Category: Magazines

Sarah Kozer to Appear in June Playboy
NEW YORK – The first time Playboy magazine came calling, Sarah Kozer from “Joe Millionaire” said no. The second time, she said no again.
But the third time — after receiving unanimous approval from her family and friends — she changed her mind. Now, the reality show runner-up is on the cover of the magazine’s June issue.
Kozer said she only agreed to pose for Playboy if the photos entailed no full-frontal nudity. “I was a women’s studies major,” she said Monday night at a party celebrating her appearance.
This isn’t the first time the 29-year-old has modeled; as the Fox romance series was airing, it was revealed that she’d appeared in bondage and fetish films to help pay the bills during law school.
“Joe Millionaire” star Evan Marriott chose Zora Andrich over Kozer, but the two since have split up. The women were among 20 who competed for Marriott’s affections under the belief that he was a millionaire, when he was actually a construction worker who made $19,000 a year.
Since the show’s February finale, Kozer has been finishing a novel and a cookbook — and coping with the chaos of her newfound fame.
Sipping champagne and surrounded by pals and publicists at a trendy lounge Monday night, Kozer said of the whirlwind, “I don’t like it, but I don’t mind it.”
“If this is the worst that life has to dish out for me,” she said, “I can’t really see any reason to complain.”

Dixie Chicks Pose Nude in Answer to Critics

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The three women of country music band the Dixie Chicks pose nude on the cover of a weekly showbiz magazine in a defiant answer to a backlash over their opposition to the war in Iraq.
Entertainment Weekly on Thursday released next week’s cover in which the Grammy-winning performers wear only contradictory slogans painted on their bodies, including “Traitors,” “Saddam’s Angels,” “Dixie Sluts,” and “Proud Americans.”
“We don’t want people to think that we are trying to be provocative. It’s not about the nakedness,” band member Martie Maguire said in an accompanying interview with the magazine. “It’s about clothes getting in the way of labels.”
Maguire and fellow musicians Emily Robison and Natalie Maines said they posed nude in response to the controversy created by pro-war advocates over Maines’ remark at a concert in London on March 10 that they were “ashamed” President Bush was from their home state of Texas.
Maguire told the magazine Maines also said in introducing the song “Travelin’ Soldier” in London that it was neither a pro-war nor a peace song. She said Maines’ bandmate Robison took the microphone immediately after the comment about Bush and said, “But you know we support the troops 100 percent.”
Within days of the comment being published, Maines apologized, but many U.S. country music radio stations all but banished Dixie Chicks hits from the airwaves, some fans smashed their CDs and sales plummeted. Trash was dumped outside Robison’s house.
DEATH THREATS
Maines said in a separate ABC TV “Primetime” interview to air on Thursday night that the band members feared for their lives amid criticism they say was “out of control.”
She told ABC’s Diane Sawyer she criticized Bush out of frustration and remained “passionate” in her anti-war views, even if she now regretted the remark. ABC released a transcript of the interview on Wednesday.
“At that moment, on the eve of war, I had a lot of questions that I felt were unanswered,” Maines told ABC. “I think the way I said it was disrespectful. The wording I used, the way I said it, that was disrespectful. I feel regret for, you know, the choice of words. Am I sorry that I asked questions and that I don’t just follow? No.”
Maines, who was interviewed with Maguire and Robison, said despite telling the London audience she was “ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas,” she did not feel that way.
“No, I’m not truly embarrassed that, you know, President Bush is from my state, that’s not really what I care about,” she said. “I felt like there was a lack of compassion every time I saw Bush talking about this. I honestly felt a lack of compassion for people that are questioning this (war), for the people that are about to die for this on both sides.”
Maguire said she understood why some fans would be upset by the remark but found much of the reaction to be disproportionate.

J.Lo voted top ‘celebrity monster’
Jennifer Lopez tops the list of “celebrity monsters,” according to a new U.S. magazine.
According to Radar magazine, to be a celebrity monster someone has to have, “distinguished themselves in the areas of physical and verbal abuse, overweening arrogance, and by the imposition of a particularly nasty influence over the culture at large.”
J.Lo is guilty of a “cynical bid for urban authenticity,” Radar says, citing reports when J.Lo returned to her native Bronx to film a video, her guards shoved excited kids out of her way– leaving one young fan in tears.
Radar also blasts filmmaker Michael Moore for acting like a working class man while owning a $1.27 US million apartment.

POWER PLAYERS
Steven Spielberg tops Premiere magazine’s annual power list. At number 13 Tom Hanks is the most powerful actor, while Julia Roberts is the most powerful actress at number 18.

Lisa Marie Presley Talks

Lisa Marie Presley really loved Michael Jackson – but now wonders whether he married her just to improve his public image.
Usually tight-lipped about her love life, Elvis Presley’s only child has finally found a reason to talk.
Her recording debut, “To Whom It May Concern,” will be out April 8, and the mysterious Presley is coming out, too, in the new Rolling Stone, on newsstands Friday.
“I did fall in love with him,” she told writer Chris Heath.
“I can’t tell you what his intentions were, but I can tell you I absolutely fell in love with him and fell into this whole thing which I’m not proud of now.”
During their two-year marriage, Presley, 35, says they had sex – “for a while.”
“And then it became ‘Def Con 2,’ ” she said. “It just got really ugly at the end.”
Jackson, 44, first tried to get in touch with her when she was a teen, but she “thought he was weird,” she says.
Fast forward a few years: Jackson sent word through a friend he wanted Presley to hear a demo record he made.
“He was very real with me off the bat,” she says. “He immediately went into this whole explanation of what he knew people thought of him and what the truth was.
“He was very real – he was cursing, he was funny. . .”
Presley continues, “I was always saying, ‘People wouldn’t think I was so crazy [for marrying Jackson] if they saw who the hell you really are; that you sit around and you drink and you curse and you’re f – – – ing funny, and you have a bad mouth and you don’t have that high voice all the time . . .”
They became friends; she was still married to her first husband, rocker Danny Keough (with whom she has two children, Danielle, 13, and Ben, 10). Jackson confided in her during a costly lawsuit and a police investigation of claims he sexually molested a 13-year-old boy.
“I got into this whole ‘I’m going to save you’ thing. I thought all that stuff he was doing – philanthropy and the children thing and all this stuff – was awesome . . . OK. Hello. I was delusionary. I got some romantic idea in my head I could save him and we could save the world.”
Jackson began courting her with candy and flowers, and she left her marriage to Keough “probably quicker than I would have, and that was probably one of the bigger mistakes of my whole life,” she says.
Remember that famous Jacko-Lisa lip-lock at the MTV Music Awards?
“It was his manager’s idea,” she said. “I thought it was stupid. All of a sudden, I became part of a p.r. machine.”
Still, she went on TV to defend him to Diane Sawyer.
“I was really in this lioness thing with him – I wanted to protect him. Naive as hell. I never thought for a moment someone like him could actually use me.”
His mind, she says, was “constantly at work, calculating, manipulating. And he scared me like that.”
Toward the end of their marriage, he would disappear for weeks at a time, she says.
The last straw came when he dissed Elvis in a TV Guide story. “He was quoting me: ” ‘Presley told me Elvis had a nose job,’ which is absolute bulls – – -. I read that and I threw it across the kitchen. ‘I told you what?’ ”
She demanded a divorce and plunged into depression.
“My body started to deteriorate. I started to have panic attacks.”
Finally, a homeopathic doctor told her to get her fillings removed, which cured her. “Mercury [in the fillings] can make you go f – – – ing crazy” she says.
She blames their volatile personalities on her short-lived marriage to Nicolas Cage.
Labeling him a “hothead,” Presley says ” . . . we’re both so dramatic and dynamic that when it was good, it was unbelievably good, and when it was bad, it was just a f – – – ing bloody nightmare for everybody. It was just Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.”
Even Presley shakes her head at her troubles with men.
“If you lined up all the men I’ve been with in a row, you’d think that I was completely psychotic,” she says.
Presley still visits Graceland, parts of which, she says, hasn’t changed at all.
“Upstairs, which has never been open to the public, is my room and his [Elvis’] room, next to each other, and an attic. It’s pretty creepy. It’s a shrine.”
As for her own new record, Presley at first says, “I don’t give a crap about hits,” then backtracks, saying, “I mean, I do, of course. But as long as people know it’s for real, it’s not BS, it’s me, my spirit, my heart, my head. You bare your ass for everybody and go, ‘What do you think?’ It’s scary, but it’s me.”

Magazine: Michael Jackson Put ‘Curse’ on Spielberg
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Embattled pop star Michael Jackson wears a prosthetic nose and once paid $150,000 for a “voodoo curse” to kill director Steven Spielberg despite being deep in debt, Vanity Fair magazine reported on Monday.
Vanity Fair, in an article for its March 11 edition, also reports that Jackson bleaches his skin white because he does not like being black. The 44-year-old singer sometimes refers to black people as “spabooks,” the magazine said
Jackson’s manager did not immediately return phone calls and a faxed request for comment on the article. Jackson’s London publicist could not be reached for comment.
The onetime King of Pop has been dogged by controversy for months, first over his odd appearance in a California courtroom last November. That same month, Jackson stunned fans in Berlin by briefly dangling his young son from a hotel balcony.
And in February a British television documentary that aired to blockbuster ratings both in England and the United States caused a stir when Jackson told his interviewer that he slept in the same room, and sometimes the same bed, as young boys.
Vanity Fair reported in the article that in 2000 Jackson attended a voodoo ritual in Switzerland where a witch doctor promised that Spielberg, music mogul David Geffen and 23 other people on the entertainer’s list of enemies would die.
Jackson, who underwent a “blood bath” as part of the ritual, then ordered his former business adviser Myung-Ho Lee to wire $150,000 to a bank in Mali for a voodoo chief named Baba, who sacrificed 42 cows for the ceremony, the magazine reported.
Vanity Fair reported that Jackson wears a page-boy wig and a prosthesis that serves as the tip of his nose. The magazine interviewed a source close to Jackson who said that, without the device Jackson resembles a mummy with two nostril holes.
According to the magazine, Jackson’s extravagant lifestyle and declining record sales have left him $240 million in debt.
The article, which relies in part on court filings in a $12 million lawsuit against Jackson by Lee, said that since the mid-1990s the reclusive entertainer has relied on a series of multimillion-dollar loans to cover his expenses.
In addition to the lawsuit by Lee, Jackson is also enmeshed in a $21 million court battle with German concert promoter Marcel Avram over canceled Millennium concerts and has been sued by Sotheby’s auction house for $1.6 million.
The magazine reported that Jackson must pay off the principal on a $200 million loan within a few years, which will be nearly impossible unless he sells his most valuable asset, the Beatles song catalog. He owns only half of the catalog while Sony Corp. owns the other half in an arrangement that might make selling his share difficult, Vanity Fair reported.
Jackson has also run up nearly $4 million per year in expenses from his Neverland Valley ranch in central California, where in April 2001 his amusement park equipment was nearly repossessed for late payments, the magazine said.

Playboy Is Looking For ‘The Women of Starbucks’
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Lattes aren’t the only steamy things at Starbucks these days. Much to the chagrin of Seattle-based Starbucks Corp., Playboy Magazine has issued an alert: “Calling all coffee-making cuties!” to pose nude for an upcoming issue featuring the “Women of Starbucks.”
With the application process already percolating, the chain of more than 6,200 coffee shops worldwide, is anything but thrilled with the cattle call by the adult magazine to its coffee-making employees, known as baristas.
The company on Thursday offered a frosty statement: “Starbucks Coffee Company is aware that Playboy Enterprises has issued a call for entries for a ‘Women of Starbucks’ section in a future magazine. Starbucks is not affiliated with this project and does not endorse it. All further inquiries should be directed to the contact at Playboy, Theresa Hennessey.”
Hennessey, at Playboy Enterprises Inc.’s Chicago headquarters, said the magazine was already getting a lot submissions for the issue. “Starbucks is such a big part of American pop culture, and Playboy is always trying to stay on top of the latest trend so it seemed like a natural fit, especially with all the beautiful women there,” she said.
Hennessey said that while Playboy had not approached Starbucks beforehand, it was sensitive to copyright and trademark issues.
FAIR USE, FAIR PLAY, FAIR PLAYBOY
“However we use or title the piece, we’ll be using it within the boundaries of fair use of trademark law. By saying ‘Women of Starbucks,’ that’s using it an a descriptive manner within the boundaries of fair use,” she said.
“If the girls want to submit their photos and want to do something in their off time, they should be able to do that.”
The application deadline is April 1 for a publication date likely before the end of 2003.
“The photo department will sift through the applications and will narrow it down and try to see who would be the best representatives to put in a pictorial. Typically we have about 10 to 15 women for a themed pictorial in an issue,” she said.
In recent years, Playboy has scored big with other corporate-themed pictorials such as “The Women of Enron,” as well as 7-Eleven.

Czech, please: It’s SI’s swimsuit cover girl
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Known affectionately as the “Czech Chick,” Petra Nemcova was named the 2003 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue cover girl Monday.

Putting a thaw on the East Coast blizzard, Czech supermodel Petra Nemcova was named the 2003 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue cover girl Monday.
Magazine editors were planning on surprising Nemcova at New York’s JFK airport with flowers and a camera crew.
Instead, “I’m stuck at the Atlanta airport because of the snow,” Nemcova, 23, said Monday after receiving the news in an uneventful phone call. “I’m supposed to do morning shows and a big party (Tuesday). How I’m going to get to New York, I just don’t know.”
Nemcova is the third Czech mate to make the SI cover, after Paulina Porizkova and Daniela Pestova. “Maybe it’s something in the water,” says Nemcova.
The first person she called was longtime boyfriend, Dutch model Donaes Platteel. “He was super happy for me,” says Nemcova, who speaks three languages.
Known affectionately as the “Czech Chick,” Nemcova hails from Karvina, a small mountain town northeast of Prague. “Some people love the ocean, but for me, it’s the forest.” The former fashion design student was discovered at a talent audition in her hometown. Now she travels the globe posing for Victoria’s Secret, Cartier and others.
“I am in the air more than I am on earth,” she says. Terrorism and war talk don’t scare her. “I’m not afraid to fly. I think when the heart is filled with love, there is no room for fear. So I try to fill my heart with love.”
The issue hits newsstands Wednesday.

National Geographic Reveals Swimsuit Issue

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – There are bare breasts, naked bottoms and a cover girl wearing three well-placed shells and a bit of sand, but this is no girlie magazine. It’s historical. It’s national. It’s cultural. And it’s definitely geographic.
It’s National Geographic.
The venerable yellow-bordered magazine, long a repository of gorgeous family-friendly photography, is publishing its first swimsuit issue, on newsstands and online Saturday.
Timed to roughly coincide with the publication of a racy annual look at bathing beauties by Sports Illustrated, the National Geographic issue is meant to offer lighthearted diversion when that seems to be in distinctly short supply.
“We just wanted to have a little fun, especially when it’s so cold in the winter,” said Bill Allen, National Geographic’s editor in chief. “And I think that this country could use a little bit of lightness and fun right now. We’ve had a pretty tough year and a half in this country.”
So as the United States girds for war and weathers a shaky economy, here comes Hanna Hobensack, a fashion design student in Sydney, Australia, who posed for the cover shot in Hawaii wearing three scallop shells and partially submerged in slightly sandy water.
The cover is one of the few pictures specifically shot for the special large-format edition, Allen said. Most are from the magazine’s archives, showing how people dressed for swimming over the last 100 years.
“We had looked at all of the pictures that were coming in for this out of the archives, literally tens of thousands … none of us were really satisfied that it was bringing things up to date,” Allen said in a telephone interview, explaining why they sought a new photo for the cover.
‘CLOTHING OPTIONAL’
He sent veteran National Geographic photographer Susan Leen to Hawaii “to find something that would really show what the contemporary feeling of bathing suits and the whole enjoyment of fun in a natural setting would be, sort of bring us all the way from our history back in the 1900s to the present.”
One of the earliest photographs is from 1900, showing a Red Cross swimming instructor demonstrating strokes while propped up on a stool, wearing the cover-up swimsuit of the day, with only her head and arms uncovered. When wet, such a costume would have weighed about 22 pounds (10 kg), the magazine said.
A pair of bare backsides from Cable Beach’s “clothing optional” zone at Broome, Australia, is a more modern archival image, from 1988. Two more posteriors were shown in a 1908 shot of surveyors near a rocky pool along the Canada-Alaska border.
A photo from 1917 showed two bare-breasted women from the Marquesas Islands, “where women dressed simply for the Polynesian weather — to the dismay of Western missionaries.”
This is the sort of partial nudity that made National Geographic a must-read, or at least a must-ogle, for generations of curious adolescents, but Allen said he saw no problem with this image or any other in the collection.
Readers may be surprised that the 112-year-old magazine is making a seeming departure from such sober-sided topics as the outcast Nuba of Sudan and the environmental consequences of global warming — two recent articles — but Allen said a history of swimsuits is in line with National Geographic’s mission.
“The whole issue is just a retrospective of how people have dressed to have fun in the water over the last century,” he said. “If you look through the magazine, you’ll see that there are people in all stages of dress and all kinds of bathing costumes, so it’s very much in keeping with the whole cultural history of the world, which is what National Geographic portrays.”
Sports Illustrated’s Rick McCabe said he had not seen the special issue but graciously observed, “As the pioneers of the swimsuit genre, we welcome National Geographic into the fold.”

Rolling Stone honours ‘The Simpsons’

Rolling Stone magazine is commemorating the 14th season of “The Simpsons” by featuring them on its cover.
The magazine is releasing three different versions that depict Homer and the gang on famous album covers.
One shows “The Simpsons” as The Beatles on the cover of “Abbey Road”, another features Homer as Bruce Springsteen on the cover of “Born in The U.S.A.”, and the third shows Bart as the baby on Nirvana’s “Nevermind” cover.
“Simpsons” creator Matt Groening designed all three covers.
Inside the magazine there are special features celebrating Springfield’s best rock ‘n’ roll moments and the family’s many brushes with famous rock stars.
Sunday’s new episode of “The Simpsons” features Homer going to rock ‘n’ roll fantasy camp.