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For Hsieh, the festival will be a way to reintroduce Las Vegas to itself. Choudhry says 40 percent of tickets have gone to Las Vegas residents, most of whom have never spent time downtown, a neighborhood still best known for the Fremont Street Experience, a walking mall next to the town's oldest casinos that sprawls out beneath a long metal canopy rigged with hourly light show.During the past few years, the adjacent area, dubbed Fremont East, has become the closest thing Las Vegas has to a traditional neighborhood, with cutesy restaurants, high-concept bars and a cozy cafe all clustered within walking distance. The festival may be the most high profile of the 200 or so Hsieh's organization is sponsoring. In addition to 70 bands and DJs, Life Is Beautiful will feature wine tastings, dozens of food vendors, two Ferris wheels, and the spectacle of pop icons swapping instruments for aprons and cooking alongside celebrity chefs. Side stages will feature performances grabbed from the Strip, including Cirque du Solei acrobatics. There are reasons the festival might not make the splash organizers hope. Prices are relatively high
-- $100 for a day -- with fewer big names than a typical summer music festival. There's also the possibility of competition from the Strip, which doesn't need a festival because it is a festival.
It's unclear that people in Las Vegas have an appetite for the more obscure acts further down the ticket, and not everyone is drawn to Life is Beautiful's warm and fuzzy aesthetic, with its red and purple heart logo. A group of local punks are staging a counter-festival this weekend, with a title that borrows the "Life is" construction, but ends on a bleaker, more obscene, note. But even the organizer of that festival, Jack Johnson, gives credit to the downtown effort. "We're just capitalizing on the attention," he said. "The party spirit is contagious"
[Associated
Press;
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