Anticipating Europe's implosion into austerity, the fashion houses of Paris and Milan have been looking east, each courting China. Here's a triptych of film woven together by oneiric visions of Asia.

Dior has just released Lady Blue Shanghai, a 16 minute film by David Lynch (art direction by John Galliano). Chinese artist Yang Fudong made the nine minute First Spring for Prada. For his part, Karl Lagerfeld, as creative director at Chanel, kept filmmaking in-house with his Paris Shanghai.

(Still from First Spring)

From Colombia to China, via the Gypsy camp on the Casilina in Rome, the photojournalism of Jeff Antebi captures the chaos, the cries and the utter humanity that runs through it all.

Danish fashion brand Forrest & Bob heads to the Hollywood hills with photographer Henrik Adamsen for a sultry spring-summer campaign.

This is a footwork circle. Awesome dance battle out of Chicago. Courtesy of ghettotekz.

(via & via)

Came across Todd Selby's work the other day and just love his visual explorations into the living and work spaces of the creative.

I've been rummaging through his archive and - as an added bonus - indulging in all the bookcases featured. Here are a few (click on each one for their provenance). We all have our fetishes after all.

And to close the loop - yes - I've ordered his book.

"I always like to buy what's out of fashion. I'm very perverse like that." I googled this interview up, after reading with pleasure about Peter Marino - the architect/designer behind some of the most iconic retail spaces in the luxury fashion world, collector of Renaissance and Baroque bronzes among other objects, lover of biker leather and motorbikes - in a discarded mag found earlier on the 11 bus.

"Truckloads of freaks, strippers, art and noodles drive NYC’s Lost Horizon Night Market.... Part 21st-century street carnival, part Burning Man-style artgasm, the Night Market is an empirical example of the participatory culture movement."

In the late 80s, David Hlynsky captured the end of an era by documenting shop windows and signage in Eastern Europe.

Yann Gross takes a look at Ugandan skateboarders and the first skatepark in East Africa, built by local kids in Kitintale. He discusses the project here.

Disney meets the shantytown, superflat is slapped on slums, and Spongebob makes a cameo appearance in Jeff Gillette's Dismayland.

Elsewhere, not far from Eurodisney, Eric Garault takes an empathic look at Parisian bidonvilles.

It was eight years ago today that I made my first blog post. This is what I wrote:

"May Day 2002. The International Workers' Day. Strange concept really, strange celebration. Makes me think of tanks rolling through Moscow on parade, on black and white television, as a child. My grandfather telling me how he had never spent a day unemployed.

An email from a friend earlier today tells me how he was Fed-exed his notice of redundancy. Another casualty of an old economy having drunken sex with new technologies. Unprotected.

From indymedia UK I learn that the cyclists of critical mass are out across the city. From my window on the borders of east london, the sun is streaming through clearer than any media."

There's loads that could be said to mark this anniversary of "notes from somewhere bizarre". About the changes that have happened online, offline and in all the liminal spaces the 21st Century has introduced. Across the intricate interconnectedness of being in this first decade of a novel, accelerated time.

But the industrial ice in my organic gin & supermarket-branded tonic is melting fast. So I'll just post a pretty protest photo instead.