All posts by rexmerritt

Dim Neon, Poky Town

The Flotsam Society

What am I thankful for? Two years residing here in Transient City and some personal circumstances have improved.

When I settled in Las Vegas the housing market had bottomed out. The city sat poised for a rebound. Fortunately, I bought just before the spring sprung.

My address sits on the fringe of downtown. Unlike the Strip’s clamor, bustle, and crowds, to a lesser extent Downtown as well, this neighborhood, much of Vegas is quiet. Regard these environs as an expanded Mayberry.

I slipped the Mayberry reference onto a young woman with whom I’d been chatting and it zoomed over her pretty, vacant head. Doesn’t it just spoil the shorthand reference when relevance must be explained? Like who Mel Tormé was and his meaning to this city and the American songbook? That’s always somewhat disheartening. Younger audiences only know of Tony Bennett from his duets with Lady Gaga.

As my conversant blithely answered, “It must be a generational thing.” Continue reading The Flotsam Society →

Quarropas

Girl Clash

Now and then news from Quarropas, once my New York home, wends its way West and gives me pause to consider the arc of our world. Is it by design? Are there patterns in its seeming randomness? One beyond the ken of us simple mortals?

Two years ago, the notable event among locals which received widespread coverage was Eddie having stabbed Mike to death then in, oh, let’s say, remorse, or recognition of his heinous act, Eddie blowing himself up. As much as nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, who the hell could’ve foreseen real-life ending Grand-Guignol playing out in sleepy Quarropas?

This latest incident is bloodless, though pleasantly mortifying. Continue reading Girl Clash →

Observed

Who Was Oisk?

A vintage sportswear retailer issued a baseball catalogue a short time ago. Its cover featured a forlorn boy amid the ruins of what had been the quirky splendor of Ebbets Field, one-time home of the Brooklyn Dodgers. They had abandoned the ballpark and borough for Los Angeles. Their old address was being razed for low-income housing.

The dejected boy toted a bat and glove. By his demeanor both destruction and departure confused him. Doubtlessly he had been a true-blue Dodgers fan.

Can’t imagine such devotion today. Sports franchises routinely extort municipalities for taxpayer funded improvements and fresh facilities. Free agency has broken once solid binds between players and fans.

Even our old baseball cathedrals are no longer sacrosanct.

There should’ve been an outcry and defense for old Yankee Stadium similar to that which spared Grand Central Terminal sharing the fate of McKim and White’s Penn Station. Instead, wrecking balls demolished the House That Ruth Built. And while the team simply moved across 161st Street, the old edifice’s aura remained put. Monumental as the new structure is, the Yankees’ glorious continuity is broken.

Ghosts do not travel. Not even in the Bronx. Continue reading Who Was Oisk? →

Observed, Tales Out of School

Sometimes a Quaint Notion

A worthy gridiron rival recently shamed alma mater on national television. That’s great. It’s just the sort of trip/fall/lose-that-ball pie in the face which should prompt donations from already alligator-armed fellow alums.

Eh. Probably not.

What resulted fell into the tiger pit of unintended consequences and receiving just desserts. Prestige game as it was, if Arizona administration had treated outside forces with less deference and considered the homefolks above mammon, it may’ve improved the squad’s chances of victory. Surely less embarrassment would’ve ensued.

My school went for the cash. The do-re-mi, baby. A major sports network dangled a big bag of money before the accountants who today determine the athletic department’s direction. Bottom-line nabobs as they are lucre trumped the old virtues. Any old virtues. No one even bothered with lip service about “the fans.”

So making greed is good palatable, that Saturday also became an opportunity to promote the university’s “brand.” Just the sort of fresh-scented aerosol which ought have allayed most of the unsavory stink. Continue reading Sometimes a Quaint Notion →

Dim Neon, Poky Town

Chumps & Busters

The first two weekends of September were prime times to observe a Las Vegas peculiarity.

During workweeks the city hosts conventions which attract the expense account crowd. There will be other visitors as well, of course, however business people predominate.

Weekends, though, the focus shifts away from serious travelers. Las Vegas becomes the purview and playground of “Vegas for Vegas!” types. Young coastal Californians account for the greatest portion of these hordes.

No doubt the overwhelming majority of these youthful adults comport themselves inconspicuously. But this isn’t about them. This is about the oblivious boobs and braying cheapskates jamming Las Vegas Boulevard when they’re not cutting the fool inside the thoroughfare’s establishments.

I don’t know what service personnel and hoteliers call them, but I see them as chumps and busters. Continue reading Chumps & Busters →

Pornography

At the Philosopher Hotel

While rummaging and discarding, I came across photos of Chantal. We met what must’ve been a whole ‘nother lifetime ago.

Ours was the most casual of fleeting acquaintances. In 2006, I attended a World Cup soccer match in Germany. Or eventually intended reaching Germany in order to watch Ukraine against Switzerland. To say I detoured stretches the phrase “taking the long way.”

First into London, then through the Chunnel into Belgium and a dogleg into Holland which would finally funnel me into Germany. The trip was, after all, for pleasure. In early June when Old Europe remained temperate to American skin and this Yankee had no need to insist every interior to be airy and artificial.

Frankly I’d forgotten Chantal. We’d been one another’s one-night stands. Or, she’d certainly been my one-nighter, while I suppose I sufficed as her any port in a storm. Continue reading At the Philosopher Hotel →

Quarropas

Edna Long Left Questions

Vernon waited too late. A cousin, he now wants to assemble our family tree. A branch of it at least. One comprising our mutual matriarchal entities. The moment to have done this was decades ago when enough generations still stretched among us to weave that narrative together.

My grandmother Alice, his aunt, was born in 1908. Hers would’ve been a fine memory to excavate. She could’ve provided his enterprise’s bones. After all she was old enough to have known ex-slaves.

Ex-slaves. Talk about history coming to life. It’s one thing to watch Skip Gates’ Finding Your Roots or Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary. It surely would’ve been more immediate to have such recollections lent voice from a listener who heard them directly from people who underwent those indignities.

It’s no stretch to any imagination in Alice seeing her own grandparents as having once been chattel.

What prompted Vernon’s late, nearly futile search? Edna Long. Edna Long piqued him. Continue reading Edna Long Left Questions →

Observed, Pop Culture

… But Necessary Nonetheless

Screw John Hersey.

He actually covered (as a war correspondent, Hersey wasn’t a combatant) both theaters during World War II, yet his much lauded New Yorker article describing the aftermath of Little Boy on Hiroshima is steadily transforming the conflict’s concluding factor into a war crime against the victors.

When did commemorations for Hiroshima and Nagasaki become more noteworthy than Pearl Harbor remembrances? And why is this?

How have foreign revanchists and native revisionists alter just punishment into crimes perpetrated by the victims? Continue reading … But Necessary Nonetheless →

Dim Neon, Poky Town

Niggling and Nettlesome

What visitor doesn’t arrive in Las Vegas believing its “What happens here, stays here!”© slogan? O.J. Simpson did. Where’s he now?

Those weighty limiting inhibitions out-of-towners have dragged along from Boise, Iowa City or Little Rock get stored at McCarran International upon arrival and are barely, or in some cases gratefully, retrieved just in time for the return trip to real life.

In between seeing slot machines and liquor stores at the airport, and later regretting busting the holiday budget at casino table games while developing monstrous hangovers through overpriced Strip drinks, the sober comportment which defined them at home dissolves. That probity probably winds up somewhere in the Mojave.

Likely in one of those San Berdoo meth oases across the border in California. Continue reading Niggling and Nettlesome →