one of my ideas for the album cover contest

My question is: if Mike had been on so many drugs for such a long time, would he be able to dance? Don´t these drugs somehow effect your coordination. Cause I remember reading that Elvis did have problems with coordination taking all those pills.

EmeraldSkies said:

I just noticed that.

bboy87 said:

Timmy84 said:

Very nice. When is the comp officially opening. I know it has been rumoured.

Swa

Another video of Mike speaking in Carnegie Hall about not being able to find a date for himself with the girls in the audience screaming "I´ll take you. I am single".



Nice cover bboy. Nice and simple. I like it like that.

I tried to listen to some MJ songs on my headphones before going to sleep which is something I hadn´t done for a while and was crying all the time. Damn, I wonder if I´ll ever be able to listen to it without crying. I loved the music so much, it used to bring me so much joy, now it´s a very reliable source for tears.
[Edited 7/29/09 0:39am]

dag said:

It depends if he took them during rehearsals, I noticed he was dancing a bit sluggish (but he still kept up with the dancers I guess). And MJ look like he was going to fall over during the last press conference. I mean I know he was always nervous during press conferences but something was a bit OFF there.

Timmy84 said:

He did look weird during that press conference. He might have had something that day, but if he was an addict and needed it everyday, how could he rehearse. The rehersals lasted for couple of months. I don´t know if he rehearsed everyday or not, but that would mean he would have to be days without the drug to be able to rehears.
I remember Lisa saying that she would sometimes have to go and catch Elvis. I really don´t know if they took the same pills or not, but if they do have similar effect and Elvis was not able to even stand, than it´s weird that Mike was able to dance.
I hope we get the autopsy results soon, cause these speculations are a nightmere.

bboy87 said:

What is this?

http://www.digitalspy.com...ghost.html

Winehouse 'visited by Jackson's ghost'

Amy Winehouse has apparently claimed that a recent visit she received from the ghost of Michael Jackson helped her stay off drugs.

The 'Back to Black' singer, who has previously said that she is a big fan of the late King of Pop, reportedly met with mediums during her stay on the Caribbean island of St Lucia.

A friend of the star told The People: "[Amy] heard Michael's voice telling her if she didn't sort herself out, she'd lose everything."

Several people have claimed to witness the ghost of the 'Bad' singer since his death last month, at locations including his Neverland estate, in a tree stump and on a car bonnet.

Winehouse once said: "I could never decide whether I wanted to be Michael Jackson or marry him. I don’t care what people say because he’s a f**king genius.

dag said:

Yeah it is weird.

EmeraldSkies said:

Lawd Jeebus!

dag said:

Probably not. Some of world's greatest ballerinas and and danseurs have leaped across stages before our very eyes high as a freakin' kite. Gelsey Kirkland of American Ballet Theatre comes to mind; in her autobiography she describes how she had to score fixes before she had to dance 3 hours every night for the Nutcracker.

Ottensen said:

Let's not forget when Liza Minnelli did the same thing and she had a prescription addiction a while back.

Ottensen said:

Really? OK, let´s wait for the autopsy results, then.

bboy87 said:

I really dig this

Cool cover bboy87 !



Just saw this Japanese compilation on vinyl :

Jermaine~ I don't want to be a girl Mike.

Chic35 said:

good times, reminds me when I was a kid

Apologies if this info has been posted before :


Tour Set Dies with Michael Jackson
by Cassandra Wiseman

On a brilliant summer day in Topanga Canyon last month–the morning after Michael Jackson's sudden death stunned the world–the art director Bernt Capra was walking home up Fernwood Pacific with the slow gait of a man in deep reflection. He was carrying a single manila envelope that he'd just picked up from his post office box. In it were the proof sheets of the latest photographs of the just completed sets that he had designed for the fifty "This Is It" concerts that were supposed to have opened this month at the O2 Arena (The Millennium Dome) in London.



(photo by Katie Dalsemer)

Bernt Capra poses in front of a painting by his son, Pablo, another one of the talented Capras, that hangs outside the family home in Topanga.


"I've never had a boss die on me before," said the soft-spoken Capra, shaking his head. Originally from Vienna, but having lived in Topanga since 1980, he seemed almost in a state of shock. At 6'6", fit and tan from surfing, he has the quiet, dignified mien of a European nobleman. Tristfully, he took out the two sheets of photographs and passed them through the car window. "This is very sad because these sets we designed can only live with Michael performing. Michael Jackson was an original like Elvis. No one can take his place on these sets."

Capra, who has had a long and remarkable film career, had worked with Michael Jackson from conceptional design to being ready to shoot in just five weeks. "We all were working very hard. There was no margin for error. The week before Michael Jackson died we were done with everything, [except for] the re-shoot with the sets, and that never happened."

"It really hurts me to think that all this work we did will never be shown. The whole idea to make this concert such a theatrical event was really nice and I don't think there will be a way for any of us to see it now. It hurts that it won't ever be seen the way it was supposed to be."

Capra worked here in Los Angeles with Michael Jackson to turn his design conceptions for the O2 Dome concerts into a reality on the "the biggest four sound stages in the Culver Studios, Culver City, all 235 feet by 150 feet, and 45 feet tall. These were the same stages where they shot the burning of Atlanta in Gone with the Wind.

"This was supposedly the biggest LED (light emitting diode) screen assembled. It was 33 feet tall and 100 feet wide, and so, ...it was to cover the whole stage with a background of videos shot in 3D running the whole time (the audience was supposed to get 3D glasses with their tickets).... and because of the 3D effect those phantom dancers and sets would blend seamlessly with the real dancers live on stage, much like a hologram would, to give the audience an ultimate image."



(photo by Bernt Capra, © 2009)

"We had live wolves and ravens flying around in the cemetery set. There were Mummies and Zombies in the cemetery and the Zombies were dressed like historic characters, Louis XIV, Napoleon, a Federal Soldier… I'm really sad my decomposed pirate will never be seen." –Bernt Capra


Capra and his partner worked on the remake of five of Jackson's videos for the tour: "Thriller," "The Way You Make Me Feel," "Smooth Criminal," "They Don't Care about Us," and "Earth Song."

"I know all the rumors about Michael Jackson but what I can say is that he was the nicest guy to work with–there was no facemask–he always was elegantly dressed, he definitely looked like Michael Jackson–he'd wear a black military style jacket with elaborate golden braiding to rehearsal, a red leather jacket with elaborate embroidery… but Michael was businesslike, very accessible, super polite and incredibly considerate. I had tickets today for the funeral, but I gave them to a friend," Capra said over the phone, about an hour after the memorial at the Staples Center had ended. "I was hoping to see the sets used. I was in tears when I saw Paris Jackson speak of her father. Michael introduced his children to us when he took them on a tour of the sets. The children were normal children, very happy children and they just wanted to play on the cemetery set and he played with them. He seemed like a natural dad and I am sure that he loved his children and he obviously doted on them."

"His life was obviously a little surreal. When he arrived to work, he'd have to come with heavy security of course. There was an entourage of dark suits, at least four body guards. We even had a code name for the production stages in Culver City - "DOME." We were the Dome Project. AEG was obviously worried about security. He would arrive in one of the two or three brand new shiny dark Cadillac SUVs that would accompany him to rehearsal. One vehicle for him and the children, one that contained the four bodyguards and sometimes there was a third car just to throw off the paparazzi a little. None of the cars had license plates."



(photo by Bernt Capra, © 2009)

""Michael Jackson was very well read and he loved art, and he knew his photography, and he liked this photographer, Lewis Hine, who had been a social worker in the depression era and shot photographs of victims of child labor - four, five, six year olds working in mills and mines. He was also very well known for a collection of photos of the construction of the Empire State Building which are very valuable now. Michael loves this guy and he based "The Way You Make Me Feel" choreography and set design on the photos of the men constructing steel beams as if they were on the top of a skyscraper having a lunch break."" –Bernt Capra


"Usually when Michael came to the sets, he was there to work; he just wanted to show us what he was doing and choreograph the dancers on the sets with the show's choreographer, Travis Payne and with the director, Kenny Ortega, who is also a long-time choreographer. The rehearsals were amazing to watch. I think Michael invented all the moves. Michael defied the laws of nature. From where I stood, which was about 30 feet away from the stage, he looked like he was dancing like he did thirty years ago, he was beautiful to watch. He was so lithe, and his dancing so fluid–there is no one that could dance like this–for me there was no better dancer, not Nureyev, not Fred Astaire."

"One thing you realize when you meet Michael is that he has this natural charisma–I don't know what to call it really–I don't know if it's a chemical reaction, because I've worked with Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert DeNiro but working with Michael felt so different from anything I've ever experienced. We only had five weeks to go from conception to production, which is so little time for a project like this–but whenever he saw me, he was very considerate of me and the sets and very nice. There was no time to do things over, everything had to be approved and there was no going back. I only saw him for the first time when we were halfway through the construction stages that they had rented for him to rehearse at the Forum."

Capra got the job through a line producer, "an old friend I happened to be working with at the time, making some viral films for the internet, and he got into this accidentally through another producer that he had worked with before. He couldn't tell me over the phone what the project was, but when he asked me if I wanted to work with him on something, I said yes, but I didn't know what it was. So I came in for a meeting with Robb Wagner of Stimulated Incorporated who was in charge of the execution of the whole project (he was also part of the Memorial) and I was introduced to Robb Wagner and Bruce Jones. We sat down at the table for our meeting and I saw that this was a bigger project than I thought."

"Nothing Michael Jackson does is small. Really everything he does is big budget so we were never turned down for anything we asked for but we were told we had to make it happen fast and so everything was always done by the ‘best people' with a big budget. I worked with the conceptual artist Nicole Loebart and her husband, the art director William Budge. I sat down with her and from photos and ideas she makes these elaborate conceptual drawings on her computer and everything was pretty much approved so we could begin to build the sets."

"Michael Cotton designed the stage and built it. Bruce Jones, co-director in charge of visual effects, was the digital creator, doing the tech parts. The whole concert was like a flamboyant opera performance. The set was conceived like a big musical Broadway show, elaborate, but instead of rebuilding the sets between songs–because Michael wanted the show to be seamless, there would be no time–the sets were these 3D videos we made."

Capra ordered all of the construction material from Topanga Lumber.

Capra was born in Vienna during World War II. His father was drafted into the war, and when the allies started bombing his mother fled with him to her mother's farm. He was only one when he left Vienna and stayed on the farm until he went back to get a BA at the University of Vienna. "I was basically a farm boy." He went on to get a masters in engineering and architecture at the University of Graz.

"I always thought that I would be an artist creating things and building things. But I wanted to make money, too. I thought architecture would be the best of both worlds. But I went to an avant-garde university.... We were trying hard to design things that couldn't really be built, at least not at the time, before the use of computers.... Our heroes were Buckminster Fuller and Peter Cook. We were more interested in showing how the world should look–a Utopian world. Our engineering was solid but we tried very hard to create new concepts. There were no computers so we couldn't make the means to execute our designs. We so wanted to make our world independent from our fathers' generation and the post-war architecture was so cheap and horrible–no design really–just those awful buildings they built in the fifties and sixties. When I graduated, in 1968, I knew I would be drafted and I panicked because I was a pacifist so I applied for a full scholarship for Urban Design at UCLA and received it. After graduating, I practiced architecture for a short while in Culver City, when a fellow draftsman called me from Paramount Studios and asked me if I wanted to work there. It was The Last Tycoon–the last movie Elia Kazan ever made."

Capra has two sons, Pablo and Lucas and a daughter, Michele, who was born in Germany, while Capra was working on post production of a film he directed, called Mindwalk, which stars Liv Ullman, Ione Skye, John Heard and Sam Waterston. The children grew up with Capra in the lower Topanga Rodeo Grounds "until a sheriff came and kicked me out in 2006."

Capra recently received an Emmy for his production design for HBO's Carnivale and he was the art director for This is Spinal Tap and the production designer for the film Bagdad Café. He designed the sets for Janet Jackson's music video hit "Nasty Girls," and acts like Tom Petty and The Pointer Sisters amongst other big names in the music world.

"I've been working on location all over the place–New Orleans, the Carolinas, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica. I love coming back to Topanga. Three years ago I started surfing so now I never want to leave it but nobody seems to want to work here in LA anymore."

According to AEG, the "This Is It" Tour had generated more than $85 million in ticket sales and they had spent more than $30 million on production. Although AEG offered full refunds to the nearly one million ticket holders, many want to keep their commemorative tickets for the now-cancelled shows.

"I am so sorry," Capra said, "Because I wanted to see this production too. And now nobody will."

http://www.topangamesseng...cleID=3581

( Also posted here : http://www.mjfanclub.net/...&Itemid=82 )

I didn't realize Omer was at the service,in the front row with the family

EmeraldSkies said:

LOL!! at the 3:15 mark when the earthquake strikes... Mike got all scraed! lol but he jumped right back into his lines...
[Edited 7/29/09 2:40am]

Shango said:

Thanks for the article. It hurts to know what we got to miss.

And thanks everyone for all the J5 videos in such cool quality. I haven´t seen them yet, but I will when I get back.

bboy87 said:

Don't remind me of MJJSource - that was a bad deal for fans.

Swa

Three new reports from TMZ:

Dr. Conrad Murray has emerged as the primary target in the death of Michael Jackson -- but law enforcement sources tell us a massive investigation is taking form into what could be fraudulent prescription practices of more than a dozen doctors ... and we're told that number could easily double.

LAPD detectives and members of the L.A. County Coroner's office are gathering info on various doctors who treated Michael Jackson over the years. Subpoenas have been issued, medical files have been taken and conversation with various doctors and their lawyers are taking place.

Jackson has used more than 2 dozen aliases to score drugs, with the help of doctors ... 19 alone are mentioned in the affidavits used to secure search warrants against Dr. Murray.

We're told the prescription practices became so egregious that one prominent pharmacy wouldn't even bother to write the patient's name when a certain doctor called in scripts for Jackson.

Sources say law enforcement is looking at one doctor who used the same anesthesiologist dozens of time to put Jackson under for routine procedures that should not have required sedation.

Law enforcement sources say the Jackson case could be the biggest of it kind when it comes to doctors who enabled celebrity patients to fuel their drug addiction ... and we're told criminal charges could loom large.

***** *****

More bad news for Dr. Conrad Murray -- the bank is trying to foreclose on his Las Vegas home ... the one that was filled with DEA agents yesterday.

According to the Clark County Recorder's Office, Dr. Murray owes more than $15,000 in back payments to Irwin Union Bank.

Sources tell us Murray recently took out a $1.6 million loan -- but the bank says he stopped paying back in January, and now they have just filed a "Notice of Default" document.

In order to keep the house, Murray not only has to come up with the $15k -- he is also responsible for any possible late fees, unpaid taxes and insurance costs he may have accrued.

***** *****

Authorities believe Michael Jackson used at least 19 aliases to score drugs -- including the names of a famous sex symbol and possibly his own son, this according to the Los Angeles Times.

According to the report, the authorities who raided Dr. Conrad Murray's Las Vegas home and office today had a warrant to search for medical records under 19 different names -- including Josephine Baker, Paul Farance, Bryan Singleton, Jimmy Nicholas, Blanca Nicholas, Roselyn Muhammad, Faheem Muhammad, Frank Tyson, Fernand Diaz, Peter Madonie and Kai Chase.

Also listed -- the name of Jackson's son, Prince.

As TMZ first reported Jackson also used the name Michael Armstrong, Jack London, Peter Midani and his personal favorite, Omar Arnold.

Law enforcement sources tell us they found the name Omar Arnold on medical records they took from Jackson's dermatologist, Dr. Arnie Klein.

rabid MJ fans r blaming the doc for his death. MJ has been abusing all these drugs since the early 90s and he has only had this doc for a fairly short time.
Of course what dr murray did was unethical and he was stressed out financially too
So he took this job in an act of desparation
MJ would have got hold of these drugs regardless of the doc.
MJ has been a junkie for the last 17yrs or even more

asg said:

true- howeveri dont belithathe used them as much a he did aroud the time of hi passing and this nit wit didnt kno the first thing bout adminiserinit- he kild him by giving him too much