The company suing the Michael Jackson estate for $300 million over the Jackson family concert that never took place just got two strikes against it, and the pitcher was a federal judge. The judge on Tuesday threw out two of the three claims.

Source: TMZ.com

An MJ fan club is on a desperate mission to clean up the recent graffiti onslaught outside the King of Pop ’s tomb — claiming a few bad apples could spoil everything for MJ’s non-vandal followers. The Official Michael Jackson Fans of Southern California…

Source: TMZ.com

Filed under: Mel Gibson, Reverend Jesse Jackson, Gloria Allred

Reverend Jesse Jackson claims Mel Gibson ’s racist rant reveals he has a “fundamental character flaw” … and says the actor truly “needs help.” TMZ just spoke to Rev. Jackson, who said, “Mel Gibson’s outburst demonstrates once again that we are far…

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Source: TMZ.com

Autoblogging

The Drug Enforcement Agency “inspected” Dr. Arnold Klein’s Beverly Hills office last Tuesday.

Sarah Pullen, spokesperson for the agency, confirmed this for me today.

According to Pullen, investigators didn’t “raid” Klein’s office. But they conducted a rather stringent regulatory examination. It’s called an Adminstrative Inspection Warrant. This meant that they went through all his logs, and did extensive checking to make sure  what drugs are being administered to which patients, and if it’s all being done properly.

Here’s the weird thing: the warrant was not related to Michael Jackson, per se. But Klein, according to sources, has been on the…

Source: Showbiz411.com

Filed under: Katherine Jackson, Michael Jackson

Katherine and Joe Jackson are set to make a bundle off of their various Michael Jackson business ventures.? But Katherine and her hubby haven’t figured out … someone is waiting in the wings to take away everything they make. TMZ broke the story…

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Source: TMZ.com

Michael Jackson enjoyed spending time with his children, cruising the Vegas strip and even ordering fast food through a drive through, according to three of his former bodyguards.
The King of Pop trusted his three bodyguards with his life, kids and secrets.

But the men also said Jackson’s lifestyle was isolated and lonely and described it as full of

“stress, paranoia and pain.”

In an exclusive interview with “Good Morning America,” Mike Garcia, Bill Whitfield and Javon “BJ” Beard spoke out about Jackson’s secretive life, describing some moments as just plain “sad.”

For instance, when Jackson held a birthday party for one of his children, only Jackson, the teacher, the nanny and the three bodyguards would attend, the men said. No other children were there.

“None,”

the three men said.

Jackson died June 25 following a lethal cocktail of prescription drugs and propofol. The three men said they first met the pop star more than two years earlier in 2007.

“He’s got his little doctor’s mask on and he says, ‘BJ, hi, I’ve heard so much about you. Go ahead and have a seat,’”

Beard said.

The three men signed up for personal protection, but the job became much more, they said. Jackson trusted them with his life, his children and his secrets.

“We were with Michael Jackson the person, not the entertainer,”

Garcia said.

In fact, the bandages Jackson wore frequently in public were not concealing secret surgeries, Whitfield said. Instead, the singer was using them as a disguise.

“That disguise to him was the burn victim look,”

Whitfield said.

Although the men wondered what was going on, they never asked Jackson about the mask.

“He’s coming down with the kids and we can’t say, ‘What the hell you got on, sir?’”

Beard said.

“How could you tell him that?”

Prior to his death, Jackson was staging a comeback tour in London. When the family was not on the road, Jackson called a rented Las Vegas mansion his home. But his bodyguards said the singer did not enjoy being there.

“For you and I, it’s a great house…but for security for MJ and his kids…[it's a] horrible house,”

Whitfield said.

The men said Jackson was always paranoid about security.

The men described Jackson as an “awesome” dad who loved to spend time with his children and took them to fast food drive-throughs for Big Macs and fried chicken. Often, Jackson would insist on ordering himself, the guards said.

“The kids were constantly saying, ‘I love you, Daddy…They were like four buddies,”

Garcia said.

Despite having a privileged upbringing, Whitfield said the children were very “polite” and “well mannered.”

A note from Paris to Whitfield asking for tuna fish for the cat is filled with please and thank you.

In fact, the bodyguards said the children were the easiest part of their job, and remember, wistfully, moments when they misbehaved and tried to sneak extra Oreos.

“I mean, sometimes they would say little things like, ‘Bill, Daddy wants you to go get some cookies for us,’” Whitfield said, remembering moments when Jackson’s kids tried to trick him into getting them cookies.

Source: mjfanclub.net

It was one year ago today that Michael Jackson announced plans for the ‘This Is It’ concert run at a press conference at London’s O2 arena. To mark the anniversary, Charles Thomson sat down with Jackson’s long-time guitarist Jennifer Batten, to talk about what it was really like behind the scenes on a Michael Jackson tour.

Batten was Jackson’s lead guitarist for a decade, accompanying the star on all three of his record-breaking world tours. At just 29 years old she was plucked from complete obscurity by the King of Pop. As impossible as it sounds, before Batten joined Jackson, her touring experience was limited almost exclusively to a brief spell with an Elvis impersonator.

“We played down in American Samoa of all places,”

she laughs.

“He had a brother that was a missionary on the island, so he set up the gig. Then we did another stint in Colorado because he had a brother there too. That was it.”

Inspired by blues legends like BB King and Brownie McGee, Batten began playing guitar at the tender age of eight. As a young woman she attended the Musicians Institute in Los Angeles where she was the only girl.

“I was the only woman with 60 guys,”

she says.

“I didn’t have a problem with it. I could go practice in the bathroom because you get the natural reverb in there and I knew I wouldn’t be bothered.”

BAD TOUR

After the Elvis gigs she lived for several years in San Diego, playing in cover bands before heading to Los Angeles in search of success on the music scene. It wasn’t long before she began teaching at her former school, the Musicians Institute. It was there – on one fateful day in 1987 – that Michael Jackson’s representatives called asking for musicians to attend tour auditions. Batten recalls,

“They were auditioning about a hundred people so it was pretty intense. When I went, there was just a video camera, no band. The only guidance I was given was to play some funk rhythm stuff so I did that, then I finished off with the Beat It solo because I had been playing that for years in cover bands. I think ultimately that’s what got me the gig.”

Batten says that earning her place on Jackson’s Bad Tour in 1987 changed her life.

“It was like a paid vacation. I had been teaching and gigging pretty much seven nights a week and all of a sudden I’m on the biggest tour in the world making ten times the money and only working two or three days a week!”

Rehearsals began immediately and they were brutal; seven days a week for two solid months. For the first month the band, singers and dancers would rehearse separately. They all came together for the second month in a production studio, where every element of the show came alive. It was here that Batten first met Michael Jackson.

“We heard that if he liked the music he’d start dancing and he did as soon as he walked through the door. We stopped and people who hadn’t met him before were introduced to him. I remember seeing his manager Frank Dileo come in with the ponytail and the cigar. It was kind of surreal seeing the two of them together. I just remember Michael looked gorgeous close up. He was just beautiful.

“He was very much hands on and he was an extremely hard worker. By the end of rehearsals we were running the show a minimum of once a day, sometimes twice. I would say that’s the number one thing I learned from him: the value of rehearsing that much and that intensely, because by the time we hit the stage everybody was relaxed.”

Batten recalls opening night in Tokyo saying,

“I’d never played for that many people before. On the road Michael took it up another notch. I mean, he was pretty full out at the last rehearsals anyway but that extra excitement of knowing there are people going nuts watching you… There’s an extra amount of fire that you can feel onstage with everybody doing their best and trying to give 110%.”

But soon after hitting the road, Batten says she discovered a more sinister side to working with Michael Jackson.

“I was approached in the beginning by somebody who said I could make a lot of money by talking to the National Enquirer. I was just appalled. I thought ‘that is just sick’, you know? I just got this great gig. Why would I sabotage it like that? It seemed like a really evil thing to do.”

Batten grew to feel sorry for Jackson, who she says was trapped by his celebrity.

“If he wanted to go anywhere he had to alert the security and he had to really have it planned in advance. If he wanted to go to a store they would have to be called and shut it down for him. He was a prisoner of the hotel room, really.”

Batten says Jackson compensated by treating himself and his entire entourage to special excursions. Sometimes he had theme parks closed to the public so that he and his team could have some fun without being hounded.

“He did it first at the Tokyo Disneyland. That was just unbelievable. We would go on the rollercoaster rides and when we were done they would just ask us, ‘Do you want to go around again?’ We were very, very spoiled.”

The Bad Tour ended in January 1989 and the group disbanded. In later years Sheryl Crow, who worked as a back-up singer on the tour, would make several disparaging remarks about Jackson during interviews publicizing her own work. Crow called Jackson a diva who never bothered to learn people’s names. Batten refutes this saying,

“I think singers in general are just nuts and ultra-sensitive. One night Michael called Sheryl ‘Jennifer’,” she giggles, “and I know that pissed her off. But it’s like, so what? I mean, you got the biggest gig in the world and it’s not like Michael was unaware of who was onstage with him. We were with him for a friggin’ year and a half.”

DANGEROUS TOUR

In 1992 Batten was called back to work on Jackson’s Dangerous Tour. Batten says Jackson seemed like ‘the same Michael,’ if slightly more fatigued.

“I noticed that he was busier and I remember that one time he came to rehearsals and just apologized for not having been there the last few days. He said, ‘I was just showered with meetings’ and he just repeated it with emotion, ‘meeting after meeting after meeting’.”

Jackson’s heavy schedule dictated that he was limited in his rehearsal time, which meant that much of the set list was simply carried over from the Bad Tour. Batten said this was a little disappointing to the band because they all wanted to play the new stuff. One of the few new tracks – Remember The Time – was cut from the show after a wardrobe malfunction. She laughs saying,

“They had Egyptian costumes and the male dancers had these skirt kind of things. The first time we did it one of the dancers’ costumes fell off. That was a little disturbing to Michael.”

Unfortunately, the wardrobe malfunctions didn’t end in rehearsals. Speaking about that enormous fibre-optic headdress Batten says,

“At the end of Beat It everybody would run out on the stage,” she remembers. “Invariably, I would be running at full force and somebody would step on my fibre-optic cable – it would pretty much knock my head off. That was kind of a drag.”

Talking about the end of each show when Jackson would exit the stage on a jet pack, floating over the audience’s heads Batten said,

“He wanted to come out with the biggest show on earth. He wanted it to be like Christmas for people. His imagination was like a creative tornado. He would come up with his wildest dreams and then hire people to carry it out. It was really amazing to be a part of that.”

SUPER BOWL PERFORMANCE

In January 1993 Batten accompanied Jackson for his legendary Super Bowl performance, which was watched by 1.5 billion people. She says,

“I’ll tell you, it was the only time I ever saw Michael nervous. It’s live and there’s only the time of a couple of potato chip commercials to get the stage out into the field. There’s one scene where I’m on the corner of the stage with Michael and there’s so much fog coming out that we both get lost for a second, but that’s the beauty of live gigs. You never know what’s going to happen. That was one of my favorite times because it was a one-off special thing that will never be repeated.”

After the Super Bowl there was a long break before the second leg of the Dangerous Tour. It was during the second leg that allegations of child abuse were leveled at Jackson. Batten  says matter-of-factly,

“I figured it was an extortion case, which I still figure it is. Everybody was concerned about him. I think it pains all of us that he was so attacked and so unfairly. Most artists are sensitive and he was talented times ten, so ultra sensitive, and to be slung that kind of stuff… I mean, you can hear it in his lyrics. It’s a real drag because you wonder what kind of music he would have come up with if people weren’t attacking him like that.”

“Honestly, I think it would have been considered uncool among the press to take Michael’s side. I think it would take a brave soul to do that, which is really sad. Really pathetic. Even at the 2005 trial… I know people who were inside the courtroom and then they would watch the news at night and it was complete lies.”

HIStory TOUR

In 1996 Batten was brought back onboard for the HIStory Tour, although she recalls that it was ‘very last minute.’

“I got hired a week before I was supposed to start rehearsals, which was a real scramble. It was just nuts. I had to cancel some work.”

The tour brought with it more costume problems for Batten, who describes her black latex get-up as ‘just dreadful.’

“That mask I had to wear was just ugh… ghastly. Somebody had shown Michael an art book that was kind of S&M based and all the paintings looked really beautiful. So he had that in mind but when it came to real life it wasn’t too beautiful anymore,” she laughs. “I just had to remind myself that it was all about the theatre, you know? It’s not just about the music.”

Batten says Jackson got ready for each concert by warming up his voice.

“Every night he’d be warming up with his vocal coach. You could hear him doing arpeggios from his dressing room.”

The guitarist says that initially she was alarmed by Jackson’s decision to end each concert flanked on either side by young children.

“At the end of the show he would disappear down an elevator in the stage with a little boy and a little girl. At first I thought, ‘God, because of the allegations you’d think he wouldn’t do that’. But then I thought, ‘You know what, he hasn’t done anything wrong so why the hell should he change his life?’ I think that was a little bit of giving a finger to his critics.”

The HIStory Tour lasted into the Summer of 1997 and would mark the end of the pair’s working relationship, but Batten says she never felt disappointed that he didn’t bring her back.

“I would just go off and work on my own career. If he calls, great, and if he doesn’t, great. It’s been a great ride with him anyway.”

MICHAEL’S DEATH

Batten was in her car on June 25, 2009 when someone called to tell her about rumors of Jackson’s death.

“I didn’t really believe it when he told me because I had heard so many rumors about Michael over the years, false alarms about everything. I thought, ‘Yea, right’. I saw it was true when I got home and I had mixed feelings. I was sad but in a way I thought power to him for going to the other side, because of all the torture that had come at him. I just can’t imagine living with that.”

In the weeks after Jackson’s death Batten says she was unable to watch the media coverage, knowing how much of it would be slanted.

“They were respectful for about two or three hours and then they turned it into a tabloid festival. I just couldn’t watch it. There were a lot of specials on about him and once in a while I would turn one on and it was just shit. I guess it makes money to just bring up negativity and stir up controversy but it’s pathetic and I just can’t watch it. It’s all about money now, not about truth. People can be very cold.”

Unlike some of Jackson’s friends and family, Batten says she was able to bring herself to watch ‘This Is It,’ even if she did have mixed feelings about it.

“I hadn’t seen any video of him for years and just to see his talent, even when he wasn’t going full out, the way he sang ‘Human Nature’ was just chilling. The way his body moves – there was just no other dancer in the world that was like that. So I enjoyed it.”

Source: mjfanclub.net

Paying tribute to the King of Pop, Hot Toys is proud to present the 1/6th scale Michael Jackson collectible figure again, this time depicting his image in his popular hit Bad’s music video in 1987, highlighting the authentic head sculpt, the multi-layered stereoscopic hair sculpture and the highly-detailed costume of his style. A complimentary value-added set of upper outfit portraying his image in the Dirty Diana music video in 1988 is also presented.

The 1/6th scale Michael Jackson (Bad version) collectible specially features:
- Authentic and detailed fully realized likeness of Michael Jackson in the Bad music video
- Newly developed head sculpt with new make-up
- Parallel Eyeball Rolling System (PERS) and colored Translucent Iris
- Multi-layered stereoscopic hair sculpture
- Slim version of TrueType body with 38 points of articulation
- Approximately 30 cm tall
- One (1) pair of punches, five (5) additional right and two (2) extra  left interchangeable and posing palms
- Each piece of head sculpt is specially hand-painted

Costume:
- Two (2) sets of costumes (one (1) set for Bad version and one (1) set of upper outfit in Dirty Diana image)
- Bad costume:
+ Black jacket with buckles, zips and pouches as accessories
+ Black and white tees
+ Black pants with buckles and a red stripe on the left
+ Four (4) belts with buckles (three (3) in black and one (1) in brown)
+ One (1) pair of black shoes with buckles
+ Nine (9) pieces of black gloves with buckles (six (6) for right hands, three (3) for left hands) (right gloves with rivets added)
- Dirty Diana costume:
+ A set of white shirt and tee

Accessory:
- Square-shaped deluxe figure stand with LED lights with Michael Jackson nameplate and M ICON DX series title

Release date: Q2, 2010

Artists:
-  Head Sculpted by Lee So Young
-  Head Painted by JC. Hong
-  Head Art Directed by Yulli
-  Figure Costume Made by Namgung Mijin
-  Accessory Sculpted by Kouhei Okui

© 2010 Triumph International, Inc, under license to Bravado International Group, manufactured by Hot Toys Ltd.

To see additional details and photos of the doll click Here.

Source: mjfanclub.net

On a family outing for the first time since the LAPD began investigating that whole stun gun mess, Jackson family children (L-R) Paris, Blanket, Prince, Jaafar and Jermajesty all went to the movies in Los Angeles yesterday, reportedly to see “Alice in Wonderland.”

Source: TMZ.com

Armed LAPD officers swarmed around the Jackson Estate tonight on foot and in the air, but it turned out to be much ado about nothing — the perfect ending to a crazy week at the Encino home.

Around 9:00 PM PT, at least five officers entered through the front gate of the compound with shotguns drawn — while an LAPD chopper circled overhead. Cops tell us they were responding to a burglary in progress call.

But everything was fine once they got on the grounds. We’re told the emergency call — which came from outside the house — was a false alarm.

No word on exactly which Jacksons were home during the raid.

L.A. County Department of Children and Family Services investigators have been at the Jackson home all week over that whole stun gun thing with Jermaine’s son Jaafar.

Source: TMZ.com