In 2009, when Adam Yauch first found out he had cancer, The Beastie Boys had to cancel a number of shows that they had committed to. Other artists stepped up to fill in for them, including Jay Z at All Points West. He dedicated his performance to MCA and opened with a cover of No Sleep til Brooklyn. It seems a good tribute as any, from one Brooklyn boy to another.

Last week, Todd Cole’s agent sent me a link to the new video he did for Kate Spade. So many fashion videos are boring, or cheesy, or just kind of mediocre, that I really appreciate when I see a good one. And this one is really good – so much so that I wanted to hear more about how it came about. I also realized that although I’ve known Todd for some time, I didn’t know much about his background and how he came to do what he does, so while I was at it, I sent through a few more questions.

Skye Parrott: I really love the new video you did for Kate Spade, which functions as a choose-your-own-adventure. How did the idea for it come about? Did you have a lot of input on the feel and style of the video, or did that direction come down from the brand?

Todd Cole: Kate Spade approached me with the idea of doing some films with this interactive concept. I thought it was a great idea, super smart and very forward thinking. I thought it was a great progressions to what these fashion brands films can be. They had the initial idea that you could choose whether the girl did a cannonball or swan dive, etc… and I just took that and fleshed out the scripts. Instead of a swan dive, I loved the idea of a swan landing in the pool and disrupting her perfect dive. Kate Spade has such an identifiable brand aesthetic, and that is always a great starting point. We just built on this. The bathing suits recalled the glamour of old Hollywood, and the history of movie stars escaping for long weekends of parties in Palm Springs. So Palm Springs was the obvious location to me from the beginning. I have an amazing production designer named Ruth de Jong who I worked with closely to create this girl’s world. It was so perfectly Kate Spade to me. I was heavily referencing the films of Douglas Sirk, real classic cinematography, graphic. And I only wanted primary colors in the frame.

Skye: It has an amazing shot in it of a swan wiggling its tail. Was that planned or just really lucky?

Todd: Animals are tough to work with…  and swans are generally not nice birds. It was planned. That swan was a pro. We just let her go in the pool and filmed her with long takes as I waited for her to do something spontaneous that would help tell the story and give the bird some attitude!

Skye: You shoot both still and moving images. How different is the process for you of making a video or shooting photographs? What’s the same? Which do you prefer?

Todd: I love doing both, but they are completely different to me. Videos in generally require you to tell a story, or at least string a series of images together over a period of time in a coherent way. Film/video is 24 frames per second, where with photography you can shoot thousands of frames to get just one good one. So film is much more challenging in my opinion. I am a photographer, and I really understand how to compose a frame, but I always work with a DP when doing a video. There are so many other things I need to worry about, and I would rather not have to worry about exposures and the specifics of lighting, etc. I feel like I would be very foolish to try to do it all myself, when I could work with a great DP who has been working in these situations with these cameras for ten years. But photography, especially fashion photography, is about directing your subject to get what you want, as well as lighting, composition, building characters. So I have been surprised on how much of this has translated to directing film/video.

Skye: Since we’re having this little email conversation, tell me a little about how you grew up. Were your parents creative? How did you become a photographer? What do you think you’d be doing with your life if you hadn’t?

Todd: I grew up in Houston, TX. My dad is a scientist and geologist and my mother is an artist and new age shaman for the Junior League and debutantes. So it was a fairly interesting childhood. I was a really good football player in high school – which means more in Texas than most places – so I went to college to play football and just got a business degree because I thought it might be useful. I got out of college and went to work for some stockbrokers and had an existential crisis. So I had a few astrology readings and a past life regression session, and then moved to LA to be a director. I assisted some directors and  I taught myself photography with the help of some good friends who had graduated from the art schools out here.

Honestly, I have always been very serious about creating the life I want to live, so I can’t envision it being any different from what it is.

Skye: Tell me about your first real job as a photographer.

Todd: Oh man. It might have been shooting Paul Verhoeven for Index back in the day. I had him at the Chateau for like 30 minutes. He is super intense, but cool… and one of my favorite films is Starship Troopers, so I fanned out on him for the first five minutes. Telling him he is a subversive genius and that no one got that movie. Then I asked him to hit ping pong balls at me at the ping pong table as I took photos. He went nuts and started slamming ping pong balls at me. He was sweating and had this crazy look in his eye. We did that for like ten minutes and then I took a couple of bad portraits and that was it. Index never ran the ping pong shots, but they were epic.

Skye: What’s the best job you’ve ever done (and – if you want to tell me – the worst)?

Todd: An early best in my career, was shooting a project for Martin Margiela for their SS 07 mens collection. I have always had such respect for him and the label he created. I love the clothes. And then one morning I received and email from the house asking me to do a project. I totally tripped out. I also LOVE my Rodarte films. There in no one I like working with more than Kate and Laura. I think the things we do together is my best stuff. Worst… hmmm… back when I was living in Houston, after I decided I wanted to be a director, but before I moved to LA, I worked for a corporate video company in Texas. We made infomercials and internal videos for home builders and hospitals. I remember some of those as being very dry, to say the least. I had NO idea what I was doing and spent a lot of time in trying to figure out how a camera worked in some track house on the outskirts of Houston.

Skye: When I get interviewed people always ask me what projects I’m working on now. On one hand that feels like a cliché. On the other, it’s nice to have an opportunity to talk about stuff you’re excited about. Can you tell me something you’re working on that feels like a departure? If nothing fits that description, is there anything you have brewing in your head that’s really different than the work you’ve done so far?

Todd: Eventually I would like to direct a feature film. I have written a script for a short film that I am trying to raise some funding for. I am pushing myself more into working with proper actors and dialogue. It’s a whole new world for me, and is deeper creative experience when it comes to making films. I have always been more drawn to quiet films, but  lately everything I write or pitch has a crazy car stunt or big explosion scene. I don’t know why. Hollywood is getting to me, I guess. I am seeing things with Sam Peckinpah eyes.

Opening tonight in Berlin, This Land Was Made for You and Me explores the idea of America, through the eyes of young American photographers. The title is taken from the Woody Guthrie song This Land Is Your Land, which was written as a critical retort to Irving Berlin’s saccharine God Bless America. Guthrie meant for his song to present not just the scenic landscape of the country, but also the social realities. The show looks to explore those present day realities: particularly the experience of being young, right now, in the USA.

When the curators asked if we would want to cover it for the site, I realized that although I knew the title, and the basic premise, I didn’t know much about their thinking behind the show. So I emailed them a few questions, which are answered below.

Skye Parrott: You guys curated a show that I contributed to that is opening in Berlin this week. The theme is America. Does that mean American photographers in particular, or just America as an idea? What is your idea of America?

Ann-Kathrin Obermeyer: The idea is about American photographers and photographers living in America. When I moved to America, I wasn’t surprised because everything was just like in the movies. Although it took me quite a while to feel really comfortable. Being German/European means it’s not always easy, since we lack the openness which America’s culture is based on. I feel so much richer now after succeeding and adjusting.

Adrian Crispin: I grew up in New York and New Jersey, so for me America has always been about the outsiders, the hero/antihero of subculture. Whitman, Steven Segal, etc.

Skye: I find one of the strangest things about being American that wherever you go in the world, your culture has been accessed by people via movies and television. How much has your idea of America been influence by those mediums?

Adrian: I think movies and TV are quintessentially American and equally important in the shaping and informing of my visual background.

Skye: Adrian, you’re a photographer, and Ann-Kathrin, you’re a stylist. How did the idea come about to curate this show? Has either of you ever curated anything before?

Adrian: We were asked by the gallery director, Kirsten Hermann, to curate a show based on our American experience. Despite having no prior curatorial experience , we both know what we respond to and decided to just do it.

Skye: I’ve curated a couple of shows and really enjoyed it. It feels like putting together pieces of a puzzle. How did you go about picking the photographers for this show? How about the specific images?

Ann-Kathrin: It was a long process of looking at lots of people’s work from all different types of backgrounds until we finally narrowed down the selection of photographers whose work we really responded to and then proceeded to choose images that would work together as a group either as a complimentary dialogue with each other or as counterbalance in opposition.

Skye: You’re a couple, right? How do you find the process of working together while being in a relationship?

Adrian: Yes, we are a couple. We met in Paris at a museum bookshop. I was looking at art books and Ann-Kathrin was looking at fashion magazines. We have a very natural, intuitive, and complimentary way of collaborating from grocery shopping to doing editorials together.

Skye: Do you have plans to curate any more shows together? What would be your dream space to curate something in? Who would be part of that show?

Adrian: It has been a great experience and was a lot of work but now that we are almost at the end and about to physically put everything on the wall.

Ann Kathrin: I would do it again any time. I think a dream space would be the MoMa and also a dream (we were always thinking about this) would be having shows in our apartment with some good food. I definitely would ask Juergen Teller to be a part of it.

Adrian: There is a lot of really talented people out there whose work remains to be seen, so I would include the unknowns.

This Land Was Made for You and Me opens Thursday, April 26 from 7-9 pm at the Galerie fuer Moderne Fotografie, Schroederstrasse 13, Berlin, and runs through June 9.

Top image: RJ Shaughnessy, Black Kid, Afro; Middle image: Anna Moller, Rooster, 2009; Bottom image: Grant Willing, Untitled (Capri Sun), 2009

Underline Gallery is holding an online raffle to help one of their artists, photographer Bhumika Bhatia. Bhatia was is a terrible car accident in India, cannot currently use her hands, and has an enormous hospital debt. The raffle tickets are $50, and the winner can chose from four prints. All proceeds go to support the artist.

Every month, artist Sam Falls makes a mix and sends it out to a group of friends. He also shares the playlists as a monthly feature here. They are compiled from the daily mixes he makes in his studio while working and are deliberately unthemed. Click here to download the March mix.

Compound Eye are swiftly entering into the coveted periphery of New York City’s musical consciousness. With their debut LP Origin of Silence (The Spring Press), Drew McDowall and Tres Warren mark out a sound that is as traditional as it is experimental. Their drone, motif, repetition and electronic synthesis could be the vibrations of a new sound of occult mysticism, owing little to anyone who could be considered contemporaries.

McDowall has a rich musical history. With his involvement in both Psychic TV and Coil, he has amassed a discography that could arguably form the nexus for industrial music. Over the last seven years, Warren has traversed the bounds of psychedelia and minimalism with his band Psychic Ills, while his other group Messages taps into the beautiful Eastern energies still resonating in New York’s Lower East Side.

Drew and Tres recently took some time out to speak to Dossier about their new band Compound Eye. With minds such as these (and music criticism in the state its in), who better to conduct the interview than themselves?

Tres Warren: What are some everyday sounds that you like?

Drew McDowall: I’m really into the sound of cicadas. I love the way that they change tonality from daytime to evening – the soft, lazy way that a couple of cicadas buzzing on a summer afternoon changes by evening into this incredibly intense alien chorus. I could never get bored of that. Another sound that I like is in this huge old warehouse building that has some high voltage transformers that hum at 60hz and at the higher order harmonics too. The structure of the building resonates with the sound, so as you walk around the space your perception of the harmonics change and your cannot pin down where the sound is coming from so you walk around immersed in this shifting gauzy sound-field where even moving your head a few inches changes the timbre and direction of the sound. What was the first sound you heard this morning?

Tres: Pigeons roost outside my window in my shaftway and they warble sort of a collective drone every morning before the sun comes up. It used to annoy me, but now when I’m not sleeping at my place, I find that I miss it. What is your favorite place to be, outside of New York?

Drew: The desert, Death Valley. Apart from it being one of the most beautiful places that I have ever been, I love the silence. It’s an all encompassing silence that even the sound of someone talking or a car passing in the distance does nothing to disturb, but instead those transient sounds are swallowed up by the silence. It makes you realize that true silence is not the absence of sound but is instead a thing in itself. Do you feel a sense of landscape or physical space affects your work?

Tres: You can touch both walls of my basement apartment if stretch your arms out. I’ve learned to live this way and don’t mind it too much, but it feels like there’s another space in my mind that I might be referencing consciously and unconsciously when I’m working on music – maybe places I’ve been or want to be. Where or when have you experienced a mind altering/conscious altering phenomenon? One that related to a physical space, not to anything you had ingested?

Drew: The most recent was in in the Catskills. It was around 3 am and I was out walking around in the dark looking at the stars when I experienced an intense visual distortion. It felt like being under fast moving water. The air was rippling intensely in front of my eyes from ground level to around to a height of around 10-15 feet. It completely surrounded me and didn’t feel like a visual disturbance or a trick of the light. It felt profoundly other, numinous.

Tres: What’s your favorite thing to generate sound with at the moment?

Drew: Probably my modular synthesiser. I try to patch it so that it’s always on the verge of instability, so that you feel that even breathing on it will cause the sound to fall apart. It should always be organic and always feel like you are one slight misstep from chaos. How do you feel that the way we approach music together is different from the way that you work with Psychic Ills or Messages?

Tres: I guess they’re all similarly different. we’ve been getting together intermittently for what? Four years? And mostly on Sundays. It seems like the recording process is a larger part of the equation with Compound Eye since we mostly get together and put something new down or add something to something we’ve been working on. I guess its largely a recording project. But we have been jamming lately, and played the show at Printed Matter.

Drew: You have an interesting collection of instruments. How did you come across them?

Tres: I’ve gotten more synth stuff since we’ve been working together and will probably keep adding to the foundation of what I have anytime I’ve got some spare change. Your advice on that subject and most others is always welcome. Surprisingly, some of the non-traditional instruments, like the shruti box and ukelin, came to me as gifts. Being from Scotland, do you have any nostalgia or interest toward the bagpipes? They seem like a drone instrument that is under-discussed outside of the classical realm.

Drew: The sound of the bagpipes influenced me enormously growing up and it’s always something that I’ve explored, not always consciously, from the first time that I started making music to this day. Not the sound of the bagpipes as such, although I do love the sound, but the underlying principles of it, the multiple concurrent drones and the basic instability of the pitch. That idea was one of the motivations underlying Time Machines (Coil/Time Machines).

Tres: Is there any other music or sound that you associate with being there or then that you don’t necessarily come in contact with now? For me, I just heard Amazing Grace being sung at my grandmother’s funeral and it reminded me of being in church as kid. I was never into to church, but I always liked the music – it was nice to hear.

Drew: There is a type of bagpipe composition called Pibroch that you don’t hear much outside of Scotland. It’s for solo bagpipe and is usually a lament for a fallen comrade. Pibroch is semi improvised although with some very formal guidelines. It’s part of the martial traditions of the bagpipe and is incredibly poignant and beautiful. What are you playing in the background there?

Tres: Henry Flynt and Catherine Christer Hennix Dharma Warriors. And there?

Drew: Today I’ve been listening to Stockhausen Stimmung, Bobby Beausoleil Lucifer Rising Suite and The Circle Is Unbroken by Incredible String Band. I was struck, as always, by how vulnerable and exposed Robin Williamson’s voice is on that song. Have there been any films that you’ve watched recently that have surprised you like that?

Tres: I’ve been slacking on watching films lately, but was re-checking Jud Yalkut’s Godz movie recently. And I’m similarly obsessing on the title sequence of Soylent Green – a work of art.

Drew: And visual art?

Tres: I bought a print called True Happiness from Powell St. John, an artist/musician from Texas. It’s a real cool drawing of two skulls. He wrote some songs that the 13th Floor Elevators did; I just wanted to have a piece of that feeling around. I’ve also been looking at the Wallace Berman Semina Culture book a lot again, endlessly inspiring.

Photographs by Benedict Brink

Hot and Busted is a Tumblr page where readers can submit mugshots. Most of the photos submitted (or at least those approved by the editor) seem to be of young, model-y looking white guys (a minority of the prison demographic here in the States, I would venture to say). I find reading what they were busted for to be the most interesting. The guy I thought was hottest had been arrested for murder.

Above: Criminal registration; Below: DUI

This clever ad campaign is for the College of Creative Studies, an art school in Detroit. Clever, but oh how true. Click “Read More” below for additional images.

Obama made an appearance at the Apollo last night for a fundraiser, also attended by Al Green. Channeling the Reverend, the President sang a few lines of Let’s Stay Together. It reminded me why I liked Obama so much four years ago.

This weekend, Printed Matter presents the sixth annual NY Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1. Free and open to the public, the fair features more than 200 stands selling artists’ books, contemporary art catalogs and monographs, art periodicals, and artist zines. Exhibitors include international presses, booksellers, antiquarian dealers, artists and independent publishers from twenty-one countries. Personally, I recommend it highly. I went for the first time last year and got so many (too many) small photo books that I never would have seen otherwise. The selection of limited edition prints is also amazing. The fair opens today and runs from 11-7 through Sunday, October 2.