american graffiti

Two marriages, a baby, and an OK! magazine family-photo exclusive - what more does Michael Jackson have to do to prove to the world that he's normal? Well, for starters, he might want to consider tracking down and burning all copies of a book entitled Michael Jackson Was My Lover: The secret Diary of Jordie Chandler, written by journalist Victor M Gutierrez. In 1993 Chandler, then 13, accused the pop star of sexual abuse; the boy was reportedly paid $20m to drop the law suit and shut up, but his diary apparently fell into Gutierrez's hands. Extremely scarce for obvious reasons,Gutierrez's self-published, dirt-packed book has swiftly gained a reputation as a must-read among sleaze hounds. Jackson has slapped Gutierrez with a $100m slander lawsuit - not for his book, but for a claim he made on the tabloid TV show Hard Copy. An October trial date has been set.

If you couldn't deal with two volcano movies, you might not want to know that there appear to be four mummies lying in wait - 1) Russell Mulcahy (Highlander), plans to tackle something called Talos: The Mummy. According to Movieline magazine, the story involves an archaeologist and his team who "let loose an evil god intent on ruling the world"; 2) Horror high priestess Anne Rice has sold the movie rights to her novel The Mummy for a tidy fee; 3) Director Michael Almereyda, who made the moody vampire flick Nadja, is mounting his own swathed adventure, to be set in Ireland; and 4) Universal plan a remake of the 1932 Boris Karloff classic; directors being mentioned include Sam Raimi and George Romero.

Big winners at last week's Tony Awards: Titanic, A Doll's House, Chicago (soon to be a Madonna film), and host Rosie O'Donnell, who - despite occasional jitters and some awful singing - confirmed her formidable pulling power. The presenters were certainly starrier than usual (Roseanne, Susan Sarandon, Alec Baldwin), but it was undoubtedly O'Donnell, plugging the telecast shamelessly on her talk show, who gave the Tonys its biggest TV audience in 10 years.

l Some years ago, two American photographers discovered some 7,000 negatives at Tuol Sleng, a Phnom Penh prison/torture chamber-turned-genocide museum. The pictures were of Khmer Rouge prisoners, all unnamed, captured on film shortly before they were killed. The Cambodian Genocide Project uses the photos on its web site in its attempts to identify the victims; it was only a matter of time, however, before some art publisher appropriated these images - and consigned them to the coffee-table.

A total of 78 Tuol Sleng portraits have just been made available in a glossy book called The Killing Fields. And, in a disconcerting show of insensitivity and ignorance, museums across the country have snapped up some of these prints for display. "Photographs from S-21", an exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art, features more than 20 of them. Defending her position in the Village Voice, a MOMA curator argues that the pictures "show the photograph's ability to capture people who are terrified".