We found this beautiful gif of a running scrapwood horse on dvdp, with the caption “horses know how to run with style.” That’s what we want to do. (…It’s a clip from the Chemical Brothers video ‘Horse Power’, which we find curiously thrilling watched with the sound off; we felt like we’d been riding a galloping…
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Today we got a Comment from a reader about a riff she did on our Roasted Chestnut How-To from last year’s Thanksgiving. OMG, we thought, it’s next week!. If you’re still mulling over what to make – or bring – for your Thanksgiving day…here are are our greatest hits. As for the inspired chestnut riff,…
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H-m-m-m. This high-design elevator installation reminds us our favorite words that have been at the top of ‘the improvised life’s page’ for 2 + years. Wonder if ‘the improvised life’ passed through the designer’s field of vision at some point and had a subtle influence, or if it is just the zeitgeist… Wouldn’t it be…
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Film Maker/ProducerLauren Malkasian recently sent us this email: “We love your daily inspirations and have very much been taken, moved and forever changed by ‘the improvised life’; it’s like a magic tonic everyday. So here is a little something from us, all the way from LA, that we thought you might enjoy. We live on a street…
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At the end of designer Reuben Miller‘s clever riff on the extreme repurposing movement, some readers commented that that a fly swatter face protector and a paint brush door stop were “stupid’; other’s thought Dada. Some, like us, dug the IDEA that you can make something out of just about anything. But we fell in love…
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We always love hearing about where artists find their inspiration. In this video of Leonard Cohen, he has much to say about the process of cultivating an authentic “voice”
Read More(We advise watching with sound off.) Every once in a while, if we can’t actually get a dose of REAL nature, we turn to a video of some crazy wonder of the natural world to shift our view. This owl’s identity changes radically depending on his perceived threat level – kind of like many humans…
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Recently, Manhattan User’s Guide featured a chic cast iron book bar from Beekman 1802 in a round-up of gifts under $21. It’s designed to hold open the pages of a book, while providing a horizontal guide for reading. It is 7 inches long by 1/4 inch square and weighs 4.4 ounces; with shipping, it costs…
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We’re back, our space stacked with drawings and notes of new projects (almost ready to get off the ground), books to tell you about and give away, and ideas to start flanging again. We feel like artist Myeongbeom Kim did us a fab balloon hairdo: seriously uplifted. Thanks for bearing with us! Related posts: myeongbeom kim’s forest…
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We’ve got so many ‘improvised life’ projects on the burners that we need to take the week off to focus on them. While we’re on our tiny hiatus, we recommend poking around our attic/archive of past posts (type a word into the search box and see what appears)…. OR check out this illuminating anagram-maker that…
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(Video link here.) In 1964, the great Anthony Quinn, then 49, knocked everyone out with the famous scene in the movie Zorba the Greek where he teaches an uptight Englishman how to dance after his business enterprise goes bust. It remains one of the most life-affirming moments in screen history. You can feel the sun…
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We never cease to be amazed at the uses people have come up for shipping pallets. Their boxy form naturally allows for building block type constructions of all kinds. DE-constructed, they afford an unpredictable variety of rustic, often beat-up woods, in roughly 2 or 3-foot lengths. The chicest application we’ve seen lately are these floors…
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Remember the beautiful Chauvet cave paintings we wrote about a few months ago? Well every artist needs his or her toolkit, and archeologists recently discovered what appear to be “artist kits” in a South African cave. The kits, which date back 100,000 years, are made of abalone shells, perfect for holding and transporting essential painting materials:…
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myeongbeom kim Conceptual Artist Myeongbeom Kim makes eerily beautiful and evocative work that fuses manmade things with big doses of nature. We can totally see ourselves lying down on this bed, and feeling like we are in a mossy woods… …we can imagine how we’d feel riding an elevator like this one:
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A friend recently sent us a postcard with this image; it’s called Leaping the Chasm at Stand Rock, Wisconsin Dells, 1887 by Henry Hamilton Bennett. On the back she wrote: “…thought it was an appropriate image for this phase of your life – taking risk, eager to have a new perspective/vantage point, lots of momentum…
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(Video link here.) After hearing a lot of very kind and reverent words about Steve Jobs lately, Walter Isaacson’s new biography about him, apparently balancing the picture, which we can’t help but think is a good thing. The guy was brilliant, but no angel; he was deeply flawed. Ryan Tate of Gawker wrote just this…
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While we were checking out ideas for making a faux fire for mantle with no hearth, we came across a clever d-i-y for a wood fireplace mantel made of stacked boards. Take away the retro lamp and file drawer cabinet and it curiously stylish and modern. And although you can’t light a fire in it,…
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For years we’ve enjoyed a mantle with no fireplace. It was taken out of an old house in Maine; it’s color, an ochre yellow milk paint. It leans as a sort of sculpture against the living room wall, defining the space in a unique way, and just like that, it is a pleasure. Then some…
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If you’re a kid, one of the pleasures of trick-or-treating is AFTERWARDS, when you’ve got a big stash of candy. Maria Robledo sent us this photo of her daughte Isabel’s haul: “she organizes her Halloween catch & stashes it conveniently under the couch for easy access while reading…” We envy that very cagey strategy… Related…
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