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When last we saw Matthew McConaughey, his babymama Camila Alves and his baby boy Levi Alves, the family had made their way down to Brazil for a little R&R family vacay time … but it looks like the holiday is over. Here are new pics of the family as they made their way out of a local grocery store here in SoCal yesterday afternoon:

I cannot believe that Levi has grown so much already! It doesn’t seem like it was that long ago but Levi was born 5 months ago … so I guess enough time has passed for him to get so big. I think he looks a lot like his mommy … she’s a little doll. There are so many new celeb babies out there, it’s almost impossible to keep them all straight. Something tells me that little Levi is not going to be a party animal, hellion like his father … methinks he’s likely to take after his mother. He’s a cutie … glad to have the entire family back home in LA.

[Photo credit: Splash News]

Trent Reznor has updated the official Nine Inch Nails website with a new message to fans concerning a report that asserts that music by his band Nine Inch Nails (among other bands and types of music, including Sesame Street) has been used in torture scenarios on the inmates at the US prison facility at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. As you might expect, TR is not pleased to learn of this torture tactic and wants the world to know about it. Here is the full text of Reznor‘s message and a portion of the initial report:

It’s difficult for me to imagine anything more profoundly insulting, demeaning and enraging than discovering music you’ve put your heart and soul into creating has been used for purposes of torture. If there are any legal options that can be realistically taken they will be aggressively pursued, with any potential monetary gains donated to human rights charities. Thank GOD this country has appeared to side with reason and we can put the Bush administration’s reign of power, greed, lawlessness and madness behind us.

Trent Reznor

From MSNBC: Blaring from a speaker behind a metal grate in his tiny cell in Iraq, the blistering rock from Nine Inch Nails hit Prisoner No. 200343 like a sonic bludgeon. “Stains like the blood on your teeth,” Trent Reznor snarled over distorted guitars. “Bite. Chew.” The auditory assault went on for days, then weeks, then months at the U.S. military detention center in Iraq. Twenty hours a day. AC/DC. Queen. Pantera. The prisoner, military contractor Donald Vance of Chicago, told The Associated Press he was soon suicidal. The tactic has been common in the U.S. war on terror, with forces systematically using loud music on hundreds of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, then the U.S. military commander in Iraq, authorized it on Sept. 14, 2003, “to create fear, disorient … and prolong capture shock.” Now the detainees aren’t the only ones complaining. Musicians are banding together to demand the U.S. military stop using their songs as weapons. A campaign being launched Wednesday has brought together groups including Massive Attack and musicians such as Tom Morello, who played with Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave and is now on a solo tour. It will feature minutes of silence during concerts and festivals, said Chloe Davies of the British law group Reprieve, which represents dozens of Guantanamo Bay detainees and is organizing the campaign. At least Vance, who says he was jailed for reporting illegal arms sales, was used to rock music. For many detainees who grew up in Afghanistan — where music was prohibited under Taliban rule — interrogations by U.S. forces marked their first exposure to the pounding rhythms, played at top volume. The experience was overwhelming for many. Binyam Mohammed, now a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay, said men held with him at the CIA’s “Dark Prison” in Afghanistan wound up screaming and smashing their heads against walls, unable to endure more. “There was loud music, (Eminem’s) ‘Slim Shady’ and Dr. Dre for 20 days. I heard this nonstop over and over,” he told his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith. “The CIA worked on people, including me, day and night for the months before I left. Plenty lost their minds.” … The spokeswoman for Guantanamo’s detention center, Navy Cmdr. Pauline Storum, wouldn’t give details of when and how music has been used at the prison, but said it isn’t used today. She didn’t respond when asked whether music might be used in the future. FBI agents stationed at Guantanamo Bay reported numerous instances in which music was blasted at detainees, saying they were “told such tactics were common there.”

This is absolutely abhorrent. I cannot, for the life of me, understand what it must feel like to learn that your country has decided to use something that you create (be it art or something else) and use it to torture another human being. It is just unreal. I sincerely hope that any legal remedy that can be won by these musicians who are bringing suit against the government is swift and substantial. I, too, echo Reznor‘s happiness that the Bush administration’s control and manipulation of our country’s integrity is about to be over. I am so tired of being ashamed and embarrassed by things done in the name of the United States of America. That is NOT to say that I am ashamed and embarrassed by my country that is to say that the good name of the USA has been abused and misused for far too long. I really look forward to things like this really becoming a thing of the past.

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Britney Spears, who recently spent a bit of time promoting her new album Circus in Europe and here in the US, has made her way to the Land of the Rising Sun to take the promo machine there for the next few days. Britney, with her amazing assistant Brett Miller and her astounding manager Larry Rudolph (not pictured), arrived at LAX Airport yesterday and have already arrived at Narita International Airport in Japan:

I think it’s tomorrow, Saturday, in Japan right now … I understand that our dear Britney is scheduled to perform on a Japanese TV show called HEY!HEY!HEY! on Monday night (12/15) and will be appearing on a program called NTV Best Artist 2008 on Tuesday night (12/16). I believe Brit will be performing on both of these shows. I know that folks in Japan got mad lurve for Britters so I’m sure they’ll take good care of her. I suspect that Brit will sneak in some holiday downtime while there this weekend … it sounds like it’ll be a pretty fun trip. I can’t wait to see her performances on these upcoming shows.

[Photo credit: Splash News, Wireimage]

Sad news to report today … 1950′s iconic pin-up model Bettie Page, who suffered a heart attack last weekend after dealing with a case of pneumonia, passed away at the age of 85 according to a statement from her agent who broke the sad news on her official website BettiePage.com last night:

With deep personal sadness I must announce that my dear friend and client Bettie Page passed away at 6:41pm PST this evening in a Los Angeles hospital. She died peacefully but had never regained consciousness after suffering a heart attack nine days ago. She captured the imagination of a generation of men and women with her free spirit and unabashed sensuality. She is the embodiment of beauty.

Here is a portion of the obituary article published in The New York Times:

Bettie Page, a legendary pinup girl whose photographs in the nude, in bondage and in naughty-but-nice poses appeared in men’s magazines and private stashes across America in the 1950s and set the stage for the sexual revolution of the rebellious ’60s, died Thursday in Los Angeles. She was 85. Her death was reported by her agent, Mark Roesler, on Ms. Page’s Web site, bettiepage.com. Ms. Page, whose popularity underwent a cult-like revival in the last 20 years, had been hospitalized for three weeks with pneumonia and was about to be released Dec. 2 when she suffered a heart attack, said Mr. Roesler, of CMG Worldwide. She was transferred in a coma to Kindred Hospital, where she died. In her trademark raven bangs, spike heels and killer curves, Ms. Page was the most famous pinup girl of the post-World War II era, a centerfold on a million locker doors and garage walls. She was also a major influence in the fashion industry and a target of Senator Estes Kefauver’s anti-pornography investigators. But in 1957, at the height of her fame, she disappeared, and for three decades her private life — two failed marriages, a fight against poverty and mental illness, resurrection as a born-again Christian, years of seclusion in Southern California — was a mystery to all but a few close friends. Then in the late 1980s and early ’90s, she was rediscovered and a Bettie Page renaissance began. David Stevens, creator of the comic-book and later movie character the Rocketeer, immortalized her as the Rocketeer’s girlfriend. Fashion designers revived her look. Uma Thurman, in bangs, reincarnated Bettie in Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction,” and Demi Moore, Madonna and others appeared in Page-like photos. There were Bettie Page playing cards, lunch boxes, action figures, T-shirts and beach towels. Her saucy images went up in nightclubs. Bettie Page fan clubs sprang up. Look-alike contests, featuring leather-and-lace and kitten-with-a-whip Betties, were organized. Hundreds of Web sites appeared, including her own, which had 588 million hits in five years, CMG Worldwide said in 2006. Biographies were published, including her authorized version, “Bettie Page: The Life of a Pin-Up Legend,” (General Publishing Group) which appeared in 1996. It was written by Karen Essex and James L. Swanson. A movie, “The Notorious Bettie Page,” starring Gretchen Mol as Bettie and directed by Mary Harron for Picturehouse and HBO Films, was released in 2006, adapted from “The Real Bettie Page,” by Richard Foster. Bettie May Page was born in Jackson, Tenn., the eldest girl of Roy and Edna Page’s six children. The father, an auto mechanic, molested all three of his daughters, Ms. Page said years later, and was divorced by his wife when Bettie was 10. She and some of her siblings were placed for a time in an orphanage. She attended high school in Nashville, and was almost a straight-A student, graduating second in her class. She graduated from Peabody College, a part of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, but a teaching career was brief. “I couldn’t control my students, especially the boys,” she said. She tried secretarial work, married Billy Neal in 1943 and moved to San Francisco, where she modeled fur coats for a few years. She divorced Mr. Neal in 1947, moved to New York and enrolled in acting classes. She had a few stage and television appearances, but it was a chance meeting that changed her life. On the beach at Coney Island in 1950, she met Jerry Tibbs, a police officer and photographer, who assembled her first pinup portfolio. By 1951, the brother-sister photographers Irving and Paula Klaw, who ran a mail-order business in cheesecake, were promoting the Bettie Page image with spike heels and whips, while Bunny Yeager’s pictures featured her in jungle shots, with and without leopards skins. Her pictures were ogled in Wink, Eyeful, Titter, Beauty Parade and other magazines, and in leather-fetish 8- and 16-millimeter films. Her first name was often misspelled. Her big break was the Playboy centerfold in January 1955, when she winked in a Santa Claus cap as she put a bulb on a Christmas tree. Money and offers rolled in, but as she recalled years later, she was becoming depressed. In 1955, she received a summons from a Senate committee headed by Senator Kefauver, a Tennessee Democrat, that was investigating pornography. She was never compelled to testify, but the uproar and other pressures drove her to quit modeling two years later. She moved to Florida. Subsequent marriages to Armond Walterson and Harry Lear ended in divorce, and there were no children. She moved to California in 1978 … In recent years, she had lived in Southern California on the proceeds of her revival. Occasionally, she gave interviews in her gentle Southern drawl, but largely stayed out of the public eye — and steadfastly refused to be photographed. “I want to be remembered as I was when I was young and in my golden times,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 2006. “I want to be remembered as a woman who changed people’s perspectives concerning nudity in its natural form.”

This is very sad news. Bettie Page was a true icon … some even put her in the same category as the immortal Marilyn Monroe. I have always been a fan of her photos not necessarily because of the sometimes nudity but because she always appeared as a woman in control of her destiny. In her heyday, I suspect women were not given much say in the way they were portrayed when they posed for men’s adult magazines but it seems to me that Bettie Page was a woman who definitely called as many shots as she could. I think that Page will get her wish and will be remembered when she was young and extremely beautiful. I know, for sure, that is the way I will always remember her. She will be missed.

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