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!

 

 
Simply put, John Nolan‘s 2010 reel for his animatronic creations is amazing. You may recognize some of John’s work from Clash of the Titans, Where the Wild Things Are and the television series Being Human.

BTW, there’s a blobby thing with lips that’s rather disturbing in this video. Just wait for it.

 
(via Nerdcore)

 
In the past few weeks I’ve dug through boxes of my old records and dusted off my turntables. Right now, sitting a few feet away from me, are stacks of vinyl that I’ve been collecting since I bought my first record, “Return To Sender” by Elvis, when I was 10 years old. While I’ve got a CD collection that numbers in the 1000s, I still love my vinyl. And I’m not the only one. Records have been making a comeback for the past decade and stores like Waterloo in Austin (one of the last record stores standing) devotes close to half its square footage to vinyl.

Of course much of the pleasure of collecting vinyl records is the thrill of the hunt, going to stores and searching through bins of musty merchandise hoping to score something offbeat or a sentimental artifact. Sadly, those days are mostly over. It’s a rarity to find a record store anywhere anymore.

While I appreciate the convenience of ordering music online and the swiftness of downloading, the experience of browsing in a record store is a unique pleasure that is irreplaceable. I miss it and I know that the death of the record store diminishes the experience of being a music fan. What have we sacrificed for speed and laziness? For me, record stores, like bookstores, have always been a great place to gather with people who love art and a place where I might encounter something unexpected among the those mystical slabs of plastic and cardboard.

Record lovers, these 40 photos of shuttered record stores will probably make you misty-eyed. Most of you will recognize among them one or two that are connected to your rock and roll heart.
 

 
Via The Daily Swarm

 

 
I think I’ve made a love connection.

(via reddit)

 
Los Angeles DM readers ! Come on out tonight for lovely records and adult beverages.

 
From the darkest depths of hipster Brooklyn comes this head-scratcher of a faux-public access half hour by one B.J. Rubin and a gang of amiable hangers-on. Highlights include a seemingly endless stream of half-remembered old time-y piano tunes, an annoyingly circular and obsessive grade-school poetic remembrance, a live cat, and most notably, a 15 minute (!) drum performance by one Kevin Shea that may be one of the most relentlessly funny and potentially self-destructive things I’ve ever witnessed. Seriously, just go ahead and skip to around the 14 minute mark and marvel at the madness.
 

 
Thanks Cory Flanigan !

 
Who wouldn’t want to try this? Ten years on, Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers is still gob-smackingly good fun.

Six drummers participate in a well planned musical attack in the suburbs. As an elderly couple leave their apartment the drummers take over. On everyday objects they give a concert in four movements: Kitchen, Bedroom, Bathroom and Living-room.

 
With thanks to Duke Sandefur
 

 
Clips from low-budget and very bizarre children’s movies of the 1950s and 60s with a Bollywood mix by Madlib.

Bollywood soundtracks and children’s fairytales seem to have an affinity for each other.

Puss N’ Boots - Mexico
Tom Thumb - Mexico
The Brave Little Tailor -Germany
The Wonderful Land Of Oz - USA
 

 
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.
 

 
Nicole Belle put it nicely at Crooks and Liars:

Man, conservatives sure do want everyone to buy into the notion that the only answer to Medicare is to not have it. They go on and on about how Medicare is going to go bankrupt. But what is never mentioned is the actual end of that sentence “...under current spending levels.”

Let’s remember that there are two sides to that coin. One way to deal with rising costs is to drastically cut benefits. But that doesn’t reduce the existence of the need for those benefits, it simply transfers the costs to the individual, who is on Medicare because they cannot afford private insurance. As in our current system with those who are uninsured, if those individuals can’t pay those costs, they get passed on to everyone else in the form of increased premiums and bloated medical charges (nothing like paying for a $20 box of tissue during a hospital stay).

But the other way to deal with it—which is apparently unthinkable to George Will and Chrystia Freeland—is to increase spending, in the form of tax increases. Yes, I said the dreaded phrase: tax increases. At the time that Medicare was enacted in 1965, the top marginal tax rate was 70%. Now it’s less than 40%. Of course there’s no money…we’re too busy allowing the uber-wealthy and corporations to skate on their share of the social fabric to create huge population-sized holes in the safety net.

I do have to credit the GOP with the talking point that it won’t affect anyone currently getting Medicare or scheduled to receive it for the next ten years. *Wipes brow* whew! I guess that leaves me—in my mid-40s, with a history of cancer and without a steady paycheck for 15 years, so I’m imminent competitively hire-able—in the perfect spot to afford private insurance policies as a senior? I guess it’s a good thing I had children…I’ll need somewhere to live when my IRA (since Social Security is in the crosshairs as well) goes almost exclusively to my medical needs. Multiply that over tens of millions of Gen X-ers and Y-ers and Millennials and suddenly, that doesn’t seem so sustainable for the economy, does it?

And can we please call a moratorium on calling Medicare and Social Security “entitlements”? I’m so sick of that bull excrement. There is nothing “entitled” about having taxes taken out of every paycheck to a trust fund that will enable one to live through one’s golden years without resorting to eating catfood or wearing a Walmart greeter’s vest because the idea of a true retirement is out of the realm of possibility. The only entitlement I see is the white privilege of the Beltway establishment, unwilling to actually be honest about the consequences of such destructive Republican policies.

Below, Rep. Eric Cantor says things that will make you want to vomit on Fox News.
 

 
Cartoon via Bart Cop

 
Now in its 80th year, Afri-Cola, Germany’s answer to those other well-known soft drinks, has used some wonderfully thirst-quenchin’ advertising to promote itself over the years. None more bizarre than this lip-smackin’ beauty from 1968, which says everything you need to know about the sixties and the “sexy-mini-super-flower-power-pop-op-cola”, Afri-Cola in sixty seconds.
 

 
With thanks to Steve Duffy
 

 
It’s been a busy year for Anne Pigalle, who follows up the recent release of her brilliant album, L’Amerotica, with L’âme érotique, a selection of twenty-one erotically charged poems, each with their own musical accompaniment. The poems deal with love, sex, and soul. It’s a fabulous oeuvre, and range from the personal (“You Give Me Asthma”, “Lunch”) through the comic and the Surreal to the sexually explicit (“Saint Orgasm”, “X Amount” and “Erotica de toi”).

Throughout is Anne Pigalle’s richly seductive voice that sounds intimate enough to kiss. It’s a fabulous mix, and for fans of the legendary Miss Pigalle, it is a must-have. For first timers, it’s a breathless, arousing and unforgettable introduction.

Anne Pigalle’s L’âme érotique is now available on i-tunes.

To celebrate the release of L’âme érotique, the fabulous Anne Pigalle will hold An Amérotique Salon on 21th april 2011 - at the Idler Academy, 81 Westbourne Park Rd. London W2, check here for details.
 

‘Cunt Me In’ - Anne Pigalle from ‘L’âme érotique’
 

 
‘Are You Real?’ - Anne Pigalle from ‘L’âme érotique’
 
Previously on DM

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.
 

 
Curiouser, and curiouser… The Daily Mail reports on a memo that appears “to prove that aliens did land in New Mexico.”

A bizarre memo that appears to prove that aliens did land in New Mexico prior to 1950 has been published by the FBI. The bureau has made thousands of files available in a new online resource called The Vault.

Among them is a memo to the director from Guy Hottel, the special agent in charge of the Washington field office in 1950.

The memo has been published on the FBI website. In the memo, whose subject line is ‘Flying Saucers’, Agent Hottel reveals that an Air Force investigator had stated that ‘three so-called flying saucers had been recovered in New Mexico’.

The investigator gave the information to a special agent, he said. The FBI has censored both the agent and the investigator’s identity.

Agent Hottel went on to write: ‘They were described as being circular in shape with raised centers, approximately 50 feet in diameter.

‘Each one was occupied by three bodies of human shape but only 3 feet tall,’ he stated.

The bodies were ‘dressed in a metallic cloth of a very fine texture. Each body was bandaged in a manner similar to the blackout suits used by speed flyers and test pilots.’

He said that the informant, whose identity was censored in the memo, claimed the saucers had been found in New Mexico ‘due to the fact that the Government has a very high-powered radar set-up in that area and it is believed the radar interferes with the controlling mechanism of the saucers’.

He then stated that the special agent did not attempt to investigate further.

The release of the secret memo is likely to fuel conspiracy theorists’ claims of a government cover-up.

The town of Roswell in New Mexico became infamous after reports that a flying saucer had crashed in the desert near a military base there on or around July 2, 1947.

The bodies of aliens were said to have been recovered and autopsied by the U.S. military, but American authorities allegedly covered the incident up

Military authorities issued a press release, which began: ‘The many rumours regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence officer of the 509th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc.’

The headlines screamed: ‘Flying Disc captured by Air Force.’ Yet, just 24 hours later, the military changed their story and claimed the object they’d first thought was a ‘flying disc’ was a weather balloon that had crashed on a nearby ranch.

Amazingly, the media and the public accepted the explanation without question. Roswell disappeared from the news until the late Seventies, when some of the military involved began to speak out.

Another memo published in The Vault from 1947 claimed that an object ‘purporting to be a flying disc’ had been recovered near Roswell.

The disc was ‘hexagonal in shape’ and ‘suspended from a balloon by a cable’, according to the memo, marked as ‘Urgent’, to the FBI director.

The memo noted that the disc resembled a weather balloon - but claimed that a telephone conversation between the Air Force and the field office ‘had not [word censored] borne out this belief’.

The disc and balloon were being transported to Wright Field for further inspection, the memo noted.

It added that the information was being flagged up because of ‘national interest’ in the episode, and noting that both NBC and the AP were set to break the story that day.

Of course, such loose-leaf documents are easy to forge, but it should be possible to confirm the existence of “Agent Hottel”. If it is a forgery, I doubt it will effect the interest in Roswell or, stories of alien landings. Indeed, the Daily Mail ran another story on Roswell in 2007, in which an officer’s deathbed confession confirmed extraterrestrials had landed back in 1947. This report can be read here.
 

 

 
Disturbed? Aroused? Both? Find more chicks with Steve Buscemi eyes here.
 

 

 
Previously on DM

 
More ladies with Steve Buscemi eyes after the jump…
 
With thanks to the divinely talented Steve Duffy!