Some SuicideGirls have been modeling for the site for 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, or even 10 years. We thought it would be fun to show you a look back and some of the SuicideGirls throughout the years.

 This week we bring you Rigel!
 Rigel has been a SuicideGirl since 2006 and she has 20 strikingly sexy photo... more

Some SuicideGirls have been modeling for the site for 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, or even 10 years. We thought it would be fun to show you a look back and some of the SuicideGirls throughout the years.



This week we bring you Rigel!


Rigel has been a SuicideGirl since 2006 and she has 20 strikingly sexy photo sets. Enjoy this gorgeous look back at the stunning Rigel…



From her first photo set On Her Tippy Toes shot in 2006:



Rigel gets wet in Wax On Wax Off shot by Lorelei in 2006:







She's Out All Nite in this sexy set shot by Lorelei in 2006:





Take Flight with the lovely Rigel in this set from 2007 shot by Cymagen:





She's adorable in Tile and Wine shot by Sean in 2007:





Rigel is elegant and sexy in Little Boxes from 2008 shot by Missy:





Rear Window shot by Zoetica in 2008 is Rigel's tribute to Hitchcock:







She gets into Shenanigans in this set shot by Zoetica from 2008:







Rigel says there's a Silver Lining in this gorgeous set shot by Cherry in 2008:







Rigel's tribute to the classic The Birds was shot by Alissa in 2008:







She's all tied up in Petite Merde shot by Cherry in 2009:







It's Rigel Vs. Aliens in this set shot by Cherry in 2009:







Rigel self-shot this whole set with her iPhone in 2009:





She has Paper Thin Walls in this sexy set from 2009 shot by Cherry:





She has a Pillow Fight with Radeo and Marianne in this set from 2009 shot by Shazzy:



Rigel is a sexy chicken in Trick or Treat shot by Sean in 2009:



She's stunning in Black Swan shot by Alissa in 2010:





Rigel is a sexy redhead in Bed Rock shot by Alissa in 2010:





Hope you enjoyed the lovely look back at the gorgeous SuicideGirl Rigel! Be sure to keep an eye out for a new set coming soon to member review!

 Become a member TODAY for only $4/month (if you sign up for a year) to see all 20 nude pin-up photo sets of Rigel - http://suicidegirls.com/join/


Laura Dern is the talented and beautiful muse of many of David Lynch’s best films. Dern has starred in Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart and most recently, Inland Empire. In Lynch’s three hour, shot on video opus Dern plays multiple characters all orbiting her main character of an actor who lands her first... more

Laura Dern is the talented and beautiful muse of many of David Lynch’s best films. Dern has starred in Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart and most recently, Inland Empire. In Lynch’s three hour, shot on video opus Dern plays multiple characters all orbiting her main character of an actor who lands her first really great part in a long time. Dern has not only supported many independent filmmakers throughout her career, she produced Alexander Payne’s first film Citizen Ruth, scored an Oscar nomination for Rambling Rose and even changed herself into a femme fatale for Novocaine. I got a chance to talk with Dern about Inland Empire from an undisclosed place in Manhattan.

Check out the official website for Inland Empire

Daniel Robert Epstein: So have you and David have kept in contact over the years?

Laura Dern: Yeah. We both got busy in different directions for a while which is part of why we didn’t work together for a period of time. But we always remain friends and keep finding each other in the course of life.

DRE: I asked David if there is a narrative in Inland Empire and he said “Yes there is.” What did you ask him about when you were shooting this?

LD: I only remember a couple of times where I really had to pinpoint him down and say “I need more.” That’s over a three year period so that’s pretty amazing considering there wasn’t a script. If I could say anything to someone who’s going to his film; I would want them to know about David before they entered the theatre. There’s nothing about David that is elitist. He hasn’t figured out the plot and is sitting back waiting for you to fail his test. He believes in the visual arts and he is a painter who’s start was about creating something on canvas and having interpretations be intuitive and completely different than anyone else’s. That’s how he created art and then cinema took off from there. David believes in the intelligence of an audience. He believes in an audience going into the experience and discovering it for themselves. He knows what it is for him but he doesn’t need it to be the same for you and I love him for that. I want people to know that because I had the same experience making it that they had watching it. I didn’t know what the plot was but I had to feel my way through it and consider behaviorally what the character is walking through in each scene as we did it because I didn’t know what was coming after or what had come before. I had no script to guide me. But David is so specific about the feeling he wants you to have. Even when he speaks in code, he gives you a word or a feeling or the mood that he wants then you can run with that for a long time. He told me at the beginning of shooting that it is about a woman in trouble. That really helped me. For me it became about many aspects of a woman going through a dismantling and maybe even a resurrection at some point. So I never saw it as these different characters and these different pieces. That’s a very exciting way to work.

DRE: Obviously you understand your interpretation of the film but do you feel that you and David were in sync?

LD: Emotionally yes. I think most of people who see it, probably could get all the same feelings from it. But even though I figured it out for me, I don’t necessarily know what the rabbits mean or what does 47 mean or am I killing myself, is the guy my husband and what is the Polish connection? Is that woman me from a past life? Is it me in an altered state and I’m finding myself? There’s so many ways people are talking to me about it and they’re all pretty fantastic ideas. So I can’t wait to see it again to figure it out more and see what it makes me feel. The first time you see it you’re watching yourself and seeing what you all did and how it came together. So it takes a couple times before you just sit and witness the movie.

DRE: Would you have done this film if it had been any other filmmaker but David?

LD: There are only a few filmmakers that I would take a three year journey with. But I would trust them because I either know them personally or because I love their work. But to have no script and to play several people takes the length of familial relationship. Also it wasn’t just me trusting him but also knowing how much he trusts me. That was an incredible gift. The greatest thing a director can learn from David is that he believes so much in his actors. That confidence and faith forces you to take risks in a much greater way.

DRE: Do you remember your first audition for David?

LD: Yeah, it was for Blue Velvet. I was 17 and I went in figuring I’d do what is always done at auditions which is sit down and be asked to read a scene. I’m sitting on a floor in the hallway when David came out of the office and said “I got to take a leak.” He ran to the bathroom and afterwards he invited me into his office with the casting director and we spoke about life for 30 minutes. I remember us discussing trees and meditation. He mentioned something about being a mediator. We talked about him growing up in the Northwest and me growing up in LA and that we lived near each other in LA when he was making Eraserhead. We never mentioned acting or movies. I don’t think he’d ever seen me in a movie but he’d been told something about me. Then he asked me to come to Bob’s Big Boy with him to meet Kyle MacLachlan for French fries.

DRE: So he really does like Bob’s Big Boy.

LD: That’s real. We went to Bob’s and he was drawing on a napkin and then he asked me to go do Blue Velvet. That was my audition process. So I should have known then that I’d end up doing Inland Empire because already it was going to be an unusual journey.

DRE: Is part of the fun of doing a David Lynch movie seeing what he does with all these disparate parts?

LD: What’s incredible is that it’s only as fun or maybe even less fun than the journey itself. David is so much fun. He wants it to be such a good time. He’s a nice man. He wants everybody to have fun which is unbelievably rare to have on a movie set. He cares deeply about this spontaneous, fun, experimental feeling. Being pushed towards bravery is a blast. He had a camera operator working with us and he needed something like a dolly shot but we had no equipment. So he put the camera operator on rollerblades. That can only be paralleled by seeing it. It’s exhilarating, it’s scary, it’s exciting and you don’t know what to expect. That’s what everyday at work was like.

DRE: David also loves Los Angeles. You grew up there and your parents are actors. Do you love Los Angeles?

LD: In some ways. I think he has more of a love of it than I but the parts of LA that I love, he loves equally. He loves old school Hollywood like Grauman's Chinese, the old Hamburger Hamlet restaurant on Beverly and places like the Beverly Hills Amusement Park. Those are things that I love too because they were my childhood and he has an appreciation for it on a whole other level and I love that about him.

DRE: Since you and David have worked together so much, do you have a shorthand on set?

LD: Yeah, we talk a lot about everything but the movie. I think he’s a believer in not over talking, just like he’s a believer in not over plotting. Everything becomes an intuitive, feeling experience and that’s the way he describes it.

DRE: Have you ever shot a movie on video before?

LD: No.

DRE: Was it a different experience?

LD: Wildly different. Nothing like shooting a 35mm movie. With a 12 hour day on a regular movie, you hope for an hour’s worth of great footage. On a 12 hour day on this movie, we’d come away with probably ten hours of great footage. We shot all the time. We’d get to work and start shooting. The Sony PD-150 is so lightweight that we were close together the entire time. It wasn’t like he was in his tented little place watching a monitor. There are certain kinds of movies that require that, but there are other kinds of movies that are about human behavior and to have your director right there with you watching what you’re doing and pushing you to try different things or go to a different place is the way it should be.

DRE: One of the last scenes has Laura [Harring] blowing a kiss and then there’s all the other actors. Do you have a shorthand with the other actors since most of you have worked with David before?

LD: Not really oddly enough. David has a different language with each person. He gets his own feeling with each person. Each experience is so unique with David. I’m friends with Naomi Watts and she and I did a movie together [We Don't Live Here Anymore] and we talked about how much we loved David and loved working with David, but it is still it’s own experience. But there are a couple of catchphrases we all know. He’s the most unique person and such a brilliant and extraordinary gift to film. I just feel really lucky to work with him.

DRE: Your two previous films with David are so beautiful and lush, do you feel like we are losing that now that David is only going to be working with video?

LD: I don’t know the answer to that because I haven’t seen that much digital video being transferred. I thought I would hate it because I love film. But what David did with the transfer process and how he transferred it and how he works with color and light and sound and mixing and matching them all together is so beautiful. The crudeness of the film that he was working with becomes its own art. I don’t know if in somebody else’s hand I would feel the same way but somehow the nastiness of it was the beauty. But David certainly feels like it’s his future and I’m sure it is the way of the future.

DRE: I love the scenes with you, Jeremy Irons and Justin Theroux. How was doing those?

LD: Great. That was the most like making a regular movie. The scenes with Jeremy and Harry Dean Stanton were done all together in five days. There was more crew as well. But we still were moving so fast which I think all the actors loved.

DRE: I know you’ve done like a dozen pictures with your mom including this one.

LD: Something crazy like that at this point. But there are only two where I felt like we were really working together, Rambling Rose and Wild at Heart.

DRE: Is it coincidence when the both of you are on a picture?

LD: Oh, total coincidence. Rambling Rose is the only time we actually sought out doing it together. I was involved in the movie and the director [Martha Coolidge] and my mom were very good friends because they had done another film. She really wanted my mom but mom and I also wanted to do it together. But David asked my mom to do Inland Empire without me even knowing.

DRE: I heard you might be in Jurassic Park 4.

LD: I heard that too. I don’t even know. People have asked me if I’m going to be in it so I don’t know if that means they’re writing it and my character is in it.

DRE: Would you be interested?

LD: Well if Steven [Spielberg] were there I’d always be interested because I love him.

DRE: What if he were just producing because I don’t think he’s going to direct it?

LD: You never know. I guess it depends on where they take the dinosaurs and me.

DRE: It has been almost ten years since your appearance on Ellen DeGeneres’ sitcom. It had a big impact at the time but it seems like it has faded.

LD: It had an impact on people who were ready to listen. That’s the good news. But it did not have an impact on the Bush administration. So Ellen’s show didn’t make it any different. But what did excite me is that I’ve never received more fan mail for anything in my life. A lot of it was parents thanking me for being part of something that helped them to honor their children’s choices. That moved me so much. At the time, it was huge because these huge sponsors were pulling out and we were in the middle of shooting and it was becoming a huge controversy. It wasn’t just that she mentioned being gay but I was also playing a gay woman that she was coming out to and potentially coming on to. The whole thing was amazing and it seemed to be radical in this day and age, but it was at the moment. Unfortunately not quite huge enough to shift the tide of unconscious idiocy.

DRE: Did you have a big part in Year of the Dog?

LD: I don’t have a big part. It’s very much an ensemble. I had a hilarious time doing it and it was a hilarious character that I loved playing. I really wanted to do it because I think Mike White is totally brilliant. Mike is a born director. We tried to do a movie together a long time ago that he had written and that he wanted to direct. It never came to be so I wanted to support him when he finally got to direct.

DRE: Do you know what you’re doing next?

LD: I don’t. I had a small part in a movie with Russell Crowe [called Tenderness] and there’s a movie with John Travolta and James Gandolfini that’s supposed to come out called Lonely Hearts. But I don’t know when that movie’s coming even though we did about a year ago.

Now I’m trying to figure out what to do after this. I feel so liberated from doing Inland Empire that I’m like “Gosh, what do you do when you get to be three totally different people.” But I’ve been lucky enough to run the gamut so hopefully something fun will come up.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

i never realized i was an introvert until around 2010 when i took the Myers-Briggs Type and Temperament questionaire. ever since then i have noticed it more and more. it boggles my mind, because once i know people, i'm a complete donkey around them...and they usually wish i'd go back to being... more

i never realized i was an introvert until around 2010 when i took the Myers-Briggs Type and Temperament questionaire. ever since then i have noticed it more and more. it boggles my mind, because once i know people, i'm a complete donkey around them...and they usually wish i'd go back to being quiet. ha!

Some SuicideGirls have been modeling for the site for 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, or even 10 years. We thought it would be fun to show you a look back and some of the SuicideGirls throughout the years.

 This week we bring you JoLeigh! JoLeigh has been a SuicideGirl since 2006 and she has 10 strikingly sexy photo... more

Some SuicideGirls have been modeling for the site for 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, or even 10 years. We thought it would be fun to show you a look back and some of the SuicideGirls throughout the years.



This week we bring you JoLeigh!

JoLeigh has been a SuicideGirl since 2006 and she has 10 strikingly sexy photo sets. Enjoy this gorgeous look back at the stunning JoLeigh…



From her first photo set Needs You shot in 2006 by polishdan:







She says she's notorious for having fits of laughter in her set Giggles from 2007 shot by Kamila:





JoLeigh gets all the wrinkles out in Ironed Out shot by tmronin in 2007:





She has an Oral Fixation for Addison in this set from 2008 shot by ScottSmallin:







She's being watched in Big Brother in this self-shot set from 2008:





JoLeigh is enjoying the autumn weather in her set Vermilion shot by Alissa in 2008:





She's looking for Resolution in this smokin' hot set from 2009 shot by Cherry:





JoLeigh gets close with Lainey in Camp Crystal Lake in this set from 2009 shot by Alissa:





She's featured in the sexy Fight Club set from 2009 shot by Cherry:





Rambo and JoLeigh are Two Consenting Adults in this gorgeous set from 2009 shot by Alissa:





Hope you enjoyed the lovely look back at the gorgeous SuicideGirl JoLeigh! Be sure to keep an eye out for a new set coming soon to member review!

 Become a member TODAY for only $4/month (if you sign up for a year) to see all 10 nude pin-up photo sets of JoLeigh - http://suicidegirls.com/join/


It was the summer of 1976 in Los Angeles and the Ramones were playing second bill to the Flamin' Groovies at the Roxy. Across the pond, the Sex Pistols were still months away from achieving everlasting infamy by calling their host a "fucking rotter" while live on British TV. In a Kentucky... more

It was the summer of 1976 in Los Angeles and the Ramones were playing second bill to the Flamin' Groovies at the Roxy. Across the pond, the Sex Pistols were still months away from achieving everlasting infamy by calling their host a "fucking rotter" while live on British TV. In a Kentucky Fried Chicken parking lot off Third Street in L.A.’s Fairfax District, an 11-year-old Marc Canter caught his fellow classmate, Saul Hudson (aka, an 11-year-old Slash of Guns N’ Roses), suspiciously eyeballing Canter's mini-bike parked outside. “In those days there was a lot of bike stealing. I was one of the thieves, I know.” Slash laughs. “It’s quite possible I was thinking about taking off with it because I used to be like that back then. Anyhow, that’s how [Marc and I] met and we’ve been friends ever since.”

By high school, Slash was into guitars and Marc was taking pictures of local rock bands. With a few candid photographs of his best friend, Marc Canter unknowingly began to document the rise of the greatest rock band of its time: Guns N’ Roses. Over twenty years in the making, Marc’s new book, Reckless Road: Guns N' Roses and the Making of Appetite for Destruction, is a collection of exclusive interviews, rare photographs and original memorabilia including show flyers, magazine articles, ticket stubs, set lists, and hand-scrawled song lyrics. From the band’s first gig at the Troubadour in 1985, to signing with Geffen Records, to being dubbed “The Most Dangerous Band in the World,” Marc Canter was there, up close and personal, camera and tape recorder in hand. The result is a comprehensive account of the band’s early days, as well as a portrait of Marc and Slash’s friendship, still strong to this day.

“My goal here,” Marc says, “is to let everybody that likes this band – or even if you don’t like the band – see the making of one of the greatest records ever made.”

SuicideGirls met up with both Slash and Marc Canter at legendary rock and roll hangout Canter’s Deli, in the heart of Hollywood, to chat about Reckless Road and the stories behind the photographs. Even more, we got them both in front of the camera for their first-ever, joint video exclusive.

Reckless Road is in stores and available online now.

Watch Part One and Part Two of the video interviews.


Erin Broadley: So, Reckless Road is a fascinating book.

Slash: It’s great. It’s probably the best rock and roll coffee table book I’ve ever seen.

EB: Slash, the story goes that in 1976 you and Marc became friends when you tried to steal his bike?

Slash: [Laughs] Was it 1976? I guess, yeah [laughs]. I didn’t actually steal it; I was checking it out. It was a mini-bike, and it was outside of Kentucky Fried Chicken on Third Street… he was inside and saw this kid suspiciously checking out his bike and decided to intervene before something happened.

EB: [Laughs] Little kids protect their bikes, man. It’s their livelihood. It’s all they’ve got.

Marc Canter: They call it a mini-bike but really it’s a motorbike. We went to Third Street School but I didn’t know his name; I just knew his face. So I had this motorbike and was parked at KFC and I’m in there, buying whatever, he was walking home, saw it and was thinking about stealing it. He looked inside to see who it might belong to or if anyone was looking and then he saw me and thought, “Oh, I know him from school.” So he went in and instead of stealing it, asked if he could ride it. We became friends from that point on and pretty much never looked back.

Slash: In those days there was a lot of bike stealing. I was one of the thieves, I know. It’s quite possible I was thinking about taking off with it because I used to be like that back then. Anyhow, that’s how we met and we’ve been friends ever since. After Marc and I hooked up in fifth grade, we were friends for a while though junior high school. Then somewhere in junior high school I took off and moved into deeper East Hollywood and I didn’t see him for a while. At some point in high school we reconnected and he’d turned into this mega rock fan, which I had too, but he was really serious. He had his cameras and shit and he would sneak them into concerts… his favorite band was Aerosmith. He used to buy all kind of photos. Aerosmith was one of the major bands that I was a fan of when I started playing guitar and they definitely influenced what direction I went. So we had that new thing in common. I had started playing guitar at that point, and he just started taking pictures of everything because that was his way, you know [laughs]. It’s funny because I look at the book now and all those pictures that he was taking all the time, as far as I was concerned he was just casually taking pictures of everything. I didn’t expect it to be something later on. I never would have imagined that him being around all the time just taking 35 mm pictures would amount to this documentation later.

EB: Right. There’s a part in the book where, Slash, you say that the first thing you did as soon as you could put three chords together was start a band. And Adam Greenberg said it was almost like going to a rock and roll school. What was the creative climate like in L.A. as teens, learning how to play music?

Slash: I was pretty much an outcast in school and as a musician I was an outcast… When I first picked guitar up it was during the summer time so I spent that summer learning how to play and I think by the next semester I started looking for musicians. At that time, Van Halen had come out so there were a lot of musicians in junior high. That’s where it all started. I met Ron Schneider and Adam Greenberg and that was probably the third throw-together band I had, but it was the first one that started playing keg parties and, you know, terrorizing people’s houses...

EB: Playing the senior citizens’ center.

Slash: Yeah, [laughs] all these bar mitzvahs. It was a cover band that could never find a singer. Which is, like, the story of my life. Still is, to this day.

EB: [Laughs]

Slash: It wasn’t a big, heavy-duty, rock and roll scene in high school. There were a few musicians I was friends with. I went to four high schools, so every one I went to had its little clique of Eddie Van Halen wannabes [laughs]. Marc was hanging out, keeping tabs on the whole thing. Marc was also the first guy, when Guns N’ Roses first started, before Guns N’ Roses was even a nightmare, Marc was probably the only person interested in what I was really doing, [laughs] for the most part.

EB: Duff said that Marc was a pillar of stability for the band. How so?

Slash: When Duff and I first met, we met at Canter’s Deli. I used to work there and Marc would always help me out. I always had a job but if I was in between jobs, I would work at Canter’s. He was financially stable and I wasn’t [laughs]… he was just a really good, loyal friend. I still, to this day, don’t have many loyal friends. So when Guns first started, he instantly took the job of marketing and doing all the promotion. We all did it but I was real fanatic about it, I never slept. [Laughs]

EBidn’t you get fired from the Fairfax newsstand for conducting band business on their hours?

Slash: [Laughs] Yeah, that’s where I used to sell tickets… to customers at work. People would come in and I’d sell Troubadour tickets.

MC: I used to feed the band. Not three meals a day, not every day, but when they were hungry they knew they could come to me and I could get them a pastrami sandwich or whatever was needed. And why not? They’re my friends. I would drive them places, I had a car, I had gas -- they didn’t. I’d buy them guitar strings, whatever they needed, little things… I was paying for some of the band magazine ads that were coming out. First we started with quarter page ads and they were like $288. It wasn’t a big deal. Then after two of those, we went to full page and it got to be a little bit more expensive. But, at that time, I knew that would work for the record company people, like, “What’s going on here? This band keeps selling out these Troubadour gigs and they’ve got full-page ads. It’s not just some flunky, fly by night band.”

Then they found someone to help them with the demo tape but that person gave out in the middle and didn’t put any more money in, so they needed a couple hundred bucks to get it out of hock. I did what I could. I didn’t do everything but I helped because they’d do the same for me if they were in my situation. I lived at home, I had a good job, I didn’t have any expenses and pretty much, if they did work, they had to support themselves. I always knew Slash would make it as a guitar player, even if he was just a guitar teacher, because there was such a talent there. His playing was very seductive; you’d feel goose bumps when he’d play because he just hit those certain notes.

EB: Slash, when you first hooked up with Axl, Marc wrote that you guys had an amazing chemistry and I think that this really comes through in a lot of these early photographs. What were those early days like when you and Axl first entered into each other’s lives?

Slash: When we first hooked up, it was pretty uneventful, the first time we met actually I answered an ad that Izzy and Axl had in the paper looking for a guitar player. I went down there to where they were staying, which were some little guest room off of a house above Sunset. It was real dark, it was one room, they had like a bed that took up 75 percent of it, a TV that took up another 10 percent, and there was like 15 percent walking space.

EB: [Laughs] Just a path.

Slash: [Laughs] Right. Axl was on the phone and Izzy was the one I did all the talking with. I’d already met Izzy because he had come into my music store looking for copies of this picture of Aerosmith that I drew for Marc. He showed up at my work one day… this little, scraggy Johnny Thunders comes walking in and he’s looking for Saul Hudson, right? That’s how we met and he played me a tape of his band later that night. It was really ratty, with a tiny voice in the background screaming at the top of its lungs. But it was in key so I was interested. He told me the name of the band was Hollywood Rose… so later on I answer this ad and it turns out to be Izzy and this guy Axl. The whole time I was there, Axl never got off the phone. Axl was in Mark Twain mode, Twain wreck, which was when he starts talking, ‘cause he won’t stop.

EB: [Laughs]

Slash: That was our first meeting. Nothing came of out of that. Nothing happened. Then I was another time when I was actually seeing my dad. I didn’t see my dad that often but one time we hung out and we went down to Harry’s Barbeque and I looked over and there was Axl and he was talking to this chick and, again, he was doing all the talking and she was just sitting there. That went on for the whole time I was there [laughs] so I didn’t approach him and that was that. At some point we all hooked up when Axl approached me about playing with Hollywood Rose, which I thought was a pretty good idea at the time. Axl picked me but never talked to Izzy about it so I came along one day not knowing that there was any of this drama going on. I walk into this rehearsal studio called the Fortress in Hollywood… this grungy little room and Izzy was there and, because Axl had made this decision without Izzy’s input, Izzy quit. So Steve Darrow and Steve Adler came in and we put a band together with the four of us. That was the beginning of me and Axl’s real relationship… it started with the Hollywood Rose band.

EB: So it was chemistry but was it a volatile chemistry?

Slash: Well, yeah, that’s what I’m getting at [laughs].

EB:Some people think volatile chemistry fuels creativity.

Slash: I don’t think volatility fuels anything. I don’t agree with people who think you need that controversy to make music. It’s not really conducive to writing songs. If you have chemistry, you don’t need all that other shit [laughs]. Anyhow, but it started off cool and I liked Axl… he came and stayed at my house but then the yin and yang of Axl’s personality started to present itself. One minute he was really, really cool and somebody that I liked a lot. You could spend almost two days with him like that. Then the smallest little thing would turn around and change his personality completely. I’m pretty even keeled; nothing really phases me. I’m probably like that to the extent that some people don’t understand how I can be so fuckin’ blasé about things [laughs]. So we had a real contrast going on, but the music was cool. When we had a good time, we had a great fucking time. But when it was bad, I couldn’t understand the origins of some of these issues and why they would be blown out of proportion to the extent that they were. To him, it meant everything. But to me, I could just never understand it.

So this band lasted for a little while. We did a bunch of gigs. Marc documented those gigs. They’re in the book. Finally, we had this one gig where Axl got into a fight with somebody in the front row at the Troubadour and at that point I’d already been through another thing with him jumping out of my car one night. It was just tedious. The good times were good but the tedious times were really trying. So at this particular gig, when he got into this fight with this guy, and the gig wasn’t going as well, I thought it was pointless. After that show I was like, “You know what? I don’t have time for this.” [Laughs] So I was in a couple bands during that period. I was very ambitious but, at the same time, there was a limit to what I would and wouldn’t do to get by in this business. I wouldn’t do a lot of conformist sell out kind of stuff.

When Duff came into town, we met at Canter’s. Steven, my girlfriend, Steven’s girlfriend, a bottle of vodka… Duff comes in and we went up to the men’s room and hung out up there and drank the bottle of vodka and formed a little unity. We wanted to start a band with the three of us but, once again, we couldn’t find a singer. That went on for like a month and finally that split up and Duff had, ironically enough, just moved into this cheap little apartment right across the street from Izzy’s apartment. So those guys met and the next thing you know, Duff ended up joining their band, which I think had become Guns N’ Roses at that point. They had Duff, Izzy, Axl, Tracii Guns and Rob Gardner who was the other drummer from L.A. Guns. I was working at Tower Video at the time and Axl and I sort of had a certain amount of animosity going on which was slowly but surely fading. Axl came into my work one day and goes, “Do you want to play with me and Izzy?” As much as I was really unsure about dealing with Axl again, I really liked Izzy and I liked Duff, obviously, so it seemed like maybe it’d be a cool idea. I went and jammed with Izzy one night and he had the song called “Don’t Cry” and we put the guitars together and that’s really what started it.

At that point Duff came in with this idea of doing a Pacific Coast tour and going up to Seattle. He put all the gigs together from his experiences with a punk rock band up there in the Pacific North West and so I said, “Sure, let’s do this.” Rob Gardner chickened out; he didn’t want to take this perilous, fucking road trip with no real exact future in it. So we called Steve Adler and he came down and we rehearsed one night and that was basically it. We set off on that tour and our car broke down, fuckin’ 100 miles out of L.A. so we ended up hitchhiking all the way to Seattle. That’s really what cemented the band. The chemistry just on a human level between the five of us… just as guys who stick to their guns with what it is they want to do. That trip really had a lot to do with it.

EB: There’s something special to these Guns N’ Roses photographs. Band photos today are so heavily retouched and photoshopped together. There’s something about how raw these photos are that really captures the band’s gritty nature. Like the Reckless Road cover…

MC: The cover is them, the day they came back from their “Hell Tour” in Seattle. They had a gig booked at the Troubadour on June 6, 1985… it was on a Thursday night, and there was something really special there. But it wasn’t enough to solidify the band. Then a day or two after that, they went on that Seattle tour. The car broke down, they ate onions in the field, they hitchhiked…

EB:That’s where the real camaraderie formed.

MC: They had each other’s backs after that. When they came back to Los Angeles they wanted to do a photo shoot to make flyers for the next gigs that they had. They booked a bunch of gigs and said, “Let’s go fuck up L.A. We can do it now. If we lived through this we can do anything.” So if you look at the look on their face, they’re a gang. This is a gang now.

EB: They had their road warrior experience and now they’re ready to take it to the streets.

MC: Yeah. If you fucked with one of them, the other one would jump on your back and kill you. It was like they were a gang. And they started writing songs; each gig they came up with a new song, pretty much. And it was a great song. Just boom, after boom... There were no what they’d call “dead songs”... No fillers or throw always; every song they wrote was perfect. In fact the leads for the songs, the first time they ever played them are the same leads that you hear on the record. It was pretty much self-produced in that way because it worked. There was something special there. But anyway, back to the photos, yeah, my friend Jack Lue started taking pictures before I did and he would sneak his camera into concerts. Jack always did that and what happened was, to be honest with you, Eddie Van Halen was going to play at the Roxy and Jack Lue couldn’t make that gig so he gave me his camera, showed me how to use it and said, “Take pictures.” So I took pictures and I had fun and when I got them back, I was freaked like, “Whoa, these are really cool.”

From that point on I started taking pictures at every concert we went to. That was in 1982. Right around that same time was when Slash was playing gigs everywhere. And now that I knew how to shoot, and I saw that it works, of course I was going to shoot him. I was already tape-recording his shows. Now I had a tape, and photos and the flyer. So I just kind of kept everything because I saw something that was special. If you don’t tape-record it then it’s just gone. After awhile we met Axl and then it was like, wait a minute, now there’s not only Axl, there’s Izzy, Steven and Duff… there’s like five Jedis working together. It wasn’t just Slash anymore. Now it was just like all of them together made a chemistry. Now, I was not only documenting Slash, but I was documenting...

EB: All these other big personalities as well.

MC: Right. And it just became so much fun. I used to get butterflies in my stomach before the gigs. I wasn’t going to be surprised; I knew what I was going to see. But it was just so exciting. So here I am taking pictures and I'm hearing “Rocket Queen” for the first time. It’s one thing when you do some covers and a couple of originals but all of a sudden you start writing these new ones that are just really, really, good songs. You’re taking pictures going, “What am I hearing?” Then you get home and you listen to the tape and you go to that song and you hear it two or three times and you’re like, “Wow, we have a Led Zeppelin here.” They could do no wrong. It all worked! The vocals, the melodies, the lead guitar, the drums – it was the first attempt and it didn’t even need tweaking, it was there. Every now and then you’d hear a song for the first time and Axl, the next time they’d play it, would change a couple lyrics, or some of the lyrics weren’t completed. The first time they played “My Michele” there were some verses simply missing. They went without vocals. But, other than that, pretty much, they knew what they wanted.

EB: In Reckless Road, Marc, you write, “My goal here is to let everybody that likes this band – or even if you don’t like the band – see the making of one of the greatest records ever made.”

MC: It’s interesting, I’ve met some people that when I told them that I did this book they take a look at it and they’re the least likely Guns N’ Roses fans just because they’re into different kinds of music like jazz or whatever, but they respect what’s there. They’re glad it’s there to be documented and to watch history in the making. It’s the making of one of the greatest records ever made. I’ve met a couple people that really, not that they hate the band, they just don’t like that kind of music at all. But they can appreciate that it’s been documented. Like at Canter’s, a lot of the employees got books and they have never even heard of Guns N’ Roses. Some of the older waitresses, they’re 65-years-old and how could they possibly know what this is? But because I'm involved in it, they’re interested in it. I have a book all of a sudden and they want to read it. So they take it home to read it and they’re sucked into it and can’t stop.

EB: The band is as seductive in this book as the band was on stage. The book also states, “Launching a successful rock band in the ‘80s required three ingredients: a dream, some talent, and die hard ambition.” Were those really the three most important things back then?

Slash: Well, because of the climate of what was going on in Hollywood at the time, which was really excessive, commercial glam-metal kind of deal, everybody was getting signed. Motley Crue had already gotten big and famous and Ratt was coming out and then there were all these fuckin’ offshoots of that, cruising up and down Sunset Boulevard. We were sort of like the ugly ducklings of that whole thing. We didn’t fit in with any of it. We were the black sheep and we enjoyed that; we loved the fact that we were the scary band out of the bunch. We hated the rest of them and we provided a kind of entertainment that was very seedy. If you asked us if we were extremely talented, [laughs] I don’t think we would have looked at it that way. Really, when it comes down to it, I’d say blind ambition, desire, and the integrity and the passion for the music was probably the most important thing. There was a lot of integrity in the band and there was a lot of really focused passion for what every individual did… everything about the songs was really driven from the heart.

Looking back, there was definitely something unique going on which turned out to be a lot bigger than what most of our peers were doing. We were a gang of five that was a force to contend with. We were a 24/7 experience. We lived with each other and were together all that time. Everything we went through, which was a lot, we did together and that’s what strengthened that bond. It was really important as to what the band sounded like… it was a collaborative effort, every single song. Then we became very successful at that time but we were this vagabond bunch of drunken gypsies that sort of stuck together. But we were still pretty naïve really in a lot of ways.

MC: You want to hear the funny part to that? Jason Porath actually wrote that part in the book. And, in the manuscript I have, the third thing was “Slash” [laughs]. He actually wrote the word “Slash” but he changed it on his own before the book came out because he though it was a little bit too much Slash serving. Plus, the rest of the band had plenty of talent so he changed the word to "talent". The truth is, Izzy would be the backbone of a lot of those songs but Slash tweaked those songs… if Slash weren’t there, who knows? Slash would put the funky punch into it. Like “My Michele,” he added those four little jerky parts to change the song. Plus, you already know what he could do in the studio with his leads. Even if he had nothing to do with writing the song -- like “November Rain,” that was Axl’s song -- Slash comes in and puts the leads in that just rip you to pieces. So, he wasn’t far off when he put “and Slash.” It’s a good ingredient to have in the mix [laughs]. Slash will always call me after a gig and I’ll always tell him what I thought of it, good or bad, and he always gets exactly the truth out of me. He’s always very modest about it. Whenever I say, “That was great, that was great,” he’s very modest about what his talent is. He never wants to reveal how good he really is. After doing the Use Your Illusion tour for two years and playing big stadiums, there’s a certain amount that goes to your head that puts you in a rock star mode and on a pedestal. But as far as the actual talent, they were always modest about it.

EB: Another part in Reckless Road states, “The eventual merging of the Appetite lineup of Guns N’ Roses can be more easily attributed to chaos theory than a straight forward chronology.”

MC: Yeah, that’s pretty much the way it went down. There was no loyalty. Like Vicky Hamilton says in the book, they were trying on band members like clothes. You hung around people that were into the same music you liked and you jammed together. You found a garage and you jammed in that garage and if it worked, great. If it didn’t work then you moved on. Eventually, these five musicians found each other and, on top of finding each other, they went on that little road trip to Seattle which made them a little bit closer. At the same time, they knew they were the best at what they did. And the music industry sucked; there was nothing going on. Motley Crue was really the only band left and that wasn’t enough to make a whole scene. There was really nothing going on and Guns N’ Roses just came by and changed everything, putting the f-word on the record… it was really ballsy [at the time] and a lot of it has to be credited to Tom Zutaut for allowing them to do that because Axl was at the point where he was going to change the lyrics. Tom said, “No, leave it alone.”

MTV had a lot to do with it. The band had sold like 200,000 records underground and it was kinda dying out and MTV wouldn’t play the video. David Geffen pulled a favor and called in an executive at MTV and they said, “No, we can’t do it because we don’t want to lose our commercials because they’re known as drug addicts and they look like they’re going to rape my daughter” … that kind of thing. They didn’t want bad press out of it. So, they played the video on a Sunday night at like six in the morning Eastern Time and the switchboard blew up. Then, that next week, they got put right into Top 10 rotation for “Welcome to the Jungle” and from that point on they started selling records, like 200,000 a week. So, they went a whole year before the record even went to number one. Appetite For Destruction wasn’t just one song; the whole record is good. That’s why it’s going to stand the test of time. And another reason why is because its so raw and natural. And another reason why is because they were living on the streets. It’s the fact that you’re getting the raw energy and it wasn’t tampered with. What they wrote was ready to go.

EB: On a personal note about your friendship, it says in the book that in 1985 Axl asked Marc to talk to you, Slash, about not getting drunk before a show. Was it unfair of him to put Marc in that kind of position as a mediator?

Slash: Yeah…

EB: Or was he just the only one you would listen to?

Slash: Well, no I think there’s been many times that Axl has reached out to different people like my mom or my dad or girlfriend or Marc or something like that. But nobody wants to try and tell me what to do so it is very uncomfortable.

EB: No one wants to be the middleman between you and Axl!

Slash: Yeah, it’s never worked. If somebody like Marc or my dad actually does approach me just to sort of follow through with carrying the message, it’s done very delicately [laughs]. It’s not really effective [laughs]. That’s funny though.

EB: What do you think has enabled you and Marc to stay friends after so many years of chaos?

Slash: Well, because the chaos never had anything to do with Marc so our relationship has always been intact. He never really had to deal with the out of control me… he never put himself in that place. He never was judgmental; he was real objective. That always made me feel like he never crossed that line with me and so I’ve always had a respect for him and I would never rub him the wrong way because of that mutual respect. I never did anything to take advantage of him or make him overly uncomfortable or expose him to the darker stuff that was going on behind the scenes. He was never forced to be around that. So we’ve always had that mutual thing for each other.

EB: That’s once in a lifetime, man.

Slash: Yeah. And to this day, if he calls me, he can ask me for anything. He called me this morning all freaking out trying to get all this stuff done. I said, “Marc, don’t worry about it.” [Laughs]

MC: The thing about me, any friends that I’ve made over the years, I still have. If they need something, I’m there. And if I need something, they’re there. I’m a good person to be friends with because I'm an easygoing guy. Slash has always kept in touch. The friendship has always been there.

Video Exclusive Part One:

Video Exclusive Part Two:



Go to RecklessRoad.com for more information.

I am starting to get more relaxed and have more free time now that I am getting caught up with bills and having a constant stream of income now. Still im broke, and owe more cash than what i have. But still, I am in a better situation than i was a couple of months ago. SOOO now that i have more mental... more

I am starting to get more relaxed and have more free time now that I am getting caught up with bills and having a constant stream of income now. Still im broke, and owe more cash than what i have. But still, I am in a better situation than i was a couple of months ago. SOOO now that i have more mental ability free to focus on other matters, rather than stressing, WELL i am getting slightly pissed as to the "sustainable" BS of my school and of the winter sport world.

The newest thing was the flame throwers at the Austria Air & Style. For a sport that is just about 100% reliant on climate, and the need for less of climate change (of course if there is more snow, but that is not happening) it would make sense to be as least impactful as possible. SOO again, how do flame throwers fall under sustainable ideals. I am not sure? Just food for thought.

On an even more disturbing note, is the very silly unsustainable choices made here at my "sustainable" college. This school is aiming to be a significant player or hold a place in the ranks of a sustainable school. My newest and biggest gripes are the lack of double sided printing of class hand-outs. OR, the inability on my part to hand in double sided HW assignments. I will say i can understand that the school is trying to prepare us for for a a business world mentality of formal work, so for that I can understand the reason for not utilizing both sides of a sheet of paper. However, for a weekly assignment that is only a reflection of the assigned reading, that to me is very unnecessary to have a two pieces of paper, for a two page assignment. Now for a final or larger project I can understand the proper and more formal reasoning for handing in single sided print papers. However, for a weekly sort of "prove you did read" type of paper, it seems silly to me. Also a few other points are the lights that are always left on in unused areas of the library of the school. I mean sure they are LED lights, but in this school we should shut them off at night at least.

Maybe a picture of the school could help you reach my confusion as these points. This school for a number of students cost 40gs or so a year. An expensive liberal arts school, but the school has literally 5 buildings, only one of which is solely dorms. The other 4 have classrooms. The Admin building is 3 stories but only half of the middle floor is offices. The is a about a 500 student population putting the total income of at least 10 million a year. Sure that could be debated with scholar ships and grants given out, but something tells me that the school still gets the money. Idk im a few beers deep now and this seems to be a bitch fest, but my thought is that with this school aiming to become a sustainable note in the number of schools across the country, I feel there is a number of items they have missed out on. Maybe they are just a money making machine and feel that claiming sustainable is another form of marketing that brings new students here. As a small school I also feel they have the ability to make moves. Hopefully all my bitching will make enough noise to change something.

Anyways if got here, follow me on twitter @adamgaron686 more funny stuff and not bitching as much haha

stay well SG

Hello internet friends... the original post and accompanying image has become obsolete. Apologoes to Big_Slikk <--- over there. As of this writing, there are 170+ pages of fake tits and comments for you to read and enjoy. About every 10-15 pages or so, you'll encounter a brief and turgid argument... more

Hello internet friends... the original post and accompanying image has become obsolete. Apologoes to Big_Slikk <--- over there.

As of this writing, there are 170+ pages of fake tits and comments for you to read and enjoy. About every 10-15 pages or so, you'll encounter a brief and turgid argument about fake tits suck and are ugly and how could any woman in their right mind want to do that to their body. Suicide Girls is a haven for women to express their beauty in any way they feel how. Many girls dye their hair, have tattoos and/or piercings. Some have gone so far as to place sub-dermal implants in their arm or chests while others have needles and wires and ribbons make a corset pattern on their back. One girl went so far to sew her mouth shut! Some girls have done nothing at all.

And, yes, some have enhanced boobs.

If that isn't your thing, I'd recommend you click your way out of this thread now because this thread is for those who love fake boobs.

FAKE BOOBS or GTFO.

Thank you,

Your Moderator.

Frank Portman is best known as the lead singer/songwriter for The Mr. T Experience but now that he’s written his first novel, King Dork, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if you referred to him as the next JD Salinger. But that’s a non de plume that the main character of King Dork, Tom Henderson, would hate. more

Frank Portman is best known as the lead singer/songwriter for The Mr. T Experience but now that he’s written his first novel, King Dork, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if you referred to him as the next JD Salinger. But that’s a non de plume that the main character of King Dork, Tom Henderson, would hate. You see Henderson calls himself King Dork because of his status in high school. He only has one friend, Sam Hellerman, no girlfriends or friends that are girls and he hates the fact that every teacher in his school is obsessed with making the students try to be obsessed with The Catcher in the Rye. Henderson spends his time making up band names for him and Hellerman and obsessing over girls he will never get to touch. But all that changes when he finds his dead father's copy of The Catcher in the Rye with many mysterious notes in the margins.

Buy King Dork

Daniel Robert Epstein: How long have you been working on King Dork?

Frank Portman: From the first time I had lunch with the editor to the publication was just about two years. My band was on tour in New York and the agent who was trying to talk me into trying to write a novel set up a lunch with an editor at this publishing company. I didn’t have a book idea and I didn’t really think I was going to write one, but I thought, “Hey, free lunch.” So I went there and talked to her and I had to admit that I hadn’t written anything and I didn’t have an idea. So she was like, “Well, that’s okay. You’ve written a lot of songs. Why don’t you try to turn one of the songs into a book?” So I thought about it and gave it a shot. But then it was a long process after that because I procrastinated for awhile and then I typed out the first draft, which took about a month. That’s the thing with a book, you have to keep doing it over and over again. So you turn in your draft and then you wait while you get it back with notes. It’s like being in school and turning it homework. You wait until you get your grade back and then you’ve got to go work on it again to improve your grade. Two years later, it’s published and then it’s all over.

DRE: Did you really adapt a song?

FP: Yeah, pretty much. The book turned out to be quite a bit different from the song as you’d imagine. But the song that I got the title from is called King Dork. In the song there was the character of the narrator, who is the same character who had been the narrator of several other songs actually. I just thought King Dork was a pretty catchy title, so I just tried to imagine what that guy in the song would’ve done as a little interior monologue and then eventually it turned into a book.

DRE: It’s amazing that the character in the book came up with all those band names and there wasn’t one having to do with Mr. T.

FP: Yeah I had made that mistake myself. I didn’t really feel like forcing it upon my fictional character. But the book takes place over three months so he was coming up with band names for much longer than that. By the time you get out of high school and have your own band there is no telling how many fake band names you’d end up accumulating.

DRE: Is that how you came up with Mr. T Experience?

FP: It was something like that. People often don’t seem to realize how little difference there is between the fake band that you make up in high school and actually having a “real band,” where you play shows and put out records. It’s all imaginary. But the way that my band ended up being called Mr. T Experience is similar. We’d be sitting around watching TV and drinking Budweiser and someone says, “Hey, let’s call it I Dream of Jeannie on Acid.” Everyone goes, “Yeah. That’s good.” So someone said at some point, “Hey. How about Mr. T Experience?” Everyone laughed and we were making a flyer for a show and we got stuck with the name because it happened to be what we put on the flyer. Then I was in denial about it for years. I never really thought I’d have to be explaining it 20 years later. That’s a pretty terrible name, but it’s by no means the worst name. Anything can be a band name. That’s really the lesson. I just noticed a brazil nut on the linoleum there in my kitchen. Brazil nut linoleum, that’s a band name.

DRE: That’s why you’re an author.

FP: That’s right. This is how the content gets provided.

DRE: Why’d you meet with those guys in the first place about doing a book?

FP: The guy who’s my agent now was a fan of my band when he was a youngster and he grew up to be a pretty sharp literary agent. He thought, “Hey. Maybe this guy could write a book.” So he contacted me several times over the last few years and I never took it very seriously because I didn’t really have any literary ambitions or the idea that I could really write a book. But in the end I gave it a shot. I typed out a few chapters like a demo book, just to ask him, “Is this the thing you’re talking about?” and then I didn’t hear from him for awhile and I thought “Okay, it sucks and that’s why I’m not hearing from him.” But then when I did hear from him, he said, “I sold this to Random House.” I was like, “Man. Now I got to finish it.” So it took awhile and it was scary because if you don’t finish it, then you have to give at least part of the advance back. So that’s a real incentive.

DRE: There are a lot of blowjobs in this book for a young adult novel.

FP: Yeah. There’s a long tradition of YA novels that deal with sex. A lot of traditional teen lit and movies tiptoe around the actual reality of it. I’m not the only one who ever thought this would be a good idea, but I just thought, “Let’s not tiptoe around it.”

DRE: I’m not criticizing it. I’m just saying.

FP: Yeah. I think a lot of people are surprised. “Wow. I can’t believe they let you do that.” But I was surprised because Random House is a big company so I thought there would be some attempt at censorship or trying to make it more commercial. But there was nothing like that. They made suggestions, but it was like, “You’re the writer.” That was a pleasant surprise.

DRE: I thought it was cool when she wrote “slurp” on the note.

FP: That was cool. I’d like to get a note like that.

DRE: Why aren’t I getting notes like that?

FP: Yeah, sometimes you get lucky. You should go around telling people you’re in a band because that’s a good first step towards getting notes like that.

DRE: If I had known when I was young that being in a band would’ve done for me, in terms of girls, I would’ve been in a band since I was five.

FP: I just stumbled onto it blindly. No one told me. But it’s a valuable lesson.

DRE: My kid’s going to be jammin'. I’m going to shove an instrument in his hand, if and when I have a kid, If I have a girl she won’t be in a band!

FP: Yeah. The dynamic might be a little different. You make your decisions on child rearing yourself though.

DRE: Is the book autobiographical at all?

FP: Not really. The narrator is not me. But the general experience of what happens when you are an alienated teenager, even alienated from within the alienated subcultures, is what I experienced. If you were on the A list socially in high school, it’d be hard to write a book like King Dork, but by definition most people were not on whatever the A-list is, so I think that’s why it’s relatable.

DRE: What age did you start a band?

FP: I first started to say I was in a band around 13. But I was in a “band” long before I even had an instrument or anything. In fact I probably had like 20 or 30 bands before I actually learned how to play the guitar. If there’s any message to that book it is that having a band where you play instruments is optional. It’s more the concept and if you say that you are in a rock and roll band, you pretty much are in one.

DRE: When did you get your first girl as a result of being in a band?

FP: It was almost immediately. It’s the strange power of rock and roll, but I merely point it out.

DRE: When did the idea of the mystery of the Tom Henderson’s father come into your mind?

FP: One thing that writers often say that I always found pretentious is that once you have your characters and your setting, you start writing to find out what’s going to happen and the characters take on a life of their own. That is sort of what happened. One of my hobbies is that I collect found objects like letters and cards and various things from other peoples’ lives that are interesting or amusing or poetic. So I really like to go to yard sales and used bookstores and the Salvation Army and look through the books because a lot of times people have interesting things written in books. I noticed that the book that tended to have the most things written in it is The Catcher in the Rye. So as I was writing this book and I was engaging in my hobby of looking through these books, I had the idea, “Well, what would be interesting is if something written in one of these books turned out to have a mysterious significance in this character’s life.” Once I had that idea, then the plot snapped in. But of course the mysteries and the paranoid idea of conspiracies is really just a structure to hang the characterization on.

DRE: Is Henderson a good looking guy?

FP: He doesn’t think so. He’s probably not bad looking though because if you remember his sister’s really good looking. His parents are good lucking. But he’s a nerdy guy with glasses so you don’t really tend to think of yourself as really great looking when you’re in that mode. But if you’re anywhere shy of being a hideous monster and maybe even if you are a hideous monster rock and roll can counteract almost anything.

DRE: Is Sam Hellerman based on anyone you know?

FP: He wasn’t really based on anyone I knew. I was a little more like the Sam Hellerman figure in my childhood than I was like the Tom Henderson. You always find that books and movies are from the point of view of a single person with another person there so that there’s something to interact with or else it’s very hard to get anything going. For dramatic purposes I needed there to be a friend of some kind.

DRE: Do you like Catcher in the Rye?

FP: I reread it while I was writing the book and I liked it better than I did when I was a kid. I didn’t hate it as much as Tom Henderson does but I did feel that there was something weird about how everyone was in love with it. The only explanation Tom can come up with is that it’s a sinister cult. Maybe I wouldn’t have gone that far, but I did think there was something a little spooky about how everyone was under its spell without reservation. Now that I’ve written a book that is more or less an attack on it, although an ironic attack, I’m running into more people who say, “Yeah. I’ve always hated that book.” I never met anyone who did when I was a kid or up until now. I just thought it was required that you love it or else they put you in jail or something. Any time you are forced to feign enthusiasm for something, it fosters an antipathy. There’s a lot of stuff in school like that. It doesn’t have to be that particular book. It’s anything that your teacher is really excited about. Your job is to come up with the best way to act like you’re excited about it as well, but you want to find your own things to be excited about. So there’s a classic tension there with Catcher in the Rye.

DRE: Whose idea was the cover?

FP: That was actually my editor’s copy of the Catcher in the Rye that she used to carry around with her when she was a kid. We just took that and defaced it. It was fun. I was originally worried about being sued by the Salinger estate because I know they sue people and he’s still alive, which I was surprised to learn. But the result from the legal department is that it’s the same company. They can’t sue themselves. We can do anything we want to that cover.

DRE: What’s going on music wise for you?

FP: I have my eye on doing another rock and roll album, although it’s not completely in the planning stages. It’s past the fantasy stage and now it’s more in the daydreaming stage. But I’m writing some songs and trying to pull together some ideas. I’m really hoping I can get my act together enough to do another tour in the fall.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

countryval Hectorian heathen Andysith Stcyr Treze Jimmy Andybeau el_diablo_blanc vivianevog Thank all of you guys so much its been a very strange and kinda of sad few days finding out the people that I though were my friends to a certain degree actually think I'm a terrible person but everything... more

countryval Hectorian heathen Andysith Stcyr
Treze Jimmy Andybeau el_diablo_blanc vivianevog

Thank all of you guys so much its been a very strange and kinda of sad few days finding out the people that I though were my friends to a certain degree actually think I'm a terrible person but everything all of your said helped me remember that I'm not a bitch I'm actually fucking awesome. <3
I've come to the conclusion that the people that are saying these things about me and feel the need to let everyone else know how they feel about me are women hating, insecure freaks who would probably benefit from some kind of psychiatric treatment to address there lack of interpersonal and all around social skills. And I'm not going to worry about it too much because the people that do know me, love me. And they love me for a reason and certainly not because of how awful I am...cause that's just not true and weird.
Enough about that shit.

Friday I will be having the injections in my neck that MIGHT get rid of the pain that has been slowly but surely ruining my life for the past year and a half. Please keep your fingers crossed, pray, wish, or whatever you do to make shit happen that they help and I can stop living the life of a physically disabled 80 year old and go back to do fun things and not have to take pain killers every day. Thanks

Narrowed down all pis for my new set I just have to get them back to the photographer for a little editing and cropping and such and then I will submit! Thats another thing I would do a lot more if my back didn't keep me from, more sets! Regardless I am going to try to make more time to shoot.

That is all for now! Thank you again for being so awesome. Why the fuck is this site so awesome??

B

If you slacked and didn't get the new UK Holiday movie yet, this is probably the one time when procrastination paid off for you. You can now buy it on DVD or Blu-Ray in the SG Shop! (image) Each one will be hand numbered and signed by Missy, so quit slacking and order ASAP while they exist!! Limited... more

If you slacked and didn't get the new UK Holiday movie yet, this is probably the one time when procrastination paid off for you. You can now buy it on DVD or Blu-Ray in the SG Shop!



Each one will be hand numbered and signed by Missy, so quit slacking and order ASAP while they exist!! Limited numbers, guys!!!

To cast aside his squeaky-clean school boy image, Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe appeared on the BBC skit show Extras. He chose the show because it regularly features well-known actors satirizing characters they played in the past. Radcliffe’s skit showed him dressed as a Boy Scout, using foul language... more

To cast aside his squeaky-clean school boy image, Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe appeared on the BBC skit show Extras. He chose the show because it regularly features well-known actors satirizing characters they played in the past. Radcliffe’s skit showed him dressed as a Boy Scout, using foul language and mercilessly hitting on an older woman.

While some fans (parents) hated the skit, many others (adolescents) enjoyed it. YouTube uploaded the skit, allowing anyone with a computer to watch.

Though Kinky Friedman was born in Chicago everyone knows he has the heart of a Texan. Friedman first came to notice as a musician with the Kinky Friedman and The Texas Jewboys which created satirical country music. Soon Friedman brought his satire up to a new level with his novels using a fictionalized... more

Though Kinky Friedman was born in Chicago everyone knows he has the heart of a Texan. Friedman first came to notice as a musician with the Kinky Friedman and The Texas Jewboys which created satirical country music. Soon Friedman brought his satire up to a new level with his novels using a fictionalized version of himself as a private detective solving crimes in New York City. Friedman’s most recent bid came as he ran for governor of Texas this past midterm election which he lost to Rick Perry.

Right on the tail end of the campaign Friedman released the book, The Christmas Pig, which is about a fictionalized land where the king needs an artist to create a nativity scene. The king decides to hire an artistic but mute child prodigy. While the child is creating the scene, he becomes friends with a talking pig who helps him along the way.

Buy The Christmas Pig

Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you up to today?

Kinky Friedman: Well, I’m on a book signing tour for The Christmas Pig.

DRE: I loved the book, by the way.

KF: You’ve read it already, wow. You don’t waste much time Daniel. It’s a lovely little Christmas book that has turned out to be one of my best efforts.

DRE: [laughs] We Jews are always inundated with Christmas and Christmas stories and a lot of them are done by Jews. What made you decide to write Christmas Pig?

KF: Kind of like Dostoyevsky I took an assignment to write a celebrity Christmas book to earn gambling money for Vegas. It turned out to be a better book than I anticipated because sometimes when you set out to write the great American novel or paint your masterpiece, you never do. It’s always done accidentally. The great work is done obliquely by people who are trying to pay the rent or gambling debts, either one will work. Once you can get that mindset going you have a chance. But Christmas Pig goes beyond Christianity and Judaism. As Thomas Payne said on his deathbed, “The world is my country; to do good is my religion.”

DRE: Have you ever known a kid like Benjamin?

KF: Yeah, I have. In fact I know several but I know one very much like that and I suspect there are lots more. His autism is academic and a lot of autistic kids are brilliant artists. I also knew a pig once.

DRE: It wasn’t a talking pig I assume.

KF: No but close though. I’ve never really known a king though. Mark Twain only met one king. It was the king of Hawaii.

DRE: Why did they offer you a Christmas book?

KF: I don’t know. That was David Rosenthal’s idea at Simon & Schuster. It’s worked out well because the wonderful Germans have already translated it with illustrations for next Christmas. If the Germans like it, the rest of the world can’t be far behind.

DRE: Was part of the fun you being a Jewish guy writing a Christmas story?

KF: Well, I kind of am a Judeo-Christian. I contend that I have Jesus and Moses in my heart and they were both good Jewish boys that got in a little trouble with the government. I don’t think of myself as a Jewish guy. I’m pretty damn open about being Jewish, but none of it makes a lick of sense. Heroes of mine are Father Damien, a Catholic priest who died of leprosy over 100 years ago. Martin Luther King was one. Gandhi, Breaker Morant. A lot of people who weren’t Jewish are my heroes. Jesus was just one of a great line of misunderstood people that I admire.

DRE: Do you celebrate Christmas?

KF: I don’t celebrate anything but hunting accidents. I don’t celebrate holidays. I don’t like them.

DRE: Why is that?

KF: Because they’re stultifying dull. I think life is moments, that’s all. I don’t think you can contrive having a Jewish singles of Dallas Purim party and make it soulful.

DRE: [laughs] Was that your pig on the cover of The Christmas Pig?

KF: Might as well have been. No, my pig has already gone to Jesus.

DRE: I read that you save many animals. Do you eat meat though?

KF: Yes. I have been a vegetarian in the past although I still love a big, hairy steak. Do I eat pork? No. I don’t eat pork for spiritual reasons not for any narrow, stupid religious reasons. I like pigs, I think they’re really smart, good and I think we’re very deceitful toward them. Pigs are getting them a very bad deal. It’s like the horse sslaughter plants in Texas that I’m trying to close. They’re shipping meat to France for people to eat. After you get past closing the horse slaughter plants then you should close the cattle slaughter plants too.

DRE: Are you still involved with the Max Soffar case?

KF: Yeah, I don’t know where it’s going to go except that I’m now closer friends with the governor than I’ve ever been. That’s one that’s really an injustice in a lot of respects. I don’t think Max did this crime and I don’t think that there’s much evidence that he did either. Yet two juries have convicted him. Why did that happen? When was the last time we executed a rich man in Texas? The answer is never.

DRE: That’s crazy.

KF: Yeah so it’s probably true in New York. You wonderful, progressive motherfuckers. You are probably the most parochial, provincial group of people on the whole planet, people around New York. Particularly Manhattan because they look down on you as well, they don’t think Queens exists.

DRE: Well, I just moved to Queens.

KF: Then you just step up. It’s a real place in the world. The Christmas Pig was written for people. It wasn’t written for Jewish intellectuals. This is a book for people who can read between the lines. Really being Jewish or being Christian is pretty damn similar.

DRE: If they follow the basic rules.

KF: Yeah, which they never do. Those are the ones they totally ignore. That’s why Israel’s main support comes from the Christian right, not the Democratic left who ought to support Israel if they look at the Lord.

DRE: Do you still create music?

KF: As little as possible.

DRE: Why is that?

KF: Because I never have time. I hang around musicians a lot. A lot of them are good friends of mine. I like music but mostly I’m writing and campaigning even though that’s over with. But I may get back to music though I doubt it. I say musicians can run this country better than politicians although we won’t get a lot done in the mornings. We’ll work late and we’ll be honest.

DRE: Obviously you didn’t win the bid for governor in Texas.

KF: Well, the people have spoken the bastards, as Hunter Thompson said. The people have mumbled actually. There was a pretty apathetic turn out. I gave Texas my phone number and she never got back to me. But the whole point of the Alamo was not that they won or lost but the fact that they stood up against insurmountable odds and it led right to the battle of San Jacinto and the formation of Texas. The Alamo, while not being a technical victory, was what sparked and continues to spark the imagination of millions of people. It was like when Kissinger asked Chairman Mao if he thought the French Revolution made a difference or not and Chairman Mao said it was too soon to tell. That’s where we are at this point.

DRE: What were your expectations?

KF: I thought the people would turn out. Had they voted in big numbers, we would have won. They did not. As long as the turnout is low, the Crips and the Bloods are always going to control.

DRE: I know they attacked you for a few things you said. Do you feel like you should have said those things?

KF: No, not at all. Particularly the Democrats proved themselves to be vicious and the main victim was the truth. That was the casualty. I would have looked to the Democrats to stand up to the truth but they didn’t. They pretended that they didn’t understand what satire was. In other words, they pretended that they didn’t understand Mark Twain or Voltaire or Borat or Blazing Saddles. They pretended that I was a raging racist like the guy in To Kill a Mockingbird. To paraphrase Mark Twain, he said that the three most precious things in America are Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Conscience and the prudence never to use either one of them.

DRE: What do you think of Governor Rick Perry?

KF: Well, he called me yesterday. He’s been very gracious. He said that he could use a guy like me to reach the people he can’t reach, which are a lot of Texans. The vast majority of them are black. So who knows, there may be some bridge building here. We might both end up working for the people of Texas. I like him personally. I don’t think he’s been really been an activist type of governor in the past six years. There are a lot of areas that I don’t think are doing well such as education, immigration and environment. Those are big ones.

DRE: How do you feel about the Democrats getting control of Congress?

KF: Totally irrelevant. Just a different set of lobbyists moving to Washington.

DRE: You don’t think there’ll be any change for the good?

KF: Very unlikely. I think I’ve really had enough of the Republicans and the Democrats. The two party system is offering us some of the worst candidates that you’ve ever seen. If the best we can do is George Bush and John Kerry we’ve got a serious problem. We can’t even nominate guys like McCain and Rudy [Giuliani] for starters because of the system. George Washington was right, we don’t need two political parties. All government needs is common sense and common honesty.

DRE: When will that happen? Never?

KF: Never. Well, Texas had an opportunity.

DRE: You think you’ll run again?

KF: Pretty doubtful, I’m getting pretty old. I’m 62 years old which is too young for Medicare and too old for women to care.

DRE: When did you start doing the animal rescue?

KF: We opened Utopia Rescue Ranch eight years ago and it’s a real eye opener to deal with abused and stray animals and to see what people have done. We’ve adopted over 1500 animals in the past eight years; it’s a really great thing.

DRE: Was there something specific that led you to doing that or was it a decision?

KF: It was a dream. Cousin Nancy runs the ranch. She wrote a book called The Road to Utopia: How Kinky, Tony, and I Saved More Animals than Noah. That’s the whole story of the rescue ranch.

DRE: What’s the next project you’re working on?

KF: Maybe I’ll do a book on the campaign. We’ll see. I don’t think I’ll do another mystery book until I hear the literary world clamoring for it’s return.

DRE: We’d love to get you a membership to SuicideGirls.

KF: Well the problem I have is that I don’t use the internet at all. I think it’s the work of Satan. I don’t have email or any of that shit. Even Willie Nelson doesn’t approve of that. Willie was a little bit irritated when I told him I don’t use email.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

So I want to give a BIG HUGE THANK YOU!!!!!!!! to everyone who has shown love to me and my newest set. I really appreciate everyone and I DO take the time to read EVERY SINGLE comment that gets left. Thank you. I know what things I need to do better from this set moving forward and I plan to work with... more

So I want to give a BIG HUGE THANK YOU!!!!!!!! to everyone who has shown love to me and my newest set. I really appreciate everyone and I DO take the time to read EVERY SINGLE comment that gets left. Thank you. I know what things I need to do better from this set moving forward and I plan to work with the most awesome SoBelle hopefully in March and I can't wait. I can tell you that will be THE ONE! IT will be the one where everything gets done perfectly. I can feel it. 2013 is going to be my year I tell ya! I'm excited!!

Bellissa

If you want to see the commercial that I'm (very briefly) in that ran during the Super Bowl today, you can see it at steerthescript.com. You can read the blog post I wrote all about it at WWdN. more

If you want to see the commercial that I'm (very briefly) in that ran during the Super Bowl today, you can see it at steerthescript.com.

You can read the blog post I wrote all about it at WWdN.

by Alexander Hinkley for Examiner (image) [Squeak in I Am] Squeak is this week's SuicideGirl gamer of the week. She is a sweet, shy girl who not only really loves comic books, but also is into video games. I spoke with her about which games she likes most and she also shared what she believes is... more

by Alexander Hinkley for Examiner



[Squeak in I Am]


Squeak is this week's SuicideGirl gamer of the week. She is a sweet, shy girl who not only really loves comic books, but also is into video games. I spoke with her about which games she likes most and she also shared what she believes is the meaning behind the name "SuicideGirls."

What is the story behind your SuicideGirls nickname, "Squeak"?

Anyone who has ever met me in person can tell you that, haha. I have a high voice...which only gets higher and squeakier as I get more nervous or shy. (And being an introvert with social anxiety, it happens quite a lot!) I got the nickname back in High School and I guess it just stuck. I sort of embraced it eventually and made it my SG name.

How did you first get into modeling?

I started modeling when I was about 14 years old. At the time, there were no internet agencies. You had to be with an agency or have some kind of actual representation. I worked for a local modeling agency for a couple years before branching out on my own. Going independent gives you more freedom, but the money is no where as good as when I had an agency.


You have a lot of sets with different hair colors. Blue, pink, red, blonde...which is your favorite look?

Hmmmm...well I guess I like them all in their own way. I tire of hair color pretty quickly and I am always excited to try something different. Although I love doing bright colors, it is not always fun (or convenient!) to stand out. The advantage to going blonde is that I can sort of blend in a bit easier...so I always seem to eventually return to my natural blonde color. At least for a bit.

What are some of your all-time favorite games?

Well, nostalgia often plays a big part in what I pick as far as my "favorites" go. The first series I ever played were the Kings Quest games on my grandmother's Tandy computer. So I was sort of raised on RPGs. When Baldur's Gate came out in the late 90's, I really experienced my first great love. I probably played that game for two years straight; over and over again, I still compare every single RPG I play to Baldur's Gate.

I also love Silent Hill 2. I'll never forget the day I finished it and watched the ending where you find out what sort of man James really is. It blew my mind. The overall atmosphere and game play was incredibly surreal and enjoyable. Not to mention Pyramid Head! What an awesome bad guy.

Lastly, I'd have to go with Halo. I know it is sort of a cliché nowadays, particularly amongst Xbox users, but you have got to give credit where credit is due. The first Halo game had an amazing storyline and the Halo series has had such a huge impact on the younger generation of gamers. Every time I see some kids bouncing around and shooting on Call of Duty or Left 4 Dead, I immediately know they were raised on Halo. They play every FPS like they are Master Chief and in low gravity. It cracks me up.

Which system do you prefer?

I am definitely an Xbox fan. I have most of the other systems as well; Wii, Playstation, etc...but I always go back to Xbox. I think it has to do with the size of the controller; I like a big controller. What can I say? I'm a "Size Queen!" Haha!

What are you currently playing?

I've been going back and forth between Halo 4 and Red Dead Redemption. I have a stack of RPGs piled up next to my computer that I hope to get around to when I have more time.

How's Halo 4 stack up to previous games in the series in your opinion?

The storyline is great! Much more akin to the first Halo as far as that sort of thing goes. I enjoyed Halo 2 and 3 but the storylines and boards didn't grip me enough to play them over and over again. I ended up finishing them and just putting them away. But I think I will most likely play through Halo 4 a few times before moving on.

It is also visually stunning. I am usually not too picky about graphics in games other than RPGs, but Halo 4 is definitely going to be setting the bar higher in the FPS realm.

Do you prefer playing games online or offline?

Offline. I take things way too personally. When I lose against a computer, I get a bit frustrated, walk away for a while, and then come back and try again. When I lose against a person, I am angry for days and fantasize about going to their house and kicking them hard in the shins before running off into the night. I just wasn't designed to play well with others.

Are you into motion gaming at all?

A little bit. I was really into Wii when it first came out and then later got the Kinect. By then I started to lose interest. I work as a fitness instructor and aerialist, so by the time I get home at the end of the day, the last thing I want to do is jump around in front of my console. Sitting is so much better.




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Stan Lee was recently named the 26th most influential American by Atlantic Monthly, but if it was up to me I would have put him quite a bit higher. Lee is, of course, best known as the co-creator of Spider-Man, X-Men, Fantastic Four and dozens more, though controversy has always swirled around how big... more

Stan Lee was recently named the 26th most influential American by Atlantic Monthly, but if it was up to me I would have put him quite a bit higher. Lee is, of course, best known as the co-creator of Spider-Man, X-Men, Fantastic Four and dozens more, though controversy has always swirled around how big his real contributions might have been. But first and foremost Lee has always been the consummate salesman, whether it was selling the latest weird Spider-Man villain to the readers or hosting the television show Who Wants To Be A Superhero?

Lee’s latest projects are totally without connection to Marvel Comics. His company, Purveyors of Wonders, has been producing original characters for straight to DVD movies. One of the best is Mosaic, an animated film starring the voice of Anna Paquin as Maggie Nelson a high school student whose father is an Interpol agent investigating a mysterious race that can change appearance at will. After Maggie is bathed in the power of one of her father’s discoveries, an ancient runestone, she gets all the powers of a chameleon. Maggie teams up with a member of that ancient race, codenamed Mosaic, to defeat the evil Mannequin who wants to take over the world.

Check out the official site for Stan Lee Presents: Mosaic

Daniel Robert Epstein: So Stan, these are the Purveyors of Wonders projects you’ve been talking about for years.

Stan Lee: Yeah Purveyors of Wonder or POW! is our company. Obviously we wouldn’t purvey anything that wasn’t at least wonderful.

DRE: How involved are you with this?

Lee: I come up with the basic concept for what we do. I’ll write an outline or a treatment or something of that sort. Then we find the best script writer to put it into script form and I stay on top of the whole operation.

DRE: Do you find it difficult to keep relevant?

Lee: I have this one problem. I’m a little too hip. I have to cut back as much as I can because I don’t want to lose too many readers or too many viewers because I am too advanced. When I walk past a bunch of kids playing ball in the street I am always surprised when they don’t yell at me, “Hey fella we’re one man short. You want to join us?” I still feel like I’m one of them.

DRE: I interviewed Roger Corman not too long ago who I believe you’re friends with.

Lee: He’s a great guy.

DRE: His company is now doing stuff straight to DVD. I think some of the best stuff I’m seeing now is straight to DVD. Do you feel this is a really untapped market?

Lee: I don’t know how untapped it is because we’re starting to tap the hell out of it. It’s a great market absolutely.

DRE: Did you find more freedom in straight to DVD movies than theatrical films or even comic books?

Lee: We can do whatever we want but I still love movies and television. But the beautiful thing about POW is that we’re involved in all of them. We’re working on movies, TV series, videogames and we’re doing things for cell phones. DVDs are fun because we just decide to do one and we damn well do it.

DRE: People have trouble creating new franchise characters, what’s the key to writing compelling characters?

Lee: Sure I’m going to tell you so that all our competitors can make note and put us out of business [laughs]. The key is to create characters that people will care about and will want see more of. Now how you do that, I am not going to tell you.

DRE: [laughs] We spoke of a few years ago and you said that you weren’t a fan of pure fantasy, did you relax that a bit for Mosaic?

Lee: It depends on what you’re talking about pure fantasy. If your story has nothing but fairytale qualities then I’m not interested in it. Fantasy has to be tempered with reality. For example, one of the famous fairytales is Jack and the Beanstalk. The fantasy element is that he had magic beans and they grew a giant beanstalk that went up to the sky where a giant lived. That’s fantasy, but it was coupled with reality. Jack was a poor kid who lived with his mother. They didn’t have enough money and finally she told him to sell their cow. By making the character’s realistic and empathetic, you can go into fantasy but if everything is fantastic then it gets boring.

DRE: I know that you said many times that the executive producer credit you get on the Marvel movies are honorary.

Lee: I really don’t have that much to do with producing the movies. Though many of them are based on the things that I have written years ago. As far as the production of the movies, there are so many talented people that they don’t need any help from me.

DRE: Would you be interested in being more involved with the Marvel movies in the way you are involved with the Purveyors of Wonder projects?

Lee: Any creative juices that I have, I can expend on POW so I don’t have to butt into other projects. At POW we are doing so many things that I’m totally involved in so I do manage to keep busy and stuff.

DRE: I read that you will be making a cameo in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.

Lee: Yes and it’s a great appearance too. I have a couple lines to say and I think the viewers who are old Marvel fans will get a kick out of it because my appearance is based on something that happened in a Fantastic Four story years ago.

DRE: I assume that means Willie Lumpkin will be using his ear wiggling superpower.

Lee: I’m not going to be Willie Lumpkin in this one. I’ll be an even more recognizable figure and I can’t tell you anymore.

DRE: Obviously I write for the internet and so much of the comic book community can be traced back to the fanzines that came about after you started printing people’s addresses on the Marvel Comics letters pages. What made you start doing that?

Lee: I just wanted to make everything personal and friendly and make it seem as if we’re all part of a little club. I wanted to have a warm friendly feeling for everything we did and I thought that helped.

DRE: Did you have any inkling that people would start corresponding with one another?

Lee: I hoped that would happen like that and it did and it was very satisfying. It was very gratifying.

DRE: I read that Atlantic Monthly voted you the 26th most influential American.

Lee: I don’t know how I missed being in the first 25 but you can’t win them all.

DRE: What does being a living legend mean to you?

Lee: Between you and me I don’t give it much thought. I just keep busy doing what I am doing and having fun working with people that I like. That’s the most important thing. I’ve always worked with people that are very talented and whom I like personally so it doesn’t feel like work. You are joining your friends and you get to have a good time.

DRE: I always wondered why it seems that Marvel and whoever their parent company is never gives creators like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko their due. What are they afraid of?

Lee: I don’t know what you mean but if what is it you would want them to do?

DRE: It always seemed that they never seem to get as much credit as they deserved.

Lee: Everything that they’ve done, their name has been on. I make sure of that. How much more credit could they get? Anytime I do an interview and we are talking about Spider-Man or Dr. Strange, I always mention Steve Ditko. When we talk about some of the other things I always mention Jack. Nobody has been hiding them. Marvel publishes a series called Marvel Visionaries and one whole book was devoted to Jack. I think they’ve done one devoted to Steve Ditko. I’m happy to say they did one devoted to me. I don’t really know what more you would want. I’m not a spokesman for Marvel so I’m not speaking as a Marvel representative but just as a guy outside looking in.

DRE: Years ago Daniel Clowes wrote a book called Dan Pussey and it had a Stan Lee-like character and Kirby had a character based on you in New Gods called Funky Flashman. How did you feel about those?

Lee: At that time Jack was mad at me and he had some fun doing it. I thought it was funny.

DRE: You thought it was funny even though he was mad at you?

Lee: Well, he didn’t stay mad very long. If you’ve worked with an artist for years. it’s almost like a married couple. Every so often you have a quarrel then you get over it.

DRE: Are you working on any new comics?

Lee: Not really. I did some comics for Marvel called Stan Lee Meets. I am in the story and I meet Spider-Man and then I meet Dr. Doom. In another one I meet The Thing and Dr. Strange. John Romita Jr. has done the art. We planned to do that five years ago and I forgot all about it and John was busy. But he got the artwork done a couple months ago. I’ll do a story if something comes up and if they ask me but basically I am pretty much out of comics now.

DRE: Howard Chaykin told me that he doesn’t think comic books are going to last through his life time, which is another 30 years or so, because of computers and the internet. Do you think comic books have a lot of time left?

Lee: I think that comics will be around for a hell of a long time. My gosh, comics are fun to read. Now there is more competition then there has ever been. When I was writing comics they didn’t have television, they didn’t have videogames, they didn’t have iPods and they didn’t have computers. The only competition was movies. But comic books take their place with all the other forms of entertainment and I think that they’ll always be here.

DRE: It’s interesting that you say that while you’re not working on comics anymore.

Lee: Believe it or not I don’t think that I am so important that if I am not working on comics, the companies would fall. People would think that I am stupid or the most conceited guy in the world. Comic books are a great way to read a story. Movie producers are getting more and more interested in comics because they realize that they are great sources of material for TV shows and movies.

DRE: Marvel has many amazing properties but most of them are not nearly as popular as the X-Men and Spider-Man, do you think Marvel has properties that could be as popular in movies as those characters?

Lee: I don’t know if they could be as big as Spider-Man but there is always a chance. I don’t think that anyone will agree with me but I feel almost every character can be successful depending on how you write and produce the character and who plays the role and who directs it.

DRE: A lot more women are interested in superhero comics than ever before. Was that an audience that you found difficult to crack in the 60’s and 70’s?

Lee: Back then there weren’t many female readers but the movies have helped a great deal. Women who have seen X-Men and Spider-Man realize that there is romance, human interest and quite a bit of realism in them besides the fantasy. That’s what women like so more and more women are getting into comics and comic movies.

DRE: You’ve said publicly that you and Steve Ditko were never friends, right?

Lee: Well, we didn’t socialize. But I always thought of him as a friend when we worked together. I had great respect for his brilliant talent. He was so important in creating and making Spider-Man important.

DRE: Do you ever think he’ll show himself publicly again?

Lee: If I had to guess, I would say no. If he hasn’t done it in all these years I don’t know why he would do it now. For some reason the guy just doesn’t want publicity or he just doesn’t want to speak to the press. It’s certainly his prerogative.

DRE: How many Stan Lee related tattoos have you seen on people over the years?

Lee: Quite a few. When I would go to comic book conventions for autographing, very often somebody would roll up their sleeve and say, “Would you sign under the Spider-Man tattoo?” Or under the Dr. Strange tattoo. One of them actually had a tattoo which was a caricature of me [laughs]. I don’t think it did me justice, but hey, what are you going to do?

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck