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makeover-blog1 · 4 years

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Marilyn Manson -2-

NEW: I NOW CREATE MUSIC, JOIN ME ON SOUNDCLOUD!

SHOP: www.icanvas.com/canvas-art-prints/artist/ben-heine

This is a pointillist work I made with yellow, red blue and black ink on paper. I just love Marilyn Manson’s personality and crazy style! Everybody should have an aura…

Please, see my other portrait of Marilyn Manson _______________________________________________

For more information about my art: [email protected] _______________________________________________

Biography

Brian Hugh Warner (born January 5, 1969), better known by his stage name Marilyn Manson, is a professional musician. He is the lead singer of the industrial metal band that bears the same name. His stage name is formed from the names Marilyn Monroe and Charles Manson.

Brian Hugh Warner was born on January 5th 1969 in Canton, Ohio. He attended Heritage Christian School. After transferring to and later graduating from Canton’s GlenOak High School, Warner moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida with his family. While living in Fort Lauderdale, he studied journalism and theater at Broward Community College, and became the assistant entertainment editor of BCC’s student newspaper, the Observer.

Romance

Warner’s first serious relationship was with Melissa "Missi" Romero. As explained in his autobiography, during the production of "Antichrist Superstar," Missi became pregnant with Warner’s child, but had an abortion during her second trimester. He has also been linked to Traci Lords and Jenna Jameson. Jameson wrote about her sexual encounter with Manson in her autobiography, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale in which she noted him as being "massively endowed". Manson was engaged to Rose McGowan, but their relationship ended around the time he became involved with burlesque dancer and fetish model model Dita Von Teese. Manson photographed Von Teese for the December 2002 issue of Playboy. Manson and Von Teese wed in December 2005 in the Irish home of friend Gottfried Helnwein. Von Teese filed for divorce as of December 2006. The divorce came through in January 2007. In April of 2007, Marilyn Manson’s girlfriend, Evan Rachel Wood, admitted that they were actually a couple.

Marriage

Manson and Dita Von Teese started dating on Manson’s 32nd birthday, and Manson proposed three years later on March 22, 2004. On December 3, 2005 (court documents say November 28), the couple was married in a non-denominational ceremony at Gurteen Castle in Kilsheelan, County Tipperary, Ireland, the home of Gottfried Helnwein. The wedding was officiated by surrealist film director and comic book writer Alejandro Jodorowsky. Dita Von Teese wore a royal purple silk taffeta gown by Vivienne Westwood, complete with train and petticoats worn over a Mr. Pearl couture corset, topped off by a tricorne hat by Stephen Jones, while Manson wore a John Galliano black silk taffeta tuxedo with velvet trim and a hat also crafted by Stephen Jones. They reportedly exchanged vows in front of approximately 60 guests, including burlesque dancer Catherine Delish, Lisa Marie Presley, Eric Szmanda, David Lynch, Jessicka and Christian Hejnal, and Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne. Vogue magazine ran a multiple-page feature on the wedding in its February 2006 issue. Just before his own wedding, Manson criticized Britney Spears’ wedding to Kevin Federline, in which they celebrated by wearing personalized tracksuits: "If you’re going to do something like getting married, it should have a sense of celebration to it. It should be grand and not in tracksuits!"

As of January 30, 2007 Manson and Dita Von Teese reportedly split after her filing for divorce due to "irreconcilable differences" according to Von Teese. ET.com along with People Magazine has claimed that Manson was having an extramarital affair with actress Evan Rachel Wood, which may or may not be the true cause of the split. Manson’s alcohol abuse and distant behaviour have also been cited as cause for the split. It has also been claimed that Manson was not aware of Von Teese’s filing for divorce and moving out of their home at the time that the story was published, conceivably due to his reported stay in Paris, France. Von Teese reportedly took their two cats and two dachshunds, Greta and Eva, with her when she left. Manson fought for custody of the two cats, but only received one of them.

Evan Rachel Wood attended the grand opening of Manson’s new Celebritarian Corporation Gallery of Fine Art and among the most notable artworks were two portraits of Evan. She will also co-star in his upcoming horror film Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll.

In music

Jessicka of the band Jack Off Jill was an early friend of Manson’s, her band opened most of his South Florida shows. He not only produced most of the band’s early recordings but also played guitar on the song "My Cat" and helped name the band. Manson later wrote the liner notes for the band’s album Humid Teenage Mediocrity, a collection of early Jack Off Jill recordings.

In early 1993, after being instructed by his new label, Interscope Records, not to play any local shows, Manson formed Mrs. Scabtree. Mrs. Scabtree was a side project between he and newly hired Jeordie White. Manson played drums, while White (dressed as a black woman) shared vocal duties with then girlfriend Jessicka from Jack Off Jill who wore a blonde wig. Mrs. Scabtree only played two shows in South Florida.

Manson has helped or provided full scores for several major motion pictures, although several of his pieces have been cut, and his name dropped from the credits. Some of his more notable soundtrack score contributions include The Matrix, From Hell and Resident Evil.

Manson appeared as a guest on rapper DMX’s album Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood for the track "The Omen", produced by Swizz Beats, and has performed (with the rest of the band) on stage with Eminem as background music in the song "The Way I Am".

Manson sang vocals on "Break You Down" off of the Washington, DC-based industrial rock band gODHEAD’s 2000 Years of Human Error album. This album is distinguished for being the only one released on Manson’s vanity label Posthuman Records.

In film and television

Manson made a cameo appearance as a doctor in the Murderdolls’ music video "Dead in Hollywood", and also appears in the Nine Inch Nails music video "Starfuckers, Inc.", as well as "Gave Up", and Eminem’s "The Way I Am" music video.

His first appearance in a film was in the role of a pornographic actor in David Lynch’s Lost Highway, in 1997. He also had a minor role in former love interest Rose McGowan’s 1998 film Jawbreaker and a supporting role in 2003’s Party Monster, which is based on the events leading up to and the murder of Angel Melendez by the infamous Michael Alig of club kid fame, where Manson portrayed a psychotic drag queen named Christina . Manson made a cameo appearance in The Hire: Beat the Devil, a short film in the BMW films series (starring Clive Owen as the Driver), which featured James Brown as himself, and Gary Oldman as Satan. His most talked-about film cameo was in the Michael Moore political documentary Bowling for Columbine discussing the motivations of the perpetrators and allegations that his music was somehow a factor. He played himself, in animated form, on an episode of the television series Clone High, in which he sang a song about nutrition and the food pyramid. He is featured prominently throughout Not Another Teen Movie, and covered the song "Tainted Love" for its soundtrack.

His music is frequently featured on the show C.S.I.. The character on the show, Greg Sanders, is a big fan of Manson and the actor who plays him, Eric Szmanda, is a personal friend of Manson’s.

Manson was featured in the 2004 film The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, and was set to appear in Abelcain, directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Living Neon Dreams in 2005, although both of these projects are still unreleased as of 2007. He will also be seen as a bartender in an upcoming vampire movie starring Lucy Liu called Rise and possibly has pending roles in Abelcain, RISE and other projects.

Manson has produced 23 music videos, most of which have gone beyond the scope of a normal performance video and been well received by critics for their imagery and direction. Manson’s three most recent released videos – Personal Jesus, (s)AINT and Heart-Shaped Glasses – were voluntarily funded with his own money (to a sum of $1,500,000) and largely not that of the record company. Manson stated in June 2006 that he saw himself "as more a student of film than of music".

In July 2005, Manson told Rolling Stone that he was shifting his focus from music to filmmaking – "I just don’t think the world is worth putting music into right now. I no longer want to make art that other people–particularly record companies–are turning into a product. I just want to make art."

By 2006 Manson was working on his directorial debut, Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll, but has since put the project off until November 2007 to focus on recording Marilyn Manson’s sixth studio album, Eat Me, Drink Me, followed by a world tour. The film is said to feature special effects using a magician rather than computer-generated imagery.

In graphic art

From the beginning Manson has been a recreational painter, the oldest of his surviving pieces dating back to 1995-1996, but it was after his 1998 Grey period that Manson began his career as a watercolour painter. In 1999 he made five-minute concept pieces and sold them to drug dealers with their knowledge that they would accumulate in value over time. Gradually Manson became more drawn to watercolors as an art form in itself, and instead of trading them, kept them and continued to paint at a proficient rate.

This manic creativity resulted in an exhibit for his art, The Golden Age of Grotesque, held at the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions Centre on between September 13 and 14, 2002. The reaction to his paintings was largely positive with one critic comparing them to Egon Schele’s pieces and describing them as heartfelt and sincerely painted, and Art in America went as far as to liken them to the works of a " psychiatric patient given materials to use as therapy ". Others however saw less merit in the works stating that the value was in the celebrity.

Two years later almost to the day, during September 14 and 15, 2004, Manson held his second exhibit on the first night in Paris and the second in Berlin, Trismegistus, which was also the title of the center piece of the exhibit – a large three headed Christ painted onto an antique wood panel. Again the reception to the works could be described as mixed but was largely in favour of the artist.

Manson opened his own an art gallery, The Celebritarian Corporation Gallery of Fine Art, on October 31, 2006 in Los Angeles for which his third exhibition (by invitation or appointment only after the opening night) was the inaugural show. From April 2 until April 17, 2007 Manson’s recent works were be on show at the Space 39 Modern & Contemporary in Florida.

A coffee table art book is in the works, initially titled The Death of Art. The last given title was Quintif. It will be published by the makers of Flaunt magazine.

40 pieces from this show were ported to the Gallery Brigitte Schenk in Cologne, Germany to be publicly exhibited from June 28 until July 28, 2007. After this they will return to the Space39 Modern & Contemporary Gallery thus leaving Manson’s own gallery in Los Angeles temporarily without his own work until 2008.

The price of Manson’s works has been a somewhat controversial point for fans and critics alike, with most fans realistically unable to afford the paintings save for fine art editions and lithographs. Manson’s prices though are realistic and reasonable considering the long-term value at a time when prices for contemporary art have never been higher.

During his European tour 2007 Manson has exhibited his paintings in Germany, Russia and Switzerland.

In other areas

Manson provided the voice of the alien Edgar in the 2005 first-person shooter video game Area 51, which also featured David Duchovny. Marilyn Manson also appears (as himself) as a playable character in the video game Celebrity Deathmatch. Allegedly, the artist posed nude for photos prior to his rise to fame. The pictures appeared in the March 1999 issue of Honcho.

Professional fallouts

Trent Reznor

One of Manson’s high-profile relationships, the defunct friendship with Trent Reznor, has been marked with mutual bitterness and perhaps vendetta. This started in the mid-90s, when Manson was due to make a track that would appear on the soundtrack to David Lynch’s Lost Highway, but instead Reznor was the one who wrote a song, "The Perfect Drug", for the film. In 1999, it seemed the two artists had patched their differences, as Manson made an appearance in the video for the Nine Inch Nails song "Starfuckers, Inc."

In 2004, Reznor was asked whether he had plans to do any covers; he sarcastically replied, "I was really hoping to do something unique and pertinent – like do an exact copy of "Personal Jesus" – but it was already taken."

In a 2005 interview, Manson said Reznor’s Nothing Records had lost the master recordings of Manson’s first three albums. He implied it was Reznor’s intention, "Now that Nothing Records doesn’t exist, I think there’s only one of two people responsible for that. Out of those two people, there’s only one that really has an opinion of me that is voiced very often."

Twiggy Ramirez

In May 2002 Twiggy Ramirez left the band, citing differences in perspective on the future of the band. He went on to play bass for A Perfect Circle and Nine Inch Nails. During this time, Manson claimed in interviews that he and Ramirez were still close friends, while Ramirez maintained that he rarely spoke to Manson. In an interview in February of 2006 Twiggy stated he was willing to record an album with Marilyn Manson if the right conditions were met. In Autumn 2006, Manson and Ramirez were photographed together at numerous parties in Los Angeles, in amicable poses.

In January 2008 it was announced that Ramirez had reunited with the band as live bassist for the last leg of the Rape of the World tour as well as co-writer of the band’s seventh studio album. In an interview with The Heirophant on January 11, 2008, Manson revealed that the reconciliation with Ramirez was not as abrupt as it initially seemed, and that the two had been occasionally communicating with each other since speaking at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, California prior to the Winter European leg of the Rape of the World tour.

John 5

John 5’s reasons for leaving Marilyn Manson were cited as being mutual, despite the mysterious nature of his sudden firing by Manson’s manager in 2004.

John was quoted at the time as saying about the incident, "I don’t know. . . I was nothing but nice to him," he continued. "I never screwed up onstage — well not really badly — and I did everything I could to get along with him. Maybe, just maybe, it had something to do with the fact that I don’t drink or do drugs, and he’s not like that at all. Maybe he held that against me. I don’t know. He never said." John 5 was notorious among fans as being drug and alcohol free.

Before the incident, Manson had assaulted John on stage, notably, Manson kicked John in the face during a televised performance, leading to a brief confrontation in front of a packed and roaring audience (available on YouTube). This was during the intro to "The Beautiful People", when played at the Rock AM Ring 2003.

Also, during the tour John maintains that Manson spoke about matters other than business only once, "It was on my birthday, and he turned to me and said, "Happy birthday, faggot" — then walked away."

Despite this, John maintains he respects Manson, citing his skilled production style and his love for the band’s music. John was already a fan of the band before joining in 1998. In response to a question regarding the reason for the split with Manson, John 5 was quoted by Vintage Guitar Magazine as saying, "(laughs) At the end of the last tour, I decided I really wanted to do this solo thing and that I had to devote all my time to it. The split with Manson was totally amicable. It wasn’t one of those big breakups. We’re friends. I wish there was some good dirt, but there’s not (laughs)!"

In an interview prior to the January 19, 2008 performance in Orlando, Florida, Marilyn Manson revealed that John 5 would make a guest appearance during the show, stating: "I’ll have [John] come on stage and play songs with us this first show. It would practically be the Holy Wood lineup." This guest appearance ultimately did not take place, however.

Madonna Wayne Gacy

Before leaving the band nothing was heard of Madonna Wayne Gacy for over a year. In an exclusive conference conducted by Marilyn Manson in April 2007, he revealed the upcoming album Eat Me, Drink Me was recorded in collaboration between himself and Tim Skold. Essentially this meant Gacy did not partake in the album, but not ruling out the possibility of him performing as live keyboardist on the upcoming tour. Later, Manson revealed that Chris Vrenna (who previously drummed for the band during Ginger Fish’s hiatus in 2004) would be performing as live keyboardist on the tour, in Gacy’s place.

On August 2, 2007, Gacy filed a lawsuit against Marilyn Manson seeking a back pay of $20 million dollars. Gacy claimed Manson has been using the band’s money for personal interests, among which are his collection of Nazi paraphernalia, his drug addictions, his wedding with Dita Von Teese and the production of Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll.

On December 20, 2007, Manson countersued Gacy. As a reaction to the lawsuit Gacy filed against Manson in August, Manson claims, "keyboardist Stephen Bier did not carry out obligations to take part in master recordings [of Eat Me, Drink Me], concerts [of the Rape of the World tour] and the selling of band merchandise," according to this report which states that Manson is seeking unspecified general and special damages.

Insight

Even though he is known mostly for his music, which some refer to as crude and grotesque, Manson is a very intelligent and insightful man. In interviews he is always well spoken and is calm to the people who challenge him. Most people see his music as delivering the wrong message, but Manson states that his message was to be creative.

Causes

•In 2002, Manson worked with the Make-A-Wish Foundation to make the wish of a boy with a life-threatening disease come true. 16-year-old Andrew Baines from Tennessee had a wish to sing back-up vocals for a "big" band; Manson jumped on the task and took Baines under his wing to make his dream come true. Manson invited Baines to the studio on August 27, 2002, where he let Baines perform backing vocals for the then-upcoming album, The Golden Age of Grotesque. "Yesterday, I spent the afternoon with Andrew, who reminded me the things I create are only made complete by those who enjoy them. I just want to simply say, ‘thank you’ to Andrew for sharing such an important wish with me," Manson said, according MarilynManson.com.

•In 2005, Manson donated a signed collector’s edition mask to Music for Relief to help victims of the 2004’s Boxing Day Tsunami; this auction raised $155.

•In January 2006, Manson contributed a hand-painted guitar from the Six-String Masterpieces – The Dimebag Darrell Art Tribute to the Little Kids Rock auction. For every $100 raised by the product, Little Kids Rock would provide one low-income child with an instrument and lessons – Manson’s guitar raised $6,250.

•In 2006, Manson became a benefactor of Project Nightlight, an LA area foundation that uses short films, music, and apparel to grab teenagers attention and inspire them to speak out against sexual and physical abuse. Manson afforded Project Nightlight a stand at the opening of his art gallery, and in April 2007 gave the charity a print of his painting Eve of Destruction and a framed collector’s edition mask.

Legal history

Marilyn Manson was first arrested in Florida on December 27, 1994 after a concert at Jacksonville’s Club 5 for "violating the adult entertainment code." Manson was detained for 16 hours before been released without charge. Bizarrely police believed Manson had performed oral sex on stage with a man (when in fact it was Jack Off Jill vocalist Jessicka wearing a fake penis) and thrown either his or the man’s penis into the crowd. On February 5, 2001 in Marino, Italy Manson suffered what is to date his only other post-concert arrest when he was accused of blasphemy having worn the outfit of a cardinal on stage during the song "Valentine’s Day". Soon after the detention it was ascertained that Manson had not committed a crime and it appeared the legal troubles were over until the next day when Manson was arrested in Bologne on charges of public indecency relating to a 1999 show where it was alleged Manson had exposed his penis. Manson was released and the charges dropped, notably the arrests came a week after two teenagers brutally murdered an Italian nun which some less reputable sections of the Italian press blamed on Manson’s music.

Sexual misconduct

In a civil battery suit, David Diaz, a security officer from a concert in Minneapolis, Minnesota on October 27, 2000, sued for $75,000 in a Minneapolis federal court. After two days deliberation the jury decided that Manson’s alleged molestation had been part of the show and that he had not overstepped his boundaries as an artist, ruling in favor of Manson and against Diaz.

Manson was charged with "sexual misconduct" on August 16, 2001 after Joshua Keasler filed a complaint that as he was providing security for a July 30 concert Manson had allegedly spat on his head, wrapped his legs around him and began to gyrate his penis along his neck.

Oakland County prosecutor David Gorcyca said that "It was offensive, crude and rude. This was not something that was orchestrated or choreographed as part of the act. The security guard was an unknowing and unwilling participant and, ironically, while he was there for protection… was sexually assaulted." The charge, punishable with up to two years imprisonment, was accompanied with a charge of disorderly conduct. The complaint came with an arrest warrant but Manson thwarted this by posting a $25,000 personal bond. In a one-day December 28, 2001 trial the presiding Judge dismissed the charge of "sexual misconduct" as Manson had in his view "gained no sexual gratification from the act." Manson pleaded "no contest" to the outstanding lesser charge, which carried only up to three months imprisonment, and was ordered to pay $4,000 in fines. After the trial Keasler pursued a civil lawsuit against Manson that was dropped when the two settled out of court in February 2004.

Lawsuits

•In 1997, former Marilyn Manson guitarist Scott Mitchell Putesky filed a lawsuit against Manson seeking unpaid royalties for his contributions to the band’s output up to that period, including the band’s recently released second studio album Antichrist Superstar. The case was concluded in 1998, although the outcome was confidential.

•On January 4, 1999, SPIN editor Craig Marks filed an assault and battery lawsuit against Manson in the New York Supreme Court. Marks alleged that Manson, upset at not making the cover of SPIN, the lawsuit specifically alleged Manson had yelled "I can kill you, I can kill your family, I can kill everyone you know!" before two of Manson’s bodyguards were said to have charged him and held him against the wall and threw him to the floor after which it was alleged Manson had said, "That’s what you get when you disrespect me." The case was dropped when, weeks later, Marks was fired from SPIN over financial irregularities.

•On April 2, 2002, Maria St. John filed a wrongful death lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court accusing Manson of providing her adult daughter, Jennifer Syme, with cocaine and allowing her to drive while under the influence. The case was settled out of court.

•On August 2, 2007, former Marilyn Manson keyboardist Stephen Bier filed a breech of contract lawsuit against Marilyn Manson seeking $20,000,000 in damages. Bier claimed Manson has used the band’s money for personal interests, among which are his collection of Nazi paraphernalia, addictions to cocaine and Valium, his $300,000 wedding with and $150,000 engagement ring given to Dita Von Teese and the production of Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll as well as Lewis Carroll memorabilia, human skeletons and taxidermy. Manson’s lawyers responded in January 2008 with a 101-page rebuttal of the claims, the case will be tried by jury in November 2008 in the Los Angeles Superior Court.

Major label discography

•Portrait of an American Family (1994) •Smells Like Children (1995) •Antichrist Superstar (1996) •Remix and Repent (1997) •Mechanical Animals (1998) •The Last Tour on Earth (Live) (1999) •Holy Wood (In the Shadow of the Valley of Death) (2000) •The Golden Age of Grotesque (2003) •Lest We Forget (The Best Of) (2004) •Eat Me, Drink Me (2007)

Filmography

•Lost Highway (cameo, 1997) •MTV Video Music Awards (commercial, 1998) •Jawbreaker (cameo, 1999) •Clone High (cameo, 2000) •From Hell (score, 2001) •Not Another Teen Movie (score, 2001) •Resident Evil (score, 2002) •Bowling for Columbine (interview, 2002) •The Hire: Beat the Devil (cameo, 2003) •Party Monster (2003) •Doppelherz (director, 2003) •The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things (cameo, 2004) •House of Wax (2005) (acting, score) •Abelcain (2007) •Living Neon Dreams (2007) •Rise (cameo, 2007) •Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll (acting, directing, writing, score, 2008)

Bibliography

•The Long Hard Road out of Hell (1998) •Holy Wood (Unreleased)

Trivia

•All Manson’s tattoos were done at Tattoos By Lou in Miami, Florida over a four-year span starting in 1991, until a new tattoo emerged in early-2007.

•In the 1990s, an Internet rumor spread stating Josh Saviano (who played Paul Pfeiffer in 1980s drama The Wonder Years) grew up to become Marilyn Manson. As of 2007, Josh Saviano is a licensed attorney in New York. He has, however, commented on the rumor, and thinks it is neat people believe him to be in a "goth band".

•Contrary to what some may deem "common knowledge", Manson has not had any ribs removed for the purpose of autofellatio. "If I really got my ribs removed," he said in the The Long Hard Road out of Hell autobiography, "I would have been busy sucking my own dick on The Wonder Years instead of chasing Winnie Cooper."

•In an E! interview, Manson revealed that he owns a Nintendo DS. "My friend got me this little Japanese lawyer game; it’s fucking amazing," he said in reference to Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. He also mentioned that he was "pretty good at Mario Kart".

•In an interview with MTV in 2002 Manson revealed that for most of his paintings he uses a children’s Alice in Wonderland tin. He also uses a 1920’s mortician paint kit originally used for retouching cadavers.

•Manson has Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, an erratic, rapid heartbeat.

•Manson, who cites David Bowie as being his biggest influence, claims his favorite songs by him are "Quicksand", "Ashes to Ashes", and "We Are the Dead". He even proposed to his ex-wife, Dita Von Teese, during a David Bowie concert (at the time Bowie was performing "Be My Wife") .

•Pets Manson has had in his life include the childhood dog, an Alaskan malamute named Aleusha, an orange tabby named O.J. which he found on the steps of Christian school, four Devon Rex cats named Aleister, Edgar, Herman, and Lily, and two dachshunds named Greta and Eva. After the divorce of Manson and ex-wife Dita Von Teese, Von Teese won the custody of both dachshunds and Aleister. For Manson’s 39th birthday on January 5th, 2008, girlfriend Evan Rachel Wood gave him a new cat, Charlie (Manson), as a birthday gift.

•When asked in 2007 by Rolling Stone what his current favorite playlist was, Manson chose among Radiohead’s "Exit Music (For a Film)", Amy Winehouse’s "Rehab" and David Bowie’s classic "We Are the Dead".

OFFICIAL WEBSITE : marilynmanson.com MARILYN MANSON on MYSPACE : www.myspace.com/marilynmanson

———————

–> This biography appeared on www.mansonwiki.com/ (Manson Wiki)

Posted by Ben Heine on 2008-05-09 23:47:25

Tagged: , Marilyn Manson , Brian Hugh Warner , USA , American , crazyness , mickey mouse , hat , fun , outrageous , make up , image , graphic artist , watercolor , singer , child , logo , band , rock , punk , Charles Manson , Marilyn Monroe , ink , black , Metal music , Grammy Award , musique , Mobscene , Mansinthe , industrial metal band , shocking , post modernity , badge , smart , tie , bretelle , lipstick , man , provocative , traditional art , ben heine , pointillism , black ink , painting , Disney , Antichrist , Antechrist , full biography , scary , fearless , androgyn , [email protected] , print , copyrights , art , poster , wallpaper , contemporary art , Resident , Evil , fine art , expo , mixed styles , aquarelle , flickr united , anti-conformism , anti-capitalism , dark , romance , provocation , plume , pen nib , paper , music , Beat the Devil , bowling for columbine

The post Marilyn Manson -2- appeared first on Good Info.

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luckygirl-blog1 · 4 years

Text

Marilyn Manson -1-

NEW: I NOW CREATE MUSIC, JOIN ME ON SOUNDCLOUD!

SHOP: www.icanvas.com/canvas-art-prints/artist/ben-heine

This is a pointillist work I made with blue, red and black ink on paper. I just love Marilyn Manson’s personality and crazy style! Everybody should have an aura…

Please, see my other portrait of Marilyn Manson _______________________________________________

For more information about my art: [email protected] _______________________________________________

Biography

Romance

Marriage

In music

In film and television

His music is frequently featured on the show C.S.I.. The character on the show, Greg Sanders, is a big fan of Manson and the actor who plays him, Eric Szmanda, is a personal friend of Manson’s.

In graphic art

A coffee table art book is in the works, initially titled The Death of Art. The last given title was Quintif. It will be published by the makers of Flaunt magazine.

During his European tour 2007 Manson has exhibited his paintings in Germany, Russia and Switzerland.

In other areas

Professional fallouts

Trent Reznor

Twiggy Ramirez

John 5

John 5’s reasons for leaving Marilyn Manson were cited as being mutual, despite the mysterious nature of his sudden firing by Manson’s manager in 2004.

Madonna Wayne Gacy

Insight

Causes

•In 2005, Manson donated a signed collector’s edition mask to Music for Relief to help victims of the 2004’s Boxing Day Tsunami; this auction raised $155.

Legal history

Sexual misconduct

Lawsuits

Major label discography

Filmography

Bibliography

•The Long Hard Road out of Hell (1998) •Holy Wood (Unreleased)

Trivia

•All Manson’s tattoos were done at Tattoos By Lou in Miami, Florida over a four-year span starting in 1991, until a new tattoo emerged in early-2007.

•Manson has Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, an erratic, rapid heartbeat.

OFFICIAL WEBSITE : marilynmanson.com MARILYN MANSON on MYSPACE : www.myspace.com/marilynmanson

———————

–> This biography appeared on www.mansonwiki.com/ (Manson Wiki)

Posted by Ben Heine on 2008-05-09 23:39:26

Tagged: , Marilyn Manson , Brian Hugh Warner , USA , American , crazyness , cry , shout , balls , outrageous , image , artist , watercolor , singer , child , logo , band , rock , punk , Charles Manson , Marilyn Monroe , ink , black , dots , Metal music , Grammy Award , musique , Mobscene , Mansinthe , chanteur , musicien , make-up , lipstick , facial expression , arrow , sick , shocking , oh , ben heine , madness , painting , watercolour , powerful , violent , teethn mouth , anti-capitalism , anti-conformism , unusual , pointillism , black ink , Disney , Antichrist , Antechrist , full biography , scary , fearless , androgyn , [email protected] , print , copyrights , art , poster , wallpaper , contemporary art , Resident , Evil , fine art , expo , mixed styles , aquarelle , dark , romance , provocation , plume , pen nib , paper

The post Marilyn Manson -1- appeared first on Good Info.

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kidsviral-blog · 6 years

Text

The Hunter, The Hoaxer, And The Battle Over Bigfoot

New Post has been published on https://kidsviral.info/the-hunter-the-hoaxer-and-the-battle-over-bigfoot/

The Hunter, The Hoaxer, And The Battle Over Bigfoot

Jeffrey Meldrum is a respected anthropologist risking his reputation to prove Sasquatch is real; Rick Dyer is a self-described “entertainer” unapologetically capitalizing off it. Their rivalry represents two sides of the fractious but booming subculture.

View this image ›

Illustration by Morgan Schweitzer for BuzzFeed

It’s a sweaty July day, and Rick Dyer is in his tank-like Toyota, barreling down a highway just south of Atlanta. It’s a comically oversize SUV, with a rack of roof lights and an exterior wrapped in flat-black vinyl. If Batman drove a Jeep, it would look like this.

Somewhere near the turnoff for a Christmas tree farm, Dyer abruptly turns into a sloping grassy median, then into a field of knee-high weeds beyond the road, then down a narrow dirt trail, where, after rumbling over an impressive heap of felled trees, we arrive at a small clearing just on the other side of a trailer park. Dyer, 37, is wearing a red T-shirt, red gym shorts, and a camouflage hat embroidered with a Bigfoot logo. His neatly trimmed beard frames a mischievous grin. “Let’s go do a Bigfoot investigation,” he says.

Moments later, we’re parked beside a trailer where a couple of boys are milling around a rusty grill. “Are you the one who called about Bigfoot?” Dyer asks. The pair looks confused. Soon, there’s a small gathering and Dyer explains that someone from a nearby trailer said that a Bigfoot attacked his car. “I went up there and checked it out, and his door from his car is ripped off,” Dyer says matter-of-factly. Someone asks what kind of car it was, and Dyer provides a make and model, and says a tow truck is on its way. If they see anything, Dyer tells them, please contact him through his website.

“What are you going to do if you find it?” a man in a basketball jersey and sunglasses asks.

“Well, I’ve already killed one,” Dyer says.

The boys look on in amazement as Dyer offers his bona fides. Look him up on Google, he says. They’ll read the accounts of how he bagged a Bigfoot. They’ll see the photos. Then, the boys scuttle away in search of the car with a missing door.

It’s an odd thing to witness such instinctive slipperiness. But Dyer is untroubled. To him, lying about one of the world’s most enduring wilderness mysteries is no different than a pro wrestler getting in the ring. “I’m an entertainer,” he likes to say. Or: “You can choose to believe my story or not.”

It’s been more than a half-century since a Northern California newspaper printed the headline that made “Bigfoot” a household name. In the decades since, no definitive proof of the large, ape-like creature that people also call Sasquatch (from Canada), Yeti (from the Himalayas), or Skunk Ape (from Florida) has surfaced. But the eyewitness accounts, the indistinct photos, the brief, blurry videos, the footprints — they’re as persistent as ever.

There are news stories about the latest sightings and YouTube clips purporting to show them. There are successful television series like Spike TV’s 10 Million Dollar Bigfoot Bounty, which premiered earlier this year, and Animal Planet’s Finding Bigfoot, now in its fifth season; on the channel’s website, there is a “Bigfoot Cam,” where “the search for Sasquatch goes 24/7.” There are countless groups and clubs and museums with names like North American Wood Ape Conservancy and Bigfoot Discovery Project. There are self-styled, expedition-leading Sasquatch “hunters” and online radio talk shows and origin theory-peddling experts.

Against this backdrop, Dyer’s anything-goes hustle means business. He markets himself as a “master tracker” after all, a label that is prominently attached to the short-sleeve camouflage button-up he wears.

As we get in the Toyota, Dyer delivers a full-throated roar. “They’re going to be talking about that for weeks and weeks and weeks,” he says. And yet, this off-road adventure is nothing compared to Dyer’s big hoaxes.

Over the last 50 years, allegations of devious men using wooden feet and fur suits have cast a long shadow over the Bigfoot phenomenon. But Dyer’s dark talents are rare. He’s an admitted serial hoaxer with a chameleon-like ability to cultivate a new persona for each gambit, from bumbling neophyte to Sasquatch evangelist to P.T. Barnum-like showman. “In the annals of Bigfoot hoaxers, he’s earned himself a place in the hall of fame,” says Benjamin Radford, the deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer and author of Hoaxes, Myths and Mayhem.

As Dyer has become a wily villain in the Sasquatch scene, he has drawn outsize media attention, swarms of paying customers and fans, and loathing from the many people who consider Bigfoot a living creature. After a hoax earlier this year, a petition was posted on Change.org demanding that he be charged criminally (he has not been). Loren Coleman, the cryptozoologist and author of Bigfoot! The True Story of Apes in America, describes Dyer as a “disgusting phenomenon” who just won’t go away.

For this second variety of Bigfooter, the search for Sasquatch is a serious endeavor. They are modern-day explorers, amateur investigators, and even academically credentialed researchers who have sought to not only bring science to Bigfoot, but Bigfoot to science. While no bones, body, or DNA have been discovered, they argue that there is considerable circumstantial evidence that Bigfoot is real.

For these dedicated few, Rick Dyer is more than an entertainer — he’s a danger to a field of study that already has credibility issues. That they all toil under the same big tent is one of the great oddities of a subculture that is as crowded and fractious as ever, one that can seem like an amalgam of a cult and an earnest explorers club, with competing camps of believers and skeptics, hoaxers and hunters, self-appointed experts and serious-minded scientists, all seeking to advance, in their own peculiar way, the mystery of Sasquatch.

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Photograph by Tim Stelloh for BuzzFeed

Jeffrey Meldrum’s office is on the second floor of a plain redbrick building in Pocatello, a college town in southern Idaho. It’s cluttered with books about anatomy and biomechanics, evolution and mammalogy. There are plastic skulls and wooden skulls, framed images of the surreal-looking red-faced uakari, and a silverback gorilla, his arms aimed piercingly straight into the ground.

Then, there is the Bigfoot stuff: hundreds of plaster foot casts believed to be Sasquatch, sitting on the floor, scattered on a work table, crammed into shelves. There are cartoons and tiny statues, books and envelopes labeled “hair.” Meldrum, 56, with a white beard, is wearing a black T-shirt with a pair of green eyes that stare back at me. “Sasquatch as seen through night-vision goggles,” he explains.

Against the far wall is a life-size image of the most well-known Bigfoot of the modern era: “Patty,” a nickname derived from the man who filmed her, an out-of-work cowboy named Roger Patterson. In a few dozen shaky seconds in 1967, Patterson captured her on film in the remote woods of Northern California striding along a creek bank. The footage, which he shot with the help of a rancher named Bob Gimlin, has remained an obsession, endlessly watched, dissected, debated.

An anthropologist at Idaho State University whose work on Bigfoot garnered a rare, significant endorsement from famed primatologist Jane Goodall, Meldrum specializes in the evolution of primate movement — he’s sometimes called “the foot doctor.” His scientific pursuit of Bigfoot began in the late 1990s with a brief question: “Is there a biological species behind the legend?” In the years since, Meldrum has analyzed hundreds of footprints, examined reams of supposed hair, and developed a working hypothesis. He’s trekked across dozens of miles of Western wilderness, where he says he’s had his own Bigfoot encounters, and in 2006, he published Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science. In addition to Goodall’s praise, the book won support from the pioneering field biologist George Schaller, who wrote that Meldrum “disentangles fact from anecdote, supposition, and wishful thinking” and has “done more for this field of investigation than all the past arguments and polemics of contesting experts.”

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Jeffrey Meldrum with a plaster foot cast in his Idaho office. Photograph by Tim Stelloh for BuzzFeed

The year after Meldrum’s book was published, he developed a scientific name and set of characteristics for the creature’s mythically massive footprint; it is, he says, one of the few peer-reviewed papers supporting the existence of Sasquatch to appear in mainstream academic literature. A few years later, he founded a peer-reviewed journal that publishes Bigfoot research. Among his current collaborations is a project that would use a drone to fly over suspected Sasquatch habitat in the United States and possibly Canada.

Meldrum’s research has made him a lonely figure in academia and an unlikely public face on this side of the Sasquatch phenomenon. He’s become The Bigfoot Guy — the level-headed, go-to scientific authority for conference organizers, countless documentary filmmakers, and on-deadline reporters who may not know the first thing about Bigfoot but are calling to ask about someone named Rick Dyer who claims to have killed one. The two know of each other, and they’re not friendly.

When Meldrum was a kid living in Washington State in the 1960s, his father, a grocery store manager at Albertson’s, took him to see the documentary that featured Patty. He was taken with snakes, insects, dinosaurs — anything natural history-related — so it didn’t take much to get him to the Spokane Coliseum, where it was showing. Meldrum sat transfixed as Patty’s slow-motion image meandered across the screen. “The notion that there might be a caveman stomping around out there was fascinating to me,” he recalls. For him, there were no questions of authenticity. “It was like, ‘Here it is. Wow.’ It was a mystery to be explored.”

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“Patty.” Still from Patterson Bigfoot sighting footage

At the time, Bigfoot was just beginning to lurch into the American imagination. Meldrum had no idea about the footprints found a decade before that produced the Bigfoot moniker. Nor did he know that for the Hoopa in California, for the Anasazi in the Southwest, and for many more, stories of wild, hairy men in the woods had been told for generations. The term “Sasquatch,” after all, was derived from the Salish tribes of British Columbia.

In 1993, Meldrum got a call from the prominent cryptozoologist Richard Greenwell. A television production crew in Northern California had been filming b-roll when they picked up what looked like a Sasquatch; when the crew wanted some expert opinion, they called Greenwell, who wondered if Meldrum wanted to tag along. Meldrum didn’t think much of Bigfoot anymore, but he wasn’t a strange choice: For years, theories had been floated that perhaps the Yeti was related to a giant ape that once lived alongside prehistoric humans. The creature was believed to have gone extinct, but perhaps it survived “in refuge areas,” as the primatologist John Napier suggested in 1973. Who better to examine the evidence than a primate expert?

Meldrum was skeptical, but he agreed. “I thought it would be an easy exercise in exposing the zipper,” he says. “Instead, I kept finding these different things that were quite compelling.” It was grainy video, and it was night, but he could see how its foot bent when it walked. He could see how the hair hung down from its arms, like an orangutan. They were able to determine its height too: more than 8 feet tall.

Then, after visiting the late Grover Krantz, the eccentric Washington State University anthropologist who was among the few academics to conclude that Sasquatch existed, Meldrum got out into the field. For the first time, he examined what were purported to be fresh tracks. They were 14 inches; there were a few dozen of them, pressed into the muddy foothills outside Walla Walla in eastern Washington, on the shoulder of a restricted-access farm road. When Meldrum bent down, he was astonished. He could see the telltale traces of a living foot, a foot where dozens of bones and joints appeared to be interacting with the ground beneath it. “I could see tension cracks, push-off ridges,” he recalls. “I could see toe slippage, dragging.”

This was not what happened when a blocky piece of wood was stamped in the mud, Meldrum thought. If it were a hoax, it would have been executed by someone who understood the subtleties of foot anatomy.

“As I sat there kneeling beside these tracks, I said, ‘Is this a path you’re willing to go down? Are you willing to preoccupy a portion of your attention, your career to this question, at the risk of jeopardizing your credibility?’ I’m looking at these tracks and I’m thinking, How could I not?”

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Photo by Tim Stelloh for BuzzFeed

Rick Dyer and I are driving around an affluent black suburb of Atlanta, a neighborhood of large lots, elegant brick homes, and golf course lawns. In a driveway, he sees what he’s looking for: a black luxury SUV with low mileage and a low asking price. Dyer, who’s wearing his camouflage Bigfoot hat and matching “master tracker” button-up, is looking to flip it — this is his day job — and he’s sized up the seller immediately. “The oil is full but he doesn’t know what a jumper cable is,” he says. “What you’re looking at is the perfect person to buy a car from.”

After a quick drive around the block, Dyer tells the seller that the transmission is shot. It needs a rebuild, and thus, the $2,000 price tag just doesn’t make sense. The two men haggle for a moment, and eventually settle on $1,400.

Afterward, I ask Dyer what he’ll make reselling it.

“$5,500,” he replies.

“Does that include what you’ll pay for a new transmission?”

“It doesn’t need one,” Dyer says, chuckling. “But it does need some transmission work.”

It can be difficult to untangle basic details about a man who lies for a living and seems to have no connection to his past. I ask, for instance, if he’ll put me in touch with his sister, and, in a text, he says there’s zero chance she’ll talk to me. I ask who his oldest friend is, and he connects me with a chicken farmer in Virginia named Jackie Pridemore. Pridemore tells me that the two met a couple of years ago, after he wrote a rap song about Dyer’s Bigfoot exploits. Dyer says his mother is a country music songwriter, but he can’t tell me who she is because the “haters” in the Bigfoot scene will go on the attack. His car has been vandalized, he says, and a variety of pranks have been orchestrated against him and his clique of Bigfoot friends.

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Dyer’s peculiar enterprise seems driven in part by money — he claims to have earned hundreds of thousands of dollars — though as Loren Coleman explains, there just isn’t that much to be made from Bigfoot hoaxing. (“It’s not like a stock market scheme,” he says.) Attention seems to be Dyer’s motivating force, and he is relentlessly on-message: The Bigfoot scene is filled with self-serious crybabies, and Rick Dyer might be a hoaxer, but he only hoaxes because, like Santa, Bigfoot brings joy to people. And really, you should listen to Rick Dyer because Rick Dyer is the only person to have ever killed a real live Bigfoot.

Dyer embraces the confusion. “I want people to write that I’m very deceptive, that I dance around stuff,” he says. “I want people to write all kinds of shit. I want people to write that I don’t have a body, so that when that time comes and I do, then it’ll make the people who said I didn’t look like idiots.”

Unlike Meldrum, Dyer was never a Bigfoot-phile. When he was a boy with a stutter growing up in Stockbridge and attending Christian school, he had never seen the Patterson-Gimlin film, as the grainy Patty footage came to be known, or heard of the persistent rumors surrounding it — that the fur suit had been created by the Hollywood makeup artist behind the original Planet of the Apes franchise, for instance. Nor had Dyer heard of Ivan Marx, the alleged hoaxer behind the 1976 film The Legend of Bigfoot, or of one of the other (alleged) classics: that the original “Bigfoot” prints from Humboldt County, California, came from a pair of carved wooden feet owned by a man named Ray Wallace.

Mainly, Dyer says, his interests, after a stint in the Army, were traveling — he went to Thailand, to Mexico, to Japan — and women; with three, he has seven children. But in March 2008, not long after he quit his job as a corrections officer at a state prison, Dyer’s first hoax was born. It happened while he and a friend, a police officer named Matthew Whitton, were hiking in Tennessee. It wasn’t exactly inspired. “I said, ‘Hey man, I saw Bigfoot,’” Dyer says he told Whitton. “He said, ‘Me too.’ We didn’t. I said, ‘Let’s do a Bigfoot hoax.’ He’s like, ‘OK.’”

They built a cheap website and started a YouTube page, where he and Whitton posted videos and advertised expeditions and gear. They were “the best Bigfoot trackers in the world,” they claimed and, as Dyer put it in one video, “they had some very compelling evidence” that would “change everything you knew about Bigfoot.”

“We thought we’d get a couple of hundred views,” Dyer says. “But it took off.”

After appearing on a Bigfoot radio show, Dyer and Whitton were in touch with a man named Tom Biscardi. Biscardi is a brash, self-described “real” Bigfoot hunter who is from Brooklyn, but now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is also an accused hoaxer and the proprietor and “team leader” of the California-based Searching for Bigfoot Inc., which investigates sightings, and, through its website, sells all manner of Bigfoot paraphernalia. In Dyer’s telling, Biscardi told him that he knew they didn’t have a body. “But we can make a lot of money,” Dyer recalls him saying. In Biscardi’s version, Dyer’s the con man. “He’s a motherfucker,” Biscardi says.

“DO YOU KNOW HOW HARD IT IS TO FIND GOAT BALLS?”

Dyer and Whitton set about building a fake body; the plan was to present a staged, video-recorded autopsy in the tradition of the famously hoaxed alien autopsy film of the 1990s, Dyer says. He spent a few hundred dollars on a rubber costume, and filled it with a macabre mix of animal bones and innards: There were pig intestines. There was a cow jaw. For the genitalia, they went to a slaughterhouse. “Do you know how hard it is to find goat balls?” Dyer says. The body was placed in a deep freezer, which was slowly filled with water, then switched on. For an accompanying DNA analysis, Dyer found an opossum on the side of the road. He carved off a sliver and bled on it; the hope, he says, was to have the analysis come back as human.

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Tom Biscardi displays one of the photographs given to reporters during a press conference on August 15, 2008 in Palto Alto, Calif. AFP / Getty Images IAN SHERR

In Dyer’s telling, Biscardi liked what he saw, and agreed to pay $50,000 for the finished product; Biscardi says that he never actually saw the body. “They gave me a piece of intestine,” he recalls. In the parking lot of a redbrick county courthouse in suburban Atlanta, Dyer and Whitton were given $50,000 in cash, and the freezer was loaded into a U-Haul and driven to an out-of-state “safe house.” Then, the pair flew to California, where Biscardi scheduled a news conference for noon on Friday, Aug. 15, 2008, at the Cabaña Hotel in Palo Alto. In a press release, Biscardi offered a few tantalizing details: Dyer and Whitton found the creature in the woods of north Georgia. It weighed more than 500 pounds. DNA tests were being conducted and the results would be presented at the news conference.

This last detail, says the author Benjamin Radford, was key to selling the hoax: No one had ever dangled a promise of that modern scientific marvel, DNA, before an audience desperate for direct evidence. An onslaught of media attention followed. Most was dubious, but there was plenty of it. Stories appeared not just in the local media, but in Scientific American and the New York Times, on CNN and NBC. “It was pretty fucking intense,” Dyer says.

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Illustration by Morgan Schweitzer for BuzzFeed

It’s a cold, damp summer night deep in the Wyoming wilderness, and a night vision scope is pressed to my right eye. In the distance, the flickering black-and-green tree line looks like an ’80s-era computer screen. Beside me, Meldrum’s research partner, the wiry wildlife biologist John Mionczysnki, is sitting on a small canvas stool, accordion in hand, playing a lullaby-like Scottish folk tune, which he swears is a soothing animal lure. Periodically, he trades his squeezebox for a portable floodlight and scans the foliage. In front of us, Meldrum is stretched out on a sleeping bag, peering through binoculars into the inverted darkness.

We’re here in this boggy, bug-infested section of Wyoming because there have been Sasquatch stories dating back more than a century — everything from visual eyewitness accounts to elk hunters reporting what’s been described as Bigfoot behavior: something lobbing rocks in their direction. Earlier in the day, they spent a couple of hours trudging through the area, doing what they often do on these trips. They survey. Meldrum looks for traces of Sasquatch: footprints, hair, scat. He finds turned-over rocks — most likely a bear — and a long line of elk prints. He finds tufts of hair snagged on a branch. “Deer or elk,” he says. Mionczysnki, who’s also a botanist, catalogs the flora. He notes the sorts of things that might satisfy the appetite of a large mammal — the pocket gophers, the carbohydrate-rich sedges, the limber pines and their high-calorie pine nuts, the lily ponds and their fish and insects and frogs, the thistles, a favorite of gorillas.

This is a fairly routine night of research for Meldrum. Fifteen years ago, he had been so impressed with the footprints in Washington State that he ignored his inner pragmatist and decided to seriously pursue the question of whether an ape-like creature could have made them. He was untroubled by the lack of additional evidence: bones of uncommon top predators are rarely found and the fossil record is notoriously patchy. Plus, the discovery of new mammals — some of them large — is not unheard of. In 1994, a rare species of ox was located in Vietnam. The following year, a breed of prehistoric horse was found roaming in Tibet. In 2001, the three-toed pygmy sloth was identified in Panama.

“IT’S SO EASY TO SAY, ‘OH, IT’S JUST A MAN IN A FUR SUIT’ UNTIL THEY SEE IT BESIDE A MAN IN A FUR SUIT.”

So Meldrum’s search began in earnest. One element was a close examination of plaster foot casts and footprints that appeared credible. He thought enough of them that he told me, “It’s the most elegant adaptation of a giant bipedal” — or on two legs — “primate living on the ground in steep mountainous terrain.” Another still-ongoing project has been a collaboration with a costume and robotics designer to reexamine the footage he first saw as a young boy in Spokane. “It’s so easy to say, ‘Oh, it’s just a man in a fur suit,’” he says. “Until they see it beside a man in a fur suit.”

Finally, there was fieldwork, and the hope of acquiring DNA from hair, or perhaps shooting some high-quality photos or video. And that required money. Bigfoot was hardly a burgeoning research subject in academia, though. As University of Florida anthropologist David Daegling observed in Bigfoot Exposed, “Within the Ivory Tower, it is perfectly legitimate for a folklorist to pursue unicorns; for a biologist, it is a foolish commitment of resources.” (A letter circulated at Idaho State signed by more than a dozen colleagues complained that Meldrum’s work was “fringe science.”) So, like many Bigfoot searchers before him, Meldrum secured private funding. With money from a wealthy oil and gas businessman in Texas, a foundation in California, and others, he planned weeks-long expeditions to the remote corners of the West where, often with Mionczysnki, he spent many nights listening, watching, and waiting.

Meldrum has stories of encounters from trips like this. He was weeks into a month-long expedition in Northern California when, late one night, he heard something rummaging through his guide’s pack. The two men jumped out of their tents, but whatever it was disappeared. Not long after, Meldrum heard footsteps. “I could hear the pat-pat-pat coming right towards me,” he recalls. “It brushed against the fly of my tent and hit the pole.” He called out to make sure it wasn’t his guide, then leaped from his tent. As he chased after it, he could hear it splashing through a marsh, and when he pointed his flashlight at the mud, he could see a pattern: right-left-right-left. Each track was about 16 inches. Then, it vanished.

It’s a dramatic story, but it’s among the most compelling pieces of evidence from Meldrum’s expeditions. He’s collected no DNA, and he’s gotten no photos and no video. When I ask if this gives him pause, he tells me that a combination of variables (including bad weather) and the nature of the work — “You’re looking for a moving needle in a haystack,” he says — can make this an all too common experience in wildlife tracking. Based on the evidence he’s seen, he’s concluded Sasquatch is a living thing, a large, upright ape of which there are a couple thousand west of the Mississippi in Canada and the United States.

Sitting in our camp, the three of us look beyond a narrow, shallow creek, toward a large pine tree to which Meldrum has strapped a camouflage digital camera with a built-in motion detector. If a Sasquatch is going to appear tonight, he and Mionczysnki reason, it’s going to come from the area that they surveyed earlier in the day.

So we wait.

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Photograph by Tim Stelloh for BuzzFeed

In the summer of 2008, Meldrum was among the first to weigh in on the hoax from north Georgia. Even before the Palo Alto news conference, during which Biscardi distributed a close-up photo of the teeth — “It’ll prove to you people that this is not a mask,” he said to the crowd — Meldrum told Scientific American that it looked exactly like the thing it was: “a costume with some fake guts thrown on top for effect.”

It took just a couple of days to unravel. In Dyer’s telling, it was over money. Someone at the so-called safe house wanted more, but Biscardi refused to pay, and, lest he be extorted, outed the hoax. In Biscardi’s version, he got a call from a costume maker who claimed that Dyer’s body matched their product. So Biscardi instructed his associate at the safe house to heat the slab of ice. “Seven hours later, they call me back and say it was a rubber suit with body parts,” Biscardi says. So he confronted Dyer and Whitton. “I say, ‘Is there anything you want to tell me?’” he recalls. “They say, ‘Oh no.’”

Biscardi says he contacted Fox News, and a wave of stories about the boys from Georgia followed. Biscardi pursed fraud charges, and though they were unsuccessful, Whitton was fired from the Clayton County Police Department. (He and Dyer are no longer friends, and Whitton couldn’t be reached for this story.) For Dyer, though, the event served as a strange entry point into a new hustle. People kept contacting him, wanting to go on Bigfoot expeditions, he says.

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So Dyer obliged. He created a new storyline, and presented himself as a reformed hoaxer. “He said that he had seen Bigfoot, and that he was on a mission to redeem himself,” a documentary filmmaker named Morgan Matthews told the Canadian Broadcasting Company last year. (Dyer would later appear in one of Matthews’ films.) Dyer made T-shirts and hats, and he took people on what were little more than backcountry fishing trips that ranged from two days to two weeks in Tennessee, Texas, north Georgia, California, and beyond.

Among the people to contact him was Matthews, who was working on a project about Bigfoot hunters. And so began Dyer’s next hoax. It’s a convoluted tale that begins, of course, with the real killing of a real Bigfoot.

During the summer of 2012, Dyer and Matthews embarked on a week-and-a-half-long expedition in a forest on the edge of San Antonio. On the morning of the sixth day, Dyer says he awoke to the sound of bone crunching; he looked out of his tent and saw what he claims was a large creature with reddish-brown hair. It was, Dyer says, his moment of conversion to Bigfoot believer. “I was in shock,” he says. “I didn’t even think Bigfoot exists.”

Matthews didn’t respond to interview requests, but Dyer claims the filmmaker captured the encounter on a high-resolution camera. Dyer, meanwhile, says he got it on his cell phone. But they wanted more. So that day, Dyer says, he and Matthews bought a rack of ribs from Walmart and Dyer nailed it to a tree at their camp. Then, they waited. Around 11:30, Dyer says he heard footsteps and twigs snapping. He jumped out of his tent and, with Matthews chasing him, ran after the creature. Dyer had his .30-06 hunting rifle; Matthews had his camera. In the end, Dyer says, he fired three shots at the thing, killing it.

Within a couple of weeks, Dyer says he uploaded video footage to YouTube, where it vaulted into the pantheon of furiously debated Bigfoot films. Andrew Clacy, a 47-year-old former television news cameraman and longtime Sasquatch enthusiast in Australia, was among the converted. He knew about Dyer’s history as a hoaxer, but he didn’t care. “Everyone overlooked it because we thought he had the real deal now,” Clacy says. “We thought it helped lead him to the real thing.”

When Meldrum got involved, the spectacle turned nasty. Two pro-Dyer amateur researchers visited Pocatello, Meldrum says, hoping to convince him of the body’s authenticity. It had already been autopsied, and DNA and tissue samples had been obtained, Meldrum recalls them saying. Plus, they had seen it. Were Meldrum to examine it, he would receive a $10,000 bank check; were the body to be proved a fake, he could cash it. When Meldrum declined, they upped the offer to $15,000. Meldrum says he laid out his terms: He’d need high-quality photographs posted on a secure website; he’d have to independently verify the credentials of the experts who examined it; and he’d need a no-contest stipulation for a fraud lawsuit in the event that the body was a fake. “I said, ‘This should be a no-brainer,’” Meldrum recalls.

There was no deal, and a video soon appeared on YouTube. In it, Dyer is wearing a cowboy hat and a striped short-sleeve button-up. In one hand, he’s holding a bottle of lighter fluid; in the other, he’s waving Meldrum’s book, Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science. “Dr. Jeffrey Douchebag Meldrum,” Dyer says to the camera. It’s dark, and Dyer is surrounded by a small audience. He looks like a drunk preacher as he reads aloud: “He knew his footprints were fake, but he thought in his mind, ‘Hey, there’s never going to be anything to compare it to.’ Until Rick Dyer. You’re busted, Mr. Douchebag.”

Dyer sprays the book with lighter fluid and drops it on the concrete. One of the men emerges and lights a match. Eventually, Dyer unzips his fly. “Roasted nuts,” someone says. The group laughs.

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Illustration by Morgan Schweitzer for BuzzFeed

Meldrum has done his best to avoid a cage match with Dyer, to keep Bigfoot madness at the margins. But if one of Meldrum’s goals has been to rescue Sasquatch from the ditch of tabloid mania and force high-minded scientists to at least consider the evidence, he doesn’t appear to have made much progress.

There are a couple of exceptions. A decade ago in Bigfoot Exposed, Daegling examined Meldrum’s footprint work and concluded that he hadn’t considered plausible alternatives for the anatomical detail that he saw. With Patty, Daegling was noncommittal, saying that while the “dynamics” of her movement appeared real, it could have also been a very, very good costume.

Then, earlier this year, a molecular biologist from Oxford published the first-ever systematic DNA analysis of 30 hairs collected from around the world that were purported to have been collected from Sasquatch-like creatures. The results were not good for Bigfoot — they came back as horse, cow, raccoon, bear, even human — though the biologist, Bryan Sykes, seemed troubled by the lack of interest in the subject. “Science neither accepts nor rejects anything without examining the evidence,” he wrote.

I wanted to find out if Meldrum had convinced any of his colleagues to take Bigfoot seriously, so I assembled a brief anonymous survey and sent it to 10 anthropologists at 10 universities who specialize in primates. I asked if they were familiar with Meldrum’s work on Bigfoot and what they thought of it. I wondered if they thought Bigfoot could be a real species of primate and if it deserved to be considered by science. I heard back from three.

All of them knew of Meldrum and respected his non-Bigfoot research, but none were convinced that Sasquatch should even be examined; their argument, in essence, was that Bigfoot isn’t possible. “A mammal that large going undetected and undocumented in the Western United States for this long defies all probability and logic,” one said. When I asked what they thought it was, all three said a hoax. Or, as one put it, “a compound of hoaxing, confusion, hallucination, and folklore.” Meldrum is used to this. Once, when he tried to present Bigfoot-related research at a meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, his submission was rejected. The program chairman later related the comments of one reviewer. “This is just not a subject that is of general interest to the anthropological community,” Meldrum recalls him saying.

In Meldrum’s view, the scientific reaction isn’t so much about evidence — though he did publish a scathing review of Bigfoot Exposed and he doesn’t have kind words for the molecular biologist. In his telling, it’s mostly a perception problem. Some academics have encountered little more than the tabloid mythology. Or the hoaxer. Others are overwhelmed by the intensity of the Bigfoot scene. “When a serious scientist shows some interest in the subject, they often become inundated with correspondence and contact requests from the amateur enthusiast community,” he says. “And there are some real strange people out there.”

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Courtesy of Rick Dyer

In Rick Dyer’s telling, he believed that Morgan Matthews’ documentary, Shooting Bigfoot, would prove him a reformed hoaxer. He believed it would contain the high-quality version of that brightly lit, early morning encounter, and on his Facebook page, he began a countdown to last year’s Hot Docs film festival in Toronto, where the movie was to premiere. “I built it up like you wouldn’t believe,” he says. The film, however, contained just one brief scene from that night — Matthews chasing Dyer into the woods, then getting knocked over by something big and mean-looking. Its werewolf-like face and arm flash across the screen. Soon after, the movie ends.

Speculation cascaded: Was the shooting staged? Had Matthews participated in an elaborate hoax? Where was Dyer’s body? Matthews has remained cagey on the matter, telling the CBC, “There was something quite extreme” at the end of his film that “may or may not have been a close encounter.”

Dyer says the corpse was moved to a secure facility, and his investors were unwilling to release it. He was losing patience; he had a fanbase to satisfy, after all, and he wanted to capitalize on the attention. “I saw an opportunity,” he says. “I said, ‘Let’s make money off a fake one and let’s make money off a real one.’” Like the traveling sideshow exhibits that once enthralled 19th- and 20th-century audiences, he would tour the South, spinning fantastic Bigfoot tales. And he would show the evidence.

In the final weeks of 2013, Dyer assembled a small team that included Clacy, the Australian cameraman, and a few other fans. From a Spokane-based toymaker, he says he commissioned a $4,000 latex, Styrofoam, and camel-hair Bigfoot, which he called Hank and placed inside a plywood-and-Plexiglas box. It would be viewed in a trailer, which would be attached to a motor home. The whole enterprise, which Clacy says was underwritten by two investors and an $80,000 loan, would rumble down the highway wrapped in gaudy, impossible-to-miss advertisements that included a massive photograph of Dyer’s cowboy hat-clad head next to the comic book text of his pitch: “See the only dead Bigfoot.”

In Clacy’s telling, he had no idea Hank was fake. He packed up his home in Wodonga and flew to Las Vegas, where Dyer was living at the time, because he believed Hank was the creature shot dead in Texas. “We wanted to be part of history,” he says. (Dyer disputes this, saying Clacy knew that it was a hoax.)

Despite a dismal start in Phoenix in January, Texas proved lucrative. From Amarillo to Houston, San Antonio to Katy, Hank was presented in flea markets and a Home Depot parking lot, at Alamo Drafthouses, and, when passing drivers flagged them down, on the side of the road. Dyer says he usually charged between $5 and $10 a head, but for the roadside stops, he claims $100 wasn’t uncommon. About 10 people could fit in the trailer at a time, and the routine was fairly brief, Clacy says. He would tell the story of how Dyer killed Hank, and he would use the photographs on the wall as supporting evidence. “I think we had a 95% belief rate,” Clacy says, adding that even taxidermists and a medical doctor in Paris, Texas, seemed convinced.

The media was incredulous. In Las Vegas, before the tour even started, a reporter from Esquire wondered why anyone would believe an admitted hoaxer, while Meldrum was again asked to weigh in, this time by a reporter from the Christian Science Monitor. “The thing has clearly been fabricated,” Meldrum said. “It smacks of images of alien autopsy.”

Clacy says his suspicions grew, but they were tempered by the endorsements from the taxidermists and the doctor (who he now thinks may have been a fake too). Finally, in March, in Daytona, Florida, he says Dyer confessed. It was Bike Week, and they were in the parking lot of an event. “He said, ‘I needed you to believe,’” Clacy recalls. “I feel like an idiot,” he adds. “I believed a con man.”

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Hank with Jimmy Smith II and Jimmy Smith at his new home in Denver. Photograph by Tim Stelloh for BuzzFeed

In the days after, Dyer revealed the hoax in a long, blustery video message on Facebook because, he tells me, “I didn’t want no one else to bust it.” Half a year later, he still claims to have the body of the thing he killed with Morgan Matthews, and he’s still sanguine about his Southern tour. “It’s entertainment,” he says. “If you want to believe I would haul around a life-changing specimen in the back of a $10,000 trailer, then you go ahead and believe it.”

Afterward, Dyer sold Hank to a marijuana dispensary in Denver called Mr. Nice Guys. The owner, Jimmy Smith II, says he bought it for $5,000, and that he’s planning to build a terrarium for it. “I look at it as an investment,” he tells me.

When I met with Dyer in July, he told me he was planning a news conference for early next year to unveil the body of a Bigfoot — for real this time — and he was offering full-access viewings for $150,000. By September, though, he was promoting a new project, a Bigfoot hunt in Pennsylvania.

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The body Dyer claims is a recently killed Bigfoot. Courtesy of Rick Dyer

On a Sunday morning a couple of weeks ago, Dyer sent me a text saying that his “team” killed a Bigfoot the night before. He forwarded “exclusive” photos of something wrapped in a blue tarp, of his friends unloading ice bags from a shopping cart, of him in a camo hat and camo shirt attaching something to the roof of his black Toyota. Later, an image of what looked like intestines arrived on my phone. “That’s the inside of the Bigfoot,” he said. The creature, Dyer told me, was found outside Hazelton, and like most Eastern Bigfoot, at least as described by Loren Coleman, it was small: 5-foot-7 and a few hundred pounds. “I got this one in my possession and it can be proven,” he wrote.

When I tell Meldrum about some of Dyer’s plans, he chuckles and offers the “Fool me once, fool me twice” line.

“What about a third time?” I ask.

He laughs. “Double shame on me,” he says.

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correction

A previous version of this story referred to the Patterson-Gimlin footage as having been in black-and-white. BF_STATIC.timequeue.push(function () document.getElementById(“update_article_correction_time_4210166”).innerHTML = UI.dateFormat.get_formatted_date(‘2014-11-08 10:14:49 -0500’, ‘update’); );

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Read more: http://www.buzzfeed.com/timstelloh/the-hunter-the-hoaxer-and-the-battle-over-bigfoot

#bigfoot hoax #bigfoot hunter #hoax #jeffrey meldrum #rick dyer #sasquatch

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