COOL HUNTING®

New Orleans musician Sunpie Barnes divides his time between playing accordion with his band, the Louisiana Sunspots, and New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park, where he's a park ranger. In this video, we get a taste of the mix of blues, zydeco, Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Louisiana music that he plays, as well as the natural settings that inspire him.

Prospect1 is New Orleans first biennial and the largest-ever international contemporary art show in the United States. Similar in style and scope to Venice, the exhibit consists of site-specific art installations, as well as several galleries in museums and elsewhere in the city devoted to it. As the front page of the event's website proclaims, it's designed to bring media attention and tourist dollars to New Orleans, so book your tickets now to get down there before it closes 18 January 2009.

For the inaugural video in our new series of mini-episodes, we're pleased to present a document of the New Orleans-based Billes Architecture's first-ever design competition. We were honored to be invited as a judge and, as you'll see in the video, the results are nothing less than stunning and?perhaps?harbingers of the design future.

Homegrown in Baltimore, Whartscape is a touring music festival featuring nearly one hundred bands, thousands of attendees and a lot of sweat. We were lucky enough to be there for the 3rd annual Whartscape and caught several performances including Ponytail, Double Dagger, Girl Talk and Dan Deacon, the festival's co-founder and main impresario. In an interview with him conducted over iChat, he explains how the police inspired the festival, why people often participate in his shows and the future.

We were recently invited out to Madame Clicquot's estate in Reims, France to learn about the process of making her Veuve Clicquot bubbly. In between boat and helicopter rides, we visited their vineyards and labs with their cellar masters for a behind the scenes look at the scientific process of fermenting their famous grapes. Check out the video for a glimpse at the good life while it still exists.

In a small studio in Brooklyn, novelist-turned-knifemaker Joel Bukiewicz crafts knives of the highest quality under the label Cut Brooklyn. Our video visits Joel in his studio and watches the exceedingly rare craft of cutting and sanding steel to perfection.

Baltimore artrock heroes Ponytail have been blowing up basements from MICA to Pratt for a while now. We included them on our Memorial Day Muxtape (R.I.P.) back in May, but we wanted more. In this video, we spend a sweaty summer weekend with Ponytail at shows in Baltimore and Brooklyn and talk shop over homemade omelets at their house and practice space. We?re hoping to make this a series of cooking with bands, and we?re excited to kick it off with Ponytail.

The world of Brazilian street artists Os Gemeos (aka identical twins Otavio and Gustavo Pandolfo) is a slightly surreal, colorful and wildly-patterned one, populated with people and animals, boats and pyramids and cars and music. In this video we visit their world, interviewing the brothers at work on an installation that took place earlier this year at Deitch Projects in downtown Manhattan. They discuss how they first started working together, the show and the free-form way they make art.

In conjunction with Creative Time, Playing the Building is an installation by David Byrne that transformed a 9,000 square foot abandoned room in Lower Manhattan's Battery Maritime Building into an instrument for the summer. An antique pump organ controls devices that create sounds using the building's infrastructure, including heating pipes, metal beams and pillars. For a special event last month, curator Mark Beasley invited accomplished musicians to perform an improvisational piece with the building. The result is a captivating musical experience.

Last month, Santa Monica's pier hosted 12 hours of performance and installation art, attracting 200,000 revelers for Glow, a public light and sound extravaganza in the style of Paris' Nuit Blanche. This video navigates through both the throngs of people (almost more notable than the art itself) and the many luminous installations dotting the beach and boardwalk. At the far end, Infranatural unveiled "The Amazing Mental Scope," which reads the viewer's emotions and translates them into changing colors on the body of the telescope. Skyglow (Jeff Cain) offered some respite from the crowd, projecting aerial footage of Los Angeles onto the ceiling of a room, which actually required you to stop moving and lie down. Other crowd-pleasers included Dunnage Ball (Peter Tolkin Projects), a sort of illuminated, modern moon-bounce, and Usman Haque's show-stopper "Primal Source." Yes, that's the one with the projections onto the big wall of water that everyone pointed and gasped at. Not featured in our video, but still worth noting, is the award for the best use of glow sticks, which goes to Illumination Migration (Frank Rozasy). Nine hundred and fifty glow sticks were stuck in the sand and rearranged over the course of the night in accordance with the change in tide and migration of grunions.

Tucked in anonymous building on a quiet Berkeley, CA street, June Taylor makes small batches of some of the most mouth-watering jams, preserves, syrups and marmalades we've tasted. In this video, June modestly shares her artisan and old-world techniques, explaining how nature helps dictate exotic flavor combinations like Strawberry and Provencal Lavender and how she takes into consideration even the tiniest of details, such as the shape and size of the pieces of fruit. It's a window into an exceedingly rare level of art and craft.

In this video RISD president John Maeda narrates a visit to Philip Johnson's Glass House in New Canaan, CT. Maeda shares his impressions and talks about how it relates to his thoughts on simplicity. Meanwhile, we explore the the site (there are actually several buildings on the property in addition to the Glass House), shot over a couple picture perfect spring days.

Bringing together 24 street artists from all over the world, Electric Windows is a semi-permanent installation of large-scale work exhibited on the exterior windows of a 19th century blanket factory in Beacon, NY. We traveled to the small town earlier this year to meet some of the artists and watch them make "urban art" in a not-so-urban setting. We also interview one of the organizers, Daniel Weise, a vet of the NYC street artist scene who recently moved to Beacon and co-founded Beacon's Open Space gallery there.

A massage-based video game controller, panties with wings and an inflatable dress were just a few of the concepts exhibited recently at the NYC gallery Eyebeam to launch Sabine Seymour's new book "Fashionable Technology." In this video, we interview Sabine about the burgeoning field and her lifelong obsession with fashion. She also helps us peruse the exhibit, chatting with the designers and artists behind each piece to learn about their inspiration and process.

Known for her hauntingly still imagery, photographer Lisa Kereszi's subjects have included junkyards, burlesque clubs and other desolate sites. Her commercial work for clients such as The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Nest, W, GQ, Tokion, Penthouse, Nylon, Flaunt, wallpaper* and others shares a similarly serenely meditative quality, capturing the quiet beauty of scenes that would otherwise likely go unnoticed. Currently teaching at Yale, as well as continuing her fine art and commercial pursuits, Lisa took us on a trip to revisit the shots she took at Governer's Island for a 2003 monograph on the former Coast Guard base. We found several of the sites she captured, including a bus stop, an elementary school drinking fountain, bowling alley lanes and a Burger King sign. In an interview in an empty pool, Lisa shares how depression informs her work, her solitary working habits and her obsession with Governer's Island.