There’s been a question for some time about the whereabouts of MIA Odd Future rapper Earl Sweatshirt and whether or not he’ll be appearing with the group during their hotly anticipated show at the Coachella music festival this weekend in Southern California.

Probably not if Odd Future leader Tyler, the Creator’s recent tweets are any indication:
 

 
No one seemed to know exactly where Earl Sweatshirt (real name Thebe Kgositsile) was and rumors have run rampant that the 17-year old rapper’s parents were horrified when they got a load of their son’s work and immediately shipped him off to a military boarding school, where he’s been for some months.

This appears to be the case as Complex magazine seem to have solved the mystery: Apparently he’s in Samoa as part of the “therapeutic” military academy for “at risk” teenage boys called the Coral Reef Academy. David Huebner, a U.S. official visiting the school provided the evidence:
 

 
From Complex:

On September 13, 2010, the U.S. ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa delivered concrete evidence to support our suspicions that Earl was staying at the Coral Reef Academy. He published the photo above in a blog post about his visit to the “off-shore treatment program for at-risk teenage boys.” Apparently, he was there for a fire-knife dance competition and variety show. We contacted the Coral Reef Academy to confirm with them that Thebe Kgositsile is or was ever a guest, but they couldn’t legally divulge that information.

Yep. It’s Earl.

If Earl Sweatshirt’s parents really want to completely alienate their son from them to the extent that he never speaks to them again, my guess is that they’re going about it in exactly the right way. What 17-year-old kid wants to hear that his partners-in-crime are about to get their own fucking TV show on Adult Swim (a surreal, half-animated hip hop Jackass is what I’m imagining from this crew) and is okay with missing out that action? Methinks Earl’s got just a slightly odder future planned for himself than his parents have… Just sayin’...

I’d imagine that the next chapter in this saga will be “Earl Sweatshirt: The Breakout!” Stay tuned.

Read the whole story: We found Earl Sweatshirt (Complex)
 

 
More Earl Sweatshirt with “Molliwop”:
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
My Name is Earl (Sweatshirt)

 
Don Ho died on this date four years ago and I can’t imagine a better way to commemorate his legacy than sharing this live footage from the early 1990s of Ho singing his classic song “Suck ‘Em Up.” Enjoy now. Thank me later.

Don is definitely in Dean Martin mode on this one.
 

Video gaming pioneer Gerald Lawson has died from complications related to diabetes. He was 70 years old.

In 1976, Lawson designed the Fairchild Channel F, the first programmable ROM cartridge-based video game console. He went on to create software for the Atari 2600 in the early 80s.
 

Lawson was the sole black member of the Homebrew Computer Club, a group of early computer hobbyists which would produce a number of industry legends, including Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Lawson also produced one of the earliest arcade games, Demolition Derby, which debuted in a southern California pizzeria shortly after Pong.”

In a 2009 interview, Lawson was candid in his appraisal of Jobs and Wozniak: “I was not impressed with them — either one of them, actually.” He was so unimpressed by Wozniak he turned down his application for a job at Fairchild.

In March, Mr. Lawson was honored for his innovative work by the International Game Developers Association, an overdue acknowledgment for an unfamiliar contributor to the technological transformation that has changed how people live.

“He’s absolutely a pioneer,” Allan Alcorn, a creator of the granddaddy of video games, Pong, said in an interview with The San Jose Mercury News in March. “When you do something for the first time, there is nothing to copy.”

 
Here’s Mr. Lawson discussing Fairchild Channel F and the roots of virtual reality:
 

 
From The Telegraph:

Wesley Hosie, 25, found the yellow and red sweet by chance as he and his girlfriend tucked into a 700g jar from The Jelly Bean Factory.

Mr Hosie and girlfriend Jessica White, 24, from Taunton, Somerset, kept the mango-flavoured bean and now plan to sell it on eBay for £500.

Mr Hosie said: “As Jessica opened the jar, I saw her immediately. She was literally lying there staring back at me.”

Tasty!

 
The late Belgian painter Guy Peellaert (1934-2008) was once called the “Michelangelo of Pop Art” for his amazing photo-realist style. Famous for his iconic album covers for David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs and It’s Only Rock and Roll for the Stones, Peeleart was also noted for his legendary million-selling coffee-table book, Rock Dreams, a collaboration with British rock writer writer Nik Cohn. Rock Dreams featured 125 paintings by Peellaert of rockstars ranging from Frank Sinatra to Lou Reed in (often lurid) fantasy settings. It was something you’d see often in head shops in the 1970s. Many of the paintings are owned by Jack Nicholson.
 

 
Rock Dreams is a special favorite of mine. I’ve had a copy since childhood that I got from the Columbia House Record Club when I joined for a penny. One day in the late 80s, I came across a huge pile of hardback copies at the Strand Bookstore in NYC for $1 each. I bought the entire stack and gave them out as Christmas presents that year. It’s one of the best art books I’ve ever, ever seen.
 

 

 

 
Less well-known are Peellaert’s sexy 60s posters for Paris strip club The Crazy Horse Saloon (I used to have a few, but the tube they were kept in got lost during a NYC to LA move) and his books The Adventures of Jodelle (one of my most prized possessions) and Pravda with its title character based on gorgeous Francoise Hardy. (“Jodelle” had been modeled on French pop singer Sylvie Vartan). Below a super cool “Pravda” animation that Peellaert did in 2001 featuring a soundtrack by The Rolling Stones, Missy Elliot and Joy Division.
 

 

 
Even less well-known is the animated opening credits for Peellaert did for 1967’s Jeu de Massacre. (He also did the poster, too, obviously). Revel in New York describes it like this:
 

Two cartoonists meet a playboy who lives out the fantasies created in their cartoons. He hires them to create a new comic strip. As they work on the new strip, the playboy begins to live it out. Unfortunately, the new strip deals with murder.

 
Charles Laufer creator of Tiger Beat magazine has died.

For teenyboppers of the 1960s Tiger Beat magazine spoke to them loud and clearly about the things they loved the most: pop stars, cute boys, fashion and rock and roll. With its colorful covers and bold poster-like graphics, Tiger Beat was a gateway magazine to Creem and Rolling Stone.

Charles Laufer, who as a high school teacher in 1955 despaired that his students had nothing entertaining to read and responded with magazines aimed at teenage girls desperate to know much, much more about the lives of their favorite cute stars, died April 5 in Northridge, Calif. He was 87.

Mr. Laufer’s best-known magazine was Tiger Beat, published monthly. With its spinoff publications and its competitors, of which the most popular was 16 Magazine, Tiger Beat had it all covered — or at least what mattered most to girls from about 8 to 14. The Beach Boys’ loves! Jan and Dean’s comeback! The private lives of the Beatles!”

While The Beatles and Beach Boys sold magazines, it was The Monkees that put Tiger Beat on the map and turned it into a profitable enterprise.

Recognizing the Monkees’ potential, he put them on the cover of Tiger Beat. That put the still-struggling publication in the black, and he signed an exclusive deal for special Monkee magazines, Monkee picture books and Monkee love beads, which added to the bonanza.”

 

 
Tiger Beat looked like pop music sounded, fun!
 

 
Obituary at the New York Times.

 
For the past ten years, Los Angeles Times staff reporter Deborah Vankin has covered arts, culture and nightlife for the LA Weekly, Variety, Brand X and the New York Times. She has a special talent for observing and commenting on youth culture in particular.

Poseurs, her new grapic novel, is set amongst restless fashion tribes of Los Angeles and there will be a signing tomorrow night celebrating the publication of the book at LA’s premiere geek emporium, Meltdown Comics.

Vankin told the LA Weekly:

The crux of the story is that a shy, artsy teenage girl gets a part-time job as a “houseguest for hire.” She’s hired by this agency called “We The Party People” who rent out fake guests for peoples’ private parties. Why? Image is everything in L.A., you are who you know. They help “flesh out” the guest list. Thing is: you never know who’s real and who’s rented. Drama ensues.

Buy Poseurs on Amazon

Meltdown Comics, April 13th, 2011 7pm, 7522 Sunset Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 9004

 
I think this is kind of cool, but I question the wisdom of choosing to immortalize the Iggster at 64-years of age rather than 24? 

This I can pass on, though had they gone with a Raw Power-era Iggy in his silver pants, I’d have bought it without hesitation…

Pre-order your Iggy Pop action figure from Toys R Us, it’ll ship in early June.

Below, Iggy smears himself in peannut butter at the Cincinnati Summer Pop Festival of 1970. Scroll in about two minutes for the Stooges mayhem to start:
 

 
Thank you Chris Musgrave!

 
There’s a fascinating article in the New York Times, That Noisy Woodpecker Had an Animated Secret, about Shamus Culhane, a pioneer of modern animation, who slipped homages to avant-garde artists into several Woody Woodpecker cartoons in the 1940s.

Sixteen years ago Tom Klein was staring at a Woody Woodpecker cartoon, The Loose Nut, when he started seeing things. Specifically, Mr. Klein watched that maniacal red-topped bird smash a steamroller through the door of a shed. The screen then exploded into images that looked less like the stuff of a Walter Lantz cartoon than like something Willem de Kooning might have hung on a wall.

“What was that?” Mr. Klein, now an animation professor at Loyola Marymount University, recalled thinking. Only later, after years of scholarly detective work, did he decide that he had been looking at genuine art that was cleverly concealed by an ambitious and slightly frustrated animation director named Shamus Culhane.”

Culhane was an admirer of experimental film makers, Eisenstein in particular, as well as abstract painters and managed to work some of his artistic obsessions into his commercial work.

High art meets popular art inThe Loose Nut when Woody “is blown into an abstract configuration…a convergence of animation and Soviet montage.”
 

 
In lowbrow mode, Culhane enjoyed pranking Universal Studios and Walt Lantz by throwing not-so-subtle sexual imagery into his cartoons. In The Greatest Man In Siam, Culhane’s libido goes nuts in a veritable onslaught of genitalia. You don’t need to be Freud to notice the erect phalluses and vaginal doorways. At the 4:36 point in the clip, there’s a glimpse of a pink passageway that incorporates both yin and yang.
 

Above, artist Kembra Pfahler and friend.

Glamorous new video from Dangerous Minds pal Kembra Pfahler, it’s The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black’s new song “Bring Back the Night.” Directed by Bijoux Altamirano. Might be NSFW.