Off To Disney

My nephew in Arizona graduated high school last night and today they're leaving for a drive to Disneyland where the park will be open all night for them and thousands of other graduating seniors in the Southwestern U.S. Then they drive back. I've been invited to go, I think it'll be an amazing experience with my nephew and, more than likely, a really good travel essay. So I'm outta here till Friday. Bye bye.

Show is UP: What Rimes With Badu

This week's show is now available. The link on TheStripPodcast.Com will be fixed later today, but this is correct:

May 22: Leann Rimes and Erykah Badu

We’re getting a little bit country, a little bit soul this week with interviews with two very different artists. First, former teen prodigy LeAnn Rimes is all grown up and writing her own music these days, some of it offering a window into what it was like to transition from teen phenom to married lady. Then, Erykah Badu, the R&B star often likened to Billie Holliday, is back after a five-year break with three – yes, three – new albums this year. She’ll explain how Apple’s Garageband kicked off that spate. Also, the winner of our Jersey Boys tickets giveaway is revealed!

In Banter: Playing the Criss Angel Red Carpet audio, a weird country song, Aria is named, Jubilee is old and a peek at Fontainbleau.

Links

Leann Rimes’ site is here
Erykah Badu’s site is here
Get tickets to Rimes’ concert at the MGM Grand here
Get tickets to Badu’s 6/13 concert at the House of Blues here
Hollyscoop is here
Read about Criss Angel’s threat to Norm Clarke here
Sharmian, who wrote that weird country song, is here
The YouTube video of the notable Taylor Swift can be seen here
Steve’s blog posts about the naming of Aria is here
Get tickets to Jubilee! here
The website for the Fontainebleau is here
An image of the Vegas Fontainebleau is here
The Jersey Boys Podcast can be found here

R-J Bafflingly Sucks Up To Criss Angel

Yesterday, tickets for Criss Angel's new Cirque show went on sale. That, evidently, is considered important news to the local media. I can't figure out on what journalistic planet that ought to be the case, but whatever.

The trouble is, Criss Angel stands accused by Norm Clarke of the R-J of having shoved and threatened him over his coverage. Several very credible eyewitnesses saw the incident. Angel has refused to answer questions about it, then whined to me on the carpet at the ACMAs the other day that people don't know the whole story.

Imagine, then, my surprise when the normally excellent Mike Weatherford ran this embarrassing puff piece on Angel and his ticket sales in yesterday's newspaper. There is nary a question, comment or no-comment in it about the most significant, most newsworthy relevance of Criss Angel at this point in time, his alleged threat to a journalist.

I asked Mike about this omission and here is his response, which was also sent to Richard Abowitz of the L.A. Times' Vegas blog when he, too, asked:

"This hasn't been actively discussed, but I think it has gone unsaid that since Norm and I mostly work independently already, I need to keep doing my thing (cover this show all the way through its opening) and let him do his. Besides, the interviews weren't one-on-one and there was a sense of the meter running in the presence of Kats and the AP on my side of the table, and the show's director and choreographer on the other, none of whom would probably appreciate the limited window of time sidetracked by Norm talk."

Wow. There are so many things wrong with this I can't get my head wrapped around them all. First, all journalists at all times are responsible for asking the most newsworthy questions. It doesn't matter if others are covering it and it doesn't matter if you're sharing access with other people.

And particular in this circumstance, why does Mike, Kats and the AP think they were invited to sit down with these people? Oh! That's right! To promote their forthcoming $100 million show. Something tells me they were going to sit right where they were as long as it took to give the journalists the promotional bits they wanted to get out there in the ether. They were using the journalists in no uncertain terms, but the journalists owe it to the public to ask the hard, uncomfortable questions and not just go along for the ride.

Think of the case of Martha Stewart thinking she'd get a free pass at the height of her tax-evasion scandals when she went on the CBS morning show and got badgered by the anchor during a food segment. Martha didn't get to decide what sorts of questions she answered or to merely focus on her salad just because she thinks that she picked a softball forum. And if she wouldn't answer the questions, then she didn't get to do her little self-promotional thing.

That this hasn't been "actively discussed" within the halls of the Review-Journal is even more shocking, although not surprising given the famous contempt for Clarke possessed by R-J Editor Thomas Mitchell. Violence and threats of violence against reporters are not small matters. They weren't back in the day when journalists were being threatened for covering the Mafia and they're not today when a star with thousands of rabid goth-crazed followers can cause serious harm that even the star himself doesn't intend.

It also does not matter if the subject matter is celebrity gossip nor the regard with which anyone holds journalist involved. (In this case, I happen to hold Norm Clarke in quite high regard because he's pretty much the only journalist in Las Vegas who actually credits others for stories they break. That's a level of uncommon integrity and generosity that deserves a great deal of respect.)

I do wonder, too, how such excellent reporters as Greenspun's John Katsilometes and whomever was sent by the Associated Press similarly fail to understand the gravity of the matter. Threats against journalists can cause a chilling impact on their comfort level in covering someone in the appropriate manner. It's a serious situation.

No self-respecting journalist ought to be asking Angel anything else until he at least responds to this situation and disavows any violence, suggested or otherwise, against journalists.

The Strip is LIVE at 7 pm PT!

Join us at 7 pm for the live version of "The Strip" featuring LeAnn Rimes and Erykah Badu tonight! Plus, the winner of our Jersey Boys tickets giveaway and, finally, a new trivia question!

Come to LVRocks.Com and chat with fellow listeners! As always, if you can't make it, hooray! Be that way. Grab the podcast on Thursday.

Here's the video of LeAnn's great new tune "Nothin' Better To Do" and then the video of Badu's "On & On," Miles' favorite of hers. Both are terrific videos and will get y'all in the mood.

Serve Us Up Some Fresh ARIA!

This is why you read this blog.

Way, way back on December 17, you read here the first inkling that the central 4,000-room hotel-casino of CityCenter might come to be known as ARIA. At the time, MGM Mirage Chief of Design and Construction Bobby Baldwin disclosed to me that it was a name the brass loved but that they couldn't wrestle free the trademarks.

Evidently, that logjam was broken sometime in the past seven weeks. As recently as late March, MGM Mirage Chairman and CEO Terry Lanni told me in an interview for The New York Times that we aired on "The Strip" on April 17 that naming the hotel was "one of the most frustrating things" he'd dealt with in his career.

I guess in the three weeks between when I spoke to Lanni and when we posted that interview, the matter was resolved. It's not unprecedented; Steve Wynn bought the name "Mirage" from more than one proprietor in Vegas including from what then became known as the Glass Pool Inn.

As the screenshot of the trademark filing above shows, they got their wish on April 11. Some further digging showed that as of April 15, MGM Mirage took ownership of the Internet domain name AriaVegas.com and AriaLV.Com. On May 1, they grabbed AriaHotelCasino.Com. I spoke today with the owner of AriaLasVegas.com, a Las Vegas man who bought the domain on Sept. 29, 2007. That's pretty prescient timing. He wouldn't discuss it his negotiations right now or how he might have known that it was a name under consideration.

I don't know if that logo above is in any way related to the resort's logo. I doubt it.

I asked Alan Feldman, the MGM spokesman, about the process. Why Aria?

"Interestingly enough, Aria was one of those names that came up early in the process. For a little while, we were focused on creating a new name, a new word. But the thing about Aria was, we kept coming back to it."

Like anything else in Vegas, it'll take some getting used to but is certainly workable. Remember how we scratched our heads at "Love"? Now it fits. Or THEhotel? Oh, wait. That one's still stupid.

My favorite Vegas name? Zumanity. I don't even like the show. I just like the name. What's yours?

No More Capn Crunch or Twinkies?

I just caught a TV ad for the Blue Man Group at Venetian. The image above startled me. As any good BMG fan knows, they don't use generic products. They use Cap'n Crunch cereal and Twinkies, not Junk N Puffs and Kreamy Kakes. What gives?

I suspect there's a licensing issue here, but if Cap'n Crunch and Twinkies are happy being used in the show itself, why would they possible object to the free TV exposure they'd get from being in Blue Man ads?

I've got an e-mail out to find out.

Criss Angel: I Didn't Threaten Norm

It's hard to believe that it's been more than a month since Norm Clarke of the Review-Journal wrote that he was threatened by Cirque du Soleil star Criss Angel at the Miss USA contest and, so far as I can tell, nobody has directly asked Angel for comment. I mean, the guy goes to more openings than a can opener.

So I did it last night while on the carpet at the ACMAs for USA Today, right after Dippy from HollyScoop (see earlier post) asked him what "country" is to him and let him pimp some trick he's planning to do on TV where he walks on Lake Mead. Has it dried up even sooner than predicted?

Here's how it went:

Friess: Are you planning to apologize for the threat you made against Norm Clarke of the Review-Journal?

Angel: The problem is, some people got their lines crossed. And if some people got the whole story, they would see that what he wrote is actually not what really happened. So there’s nothing to apologize for.

Friess: What really happened?

Angel: I’d need a while to explain that to you and now is not the appropriate time.

That's odd. For a full month, this story's been out there. Richard Abowitz of the L.A. Times' Vegas blog put in some unreturned calls and emails and heard nothing. Sherman Frederick, Norm's boss as publisher of the Review-Journal, finally peeled himself away a full week after the alleged threat from misleading his Sunday readers about a circulation increase that was actually a decrease to stand up on behalf of his journalist.

And yet in the face of such a PR nightmare, Mr. Angel -- neither of his own volition nor encouraged firmly by the companies that have tethered $100 million+ to his mercurial persona in Vegas -- bothered to issue a statement, do an interview, write a letter to the editor. Not only that, but he's scolding "people" for not having the whole story when ample opportunities have been provided him to give it?

Hey, Criss. Here's yet another chance. I've got all the time in the world. Whatcha waiting for?