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by mickey rapkin

it's not like you don't know what High School Musical is, though unless you have kids, you probably skipped it. Still, this silly name—Vanessa Hudgens—has somehow wormed its way into your consciousness. (Those photos didn't hurt.) With boyfriend Zac Efron in tow, her every move has been documented by the tabloids in what amounts to a string of Facebook mini-feeds. "If you have paparazzi," says Vanessa, 19, "you know you've gotten somewhere." Whoa. Her nudie snaps—sent to a boy like some modern-day love note—hit the blogosphere in September 2007. And it was a first-class poondoggle. "Honestly, you have your ups and downs," she says now.  "But it's over with and it's done." And it is done—a testament to the power of the Hudgens brand, a brand she's all too happy to illuminate for you. Of her sophomore album—out next month, still untitled—she says, "It's definitely more grown-up. But not to the point where I'm singing I'm so hot! I'm so hot! Boys want me. I'm so hot!"

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Papa

When James Brown died on Christmas Day 2006, he left behind a fortune worth tens, maybe hundreds, of millions of dollars. The problem is, he also left behind: Fourteen children (pending DNS tests); Sixteen grandchildren (and counting); Eight mothers of his children (that’s a low estimate); Several mistresses (the man was a rock star); Thirty lawyers; A former manager; An aging dancer; A longtime valet; And a sister who’s not really a sister but calls herself the Godsister of Soul anyway. All of whom want a piece of his legacy. And when the dust clears, there might be nothing left of the (supremely talented, extremely careless, and massively troubled) Godfather of Soul. Selections from GQ's April 2008 issue

By Sean Flynn

Photograph by Robert Knight; Courtesy of Retna

*****

On the current legal claims to the James Brown estate:

Mr. Brown was not wholly unprepared to die, either. Several years earlier, in August 2000, he’d drawn up a will in which he bequeathed his “personal and household effects”—his linens and china and such—to six adult children from two ex-wives and two other women. He was very clear, too, that those were the only heirs he intended to favor. “I have intentionally failed to provide for any other relatives or other persons,” he wrote in the will. “Such failure is intentional and not occasioned by accident or mistake.”

Everything else he owned, including his sixty-acre estate in Beech Island, South Carolina, and his catalog of 800 or so songs, was to remain in a trust, which in turn was divided into two funds: one to educate his grandchildren (seven among those six named children, plus the daughter of his son Teddy, who died in 1973) and a much larger one to pay tuition for “financially needy” students who attend school in South Carolina or Georgia. How much is that trust worth? Hard to say, because Mr. Brown’s best assets are of a sort that can be marketed and managed in perpetuity as opposed to simply liquidated for cash. But the lowball estimate is $20 million, which, with proper promotion, could be multiplied many times over for many years to come. Elvis has been dead for three decades, after all, and he’s still pulling eight figures annually.

In other words, Mr. Brown left a fortune to poor strangers.

Fifteen months later, none of those poor strangers have seen a nickel. Nor will they for months, and more likely years, to come, by which point there may be little left, after the creditors and the lawyers are paid. The first attorney was hired barely thirty-six hours after Mr. Brown died, and the first legal challenge was initiated less than two weeks after that. The lawsuits and lawyers rapidly multiplied—there are now more than thirty lawyers suing in three different courts—which has had the predictable result of resolving…precisely nothing.

For such a simple little will—all of five pages, and mostly boilerplate at that—there are a stupefying number of issues to resolve.

Mr. Brown’s ostensible widow and the mother of James Brown II wants at least a third and perhaps half of his riches—though, as a matter of law, she is almost certainly not his widow nor, as a matter of human physiology, the mother of his biological child. Five of the six children named in the will want the trust dissolved and the will invalidated, which would entitle them to equal shares of the entire estate; that puts them at odds with the sixth sibling, Terry, and his boys, Forlando and Romunzo, who want the will and educational trusts to stand. At least two other daughters whom Mr. Brown never acknowledged also want a share of the pot, as well as eighteen years of back child support. Four more potential children—Jane and John Does I, II, III, and IV in the court records—might have similar claims. The three men Mr. Brown named as trustees have resigned, though two of them, Albert H. “Buddy” Dallas and Alford Bradley, want to be reinstated, because they say a judge bullied them into quitting. That same judge, Doyet Early, wants to put the third former trustee, David Cannon, in jail for not repaying $373,000 in misappropriated funds. Cannon says he can’t afford it, which looks bad considering he spent almost $900,000 in cash to build a house in Honduras last year. State investigators are working a criminal case on Cannon, too. The two special administrators Judge Early appointed to replace those three men, meanwhile, are being sued in federal court by Forlando Brown, who argues that they were illegally put in charge and are improperly attempting to shift assets from the trust to the estate, from which their $300-an-hour fees could be paid. The administrators, Adele J. Pope and Robert Buchanan, have in turn sued Bradley, Cannon, Dallas, entertainment lawyer Joel Katz, his firm (Greenberg Traurig), and Enterprise Bank in state court, alleging a years-long conspiracy to swindle millions from Mr. Brown. All of those people have lawyers, and many of them have more than one. Tomi Rae Hynie, the widow who’s probably not technically a widow, has five. Her son has his representative, a guardian ad litem, and the guardian ad litem has his own lawyer. Pope and Buchanan have lawyers. Even the anonymous beneficiaries of the trust, all those needy and deserving would-be students, have a lawyer—the attorney general of South Carolina—and they used to have two until Judge Early tossed out the Georgia attorney general.

And those are the relatively dignified legal proceedings.

Outside the courtroom, the family has bickered over absolutely everything, including the disposition of Mr. Brown’s body, which for a time was kept in a gold-plated coffin inside a climate-controlled room in his house. When it was finally decided that the corpse would be put in a crypt in daughter Deanna’s yard in early March, daughter Yamma nearly missed the private ceremony because police in Atlanta had arrested her the night before for stabbing her husband in the arm with a butcher knife. Since then, Forlando Brown has accused those two aunts, Deanna and Yamma, of swiping mementos, checks, and tens of thousands in cash from his grandfather’s house, and in court he called their lawyer—who used to be his lawyer—a liar and a forger, or at least an accomplice to forgery. Yamma, Deanna, and half-brother Daryl accused the former trustees of hunting for “certain assets” when the trustees photographed the woods around Mr. Brown’s house, an obvious reference to cash Mr. Brown is believed to have buried in the yard. Tomi Rae Hynie, who prefers to be called Mrs. Brown, was locked out of the house, and she insists someone—the adult children or the former trustees, or a combination thereof—shredded more recent wills, which she believes left half of Mr. Brown’s assets to her and her son, and took all of her jewelry and most of Mr. Brown’s clothes. “They looted everything,” she says. “You’re dealing with nothing but liars and thieves and cheats who would throw a widow and a 6-year-old child out on the streets.” She also believes, along with several other people, that Mr. Brown was killed, though by whom and how neither she nor anyone else will say. “I can’t comment on that right now,” she says, “for the safety of myself and my son.” Even the lawyer who drew up the will and trust that are now being contested is a tawdry little sideshow: He’s in prison for the 2006 murder of a strip-club manager who’d bounced him for nakedly masturbating while waiting for a $300 lap dance.

Wait, there’s more.

There are claims against the estate from creditors and would-be creditors. The funeral home wants $17,995 for the programs it produced for the services. One of Mr. Brown’s managers wants a $200,000 cut of royalties he was promised. Buddy Dallas would like $624,876 in fees he says he was shorted over seven years. The Pullman Group, to which Mr. Brown mortgaged his royalties in 1999, wants $31 million (the refinancing of that deal is the subject of yet another lawsuit). A doctor wants $8,500 to reimburse her for, among other things, all the times she packed Mr. Brown into a limo to rehab in Atlanta; she’d like an additional $14,000 for two African carvings he never returned to her, or failing that, the carvings. Roosevelt Johnson, too, would like to get paid. “We were always told by Mr. Brown we would be taken care of should anything happen to him,” he wrote in his claim. “We, meaning myself, and his group should have at least got two weeks severance pay. Myself for over 30 years of faithful service should get 2.5 million for a lifetime of service as he promised.”

Maybe Mr. Brown did make that promise. But he never put it in writing, and it probably wouldn’t have mattered if he had. Somebody surely would’ve sued.

*****

On Brown’s sexual habits:

“You’d have to grow up in a whorehouse to understand how James Brown felt about women,” one of his confidants says, which is apt because Mr. Brown did, in fact, grow up in a whorehouse. His mother walked out on his father when he was 4, and two years later, he was sent to live in his aunt Honey’s brothel in Augusta. He shined shoes for the soldiers from Fort Gordon, danced for nickels and pennies they’d flip at his feet, watched them shamble into Aunt Honey’s to fuck the women, watched them shuffle back out.

When Mr. Brown grew up, when he was a famous performer touring the world forty, fifty weeks a year, he fucked a lot of women. That is a deliberate term, fucked, because Mr. Brown was not a man who made love or even had sex. Mr. Brown fucked. “He did not know about the soft,” a longtime friend says. A lot of times, he’d let one of his cronies deal with the preliminaries, make small talk with a girl, get her a drink, keep her company. “She ready?” he’d ask. “I ain’t got no time now. Make sure she ready.” He’d hop on, roll off. Straight missionary, straight to the point. He never saw a reason for much else. “Why’s a white man eat a woman?” he once asked a white friend. “What’s he get outta that?” Hell, the man was in his sixties before he discovered doggy style on the Playboy Channel. He called up Roosevelt Johnson at three in the morning to tell him about it. “You sittin’ down, Mr. Johnson?” he asked, which is what he always said when he had an astonishing new fact to report. “Black man don’t know nothing. Black man don’t know a damned thing. A white man, he get up in his woman from behind.” Johnson pretended to be surprised by that. (“You had to go there with him,” he says, “because you didn’t know anything Mr. Brown didn’t know.”)

So how many women? How high can you count? Mr. Brown always kept a few girlfriends on the side, some for decades, and he always found a woman or two in whatever city he happened to be playing. “There’d be times, literally, when one would be coming in the front door while another one was going out the back,” says Buddy Dallas.

Naturally, some of them got pregnant.

*****

Former lawyer Buddy Dallas on Brown’s financial struggles and eventual vasectomy:

Buddy Dallas met James Brown in 1984 at a political reception in Augusta, Georgia. It was a brief and unremarkable encounter—Dallas mostly remembers that his 2-year-old daughter liked the little man with the funny hair—but the next day, the phone rang in Dallas’s office. It was Mr. Brown.           

“Mr. Dallas,” he said, “I need you to represent me.”

“But Mr. Brown,” Dallas replied—it was somehow automatic that James Brown was Mr. Brown—“I don’t know anything about the entertainment business.”

“That’s all right,” he said. “I’ll teach you about the entertainment business. But I need you to represent me now.”

Mr. Brown’s immediate problems didn’t involve entertainment. Mainly, he was broke. He hadn’t broken the Billboard 100 in seven years, and he was playing shows for $7,500 that cost him $9,500 to produce. The IRS wanted $20 million in back taxes and penalties, the phone company had cut his line, and the founder of the Sacramento chapter of his fan club was after him for child support. “Mr. Dallas,” he said a week after they’d met, “I hate to ask you this, but I really, really need some money.”

So the first thing Dallas did as Mr. Brown’s lawyer was give him $12,000, two grand in cash, the rest in checks paid to his creditors. Less than a year later, Dallas put up his own Lincoln as collateral for another $18,000.

The second thing he did was straighten out the child-support mess in Sacramento. “Mr. Brown,” Dallas told him when the paperwork was settled, “you’re going to have to be more careful.”

“Well, Mr. Dallas,” he said, “we’re not going to have to worry about that no more.”

What he meant was there wouldn’t be any future paternity suits: Mr. Brown told at least six people he’d had a vasectomy earlier that year. But that was too little and much too late: One reason his estate is such a disaster is that he left so many heirs who could lay claim to his wealth.

His first wife, Velma, bore three sons in the 1950s, of whom two survive, and a backup singer had a fourth boy. Another singer gave birth to a daughter in 1965, and his second wife, Deidre, had two girls, one in 1968 and the other in 1972. The fan-club woman in Sacramento had her son in 1968.

That’s seven children from five women.

*****

Singer/songwriter Jacque Hollander on Brown’s sexually abusive behavior.

The idea of a trust—specifically, the I Feel Good Trust, which is what the fund meant to send poor kids to college is called—dates at least from 1988, when Mr. Brown performed a charity concert in Augusta to benefit a local children’s hospital. The woman who produced the show, a songwriter and singer named Jacque Hollander, made a video about one of the sick kids at the hospital, a little girl with cancer. Near the end of that tape, after Hollander had made a wrenching case for a worthy cause, she announced the creation of “the I Feel Good Children’s Trust Fund.” Hollander was not acting on a whim. “This was discussed with Mr. Brown and with Buddy Dallas,” she says now. “I mean, it was there.”

Well, almost there. Papers to establish the trust were never filed. Yet around the time the tape was made, she sat in an office with Dallas and listened as Mr. Brown outlined his plan for it. “I want everything to go into that trust,” he said. “My house, my royalties, everything.”

“Mr. Brown,” Dallas said. “You’ve got kids.…”

“Dammit, I ain’t giving them a stepping-stone to make history,” he snapped. “They all got education. I been supporting them. I ain’t givin’ them a dime.”

Dallas remembers that conversation almost verbatim, which is notable because Hollander didn’t speak to him for twenty years after it took place. And Hollander certainly has no motive to soften Mr. Brown’s image now. In fact, she says he raped her later that same year, drove her deep into earlier woods, high on PCP, and told her to take her clothes off. When she refused, he said, “I’m not going to ask you again. And if you don’t, I’m gonna.” Then he put a shotgun in her face. “He told me, ‘If you try to run away, I’ll kill you,’ ” she says. “He told me he owned me. He told me he was giving me a blessing.” (She never brought criminal charges, but she later passed two polygraphs, including one administered by a twenty-seven-year veteran of the FBI.)

Also, she’s glad he’s dead. “His death was the most unbelievable Christmas present God could have given me,” she says. “Is that a horrible thing to say?” Not really, considering. But she does like to believe that Mr. Brown called his fund the I Feel Good Trust because he remembered the first one, that he chose that name to cleanse his sins.

*****

On maintaining his mystique and creating his legacy:

The truth? No one knows the truth about James Brown, not the whole truth, because Mr. Brown never let anyone close enough to reveal the full measure of himself. He could make you believe you were close, make you believe that you, and only you, had been blessed with a glimpse of his soul. But that’s merely charisma. Or manipulation.

“People were his confidant in that area of his life where he was dealing with them,” Sharpton says. “All of us—all of us—were consequential to his self-image.”

And that’s from a man who was closer than most to Mr. Brown. He toured with him in the 1970s, lived with him for a while in the early 1980s, wrote the introduction to his autobiography. He’s called Mr. Brown his surrogate father, and Mr. Brown likened him to a son. Yet he has no illusions, either. He knows he was also a useful prop, a gifted black preacher Mr. Brown could mold and brand as a protégé, help smooth the friction with the civil rights establishment (Mr. Brown, after all, endorsed Richard Nixon). “He saw me as his answer to Dr. King,” Sharpton says, and then he drops into a pretty good impersonation: “I’m gonna make my own Dr. King.”

(Decades later, Mr. Brown still saw his reflection in Sharpton. “One of the proudest moments of my life,” he told the reverend in 2004, “was when you walked out at the Democratic National Convention with that James Brown hairdo and brought James Brown into mainstream national politics.”)

For all that, Sharpton doesn’t claim to have known the total man. “Only tell people what they need to know, Rev,” Mr. Brown told him long ago. “And anybody want to know anything outside their lane, don’t trust ’em.” Mr. Brown trusted Al Sharpton because he stayed in his lane.

Everyone saw in Mr. Brown only what he let them see. A mistress saw a frustrated old man trying to get hard while whacked out on PCP. His pastor in Augusta saw a spiritual man who quoted Scripture, especially Matthew: “Verily, I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” Forlando Brown saw a grandfather who read through his college applications and checked his grades every semester. Buddy Dallas saw a captivating performer, an astute businessman, and more than that, a man who survived poverty and prison and drugs and the IRS. We rather die on our feet / Than keep living on our knees / Say it loud / I’m black and I’m proud. That’s what Buddy Dallas saw.

But none of them saw it all. Indeed, you can tell how close someone was to Mr. Brown by how readily they admit that fact.

“Mr. Brown was an exceptionally slick, conniving, brilliant man,” says Charles Bobbit, his friend for forty years and his manager from 1966 to 1977 and again from 2000 until Mr. Brown died. “And he made sure—made sure—he was misunderstood.”

Yet there was one matter on which he clearly wanted to be understood: his legacy.

Mr. Brown told people for twenty years how he wanted to be remembered. A few small details would change now and again, but his general wishes were consistent.

For instance, he didn’t want his children getting his money. Why depends on who he was talking to and what his mood was at the time. Partly, he was a detached father. Blame the constant touring, blame the multiple divorces, blame whatever demons crawled around his head. “He was never much of a family man,” Bobbit says. “But I guess you got that.” Sometimes he’d say that being James Brown’s child was enough of an inheritance, that the name alone was worth more than anything he had growing up. He worked for his wealth, and they could, too. If he was in a foul mood, he’d be blunter: “They ain’t gettin’ rich off my back,” he told at least four people over the years. “They ain’t gettin’ a damned dime.”

*****

Gloria Daniel, Brown’s former mistress, on his paranoia and drug use:

To be fair, Mr. Brown did, on occasion, lapse into utter lunacy. He was terribly paranoid, convinced the government had bugged the armoire in the den, placed tiny cameras in the curtains, pointed satellites through his window, even wired up the yard. “See them trees,” he’d say when the wind blew and the branches swayed. “That’s them. They watching me.” And he would occasionally flat out lose his mind. “Motherfucker was crazy,” says Gloria Daniel, a girlfriend he kept on the side for forty years. “It was the drugs.”

Mr. Brown smoked his drugs—PCP, until that got hard to find, then cocaine—mixed with tobacco from his Kools. “You sitting there rolling tobacco out of a cigarette—that’s a woman’s job—and you sitting there naked so he can look at you ’cause he getting ready to fuck you,” she says. “Yeah, right.” She rolls her eyes. The drugs, to say nothing of the diabetes and the prostate cancer, made him impotent. “He tried like hell, though,” she says. “He’d wear you out. That man died trying to come.”

One night in the summer of 2001, after he’d slathered her in Vaseline (“He liked you all greased up,” she says. “Like a porkchop”) and wore her out trying to come, he gave up and left the room, and Gloria dozed off. When she woke up, Mr. Brown was standing at the foot of the bed in a full-length mink coat over his bare chest, a black cowboy hat, and silk pajama pants with one leg tucked into a cowboy boot and the other hanging out. He had a shotgun over his shoulder and a white stripe of Noxzema under each eye. “I’m an Indian tonight, baby,” he announced. “C’mon, let’s let ’em have it.” Then he dumped a pickle jar of change on the floor, told her to get a machete, and went out to the garage. He took the Rolls, drove ten miles to Augusta, weaving all over the road, clipping mailboxes, smoking more dope, and screaming about being an Indian. Gloria kept thinking she should flag down a cop, say she’d been kidnapped.

Like she says, motherfucker was crazy on drugs.

*****

Charles Bobbit, friend and former manager, recounts Brown’s final moments:

The tour after Christmas was going to be the last one. Mr. Brown would play his final show in Anaheim, then pack it in after fifty-seven years. “When we finish this little thing, we going on a vacation,” he’d told Bobbit. He was going to take Tomi Rae and go to San Francisco, a few other towns, spend some money. “Then we going to Vegas, and I’m gonna marry her again. She’s my wife, I love her, and I ain’t gonna punish her no more.”

But first they had to do the shows, and for that Mr. Brown needed new teeth. Getting implants screwed into the jaw is a brutal procedure, and Mr. Brown didn’t think he could stand the pain. He wanted to be put under. But the man was sick. His knees were shot and his feet were swollen, his stomach hurt all the time, he was constipated and couldn’t pee too well, either. Now he had a bad cough, and he was losing weight.

Bobbit was waiting for him when Washington drove Mr. Brown to the dentist in Atlanta. Bobbit had a physician with him who gave Mr. Brown the once-over and then told him he might not ever wake up from anesthesia. He checked him into the hospital that Saturday, December 23. He rested all night and the next day, the doctors checking him, trying to clear out the pneumonia. Bobbit and Washington stayed with him. And then, late Sunday, just before midnight, Mr. Brown told Washington to leave the room.

“I’m gonna leave here tonight,” he said.

“If you’re talking about what I think you’re talking about,” Bobbit said, “that’s a trip I can’t make with you.” He was trying to lighten the mood, not ready for Mr. Brown to die, not believing he could die.

Mr. Brown stayed serious. “I want you to look out for my wife, if you can,” he said. “And I want you to look out for Little Man, if you can. And look out for Reverend Sharpton.”

He always called Tomi Rae’s son Little Man. He knew he wasn’t his son, but whenever someone told him to get a DNA test, he said no, not while he was alive. Because he loved Little Man, loved him as his own, almost as if he was finally going to be a proper father, make up for all those years and all those other children. Bobbit thought that’s why he called him Little Man. “It was his ego,” he says. “Like, ‘Look at him, look at that little man—he’s just like me.’ ”

Bobbit settled into a chair at the foot of the bed. Mr. Brown lay back and dozed. Then he bolted upright, grabbed at his chest. “I’m on fire, I’m on fire,” he said. “I’m burning up. Burning up.” He flopped across the bed, and his gown rose up, exposing him. Bobbit got a blanket to cover him up. He was leaning down, his face close to Mr. Brown, still holding the blanket. He heard Mr. Brown take three short, weak breaths, saw his eyes open wide for an instant, then close. “As God is my witness, I don’t know why,” he says, “but I looked at my watch and it was one twenty-four.”

The doctors worked on his body for another twenty-one minutes, but James Brown was already dead.

To read the full article, pick up the April 2008 issue of GQ.

Love Is a Battlestar

It’s smart. It’s political. It has epic space battles. And it stars three of the toughest space babes ever to invade your TV screen. Need any other reasons to watch Battlestar Galactica? How about this: it’s your last chance

By Dan Fierman; photograph by Danielle Levitt

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Do the words Battlestar Galactica make you break out in nerd hives? Do you think Cylons and the gods of Kobol are the stuff of World of Warcraft gnomes? Did you stop on this page only because you wanted to take a longer look at these three space babes doing their best Barbarella? Well, if that’s what it takes to get you to finally pay attention to one of the savviest, most subversive shows on TV, that’s okay with us. Because with the demise of The Wire—a moment of silence here—no other show combines intellectual heft with pure viewing pleasure quite like this. Just ask your local Dungeon Master. Or ask the Peabody Awards committee, which gave Battlestar its blessing in 2005 alongside BBC’s Bleak House and CNN’s coverage of Katrina. Better yet, just tune in, and soon you’ll be rooting for suicide bombers, pondering the upside of having a religious fundamentalist in the White House, and fretting over prisoner abuse in the age of the war on terror. Plus, it stars these three stunning space-age badasses: Grace Park (a sympathetic cyborg named Boomer), Tricia Helfer (the evil Number Six), and Katee Sackhoff (the alcoholic antihero Starbuck).

The only drawback? You’re running out of time. Battlestar debuts its final season on March 28. For newcomers who only remember the feathered hair and Mormons-in-space ethos of the late ’70s original, a refresher: Humanity has been wiped out by the robotic Cylons, and the survivors are looking for salvation on a planet called Earth. The president is sick with cancer, and her military is riddled with double agents. And Starbuck may be dead, may be a Cylon, or may be leading the humans to the promised land. How this all ends is a closely guarded geek secret, but no matter what happens, punches won’t be pulled. “In the very first episode, one of the Cylons broke a baby’s neck,” Sackhoff says with a hint of delight. “You hear the snap and everything. This show doesn’t tread lightly, and it isn’t going to start anytime soon.”

Folky and Zooey

by WILL WELCH

It’s a match made in fanboy heaven—indie-film fantasy Zooey Deschanel (All the Real Girls, Weeds) and raspy emo folkster M. Ward (Post-War) making music together under the title She & Him. Sure, the precedent for actress music projects is bleak—Minnie Driver, LiLo, etc.—but as anyone who saw Elf knows, Deschanel can belt out a tune. On the duo’s debut, Volume 1, she and Ward command a range of diverse songs that sample classic American genres, from jazz to country to ’60s-girl-group R&B. And Deschanel couldn’t care less if some people are put off by the actress-rocker collaboration. “I’m not sure who these ‘some people’ are, but they sound petty,” she says. “I don’t think I’m very interested in them.”

Photograph by Paul Jasmin

The 2008 South by Southwest Survival Guide

by WILL WELCH

The much adored concert festival is a great excuse to visit one of the country’s best towns. Still, it will be a nightmare if you don’t follow our sage advice, from places to stay to bands to chase after (Yeasayer)

1. You don’t need an official South by Southwest badge.
Unless you like long lines of college-radio kids, don’t spend the $600. Every emerging band plays unofficial shows in addition to its SXSW showcase.

2. Embrace your inner slick talker.
The catch with going badgeless is that to see your favorite bands, you have to get into the private parties thrown by magazines and corporate sponsors. Get on the ball early and track down the RSVP addresses that go out with invitations. Failing that, talk your way in at the door. It’s worth it: Bands ’n’ booze are free.

3. Stay at the Hotel San José or the Driskill.
If you’re not already confirmed, you’re out of luck—these two hotels are long sold-out. Book yourself a room for 2009 ASAP. The San José is small and exclusive. The Driskill is opulent, with one of America’s great hotel bars.

4. Better yet, rent a house.
“I rented in 2007,” says Nils Bernstein of Matador Records. “It was cheaper than a hotel and bigger. And it avoids one of the worst things about SXSW: chatting with distant acquaintances when you’re trying to wake up or stumble home.” Go to austin.craigslist.org and search “SXSW.”

5. Don’t linger on 6th Street.
Unless you still party till you puke, stay away from Austin’s version of Bourbon Street. And remain on the lookout for the most grating types of festival-goers:
(a) the blogger,
(b) the sleazy A&R guy,
(c) the indie-rock frontman,
(d) the college-radio kid.

6. Experience Austin.
Flee the tattooed hordes for Barton Springs, the natural pool just south of downtown. Work up a sweat lying in the sun, cool off in the springs, admire the UT sorority girls.

7. Sniff out impromptu late-night parties.
Did the influx of corporate money kill sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll? Nope! Ask around, take flyers from cool-looking kids, and investigate what DIY promoter Todd P has up his sleeve (Toddpnyc.com).

8. Quit blogging.
Seriously. Stop it.

9. Hungover? Go to brunch.
Las Manitas has long lines for a reason: eggs, chorizo, coffee. For something a little swishier, cross the river to South Congress Cafe. Still hungover? Suck it up and start drinking (again).

Illustration by Peter Arkle

Still Holding Out for the Hero?

by RAHA NADDAF and BRYAN THOMAS

You won’t be able to resist the most addictive video game on earth after reading our foolproof (and Slash-endorsed!) guide to rocking Guitar Hero III

Activision’s Guitar Hero III has finally reached the cultural-saturation point where if you haven’t played it, don’t know someone who’s played it, or don’t want to play it, you are either dead or Mitt Romney. Here is our essential, expert-laden, foolproof, possibly belated guide to total Guitar Hero domination. 

10. Rock harder.
It’s tough using your pinkie on the frets, so start playing the harder levels—even if you suck—to get accustomed to using your littlest digit. Says Alan Flores, Guitar Hero III’s lead designer, “You also don’t have to have your index finger on the first fret. Take your three fingers and shift up the neck. That way you can extend your index finger back instead of making your pinkie stretch.”

9. Jazz hands!
Practice finger flourishes—it’s the only way to stay afloat on the harder levels, and they look impressive to anyone watching. Techniques to live by: Strum up and down on fast-paced passages, hammer on and pull off (fancy talk for holding down the lower notes), and tap frets with both hands (double tap). Very Eddie Van Halen.

8. Save that star.
Using Star Power—a bonus you get for playing well—as soon as you get it is an amateur move. You can score up to eight times as many points if you save it for when you’re hitting every note. “Then use the whammy bar. It’s the best way to get even more points when you have Star Power,” says Guitar Hero III champion Kelly Law-Yone.

7. Cheat to win.
We never said this, but… If you go onto Google, you can find a series of game cheats to liven up GH3. A favorite is the “unlock all” code, which offers access to all the songs available in the game—great when you’re entertaining friends.

6. Under no condition should you make the John Mayer guitar face.
Alternatively, “The vacant I’m-in-a-movie-theater-watching-a-movie stare seems to work better for a lot of people. Keeps you focused,” says John Bannon, who’s hosted weekly GH3 competitions at Orleans Bar & Restaurant in the Boston area.

5. Challenge a real rocker.
Turns out that actual musicians take a while to adjust to the frets and strumming style. “I have the hardest time going down to the orange button with the pinkie,” says Slash. Legend Joe Satriani calls GH3 “very demanding on the hands.” And Bret Michaels claims his 7-year-old daughter kicks his ass during “Slow Ride” by Foghat. “It’s embarrassing,” he says.

4. A Wii piece of advice.
If you’re playing on your Wii, return the disc. The packaging says Dolby Pro Logic II, but the sound is actually mono (and there’s a class-action lawsuit pending because of it!). Activision will send you a new one that supports actual stereo sound, so you can turn it up to 11.

3. Hail to the Chiefs.
When you earn enough “cash” playing the game, buy Kaiser Chiefs’ “Ruby,” a solid addition to your set. “The most important things are the bonus tracks. A lot of people overlook them if they don’t know the songs, but they teach you how to approach a song cold and sight-read, which gives you a leg up,” says Kevin Pereira, host of Attack of the Show! on G4.

2. Bass sucks.
Never get stuck playing the bass line in Co-op mode. You might as well be on tambourine in a real band. Sorry, Flea.

1. Blink.
Seriously. You will start to cry.

Illustrations by Jason Lee

Dave Grohl, front dude for rock juggernaut the Foo Fighters and onetime drummer for Nirvana, is back with a new album (Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace), a wife, and a kid. Still, we wouldn’t exactly say he’s settled down. GQ's Will Welch caught up with him as he was recovering from MTV’s Video Music Awards

T-shirt, $44, by Johnson Motors Inc.; Cardigan, $79, by INC International Concepts

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How were the VMAs?
Fuck, it was good, dude. We played in a hotel suite on the twenty-sixth floor with forty beer bongs. We just put them in boxes all over the room as party favors.

Did you hit one?
It was my idea! I was carrying the bottle of Jägermeister around. Ended up in the pool with all my fuckin’ clothes on.

Nice. “The Pretender,” the first single off the new record, went to number one. I have no idea what that song is about, but catchphrases like I’ll never surrender are irresistible. Is being a little vague the secret to writing stadium anthems?
There are songs that are very specific, and there are songs that are written with a very general emotion in mind. Sometimes I’ll write a song that’s so vague that an audience will sing along for 16,000 different reasons. I’d hate to exclude someone from a song because it’s about someone they don’t know.

From your first rehearsal with Nirvana to the band’s last show, I heard you got no encouragement. True?
I can remember all the compliments—there were two. The first tour I went on with Nirvana was with L7 in England in 1990. I had been in the band for a month. I remember being at some underground disco with the L7 girls, Kurt [Cobain], and Krist [Novoselic], and we were all downstairs drinking and dancing to bad ’80s new wave. Kurt came up and said, “I’m so glad you’re in this band, man. I’m so glad.” And I was like, [assumes dork voice] “Wow, that was really nice of him! Holy moly!” It was two and a half years before the next compliment. [laughs]

What was it like when you went from being three dudes in a van to being the biggest band on earth?
It happened really quickly. When Nevermind came out, Kurt and I shared a hotel room and we were still rolling our own gear. And then the video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” came out. Eventually, we got a bus. I was like, “Holy shit! It’s like a van with a bathroom and a TV!” They kept the generators running so there’d be power inside. I remember Novoselic saying, “Dude, you’re single-handedly destroying the ozone layer with that fucking generator. Turn it off.” All these other buses were pumping all this shit in the air, and we were sitting there in complete darkness because we felt guilty.

When you started Foo Fighters, were you worried that it might change the perception of your role in Nirvana—because your own music is so different?
Those are deep thoughts that I didn’t necessarily have. The day Kurt died, three years of total insanity just turned off. The last thing on my mind was music, and I didn’t even want to see the word Nirvana. I didn’t do much other than travel—I was kind of trying to run away from it. I remember being on the Ring of Kerry, in Ireland, driving a rental car on tiny little roads, getting stuck behind flocks of sheep. Then I passed a hitchhiker who had on a Kurt Cobain T-shirt. I thought, Goddamn. Where do I go? Later, someone from this band 7 Year Bitch wrote me a card that said, “We know you can’t even think about playing music right now, but eventually you will.” And that card saved my life.

Your new song “Statues” has the line Time will turn us into statues eventually. When you were writing that line, did you think someone might actually make a statue of you one day?
[laughs] Oh, my God. You think I mean that someone’s going to make a statue of me someday? Interesting perspective. That song is about my wife and me. To me there’s nothing more beautiful than seeing the headstones of a husband and wife side by side in a graveyard. It doesn’t have to do with the Nirvana Statue. Whatever!

So you’re not getting cremated?
We’ll see. I’d rather have one of those massive mausoleums you can see from the expressway.

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Photograph by Paola Kudacki

Jesu, Lifeline
hydra head records

If ever there were an omnipotent musician, a guy who could successfully flout musical boundaries at will, it would be Justin K. Broadrick. The mind behind Jesu was also at the helm of such creative genius as Godflesh, Napalm Death, and Techno Animal. Don't, however, let those heavy names deter you. This project embraces the sort of avant-garde beauty that tends to come with age and experience. Lifeline, a four-track EP, creates serenely beautiful, layered soundscapes heavily weighted in fuzz and feedback. While it does have some notable similarities to other shoegaze legends, namely Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine, Jesu goes a step beyond by meshing guitars, drums, and today's electronics, inspiring a bliss that ranges from listless to foreboding. Broadrick's melodic vocals dance within hazy layers of sound that seem nearly all encompassing. A guest appearance by Jarboe, of Swans, rounds out the EP. The result: Add yet another Jesu release to the buy-on-sight list.—brett cleaver

Buy Lifeline
CD: Amazon
Download: iTunes | Amazon

In a Q&A entitled "The Conversation" in the November issue of GQ, currently on newsstands, Francis Ford Coppola spoke with staff writer Nate Penn about his new film, Youth Without Youth, and the vicissitudes of his remarkable career. Along the way he made some controversial remarks about three great stars with whom he has worked: Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Jack Nicholson. Mr. Coppola said the three men, in their prosperous middle age, have lost interest in challenging themselves artistically. His comments about them made headlines around the world.

This past weekend, however, at the world premiere of Youth Without Youth in Rome, Mr. Coppola told reporters his remarks had been taken out of context. "I was astonished, because it wasn't true," the director said. "These are the three greatest actors in the world today and they are my friends. So I have nothing but affection for them." With all due respect to Mr. Coppola, whose work we admire immensely, we must point out that the audiotape of the interview shows that GQ did quote him accurately. Herewith the unedited transcript of Mr. Coppola's remarks on Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Jack Nicholson:

I wonder if you could comment, it seems like the sort of leading actors of your generation, the guys who—I think the three big ones, Pacino, De Niro, and Nicholson, you all worked with at one time or another and more than one time or another—and I wonder, do you think that their success has sort of altered them artistically? Certainly Pacino has never been as contained and as intense as he was for you. Maybe since Scent of a Woman, he's become sort of overbearing and a bit raving as an actor. De Niro is sort of returning again and again in this almost parodic way to the sort of menacing sociopathic character that he plays. And Nicholson is almost inseparable from the sort of comedians' impressions of him. What has happened to those guys? Do you have a sense?

Well, when I met them, they sort—you know, I met Pacino and De Niro both when they were really on the come. They were really young and insecure. Now, Pacino is very rich, maybe because he never spends any money; he just puts it in his mattress. De Niro, kind of, was very inspired by Zoetrope and created an empire and is very wealthy and powerful. Nicholson was a—when I met him and worked with him, he was always a kind of joker, you know. He's got a little bit of a mean streak. He's very intelligent and, you know, always wired in with the big guys and the big bosses of the studios and stuff. You know, he knew Brando and was influenced by kind of—well, I think, by Brando. He was always a unique kind of guy.

I think none of them—I don't know what any of them want anymore. I don't know that they want the same—I think in Pacino's—I don't know what he wants. Pacino always wanted to do theater. He wanted to do Peer Gynt. So he always wanted to do Shakespeare.

I don't know, I think if there was a role that De Niro really was hungry for, he would come after it. I don't think Jack would. I don't know, I think Jack has got money and influence and girls and I think he's sort of a little bit like Brando, except Brando went through some tough times, I think. I guess they don't want to do it anymore. But I think De Niro would. Maybe Pacino.

You know, even in those days, after The Godfather, I mean, I wanted—I didn't feel that those actors were ready to, "Let's do something else really ambitious. " Like a guy like Javier Bardem is really excited to do something really good, just really excited: "Let me do this," or "Let me do that," or "I'll put stuff in my mouth and I'll change—"you know, I don't feel that kind of passion to do a role and be really great, because if it was there, they would do it! [laughs] I mean, they're all in a position…

You know, maybe it all became—you know, like Pacino, he'll say, "Oh, I was raised in a—next to a furnace in New York and I'm never going to go to LA," and they all live in the fat of the land. I haven't seen, I want to, I wanted to see it on film, The Good Shepherd, and so I delayed seeing it on DVD. I'm going to get that print, because sometimes when someone has worked really hard on it, you really feel you want to watch it on screen. So I haven't seen it. But De Niro's not really in it very much, is he? I want to see it. He's very talented.

Photograph by Paul Jasmin

Pick up the November issue of GQ to read the complete interview.

With the arrival of his new memoir, the former 'NSYNC warbler—a.k.a. Princess Frostylocks—talks to Mickey Rapkin about his public outing, his boyfriends, and why everyone in 'NSYNC thought Justin was the one who liked dudes

In July 2006, ending months of speculation, 'NSYNC's Lance Bass finally came clean about his sexuality and his romance with square-jawed Amazing Race cheese-zilla Reichen Lehmkuhl. Bass's inevitable coming-out memoir, Out of Sync (get it?!), is in bookstores now.

Tell me about life before coming out.
The only thing I thought about was: No one can find out that I'm gay, because it will ruin 'NSYNC. I was with women. I had girlfriends.

Who was your wingman back in the day?
I used to hang out with Marc Anthony in New York and Miami.

J.Lo's husband?
We were boys. We had a good time—before he was married. He was surprised when I came out.

Really? It's not like you were a pro quarterback. You were in a boy band. You wore gold lamé. Why the secrecy?
At the beginning, 'NSYNC went to boy-band camp in Germany. I was 16. The record company told us so many things: You can't say you have a girlfriend. You cannot be seen smoking. You cannot be seen drinking. It was all about the fans; it was all about that 10-year-old girl.

Perez Hilton outed you. Did you consider denying it?
I was not hiding the fact that I was gay. I had a boyfriend. I didn't think people cared. I didn't need to make an announcement. But no one likes a liar. It would have gone on—people saying they'd caught me here or saw me there. I wanted to stand up. In a way, I'm glad I was outed.

Clay Aiken is in a similar position now—the speculation is rampant.
Did he come out? Or is he still in the closet?

Diane Sawyer asked him point-blank, and he refused to comment.
Really? Oh. [pause] Hey, maybe he's not! But it kind of gets embarrassing. People want you to tell the truth.

Do you regret missing out on the homo groupies?
I don't have any regrets. We were rock stars. We partied like rock stars. And I had companionship with my friends.

That's not the same thing.
I know that now!

You've segued into acting. Does being out affect your career?
The sad thing is, it really does. I've auditioned for movies, television shows. And casting directors come up to me and say, "We can't put you in it because you're gay." They flat out tell me that. People can't separate the two.

I'm surprised you haven't done a reality show yet.
I get offers all the time. I was offered a dating show.

From a major network? Fox?
Yeah. From most networks. Donald Trump asked me to do Apprentice: Celebrity last week, but I'm doing Hairspray on Broadway. It would be fun as hell. Supposedly, they're negotiating with Britney.

Are you and Britney still in touch?
I tried. I tried. She's my neighbor in Beverly Hills. She lives next door. I tried to get in touch with her—I wanted to be that friend to help her. I don't think she's having any of her old friends anymore.

When was the last time you and Britney spoke?
It was the night of her first wedding, actually. I was in Vegas with her, her dancers, her manager, and my boyfriend at the time.

This is the marriage she annulled a couple of days later?
Yeah. His name was Jason. That was the night I actually came out to Britney. Her manager had already gotten rid of Jason—they'd flown him home. Britney was upset about what she had done. I felt bad for her. I knew she was about to go through a lot of crap. I felt the need to share something. So I sat her on my bed, and I'm like, Well, I'm gay!

Was she surprised?
Oh yeah. I was always the southern gentleman. People never expected me to take home women. I was always the nice guy. The one you wanted to date, but not go home and fuck. That was a good thing.

Justin Timberlake told Rolling Stone that he always knew you were gay.
Everyone says that. When we were in the group, we thought Justin was gay.

Why?
Because he told us he wanted to do a gay part in a movie. We thought Chris was gay because he used to hang out with a choreographer.

How did it feel to sit around while the members of 'NSYNC accused each other of being gay?
I went along with it. I had to.

Amid all this, you set out on a much publicized mission to go into space. You even went to Russia to train. In the extensive psych evaluations required for space travel, none of your sexuality issues came out?
They thought I was straight. The doctors in Russia did a colonoscopy—no anesthesia, no sedation. I had tears coming down my face, and they started laughing. I said to my translator, "What are they saying?" He said, "Now they know you're not gay."

Ouch. Bam Margera from Jackass has a mural hanging in his house. It's a painting of you in your astronaut uniform.
I saw that. It's hilarious. I'm the first to laugh at myself.

Do you still hope to go into space?
Absolutely. I want to work on a documentary. A couple of sponsors have come in the last year to say, "We'll do the whole thing." The money is there. The Russian space program needs the $20 million. NASA doesn't need space-tourism money. They will spend that much money developing a pen that writes in space—when you could just use a pencil.

When was the last time you spoke to your old manager Lou Pearlman—who was recently extradited from Indonesia to the U.S. on bank-fraud charges?
In court. Karma is a bitch.

Put it in perspective: How much money did you put away from those days? 'NSYNC sold more than 30 million albums.
You make more off of merchandise than you do from touring or the music. Merchandise is the moneymaker. I don't know how much money I have. I know the ballpark number.

Justin's solo turn ended 'NSYNC. Is it hard to see his career take off?
I'm proud of him. There's no anger, but there's disappointment. We were starting to get respect—and Grammy nominations. And he kind of took that respect to get past the boy-band stigma. Hopefully, he'll throw us a bone and do another 'NSYNC album or a song, because the rest of us loved it. It was our life—touring, making albums.

You come across much angrier in the book. You write that he strung you along for two years, claiming he would come back to 'NSYNC.
Feelings change. I wrote the book two years ago.

You were dating Reichen Lehmkuhl when you came out. There were tabloid reports that he cheated on you, yes?
Of course. It was embarrassing, because everyone was right. I was madly in love. I was so happy. People would talk so much shit about him. I thought, Why does everyone hate him? At the end I'm like, "Okay, everyone was right."

The blogs recently posted photos of you with a male model named Pedro Andrade. The guy was dressed in a leather jumpsuit.
I don't read blogs. But friends, fans on the street, they feel like they have to tell me everything. Like, "Did you read this? They said this!" Pedro and I are not dating anymore.

Are you a modelizer?
I'm lucky enough to run into some really good-looking guys. I like nice guys. I don't like egos.

Casanova Quinn is smart and self-aware, and he digs the same music you do. Alex Pappademas talks to writer Matt Fraction about his devastatingly geeky—and brilliant—comic-book series

"Most guys who make comics—when they were kids, their heroes always put on capes," writer Matt Fraction says. "Mine always put on suits."

In Fraction's mind-altering comic book series Casanova, which recently returned from hiatus, the man in the suit is Casanova Quinn, a Bond-meets-Jagger rake with chiaroscuro cheekbones and a complicated job description. He's been plucked from his own dimension, where he's nominally a bad guy, and coerced into impersonating the Casanova Quinn of another dimension, who's ostensibly a good guy. It's part of an ongoing clash between rival spy agencies W.A.S.T.E. and E.M.P.I.R.E., and if those acronyms make you think of Thomas Pynchon spec-scripting The Man from U.N.C.L.E., you're starting to get the idea; this is a work of advanced-placement pop-culture geekery. Quinn digs the Beatles and Genius/GZA's Liquid Swords; he observes that a control room inside a giant robot could use "a few Eames chairs"; a femme fatale wears a Paco Rabanne dress "made from the seized platinum cards of indicted CEOs."

But the book is also a compelling, deadpan-funny story about identity—"I am my own evil twin," Quinn muses, mid-fight-scene—and an earnest attempt to shake the espionage genre out of its swingless, Kiefer-Sutherland-with-a-Bluetooth-headset funk. "I want to make the world we were promised from superspy films," Fraction says, "where people can just jump out of airplanes with jet packs, and there are giant flying casinos that only the super-rich know about, and we can have lots of fabulous, near-anonymous sex without consequence, and hedonism and science fiction have combined to create this really fantastic world—not this Jack Bauer bullshit we have to tolerate on a daily basis."

Do you remember what the germ of the idea for Casanova was, the very first thing that kickstarted the book?
I've always liked the superspy genre more than superheroes, whether it's James Bond or any of the million variations on that theme. I've only just now started to write superhero stuff—I didn't start out reading superhero comics, I didn't start out writing superhero comics. I've always wanted to write the comics that I wished were out there, stuff that I wish I could read. And there wasn't a story out there about a guy with a suit and tie and a martini and a gun.

It seems like that would work so well in comics—it's amazing that it hasn't become a more viable genre in that world.
The Cold War obviously had a lot to do with it. There was such a Cold War romance to [the superspy genre.] And ultimately, comics—American comics—are an insular club run by the fans, for the fans. You have guys who were born reading Batman who grow up to make Batman, and the market is engineered to sell Batman. Or Spider-Man. Whoever. American comics are designed to really perpetuate this one genre. There are exceptions to the rule, but they're really just exceptions. There was always a Cold War vibe to some of the early superhero comics—stuff like Captain America and Iron Man had a lot of that, back in the day. But ultimately, the suit always came off to reveal the underpants worn over tights, and the cape, and the beams shooting out of the eyes. It just never really caught on. And in a bigger picture, I just think it's the zeitgeist's rise and fall, y'know? Pop, pulp genres come in and out of fashion. Westerns, especially. So we're in sort of a down cycle. But I think it'll be interesting to see what comes from Casino Royale being as well-received as it was.

And the theme of espionage feels more topical right now than it ever has.
Yeah. And man, I write a comic book, I don't mean to disappear too far up my own ass. But post-9/11, the world of intelligence is much more—what's the word—fucking terrifying. Our secret agents now are Jack Bauer. And it's awesome seeing Bauer say something like "I'm gonna need a hacksaw" after shooting a bad guy. But it's bullshit to go through eight years of a guy stabbing people in the kneecaps with screwdrivers to get the satellite codes. It makes for bad fiction, it makes for bad escapism, it makes for bad pulp. But that's what a spy is now. It's not even Sydney Bristow, for fuck's sake, it's Jack Bauer. And I call bullshit.

Alias seemed to take so much more joy in the conventions of the spy genre.
Yeah. Look, spy shows should have tremendous, tremendous costume and wig budgets. That's the thing that Alias got right. Like, let's put the hot girl in the latex dress. Yes. The answer to that is always yes. On 24, there's no room for Mary-Lynn Rajskub to put on a dominatrix outfit. Also, Alias had the genius move of hiding all the secret hideouts inside of nightclubs. You're never gonna look in a nightclub for the death-laser! Jack Bauer's out stabbing guys in the kneecaps, but he should really be at the S&M nightclub, because that's where the real deal happens. That's where the space laser is. And that's what I want to see.

And he's not. He's in the office park, by the Kinko's.
Exactly. Meanwhile, in Sherman Oaks…

You've mentioned that when you were putting Casanova together, there was a "bible" of reference material that you made.
It was digital—a giant 80-page PDF document. My artist, or both artists now, are Brazilian. And their frame of reference was wildly different from mine. So when I would talk about Eames chairs or a Paco Rabanne dress, or David Bailey's photography, I needed to make sure that they knew what I was talking about. Even if they just looked at it once and ignored it from then on. I so tend to speak with a cultural shorthand, so it was really for that. And it was an opportunity for me to just kind of soak in the vibe. When gentlemen wore cravats and ladies wore giant sunglasses and everybody sat in egg chairs.

So it's like old fashion layouts and stuff?
It's fashion, architecture, interiors and exteriors. Some comics stuff. Some of the more interesting and aggressive Jim Steranko and Jack Kirby stuff from that era—the real Pop Art comics stuff. Stills from movies, just for sets and props and framing ideas and color palettes and things like that. It was as much for me to kind of get lost in the experience, and just soak it in and fall in love with it all over again, as it was to put together a nodal point for [artist] Gabriel [Ba] to go to.

How did you end up doing this book that's so steeped in American and British pop-cultural signifiers…
With a Brazilian?

Was that on purpose?
I should say yes, and sound like a genius, but no. I actually had gone after his brother, Fabio Moon, who had done a couple of things that I had seen and liked a lot. Fabio's his twin brother, too—I swear to God, they're identical twins. Fabio has this very warm, sloppy, heavy-inked feel to his pages. He was the one I went after. And the two of them talked amongst themselves, and they decided that Gabriel, whose work I'd never seen before, would be better. And they were absolutely right. For identical twins, their styles couldn't be more different. Fabio's going to be the artist on the second arc, and hopefully we're just going to alternate back and forth between the brothers.

So you're alternating between identical twin-artists on a book where identical twins are a major plot point.
Yet another way in which Casanova the book is mirroring my life.

How do you think that outsider point of view affected the way the book came out?
The superspy genre is a pretty small pond, and what little cream there is is very clearly on top, and it's a long way down. And it's very easy to kind of become a copy of a copy of a copy. The fact that Gabriel and Fabio come to it from an entirely different culture and frame of reference kept them from kind of copying, consciously or unconsciously. They're not redrawing old Iron Man comics. They're not drawing Thunderball set pieces. They don't get the reference, or they're seeing the reference but they're free of the context, so they're encountering it fresh as I send it to them. I think the book would have been wildly different had I worked with an American guy who got everything that I got and could match my Girl from Rio with Department S.

Pop music is also an obvious influence on your work. You've talked about trying to create a book as dense with information as a Phil Spector song, and you've woven references to pop songs into the dialogue. It's something you do well in this book that comics traditionally do really badly—for some reason, when comics try to touch on rock and roll, it ends up being kind of embarrassing.
I think the trick is you can't try to be current, because then you become dated. Have you ever read, like, the early Teen Titans, where the adults are having emergency town-hall meetings because the kids are listening to rock and roll music? And then the Teen Titans have to show up to defuse the youth riot? I'm not even making that up. That's like the third issue of Teen Titans. But yeah—I don't think you can be contemporary, but music and movies and everything else are just such a huge part of my life. It grounds the book in our world a little bit. And it's a short cut for character. If a guy listens to [the Beatles'] Revolver, and then [Genius'] Liquid Swords, that says something about him. And then there's the character who psychotically hates the Beatles. Everybody knows that asshole, and everybody wants to shoot that asshole in the head.

How do you decide what real-world pop-culture stuff exists in the Casanova world? It's not set in a particular era—it looks like the '60s, but the technology is futuristic, and the Beatles and the Wu-Tang Clan are contemporaries.
Initially I had it in my head that the Beatles were still around, but Revolver had only just come out. But somebody later refers to Sgt. Pepper's. I fucked up. I changed a line, for the meter, to "I like Sgt. Pepper's," and I realized I'd fractured my own Beatles chronology. So in the Casanova universe, Sgt. Pepper has just come out. But yeah, also Liquid Swords is there. And he has an iPod. It's my own capricious whimsy. I just go from idea to idea. Whatever's coolest. I want to make the world that we were promised from superspy films, where people can just jump out of airplanes with jetpacks, and there are in fact giant flying casinos that only the super-rich know about, and we can have lots of fabulous near-anonymous sex with anyone we want, without consequence, and hedonism and science fiction have combined to create this really fantastic world, and not this sort of Jack Bauer bullshit we have to tolerate on a regular basis.

It's that escapism you talked about earlier.
It's wish fulfillment. I'm writing a comic I want to live in. The greatest thing about the glory years of the superspy thing is that everybody was so rich, and so beautiful, and so well-dressed. Everybody looked great. And you could go to Monte Carlo and then Paris. And now we're in Tokyo! And it's like, "Oh, sure! Look, there's a volcano base! Great!" It all just made sense somehow. And to me, it all seemed so glamorous. When I was a kid, I always loved how Bond always knew what to do in social situations. You're a kid, and you're awkward, and you don't know how to talk to girls, and Bond is like, "I want this kind of wine, and this kind of food, and oh, I see you're wearing this, and you're wearing that, and it's this size, and we're going to play this game." Like, do you know the rules of baccarat? It's ridiculous. Baccarat is the most retarded game in the world. But Bond's like, "I can go to any casino in the world and I can make a million dollars playing baccarat, because I understand it." To me, that's the ultimate wish fulfillment of Bond. It's not about how he bangs Pussy Galore and then saves the world. It's about, like, "Oh, I want to know what kind of wine to order with the fish."

The first seven issues were dense with '60s references—that continuum of '60s cool from James Bond to the Beatles. You've mentioned that you're moving in more of a '70s direction with the storyline you're working on now.
Yeah—it's a little more glam. I'm not pushing too hard or too far, but if the first one was the David Bailey-covering-the-Stones period, this one is much more Hunky Dory. This is the glam era, and androgyny, and huge Afros. It's a subtle shift down the road, but the idea is to give each arc a different kind of timeframe as its genetic makeup.

You posted something on your blog about how you'd been checking out some of the real trippy, psychedelia-influenced '70s Marvel comics, like Jim Starlin's Warlock.
Yeah. That blog entry was called "Finally the nerds had discovered acid." It was interesting to me because [the comics creators of the '70s] were the first wave of mainstream creators who had come up reading mainstream comics, but had also seen Zap! and Mr. Natural, and got high, and were clearly trying to make comics for dudes like them. Comics were still a kids' thing back then, and they knew that they were writing for kids, but they also knew there were 22-year-olds like them, with a fistful of LSD, who were just looking to have a good time and find groovy shit. So you see that Starlin stuff—it's so awkward and it's so proggy, it's so King Crimson, it's so Peter Gabriel Genesis, and it's horrible. It reads terribly. It's like that Stan Lee monologue shit, but it's done, like, "I AM COSMICALLY AWARE," and it's just absurd and stupid. But in the storytelling—you don't draw four panels of an eyelid full of stars, opening slowly over four panels, unless you've taken heroic doses of psychedelics.

It's interesting to me to see the secret messages starting to work their way into children's fiction. Like every now and then there'd be those jokes on The Muppet Show that were clearly for the grownups. And that's what's remarkable about that stuff to me—it's that moment where the mainstream began to produce work that suggested, "Maybe we're more than fodder for the back pockets of nine-year-olds."

And here's where it gets interesting—you talk about comics and music, Starlin and [fellow '70s Marvel Comics writer Steve] Gerber, these cats were from Detroit, right? It was like the Detroit comics mafia that kind of came in. They were like wave 1.5—like Roy Thomas and those guys, the letterhacks becoming writers, was the first wave, and these guys were kind of the first-and-a-half wave. So they're all from Detroit—which means Iggy and the Stooges, it means the MC5, it means race riots and class consciousness. And all the type of crazy stuff that was informing music. You can't tell me that Jim Starlin did not listen to Hunky Dory and the MC5 while making his stuff. Like, you can't live in Detroit, and be there while these things are going on, and clearly be a head, and be into this trippy cosmic shit, and not be into music. So just by the brute nature of proximity, you realize "Well, wait—Starlin had to be listening to Iggy Pop, he had to be listening to David Bowie. And David Bowie's talking about the Homo Superior—so David Bowie's been reading Stan Lee!"

And all the heads are kind of sending their signals in the same direction. Y'know, you might have bass, and I might have treble, and somebody else might be playing drums, but it's all kind of forming this weird symphony, where science fiction is kind of finding a very sly way to infect an area of culture that hadn't been there before. And that's what's fascinating to me—you can't tell me that [Starlin] wasn't paying attention to Fun House, and all of this kind of stuff.

And that's where it gets cool. When you find out that Joey Ramone read comics his whole life. I remember when I was—oh, God, thirteen, fourteen, whenever the video for "I Wanna Be Sedated" came out. It was all filmed really high-speed, with the Ramones sitting at the table the whole time. And Joey picks up one of the Silvestri and Claremont issues of X-Men and reads it, at the table. And as a kid I was such a comics nerd that—it's subliminal, but he picks it up and I was like, "I know what that fuckin' is!" You know what I mean? And that was the coolest thing in the world to me. And then you had to like the Ramones, because the Ramones were into comics. And that was how I got into the Ramones.

You're describing this sort of magic circle forming between all these people.
I remember—I moved around a lot when I was a kid, and on the first day of school I'd always try to wear a comics shirt. It was a shibboleth. It was—"Somebody seek this out. Someone please know what I'm talking about. I can't stand being lonely." So I had the Graphitti Designs Watchmen T-shirt. It was like a cast drawing from Watchmen, that Dave Gibbons did. And I would wear it to the first day of school whenever I was in a new school, because somebody was gonna get it. Somebody in that school, if they read comics, was going to see that and go, "Hey, that's Watchmen, I know what you're wearing. And that way you don't have to go, "Hey, everybody, I'm Matt, I'm the new kid, I'm kinda fat, a little short, I got bad hair, crooked teeth and I read comic books." I could keep the comic books part to myself and pray for puberty and a growth spurt to make the rest go away.

So you're putting out this message that's going to mean nothing to 98% of the people who see it…
Yeah. It's just noise. It becomes like W.A.S.T.E., in The Crying of Lot 49, with the trumpet—it becomes a secret sign. It becomes the Christian sign of the fish. It's our little secret handshake that you're kind of broadcasting, you're looking for other brains like yours, other heads like yours. And that's ultimately what these stories are about—whether it's David Bowie doing Hunky Dory or Jim Starlin doing Warlock, it's all about, some of us are compelled to start talking when we sit around the fire, y'know? It's just about finding the fire you want to sit around. I'm just fascinated by the intersection of different nodes of culture. It's just something I'm obsessed with. I love watching old movies to see what other movies were playing—like if I'm watching a movie and a character walks by a movie theater, I love to pause it and try to read the marquee.

You were directing commercials before you started doing comics full-time.
Yeah. I was a writer and a director and an editor at a motion-graphics company that me and some friends from school started. I shot commercials and music videos, and animated shorts, and we went around the world making 'em and talking about 'em. It was a really awesome day job. It was really cool when I was getting into comics, because if something didn't work out, I could go console myself by making a music video.

Who were some of the people you did videos for?
We made the last Guided by Voices video, for a song called "Back to the Lake." That actually came out kind of a couple years after Guided by Voices stopped being a going concern, through a kind of remarkable Coke project, of all things. I codirected a video with Kanye West for Common's song "Go." We did a Hot Hot Heat video. We did a video for the Faint. Funkstorung. There's one or two that I'm forgetting, I think. And then if you're up on either baseball or basketball, if you've seen the Budweiser commercials that are going now, where the label kind of spills apart, and George Clooney is narrating, about the importance of beer? That's my old company.

Now that you're working in comics, which is a hybrid verbal/visual medium, does the stuff you learned from commercials and videos come into play? Do you think those jobs shaped your sensibility?
Oh, absolutely. Just learning how to tell stories on paper. Absolutely. And just working editorially and stuff like that. Learning how to work with a client. It was incredibly influential—and like I said, it was really cool to try to break into comics while I had that job, because it made it really easy to walk away from stuff.

Because even your day job was still a creative environment…
Yeah, boo-hoo—I'm going to go cut together six commercials for Hewlett-Packard. It wasn't like I was going back to Starbucks or anything like that. I had a really cool, creative, exciting, glamorous kind of day job. And I think it gave me a little patina of attractiveness with editors, because I never had freelancer hunger. I was never the guy that said "Yes" to every pitch that came down the pike. I wasn't deliberately playing hard-to-get, but I had the freedom to not take a gig just to pay the mortgage, y'know? I didn't pitch on anything just to be working. I didn't need it that much, and honestly I didn't want to pitch weak stuff that I didn't care about. I've been really happy and really lucky, I've loved working on everything that I've worked on so far. There are a lot of guys who can be like, "Yeah, that one kind of sucked. I cranked that out." But I'm not that dude. And I'm sure, y'know, one day, I'll find myself like, "Well, that didn't come out like I wanted," but up until now I've been lucky enough and fortunate enough to have enjoyed everything I've done, no matter how big or small it was.

It comes across in the work, that you're actually having a good time putting this stuff on the page.
It's hard not to laugh while you're writing a scene where Punisher shoots the Rhino with a bazooka. [laughs]

Since we're talking about transitioning between mediums—I don't know how you'd go about turning Casanova into a movie, but has there been interest?
Yeah.

Are you thinking about it?
At this point, no. You can't. I think if you start writing stuff to be turned into movies, you're starting from a very creatively compromised point of view. Not that you can't write something thinking, "Oh, this would make a great movie." But the minute you start thinking, "I gotta make a movie, so what comic should I write?"—that's fucked up. There are people that are interested in Cass and are talking about it. It could be really cool if it comes to pass. We'll see. I don't know how much of that I should talk about. But there's interest, that's for sure.

It seems like any comic-book property that's found an audience gets snapped up instantly.
I tend to get a lot of "I don't get it," which is kinda cool. I want to be pretty and I want to be special and I want to be rich and I want to be powerful, but in lieu of that, being told "I don't get it" by people in Hollywood is pretty satisfying way of not getting that. Being too smart for the room is kind of awesome.

Are you talking about people reacting that way to Casanova specifically, or—
I've heard it on a lot of stuff I do. One of my favorite, favorite, favorite pieces of storytelling advice came from Billy Wilder, who said "Don't talk down to your audience. Let them put two and two together, they'll love you forever." And he's absolutely right. I hate hand-holding. I hate when somebody thinks it's a good idea to stop the story and make sure the people in the slow seats got it. It compromises everything, and it insults the intelligence of the people who've followed you, and given you their time and attention. So I always try to make it a mission to make any audience I've been blessed with a co-conspirator. "Come along with me, let's see where this goes. And I believe you're smart enough to figure this out, 'cause I'm smart enough to write it, and surely you're brighter than me."

So that's the thing with Casanova. I've probably heard from 30 or 40 percent of the readership, and of those people, like 95% of them are gracious and excited and thrilled by the book, and love that it doesn't pander, and that it's not, "Okay, kids, now here's what happened," like so many other books. And then you get these incredibly rancid, incredibly vicious hate-mail letters from people basically saying "You make me feel stupid—fuck you!" And every negative review I've read of Casanova has ultimately been like, "I don't get it—fuck them. Fuck this book! If only he would explain what's going on!" Like, well—no. I don't think I'll be doing that.

If you're going to alienate one group of people…
I'm fine alienating the stupid.

Really, the first issue—where you're setting up so much of what follows—is the one that feels the most like you're being thrown in the deep end.
Yeah, if you make it through the first issue, you're with us. If you can make it through those 28 pages, we're gonna be fine.

But I imagine anybody who's sort of casually reading it to see if it would make a good movie—that's a lot to take in.
It defies being read on the toilet. It defies the skim-read at the rack. I dare ask for your time and attention. I figure you paid for it. And it's a two-dollar book, so I want to make sure everybody feels that they're getting their money's worth. So if that means compressing an entire arc into sixteen pages, then so be it.

Can we talk in a general sense about what's going to happen in the next few issues?
Yeah, yeah. We kind of establish a status quo at the end of the first arc. All the players are on the board. And by the time you get to the end of the first story, the people who live have lived, and the people who die have died, and our protagonist has decided, "This is who I am, this is what I'm going to do, this is what I'm going to be." Hooray—endings. And the second volume picks up a little bit later, and he's doing exactly what he said he was going to do. And then something happens. And he's gone. And the arc is about, "Where did he go? What happened?" The question we're going to ask—we're having buttons made up—is When is Casanova Quinn? Our lead vanishes from the space-time continuum, and people are very interested in why that has happened and where he has gone. So I'm taking the main character, the title character, out of the book, for quite a while. And we're exploring the space left in his absence.

That's a ballsy thing to do this early in the life of the book. Was that something where you came up with it and just thought, "Oh, I have to do that?"
Yeah. I don't want to spoil anything too much, but the story is about duality, and everyone kinda having two sides. And it continues a lot of the themes that we'd set up—the first arc was about fathers and sons, and this one's kind of about men and women, and boyfriends and girlfriends, or lovers, or however you want to phrase it. It's about love and friendship and relationships. And then—with Kurt Vonnegut passing away, it's especially appropriate—there's the line, "Be careful who you pretend to be, because we are who we pretend to be." We are who we say we are. Especially when you're in an industry like superspies, where you're supposed to pretend to be other people.

Tracy Morgan on YouTube: The Greatest Hits
by Raha Naddaf

1. El Paso Newscast

In this local-news interview gone batshit, Morgan's stream-of-consciousness ramblings about El Paso strippers and Vietnam amputees leave the anchor—and an off-camera staffer—a guffawing mess. Most priceless moment: when Morgan catches a glimpse of himself in a monitor and declares, "I'm handsome. Now I can see why I've got so many kids…. Somebody's gonna get pregnant while I'm in town…. Ladies, my Mercedes!" Seconds later, he's shirtless and quietly dancing.

2. 'Blackass'

Morgan plays a Johnny Knoxville-esque character who won't actually do anything dicey. When one stunt requires him to shove hay down his pants to entice a horse, he punches the animal in the face. Asked to jump into a swimming pool, he simply replies, "No." And when he has to dunk his head in a toilet bowl and eat a goldfish, he stomps out of the bathroom stall, yelling, "Y'all out of your motherfucking mind!"

3. 'Totally Awesome' Extras

Apparently, VH1 created a TV movie called Totally Awesome. It's totally unwatchable, save for a few outtakes in which a Jheri-curled Morgan tries to determine whether a white dude could be more black. Gems include "You ever got a female pregnant when you was, like, 7?… Have you ever fist-fought your pediatrician?… Have things in your house gotten so bad that you've resorted to eating a baseball cleat?"

4. 'Jimmy Kimmel Live'

Part One:

Part Two:

In the fourteen minutes it takes to do this interview, Morgan manages to name-check Flip Wilson, gloat about his kids' virginity, and explain how much love there is between Luke and Han Solo. Then there's this tangent: "I'm a freak. You know, yesterday I bought one of them leather masks with the zipper right here [gesturing toward his mouth] and a zipper on the back," adding, "somebody tonight is going to throw 2,000 grapes at my butt cheeks."