(Video link here.) In this amazing clip, Fred Astaire builds-in elements too-often missing in gym workouts: pleasure, joy, improvisation… …And just the other evening at a party, a friend was telling us the initial evaluation of Astaire’s first screen test: “Can’t act. Can’t sing. Balding. Can dance a little.” via Reference Library Thanks Albert!
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Last Wednesday, January 12 marked a year since Haiti was struck by its devastating earthquake. We recommend checking out The Big Picture’s amazing photo essay about where the country is now. Although there are images of great beauty and triumph, it is clear that great need exists in all quarters there. Witness the photos above…
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Pamela Hovland sent us this email after the blizzard that hit the East Coast last week: “I went to my local FedEx/Kinkos last night and saw this post-it note masterpiece on the wall behind the counter. My friend, who helps me with various service bureau needs there, had created a portrait of the Simpsons the…
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We just discovered BBC’s World Routes, a new archive of world music, an eclectic and unusual collection of indigenous music. You can sample the sounds of more than 40 countries, from Brazil, Corsica, China, Cuba, to Iran, Mozambique and Turkey. We’ve just spent an hour listening to Appalachian music, much of it acapella, and the Bambara…
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We have a THING for new materials, and have, until today, mostly just imagined what they could do. We couldn’t lay our hands on samples since we’re not a big commercial entity; suppliers didn’t want to bother to sell small quantities or answer our novice’s questions. So we’d read descriptions in Transmaterials, the compendium of…
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Right after we tweeted Remodelista’s great round-up of picture frames, they topped themselves with this chic frame idea spotted in The Selby’s photos of the Geneva apartment of Christie’s president François Curiel. It simply sandwiches your picture between two pieces of glass that slide into the wooden frame – no mat needed. (The truth is,…
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Laura Anne Marsden is a textile designer who created a technique for transforming waste plastic bags into lace. She uses a combination of traditional hand-stitch and needle lace-making, along with various processes to change the properties and appearance of the plastic bags (Although her technique remains secret, we imagine cutting the bags into thin strips…
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We found this good idea in Covet Garden, an appealing online shelter magazine that features spaces of real people (slightly ripping off The Selby‘s questionnaire). Here, Photographer Tracy Shumate’s converted factory space…”Necessity being the mother of invention, Tracy uses large MDF panel covered in chalkboard paint to hide her unsightly electrical panels.” Here’s another iteration…
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The maker of this cool little video saw a sewer grate and made the connection to a skeleton’s ribcage, and went from there: one of the many tiny miracles of vision and association that happen daily. And then he/she took that revelation, and the technique of stop-motion, and made something wonderful … via BoingBoing
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A number of people alerted us to this compelling video about Viviane Meier, who, while working as a nanny in Chicago during the 50’s and 60’s, was secretly photographing life the street-life of Chicago during her time off. It was not until years after her death that her enormous body of photographic work was found. Maier was…
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Shift two letters of ‘worrier’ (and your thinking, slightly) and you become… ….WARRIOR!
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Here’s a first look at the new cover of The Improvisational Cook, Sally’s award-winning cookbook; it will be released in paperback on February 8th. It’s shows you the way ‘in’ to cooking improvisationally, more freely and with what’s on hand. Find out more about the book and look inside here, sample an improvised riff on Roasted…
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The Selby recently posted its favorite photos of 2010. So we choose our favorites of its favorites: all have an idea that we can put to use (or at least make us think), like stacking books horizontally as well as vertically on our library shelves: the flow and visuals are totally different. The wall of…
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If you’ve got a wood-burning fireplace in a city apartment and use it a lot, you have to come to terms with a firewood storage system. Do you store it in the basement and lug batches up flights of stairs (which we once did), or do you find a nook inside to pile it up…
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We love painted floors, especially white ones because they expand and brighten a space AND are a great inexpensive solution to dealing with not-great floors. We never thought of painting a little patch of colorfully painted boards to break up the expanse, as interior designer Annette Verkuyls did in her home in an early twentieth…
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Whenever I find myself struggling to write and imagining harsh scrutiny and criticism, I listen to Anita Ellis singing Anyone Can Whistle. (Click to play in a separate page while you read.) Steven Sondheim‘s lyrics about the desire to overcome one’s limits echoes Ellis’ own story. She was a vocalist of great renown in the 40’s and 50’s…
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The GREAT OpenCulture has compiled a list of 275 movies you can watch online, for free. They include classics like The Third Man and To Kill a Mockingbird…and the hypnotic, disturbing Koyaanisqatsi: Life out of Balance. You’ll also find extraordinary short-subject documentaries (a category of Oscar that are all but impossible to find) like A Story of Healing,…
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Being a cook with ongoing kitchen design fantasies, I’m always on the lookout for solutions that are wonderful to look at and completely functional. I LOVE this stove hood by Architects Lhoas & Lhoas that looks like a modern sculpture; I imagine its lovely asymmetry subtly shifting the way I feel – and cook –…
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During our email correspondence with the strangely visionary Howard Rheingold, whom we haven’t met but blogged about a while back (about “shoes and my butt” as he wrote in a Tweet), we discovered a little tag line at the very end of each email: “What it is — >is –>up to us.” He came up…
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After we published A New Year’s Wish Spirals On, with our not-great scan of a copy of the crumbling 45-year-old page from the New York Times, Laura Scott, a reader we have never met, wrote us. A librarian with access to the Historical New York Times Database, she hunted down the original astonishing ad that…
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