Friday
· Music round-up: Trans Am at the Troubadour; Oliver Future and Gliss at the Viper Room; Steel Train with Wounded
Cougar at the Echo.
· Baseball iron man Cal Ripken, Jr, whose record of 2,632 consecutive games will never be equaled by the current generation of pussified, pampered, and steroid-bloated stars, signs his new book, Get In the Game: 8 Principles of Perseverance That Make the Difference, at Vroman's Bookstore.
Saturday
· Do your part to help settle a decades-old war between those who cut down our trees and those who navigate Space in adult undergarments at the Lumberjacks vs. Astronauts Smack-Down, a cellphone scavenger hunt through Griffith Park.
· More music: Art Brut at the Troubadour; Klaxons at Echoplex; Ice Cube at the House of Blues; Jewel at Spaceland.
· Back to Griffith Park for the First Annual Griffith Park Environmental Film Festival, which features new green cinema staples like An Inconvenient Truth and Who Killed the Electric Car? [via Cheapskatin' LA]
Sunday
· This Sunday, The Brentwood Spring Art Show celebrates its 20th year of music, food, art, and rich people wandering around to sample music, food, and art.
· The "World's Largest Art Colony" invites the city over to wander through its seemingly endless studios at the Brewery Artwalk, its semiannual open house.

• [Black20.com]

You know, a guy loses his temper and leaves one little angry voicemail on his daughter's cellphone, and the next thing he knows, the LA Times is making with the cheap-shot "No wire hangers!" headlines. It's days like these that make a man grateful he's at least got a super-pal like YouTube Batman in his corner.

PrivacyWatch celebrity sightings are submitted by our readers, and are posted several times a week, so send them in often. Who knows? They may give you the upper hand in your ugly, ongoing custody battle. Submit yours to tips[AT]defamer.com (please put "sighting" or "PrivacyWatch" in the subject line) and tell everyone about the morning you spotted John Mayer waiting on the steak to cook at Mastro's.

This maddeningly brief report on fallen Idol Sanjaya Malakar's current whereabouts just came in from an operative over at Fox:

On this wet, chilly Friday, we know that this week's sponsors will be waiting at home for us by a crackling fire, ready to warm us up with a vigorous freaking. If you'd like to advertise on Defamer and penetrate us over and over again with your online-adversiting generosity, see this page.

· An executive think-tank composed of movie and TV heavyweights proposes that the studios and the unions jointly fund an independent report to examine the residual and new-media compensation issues that could lead to a strike, described as a "a showbiz version of the report from the Iraq Study Group." Get ready for a prolonged, bloody, and disastrous war, Hollywood! [Variety]
·Brad Pitt joins Ocean's 13 BFF George Clooney in a project in which he may actually be called upon to act, the Coen Brothers' Burn After Reading. [THR]
· NBC's Kevin Reilly indicates that his network is pushing towards a year-round development schedule, an attempt at filling the creative pipeline with projects that can take over the timeslots of next fall's Studio 60/Black Donnellys-style disappointments once they're yanked at midseason. [Variety]
· And in other NBC programming news, the network will throw a May sweeps Hail Mary by broadcasting movies on Sunday night, realizing that an all Deal or No Deal schedule is probably not going to solve its ratings woes. [THR]
· You know what Hollywood's got too many of? Those damn meetings. Who's with us, people? [Variety]

Erik Estrada can now add another line to his impressive biography: proud recipient of a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The trailblazing '70s TV heartthrob and current informed consumer and devoted family man accepted the honor this morning, a dutiful Mrs. Ponch at his side, trying his best to keep emotions in check as he explained what having his name immortalized on a patch of Hollywood Blvd. means to him:

Following yesterday's leak of that troubling Alec Baldwin voicemail, the world was placed in the uncomfortable position of trying to determine which famous parent is the worse role-model for the impressionable Ireland, the one screaming into the phone, or the one who apparently wants their child custody battle played out in the tabloids. At least one former associate of the onetime couple has now made his choice and gone public with his feelings, bringing his trademark brand of vigilante justice to an already ugly and complicated situation.

As if poor Sanjaya Malakar, whose talent-free, network-destabilizing run on American Idol ended on Wednesday night, hasn't suffered enough, he now must face the indignity of knowing that 1.1 billion Indian citizens have risen up with one voice to celebrate his dismissal. This report of supposedly monolithic scorn, however, has us suspicious that the writer might not have done his due diligence in the pursuit of an easy hit piece; had he penetrated the subject more deeply than merely rounding up some anti-Malakar pieces from the Indian media, he probably could've turned up at least one ponyhawked, tone-deaf teenage dissident willing to offer a word of encouragement to his American TV hero.

While the males that drift into and out of her life—her father, the manager who forced her into rehab even though she totally doesn't have a problem, y'all!, the agents who scoff at her lack of focus—reliably disappoint her, troubled tabloid ubiquity Britney Spears can at least feel safe in the knowledge that she once again has a woman on retainer that's always got her back: recently rehired superflack Leslie Sloane Selnick, the tireless, for-hire protector of her virtue. Spears' retention of the publicist is already paying dividends, as demonstrated in her response to today's Page Six item in which dad Jamie comes to the defense of his daughter's manager for taking the intervention bullet on behalf of her family:

· The possible cancellation of the Law & Order "mothership" will just leave more room on NBC's schedule for promising spin-offs, like L&O: TV Production Unit. (Note: Some please send Gabrielle Carteris some money, right away.)
· Good news, peeps! The new Spidey-flick is like, totally off the hizzook! Sweetness!
· McConaughey in an Unsolved Mysteries reenactment? Yeah, that's something we might be interested in.
· Hey, if some of those firefighters Tom Cruise is trying to help just happen to become Scientologists after their sauna-and-vitamins quality time, well, whoopsies! He wasn't proselytizing! Swear!

We swore we weren't going to take another dip in the fragrant and inviting Sanjaya pool today, satisfied that enough digital ink had been spilled obsessing over the ouster of the Idol contestant who so completely transfixed a nation with a magical combination of really bad singing, funny hairdos, and a confounding ability to skirt all gender classifications. And yet, why are we beset with the sinking feeling that the end of Sanjaya's Idol journey was really just the beginning of something else—something far bigger and more foreboding, that begins, say, with an appearance at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner:

In the off chance you haven't already had a listen, celebrity child-welfare advocacy organization TMZ.com has obtained a voicemail in which Glengarry Glen Ross star Alec Baldwin unleashes a Mametesque tirade at daughter Ireland for her failure to answer the phone for a scheduled chat, a recording they selflessly share in the interest of speeding along a resolution to Baldwin and ex-wife Kim Basinger's well-publicized familial disputes. Baldwin's already issued a statement about the message, blaming Basinger for leaking it:

If while flipping through the pages of a Spider-Man comic book or watching a DVD of one of the wildly successful movie adaptations starring the character, you've ever found yourself saying, "You know what? This superhero stuff would be pretty good if there were some singing and dancing involved. These people are really leaving a lot of money on the table by not putting this on Broadway," today is truly a happy day. Marvel Comics has revealed plans for Spider-Man: The Musical, which will be directed by The Lion King's Julie Taymor, and, in a true masterstroke of surreality, feature original music by Bono and The Edge. In its story on the big announcement, the LAT notes some of the the technical challenges Taymor will face on the seemingly insane quest she's about to undertake:

· Music round-up: Lavender Diamond at the RedCat; The Royal Fever at the Roxy; Hot Rod Circuit at the Troubadour; The Now Blog This! showcase at The Scene has The Clean Prophets, The Western States Motel, The Pity Party, and The Valley Arena.
· The Munky King on Melrose hosts the Pop Cling Vinyl Show, an exhibition of adhesive art installations by Attaboy, Josh Ellingson, Luke Feldman, Uncommon Industries, Jeremyville, and many other names listed on this flyer we will link to now for informational purposes.
· The Homotracker folks are throwing their Spring Out mixer at the Standard, where future Velvet Mafiosi can do some boozy networking while supporting the LA Gay & Lesbian Center.

Neil Patrick Harris appeared on Ellen today, the platform of choice for recently self-outed TV stars looking to get something gay-related off their chests. He explained how his pronouncement came directly out of his desire to circumvent a gathering "witch-hunt" after a gossip item about he and his boyfriend led to a huffy denial from a publicist that he was "not of that persuasion." From the People.com report:

Have you ever had those moments where you just love Hollywood so fucking much that you take it in your arms and squeeze it so hard that you don't realize until it's too late that you've crushed all of its adorable little bones in your delirious, smothering embrace? We're kind of having one right now after reading in today's Var about how new Mandalay Pictures president Cathy Schulman plans on improving upon Alfred Hitchock's maddening avian backstory problems in their much-clamored-for remake of The Birds:

Until today, our only glimpses of Hairspray—a worthy follow-up to The Producers in the category of "good movies turned hit Broadway shows turned crappy, likely-to-flop Hollywood musicals"—have been sparse. There was this promotional still of John Travolta suffering from what appeared to be an advanced case of steroid-induced facial-bloat, another unsettling snapshot of a bare-legged and bewigged Christopher Walken, and a 50-second "teaser," if you consider an announcer rattling off an endless list of names you didnt know and/or care about a tease. But with the release of the movie's full-length trailer on the internets, many of our curiosities about the movie are finally satisfied. Questions like: "Does this movie want to be the next Grease?" (Yes!) "Do we want to see it?" (No.) And, "How does Travolta look in a foundation garment?" (We torched out eyes with a cigarette lighter and a bottle of Aquanet.)

Unfortunately, new Conde Nast bizporn title Portfoilio's Screed-O-Matic is not, as its name seems to suggest, a fun toy for generating the kind of Scary Hollywood Lawyer missives for which epistolary pit-bull Marty Singer is famous. as we can think of no more amusing way to fritter away an entire afternoon than by self-issuing cease-and-desist notices only marginally less petty than ones we've actually received. (I.e., "Your repeated assertion that my client Sanjaya Malakar is actually some kind of minor hellspawn sent to destroy American Idol is malicious and outrageous. He is, in fact, a major demon." etc etc.) Still, there's some entertainment value in taking the S-O-M's interactive quiz on actual letters authored by Singer, especially when one can discover fun facts about how WWD's $3,445 ostrich-skin Prada bag "peace offering" to an offended Sarah Michelle Gellar was ostensibly returned because of the actress's feelings about animal rights.