Greg Blake Miller
Managing Editor
Contact: 868-4514 • Email
Miller has helped lead Vegas Seven’s editorial team since 2010, during which time the magazine has received more than 40 state and regional honors. Named Nevada’s Outstanding Journalist for 2011, he is interested in both Las Vegas’ grand myths and its quiet spaces. “Sometimes our city’s indefensible,” he says, “but in the end it’s unsinkable. There’s strength in our sense of difference here—that chip on the shoulder keeps us fighting.”
Las Vegas is Miller’s hometown, but his career has taken him to Seattle, Los Angeles and Moscow, Russia, where he was a staff writer for the Moscow Times. He has also taught journalism, communication studies, literature and writing at the University of Oregon and UNLV.
Miller holds a doctorate in international communication from the University of Oregon, and has spoken at national and international communication conferences, often focusing on the unexpected connections between nostalgia, media and social progress. He sees these connections both in his work on Russian cinema and in his closer-to-home writing on the history of UNLV basketball. A Rebel fan since childhood, he admits the one thing that can pull him away from a good Russian movie is an even better UNLV basketball game.
Recent Articles
The Mayor of Downtown
Oscar Goodman bet his legacy on an urban renaissance. Did he pull it off?
June 9th, 2011
A dozen years ago, when he was a rookie Las Vegas mayoral candidate, the mob lawyer Oscar Goodman—who had once flicked away FBI agents and federal prosecutors like lint from a smoking jacket—decided that he wanted to be loved. So the first thing he did was tell the city how much he loved it.
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Into the Sunset
June 9th, 2011
Leave it to the state to do this to Oscar Goodman. The day before Las Vegas voters decided who would step into his mayoral shadow, the Legislature killed off his latest chances to land a stadium for the Valley. It did, however, tell him that he could once again smoke while eating. Though any plans he had to smoke and eat while texting in a moving car will have to be set aside. Nevada libertarianism only goes so far.
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Classics & Chestnuts
May 26th, 2011
There ought to be nothing more unpredictable than awards shows and Armageddon. The pounding heart, the sweating palms, the waiting. Any minute, an announcement will come from God, or from that guy in The Hangover (who emceed the May 22 Billboard Music Awards but, regrettably, not the Rapture), that forever changes at least one life, or maybe all lives.
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Goodbye to All That
May 19th, 2011
The thing about farewells is they’re much more pleasant when you know where you’re going next. But when, like a lumbering drunk, you break the furniture on the way out and step into the void of what’s next, it’s hard to relish the sweetness of goodbye. The Sahara is gone, the building is staying up, and not even the owner of the place, Sam Nazarian, can honestly tell you what for. In the phantom fever-vision future (where certain things, like local stadiums, forever reside), the Sahara site is home to a slick SLS Hotel that simultaneously embraces what Nazarian calls “the new Vegas” (whatever that is) and the classic Vegas of the Sahara’s heyday, which ended about 45 years ago.
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The Scarlet Stones of Memory
The Valley of Fire is close to home in more ways than one
May 12th, 2011
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The Strange Calm of Acceptance
May 12th, 2011
Nonetheless, as a city and as a state, we seem to have weathered an angry storm—and can only hope that today’s relative calm does not herald another.
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The Age of Abandon
The bin Laden era is over. What the national mood might mean for Las Vegas.
May 5th, 2011
Few cities take the cultural pulse more assiduously than Las Vegas. The last time America felt good about itself, the town built a pyramid and an emerald city and invited you to bring the kids. But when the nation’s feeling low, Vegas decorates itself like a space-age boudoir: dim nooks, red light, curvaceous spaceship furniture with accents in red velvet—part Victorian fetish, part post-nuclear fuck-it-all, a sort of nostalgic erotic futurism.
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3. The Vegas Light Saver
April 21st, 2011
This man has rappelled off the Rio and stood atop the Stratosphere spire. He has walked through the Hilton’s Elvis suite, greeted Engelbert Humperdinck on his way, and ascended to the top of the hotel’s sign. He’s worked on the giant antique flasher panels of Fremont Street, and he’s taken 15,000-volt hits from neon transformers. But the most radical thing Scott Hill ever had to do was change the nature of lighting on one of the brightest streets in the world.
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7. Guardians of the Shattered-Glass Dream
Can the Strip’s used bottles pave the way to a greener Las Vegas?
April 21st, 2011
In the mid-2000s, at a time when Scott McCombs could have been calmly multiplying the rewards of Realm of Design, the architectural accents firm he and his wife, Cindy had started in 1991, Scott became fascinated with the possibility that fly ash left over from burnt coal could be mixed with recycled glass to create a new kind of concrete. It would be a concrete that would use virtually no virgin materials, necessitate no environmentally damaging quarrying, and keep a whole bunch of ash and glass out of landfills.
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Old-School Visionary
The nostalgic future of Carolyn Goodman
April 14th, 2011
Carolyn Goodman, who will face off against Chris Giunchigliani on June 7 for the right to be Las Vegas’ next mayor, has been admirably clear about her major policy goal: She wants carry on her the legacy of her husband, Mayor Oscar Goodman.
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