Recession schmession. At the Art Basel events in Miami, the champagne is still flowing like Fiji water. From the rumor that UBS would not tone down their annual dinner and gala -- even amid scandal speculation -- to the abundance of caviar on hors d'ouvre trays, it all smells like decadence to me. Cartier hosted a preview of “Diamonds, Gold and Dreams,” an approximately seven-minute film by David Lynch projected inside the Cartier Dome in the Miami Beach Botanical Gardens. The transfixing film features cascading diamonds and Cartier jewels on 180 degrees of ceiling projection with an equally mesmerizing score. It played once every hour, leaving partygoers hungry for more. The Dome, built specifically for this event and film, took two weeks to construct and will be disassembled directly after Basel.

By way of these fantastic folks, GOOD Magazine brings us a nifty, albeit horrific, itemization of the long-term costs of war that would make the most apolitical design-savvy aesthete pause as it's not nearly as visceral as David LaChapelle's "Auguries of Innocence". Remember this video when Biden and Palin are squaring off tomorrow evening.

A self-professed surrealist, David LaChapelle has a talent for skewing close to reality when need be -- as in, whenever Amy Winehouse calls on him to direct a music video -- and making that reality look eye-popping, campy, and cogent to boot. But he shines the most not through his MTV cache, but through his own visual artwork. It's within the galleries where he's truly entitled to toy with and reshape reality.

When photographer David LaChapelle sought a new muse—or at least someone, as he puts it, “a-musing”—to join the ranks of Pam, Courtney, and Amanda—he found his love doll of inspiration in a Savannah art student named Molly Gottschalk, who boasted the coolest personal page on the coolest of Internet websites. She now lives with the mad-hatter of visual surrealism in his Beverly Hills home. This is their love story. It is unconventional.

For more images of David LaChapelle and his carnivale of genius, click here!


Kodachrome: Gottschalk, having a rare moment of peace.

This is the ultimate social-networking love story. It’s the tale of how David, the luckiest guy in the world, met Molly, the luckiest girl in the planet, on the internet, and how they lived happily ever after (well, for now, anyway). The thing is, Molly’s prince, well, he wasn’t like the other guys. For one, one of his closest friends is a transsexual icon of New York nightlife. And another best friend is Courtney Love. Well, was. It’s a long story. It could be a colorful blog post, but it is, in fact, a story, with a beginning, middle and… Oops! It hasn’t ended yet!