mynameisnotsusan said:

It looks like the Herald only printed half the story..it's from the Daily Mail

Here's the second part...btw my intention posting this is not to be offensive and obviously he's just mouthing off because he's got a new show but I thought some of his comments were at least interesting and of course provocative.

http://www.dailymail.co.u...erett.html


Jackson’s death, which came just weeks before the former King of Pop was due to begin a 50-date residency at London’s O2 arena, is still shrouded in mystery.

The singer, who died aged 50, suffered a heart attack at his rented California mansion on June 25 and was pronounced dead when he arrived at hospital.

He is understood to have been addicted to a cocktail of prescription drugs, but the results of toxicology tests on his body have not yet been released.

Everett predicts that Jackson’s death could spell the end of modern day celebrity.

‘You cannot divide the music from the person,’ he said.

‘I think his life - and death - is a great lesson. I think we are going to see the end of celebrity as we know it. Showbusiness is not an honest profession.’

The 50-year-old actor likened the extremities of today’s fame to the debauched Versailles court of Marie Antoinette, which sparked the French Revolution.

‘It’s like the last days of Versailles,’ he said. ‘I do wonder how much more bullsh*t people can take about celebrities.’

He added: ‘We’re living in very strange times. We have Michael Jackson, a black man who has gone white, and we have President Barack Obama, who is a half white man gone black. It’s absolutely fascinating to watch.’

But Everett, who is openly gay, confessed that he could understand the attraction people had to Jackson in his heyday.

‘I would have leapt at the chance of sleeping with Michael Jackson when I was 14,’ he joked.

Everett is known for his outspoken nature and controversial remarks.

He has openly spoken about how he worked as a rent boy, to fund his drugs habit, when he was at stage school in London.

He also admitted sending some of his pubic hair to a woman who criticised one of his stage performances.

The actor is set to star in Channel 4’s two-part documentary, The Scandalous Adventures Of Lord Byron, which starts next week.


The bit I bolded I think is true. After seeing what MJ had to go through, I think you would have to be absolutely crazy to want 'to be famous'.

mynameisnotsusan said:

Well in that case everyone is better off dead. This is a stupid thing to say, I get his point, but like I said it applies to everyone, but that doesn’t mean we should all go kill ourselves because we’re going to be hurt in life.

Has this been posted already??

suga10 said:

Guy on the left: Mr.Jackson,my condolences to your family ... we loved Mike
Joe Jackson: Ummmm....yeah yeah thankyer,Hey,Um you work heah ?lemme get uh extra crispy wangs n drumsticks,oh and-er-uh breast too uh uh ...yessuh.Fruit punch wit-a lawge Fries.
Guy on the left:
Joe Jackson:

utopia7 said:

The guy on the left does look ticked off, lol.

Timmy84 said:

either that's Joe's security guard or they forgot about his order,so they could take Joe's order ,grab their cell phones from the back and take pictures

utopia7 said:

Yeah, but who knows what's going on there.

utopia7 said:

[Edited 7/25/09 19:35pm]

Timmy84 said:

I don't know Timmy it's looking real greasy lolololol

There was some patient of Doctor Murray who called Geraldo's show praising Murray and said he saved my life and all. Her and Geraldo were having an argument about whether Murray was a good doctor
[Edited 7/25/09 20:01pm]

utopia7 said:

utopia7 said:

utopia7 said:

wow so amazing

suga10 said:

Michael can't keep still lol I thought he was gonna kick his brother in the head

Revolting Revelation: Michael Jackson Still Not Allowed Burial One Month after Death

It's been more than a month since Michael Jackson's demise, and still no burial, cremation, resting place, or any manifestation of the pop psyche term "closure" at all for this fallen King of Pop.

What is unequivocally true is that the news media has continued their relentless, wretched assault against Jackson's very quintessence with villainous coverage of all that is grotesque, repulsive and vile, with barely a fact to back up all the rancorous chatter.

The latest "so-called" news is that a Los Angeles coroner has temporary custody of his brain, endless rumors incessantly about drugs he might have taken prescribed by a long list of doctors now under investigation, the sad condition of his body, lawsuits already impending in the multiple millions, impending, custody battles, and the long-awaited results of toxicology reports given as the reason for allowing Jackson's body to remain in spiritual rigor.

His family claims they do not even know where his body is. Everyone knows this is not true.

There are rumors that biological mother Debbie Rowe may fight for custody or may simply want more money.

Brother Jermaine Jackson says that Michael wanted to be buried at Neverland Ranch, but his mother Kathryn said she doesn't want him there, not even his ashes.

Father Joe Jackson seems to be enjoying the limelight and touted his own record company just a few days after his son's death at the Black Entertainment Awards.

But throughout all of this picayune, malevolent and venomous cacophony of malicious and largely unfounded reports, Michael is still not allowed to rest in peace, just as he was never allowed to live a peaceful life.

He was a human being.

He was a man, a father, a son, a friend, and a phenomenal unreal star brighter than anyone could understand or comprehend.

He was the tabloid favorite in later years who with picayune joy called him "Wacko Jacko" and a child molester before he had his day in court, but people seemed to forget that he was a human being. I think he finally forget as well.

Jackson told many that he never wanted to be buried at Neverland Ranch, because of the pain he experienced during trial and after his more carefree Peter Pan days seemed never to be a reality again. He was stricken with deep depression even since the trial ultimately found him Not Guilty, and yet he felt forever ruined and soiled.

Just a few positive facts about Jackson in case his success has now been forever shrouded in the obscene . . .

Five of Jackson's solo albums -- "Off the Wall," "Thriller," "Bad," "Dangerous" and "HIStory," are among the top-sellers of all time. His 1982 album Thriller remains the best selling album of all time. During his career, Jackson sold an estimated 750 million records worldwide.

Jackson is featured in the Guinness Book of World Records for achievements including the "Most Successful Entertainer of All Time" with 13 Grammy Awards, 13 number one singles, and estimated sales of over 750 million records.

He was also known for being a philanthropist and humanitarian who donated millions of dollars to a record 39 charities, plus what he raised with his 'Heal the World Foundation.'

He was a fifty-year-old man who lived as a child in adulthood because he was forced to live as an adult in childhood and he suffered physical and emotional pain and torment.

Most of us experience deep, deep sorrow and all kinds of suffering on many levels. But Michael had to endure his pain in the limelight that was often sour, mean, unsympathetic and merciless.

Apparently, he was beyond help for his suffering. According to numerous medical records, he had been taking a lot of prescription drugs given my unethical doctors for many, many years, and even drugs usually only legally if administered in a hospital setting.

Yes he was famous, infamous and seemed surreal and even immortal at times.

Yes he supposedly paid a personal doctor who is named in a criminal investigation some $150.000.

Yes, we aren't sure if his children are his biologically.

Yes, he changed from a beautiful child with a bright smile and innocent eyes and eventually gave us all a vision of plastic surgery we never wanted to see or be privy to.

Yes, as a young child he had a voice that Barry Gordy, Founder of Motown Records said belonged to a forty year-old man. Smoky Robinson commented that he sang as a very young child as if he understood the blues as if he truly had lived it.

He had lived it.

Jackson told many interviewers on film and tape that had been beaten by his father and how he used to cry when he was forced for hours on end to rehearse while he watched children from the studio window play freely on the playground.

His childhood seemed like a prison, as did his adulthood.

Like many who suffer in childhood, unconditional love and acceptance is what he yearned for his short fifty years.

Now his beautiful children who clearly loved their father will be in the continual sadistic crossfire of his paparazzi-tortured life, fought for in the courts. It will all be about money.

Now his soul, just as when he was alive, floats about aimlessly while his body decays and is still not allowed death without despair and a brigade of ugliness preventing him to finally rest in peace.

The media has become the scourge of the earth. As a journalist, I am embarrassed about the horrid lengths that newspapers, television and the web will go to out-rancor the other, not caring at all about gossiping about ant rumor or untruth and only about ratings and sensationalism.

Now I simply call myself a writer, not a journalist. Ironically, the greatest TV journalist in history just passed away, the great, ethical gentleman Walter Cronkite.

Never in our history have we had such a pop icon live such an incredibly strange and fascinating public and private life- in both life and in death- Never.

Soon there will supposedly be a press conference officially announcing the cause of Michael's death. But don't be surprised if he remains a strange otherworldly ghost, not allowed a burial because of more penurious excuses.

Now in death, this fallen idol like some character in a modernized, twisted Shakespearean tragedy, while loved by perhaps billions of fans all over the world, more than a month after his death, he is not given a burial sight or resting place by his family's choice.

Shame on the media, shame on vile so-called reporters, editors and producers, and shame on some of his family members for giving the press more of what it craves, allowing Michael to continue to be portrayed as an oddity, monster, freak and ghoulish character undeserved of a proper burial..

No human being deserves such abuse and torment, before or after death.

Allow his soul to be freed from the anguish and torment now.

I am thoroughly repelled and ashamed for what our culture has become.

So should we all.

source: http://www.huffingtonpost...44943.html
[Edited 7/25/09 22:19pm]

I'm going to try and give those snake in the grass jackson family a bit of compassion over $$$$$ and hope that they have already buried mj somewhere without anyone knowing it and leave him be. Away from fans and everyone else.

lazycrockett said:

Because if he ain't buried... it's just gonna get more ugly.

Timmy84 said:

Or maybe he's already buried but they're just leaving the media and the rest guessing.

suga10 said:

Might as well keep it real and tell the truth.

Michael Jackson: Why The Weirdness WAS The Greatness
July 2009

For decades, there have been two Michael Jacksons: the whirling-dervish pop genius and the mysterious, childlike, obsessive, tormented, at times freakish private soul.

In the weeks since he died, both dimensions of Michael -- the artist and the man -- have been paraded and discussed to an exhaustive degree. You could argue that each side has been raised to the level of mythology. Yet what isn't so often talked about is the inseverable connection between the two. From the outset of Michael Jackson's career, his extreme and heightened distance from the "normal" world has been one of the cornerstones of his art. Below are some of the ways that Michael’s "weirdness" was, in fact, always right at the soul of his musical and cultural power.

The Young Michael’s Vocal Phrasings

At the memorial service last Tuesday, Smokey Robinson, recalling his reaction to the first time he heard the 10-year-old Michael sing a version of "Who's Lovin' You" that outdid Smokey’s, acknowledged the dizzyingly precocious, almost nature-defying quality of Michael's ability to sing lyrics rooted in the experience of adulthood and to interpret those lyrics exactly as an adult would sing them. For me, the line that has always made the prepubescent Michael sound most bizarrely mature comes in "I Want You Back," when he sings: "Oh, darlin’, I was blind to let you go!"

He delivers those last four words like a wise old soul-sister diva tempering her ardor with worldly grace. The question Smokey Robinson raised, and didn’t quite answer, is: How did the young Michael do it? Did he feel those feelings? I would say that he did and he didn’t -- that what his boy-virtuoso vocal-emotional mimicry expressed was a personality so empathic that it was as if he could consume, through art, other people’s experiences, and therefore felt no need to live those experiences himself. In that sense, Jackson’s "childlike" nature emerged out of the paradox that he didn't have to grow up because he was always, in his imagination, a super-adult.


Singing to Strange Love Objects, Part I

Michael first declared his independence from his brothers with his early solo albums, the second of which was Ben (1972), the title song of which was a melancholy love ballad...sung to a rat. Whoever came up with the masterstroke concept of getting the teenage Michael, with his yearning, crystalline soprano, to croon the theme song of the sequel to Willard was on to something profound: The song testified to Michael’s angelic quality (who but an angel could love a rat?), but it also hinted, years ahead of time, at his dark side -- his attraction to monsters, and the loneliness that would make the biggest superstar in the world feel too isolated and lost to be loved by anyone human. Twenty years later, Michael did another movie theme song -- “Will You Be There,” his mash note to the killer whale of Free Willy -- and though the gorgeous, gospel-inflected number is heavenly to listen to, the underlying Michael message remains the same: animals are glorious, far more so than people.

Why the Plastic Surgery Mattered, Part I

Before he went off the deep end of facial reconstruction, carving away at the features God gave him as if they were marble (or Silly Putty) and he was his own Michelangelo, Jackson’s resculpting of his facial image was an essential dynamic of his pop magic.

Amid all the standard psychosexual/racial analysis of how he wanted to be white, look like Diana Ross, etc., much has been made of how, and why, Michael loathed his adolescent face: the acne, the prominent nose that brought out a suggestion of the father he despised. In the 2003 Martin Bashir TV special, Michael himself recalls a painful incident in which a fan in the mid-'70s came up to the Jacksons looking for "little Michael," and when she saw what little Michael had grown up into, she went "Ugh!"

The key to Michael’s first foray into plastic surgery, cued to the release of Off the Wall (1979), is that it tapered his face into a grown-up facsimile of the little Michael that he had lost. In doing so, he launched, in effect, his second childhood. I think that, as much as the hooks and the burbling disco-soul rhythms, is what accounts for the incandescent joy that radiates out of him in the great videos from that album: “Rock With You” and, especially, “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough.”

In those charmingly low-tech early music vids, he’s finally on his own, trying out a first-draft version of his electro-marionette dance moves, and yes, the music is divine, but more than anything else, it is that face -- transformed and transfigured -- that liberates Michael to look more relaxed and real, more purely blissed-out in his art than he ever looked before or since.

The Real Meaning of "Billie Jean"

From that opening up/down drum beat and snaky bass walk, it is, and always will be, Michael’s greatest song -- his signature statement in the form of a demonic dance-floor epiphany.

His legendary performance of it on the 1983 Motown 25th Anniversary special was the moment he moonwalked from superstar into cosmic Elvis/Beatles strato-stardom. Yet what is it about "Billie Jean" that makes it Michael’s anthem of anthems? It’s the angry power of the song’s hidden message. On the surface, Michael tells a woman who has accused him of fathering her child that he did no such thing: “The kid is not my son.” But what the fury of his performance tells you is that he’s not just rejecting the scandal, the false accusation -- he's rejecting the possibility of such an accusation. He's spitting on the temptation of sexuality itself.
The line "Billie Jean is not my lover!" is Michael's defiant declaration that he, and he alone, will not be lured into a world of sin. And that’s the weird, even scary Michael: the man-child who could transform sexual energy into volcanic dance theater, but who, in life, viewed the erotic as a debasement (or maybe as something that needed to be done in the basement).

Why the Plastic Surgery Mattered, Part II

In a special all-Michael edition of People magazine that came out near the end of 1984 (just after the Victory tour), the pop culture writer Albert Goldman contributed an essay that remains the single greatest analysis of Michael Jackson ever written. In it, he described the deep meaning of what Michael did to his face in order to launch, and enter, the Thriller era. Goldman hailed Jackson’s "Pygmalion operation" as "a stroke of genius" that transformed a "face you could have found in any high school yearbook" into that of a "prince who is also a swami, with those haunting eyes that appear to be seeing things that we can’t see." Goldman went on: "To have fashioned this extraordinary face out of such ordinary materials is the sign of an artist who is guided by a vision. What Michael Jackson got from his audacious act of self-authorship was a face that matched his soul and thus enabled him to become all soul."

By the late '80s, of course, Jackson’s obsession with plastic surgery had become an addiction, with the star perpetually "evolving" as he made his face sleeker, lighter, cleftier, pointier, girlier… But before all that, at the height of Michael-mania (1983-1985), Jackson used his doe-eyed spectral model’s visage in a unique and heightened way: At a time when masculinity in rock was becoming brawnier, cruder, and ever more cliché, Michael fashioned himself into an androgynous beauty mask so that off stage he seemed not masculine at all, but in performance, on stage or in his videos, that delicacy gave way to a seething, snarling fury (just think of his scowling fever in "Beat It") that could express more potent aggression than that of the most "dangerous" rockers. That, more than anything, was the real leap from Off the Wall to Thriller: the outing, and stylized presentation of, Michael Jackson’s inner wrath.

His Identification With Ghouls

In the famous video for "Thriller," Michael showcased his special kinship with horror movies in the form of a corny, neo-1950s, back-to-the-future letter-sweater fantasy of beasts run wild. With Jackson himself cast as a teenage werewolf who’s "not like other guys," the 14-minute John Landis super-production had a deliberate -- and, to me, instantly dated – faux-Lucas/Spielberg cardboard “innocence.” (It was also the beginning of Jackson’s over-reliance on Broadway-style choreography, which tended to diminish the zigzag singularity of his own live-wire moves.) Yet one aspect of the "Thriller" video is far more haunting now than it was then: When Michael, in living-dead makeup, leads a chorus line of zombies, he seems to be anticipating, by 15 years, the ghostly monsterization of his own face. At the time, it seemed hip that he could play at being a ghoul. The video now looks like a dry run for the way he’d gradually turn himself into one.

The Dark Glory of "Smooth Criminal

" When Bad was released in 1987, it contained a song that was hailed as the "sequel" to "Billie Jean." Unfortunately, that song was the lugubrious, sluggish, and schematic "Dirty Diana," one of the worst tracks of Jackson’s career. Bad, however, really did contain the sequel to "Billie Jean," and it’s a song that remains, after more than 20 years, Michael’s single most under-celebrated masterpiece: the gorgeously, ominously intoxicating "Smooth Criminal." One listen to its two-step heartbeat, its percolating syncopated bass line, and you can hear that it’s "Billie Jean" shot through with more anxiety. What’s finally haunting about "Smooth Criminal," though, is the way that its lyrics offer a veiled, almost coded response to the earlier song’s puritanical outrage.

Singing in a percussive stutter, so that he sounds not just stormy but possessed, Michael unfurls fragmentary images of a woman’s bloody murder: He came in through the window, he left bloodstains on the carpet; "she was struck down, it was her doom;" and, finally, the singer’s soaring plea for the victim ("Annie are you okay, will you tell us, that you’re okay?"). A song of intense violence…and compassion. But if you watch its brilliant long-form video, in which Michael, appearing as a natty white-suited period gangster, does some of his most slashingly visionary dance moves, a deeper meaning emerges. It’s that Michael, the song’s agonized and divided conscience, isn’t just crying with compassion -- he’s also the criminal. “Smooth Criminal” mourns the death of Annie, but at the same time the song is a violent rock & roll fantasia in which the innocent Annie must die to atone for Billie Jean’s sin. It’s a song that glistens like a dagger in the night, because it reflects the ecstatic anger in Michael Jackson’s soul.

Singing to Strange Love Objects, Part II

Who did Michael Jackson love? There’s an eerie abstraction to nearly every one of his romantic songs (Who’s out of his life? Who’s the pretty young thing?), because in reality he always seemed isolated, never more so than behind the facade of his very public marriages. To me, the last transcendently great song he ever recorded -- it’s off of HIStory (1995) -- is "You Are Not Alone," a rapturous melancholy ballad that, if you listen to it closely, takes on the quality of a confession. (The song was written by -- don’t laugh -- R. Kelly.) Michael is singing to a lover who, for reasons that are never explained, was forced to part from him. "Did you have to go," he asks, "and leave my world so cold?" But even in his heartbreak, a voice whispers in Michael’s ear and says:

You are not alone, I am here with you
Though you’re far away, I am here to stay.

That voice is Michael talking to himself, soothing his loneliness. Yet as his own voice rises, slowly and majestically, building toward a tremulous croon that is shockingly passionate even for Michael (in the video, he sings it with his shirt wide open -- as close as he ever got to naked in a performance), it’s also clear that he’s addressing the mystery lover, saying: You are not alone. The song takes on a delicately omniscient, almost soft-stalker vibe. But who is Michael Jackson really singing to? Who is it that left him alone, and that he’ll always be bonded to in his heart? "You Are Not Alone" is Michael’s haunting testament to a love denied, and maybe even forbidden, by fate. It’s a song about why Michael Jackson could never find love on this earth.


http://popwatch.ew.com/po...+greatness

I've never seen this. His hair looked better back then




[Edited 7/25/09 23:46pm]
[Edited 7/25/09 23:51pm]

The Links Between Creativity And Eccentricity
July 2009



Michael Jackson's death is just another reminder of how artistic ability seems closely linked to eccentricity, often with detrimental results.

Drug use, strange public behavior, seclusion, violence, alcoholism, mental illness — all are factors in the lives of so many musicians, actors, writers and other creative artists whose work forms the basis of our pop culture. It raises questions about whether great artistic drive and substance abuse or other forms of mental troubles are somehow related.

"Scientists are discovering more all the time about brain chemistry and creativity," says sociologist and author B.J. Gallagher. "Highly creative people have more finely tuned nervous systems, which makes them high-strung and neurotic. Their brains are wired a little differently. They're more prone to ADD, bi-polar, depression and other difficult mental states. They turn to drugs, alcohol or activities to ease their pain."

The question then becomes how much do these issues affect their artistic drive, or are caused by it.

Would Ernest Hemingway have been the compelling, adventurous writer if he didn't struggle with inner demons? Would Kurt Cobain have written such vivid, introspective music without the personal struggles? Would John Belushi have created the endless stream of hilarious characters and comedy routines without drugs and alcohol? Would Jackson have written such electrifying music without his tortured early years resulting in an obsessive search for childhood as an adult? And was his apparently debilitating habit for prescription drugs part of this?

Looking for answers

It's not idle speculation. Doctors and scientists have long studied whether immersing oneself intensely in art can help bring on substance abuse and/or mental illness, or whether an artistic brain somehow is naturally pulled toward these kinds of problems.

"(Artists) have bigger appetites — an extra energy," says Eric Maisel, a Walnut Creek-based family therapist, creativity coach and author of more than 30 books, mostly focused on creativity. "They don't want to drive 60, they want to drive 100. That energy can go into eating a million peanuts, like Orson Welles, or into writing 'War and Peace.'"

Although there's no real way to determine what percentage of great artists have battled substance abuse, mental illness or other demons (for one thing, you'd have to do the impossible and define both "addiction" and "great art"), the idea of the tortured creative genius is far from just a stereotype.

"There are almost no non-addicted musicians who have created revolutionary change in music," says Doug Thorburn, an author of four books on alcohol and drug addiction. "Addiction usually comes first."

Plenty of examples back up Thorburn's assertion. For instance, the creative explosion of Jazz in the 1950s was lead by artists as Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and John Coltrane, all of whom had drug problems. Parker and Coltrane died relatively young after years of drug abuse stretching back to before they were famous.

By most accounts, Ray Charles, Billie Holiday, Jim Morrison, Johnny Cash, Eric Clapton, Sly Stone, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jerry Garcia, Bob Marley, Eddie Van Halen, Cobain, Eminem, members of the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith and Metallica, and many others who heavily influenced their art used drugs and/or alcohol regularly during their creative peak. In many cases, careers were derailed or interrupted or lives were cut short.

But what's debatable is how substance problems were related to the creative genius these artists displayed. And the situation's not universal. It's not clear that Elvis Presley, for example, used drugs until his later years. Although the Beatles were regular users during their later, most creative years, they didn't sample serious drugs until they'd already become the biggest band in the world. Jackson didn't fit the profile of an addict until he'd already changed pop music, although his eccentric lifestyle became an issue fairly early in his solo career.

For every Syd Barrett — the Pink Floyd singer, songwriter and musician whose career was rapidly fueled and destroyed by drug-induced mental illness — there were groundbreaking acts such as Prince, Madonna and U2 who did not have reputations for serious substance abuse or personal problems, even if they were eccentric.

"Creative people live in a heightened reality," says Gallagher. "The good times feel extra good and the bad times feel extra bad. However, there are plenty of creative people who find other, healthier ways to deal with their emotions."

Good with bad

For some artists, the bigger the success, the bigger the problems they face — less freedom, more demands and expectations, external pressures, media exposure. They become more public but, ironically, more isolated.

"Creative people manufacture big ideas; that has the effect of getting their words out there," Maisel says. "But the negative effect is pressure pushing them toward mania. They're also cutting themselves off from other people."

That isolation can fuel addiction and other mental issues, says Anne Paris, a psychologist and author, whose book "Standing at Water's Edge," is meant to help artists get into a creative flow.

"They need relationships with others," says Paris. "When people don't have that support to enter that state, they turn to drugs and alcohol to help immerse themselves (in their art). Ultimately, it's self-destructive. It takes them further away from creativity. Unfortunately for a lot of people, it turns into addiction."

Even for artists not prone to mental and substance-abuse troubles, celebrity itself can drive them there, especially when they don't meet expectations. "There's an emotional brutality," she says. "Having people reject your work is emotionally brutal."

Then there's the entertainment industry itself, which tends to forgive chemical abuse and bizarre behavior if the artist is successful enough.

Yes men

Then there are the enablers. As shown in Michael Jackson's case, having money and fame means more access to doctors and other people more than willing to give you what you want, even if it's bad for you. Officials in Los Angeles are probing several doctors who might have prescribed Jackson dangerous prescription drugs, although the case has not yet been termed a criminal investigation.

Enabling is almost expected in the entertainment world, says Eugene Foley, president of Foley Entertainment, a music industry consulting firm.

"In corporate America, the person would be encouraged to seek medical help. In the music industry, people often seem to accept someone's quirks and to not let it interfere with their work as best as possible. The stereotype of the crazy genius is commonplace."

Sometimes just the job of creating and performing can be hazardous.

"In people who are bi-polar, the creative process itself mimics depression," says Maisel. "You sink into your work, it gets harder and harder, then you're done and you're elated. When bands perform, there's tons of adrenaline for two hours. Then they have to eventually come down, and they do that through drugs, or drink, or sex ... whatever. There's a dozen reasons why creative people are more prone to addiction. The biggest is appetite. When there's a big appetite, it's hard to accept (normalcy)."

The biggest question perhaps is if anything can be done about the seeming connection artists/entertainers and self-destructive behavior.

The entertainment industry seems to have a better idea of how to protect its investments. Thanks to the spread of paparazzi culture, artists' signs of trouble come to light quickly, and there's a growing rehab industry to help people before they go the way of Coltrane, Parker, Morrison, Brian Jones and Cobain.

There are far more examples of artists successfully overcoming problems — the members of Aerosmith, Metallica and Van Halen, as well as Eminem, to name a few — so there's hope for those following in their troubled footsteps.

"I've seen people clean up their lives after (hitting bottom)," says Foley. "Once their addiction interfered with the creative process, that was the final straw. These particular folks needed their music much more than they needed to be drunk or high."


http://www.mercurynews.co...i_12846398

dreamfactory313 said:

Timmy84 said:

I hope so because a 25,000 dollar gold casket nor Michael should be left unsupervised.If he's in a temporary place I would hope the family has cameras 24/7
watching the cemetery grounds,and every staff on the premises.

mynameisnotsusan said:

Everyone's appearance changes asshole!

EmeraldSkies said:

The irony though is that Rupert Everett recently underwent a major facelift. Pot calling the kettle black anyone?

dreamfactory313 said:

How the hell do you make hair into diamonds?

Swa said:

So everyone else has to stay the same,but he can change. What a moron.
[Edited 7/26/09 1:05am]

Who gives a flying fuck about Rupert Everett, I can't even think of a movie he's been in recently.

He's just using MJ's name to get some headlines.