There’s been so much crap on television as of late, that when the new season of Mad Men aired last night it was like a fucking epiphany beaming out across an electric horizon. Mad Men remains brilliant all the way across the board, writing, acting and the art direction is mind blowing, it’s seriously off the charts. The show inhabits a matte filmic, cool blue mid-century modernist world of synthetics, supermarkets, TV and the revolution in mass communication. Everything is styled to look extremely sad, extremely beautiful or a combination of both. Am I insane or did we catch a bit of Gregory Crewson thrown in for good measure, it’s really pulling from so many sources.

Read the online chat with Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner, who identifies with the character of Peggy the most, but wishes he were Don Draper. The inclusion of Frank O’Hara’s “Meditations In An Emergency” was fascinating, looked to be one of the original 900 paperbound copies of which American poet John Ashbery said; “To ignore the rules is always a provocation, and since the poetry itself was crammed with provocative sentiments, it was met with the friendly silence reserved for the thoroughly unacceptable guest.”

“I Have a Rendezvous With Death” Director Joseph Kosinski delivers the first trailer for Gears of War 2. A sequel scheduled for release in November 2008. Watch the sickness at G4tv.

Warhol Stars reports that “Current TV is currently showing a preview clip from The Cool School (dir. Morgan Neville) – a film about Irving Blum and Walter Hopp’s Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles which hosted the first solo exhibition of Warhol’s Soup Cans in 1962 and became a refuge for artists that were considered too unconventional for New York’s traditional style. The film was shown last year at the London Film Festival and is now available on DVD as a download from iTunes or through the usual outlets. Watch the Clip Here“.

Something I rarely talk about on my site is the amount of reading I do, and yes, I’m horrible at updating my Good Reads profile. I usually pour over several books at once, i.e. three, four, sometimes five titles that capture and hold my attention for 3-7 days. The statement is not a secret brag, it’s just an admission or method of reading that tricks the part of my brain that tends to be a bit more A.D.D. The stack of reading material gets carried with me, or sits handily on my desk at work packed full of bookmarks and sticky notes, until the end of the week when the final pages are read, and the whole production gets returned to the library, passed on to friends, or put on my bookshelf. Yes, I do need a Kindle.

Trust, it’s not all Cervantes, Defoe, Swift and Dickens, there’s even an occasional Oprah Book Club Selection (not The Secret) comic book, magazine, graphic novel, or what I classify as “other” i.e smut. So much for intellectual pursuits. I’d love to say that I’m reacquainting myself with “Brideshead Revisited” but that would be like a gigantic step back in time; all that Catholicism expressed in a secular literary form, the wonderful ambiguity of Charles and Sebastian’s relationship that fascinated me to no end when I was a 15 year old carrying around a sketchbook and spray painting my mail man shoes silver. Well, the Charles and Sebastian thing is still interesting, and yes I will see the film.

Waugh served up some brilliant writing in Brideshead, “naughtiness high on the catalogue of grave sins”, a reference made at one point to Charles’ impatiently anticipating Sebastian’s letters in the manner of one who is love-struck. Stumbling upon that line as a teenager was awe inspiring, a salaciously delicious bit of forbidden fruit. I suppose I had the same reaction to the naughty bits of the “Canterbury Tales” (because we were forced to read that in High School) almost everything by Tennessee Williams and of course, the dirty passages from Judy Blume’s “Wifey”.

Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading? The New York Times contrasts teen and tween internet heavy reading habits with those of their paper and text loving elders. Marshall McLuhan would call this, “Information overload equals pattern recognition.” We are a nation of skimmers, no doubt school aged Americans are fueled by school systems teaching to the test (they have no choice) and laboriously uncreative state and national standards. Fortunately I live in a place where the public library system is absolutely stellar, and what can only be described as a sign of the times, patrons are not lined up along the book shelves, but waiting in line for computers. The technological gap is being filled publicly. Yes even though you are now homeless due to the foreclosure crisis, you can use the library to update your Facebook account.

That said, I still believe reading is a revolutionary act. Librarians are not and have never been shy retiring shushers’ they are quirky custodians of the mysterious whether it’s online or off. Come on you’ve seen The Desk Set! Although those who are true readers are fully ensconced in their own literary journey that unfolds accidently or fully by design and will probably never have to speak to a librarian. The days of stumbling on to James St James’ “Disco Bloodbath” or picking up White’s A Boy’s Own Story because it has a hot cover, just may be coming to a end.

Lego Rendering of the Herzog & de Meuron Architekten, BSA/SIA/ETH (HdeM) designed stadium for the 2008 Summer Olympics. Please click above for a larger version. Thank You!

Flyers handed out to advertise Barack Obama’s speech at the Victory Column at Tiergarten Park in Berlin not “Messiah Complex” but a crisp cross hybrid of (Jan Tschichold, Bauhaus) and Russian Constructivism that pulls from early 20th century German design and mid-century modern European work. The two posters embrace the ideals of the Bauhaus in that they are clearly functional, economical and above all honest in their use of space. They are an expansive unification of art and technology that rejects the overblown excess of the Bush Administration’s last 8 years and the bourgeois McCain campaign. Love the nostalgic nod to the accelerating internationalization of American culture in the postwar period. More thoughtful analysis about the flyers over at Meaningful Distraction — including a larger image of Obama’s Berlin poster alongside images of two Bauhaus posters from 1923 and 1928.

Last week was the 63rd anniversary of the first atomic bomb explosion at 5:30 a.m., 120 miles south of Albuquerque, New Mexico, 6 years later on that day, J.D. Salinger’s first and only novel, The Catcher in the Rye, was published, coincidence, I think not. It was also the birthday of comedienne Phyllis Diller, born in Lima, Ohio and that of journalist Hunter S. Thompson, whose father was an insurance agent. Forget Wii-Fit, perfect push-ups, and your gym, in just 7 days Charles Atlas can STILL make you a man, that is if you’re getting sand kicked in your face.

The Nerves – Hanging On the Telephone (1976)
The Nerves as featured on The Killed By Death Records site from their self-released self-titled four-song EP. The Nerves were notable because they were the founding vanguard of the LA pop scene that eventually produced The Knack, The Breakaways and The Plimsouls. Nerves’ guitarist Jack Lee penned the soon to be UK Top 5 “Hanging On the Telephone” made popular by Blondie. I love Blondie, but the Nerves version sounds damn good.

Stressticles
Oh the secret life of novelty items and straight people, or shop for the soon to be hosted program, the worlds funniest boobs, butts and boners. Freud would have a field day; The Giant Stress Boob, Stressticles, get rid of your frustrations, squeeze testicles and feel your stress just float away? Questionable indeed.

WordPress for iPhone App
As of July 21 this App is still “In Review” but could get approved by Apple at any time. The App provides an easy way for users to edit their self hosted or wordpress.com blog on the move. Write posts, add images from the iPhone camera or your library, tweek settings, preview posts and publish.

There’s Lots of Money in Those Old iPhones
The NYTimes reports that, “With the introduction of the 3G iPhone, the original phone is officially yesterday’s gadget, which should mean that its resale value is plummeting. But it turns out that because of some unusual factors, demand for those phones is holding up surprisingly well.”

Chuck Palahniuk Talks Sex Dolls, Strippers And…
The disciple of ‘Dangerous Writing’, Chuck Palahniuk, reveals his unusual creative process, and the one place that he won’t go in his notoriously bad-taste fiction.

Buffalo’s Boot Bird House
My nerdastic alter ego is emerging. These unique bird houses were hand-crafted from work boots, otherwise destined for the dump. The boots will welcome house wrens & other smaller birds to an exciting new place to build a nest. Too junk yard chic for you?

James Hewlett Comic Book Hero
From Anarchic comic strops to album covers, Hollywood movies to Royal Opera House, Jamie Hewlett’s angular images can be found in every imaginable art form. With Monkey Journey To The West opening in London next week The Guardian takes a look at the 2006 Designer of the Year’s career so far…

The Dakota Mint 10 Room Residence
This is most definitely a doorman building. A cool 24 million gets you into the legendary Dakota on Central Park West and 72nd Street, and one of the largest spaces in the building too. You’ll probably want to go for a bit of a remodel.

Le Corbusier in Legos
Maybe architecture really is becoming more accessible. Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye lovingly, and amazingly rendered in Legos. The interiors, doors, windows, et al are lovingly created by the ingenious Matija Grguric.

In The Mod
Looking for beautiful colors, search Flickr, capture images via your WebCam or drag-n-drop images from your computer. Click a button and the colors are saved to Illustrator, Photoshop or as an XML file for future processing.

In Radiohead’s new video ‘House of Cards’, there were no cameras on set. Instead, two scanning technologies were used to capture 3D images. Geometric Informatics scanning systems produced structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne LIDAR system that uses multiple lasers was used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In the video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes. Watch the making-of video to learn about how the video was made and the various technologies that were used to capture and render 3D data. Google has more.

TechCrunch looks at numerous iPhone applications ranging from basic games to complex GPS-enabled social networking applications. From Cocktails to UrbanSpoon these Apps have something useful for everyone; I’m quite fond of Pandora and I heard Last_FM’s App is even better.

Also, if you’re a .mac subscriber like me, you’re getting a free month. An e-mail from Apple arrived today, Apple would like to apologize to loyal customers and express their appreciation for our patience by giving all current subscribers of .mac, now mobile_me an automatic 30-day extension to their MobileMe subscription free of charge. The extension will be reflected in account settings within the next few weeks. Mmmkay, I can live with that…

Just in case you’ve forgotten, this is a gay website, one where I strive for a little balance. Let me present to you a lovely photo of a group of Turkish wrestlers. Reuters reports that wrestlers rub their bodies with oil before competing at Kirkpinar Arena during the annual traditional oil wrestling tournament in Sarayici in the western Turkish city of Edirne July 5, 2008. More than 1,800 wrestlers competing in different categories attended the event.

Paper Purses from Hermes for Download
French fashion house Hermes has recently launched a series of their Kelly bags available for download over the net. The bags’ designs are available in pdf format which you can print out, cut and fold to get your own Kelly Bag.

According to Inhabitat Dancefloor Generates Electricity at London’s first Eco-Disco. Cate Trotter writes; “Sustainability got sexier last week as Coldcut and Jade Jagger hosted the opening of Surya in King’s Cross. The Club4Climate project is London’s first taste of eco-friendly clubbing, making clubbers happy in the knowledge that their organic beverage-induced booty shaking can generate 60% of the energy needed to run the club. The venue’s most exciting innovation is the piezoelectric dancefloor, which uses quartz crystals and ceramics to turn clubbers’ movement into electricity! The rest of the power needed will come from a wind turbine and solar energy system, with any surplus used to power private homes in the area. The club will also be installing the latest air flush, waterless urinals, low flush toilets and automatic taps to ensure maximum water saving plus less greedy air conditioning units.”

Yea, I nearly lost my cookies this morn’ reading Joe My God via Atomic Gay Wonk. Turns out Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R-NC) wants to rename the current AIDS relief bill after Jesse Helms. That is strike the late lawmaker Henry Hyde’s name from an AIDS bill before the Senate and replace it with that of the (now dead, thank God Satan took ya’) homophobic Republican Senator Jesse Helms. Way to go Liddy, you’ve now secured your place in hell, right between Jerry Falwell and the guy who invented aluminum siding. Nearly speechless really, how can this woman sleep at night? Can’t say it any better than Joe:

“Jesse Helms, the man who in 2002 announced that he’d changed his mind about AIDS funding for Africa, but not for American gays, because homosexuality “is the primary cause of the doubling and redoubling of AIDS cases in the United States. Many people hold Ronald Reagan responsible for adding to the early AIDS death toll by his inaction on the pandemic, but it was Helms’ actions in thwarting early research that inarguably hastened the demise of many thousands of Americans. How many of my friends, of your friends, would be alive today if the life-saving medications had arrived just one fucking year earlier?”

An Italian court has ruled the government must pay 100,000 euros (79,981 pounds) in damages to a man who was told to retake a driving test because he was homosexual. When 26 year-old Danilo Giuffrida told doctors he was gay at his medical examination for military service, they passed the information to the transport ministry, who told him he must repeat his driving test or have his license withdrawn due to his “sexual identity disturbance.”

Giuffrida agreed to re-take his test, passed it for a second time, but the ministry renewed his licence for just one year rather than the usual 10 years because of his homosexuality.

The Onion has always done better satire than the New Yorker i.e. Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Disastrous Presidency? Well, this is The New Yorker magazine cover for the July 21st issue, entitled “The Politics of Fear,” in which artist Barry Blitt satirizes the use of scare tactics and misinformation in the Presidential election to derail Barack Obama’s campaign. The new Yorker said in a statement, “Our cover ‘The Politics of Fear’ combines a number of fantastical images about the Obamas and shows them for the obvious distortions they are. The burning flag, the nationalist-radical and Islamic outfits, the fit-bump, the portrait on the wall, all of them echo one attack or another. Satire is part of what we do, and it is meant to bring things out into the open, to hold up a mirror to prejudice, the hateful, and the absurd. And that’s the spirit of this cover.” The reader of the same issue will also see that inside there are two very serious articles on Barack Obama inside—Hendrick Hertzberg’s Comment, ‘The Flip Flop Flap,’ and Ryan Lizza’s 15,000-word reporting piece on the candidate’s political education and rise in Chicago.”

Stranger in a strange strange land, Obama has played up the fact that he is perceived as an outsider. Unfortunately when you start pulling on the anti-establishment tag with an over-the-top discourse, done poorly, the satire degrades and starts to look…nasty. To quote John Nichols “The Beat Satire or Smear: Muslim Barack, Black Panther Michelle” in The Nation: “The proper response to The New Yorker cover is not to whine about what is tasteless or offensive but rather to ask: Why do artists and editors at a magazine that clearly sympathizes with Obama think satire is necessary at this point? The answer is that Barack Obama has yet to fully or functionally introduce himself to the American people. When and if he does, with a full and frank discussion of his roots, his experience and, hopefully, his belief that being described as a Muslim is not in and of itself a smear, Obama will be embraced even more warmly than he has been up to this point. The same goes for Michelle, whose abilities and insights have yet to be well displayed by a campaign that ought to be making a lot more use of this remarkable woman.”

I’ve been covering Banksy on this site since 2004, it comes as no surprise that a British newspaper claims that the decade long quest to find the true identity of underground graffiti artist Banksy has ended. The Mail on Sunday reported that Banksy is a former Bristol public schoolboy Robin Gunningham, 34.

In a report based on interviews with friends, former workmates and even Banksy’s enemies, the newspaper said it spent more than a year gathering evidence. The newspaper supposedly traced the artist by using a photo that purportedly showed him at work in Jamaica in 2004. The photo taken by Peter Dean Rickards and was shown to people who knew Gunningham, with some confirming it was him.

The Jamaican photo has been floating around for some time, back in 2004, The Wooster Collective published the photos along with an interview of the photographer Peter Dean Rickards who is also known as Afflicted. Wooster’s editors decided to pull the story and delete the interview, you can read Wooster Collective’s statement via the Web Archive (scroll down). When the Mark Ecko produced Complex Website attempted to publish the Jamaican photo back in May which coincided with a large Banksy article in the New Yorker, they were hit with a cease and desist order from the aptly named “Finers Stephens Innocent”.

Obviously the mystery surrounding the true identity of Banksy has contributed to his work climbing in value. Not too bad for a guy who started out as a street artist but whose work is now coveted by art dealers, celebrities and earns him a fortune. The BBC reports on the identity of Banksy, WATCH VIDEO.

Banksy’s agent Steve Lazarides told The New Yorker that Rickards’ picture did not depict his client, his publicist denied the claims, while closed friends and relatives could neither confirm or deny the man in the photograph is or ever was Banksy or Robin. The alleged artist’s parents feigned a bout of amnesia when asked if they had a son who is named Robin. The artist told Swindle magazine earlier this year; “I have no interest in ever coming out…and besides, it’s a pretty safe bet that the reality of me would be a crushing disappointment to a couple of 15-year-old kids out there.”

Further Reading:
So what if Banksy’s cover has been blown?
From the Guardian: “The identity of the secretive street artist has been outed by a Sunday newspaper and, shock horror, he’s middle class. But does it matter?”

Popaganda artist Ron English’s billboard featuring John and Cindy McCain pasted into a Pfizer Viagra billboard in L.A. two months ago was made all the more relevent by the Los Angeles Times article discussing McCain’s avoidance of the topic of Viagra

The controversy is not whether John McCain uses or would like to use Viagra, but the fact that many health insurance companies will cover the cost of Viagra for men, but not the cost of birth control for women. McCain voted twice (once in 2003 and again in 2005) against a measure that would have required insurance companies to cover birth control for women. When asked about his votes, the Republican said Wednesday that he did not recall those votes. “It’s something that I had not thought much about,” he added.

Ummm, errr…to paraphrase Juxtapose where this item was first spotted; The long and the err… short of it, is that once again, the artist Ron English raised a bit of political awareness a whopping two months before the Times article appeared in print. The liberated billboard was located on Pickford Pl. and LaCienega in L.A..

A runner falls on top of a fighting bull as they take the Estafeta curve during the third running of the bulls of the San Fermin festival in Pamplona today. Charging bulls plowed into piles of fallen thrillseekers Wednesday, goring an American and injuring at least one other person during the annual run.