“Bernie Sanders: Together” by Jermaine Rogers
 
Running for president is a pursuit that attracts control freaks—let’s just say freaks, full stop. For a candidate seeking the presidency, Bernie Sanders has embraced the power of relinquishing control to a remarkable degree.

Sanders’ campaign is all about restoring power to the people, and in keeping with that, his strong reputation among our nation’s artistic community has enabled him to establish a traveling art exhibition that feels a lot like a street art show. To a considerable extent, Bernie is picking up where the grassroots campaign of Barack Obama in 2008 left off, as Obama was able to secure the support of protest-oriented artists like Ron English and Shepard Fairey and many others.

Sanders’ exhibition is titled “The Art of a Political Revolution,” and features artists like Fairey, English, Aaron Draplin, Gilf!, and Jermaine Rogers.
 

“Strong America,” by Ron English
 
A few days ago Sanders himself visited the exhibition for the first time, during which he commented that “I gotta tell you, on a personal level, it’s a little bit weird ... to see all thee guys who look like me on the wall.”

As the Slate video below asserts:

“Bernie and unsanctioned art appeal to the same people. He is to establishment politics what street artists and graffiti writers are to blue-chip galleries.”

Donate to the Sanders campaign.
 

“Thick Lines Bernie” by Aaron Draplin
 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard are doing a lot right lately. The Australian psych septet have, in just about six years, released eight albums, dabbling in garage rock, folk, and jazz, before releasing their latest, Nonagon Infinity, just last week. The album sees the band ramming its fuzzy psych stylings through straightforward early ’70s heavy rock, and the “Infinity” half of its title clues the listener in to a neat trick of its construction—the end of its final song loops seamlessly with the beginning of its first, making Nonagaon Infinity one of those rare recordings for which even the most stubborn vinyl-heads will want the digital version. Though us LP die-hards get a treat, too—the vinyl is pressed into a nonagon shape.

The band heralded the LP’s release in March with the release of the elaborate and completely bonkers video “Gamma Knife,” a trippy and mystical video which featured prismatically hued monks committing mass ritual suicide, and which turned the head of no less a personage as famed weirdo filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, who actually wrote to the band, saying “I liked a lot, has strength, imagination, sense of colour and rhythm.”
 

 
There will be more video where this came from—a video album for Nanagon Infinity is planned for release later this year. The band has already followed up “Gamma Knife” with an even more elaborate video for the song “People Vultures,” and it’s DM’s privilege to debut it for you today. And given that the egg and the riff from the final shot of “Gamma Knife” are the first things you see and hear in “People Vultures,” it’s apparent that the video album may run in a continuous loop as well. Continuing in the Holy Mountainesque vein of “Gamma Knife,” “People Vultures” adds in hat-tips to Tokusatsu TV shows like Kamen Rider, and a production crew of nearly thirty people took three weeks to build the titular vulture prop. Per the video’s co-directors Danny Cohen & Jason Galea:

We conceptualised a giant 6 meter tall musical vulture. The vulture housed all seven band members along with their instruments and trundled across different landscapes fighting various characters plucked from the tracks on Nonagon Infinity.

With the vulture fully assembled and all the band members inside, it weighed over a tonne and was difficult to move safely across the rough terrain without breaking or toppling over. [frontman] Stu [Mackenzie] had the daunting job of being inside the vulture’s neck and head with only a small railing to battle the vertigo and bumps as the vulture slowly moved.

See it, after the jump…

Le Petit Prince at ‘Lake Minnetonka’ with his customized Honda CB400A.
 
Tuesday, May 3rd marked the sadly poignant moment when it became “seven hours and thirteen days” since Prince left this world. And I for one have still not (and probably never will) come to terms with his passing. His loss is a truly immeasurable one that has left his fans (including myself and my colleagues here at DM), dumbfounded. 
 

Le Petit Prince in his ‘Dirty Mind’ outfit.
 
If you’re a Prince fan (and I wouldn’t trust anyone who said they weren’t, it’s one of my rules), you know that he was an incredibly private person—and was quick to put the kibosh on video footage of his mind-bogglingly epic live performances that somehow made their way to the Internet. In the past when DM has posted footage of Prince blowing-minds live, it’s always come with a warning to watch it before it gets taken down. Such was the case with Prince and his request to Seattle artist Troy Gua, who created a lifelike figure of Prince called “Le Petit Prince” (or “LPP”) sometime in 2012, and was swiftly served with a “cease and desist” notice by The Purple One himself. Gua, a huge Prince fan, was devastated. Figuring out a way around the order, he continued to take photos of his “LPP,” only now it had a sculpted head in Gua’s own image. In 2015, Gua started to once again publish images of Le Petit Prince and one of his most recent posts on his Instagram featured the realistic looking figure beginning his ascent to heaven by way of a ladder. Sigh.

Gua (who also makes all of Le Petit Prince’s painstakingly detailed clothes) says he doesn’t want to profit from Prince’s death, so you can’t actually purchase a small version of Prince dressed in era-specific attire (although Gua didn’t rule out this possibility in the future or selling prints of Le Petit Prince in action). When I say that the images in this post are almost as beguiling as Prince himself (almost), I’m not exaggerating. From Le Petit Prince riding a tiny replica of his customized 1981 Honda CB400A from the film Purple Rain, to the open trenchcoat and tiny black thong Prince wore on the cover of his 1980 album, Dirty Mind, Gua (who might be the greatest person ever) has created so many perfect Princes that I couldn’t possibly post them all here.
 

Prince as seen in the video for ‘Automatic’ from the 1982 album, ‘1999.’
 
More after the jump…

 
An employee from a Columbia, South Carolina Krispy Kreme is the subject of disciplinary action following an incident in which he refused to serve a customer, reportedly, solely because the customer was a cop.

A Richland County Sheriff’s Department deputy was denied his cop fuel and his department later issued a statement confirming the incident and stating, “the poor actions of one employee does not properly represent the views and values of the community, business, [or] organization as a whole.”

Krispy Kreme’s District Manager, Mechelle Carey, sent an email to the Sheriff stating “the employee has been dealt with serious disciplinary action,” further apologizing to the department, stating that Krispy Kreme has a long-standing relationship with law enforcement, military, and first responders.

The Sheriff’s Department believes this was an isolated incident, and the details of disciplinary action against the employee have not been made public.

So, was this doughnut denier a hero or a dick? Tell us in the comments.
 
Anyway, here’s NOFX with the greatest cop/doughnut anthem of all time:

When I was on the freeway, doing 70 all drunk
A copper pulled me over, and I thought that I was sunk
He came up to my car, I thought up a little trick
I took a doughnut, jelly filled, and put it on a stick
He came up to my window, and shouted to get out
So I quickly took the doughnut and I shoved it in his mouth
So I drove away, he shouted for some more
So I threw it out the window and he ate it off the floor

Cops and doughnuts
Cops love doughnuts
Cops love doughnuts
Cops and doughnuts

 
Via: WACH Fox 57

 
Somewhat like top basketballers before Michael Jordan (thinking of you, Dr. J….) the reputation of Norman Lear’s sitcom The Jeffersons suffered somewhat by poor timing and the shows that came after it. Cheers and Seinfeld are regularly lauded as among the greatest sitcoms of all time, but The Jeffersons, whose impressive 253 episodes were spread across a whopping 11 seasons (1975-1985), never seems to get mentioned with the same respect.

If you eliminate animated series and long-running staples from the dawn of TV history, the longevity of The Jeffersons puts it in a special category with Two and a Half Men (262 episodes), Cheers (275), M*A*S*H (256), Frasier (264), Married ... with Children (258), and Happy Days (255).

At a minimum, The Jeffersons is arguably the greatest put-down show of all time!

And it never would have happened but for an intervention by the Black Panthers.

Norman Lear, creator of a fair portion of the most successful sitcoms of the 1970s, including All in the Family, Sanford and Son, One Day at a Time, and Maude, is the subject of an upcoming PBS American Masters telecast under the title “Just Another Version of You,” which is expected to get a theatrical run in the summer before appearing on PBS affiliates in the autumn. Since the 1970s Lear has become more or less synonymous with the introduction of ethnic diversity in American TV as well as the foregrounding of what might be termed a liberal consciousness in televised comedy.

Remarkably, the creation of The Jeffersons was a direct outgrowth of an intervention staged by three members of the Black Panthers political organization at some point during 1974. A trio of pissed-off revolutionaries went to Lear’s office to complain about the “garbage” they were seeing on TV, specifically Lear’s show Good Times, which ran from 1974 to 1979 and focused on a black family in the projects of Chicago. You wouldn’t think that the Black Panthers would object to a popular sitcom calling attention to poverty in urban America, but they wanted to see a broader palette of Black America on TV.

Last weekend Lear visited Dan Harmon’s weekly podcast Harmontown, which is taped live every Sunday at the Nerdmelt Showroom in Hollywood, to promote the American Masters documentary and shoot the shit with a well-known showrunner (Community) from a more splintered era of TV programming, namely, ours. Harmontown tapings are usually attended by GenXers and Millennials, so the appearance of the 93-year-old (!) legend of TV was an unusual event.
 

‘Good Times’ aired on CBS from 1974 to 1979
 
At about 42 minutes in, Harmon and his sidekick Jeff Davis engaged Lear on the subject of the beginnings of The Jeffersons:

Harmon: There’s this anecdote, about ... three Black Panthers show up, and come to your office and say, “We want to talk to the garbageman! I wanna talk to Norman Lear, the garbageman!” And they storm into your office, and say, “Good Times is bullshit” ... They read you the riot act ... You credit that moment as starting us down the road towards The Jeffersons. ...

You’re still listening! You’ve already proven that you’re the king of television at that point, and people are barging into your office to call you a garbageman, and you listen to them! And took their feedback and made another great television show, that was great from another perspective.

Davis: What was the Black Panthers’ [complaint]? ... Because they were living in the projects, because they were downtrodden?

Lear: Their big bellyache was, why does the guy have to hold down three jobs and occasionally—in an episode, it almost seems like he’s looking for a fourth—he’s so hungry to make some money to support his family and why can’t there be an affluent black family on television? ... They were pissed off that the only family that existed, the guy had to hold down three jobs.

More after the jump…

 
I had no idea LiarTown USA actually had products you can buy! Like these Social Justice Kittens postcards created by LiarTown USA’s Sean Tejaratchi. They come in a set of 12 and are on pre-order for $12 through the Reading Frenzy website. The postcards will be released on May 6th.

We’ve blogged about LiarTown USA before here on Dangerous Minds. If you’re not familiar with the site and Tejaratchi’s work, here’s the link.

 
via Boing Boing

Motörhead on the cover of Flexipop! magazine, June, 1981.
 
UK music magazine Flexipop! was only around from 1980 to1983, but in that time it managed to put out some pretty cool content within its pages, such as the sweet 7” colored flexi discs that featured music from bands featured in the mag like Motörhead, The Cure and The Jam. One flexi-disc from the February 1981 issue was a recording of Adam and the Ants riffing on the Village People anthem “Y.M.C.A.” called “A.N.T.S,” which you can listen to in all its early 80s glory (as I can’t embed it), here.
 

Adam Ant on the cover of Flexipop! #4.
 

Adam and the Ants Flexipop! flexi disc from Flexipop! #4.
 
Another thing that Flexipop! featured were cool “live-action” storyboards as well illustrated strips that detailed the the fictional exploits of various bands and musicians. Starting with the September 1981 issue, there was a three-part-series about the career to date of Adam Ant drawn by Mark Manning. Manning—who would go on to assume the cool-as-fuck moniker “Zodiac Mindwarp” and form the biker sleaze band Zodiac Mindwarp and the Love Reaction in the mid-80s—was Flexipop!‘s acid-dropping art editor at the time. I’ve included Manning’s “Adam and the Ants” comic strip in its entirety, as well as some scans from the magazine’s inner-pages.

Surprisingly, given its short existence, you can find lots of issues of Flexipop! out there as well as flexi discs from the magazine’s colorful discography on auction sites like eBay and Etsy. Cooler still is the fact that you can look through even more pages from Flexipop! that have been scanned and uploaded at the blog Music Mags 1970s-1980s.
 

Siouxsie Sioux and Budgie (The Creatures) on the cover of Flexipop! March, 1983.
 
Much, much more after the jump…

 
Last night I binge-watched four of the six episodes of the new Channel 4/Seeso black comedy co-production, Flowers (It’s already aired in the UK, where they ran it on five consecutive nights at the end of April after a two-part premiere; it’s available on Seeso from today). Had my wife not conked out, I’d have happily watched the entire series. I woke up this morning feeling very enthusiastic about watching the final ones tonight, and of telling our cherished, good-looking, high IQ readership about it. I think it’s safe to say that the Venn diagram of people who read this blog and those who would like Flowers, which stars Julian Barratt (The Mighty Boosh) and Olivia Colman (Broadchurch, Peep Show, The Night Manager) will overlap quite a bit. TV.com’s Tim Surette succinctly described it as “Arrested Development through the eyes of Wes Anderson reinterpreting Harold & Maude,” a razor-sharp summation that frankly I cannot hope to top. You see what I mean, though. If these Flowers seem to smell of something you might like, then I think you’ll like it quite a bit.
 

“I suppose you can’t have too much of a good thing… like joy.”

Flowers focuses on the idiosyncratic Flowers family. Maurice Flowers, a depressed and suicidal children’s writer, is played by Barratt in his best non-Boosh role since 2005’s Nathan Barley. Colman—an actress of extraordinary gifts—plays the sweet and kind Deborah, his normal-ish (emphasis on the “ish”) wife, a highly-strung music teacher who could make coffee nervous. Their strained sexless marriage is teetering on oblivion. They have twin adult children living with them, two creepy ne’er do wells—a dickhead “inventor” of stupid things (Daniel Rigby) and his peculiar sister (Sophia Di Martino), a vaguely gothy lesbian “musician” who obsesses on the pretty next door neighbor, who is apparently fucking her plastic surgeon father.
 

 
In Flowers, suicide, mental illness, pedophilia, incest and sexual infidelity are played for laughs. Writer-director Will Sharpe (who hilariously portrays Shun, Maurice’s Japanese assistant and illustrator) doesn’t overdo the more Andersonian elements of his script and neither does the stellar cast. They’re believably strange, not the Addams Family. For wallowing in such unsettling subject matter Flowers is actually quite unexpectedly subtle, and nicely cinematic for a TV comedy series.

More after the jump…

 
Just when you think you’ve seen everything—like the Steve Buscemi bikini—you come across an item like Klaus Nomi salt & pepper shakers. Now I would have never thought this up in a million years, but yet here we are. Looking at them.

The set sells for $35 by Etsy shop Yokai John. It looks like there’s two different sets in the listing for the Nomi shakers. If you do wish to order these, I’d be specific with the seller about which set you want. The listing’s a bit confusing.

 
Parents, is it taking forever for junior to utter his first fuckwords? Then help your little sadist grow up fast with the Blue Velvet play set! From a swatch of blue fabric and an inhalant mask to a decomposing ear and a bottle of PBR, it’s got everything* your toddler needs to act out his cruelest fantasies.

Lynchland, the source of the shot above, reports that this prototype was spotted at last month’s Monsterpalooza convention. (Instagram user Rebekah McKendry uploaded the only other snap of the package I could find.)

If you’d like to get your hands on one, perhaps you should nag the inventor, Skullclown, about mass-producing these. But like Frank says, be polite!

Here’s to your fuck, ages three and up!
 

 
*1968 Dodge Charger and “well-dressed man” disguise sold separately.