Perhaps this location could provide the space you need?

Just after this theater review went to press and this supplemental CityBlog entry was posted, a PR representative for Planet Hollywood’s Point Break Live announces the audience-interactive, live-action spoof of Keanu Reeves’ 1991 action thriller has “temporarily postponed performances, effective immediately, as it searches for more intimate accommodations that the producers state, ‘will be more conducive to the full-immersion characteristics that the play requires.’” [emphasis mine]

This comes after last Wednesday’s opening night and only three more performances held over that weekend. Sounds like the producers are saying PH’s very intimate and versatile V Theater is somehow cramping Point Break Live’s highly experimental, over-the-top style. Way to blame the theater, guys, for a joyless, unfunny production this town needs like it needs more wind and dust. Secure a new space if you will, but zero times anything still equals zero.

Film critic David Thomson is coming to UNLV on Oct. 15 to promote his latest collection of criticism. In addition to his film stuff, he is also the author of In Nevada: The Land, the People, God and Chance, a book I’m reading as we speak (well … maybe not right this second). It’s not a conventional history of Nevada, more like an extended meditation on the state, with an emphasis on its loneliest and most abused quarters.

It gets pretty heavy into the social significance of atomic testing. But the book has its moments, like this one:

The government has always regarded Nevada as a place unlike others, fit for tests, experiments, and ventures it would sometimes rather not talk about.

And:

Nevada is on the edge, on the wire, off to one side, in the empty quarter, or even in the rest of the country’s head as an idea, a possibility, an alternative. It is an experiment, or a kind of theater…. for America has used Nevada as a testing ground, and not just for weapons and their destructiveness but also for new social ideas, and their explosiveness. What happens if you allow divorce, prostitution, gambling? Can there be community and purpose if you encourage things deep in human nature yet supposedly alien to order and togetherness? Don’t we need to find out?

He published the book in 1999. Maybe now, almost a decade later, he’s ready to answer some of those questions.

Another sign you've found water. Or a toy store.

I recommend you keep your tongue wrapped around a certain tart irony while reading this piece about California “water witches” who employ dousing rods and pendulums and all manner of quackery to find the wet stuff for desperate farmers: How much more robust is the science employed by the brainiacs at the Southern Water Authority in their quest to dry up rural Nevada? Sure, they know where the groundwater is — but they really have no idea what impact tapping into it will have.