August 14, 2009
Vainglorious Bastards Graphic Novel - playboy.com
Inglourious Basterds - The Graphic NovelVainglorious Bastards Graphic Novel
Quentin Tarantino provides us with a Nazi-killing scene from his new movie and artist R. M. Guera helps us give it a graphic graphic-novel treatment.
For optimal viewing, select MAX pictorial player size above.
Rock-Doc's Loud Guggenheim Grille Rap
The song is already incredible, and it has no lyrics. These guys (the guitarists) are hidden.
After building a career as a successful television director, Davis Guggenheim became an acclaimed documentarian with “An Inconvenient Truth,” the environmental film known colloquially as “the Al Gore movie.” He turned his cameras to another subject equally unexplored, the role of the guitar player in a rock band to create “It Might Get Loud,” which Sony Pictures Classics releases Friday.
Guggenheim brought together Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, U2’s the Edge and Jack White of the White Stripes for two days on a soundstage to see what would happen at the first meeting of legendary guitarists from three different eras. He spent considerable time with each individually in the cities of their youth -- Dublin, London and Detroit -- before shooting the summit meeting in Los Angeles.
Jack White is the focal point of his bands. But the other two, while stars, are sidekicks. How do they balance that with taking on a supporting role?
On U2’s Elevation tour, my wife turned to me and said, You want to be Bono. I said no, I want to be the Edge. Live, lyrics are not that important -- it’s about that intense vibration coming through those speakers. It’s the guitar that puts you in ecstasy.
Your filming process was different on this than it was on "Inconvenient Truth" ...
“The ugly truth about making documentaries is that you’re startled when you get the money, can’t believe you have the money, and just jump in. On "Inconventent Truth" we arrived at Al Gore's desk and started shooting on day one -- and you don’t have a point of view.
“This was much more intuitive We started with inexpensive, audio-only interviews and used those to tell us what to shoot. Jack told us about having to move his bed out of his bedroom to put in two sets of drums, and since we couldn’t shoot in that room, we animated it. The Edge gave a great metaphor about how trees are lined up in man-made forest, so we shot that. It was a different way to make a movie.”
What was the interview process?
We started by doing intense interviews with no cameras around, just the audio, and we captured these intimate moments. Jimmy talks about retiring in his 20s, about joining the Yardbirds to get out of doing Muzak sessions. They feel like personal journals. I wanted to get inside Jimmy Page’s head and know his deepest feelings.
That certainly occurred with Jimmy, but while he was so personal, Jack and the Edge reveal more sociological issues -- poverty and the troubles in Ireland in the ‘70s.
The revelation with the Edge comes when we see him pull out old (tapes), an early sketch of “Where the Streets Have No Name.” It’s an artifact of a hit song before it was made.
Eventually, while the stories build, they all crash down in self-doubt. For the Edge, it’s a question of “Am I a writer or just a guitarist?” For Jack, it was about ”Am I allowed to play the blues? How do I find a way to play something authentic?” In all three cases, there’s a crisis of confidence.
You captured Page’s swagger, the intense technician inside the Edge and White’s intense devil-may-care attitude. There’s a sense that they are the characters they play onstage. How much were you aware of how the images they projected?
We didn’t want to reinforce the myth of the rock star. In every interview, (stars) are fighting against a human instinct to present themselves in a certain way. On camera, people stop being who they are. Jack is aware of what people find weirdly genuine; he says, ”Let me play along.”
You see the TV footage of Jimmy (in his early teens) when he’s playing skiffle music on the acoustic. His left leg is swinging while all the other boys are very stiff. Jimmy was always moving. When the Edge was teaching him “I Will Follow,” Jimmy was trying to move in a blues rock way, even questioning whether the Edge was playing his song the right way.
Your background is TV. If this meeting were documented for a TV show, would it have come out differently?
I watched “Behind the Music” a lot. You know that every six minutes, the announcer will say, “When we come back from commercials, what happened after the third album.” TV needs to keep you connected. With a film, we have the benefit of a captive audience and could linger longer in spots.
If you could have added three other guitarists -- living or dead -- to the mix, who would they be?
We thought about putting an empty chair there for Jimi Hendrix, just because he was so huge. And people have said how about Eric Clapton? Jeff Beck? You could make a movie with three other guitar players and be just as intense as long as they are artists still trying to figure out who they are and what they play. Too many musicians are more concerned with getting the look just right and reinforcing the myths.
At the end of the film, you have three legendary electric guitarists playing acoustic guitars and play a song that is so very different from their own styles, the Band’s “The Weight.” How did that come about?
It had been all electric, great hardcore rock music for two days. I saw one of the guys noodling on an acoustic and thought why don’t we end with something acoustic. The Edge said, "Let’s play ‘The Weight.'" They had to learn it -- we had to scramble to find the lyrics.
The King Cover-up “Needle Nick" - Dr. George Nichopoulos Rap
I was 32 years ago, on Aug. 16., when the world,devastated by the news of the sudden death of the King of Rock 'n' Roll --son-in-law--passed, The King of Pop.Elvis Presley would never know -- greeted with similar incredulity, both cases: grieving family, friends, and fans like me demanded to know the cause of tragedy.
“It may take several weeks to discover the exact cause of death,” Elvis’ personal physician, Dr. George Nichopoulos, a.k.a. “Needle Nick, told reporters the next day, the Memphis coroner at his side. “The precise cause may never be discovered,” he added, positing simple “cardiac arrest” in the meantime.
A full autopsy was performed, requiring the removal of the star’s brain and organs. But the contents of his stomach were destroyed without being analyzed. No coroner’s inquest was ordered. The medical examiner’s notes, toxicology report, and photos disappeared from official files.
Rumors of a cover-up soon began to flourish.
Two years later, investigators discovered that 10 major narcotics had been found in Elvis’ system. Independent medical experts concluded that he had died of “poly-pharmacy,” the lethal interaction of these controlled substances. The most toxic in the mix was codeine, to which Elvis, a pharmaceutical autodidact, knew he was dangerously allergic.
He had secured a bottle of the painkiller during an emergency dental appointment on that fatal night. His liver was found to contain 23 times the average therapeutic dose (equivalent to the entire bottle). Another American icon, Howard Hughes himself, had suffered a fatal codeine overdose the year before, in 1976.
The King’s young step-brother, David Stanley -- his self-described bodyguard “lifer” -- insisted that he had committed suicide but was immediately muzzled. “There were millons and millions of dollars wrapped up in Elvis’s various insurance policies,” he later wrote. “If they even got a whiff of the theory that Elvis died of self-induced drug overdose then a fortune was at stake.”
But why, at age 43, would the world’s most popular entertainer take his own life? Several reasons, perhaps. His estranged bodyguards had just published a scathing tell-all -- "Elvis: What Happened" -- depicting their boss as a terminally addicted and deranged prescription junkie. He was deeply in debt, his record sales at an all-time low.
He feared he was a has-been. He was exhausted from relentless touring, but was being forced back on the road by his insatiable manager, Colonel Parker. And his fiancée, Ginger Alden, was threatening to leave him.
Moreover, the King was in desperately poor health. He had been battling lupus for more than a decade. The stress of his career exacerbated the immunological disease. Its symptoms could only be relieved by cortisone. This steroid was widely regarded as a “miracle” drug in the sixties and seventies; but it is now known to cause, in immoderate doses, psychosis and suicidal depression.
Suicide allegations, however, were nipped in the bud, and Elvis’ life insurance policies were paid out in full.
Seven years earlier, Jimi Hendrix had fatally OD'd. His close friend, Eric Burdon of the Animals, announced in a TV interview that the guitarist had committed suicide. Hendrix’s manager and his record label, Warner Bros., had taken out a multi-million dollar insurance policy on him. After Burdon’s announcement, a Warner’s VP accosted him: “You f---er, don’t open your mouth again -- that’s our insurance policy!”
The singer immediately retracted his statement. Hendrix’s beneficiaries were paid in full.
Weeks later, Janis Joplin’s body was found in her L.A. hotel room. Her insurance company denied her manager, Albert Grossman’s, claim. They alleged that the singer had intentionally OD'd, nullifying the policy. Grossman prevailed in court and was paid. He and his attorney had arrived at the hotel room before the authorities and all the drug paraphernalia had gone missing.
Cover-ups have become more the rule than the exception in celebrity deaths. Michael Jackson’s personal physician, Dr. Conrad Murray, waited at least a half hour before calling 911. What evidence might have been removed from the death scene in that time?
To date, two autopsies have been completed. Now Jackson’s mother, suspecting “foul play,” is demanding a third. In a surprisingly hasty move recently, Jackson estate executors settled for a $3 million pay-out on a $20 million policy. Should final autopsy results indicate drugs as a cause of death, the pay-out will be nonrefundable; but an additional $17.5 million Lloyd’s policy taken out by Jackson’s London promoter, AEG, could be rendered null and void.
But to date, publication of Jackson autopsy results has been delayed “indefinitely.” In the meantime, it is likely that Dr. Murray will be scapegoated and tried for murder, just as was Elvis’s physician.
Though Dr. Nicholpoulos was ultimately cleared of charges, he lost his medical license. And Vernon Presley, refusing to believe that his son was ultimately responsible for his own fate, tried to have his enabler assassinated.
The Tithe King Cover-up, a.k.a. “Needle Nick Wrap"
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