Ten years of German photographer Jürgen Teller’s candid, glamorous photo campaigns for Marc Jacobs’ men’s and women’s collections have been collated into one cohesive 576-page fashion bible. This book does an excellent job of detailing just how significant this collaboration has been for fashion, featuring appearances from the likes of Sofia Coppola, Charlotte Rampling, Meg White, Thurston Moore, Rufus Wainwright, William Eggleston, and Winona Ryder.

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One of the most intriguing stories I’ve come across this year is about a young artist called Yonlu, born Vinicius Gageiro Marques in the town of Porto Alegre, in Brazil. His story is short but fascinating. As it goes, this sixteen year old songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and virtual artist locked himself in his bathroom, signed on to one of the various suicide forums he belonged to on the Internet, and took his own life, remaining online until the very end. After his death, his father went through his computer and found numerous musical creations, including the songs that make up his debut album through Luaka Bop. It’s an amazing listen and very ahead of its time.

Some people are talented, others are just truly remarkable. German artist Edgar Muller makes these three-dimensional apocalyptic fantasy street art in cities across the world. His work is reminiscent of that of English artist, Julian Beever.

Skagen are a Danish-born design company based out of Nevada with an innovative and clean approach to their work. Their trademark product is this titanium mesh watch, which I’ve worn with pride for years. But they also produce different models of sunglasses and jewellery. When so many products these days offer extra gimmicks and weigh you down by their size, Skagen strip it all back and, in doing so, hoist themselves far above the pack.

The latest project of former punk rock drummer Andreas Asingh from Copenhagen, I literally stumbled across Small through my participation at the By:Larm music conference in Oslo. As one of the many up-and-coming bands in Denmark, their sound is a cross between M83, Remote, and Giorgio Moroder; captivating and adventurous, and full of strong melodies.

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The ECM label has been a long time favorite of mine. Apart from releasing and working with some of the most monumental jazz and avant-garde artists of the last forty years, such as Bill Frissel, Keith Jarrett and Jan Garbarek, it has also been dedicated to fostering new talent from all corners of the earth. ECM started out of Munich in 1969 and has been growing strong ever since. But ECM isn’t just one of those boring run-of-the-mill jazz labels. They constantly blur the lines between electronic, pop, world and experimental genres and create very distinctive CD artwork, which is what makes their releases so easy to identify. Apart from artist classics from Jan Garabarek and Keith Jarrett, other releases I’ve been enjoying lately are Arild Andersen’s Live At The Belleville and Arve Henriksen’s Cartogrpahy.

This nifty little piece of technology allows you to indulge into music whilst on the go. For any music freak, this iPod dock is an essential to the good life. It has a genuinely innovative approach to music. The novelty comes from the fact that the Gear4 DUO can be physically split into two pieces, with the bulky back left behind and the front acting like a portable stereo speaker system. Black and sleek, it is not only well designed but sounds great. As it’s only meant for domestic enjoyment and outside use, it still retains the quality of high class audio. It also comes with a remote and a rechargeable lithium-ion battery, so you can picnic whilst banging your head to Iggy Pop! How cool is that?

Paul Steel has slipped into my top twenty artists for 2008, right at the bottom of the final innings. I heard one of his songs, In a Coma, via BBC radio, and I am still in paralytic shock. With all the absolute sludge being released over the last twelve months, it’s so refreshing to hear music that is colourful, melodic and challenging to listen to. Forget Vampire Weekend and Fleet Foxes, this album has come from a 20 year-old Brighton native, who has taken the best elements of Brian Wilson, Elvis Costello and XTC, and transformed his album into a world of delightful tunes and animated wonders. This is what one of Brian Wilson’s band members said when he heard In a coma: ‘It just @$%^&* freaked me out! Holy @$%^&* bananas!’ What’s so upsetting is that Steel was subsequently dropped from his major label after releasing this album, but that’s ok. He’s now a truly independent genius in music.

A founding father of blues and a very influential figure for bands as varied as Led Zeppelin and Nirvana, Leadbelly lived his life to the absolute fullest (including singing his way out of prison after apparently murdering someone!) A new book of photographs and pictures commemorates his life in meticulous detail. This beautifully bound hard back book contains a ‘treasure trove of rare unpublished family and other photographs, news clippings, concert programs, personal correspondence (including letters from Woody Guthrie), record albums, awards, and other memorabilia.’ Forget the White Stripes, go an buy a Leadbelly CD. You won’t regret it, As the late, great George Harrison is quoted as saying in the book ‘No Lead Belly, no Beatles’. Need we say more.

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Alec Soth is a huge inspiration on me, a contemporary American photographer who dabbles in the grim realities of life, but always manages to coat them just enough not to depress the hell out of you. Some of his photographs are openly unbiased views of the human race, while others are just statements about how we live and the environment that surrounds us. Two books I received recently take my breath away: one is Soth’s Columbian photographic memoirs Dog Days, Bogota; the other is his peculiar photo diary, Niagara. Both books mix deep elements of tragic realism molded with Soth’s own thumbprint of bold lighting techniques and wide exposures.

Niagara contains anonymous love letters and suicide letters of common misfits and locals who share nothing that special except that they live near the most beautiful waterfall in the world. As one women notes, ‘I can’t go on like this. I hate you always. Take Care and Drop Dead’.

Dog Days, Bogota combines elements of clear desperation in the faces of the local Bogotans with astonishing landscape shots, like the one below.

The Gorilla Pod is a nifty invention, totally useful and practical at the same time. It comes from a innovative production group called Joby, based out of San Francisco, California, who started pioneering these products in 2006. It is essentially a tripod with a difference: what this tripod does differently to all other tripods is that it can hang itself wherever it wants. It looks like something out of the jungle with its ribbed and motionable bod — hence the name, no doubt. This animated product wraps itself around almost any surface, giving you a 360 degree view. Pretty amazing stuff.

I don’t know how I stumbled upon this, but it’s fantastic! Totally London and totally futuristic grime, dub step energy. It’s the debut visual feature from director Jonathan Howells and documents an audio visual journey through the margins of urban London, soundtracked by dubstep and grime from the forthcoming Dusk and Blackdown CD, Margins Music. It features grime MC Durrty Goodz, singer Farrah and a cameo from Blackdown himself and was shot on location on the edges of London, including Southall, Green Lanes, the Isle of Dogs and Edmonton.

The street art in Berlin, where I’m living, is just amazing, as these photos suggest.

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‘This is daydream music, you can’t listen to it without going off somewhere’, are the direct words from electronic wizard, Bibio. This beautiful and gentle record comes from Matt Cutler, who seems heavily influenced by WARP, 80s electro artists ,and everything in between. But somewhere down the line, listening to Lone makes you feel he is doing something distinct and unique. Even though I don’t smoke, I feel heavily stoned and happy listening to this album. Both of which are good things.

In turbulent times like these, it’s so refreshing to witness a movie that puts a lot of it into perspective. I saw Taken last night, and my legs are still shaking! It’s just riveting on every level. Liam Neeson is a tour de Force, but the real brilliance comes from Luc Beeson’s (The Professional, The Fifth Element) spellbinding script. The film deals with the heavy themes of revenge and justice in a very inhumane world. Liam Neeson’s daughter. who is 17 and beautiful, is kidnapped on a innocent trip to Paris and sold into the sex slave trade by Albanians. Ex-CIA agent Neeson embarks on an earth-shattering tirade of violence and revenge to get her back. And the choreography of the action and pursuit he undertakes is astonishing! Simply one of the best films of the year!

We have featured Tokyo Flash watches before but they recently launched a new generation of time keepers, which are innovative and ahead of its time [pun intended]. The first new watch is the Rogue, which has a vivid green LED light guide that presents the time through a labyrinth of connecting LCD blocks. The outer ring of small dots represents minutes, with every fifth dot being slightly smaller to distinguish five minute groups. The other new watch is the Pimp Star Performer, a beautiful concept based around the twin pursuits of drinking martinis and making money! With its solid stainless material and glass made out of mineral crystal with mirrored digits, this really is a ‘pimp’ watch.

Occasionally you hear something that puts everything musically into perspective. This time it’s come to me via an unknown, obscure Greek recording artist who lived between 1890 to 1943. Marika Papagika was the quintessential East European Bohemian, performing as a gypsy at cafes around Greece and recording for Victor Records in 1913. But none of these recordings were ever found. Her late husband set up a small music venue in New York on 34th St, between 7th and 8th Avenues. I found this one track recently, which is not only haunting and emotional but enduring, even in this day and age. Fascinating!

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German-born Andreas Gursky is a giant in the photography world. His masterpieces have consistently dazzled and bewildered, focused as they are on making the incomprehensible believable. Gursky’s photos theorizes how architecture can shape people’s life by having a decisive influence on their social and cultural structures, in the process underlying how fleeting and fictional today’s values are. His latest book — simply titled Architecture — is accompanied with lengthy essays about his works and is an engrossing introduction to this master photographer.

Marking the Land was named one of the ten best photo books of the year by American Photo magazine. Photographer Jim Dow is no stranger to critical acclaim, and he has a knack of making you feel sorrow and emptiness in his most current book which focuses its attention on the mass immigration of people from country to cities, and the desolation that fills the romantic countryside of the Northern Plains. It forces us all to rethink our conceptions of America’s forgotten frontier. Jim Dow began making pilgrimages to this remote territory in 1981 and, with a commission from the North Dakota Museum of Art, took photographs of the passing human presence on the land. This is a simple but evocative book full images of absolute barrenness.

Right now, the 2008 Beijing Olympics are cleaning up the mess left behind from the millions of people that passed through their city. Their forty billion dollar sporting event has come to a close and fans from around the world will take away memories of an interesting city that opened up to the world like it has never done before. One person in particular, who used China as a backdrop for his phenomenal photography project, was a French photographer by the name of Ambroise Tézenas. He made several visits to China between 2001 and 2005, taking truly innovative photographs. The subsequent book — Beijing: Theatre of the People — is a must, not just for lovers of Eastern culture and photography, but for people inquisitive about ‘a city caught between two worlds, an ancient past and a frenzied present’.
His work reminds me of Dan Holdsworth and Alec Soth, as Tézenas delves deep into the urban Chinese landscape, making some of his shots look otherworldly.