Cherry Pitz and Joe the Shark are proud to present:

Hotsy Totsy Burlesque is back with…

HARRY POTTER & THE BOOBIES OF FIRE!

at The Delancey Lounge

Tuesday, Dec 21st – 9:30 PM – $8

168 Delancey Street, NYC (between Clinton and Attorney.) Map here. Just 2 blocks from the Delancey/Essex subway stop (F/J/M/Z) in Manhattan.

That’s right, Hotsy Totsy Burlesque is celebrating the holiday season with everyone’s favorite group of magical teens!

Will He Who Shall Not Be Named ruin Hannukah and Christmas for us?

Featuring Coney Island’s own ADAM ‘THE FIRST REAL MAN”

CHERRY PITZ
ATTA GIRL
AUDREY BLOOM
BB HEART
BRAD LAWRENCE
HARD CORY
JENNY C’EST QUOI
PETER AGUERO
LILITH EVERGREEN
and more!

Check out the swell photos from our production of DR WHO BURLESQUE. And check out a great review of our DR WHO show @Vitamin C4.

Last night in a “discount store” in Prospect Heights, I came across an amazing little item. See, not only have factories in China been producing unauthorized knockoffs of popular toys (which is nothing new)… it seems like they’re hitting the “shuffle” button with whatever figures they have left in stock, and coming up with new super-teams too! Case in point: the SENSE OF RIGHT ALLIANCE!

Apparently, a robot-armed Batman, Spider-Man, Superman, the yellow Power Ranger, The Thing, and a redheaded Reed Richards and have teamed up…

…to FENCE AGAINST THE EARTH!

And on top of this already delicious ridiculousness, when I took a closer look at their approximation of Superman:

…I immediately made this association:

God, I love this stuff.
PREVIOUSLY IN FOREIGN PLAYTIME ODDITIES: Coming to America Wrapped in Plastic and Cardboard

AND PREVIOUSLY IN AWESOME TOYS : The Longing for Lost Toys

Well today was a day. It was right up there, man — about as dumb as a day can get without generating anything worth repeating publicly. Actually, come to think of it, pretty much everything dumb that happened today is highly confidential. Now that I really focus on it, a participant in every single conversation I had today said “this is highly confidential.” For the last few, I was that person.

Let me tell you something: it ain’t fun.

Now I am sitting here at my desk with the top button of my jeans unbuttoned, practicing the lost art of the perfect smoke ring while writing this in one window and downloading Led Zeppelin tunes in another.

Things are looking up. And really, they could be a lot worse. A really good old friend of mine is in jail right now, and he just sent me a pretty bleak letter. I had to have a confidential conversation about its contents.

I could have written that letter.

But do you ever have those days where you’re just like “my GOD, what has happened to the spirit of ROCK?” Where you just look back at the stuff that you liked from your twenties and forget all the scraping for respect from the world in between the good moments and say to yourself, ‘hey man, I used to ROCK. I used to feel the Spirit of Rock and now it has shambled away forever.”

On the worst days you are standing behind a tall fence in the back of your own mind and listening to the Spirit of Rock play beach volleyball on the other side.

I might be having one of those days. They’re listening to Led Zeppelin on the other side of the fence, and apparently someone’s just shown up with a fresh pitcher of margaritas but I will never be invited to taste those drinks again.

So here’s my antidote to feeling like that – I just keep this picture on my iPhone and look at it whenever I need it:

I saw this while I was out walking around about a month ago, parked right on Marcy Ave. Just look at it. It looks like things in there smell bad but feel great, like the thing is crouching on its back wheels to leap on the highway to hell. I took it on my iPhone and then fiddled with it in a few apps and on Photoshop to make it look like an old movie. This photo may not be exactly what it looks like to look at that van, but it’s a pretty good representation of what it feels like.

The Spirit of Rock is alive and well and parked on Marcy Avenue. He may not be a roommate, but I’m still in his neighborhood. And overall, I think I like that dude a lot better now that we’re not living together anymore.

A friend of mine, Schaffer The Darklord, who is very creative, asked one of our other creative friends, director Burke Heffner,  to help him do something very funny. Then they asked a bunch of other folks from the burlesque scene to lend a hand (including Cyndi and me – though I have a lens flare for a head, thank you Burke – Peter Aguero, Magdelena Fox, Jenny C’est Quoi, Boo Bess the Baroness, Rosie 151, Mary Cyn, Stormy Leather, Victoria Privates, Big Heath, and the list goes on.)

Anyway, they succeeded in making something very funny. It is an over the top parody of the life of a Nerdcore rapper who can’t decide if what lies before him is a slippery slope or a toboggan run. The result is goofy, fun, and not necessarily safe for work.

Our journey begins with Nelson Lugo and Hard Cory trying to get our protagonist home safely…

My good friend Diane Dwyer has a 3 year old nephew named James. At the moment, James is obsessed with two things: snowmen, and Darth Vader.

PREVIOUSLY IN AWESOME KIDS’ DRAWINGS: young Jeff tackles the Transformers.

My grandmother’s name is Helen Abicht, but we all call her “Daro.” Today is her 97th birthday!

She and my grandfather helped take care of my sister and I when we were growing up. I feel so lucky to have lived close to them and had them as a constant, steady presence in my life for so long. Daro grew up during the Depression, and we always had so much fun with her without spending any money at all. She knows something that a lot of parents today don’t: it doesn’t take money or electronics to have a good time. Making ice cream, painting a picture and writing a story with someone you love is the deepest, best kind of fun you can have.

She’s full of all kinds of wisdom — and doesn’t think much of people who get bored easily.

I visited her in her apartment over the Thanksgiving holiday and asked her to share her secret for having such a long and happy life. Here’s her answer:

Read the rest of this entry »

I was all squirrelly last week leading up to last night’s show — wrangling machines, sending e-mails (so many e-mails) and in between the cracks, getting my own stories ready.

And it tickles me to no end that the show was a success. It was Tauntaun weather out last night, the first seriously cold night we’d had in New York this year. Anyone in their right mind would have been home under a blanket watching TV, but we had a full house. And they weren’t ALL our friends, either!

A bunch of people — total strangers — saw the flyer on BoingBoing and came on out to check it out, too. That’s so exciting to me, and that’s the Internet at its best: connecting people who never would have known about each other otherwise.

Everyone else’s performances were tight (say what you will about mine, I’m hardly objective) and the thing ran perfectly.

Here’s Brad Lawrence, hosting:

And here’s Cyndi, Magdalena Fox and Maggie (my girlfriend and a patient, helpful lady) waiting backstage:

Read the rest of this entry »

In preparation for the upcoming live show, I have decided to post something you won’t see from someone you will see. Because I take the direct route to nothing. Which is probably why my high school career went the way it did.

So at the live show, you will see a very talented magician and burlesque host. He will be performing magic. In this video I am posting, he is not. He is telling a story. His name is Nelson Lugo.

As part of Cyndi’s neverending quest to make burlesque performers tell a story and storytellers strip, we had Nelson over at Standard Issues in October.

He did a great job, because he is a charming man. However he did wear that hat. So this is more radio than video, in certain ways.

Oh, and you should drop by billyjoesboy.com. Because I am a brilliant literary mind who could desperately use the traffic bump.

It had been a looong day of walking around Brooklyn with a bag full of colored tape, looking for something to touch off an idea for another site intervention. That’s how it works for me. I’ve gotta lug the materials around and just sort of wait for the lightning to strike. I can target an area that’s likely to have some interesting detritus to do my wandering in, but that’s about it. The rest is out of my hands.


Late in the afternoon when I was pretty well sick of walking, and the sun was hitting a beautiful angle that I knew wouldn’t last for long, I turned down a dead-end industrial street in western Greenpoint. I can usually count on the side streets and factory lots near the East River waterfront to give me something to work with, and it seemed like this spot would be no exception. Among the mostly empty parking spaces of this factory lot, between cracks in the pavement that were filling in with tall, unruly grass, there was a wood-paneled TV with its screen smashed in; a metal folding chair missing its seat; a scattering of food wrappers and discarded shoes; a stack of plywood and shipping pallets; and the requisite nasty mattress, old tires, and busted auto glass. I stared at all of that bizness for a while, mentally rearranging things and visualizing appropriate sound effects for the possible vignettes… but nothing was switching me on. Not really.


I turned around ready to leave, and saw that I had been joined on the ground by a group of pigeons that had been watching from the factory roof. They were slowly head-bobbing in the direction of a rock-hard partial loaf of bread that someone must have been using to feed them at some point. It hit me like (insert your favorite metaphor for inspiration here): with a combination of crusty old bread to draw them in, and a good stomp on a stack of plywood to make them scatter, I might be able to choreograph these dirty little bastards.


So I laid down my tape, bloodied my fingertips a little bit breaking up the hardest loaf of bread known to man, arranged the bread near the tape-writing, and then repeated the picture-taking cycle: I waited for the pigeons to get up on the bread, stomped like hell on the nearby plywood, and snapped a picture of them scattering. Wait. Stomp. Snap. Wait. Stomp. Snap. Now let me tell you – it is damned hard to properly frame a shot without a tripod or remote shutter release, while repeatedly thwomping your leg down like a jackass. But I managed to get a few decent photos in the end. Here’s my favorite:

Mini-promo time: This shot, along with documentation of other recent interventions “WAAHHH” and “ZZZAP”, and a handful of my recent collages, will be on display (and for sale) from December 11th, 2010 through February 13th, 2011, as part of the group exhibition “PARTY CRASHERS” in Arlington, Virginia. Check it out if you’re down that way!