Merlin: It's on!

Dear reader, I put it to ye thusly: what better holiday season entertainment fare can you think of, besides seeing a Shakespeare puppet play that most scholars disown, starring a clown, a pregnant woman, and Satan, held in a charming NYC warehouse?

Can't think of any, can you?

"The Birth of Merlin" in NYC!

Catclaw's NYC debut will be The Birth of Merlin, allegedly written by William Shakespeare and William Rowley, presented here as a surrealist puppet show. Watch this space, as well as the Catclaw blog, for further details!

Farewell to Conan

We're going to miss our friend Conan O'Brien, who's made NYC a wackier place to be for years. He closes the doors to his Late Night set tonight (if there's any set left to close - he's been systematically smashing it into pieces with an axe!) but we look forward to seeing him transplanted to Los Angeles, where he'll finally take over The Tonight Show at long last.

Shepard Fairey busted in Boston

Internationally acclaimed graffiti-graphics king Shepard Fairey, who recently achieved new fame as the designer of Obama's "Hope" campaign poster, has been arrested in Boston for alleged tagging.

Fairey was on his way to the Institute of Contemporary Art to DJ at a sold-out party kicking off his first solo exhibition, "Supply and Demand". Unbeknownst to him, two arrest warrants had been issued on January 24 after police determined that he had tagged property in two locations with his street art campaign featuring Andre the Giant and the word "obey," according to Boston police officer James Kenneally.

Fairey was released a few hours after his arrest, and is scheduled to be arraigned Monday.

Fairey may or may not have actually done the tagging while he was in town, but my question is, exactly how did the Boston police determine that he was directly responsible? Fairey makes his stickers and stencils widely available worldwide, and I daresay that 90 percent of the Andre/Obey tagging being done out there nowadays is done by persons other than Fairey himself.

Boston, you may recall, is the same place where police and the mayor went completely batshit crazy in 2007, and tried to treat a lightbox guerilla-marketing campaign for "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" as a "terrorism hoax" and shut down portions of the city at great expense. The mayor and the police crassly attempted to position themselves as valiant crime-fighting heroes for this surreal debacle of their own making. Of the 10 cities in which the Lite-Brite-like LED displays were placed only Boston saw them as a matter of concern, and the installations had been up for weeks prior to the hysteria.

It's A New World

Obamatinis at Bloomingdale Road!

I just found they're serving Obamatinis at Bloomingdale Road! I wonder if it's too late to get an Obamatini? And I wonder what's in it??

George Steel headed for NYC Opera

Source: Dallas Morning News.

Eyebrows rose last summer when the Dallas Opera named George Steel its new general director.

Oh, sure, the opera board was proud of landing a "star" from New York.

And there was boo-hooing in the New York media at the loss of one of the artsy crowd's darlings, acclaimed for 11 years of imaginative programming at Columbia University's Miller Theatre.

But with the Dallas Opera facing daunting financial challenges with its impending move to the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts Winspear Opera House, savvy operaphiles wondered why Dallas was hiring someone who had never run an opera company. And it wasn't long after Steel's arrival here, in October, that whispers of discontent became a crescendo of complaint.

Then, on Wednesday, came confirmation of what had been rumored for the last month: Steel is leaving at the end of January to take over the New York City Opera.

Abuzz with gossip for weeks, opera blogs have gone nuclear over the news. (If you don't mind some adult language, check parterre.com.)

Whatever his gifts, and the good intentions of the Dallas Opera board, George Steel was miscast here.

He was right to advocate more adventurous programming. For a company with a history of imaginative offerings in decades past, the Dallas Opera has gone bland in recent years. The 2008-09 season is about as daring as macaroni and cheese.

But, in a challenging economy, when audiences hesitate to take chances on anything but sure bets, Steel was making noises about booking really obscure French operas and Leonard Bernstein's generally dismissed A Quiet Place.

Voraxica!

Now there's a blog for the 21st-century space-age quasi-burlesque entertainment genre known as Voraxica, hosted by The Catclaw Theatre Company's associated steampunky secret society known as The Voraxium.

Click here to visit the Voraxical Theatre blog.

Fuel To Build A Fire

Four of my favorite New Yorkers, Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Ace Frehley and Peter Criss of KISS. This painting was acquired by Simmons and Stanley's KISS Coffeehouse in Myrtle Beach after my art show Fuel To Build A Fire there in 2007.

Village Voice Dumps Nat Hentoff

It didn't really come as a big surprise to me this morning to learn that the Village Voice has laid off the legendary Nat Hentoff. The Village Voice has pretty much been an ineffectual dinosaur for too many years now, and has long since outlived its meager usefulness. Now they've laid off the one person who still gave their rag a shred of credibility.

Think I'm being hyperbolic? Check out their website, or the screenshot I just took of their front page. These people consider an interview with scumbag gossip-columnist Perez Hilton to be front-page news. Other scintillating articles considered vital by their website at this moment include "How tacky will the inauguration balls be?" and "My boyfriend became an ugly fatty, help!"

Newspapers are dying all over the world at a rapid rate, and the Village Voice looks poised to be next on the list, having committed seppuku with this extremely bad play. Good riddance to 'em, I say.

Crispy Cards

Banjer (Crispy)

Patrick Amsterdam

I've just put the finishing touches on a brand new comedy-drama play entitled Patrick Amsterdam. The title character, Patrick, is a failed washed-up lounge singer determined to succeed but increasingly watching his chances slipping away.

There's a good possibility that this will be the next Catclaw production in NYC after Toulouse-inations.

Coming Soon: PANOLA

A few years back, I did a deliberately crappy, stream of consciousness, done-in-ten-minutes weekly comic project called Window Comics. Each Sunday morning, I'd slap out a crude comic and paste it up in the window of my studio for passersby to gawk at.

A recurring feature was Panola, originally begun as a mini-serial inside the Window Comics project.

Never one to let go of old half-baked ideas, I'm pleased as pie to announce that Panola is being given a new life as an independently syndicated comic strip! Look for it to debut in worthy publications later in the year....

105 Riv

Ever been to 105 Riv? I was there only fleetingly and didn't get to try the drinks spoken of at Shecky's:

Try one of the zany house cocktails guaranteed to start a conversation. How about, Good Night and Good Luck? It's loaded with Absolut vodka, berry puree, Red Bull, and Pop Rocks. It might sound cheesy now, but in the future people will be sitting in a floating eco-thermal café on Rivington, sipping non-alcoholic, soy-based, decaffeinated green teas, asking, "Where’s the Pop Rocks and vodka?"

Adventures in Parking

Remind me to try this sometime, because parking in Midtown is hell, I tell ya.