A friend recently alerted us to Lynda Barry‘s book What It Is: ” It is a book about writing that provides guidance on how you can re-discover skills you likely possessed before getting caught up in the notions of “good and bad”. It’s more than a book. It’s a public service. Barry is trying to help everyone reconnect…
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We clipped this amazing photo from the New Yorker a few years ago and have had it on our wall ever since. It was taken by Yumahara Hokume in the early thirties (googling Hokume curiously turned up NOTHING, so he/she remains a mystery). The woman in the photo reminds us a little of the picture…
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Stuart Mason Dambrot, ‘the improvised life’s resident concilientist|futurist has sent us many wonderful ideas since our first syncronous meeting on a New York City street corner. The latest, the work of designer Siren Elise Wilhelmsen, inventor of the Toast Spoons we recently blogged as well as Found, an oddly stylish stool put together from scraps found…
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Cara de Silva alerted us to this beauty of a video, of Yale student Kevin Olusola pushing the limits of a cello, and taking the music it makes up a totally new path. He bows, plucks and strums his cello, while accompanying it with beatbox, a hip-top derived use of voice as percussive/musical instrument. The music…
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Faced with the months-long renovation of their New York City coop kitchen, Josh Eisen, Ellen Silverman and their son Luca – who take eating and entertaining very seriously – devised a clever make-shift kitchen in their walled-off-from-the-construction living room. They had the workmen move in the
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Always on the lookout for more ideas for impermanent pop-up rooms within rooms, we were taken by a work by Zimoun, a sound artist/sculptor who builds different kinds of white noise into structures.We love his room of interlocking slabs of notched cardboard, made like a house of cards, and imagined building a smaller version that…
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via Peace and Love and Noticing the Details
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It is high season for ramps, the pungent wild leeks that grow throughout the Appalachian and Catskill mountains. Ellen Silverman sent us photos of the sublime ramp butter she was given by a friend, with an utterly simple recipe that will keep you in ramp heaven for days. She wrote this in her email: “Cyd…
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One week of the aurora borealis in 1:55 seconds…Nature’s special effects. (Shot in and around Kirkenes and Pas National Park bordering Russia) The Aurora from Terje Sorgjerd. via Manhattan User’s Guide
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One of our favorite mindgames is to think about what we can do without, or perhaps better put: What do we really need? We started doing it rigorously in the kitchen when we had to downsize years ago, and began to ask ourselves,”What equipment is truly necessary for the way we cook”. Not only did…
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A while ago, we posted an YouTube video of artist Theo Jansen’s astonishing Strandbeests, the huge, mechanical walking beests made of PVC pipe that are propelled by the wind. Jansen considers to himself to be grappling with a new form of life. In this video, he talks about the reproduction of the Strandbeests, and echoes…
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Improv Everywhere is a prank collective devoted to causing scenes of chaos and joy in public places, which they did at a recent Gel Conference. Their hilarious pranks are designed to shift your thinking, and what you take for granted. It made us wonder: Could we really disconnect if we wanted to? What do you think?…
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A friend called us recently to ask our thoughts on containers for planting her 10’x5’balcony in New York City. She wanted to have her plantings along one side of the terrace only, to leave the rest of the space clear to see the view and do tai chi. Attuned we started spotting some nice looking…
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We love artist Thomas Jeppe‘s wonderfully taped bike, via The Selby. The tape is not just a cool visual, it adds cushioning to the handlebars. We went looking for this snazzy handlebar tape at found a trove of close matches – Splash Ribbon – made by Cinelli, whose tapes get very high ratings. Possibilities include…
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When the news becomes abstract, we turn to the Big Picture’s slideshows to help us GET what is really going on. We recommend their current slideshow of the flooding Mississippi: at once frightening, heartbreaking and beautiful. We include this video of Johnny Cash singing “Five Feet High and Rising” (which we found via Constant Siege’s…
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For the past few years, we’ve been learning about how beautiful concrete blocks can be as a building material. The latest “lesson” came with a visit to the late Alexander Calder’s home in Connecticut for a birthday party for his daughter, who is a friend of ours. An artist who worked in a wide variety of…
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The best thing we found in the recent New York Times’ Design and Living Magazine was Bud Wise, a story and slideshow about making arrangements out of ordinary deli/supermarket flowers. Having found ourselves many times looking blankly at the mishmash of seemingly uninspired offerings at the corner store for a bit of REAL to perk up…
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We are really looking forward to seeing Werner Herzog’s 3-D documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams about the Chauvet cave paintings in the Ardeche region of southern France. Thought to have been made about 30,000 years ago, they evince stunning skillfulness and beauty. This video immediately sent us on the trail of images of the…
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…a 1950’s mama…(let’s see, that would put her in her nineties now)… …just remember, there’s a lot about your mother – thousands of secret improvisations – that you don’t know…
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After we posted Gary Chang’s 344 square foot Hong Kong apartment, we thought we’d pretty much seen the pinnacle of morphing possibilities for TINY. Until this morning, when we found ourselves riveted by this video of photographer Christian Schallert‘s 258 square foot Barcelona apartment (apx 11′ x 23’): a former pigeon loft re-envisioned by designer Barbara Appolloni. (Check out…
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