Damon Hodge
Story Archive
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Music
Lyrical longevity
Wednesday, June 23, 2010 "When I started the parties, I made sure that we focused on attracting real fans."
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Dining
Soul-satisfying fare at Ella Em's
Wednesday, April 21, 2010 Ella Em's fried chicken has caused a fuss, but this restaurant has more to offer.
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Music
Making their Move
Wednesday, March 31, 2010 Meet the most successful local hip-hop group no one has ever heard of.
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Features
The State of Race Relations: An uneasy peace
Thursday, Jan. 21, 2010 West Las Vegas now sits in the city’s most racially diverse district. With diversity comes both promise and peril.
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Dining
Angie's is good for the soul
Wednesday, Jan. 13, 2010 Meet Angie, an Ohio-by-way-of-South Carolina soul-food matriarch, whose two restaurants on Cleveland’s east side have provided that city’s residents a deep-fried fix for a quarter-century.
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Music
Hustle and go: Vegas hip-hop’s Mr. Do Everything refuses to slow down
Wednesday, Dec. 23, 2009 After 17 years worth on the local hip-hop frontline, DJ Dantana has stories.
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Music
Vegas rapper Mr. Finley signs with iconic label Def Jam
Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2009 “I’m definitely carrying the city on my back.”
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Local Music
Ladies first: Female rappers, Las Vegas and breaking through
Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2009 Ms. Undastood and Lady L.U.S.T. hope to empower female emcees.
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Local Music
Rideout
Thursday, Aug. 27, 2009 Cut from the North Las Vegas thug-hustle cloth, Rideout is, perhaps, one of Northtown’s more able lyricists.
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Local Music
Skydro
Thursday, Aug. 27, 2009 Daydream-inspiring, but in a generally good way, Success Stories is unlike anything you’ve ever heard from Vegas hip-hop. For starters, the 20-song CD is overwhelmingly positive.
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Local Music
Hack the Mack
Thursday, Aug. 27, 2009 Hack the Mack starts strong, but as the CD proceeds, there’s less spitfire, and Hack’s retreat to tired and ultimately unadventurous topics (guns, girls and ganja) seems to sap his energy.
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Music
Getting bigger
Thursday, July 30, 2009 At 6-foot-7, 330 pounds, Vegas-by-way-of-California artist Big B is unquestionably the biggest (and perhaps only) rapper/punker/white-trash guru/Carey Hart flunky in the music industry. And he’s hungry.
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Music
Jay-Z
Thursday, July 9, 2009 Watching Fabolous and Ciara lumber through uninspiring sets before Jay-Z took the stage Friday meant that the night’s success rested on Jay-Z’s capable shoulders.
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2008 Presidential Election
Muslims speak out
Thursday, Oct. 2, 2008 For nearly 20 months, U.S. Muslims have watched Barack Obama fumble as he tries to debunk rumors that he’s a closet Muslim.
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Politics
A debate to remember (and forget)
Thursday, Oct. 2, 2008 n hit the jackpot. Minutes into Friday evening’s presidential debate-viewing party at Sierra Gold at Jones and the I-215, someone won $20. Two center-bar televisions cut away from Barack Obama’s meandering economic prescription for the recession, and up popped glowing graphics and the word jackpot in red uppercase letter
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Education
Hey, everyone, important community issues being discussed here!
Thursday, Oct. 2, 2008 School over, dozens of students filed past the solitary sign-holder pointing visitors to the Greenspun Junior High auditorium for the first of several community forums on education sponsored by state Senate Democrats.
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Politics
Electile dysfunction
Thursday, Sept. 25, 2008 Florida in 2000 gave us hanging chads and butterfly ballots. Ohio in 2004 set precedents for voter intimidation and massive disenfranchisement (350,000 missing or purged names).
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Education
Touring the educational corridor
Thursday, Sept. 25, 2008 New York-based Edison Schools, the nation’s largest and most controversial for-profit school-management company, roared into town in 2000, winning the right to manage seven campuses, including one of the state’s most troubled—West Middle School. Burrow into a surly patch of the city, off of Lake Mead just west of Martin Luther King, and there is West. North of the school is Buena Vista, a shuttered apartment complex politely described as a mini-Beirut; to the east, the FBI’s gleaming new headquarters occupies a patch of desert that was once a popular disposing ground for used condoms and spent shell casings.
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Music
Worldwide local tour
Thursday, Sept. 25, 2008 Juiced by receptive crowds at First Friday performances in February, the West Las Vegas rapper set his sights on large bars and casino showrooms. Most venues declined before even hearing his pitch.
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2008 Presidential Election
No flip-flops
Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2008 Sunday morning and the sun is on low boil. An inordinate number of flies annoyingly hover near the entrance of the Sunrise Library. Outside, a few Barack Obama supporters prepare clipboards and paperwork for the day’s mission: persuading people to support their man.
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Politics
Lowden Clear
Thursday, Sept. 18, 2008 Come November 4, we’ll know whether Nevada Republican Party chair Sue Lowden is Nero, sitting idly by as the empire burns, or the political version of Joe Namath.
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Courts
What's the use?
Thursday, Sept. 4, 2008 Real-estate agent Jack LeVine describes the shuttered Clark County Courthouse on Third Street as a “classic icon of mid-century modernism.” You may be thinking: This place, modernist? Even before it closed in 2004—its court functions moving to the stately, 17-story Regional Justice Center a few blocks away—probably few thought that this place, with its boxy shape and the aqua-colored siding on its towering column, was much to look at.
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CD Review
Beats, rhymes & life
Thursday, Aug. 28, 2008 Damon Hodge reviews 3 CDs from local hip hop artists.
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Drugs
Solemn journey
Thursday, Aug. 14, 2008 Debbie Zarder takes a deep breath. Lips trembling, she stifles tears and begins walking down the narrow hallway in her modest Henderson home, past the game room where her son, Robert David Jojola, spent many evenings playing games on his PS2 system, toward the scrum of barking dogs, some of which he helped deliver, and to the door leading to his room. Everything looks much as it did on May 23, the day he died.
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Politics
Movement or fan club?
Thursday, Aug. 7, 2008 A line forms behind a circle of people flanking a table where ex-Black Panther Dhoruba Bin Wahad waxes pseudo-philosophic on the inherent evil of the U.S. political system. “President Bush should’ve been stopped a long time ago, but no one’s been willing to incur the wrath of the empire,” Wahad says of this unseen, Bush-empowering cabal.
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Music
Paging Mr. D ... Mr. Chuck D
Thursday, Aug. 7, 2008 Nas is bumping on the public-address system as T.J. Crawford readies the remaining National Hip-Hop Political Convention attendees for a closing session on the fall elections. “Can I have everyone’s attention?” Crawford says to nearly 60 people in UNLV’s Classroom Building Complex auditorium on Sunday afternoon. Deep-voiced, stocky and built like an NFL fullback, Crawford is a commanding presence, which helps him rein everyone in. After three days of meeting, intellectual jousting—and, yes, some partying—people are antsy to go home.
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Intersection
Trial run
Thursday, July 31, 2008 “How lucky for me that he made the stupidest mistake of his life in my city!” Scot Savage is talking about former NFL star, television pitchman and double-murder acquittee Orenthal James Simpson.
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Nevada
Five Questions with Troy Nkrumah, local organizing head of the National Hip-Hop Political Convention
Thursday, July 31, 2008 [Vegas hosting the National Hip-Hop Political Convention] is major considering Las Vegas attempted a ban of hip-hop. That, along with the fact that, nationally, Vegas is not on the map for either hip-hop—except for the b-boys—or for progressive youth activism. The 2008 Convention is the perfect opportunity because all eyes will be on Vegas.
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Music
Felina
Thursday, July 24, 2008 Vegas has been barren on the R&B front, but Felina, the first R&B act on Heat City Recordz, aims to change this with the debut of Lady Like.
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Music
Nas
Thursday, July 17, 2008 Nas is cursed. Ever since the release of 1994’s seminal Illmatic, the Queensbridge representer has faced impossibly high expectations.
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Taxes
Taxing argument
Thursday, July 17, 2008 Here’s the deal, folks: We need higher taxes. There, I said it. And (gulp) I mean it. We need them because we can’t budget-cut ($1 billion and counting) our way to fiscal health. Nor can we rely on Casino Inc. to part with much more—gaming revenues already provide half of Nevada’s general-fund budget.
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Literature
Sin City sex trade
Thursday, July 10, 2008 Tell-all books have a hold on the public psyche for much the same reason that high-level gossip does: Americans are a nosy bunch, as addicted to TMZ.com and Page Six as older generations were to the McNeil-Lehrer Report.
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Music
Rhyme N Rhythm
Thursday, July 3, 2008 Press materials for Rhyme N Rhythm describe the group as a hip-hop soul funk experience, but its seven-song demo could more aptly be described as Pharcyde-ish bonhomie mixed with Roots-ish musicality.
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Music
Hogg Corps
Thursday, July 3, 2008 Bay Area expatriates Hogg Corps don’t swing for the fences as much as they could on Street Concepts, and the result is an uneven CD that’s about as satisfying as a handful of fries on an empty stomach.
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2008 Presidential Election
Basketball vs. Barack
Thursday, June 26, 2008 The latest misnomered iteration of the U.S. basketball Dream Team begins practice this weekend in Las Vegas, in preparation for (hopefully) winning gold at the upcoming Beijing Olympics and restoring American hoops supremacy. In case you’re keeping score, NBA-ers haven’t won a gold medal since 2000 and haven’t inspired global dunk-on-your-head, shoot-a-three-in-your-eye fear since 1992’s Bird-Magic-Jordan squad.
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Features
The Unsung List
Thursday, June 19, 2008 There are more Las Vegans making a difference in our community than you might think. Meet some of the city's unsung heroes.
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Features
Crusading for your community
Thursday, June 19, 2008 By now, it’s a story we’re used to: Vegas sits atop every bad list and brings up the rear on every good list. Everything from our schools to our rickety social service infrastructure to the way we treat our homeless needs dramatic improvement. Meanwhile, our rapid growth, relative affordability (thanks foreclosure crisis), job stability (despite the economic downturn) and hotness factor (kudos to George Maloof, among others) are the envy of the country.
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Features
Who ya’ gonna call?
Thursday, June 19, 2008 Whether you want to help the homeless, save the environment or to sidewalk and shove, you can depend on these proven activists to deliver
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People
The heavenly hitter
Thursday, June 12, 2008 Lerner’s in the makeup chair, readying for his next commercial, whose campy script calls for Lerner to narrowly escape an oncoming car. Lerner is the self-professed Heavy Hitter of personal-injury lawyers—“Many of our clients have received settlements of over One Million Dollars ($1,000,000.00)!” his website screams. He’s practiced law in town for nearly 20 years, the last 10 of which he’s spent building a reputation as an ambulance-chasing, do-gooding, make-the-bad-guy-pay attorney, even if that superhero persona exists first and foremost in his own mind.
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Music
Bun B
Thursday, June 12, 2008 With II Trill, the follow up to 2005’s semi-solid Trill, Bun B (Bernard Freeman) might finally get credit for helping power the South’s rise in the rap game.
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Dining
From TV to Vegas
Thursday, June 5, 2008 Kitchen competitions have taken cable and Las Vegas by storm. Hell's Kitchen winner (3rd season) Rock Harper and Iron Chef America competitor Akira Back spill the secrets of their prime-time moments doing battle at the cutting board.
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Dining
I want to be a star
Thursday, June 5, 2008 You’d think watching Gordon Ramsay curse out lowly waffle-flippers on Hell’s Kitchen would be enough to deter anyone from a career in the kitchen. Not so. Enrollment in culinary schools throughout the country is on the rise, powered, industry observers say, by the rising popularity of reality-television cooking shows such as Bravo’s Top Chef, Fox’s Hell’s Kitchen and the Food Network’s Next Food Network Star.
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Gaming
Throw the Black Book at 'em
Thursday, May 29, 2008 The names are Scorsese flick-worthy: Francis “Lefty” Rosenthal; Dominic Anthony Spinale; Joseph Vincent Cusumano. Their crimes, the stuff of wise-guy legend: Louis Tom Dragna led organized crime in Southern California; Buffalo mobster Stephen Anthony Cino racked up a laundry list of charges, from robbery to extortion. Their bravado, incomparable: Fred Anthony Pascente was a Chicago detective busted for mail fraud and linked to the Chicago mob; Timothy John Childs once listed “slot cheat” as his occupation on a loan application.
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Education
The little (soon-to-be-big) college that could
Thursday, May 22, 2008 Nevada State College has room to grow and it hopes to do just that.
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Sports
Do you feel a draft?
Thursday, May 8, 2008 Let’s face it: UNLV will probably never reach Trojan (USC) heights in football, win as many NCAA hoops titles as UCLA (11), or fashion a college baseball dynasty like Louisiana State University. The best we can hope for is another national hoops crown in the near future. No pressure, Lon Kruger, no pressure.