In a 2008 New Yorker profile, artist John Currin said something about the process of painting that knocked us out because it is SO much about improvising, about making anything where you’re not entirely sure where you’re going: “…a big part of painting is getting used to things not looking good while you’re working on them. “…
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(Video link here.) We found ourselves so burnt-to-a-crisp after an all-day photo shoot, we couldn’t write a word about the millions of wonderful ideas in our files…We were about to call-it-a-day, secretly wondering if something would come at the very last minute to be our post for tomorrow (it often does, mysteriously)… In one last…
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When we are feeling tapped out and need an instant break, we often turn to the Encyclopedia of Life, a collaborative database intended to document the world’s 1.9 million species. It is the vision of biologist E.O. Wilson who was invited to share his “dream” in a moving 2007 TED talk: to catalogue species as…
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A few years ago, I clipped this image from Reference Library, the always-surprising visual blog that rarely gives explanations. It said simply: “Michelangelo Pistoletto Struttura per parlare in piedi (Oggetti in meno) 1965-66 This is just about my most favorite thing.” In English, Pistoletto‘s artwork is called “Structure for Talking Standing Up”, part of a series he…
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“The answer is zero. Let go of everything that can be let go of. Unaccumulate. Notice a new way of figuring out. If many places are held by nothing at all, more actions are possible. More actions are likely–all that room.” Anne Herbert’s blog Peace, Love and Noticing the Details continues to knock us out, remind…
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When we need a table in a hurry for a project or a bigger-than-expected-crowd-for-dinner, we pull out a pair of folding aluminum saw horses we keep the closet. We lay on a top made out of a hollow-core door or a slab of plywood cut to whatever size we like (we’ve got a small version…
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Our recent call for accessible clip/clamp ideas for securing stacked boxes (wood, cardboard, plastic) to make d-i-y clipped-together shelving got a big response, all offering the same solution: large binder clips. These cheap, ubiquitous clips seem to be the go-to solution for many niggling problems. Wine writer Anthony Giglio wrote: “I have improvised with these binder…
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Looking for a way to wish our friend Maria Robledo a belated Happy Birthday, we found this clip of Wynton Marsalis and a friend improvising on that simple tune…building and building on until it became some big joy… (…at the end he says “You see all the many ways we were conversing with each other?“, reminding…
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The bold and many-faceted Howard Rheingold, who we blogged about yesterday, once did a little internet art piece that asked: “Why doesn’t everybody paint their own shoes?” Yeah, why doesn’t everybody? we wondered. Shoes are basically a blank palette; it would be easy enough to do. Then you could look down and see… Rheingold has…
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Recently, Lydia Wills alerted us to an entry from Howard Rheingold‘s astonishing blog Howard’s Butt “about his rectal cancer experiences –about being cracked open. He is an amazing person…one of the earliest internet folks who knew it was going to change the world.” Rheingold’s writing sent us to his website and Wikipedia to find out…
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The sentiment around Mother’s Day is a nice one but we’ve never been crazy about all the marketing of flowers, cards, candy that can go with it; they often seem in contradiction to the gist – of honoring and thanking your mother – by blending in the desperate shelling out of $$ to buy a…
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A few years ago, Manny Howard was enticed by New York Magazine to try growing food in his Brooklyn backyard and sustain himself on it for a month. At the time, Manny wasn’t really committed to exploring the meaning of “locavore” (the magazine’s tack); he loves wild challenges of just about any kind (hunting boar…
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…we’re still trying to find our way back from the West Virginia Appalachians and the wild ramp supper, with the hopes of posting on Tuesday… Related post: Foraging for ‘REAL’: Ramps Etc (with Recipe)
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This weekend, I will take a few days off to go down to West Virginia to the Ramp Supper in Helvetia, West Virginia, a feast served family style in the community hall by the Farm Women’s Association – ham, beans, cornbread, slaw, applesauce, hash browns, ramps raw and cooked. Depending on the weather, the raw…
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Pamela Hovland, who is our BEST scout, found this cardboard box shelving system on Etsy. It’s a variation of the clipped-together shelving idea we wrote about earlier. It is to our mind a brilliant use of an ordinary cardboard box (which we’re thinking, could even be painted with rubber paint…) It seems to be the…
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We are always amazed by how we’ll have an idea and start thinking about it, trying to figure it out, and then start to stumble on echoes and iterations of it. We’ve been thinking about modular shelving that looks good and sleek and is sturdy but do-able, not too expensive…Why not stack boxes in various…
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via Core 77
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Of late we are smitten with a rather homely blog whose content is so good, and its straightforwardness so compelling, that it overcomes its strangely distracting design and ads for cutting down belly fat. Hunter Angler Gardener Cook is Hank Shaw‘s site about being just that: “I fish. I dig earth, raise plants, live for food and…
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Lately, we’ve noticed several odd and very expressive permutations of the word “fling”. Fling/flang/flung aren’t about flinging some THING across the room, but rather describe a PERSON being catapulted, by life…allowing ourselves to being flung, learning lessons, making discoveries, really living. First we read Anne Herbert’s wonderful post in Peace, Love and Noticing the Details:…
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We find ourselves inadvertently collecting images of fabulous dresses made out of unlikely materials, like this beauty made by Cristina Liedtke from discarded peanut M&M wrappers. It’s on display at TerraCycle’s Green Up Shop, a pop-up shop set up in empty retail space in Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City. “To create the gown,…
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