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Lady Gaga's Telephone is terrifically trashy in a Tarantino-like way with LaChapelle lurid colours and unapologetic product placements.

From Tel Aviv, via Oslo and Paris, Terry Poison deliver cosmopolitan electro-pop beats.

Smutty & strange. the videos of Miika Lommi.

If that psychotropic substance commonly called coffee were illegal, in the web fantasy of a manic marketeer. It's black sunshine, 100% organic.

Jason Lee captures the faces, places & spaces that drive the mythopoeia at the heart of the American guttersnipe dream.

Joi Ito on neoteny:

"Neoteny is the retention of childlike attributes in adulthood. Human beings are younger longer than any other creature on earth, taking almost twenty years until we become adults. While we retain many our childlike attributes into adulthood most of us stop playing when we become adults and focus on work. When we are young, we learn, we socialize, we play, we experiment, we are curious, we feel wonder, we feel joy, we change, we grow, we imagine, we hope. In adulthood, we are serious, we produce, we focus, we fight, we protect and we believe in things strongly. The future of the planet is becoming less about being efficient, producing more stuff and protecting our turf and more about working together, embracing change and being creative. We live in an age where people are starving in the midst of abundance and our greatest enemy is our own testosterone driven urge to control our territory and our environments. It's time we listen to children and allow neoteny to guide us beyond the rigid frameworks and dogma created by adults."

File under qualities for the 21st century.

Freaky & fresh, brash & bizarre, spooky & sponsored, and taking over the interweb with their next level sounds Die Antwoord are, in the words of this rap-rave crew, “a lovable, mongrel-like entity made in South Africa, the love-child of many diverse cultures, black, white, coloured and alien, all pumped into one wild and crazy journey down the crooked path to enlightenment'.

"Different people find Die Antwoord in different things" . Yeah. Take a stride on the zef side.

From the myriad of posts and articles following in the sad wake of his demise, two from the Times: Death, S&M, violence and religion were all there on Alexander McQueen's catwalk and Alexander McQueen fashion label faces closure.

(more here)

The art aspects of early New York punk, captured in this digital reprint of the catalogue from a seminal 1978 exhibition.

In Still Lovers Elena Dorfman explores the relationship between men (and women) and their hyper-realistic dolls. Beguiling.

I've quoted from William Dalrymple's "Nine Lives" before. It's a great book, full of gems, like this one:

"Hinduism has always held that there are many paths to God. Yet for many centuries there has been a central tension between the ascetic and the sensual. The poet-prince Bhartrihari of Ujjain, who probably lived in the fourth century AD, oscillated no fewer than seven times between the rigours of monastic renunciation and the abandon of the courtly sensualist. 'There are two paths,' he wrote. 'The devotion of the sage, which is lovely because it overflows with the nectarous waters of the knowledge of truth' and 'the lusty undertaking of touching with one's palm that hidden part in the firm laps of lovely limbed women, with great expanses of breasts and thighs'. 'Tell us decisively which we ought to attend upon?' he asks in the Shringarashataka: 'The sloping sides of the mountains in the wilderness? Or the buttocks of a woman abounding in passion?'"

Or as William Blake once wrote: "The nakedness of woman is the work of God."