impersonator. I used to headline on the strip. I used to go to the lounge to do the shows, and uh— Badlands is still open. I used to work there too as well as a performer. This was known as “The Cut” – a “cut” is where people go to sell their goods. Two bathhouses, two gay bars, in the same unit. This was a party place back in the day.
FORTINI: Paula told me that she is also president of the LAMBDA Alano Clubhouse, a 12-step recovery organization that provides meeting space in the Commercial Center for LGBTQ groups, and she spoke to me about the gay history of the strip mall.
SADLER: Yeah, there's always been businesses like that. I actually used to sing and do shows at the Las Vegas Lounge as a show director back in 2002, and it was a wonderful place and it employed all transgendered bartenders. So it gave people work, and it was a very important and vital place for the community.
FORTINI: I began to wonder how much of the prevailing perception of the Commercial Center, the notion that it was a dubious or scary scene, stemmed from the fact that it was a locus of gay culture and a place where visitors, gay and straight alike, could freely explore their sexuality and experiment with alternative lifestyles. It’s not exactly a newsflash that normies might be squeamish, judgmental, or outright homophobic.
By the mid to late 90s, the Commercial Center had fallen into disrepair, and had acquired the reputation that to this day it has not entirely been able to shake: as a ramshackle, unsavory place where crime takes place, an eccentrically oversized parking lot surrounded by an inexplicable hodgepodge of businesses. When the Commercial Center comes up in conversation, its notorious sketchiness inevitably gets mentioned.
Our initial reaction to the Commercial Center was, you might say, the usual reaction, which is that it was seedy, sleazy, and pretty strange. It was the response of the tourist, the visitor who sees only the surface. But that’s not the best way to take in Las Vegas, which is like a fan dancer, revealing herself, slowly, coyly, glimpse by ephemeral glimpse.
FORTINI: I found the business owners understandably protective of the shopping center—it’s their community, after all, as well as their livelihood. They are reluctant to focus on or contribute to any negativity about the place. In fact, more than one person was hesitant to talk to me at all, for fear I would focus solely on the past, territory they feel has been thoroughly and tiresomely tread.
Paula, who I came to think of as the Erin Brockovich of the Commercial Center, told me in August that the county had neither resealed the parking lot, nor properly striped it with lines and traffic safety markings, since 2004.
Some of the tenants blame the county for neglecting the maintenance of the parking lot, which they believe caused a broken-windows style cascade of deterioration and crime.
Paula talks about the mall’s problems in oblique and euphemistic ways—she is its biggest booster—but admits that in the years her business has been at the Commercial Center, its disrepute and general shabbiness have sometimes been an issue. Soon after moving her spa into the Commercial Center, for example, one of her longtime clients canceled.
SADLER: She says, ‘Well, I drove by, but I’m sorry I have to cancel my appointment because I just don’t feel safe.” And I—I didn’t even know what she was talking about. I didn’t see that outside. All that it was was trash needed to be picked up and there was some graffiti on some of the outer walls in the small alleyway. So it made it look very bad, but it wasn’t very bad. It was actually quite busy and full at that time.
FORTINI: Not one to let a problem linger, Paula began, in the years that followed, to make improvements with the help of some of the other business owners: from painting over graffiti to picking up trash to hiring security to engaging a junk removal service to take away detritus that had collected in the parking lot.
SADLER: “Well, I’m in the beauty business, so I like to make things beautiful. I just told myself, I cannot hear one more comment like this.
FORTINI: She wrote letters to the county, asking for broken lights to be fixed and missing stop signs to be replaced. This past year, she began a series of beautification projects, including placing boulders, sculptures, and potted palms in the medians.
SADLER: I took all my energy and I began focusing it outward on the community. Not only do I do beauty for people, but I also practice feng shui; I do numerology; I work with gemstones. So just the simple act of actually cleaning and painting and doing those things, that's actually a feng shui treatment.
FORTINI: Finally, Paula worked to rehabilitate the Commercial Center’s reputation by building a website and vigilantly maintaining its online presence, responding to every Google or Yelp review.
SADLER: The general perception that the public has had, it's changed a lot because now there's just positive review after positive review. And I maintain all of the Google reviews and I respond to them. And you know if someone gives a one star review, like recently, I said, ‘Thank you for your one star review. We hope we can turn this into five stars, and just to let you know, we have 160 open businesses. Make sure you come back and take a look at everything.’
FORTINI: Everything that’s distinctive about the strip mall has also made it an object of derision and scorn: its uniformity is said to be boring, its loud signage tacky and cheap, its massive parking lots magnets for vagrants, loiterers, and litterers. And, of course, strip malls encourage people to drive. The strip mall has become a ubiquitous symbol of unsightly suburban sprawl and excessive consumerism that gets maligned by architects, urban planners, environmentalists, and aesthetes alike. In recent years, there have been attempts to gussy up the strip mall as bougie “lifestyle centers,” where upscale chain stores like Lululemon and Pottery Barn are set off by fountains, patio furniture, and chandeliers. This has arguably made the strip mall more aesthetically appealing, but critics say it’s like putting lipstick on a pig.
Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s project was, at root, about redeeming what they called “the ugly and the ordinary,” in architecture, and today’s strip mall deserves a similarly sympathetic eye. What its opponents tend to overlook is that its unpretentious trappings often translate into low overhead and reasonable rents for its tenants— a fact mentioned by nearly everyone I interviewed at the Commercial Center. Small business owners, many of them immigrants, can afford to open a restaurant, a shop, or a franchise in a strip mall. The photographer Catherine Opie, who in 1997 and 1998 photographed mini-malls around LA’s Koreatown, has said: “These are about the American dream for me. But they’re very fragile. They change almost overnight, and are often forgotten about, just like the freeways.”
FORTINI: The Commercial Center is arguably experiencing a mini-renaissance of sorts, and the excitement among the business owners is palpable. The Vegas Room, an intimate, elegant, old-school supper club where you can see late-night cabaret performances had barely launched when the pandemic hit, but reopened with live entertainment in June 2020 and became a much needed refuge for locals. Its sister venue, the Nevada Room, a 7,000-square foot piano bar bistro located in the same building, opened a year later, in May 2021, with more space for musical groups and dancing. Both have been called the new “cool hang” in Las Vegas.
Across the way, at the south end of the plaza, there’s the recently renovated New Orleans Square, where demonstrably hip art galleries and studios, collectibles shops, and a handful of LGBTQ-owned businesses––including a cozy coffee shop with mismatched furniture––have come to reside.
FORTINI: “This is becoming the new creative hangout,” the website for New Orleans Square reads, “In a couple of years you won’t even recognize this complex.” That is, of course, the worry. It’s tricky to strike a balance between success and gentrification, and when artists discover a place, upscale or chain retailers are usually not far behind. It’s remarkable, when you think about it, that there isn’t a Great Clips, Verizon, or Chipotle in the Commercial Center. The strip mall feels intimate, special, like a secret Vegas created for itself. I could not help but fret about what might happen if corporate chain establishments, inspired by the cool-cred authenticity of the Commercial Center, move in, raise rents, and make it less accessible to immigrant families, mom-and-pop teams, and LGBTQ business owners.
In late October, I called Paula Sadler to ask whether she worried about this possibility.
[Amanda talking to Paula on the phone]
FORTINI (on the phone): ...you could tell me a little bit about New Orleans Square. Is it part of the Commercial Center?
SADLER (on the phone): Yes, it is. It’s on the same property. Yeah.
FORTINI: When I reached her it was evening; she had just gotten off work at the nail spa. She told me that –– for the first time in 17 years––the county had finally come and resealed and restriped the 18-acre parking lot, and she was feeling optimistic.
SADLER (on the phone): It's actually everything I had ever hoped it would become. I wrote a vision statement and part of it was envisioning art and galleries and music and food and all these things, you know, coming there. This kind of mecca for, you know, art. And it's happened. It's actually, you know, happened. It’s been great. So yes, I think it's been really good and I’m really pleased to see the diversity of the businesses. It’s so diverse.
FORTINI: Gentrification, she said, was not a concern for her: art galleries and piano bars were what she’d dreamed: a flourishing and prosperous Commercial Center.
The strip mall was becoming all she’d hoped it would. She’d envisioned art, music, entertainment, food––a mecca for Las Vegas culture in all its glorious variety.
Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown taught their readers to view Las Vegas with fresh eyes–– to see the beauty, interest, and dignity in what others have derided or overlooked. The city, not one to reveal its true essence easily, has taught me a similar lesson in the time I have been here: that you must always question your initial impressions––turn them over, examine them, ask yourself if they are too easily derived. That you must look beyond the obvious if you want to truly see.
ORTIZ: Amanda Fortini has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and California Sunday. She divides her time between Las Vegas, Nevada and Livingston, Montana.
[BMR Theme]
ORTIZ: In The Vegas Dilemma, a collection of short stories by Vi Khi Nao, the central characters are people who live on the margins. Set largely in Las Vegas, the stories take place inside corporate coffee shops and grocery stores, and at the Hoover Dam, and on the internet.
Vi is a writer who cares very little about the limitations imposed by genre -- she tends to move beyond those limits in her work -- she’s very disruptive, she’s experimental with form, she’s not afraid of fluidly moving between genres and playing with the signifiers of both narrative and poetry.
English is actually not her first language, which I think is a strength of her work in many ways. I’m often reminded that we both have the same vocabulary at our disposal but she consistently uses it in the most unorthodox ways and I just think it's brilliant.
VITAL-LAZARE: Yes, it’s as if the way she uses language calls attention to the fact that languages are made of symbols. Vi’s not bound to the words. She decides what the symbols mean, she makes her own meaning.
Even the title of poet can be a kind of shorthand -- people tend to project onto poets, and poets have a way of seeing themselves -- and Vi resists that.
ORTIZ: In this segment, Vi spoke with her friend, frequent collaborator, and fiction writer Daisuke Shen, about The Vegas Dilemma.
THE VEGAS DILEMMA
DAISUKE SHEN: Hi Vi.
VI KHI NAO: Hi Daisuke.
SHEN: How are you doing today?
KHI NAO: I’m ok. It's really bright and beautiful here in Boulder.
SHEN: Well excellent, I'm glad it’s sunny. It’s sunny here in Brooklyn too.
KHI NAO: Likewise.
SHEN: Are you ready to get started for this interview?
KHI NAO: I am, I am.
[Lupi’s “Blue Dot Session” song composed of minimalist instrumental notes plays in the background]
SHEN: The way that I see the Vegas dilemma is that it's a sort of historical and political archive. We have endings that feature the Iraq war and the US occupation of Afghanistan, schoolchildren's deaths in northern China. And we have figures such as Stormy Daniels and Donald Trump and more.
A lot of your endings are abrupt. And on surface level, they're only tangentially connected. But I think that they point to how much people become oblivious to or choose to ignore whenever they're wrapped up in their own lives. I was thinking about a phone call that we had where you once likened your stories endings to suicide.
You said that they simply endure if the plot demands for them to. How much attention do you believe your stories demand from the reader? And what do you think that the narrators are asking them to listen to and their respective stories?
[Lupi’s “Blue Dot Session” song composed of minimalist instrumental notes plays in the background then fades to a stop]
KHI NAO: My stories are designed to encourage readers to love my sadness, agonies, perceptions, experiences, observations through me. The rhetorical technique I use is more immersive and expansive, as you have noticed so astutely. My stories are designed to agonize. And also to air out the dirty underwears, the soiled bed sheets. The stained refrigerators of my personal experiences with existence. There are these observations about the world that I can't unsee, and I want the readers to unsee them through my shifting, shaping narrators. I don't expect the readers to understand them, a part of me no longer cares if anyone sympathizes with my narrators or with the stories themselves. People care now with distance, with a lot of distance. You know, Covid adds to that distance...
SHEN: Yeah.
KHI NAO: People care and then they don't care anymore.
SHEN: Right.
KHI NAO: And contrary to popular belief, humans are good at moving on. So cutting the past off by it’s ankle, at severing the paralyzed. Forgetting, these are the things that I think humans excel at.
SHEN: Yeah. Thank you so much for that answer. Even in that answer, you know, there is a lot of agony embedded into it, I think. And part of the not understanding is also part of the human existence of agony. So, your stories resist from being understood. And it requires, I think, a wrestling with that and for readers themselves to wrestle with themselves as well. What were the first reviews you got from the first people who read this manuscript?
KHI NAO: I don't have very good memories of certain reviews of people.
SHEN: Hmm-hmmn.
KHI NAO: When they send it to me and or I read it and I'm reading it either on bus or train stations or somewhere. And it's just like, it's like the wind, you know. Then they leave you and you don't think about it. I do have amnesia about how other people experience my work. I don't know if that amnesia is part of the way I give birth to literature.
But allows me to, like, just abandon everything and start from scratch and not memorizing what others have said about my work add to that to that routine or that ritual of productivity. When this book came out in the world, I just sort of, I kind of learned to detach myself from it, you know?
SHEN: Right.
KHI NAO: It's very vulnerable. You know, it's one of, in the same vulnerability as my manuscript, The Vanishing Point of Desire. When The Vanishing Point of Desire came out in the world, I didn't want to tell anyone about it.
SHEN: Right.
KHI NAO: When my friend Tony asked me, “You know Vi, why didn't you tell me that you have a book out in the world?” And I said, “Well, because you didn't ask.” I think because it's so vulnerable, I'm afraid others can see what I want to unsee or see more than what I could see and therefore I lose my…
SHEN: Original vision for it.
KHI NAO: Yeah.
SHEN: It's very interesting to hear you talk about it in this way. I don't know, just knowing you as a person for a bit now, you are so dedicated to making mistakes in your work and that has been something that's been very inspiring for me. And also in being a person who is very much self directed, I believe. And so to talk about it in comparison to some of your other books like Vanishing Point of Desire, you know, would you say this is your most vulnerable book yet?
KHI NAO: Yes, it is. This one is pretty vulnerable. It's also obsolete in my heart, so I feel like that vulnerability is in part protected by time.
SHEN: Right.
KHI NAO: And so, like, I don't feel as raw as I could.
SHEN: Yeah.
KHI NAO: Six of my books are coming out in this academic calendar, so it's just like an engine that just moves along and I guess like, if it's vulnerable, I'm just like, oh, that's, that's it. I think like earlier on, there were a few versions of the manuscript that had errors in it. And I wanted the publisher to keep those errors.
SHEN: Yeah, right. Like the foreword you said.
KHI NAO: Yeah
SHEN: There is something that was a misspelling and you told me it was so beautiful the way that it looked on the page.
KHI NAO: Yeah. It was so beautiful, the error. And I told the publisher, “oh you can, you don't have to correct that, that's fine.” But he was adamant about keeping it professional. I think there's a type of error that exists in professionalism that should be celebrated.
SHEN: In human nature, too. It’s human to make mistakes. Yeah.
KHI NAO: Yeah. It’s human to make mistakes. Also, when I was reviewing the manuscript, because I had to read it a couple of times and I don't really enjoy reading my own manuscript once it's been written or, or even published, I just wanted to depart from it. And I, there was one story. I thought it was terrible. I can't remember the story. I thought it about just ‘X-ing’ it out. But it's OK, you know, to have the book being a documentation of my experiences of writing across time and all of them doesn't have to be in its perfect form. All the stories don't have to be perfect for them to arrive in the world. It’s OK to have a weaker story. And so I let it live. But I think one of the stories is really long and boring.
[Both Shen and Khi Nao laugh]
SHEN: I personally do not get out at all from any of the stories that I saw.
[“Rate Sheet” song plays with the bass playing in background]
SHEN: Part of your answer just now, for some reason, made me think of a question that I have for you about language and the way that the characters in the short story collection sort of talk to or around each other. And that's sort of something that we see in your other work as well.
[Music stops playing]
SHEN: It's also written sometimes in the form of screenwriting. I don't know. And they seem to be lonely in a way or they're constantly misunderstood. No one is ever quite able to strike that balance that they're trying to find between each other. And I just wanted to know, you know, if you could talk a bit about maybe that loneliness or the isolation or even if you feel as a writer that you're able, better able to express yourself on the page than you are in person?
KHI NAO: I think I can express myself not too bad in person.
SHEN: I think, sometimes it's very rare in this world for someone's personality and expression to show so much on the page.
KHI NAO: Well thank you, Daisuke. And you know, some of the stories I wrote it in real time.
[Wind chimes gently sound in the background]
KHI NAO: The way time operates in my story is very fascinating for me as a writer. Because writers often times like write something, like a year or ten years later. Or, five months later, after they have experienced that particular experience and they want to extrapolate it in a short story or in a novel. Or, even in an essay and mine just happens now. Like my name, you know, like it's happening in real time. So it has this meta-ness. Some of the casino scenes. Some of the bar scenes. Some of the experiences I basically capture in real time, because I, I have this fear of amnesia of a particular moment in which I think, “Oh, I want to capture this later and then it's gone.” And so I would open my laptop and write it in real time and I'm writing it as it's happening. And so sometimes, like, the tenses are interchangeable in my stories because certain things do happen in a moment and then, some certain things happen later. And how do you capture time away from time while in time and at the same time at that time? [nervously laughs]
[Whimsical percussion music]
SHEN: Something I've noticed a lot of people ask, they always say, “You seem like a poet. You seem like a poet, you know.” And you have a very great answer to that. You actually put a lot of thought into your story and that it's not supposed to just be read as poetry. It has groundings. You know? It has this sort of thing to build around. So, do you want to talk a little bit on genre?
KHI NAO: Yeah. Like I think, like my fiction is very plotted. Whenever people say, “Oh, your work is poetry and so emotionally based. There's like characters move in and out without any awareness of it.”
But it's like I plotted all my stories, I sat down, I'm like I have a very precise vision for it. And I think because of the container I put them in, they don't recognize that container and they don't know how to decipher the story. And so it's easy to say, “Oh, she's a poet!”
SHEN: They don't have to think about it so much.
KHI NAO: 10:54: Yeah. They don't have to think about it. They don't have to put the hard work into to like, take the story apart. And the people that actually put time into reading it and they understand the plot realize, “Oh all is so much positioning to this.” But they don't notice that they don't and it's not my place to correct them. you know, like, oh, you misunderstood that whole story. like if they were to read Hemingway, for instance, and there's an elephant scene and the story and I think, oh, why would you want to write about elephant but it was about pregnancy is the same thing with my work. And it's not about elephant, it's about pregnancy. They're expecting they don't see they don't see an abortion. They don't see pregnancy. They don't see whatever it is they need to see.
SHEN: What sorts of questions would you have asked if you were conducting this interview for Vi Khi Nao?
KHI NAO: Well, I want you to ask me if I like bánh bèo, it's Vietnamese street food. Water fern cakes. And I want to tell you that I do very much like eating them with fish sauce, sitting on a small pink plastic chair in Vietnam at 10 pm at night where I could hear the waves and the sea surface crashing against the rocks.
ORTIZ: Vi Khi Nao has authored 20 books of poetry, essays and fiction including A Brief Alphabet of Torture, Fish in Exile, and Sleep Machine..
Daisuke Shen is currently working on a short story collection as well as a chapbook, in collaboration with Vi, based around the 1989 film Funeral Parade of Roses.
[BMR Theme]
ORTIZ: Black Mountain Radio is broadcast from Southern Paiute land.
VITALE-LAZARE: Black Mountain Radio is an audio project of the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute. Sara Ortiz is the architect and host.
ORTIZ: And this season my co-host is community leader, esteemed colleague, and my very dear friend, Erica Vital-Lazare.
[BMR Theme]
Our senior producer is Nicole Kelly. Vera Blossom and Layla Muhammad are our fantastic producers. Additional production and sound design by Ariel Mejia.
VITAL-LAZARE: This episode was edited by Sara Ortiz and Nicole Kelly. Our production assistants for this season are Sylvia Fox and Soni Brown. Our theme song is by Jeremy Klewicki. Art by Niege Borges; graphic design by Lille Allen; copy editing by Summer Thomad and a special shoutout to our engineer friend in the booth Kevin Krall.
ORTIZ: Special thanks to our contributors in this episode: Yumi Janeiro Roth, Amanda Fortini, John Fish, Wendell Jackson, Paula Sadler, Vi Khi Nao, and Daisuke Shen. Special thanks to the Aarow Sign Spinners of Las Vegas, Evan James, Chris Sicuso, Laramie Rosenfeld, and Rayen Jones.
VITALE-LAZARE: Thanks to the rest of the team at the Black Mountain Institute: Kellen Braddock, Daniel Gumbiner, Haley Patail, and Haya Wang.
ORTIZ: Black Mountain Radio is supported by the Rogers Foundation and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
ORTIZ: Our deep gratitude goes to Nevada Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities for supporting Black Mountain Radio. Thank you so much for listening.