plus 3, THEN That's What They Called Music! - A.V. Club |
- THEN That's What They Called Music! - A.V. Club
- A Million Little Lies - Exposing James Frey’s Fiction Addiction - The Smoking Gun
- Brittany Murphy leaves husband out of will - Sydney Morning Herald
- Eye-popping fashion from Elvis, Michael Jackson, Britney Spears and ... - New York Daily News
| THEN That's What They Called Music! - A.V. Club Posted: 02 Mar 2010 02:23 PM PST In early 2010, A.V. Club writer Nathan Rabin decided to listen to and write about the bestselling, zeitgeist-friendly CD series NOW That's What I Call Music! in chronological order. Each one of the 33 American NOW! collections compiles a cross-section of recent hits from across the musical spectrum. Beginning with the first entry from 1998, this column will examine what the series says about the evolution and de-evolution of pop music.
When I interviewed Brittany Murphy during the junket for Girl, Interrupted back in the prehistoric days of The A.V. Club, I remember thinking very vividly, with all the world-weariness a 23-year-old can muster, "Wow, what a sweet, guileless, sincere young woman. This industry is going to destroy her." I think we as a society had the same response the first time we saw the music video for Britney Spears' "…Baby One More Time." The question wasn't whether the doe-eyed 16-year-old pop tart gyrating in a sports bra and Catholic-schoolgirl outfit would enter the proverbial nightmare descent into booze and pills™, but when. Similarly, we didn't wonder whether the pressures of fame would drive her a little batty, we just asked exactly how fucking nuts she'd eventually become. Would she go Anna Nicole Smith crazy? Sean Young crazy? Or would she become the new gold standard for celebrity lunacy? When "…Baby One More Time" made her a household name, Spears was simultaneously a naïve young woman and a battle-hardened show-business veteran, the kind of relentlessly driven child star whose parents probably scheduled her first voice and dance lessons while she was still in the womb. She was a short-term member of a Lou Pearlman-concocted She was also, it should be noted, fucked: hopelessly, hopelessly fucked. When you're introduced to the public as a devoutly Christian, wholesome, all-American, chaste, insatiable teen whore who will satisfy any listener's most depraved fantasies when not contemplating God's unimaginable glory, a normal, sane, functional adolescence and young adulthood is out of the question. Spears' childhood was sacrificed on the altar of pop stardom; she became a star, a sex symbol, a controversy magnet, an icon, and a walking punchline, but she would never be a kid again. "…Baby One More Time" sent Spears on a rocket ride to hell, but it's a stunningly savvy piece of pop iconography, as shrewd as it is shameless. The video embodies the same combination of fresh-scrubbed all-American innocence and highway-hooker raunch that makes Spears such a troubling, fascinating figure. Depending on your perspective, it's either a light, unobjectionable video about an athletic high-school student daydreaming about having fun with her friends, or an obscene slab of softcore kiddie porn that fetishizes precocious female sexuality in disturbing ways. Spears stares at us with doe eyes and pouty lips, her Catholic-school-girl outfit strategically altered for maximum slutitude as she leads an anonymous army of dancers through hallway Stripperoebics. The song offers a despairing portrait of romantic angst, regret, obsession, and suicidal despair but the video is all about taking off your clothes and dancing with your pals. In "…Baby One More Time," Spears is either pleading plaintively for the return of a lover she thoughtlessly spurned, or begging for one last mercy fuck for old time's sake. And that's not even getting into the S&M aspects of the title, or the troubling undertones of putting Spears in pigtails and a Catholic schoolgirl outfit. If the lyrics are open to interpretation, Spears' vocals clear up any lingering confusion about whether it's about desperately wanting to get fucked by someone you've rejected. Spears coos, pants, and purrs the song's come-ons in a crazed libidinal frenzy. She embodies the aphorism I just made up that if you can't sing well, sing sexy. In both song and video form, "…Baby One More Time" is deeply problematic. It made me feel dirty the first time I saw it. Since I enjoy speaking for everyone in the world, I will come right out and say that we are all complicit in the degradation, objectification, and crazyfication of Mrs. Spears. She wouldn't be peddling her tawdry teen sexuality so brazenly if the world weren't so eager to buy it. We created a monster, then recoiled at what she'd become. So I watched "…Baby One More Time" initially with both high-minded disdain and no small amount of titillation. The video was sleazy, calculating, relentlessly sexual, disingenuous, and kind of hot. Then again, when I saw the video for the first time in 1998, I was barely out of my teens, so I was at least a relatively young dirty old man. Listening to "…Baby One More Time" as the first track on the second installment of NOW That's What I Call Music!, I had an entirely different experience. I'm now old enough to be the father of a 16-year-old, so voyeuristic delight was replaced by paternal concern. I looked at Spears' big, unsuspecting eyes and saw somebody's daughter as well as a sweet, sweet piece of underage ass. It was one thing to watch "…Baby One More Time" as a 22-year old and sense that the world would not be kind to Spears. It was another to gaze back at it through the prism of 12 years of breakdowns and reinventions, divorces and reconciliations, K-Feds and head-shaving and kids and paparazzi, umbrellas used as weapons, and other assorted craziness. The seeds of Spears' personal and professional ruin were there from the outset. They just needed time and space to grow into the glorious trainwreck of today. Spears is the ultimate NOW That's What I Call Music! artist: shiny, prefabricated, pure commercial product, and a purveyor of the synthetic, one-size-fits-all bubblegum R&B that the series' compilers love, or at least feel commercially obligated to promote. Spears has been on NOW compilations a staggering 14 times, which is 13 times more than The New Radicals, the owner of the treasured No. 2 slot on the second volume of the series. Yet The New Radicals' Gregg Alexander is a quintessential NOW That's What I Call Music! artist in his own right: a music-business lifer who stumbled onto a song that resonated with the public, then rode the wave for a brief, shining moment before slinking back into anonymity. The New Radicals were also a studio conceit: Writer/producer/singer/multi-instrumentalist Alexander and former child star Danielle Brisebois were the band's only two members; otherwise, Alexander used session musicians to realize his vision of angry, politically engaged piano pop in the mellow '70s Todd Rundgren/Joe Jackson vein. Like "…Baby One More Time," The New Radicals' "You Get What You Give" captures something ineffable about the heightened emotions and pummeling intensity of adolescence. Where Spears' breakout hit conveys how a stormy relationship can feel like a matter of life-and-death importance for a 16-year-old, "You Get What You Give" luxuriates in the romance of teen rebellion, of being 14 and choked with rage at the corruption of adults, of being a youth in revolt against a revolting world. When I was 14, I was angry at everyone, especially rich people. "You Get What You Give" builds on this free-floating anger by dragging a randomly chosen assortment of celebrities into Alexander's rant against the powers that be. In the song's most famous lines, he sings "Fashion shoots with Beck and Hanson / Courtney Love and Marilyn Manson / You're all fakes, run to your mansions / Come around, we'll kick your ass in!" What makes the whole screed so adorable is the incredibly wimpy way Alexander screams "We'll kick your ass in." I just want to give him a big hug and say, "You're not kicking anyone's ass, my follicle-challenged friend. Now take off that silly hat and we'll go out for ice cream." "You Get What You Give" made Alexander an unlikely pop star, but he decided he didn't like pop stardom. He wore his silly hat in concert to hide his lack of enthusiasm for performing. Then he broke up the band, leaving behind a lot of what-ifs and one great fucking single. As the tough guy in popular British boy band Take That, Robbie Williams was once part of the same teen-pop machinery that propelled Spears to international fame. But by the time he recorded "Millennium," the third track on NOW, he'd reinvented himself as an ironic pop star, a tongue-in-cheek international playboy who recorded duets with Neil Tennant and gave his albums nudge-nudge names like The Ego Has Landed and Reality Killed The Video Star. If "You Get What You Give" is about the romance of youth, "Millennium" addresses the total fucking awesomeness of being rich, young, and famous at the turn of the century. Built around an appropriately cinematic sample from John Barry's You Only Live Twice score, it finds Williams in continental bon vivant mode as he croons lyrics that are either clever in a stupid way, or stupid in a clever fashion, like the chorus' commandment, "Get up and see the sarcasm in my eyes." Like Alexander, Williams chooses to play the tough guy in hilariously unconvincing fashion. Just as Beck and Hanson, Courtney Love and Marilyn Manson don't have to worry about Alexander coming around and kicking their ass in, I don't think anyone was too intimidated when Williams taunted "Come and have a go if you think you are hard enough" in a faltering, girlish falsetto. Incidentally, the brothers Hanson later worked with Alexander; apparently he came over to their house intent on kicking their ass in, but they hit it off and decided to do some songwriting together. Like The New Radicals, Semisonic will forever be tarnished with the one-hit-wonder tag. That's a shame, because it was a fantastic power-pop group, a trio of eggheads with a gift for monster hooks, passionate vocals, and sincerity that never lapsed into sentimentality. Their 1996 album debut Great Divide is a minor power-pop masterpiece, but the trio's follow-up birthed "Closing Time," the group's unlikely contribution to the NOW pantheon. At a time when much of what passed for alternative music was steeped in rage, angst, and sneering irony, Semisonic frontman Dan Wilson was refreshingly willing to be romantic and sincere. He wrote great love songs like "Secret Smile" and "Singing In My Sleep," and songs that weren't what they appeared to be, like "Closing Time." On the surface, the song finds the romance in barflies scrambling for a closing-time hookup, but according to So You Wanna Be A Rock & Roll Star, the likeable memoir of Semisonic drummer Jacob Slichter, it was written about the birth of Wilson's first child. The song's key line is purloined from the Roman philosopher Seneca, who originally wrote, "Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end." It's a line with multiple meanings; there's the end of life in the womb and the beginning of life outside, but also a father and mother forsaking the pleasures of youth for the responsibilities of parenthood. I have now devoted 1,800 words to four songs, so it's time for me to pick up the pace. Among other songs, "Closing Time" is followed by "My Favorite Mistake" and "Father Of Mine": At the risk of damning each with faint praise, they're my favorite Sheryl Crow and Everclear songs, respectively. "My Favorite Mistake" addresses the imminent demise of a failing relationship with sadness and resignation rather than rage. There's a lot of misinformation about this song as well. At one point, Crow sings, "I woke up and called this morning," a line that was misheard, by me at least, as "I woke up this God this morning." That line led some to think the song was written about Crow's relationship with Eric Clapton. Some very confused souls, on the other hand, misheard that line as "I woke up with Zod this morning" and thought the song was about Crow's brief marriage to Terence Stamp. (She apparently has a thing for '60s British pop icons.) At the risk of generalizing, every Everclear song is exactly the same: a howled Nirvana knock-off with a giant chorus about how Art Alexakis' dad didn't love him, or how he'll make a glorious life for you and everything will be wonderful, yeah. Uh huh. "Father Of Mine" is the purest/finest manifestation of this aesthetic, a damning condemnation of an absent father that builds in rage and intensity until the insufferable Everclear frontman delivers the knockout blow with the lines "Tell me how do you sleep / With the children you abandoned and the wife I saw you beat." As someone irrevocably scarred by the desertion of an absent parent, I can relate all too well to the lines that follow: "I will never be safe, I will never be sane / I will always be weird inside, I will always be lame." From there, we embark on a magical musical journey through the requisite boy-band cheese (98 Degrees' "Because Of You," Backstreet Boys' "I'll Never Break Your Heart"), Fatboy Slim testifying (the rapturous "Praise You"), quirky attitude from Garbage ("I Think I'm Paranoid"), and Cake ("Never There"), as well as a cotton-candy pop song from the Rugrats: The Movie soundtrack that features Teddy Riley pretending to be a cartoon frog, and Ma$e doing an entire verse about the leads in the popular animated show. I no longer wonder why Ma$e abandoned hip-hop and sought God's grace. Sublime's "What I Got" grooves in hippified fashion on a guitar riff so killer that when the surviving members of The Beatles heard it, they decided to travel back in time to the late '60s so they could borrow it for "Lady Madonna." Sublime's breakout hit is a shaggy, ramshackle celebration of life's simple pleasures, rendered all the more poignant because it hit airwaves after Sublime frontman Bradley Nowell died from a heroin overdose in 1996. Hip-hop is shamefully underrepresented on the first two volumes of NOW That's What I Call Music! It's sadly telling that Jay-Z had to hook up with the cast of Annie in order to be pop and palatable enough for the bestselling compilation. "Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)" made Jay-Z a pop star, but at a steep cost. Compared to the intricate, machine-gun flow he flexed on Reasonable Doubt, Hova sounds bored and basic here. He dumbed down for the mainstream, and has been reaping the benefits ever since. This brings us to the compilation's last and strangest track, "Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)," a novelty song/guide to life with a curious history. The song began life, in the popular imagination at least, as a Kurt Vonnegut graduation speech. But in a funny twist, it wasn't a graduation speech and wasn't written or delivered by Vonnegut, though heaven knows the song's coolness level would jump from nonexistent to super-duper if it was. Instead, the song was produced by Moulin Rouge! director Baz Luhrmann, and the source material was a column by Chicago Tribune writer Mary Schmich admonishing young people to let go of self-consciousness and shame, to delight in their bodies and their youth before the ravages of age destroy them both. When I first heard the song in 1998, I snorted derisively. (Then again, I snorted derisively at everything back then). It was pure cheese, middlebrow hokum for folks who like entertainment that appears to be thoughtful, philosophical, and borderline profound but doesn't actually require them to think. Yes, I was far too cool and cynical for such wholesome treacle as a 22-year-old, but as a 33-year-old, the song affected me more than I'd like to admit, perhaps because I've already squandered what little was left of my youth. Where I once saw only a long string of folksy, groan-inducing clichés and homespun wisdom, I now saw something close to truth in lines like "Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they've faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you'll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked." I had an emotional rather than an analytical response to the song. Now might be a good time to make a shameful confession: I am not cool. I have never been cool. I never will be cool. I tear up during movies and hip-hop and country songs and even novelty songs put together by sexually ambiguous Australian directors. I basically am a giant fucking pussy. But I know of this one guy who is cool, or rather was cool. Super-cool. Robert Mitchum-level cool. Here's what he had to say about it, "What [Schmich] wrote was funny, wise, and charming, so I would have been proud had the words been mine." And that man? Was Roy Cohn. No, actually, it was Kurt Vonnegut. So there. At least I am not alone in my questionable taste. Up next, on NOW That's What I Call Music Volume 3: The worst song in the world, Blink 182 gets bratty, Fred Durst does it all for the nookie, Smash Mouth thinks you're an all-star, and boy bands boy bands! What was happening outside the NOW That's What I Call Music bubble in 1999: Q-Tip goes solo with Amplified:
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| A Million Little Lies - Exposing James Frey’s Fiction Addiction - The Smoking Gun Posted: 02 Mar 2010 01:47 PM PST
Three months ago, in what the talk show host termed a "radical departure," Winfrey announced that "A Million Little Pieces," author James Frey's nonfiction memoir of his vomit-caked years as an alcoholic, drug addict, and criminal, was her latest selection for the world's most powerful book club. In an October 26 show entitled "The Man Who Kept Oprah Awake At Night," Winfrey hailed Frey's graphic and coarse book as "like nothing you've ever read before. Everybody at Harpo is reading it. When we were staying up late at night reading it, we'd come in the next morning saying, 'What page are you on?'" In emotional filmed testimonials, employees of Winfrey's Harpo Productions lauded the book as revelatory, with some choking back tears. When the camera then returned to a damp-eyed Winfrey, she said, "I'm crying 'cause these are all my Harpo family so, and we all loved the book so much." But a six-week investigation by The Smoking Gun reveals that there may be a lot less to love about Frey's runaway hit, which has sold more than 3.5 million copies and, thanks to Winfrey, has sat atop The New York Times nonfiction paperback best seller list for the past 15 weeks. Next to the latest Harry Potter title, Nielsen BookScan reported Friday, Frey's book sold more copies in the U.S. in 2005--1.77 million--than any other title, with the majority of that total coming after Winfrey's selection. Police reports, court records, interviews with law enforcement personnel, and other sources have put the lie to many key sections of Frey's book. The 36-year-old author, these documents and interviews show, wholly fabricated or wildly embellished details of his purported criminal career, jail terms, and status as an outlaw "wanted in three states." In addition to these rap sheet creations, Frey also invented a role for himself in a deadly train accident that cost the lives of two female high school students. In what may be his book's most crass flight from reality, Frey remarkably appropriates and manipulates details of the incident so he can falsely portray himself as the tragedy's third victim. It's a cynical and offensive ploy that has left one of the victims' parents bewildered. "As far as I know, he had nothing to do with the accident," said the mother of one of the dead girls. "I figured he was taking license...he's a writer, you know, they don't tell everything that's factual and true."
But he has demonstrably fabricated key parts of the book, which could--and probably should--cause a discerning reader (and Winfrey has ushered millions of them Frey's way) to wonder what is true in "A Million Little Pieces" and its sequel, "My Friend Leonard." When TSG confronted him Friday (1/6) afternoon with our findings, Frey refused to address the significant conflicts we discovered between his published accounts and those contained in various police reports. When we suggested that he might owe millions of readers and Winfrey fans an explanation for these discrepancies, Frey, now a publishing powerhouse, replied, "There's nothing at this point can come out of this conversation that, that is good for me." It was the third time since December 1 that we had spoken with Frey, who told us Friday that our second interview with him, on December 14, had left him so "rattled" that he went out and hired Los Angeles attorney Martin Singer, whose law firm handles litigation matters for A-list stars like Jennifer Aniston, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Britney Spears. While saying that he had initially asked his counsel not to send us a pre-publication legal letter, Frey apparently relented late Friday night. That's when Singer e-mailed us a five-page letter threatening a lawsuit (and the prospect of millions in damages) if we published a story stating that Frey was "a liar and/or that he fabricated or falsified background as reflected in 'A Million Little Pieces.'" On Saturday evening, Frey published on his web site an e-mail we sent him earlier in the day requesting a final interview. That TSG letter also detailed many topics we discussed with him in our first two interviews, both of which were off the record. We consider this preemptive strike on Frey's part as a waiver of confidentiality and, as such, this story will include some of his remarks during those sessions, which totaled about 90 minutes. Frey explained that he was posting our letter to inform his fans of the "latest attempt to discredit me...So let the haters hate, let the doubters doubt, I stand by my book, and my life, and I won't dignify this bullshit with any sort of further response." This was, Frey wrote, "an effort to be consistent with my policy of openness and transparency." Strangely, this policy seemed to have lapsed in recent weeks when Frey, in interviews with TSG, repeatedly refused to talk on the record about various matters, declined our request to review "court" and "criminal" records he has said he possesses, and continued to peddle book tales directly contradicted by various law enforcement records and officials. But during these interviews, Frey did, for the first time, admit that he had embellished central details of his criminal career and purported incarceration for "obvious dramatic reasons" in the nonfiction work. He also admitted to taking steps, around the time "A Million Little Pieces" was published in hardcover in 2003, to legally expunge court records related to the seemingly most egregious criminal activity of his lifetime. That episode--a violent, crack-fueled confrontation with Ohio cops that resulted in a passel of serious felony charges--is a crucial moment in "A Million Little Pieces," serving as a narrative maypole around which many other key dramatic scenes revolve and depend upon for their suspense and conflict. Frey has repeatedly asserted in press interviews that the book is "all true" and he told Winfrey, "I think I wrote about the events in the book truly and honestly and accurately." The author told us that he had the court records purged in a bid to "erect walls around myself." Referring to our inquiries about his past criminal career, Frey noted, "I wanted to put up walls as much as I possibly could, frankly, to avoid situations like this." The walls, he added, served to "keep people away from me and to keep people away from my private business." So much for the openness and transparency. So why would a man who spends 430 pages chronicling every grimy and repulsive detail of his formerly debased life (and then goes on to talk about it nonstop for 2-1/2 years in interviews with everybody from bloggers to Oprah herself) need to wall off the details of a decade-old arrest? When you spend paragraphs describing the viscosity of your own vomit, your sexual failings, and the nightmare of shitting blood daily, who knew bashfulness was still possible, especially from a guy who wears the tattooed acronym FTBSITTTD (Fuck The Bullshit It's Time To Throw Down). We discovered the answer to that question in the basement of an Ohio police headquarters, where Frey & Co. failed to expunge the single remaining document that provides a contemporaneous account of his watershed felonious spree.
Since the book's 2003 publication (the $14.95 paperback was issued last summer by Anchor Books), Frey has defended "A Million Little Pieces" against critic claims that parts of the book rang untrue. In a New York Times review, Janet Maslin mocked the author--a former alcoholic who has rejected the precepts of Alcoholics Anonymous--for instead hewing to a cynical "memoirist's Twelve Step program." A few journalists, most notably Deborah Caulfield Rybak of Minneapolis's Star Tribune, have openly questioned the truthfulness of some book passages, especially segments dealing with Frey undergoing brutal root-canal surgery without the aid of anesthesia and an airplane trip during which an incapacitated Frey is bleeding, has a hole in his cheek, and is wearing clothes covered with "a colorful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit and blood." And then there's the time in Paris (he's supposedly fled to Europe after jumping bail in Ohio) when, on his way to commit suicide by throwing himself into the Seine, Frey stops into a church to have a good cry. There, a "Priest," while pretending to listen to Frey's description of his wrecked life, makes a lunge for Frey's crotch. "You must not resist God's will, my Son," says the priest. A vicious beatdown ensues, with Frey possibly killing the grasping cleric, whom the author kicked in the balls 15 times. Mon dieu! Frey told Cleveland's Plain Dealer in a May 2003 interview that the book was straight nonfiction, claiming that his publisher, Doubleday, "contacted the people I wrote about in the book. All the events depicted in the book checked out as factually accurate. I changed people's names. I do believe in the anonymity part of AA. The only things I changed were aspects of people that might reveal their identity. Otherwise, it's all true." However, the book, which has been printed scores of times worldwide, has never carried a disclaimer acknowledging those name changes (or any other fictionalization). Frey told us that his publisher "felt comfortable running it" without a disclaimer and that he "didn't ask or not ask" for one. "I didn't frankly even think about it." In subsequent book store appearances (Frey can draw 1000+ fans and celebrity worshipers like Lindsay Lohan) and interviews, he has repeated the claim that "A Million Little Pieces" is truthful. And he has never shied away from discussing his criminal past.
In a July 2005 interview, Frey recalled reading some of those classics to a fellow inmate, an illiterate accused double murderer nicknamed Porterhouse. "We got to enjoy the books at the same time, which was cool," Frey said. The author's Ohio jailhouse interactions with Porterhouse kick off the best-selling "My Friend Leonard," (currently #9 on the Times nonfiction list, also thanks to Winfrey). The first memoir ends with Frey leaving Minnesota's Hazelden rehab clinic, and "My Friend Leonard" picks up, months later, with him on the 87th day of a three-month jail term. In an interview with blogger Claire Zulkey, Frey compared those two stints: "Jail is really fucking boring, and occasionally, really fucking scary. It is about doing time and getting it over with and staying out of trouble. Rehab is about fixing and changing your life. It, however, can also be boring and scary." When recalling criminal activities, looming prison sentences, and jailhouse rituals, Frey writes with a swaggering machismo and bravado that absolutely crackles. Which is truly impressive considering that, as TSG discovered, he made much of it up. The closest Frey has ever come to a jail cell was the few unshackled hours he once spent in a small Ohio police headquarters waiting for a buddy to post $733 cash bond.
Winfrey's pick of "A Million Little Pieces" was unexpected since it overflows with vulgar and graphic language. It marked her abrupt and bracing return to the selection of contemporary authors after more than three years of choosing classics (and propelling those titles, often for months at a time, to the top of bestseller lists nationwide). Prior to tabbing Frey's book, Winfrey's other 2005 book club choices were three William Faulkner novels. Winfrey had selected books by John Steinbeck, Pearl Buck, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Leo Tolstoy, and Carson McCullers in the two prior years. The coronation of "A Million Little Pieces" came in September, when Winfrey told a Chicago studio audience (which included Frey's mother Lynne) that she had chosen a book that she "couldn't put down...a gut-wrenching memoir that is raw and it's so real..." She would later say that, "After turning the last page...You want to meet the man who lived to tell this tale." During the October show, which featured Frey as its only guest, Winfrey discussed details of that tale. He was, she said, "the child you pray you never have to raise," a raging, drug-abusing teenager who had been arrested 11 times by age 19. In college, he drank to excess, took meth, freebased cocaine, huffed glue and nitrous oxide, smoked PCP, ate mushrooms, and was "under investigation by police." By the time he checked into Hazelden in late-1993, Frey, then 23, was "wanted in three states," added Winfrey. Though Frey's book does not name the Minnesota clinic in which he stayed, the author has subsequently identified Hazelden as that rehab facility. By that point, he had added three more arrests to his rap sheet (which now totaled 14 busts), including his multiple-felony bust for that melee with Ohio cops, a confrontation that started when Frey struck a foot patrolman with his car, according to the book. That episode serves as a crucial and transitional moment in "A Million Little Pieces."
Of course, if "A Million Little Pieces" was fictional, just some overheated stories of woe, heartache, and debauchery cooked up by a wannabe author, it probably would not get published. As it was, Frey's original manuscript was rejected by 17 publishers before being accepted by industry titan Nan Talese, who runs a respected boutique imprint at Doubleday (Talese reportedly paid Frey a $50,000 advance). According to a February 2003 New York Observer story by Joe Hagan, Frey originally tried to sell the book as a fictional work, but the Talese imprint "declined to publish it as such." A retooled manuscript, presumably with all the fake stuff excised, was published in April 2003 amid a major publicity campaign. Frey told Winfrey that he wrote "A Million Little Pieces" with the assistance of "like 400 pages" of very detailed Hazelden records, documents that he told her included "legal records." In a promotional CD prepared by Doubleday, Frey reported gathering "all of my records: medical, psychological, financial, criminal, and otherwise" that were kept during his treatment center stay. Declining a TSG request to examine those documents, Frey said, "Once I start providing records for people it never ends for me...I feel like I provided the records to the people who were appropriate, who needed to see them." He added that he turned down The New York Times when the newspaper sought to review the material, though he showed Hazelden records to Winfrey staff members. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.  This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Brittany Murphy leaves husband out of will - Sydney Morning Herald Posted: 02 Mar 2010 02:30 PM PST  Actress Brittany Murphy has left Simon Monjack out of her will. Photo: Getty Images Brittany Murphy left her husband out of her will. The late Clueless'actress – who passed away aged 32 on December 20 2009 – left her entire estate to her mother Sharon Murphy, and nothing to British screenwriter Simon Monjack, it has been claimed. Despite the snub, Monjack is happy with the way his wife's assets have been divided, insisting it was on his request that he was not named a beneficiary. According to the screenwriter, the will specifically said: "I am married to Simon Monjack who I have intentionally left out of this will." According to gossip website TMZ, Murphy originally made a handwritten will years before she was married, which was stored in her manager's safe and left everything to her mother. She then had a formal document drafted, along with a trust, after marrying Monjack, but continued to leave all her assets – the value of which is unknown – to her mother, who lived with the couple. Murphy's mother has now reportedly put their Los Angeles home – where the actress was found unconscious in the shower – up for sale for $US7.5 million ($8.3 million) and she and Monjack are planning to relocate to New York. The 8,000 square foot estate was previously owned by Britney Spears, but Murphy bought it in 2003 for just under $4 million. BANG Showbiz Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Eye-popping fashion from Elvis, Michael Jackson, Britney Spears and ... - New York Daily News Posted: 02 Mar 2010 11:10 AM PST Tuesday, March 2nd 2010, 4:00 AM Here's a chance to dress like two kings, a Prince and a knight - the royalty of rock 'n' roll. Eye-popping outfits worn by the King, Elvis Presley, and the King of Pop, Michael Jackson, are up for grabs in an online memorabilia auction by the midtown shop Gotta Have It. Also available for the taking in the gottahaverockandroll.com sale running through March 10 is a gold tunic rocked by Sir Paul McCartney and a polka-dotted waistcoat worn by Prince. But owning a piece of music history won't come cheap. Minimum bids are $10,000 for Elvis' red suede jacket and $15,000 for Jackson's vintage orange jumpsuit - and prices could skyrocket as bidders jump in. "All it takes is two people, till one gets tired or doesn't want to spend any more money," said store co-owner Peter Siegel, who said a Presley jumpsuit sold for $300,000 in the shop's August 2008 auction. Presley's 1950s-vintage jacket now on the block isn't some castoff from the back of his closet. It came from his favorite Memphis men's wear store, Lansky Brothers. He wore it on the record cover of "Jailhouse Rock." And Jackson's vinyl jumpsuit was seen on the cover of Newsweek during his 1984 "Victory Tour." It has Velcro fastenings so he could yank it off for quick costume changes. "They are iconic items," Siegel said. "You can identify who wore them the minute you see them." More than 570 pop culture artifacts are being auctioned off. Some are oddities, like the white cloth napkin Jacko tossed off a London hotel balcony to an adoring crowd below. "I love this city very much ... I'm going to sleep now," he scribbled in black ink. And some are surprisingly moving, like the two small pieces of unlined paper on which Bob Dylan hand-printed, in tiny letters, complete with scratched-out words, the lyrics to "Just Like a Woman." The rock 'n' roll legends represented in the auction run the gamut, from Bono's rosary beads to Britney Spears' fishnet pantyhose. "We have something for everyone," Siegel said. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
JANUARY 8--Oprah Winfrey's been had.
Frey appears to have fictionalized his past to propel and sweeten the book's already melodramatic narrative and help convince readers of his malevolence. "I was a bad guy," Frey told Winfrey. "If I was gonna write a book that was true, and I was gonna write a book that was honest, then I was gonna have to write about myself in very, very negative ways." That is repeatedly apparent in his memoir, which announces, "I am an Alcoholic and I am a drug Addict and I am a Criminal." It is an incantation he repeats eight times in the book, always making sure to capitalize the 'c' in Criminal.
In a recent "Meet The Writers" interview for Barnes & Noble's web site (
"I know that, like many of us who have read this book, I kept turning to the back of the book to remind myself, 'He's alive. He's okay," Winfrey said. In essence, that is part of the book's narrative power and a primary marketing tool. All this terrible stuff actually happened to a guy named James Frey, a former degenerate who survived drug and alcohol addiction, escaped his criminal past, and somehow avoided a relapse in the decade-plus since leaving Hazelden. When Doubleday sent the book's galleys out to reviewers, editor Sean McDonald wrote a letter touting Frey's "fearless candor," while a publicity manager hailed his "unprecedented honesty."| You are subscribed to email updates from Add Images to any RSS Feed To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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