Tag: casino

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News News Blog

Southland Launches Live Table Games, Unveils New Name

CREDIT: Southland Casino Racing

Southland Casino Racing

This rendering shows the $250 million expansion proposed for Southland’s casino and dog track in West Memphis.

Southland Gaming and Racing launched live tables games Tuesday afternoon and the casino and dog track has a brand new name.

The newly dubbed Southland Casino Racing received its formal casino license from the Arkansas Racing Commission and opened 40 live tables games at 1 p.m. Tuesday. Visitors there can now play blackjack, craps, and roulette.

The license also allows Southland to expand the number of slot machines, now with 2,050 machines on the casino floor. The expansion created more than 100 new jobs, according to David Wolf, president and general manager of Southland for Delaware North, the casino’s parent company.

In January, Delaware North announced plans for a $250 million expansion of Southland to include a new casino complex and high-rise hotel. Construction on the project is expected to begin this summer. The casino complex and parking garage are expected to be complete in about 12 months. The hotel tower should be complete in about 18 months.

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Throwback August: Casino

Robert De Niro as Sam ‘Ace’ Rothstein

Casino (1995; dir. Martin Scorsese)—Heavily edited, poorly dubbed, grotesquely commercial-breaked TV versions of Casino sadden me. I’m happy that Scorsese’s best film continues to rumble across the basic cable landscape in various shapes and sizes at various times of day because exhibition and syndication play a major role in pop-cultural canon formation. But a sanitized version of Casino makes little sense because indiscretion and tastelessness are two of its cardinal virtues.

Trade secrets about the gaming industry and the workings of the Midwestern mob, violent confrontations involving power tools and baseball bats, an endless parade of pastel-colored custom suits so gaudy they threaten to burn out your rods and cones —there’s simply too much in this vulgar American epic to absorb in one sitting. Add in the dueling voiceover narrations, the hold-your-breath instances when the camera rushes at characters like an attack dog, and the car-bomb explosions of raunchy absurdist wit, and you’re likely to feel lost.

Sharon Stone as Ginger McKenna

The soundtrack does its best to disorient you, too; Casino’s nonstop music (62 songs are listed in its closing credits) is analogous to the constant electronic chatter of slots and video poker machines cluttering nearly every real casino floors. Given so many opportunities to choreograph miniature music videos within the frame of his story, Scorsese engineers perhaps his greatest pop epiphany—a long sequence where a pair of card cheats get taken down as Jeff Beck’s “I Ain’t Superstitious” wails in the background.

But give the movie the time and attention it needs and you’ll start to get it. Then you might start to love it. Casino is Scorsese’s Physical Graffiti, his 2666, his three-hour, thirty-course tasting menu that will set you back an entire paycheck if you add the beverage pairings, which you might as well because you’ve come this far. It is also a vision of craps-table capitalism unfolding in a multicultural American frontier where mobsters, bookies, cowboys, Italians, Jews, Arabs, Irishmen and anyone else who wants a piece of the pie can get in on the action if they’re willing to play.

Joe Pesci as Nicky Santoro

Although the three principal characters—gambler/casino boss Sam “Ace” Rothstein (Robert De Niro), mobster/hellspawn Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci) and hustler/addict Ginger McKenna (Sharon Stone)—are assholes, their long, painful falls from grace matter because their bosses are much, much worse. Which is why Casino now plays as an apt and timeless statement about the apparently untouchable gangsters responsible for the current (and no doubt future) financial crises bilking us out of our money whether we like it or not. “It’s a pity in this state that we have such hypocrisy,” says Rothstein late in the film. “Some people can do whatever they want; other people have to pay through the nose. But such is life.”

Grade: A+

Throwback August: Casino

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Best of Memphis Special Sections

Arts & Entertainment

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

Watch more than one episode of a reality show such as “Super Nanny” or “Project Runway” or “Dog Whisperer” or any of the home-design shows (or “Flava of Love,” for that matter), and you’ll notice a theme: Consistency matters. The winners of this section are a reminder of that point. Of the 13 categories, 11 of the first-place winners were in the same spot last year. One exception was in the “Best Local Athlete” category, for which there was no clear winner. But it’s the other category — “Best Sports Team” — which is particularly telling and proves the consistency maxim. Last year, the Grizzlies ruled. This year, after a very disappointing season, they’re in third place behind the (undeniably hot) University of Memphis men’s basketball team at number one and the Memphis Redbirds (who had an awful season themselves) at number two.

Best Golf Course

1. The Links at Galloway

2. TPC at Southwind

3. The Links at Overton Park — tie —

Spring Creek Golf Course

Tucked into one of our city’s nicest neighborhoods, Galloway has been one of our city’s finest courses for almost half a century. A recent multimillion-dollar renovation made something good even better, with much nicer fairways, greens as flat as a pool table, a lovely clubhouse that replaced the stone-covered building — all in a parklike setting.

Best Museum

1. Memphis Brooks Museum of Art

2. Memphis Pink Palace Museum

3. Children’s Museum of Memphis — tie —

Dixon Gallery & Gardens — tie —

Stax Museum of American Soul Music

The oldest art museum in Tennessee continues to draw crowds to its galleries. Originally a tiny jewel box in Overton Park, a massive expansion project helped turn the Brooks into one this country’s top museums.

Best Art Gallery

1. David Lusk Gallery

2. Jay Etkin Gallery

3. D’Edge Art & Unique Treasures

We’ve spent many fine evenings attending openings at David Lusk, which features an outstanding roster of artists. They also host an absolutely-have-to-be-there event for Memphis art lovers — “The Price Is Right,” an annual sale of works for under $1,000.

Justin Fox Burks

Best Live Theater

1. Playhouse on the Square

2. The Orpheum

3. Theatre Memphis

Jackie Nichols’ Playhouse on the Square has consistently presented top-notch performances for more than a quarter century. Operating out of the old Memphian movie theater on Cooper, Playhouse is in the midst of erecting a state-of-the-art facility across the street, which will provide them even greater opportunities.

Best Movie
Theater

1. Malco Studio on the Square

2. Malco Paradiso

3. Muvico Peabody Place

We can remember when the only thing that stood behind Paulette’s was a parking lot. Then Malco had the idea to construct a “boutique” theater, one with intimate auditoriums and featuring films that somehow missed the larger circuits. Well, that gamble paid off, big time, and Studio on the Square is without question one of the best places in town to watch a movie.

Best Casino

1. Horseshoe Casino

2. Grand Casino

3. Sam’s Town

Our readers must feel lucky at the Horseshoe, a perennial Best of Memphis winner. Horseshoe also features some of the coolest musical and comedy acts on tour.

Best Picnic Spot

1. Shelby Farms

2. Overton Park

3. Chickasaw Gardens Lake/Pink Palace Museum

On weekends, it’s getting harder and harder to find a nice quiet spot to set down a blanket and have a picnic, but we agree that Shelby Farms probably offers the most choices, and it is an amazing thing to “get away from it all” even though you are still smack-dab in the middle of everything.

Best Place To Meet Singles

1. Church

2. Online

3. Beale Street

This category certainly told us a lot about our readers. We’d hoped that those of you who went to church did so for spiritual enlightenment and not to check out the hot chick or guy in the choir.

Justin Fox Burks

1st Place: Best Live Theatre

Best Free Date

1. Mississippi River

2. Shelby Farms

3. Memphis Zoo on Tuesdays

We hope that everyone who listed “Mississippi River” meant watching the river from the safety of Tom Lee Park or some other vantage point, or maybe even boating in it (though not too many people we know seem to do that, for some reason). At any rate, we hope you didn’t mean swimming in it.

Justin Fox Burks

1st Place: Best Free Date

Best Family
Entertainment

1. Memphis Zoo

2. Redbirds Game

3. Children’s Museum of Memphis

The Memphis Zoo seems to be a hit with our readers for any number of reasons. Perhaps because it really is one of the best zoos in the country.

Best Sports Team

1. University of Memphis Tiger
Basketball

2. Memphis Redbirds

3. Memphis Grizzlies

We’re anxiously waiting to see if the Tigers get a #2 — even #1 — preseason ranking, but no matter how they play, Coach Cal’s Tigers have captured the hearts of Memphians.

Justin Fox Burks

1st Place: Best Family Entertainment

Best Grizzlies
Player

1. Pau Gasol

2. Mike Miller

3. Rudy Gay

When the Grizzlies first came to town, all anyone talked about was a fellow named Shane Battier. But a lanky Spaniard also began to pile up points in the paint, and when Battier jumped ship, Gasol quickly became the fan favorite. We keep hearing all this talk of trades, but new coach Marc Iavaroni insists Gasol is here to stay. We hope so.

Justin Fox Burks

1st Place: Best Grizzlies Player

Best Local Athlete

READERS’ CHOICE

Pau Gasol

DeAngelo Williams

Mike Miller

Loren Roberts

John Daly

Chris Douglas-Roberts

One of our colleagues, who knows quite a bit about sports in Memphis, recently declared that if Memphis ever put up a statue to its greatest athlete, it would have to decide between Larry Finch or Pau Gasol. Coach Finch didn’t garner many votes this time, and nobody drew enough votes for us to declare first-, second-, or third-place finishes, but our readers love their sports, naming players from basketball, football, and golf.

Categories
News The Fly-By

High Stakes

I know. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. But I’m sorry, that’s one mantra I can’t keep.

Honestly, I didn’t know what to expect when I traveled to Las Vegas earlier this month. I thought I’d soak up some sun, drop a few dollars in the slots, and basically relax.

But two things occurred to me. The first is that other cities could learn a lot from Vegas, the country’s premier convention city. While I was there, I heard that the city had three conventions in town, and every single one of their 150,000-plus hotel rooms was booked.

To be fair, other cities don’t have the luxury of living off gamblers and casinos, but there are other things the city has done that could be in the cards.

If Vegas did anything successfully, it was taking a patch of desert and creating a place that people want to experience, even if that means experiencing 3,000-degree heat, dust from ongoing construction sites in their eyes and mouths, and strange men flicking pictures of nude women at them.

Last week, during a nationwide heat wave, the mercury in Vegas hit 116, just a degree below its record. But people were still on the Strip in droves.

What is it? Despite the nudie-picture people, tourists feel safe. Maybe not in New York, New York, where a recent shooting gave the casino’s theme a bit more realism, but I digress.

And even though most things in Vegas costs an arm and a leg, the Strip is a free show.

We found ourselves walking down it one night and, although we missed seeing the ship sink at Treasure Island, we chanced upon a volcano erupting at the Mirage, fountains dancing at the Bellagio, and nightly fireworks exploding above Caesars Palace that put Memphis’ July 4th celebrations to shame.

Yes, erupting volcanoes, dancing fountains, and exploding fireworks take money, and the gaming industry — with its $85 billion in annual revenue — has it in spades. But think about what they’ve gotten in return.

I will say, I thought the volcano was a bit ridiculous. But when a fountain set to music can make people crowd together in record-breaking heat, maybe it’s something to consider when looking at local public spaces.

A lot of people have cited Vegas’ successful marketing campaign, but having something so marketable raises the odds. They’ve mined their image very successfully, not just the Rat Pack image from the past but the idea that everyone can find a little bit of excitement in Vegas.

And that happens — literally — even at street level.

The second thing that occurred to me has a lot more riding on it locally. Tunica might be dismissed in Ocean’s Thirteen as the place old games go to die, but Memphis can’t overlook Tunica.

Las Vegas is going through a major building boom, one said to be fed by smaller gambling venues across the United States whetting Americans’ appetites. I don’t see the trend stopping any time soon.

According to Hoover’s online industry profiles, 50 to 60 percent of a hotel casino’s revenue comes from gaming. The other roughly 50 percent comes from food and beverages, guest rooms, shows, and other entertainment.

I don’t know how much of Vegas’ profits ride on high rollers, but I saw a lot of people in cargo shorts, T-shirts, and fanny packs … people who would not be out of place in Tunica.

We don’t need to worry just about DeSoto County becoming the place to live, we need to think about DeSoto County becoming the area’s leading tourist destination. What would it take? A Cirque du Soleil? A water park? More golf courses?

Ideally, Graceland and Stax could benefit from Tunica the same way the Grand Canyon benefits from Vegas — as a place for visiting gamblers to go on day trips.

How can you compete with a place that comps buffets and is designed to attract people … and keep them there?

If I were a betting woman, I’d say we need to find a way to get in on the action.