Scissor Sister Jake Shears Hanging Out on BUTT

Scissor Sister Jake Shears will be featured on the cover of the coming issue of BUTT, the quarterly gay journal which is equal parts raunch and literary interviews. This time it’s by the fabulous designer/photographer Hedi Slimane. This fall issue – no. 24 – will be out late August. With loads of contributions by BUTT readers and interviews with Jake Shears from New York, Rosa von Praunheim from Berlin, Will Munro from Toronto and ‘Your Big Dick Host’ from Brooklyn.

Uh…hanging out literally.

Listen to Jamie Liddell ‘Jim’

British crooner Jamie Lidell rings in the weekend by posting his brand-new tracks from his new album “Jim” on MySpace. The song is called “Little Bit Feel Good” and if this sun-splashed soul-pop stomper is a good indication of the rest of this new Lidell LP then we’re in for a treat.

Recorded in Berlin, Los Angeles and Paris, Lidell once again hooks up with producers Mocky and Gonzales to polish his raw ideas and turn them into a collection of catchy, hit-worthy songs. A press release describes “Jim” as an album that “will switch you on in the morning, move you on the dance-floor and take you down in the small hours. It’s a bold, promiscuously diverse album, mixing up gospel grooves, sweetly sung and fiercely passionate soul, delicately moving ballads, thumping early R & B, synthed-up disco, and even a touch of “hillbilly funk.'” Sounds like a winner to me.

Lidell adds in the statement, “The most important thing was the vocal, to capture the balance of me delivering the songs with full gusto, and at the same time retaining the grain and the grit.”

You can listen to some of his songs here

Mile-High Skyscrapers and Floating Cities That Never Were

Wired.com has compiled a portfolio of “promised skylines we never got to see — and a few that may yet come to be — as seen from the imagined eyes of those who live there.” The picture above is Frank Lloyd Wright’s “This Illinois”, which was supposed to shoot 5,278 feet above Chicago. Other “alternate reality architectures” include

Welthauptstadt Germania: The projected renewal of the German capital Berlin by Adolf Hitler

X-Seed 4000: Home to 500,000 of Tokyo’s finest.

The Arcologies, 2070: Sets of architectural design principles aimed toward the design of enormous habitats (hyperstructures) of extremely high human population density.