The Animators Letter Project was started by Willie Downs, an animation student who, just a year ago, was an aspiring animator pursuing a career he knew wasn’t right for him. Petrified of the risk he would be taking in dropping out of an expensive and presumably more reliable degree program to attend animation school, Downs wrote…
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Time Magazine has come out with their 50 best websites of 2011. We find that their lists are often chock full of useful stuff—last year’s list introduced us to Wakerupper, which schedules wake-up calls (.5 each after a few free ones) which we rely on to stop pressing the snooze alarm and get us out…
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When our friend Andrea Raisfeld sent us a compelling scan from Malcolm Gladwell’s piece Creation Myth in the May 16th issue of The New Yorker, we went online to find the story and explore its ideas more fully. In the process, the post we intended to write about the creative process turned into a post…
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photo: sebastian bergne We are slightly obsessed with the idea of using Lego’s to make functional objects that we can really use; it’s kind of a mindgame we play with ourselves that we hope to put into action one day, since you can now buy as much of any color Lego as you want at…
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(Video link here.) We recently came across this great talk by Joshua Foer that explores the success of “experts.” The video is 17 minutes, which we know is long, so we’ve culled the gist for you, hoping you’ll listen at some point; we think it’s truly useful and super interesting. According to Foer and the scientists…
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(Video link here.) The brilliant Danny Macaskill ‘exploring’ an industrial train yard with derelict buildings; he and the bike are ONE. Related posts: danny macaskill’s joy ride danny macaskill’s bike lesson (setbacks + difficulties + perseverance = mastery) fly! (merce cunningham) improvised bike trailer and storage bins
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(Video link here.) Here’s a glimpse of the interactive iPAD app that Björk recently created to be part of her recent album, as she tries to give create ever more dimensions in her music. Its introduction, narrated by David Attenborough, is a strange combination of beautiful, inspiring and ever-so-slightly hokey, in a good way. We…
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In a recent interview on Nowness’ FB page, superstar chef Mario Batali was asked what olive oils he “swears by”. The answer: “Da Vero from Healdsburg, Primo Olio from Sicilia, Castello di Ama and Capezzana from Toscana.” We’ve tasted three of the oils he mentioned and they ARE stunning, as well as pricey and not easy…
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Lately we’ve been enjoying the phenomenon of succinct self-expression. A friend turned us on to SMITH Magazine and the six-word memoir revolution they’ve started, which reminded us of Studio 360’s one-line obituary challenge. (Sally’s one-line obit: “Sally Schneider, 107, Drowns in Surfing Mishap”.) Before both of these there was PostSecret, where folks anonymously share secrets that fit on the…
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While we were away, a reader left a Comment in response to our post about Constantino Nivola’s Tinkertoy lamps. She described a trellis she had made out of vintage Tinkertoys bought on Ebay. She devised it to display her tillandsia, which are also known as air plants because they grow without soil and can be…
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Recently, during a birthday celebration for a friend at Eleven Madison Park, we were invited to see the kitchen of what is, arguably, one of New York’s best restaurants; the number of staff on any given day roughly equals the number of diners – THAT’S how attentive the service and complex the menu. While cooks…
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Ellen Silverman is traveling with her family in Venice, sending us the occasional wonderful photo. First came this one of the Grand Canal – like a teeny vacation for us. Then came a few-line story of the clever idea she learned while visiting friends: We were invited to an impromptu lunch on our first day…
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Those of you who have been following ‘the improvised life’ are familiar with our love of colored tapes, both for pure decoration and for dressing up a practical application. So you can imagine how excited we were to stumble upon the above zebra duct tape at Target last week. We went in search of more…
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This photo of artist Lucio Fontana reminded us how central that concept of “blank canvas” is to ‘the improvised life’. Getting up in the morning, the day ahead is our first blank canvas. Each post we write starts as one as well: blank space that is pure potential; we often don’t know where it will go,…
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It has been such a wild and busy few months, we find ourselves running out of gas. So we’re going to take a week’s break (and another at the end of August), to catch up with ourselves, our work, and the many projects we’ve got on the burner. We were poking around for a picture…
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Maria Robledo sent us this iPhone photo of a recipe she’d made by improvising with one of Sally’s and marrying it one a friend taught her. The Sally recipe is a endlessly mutable Brown Sugar Butter Cookie dough made with so much butter that it is SHORT, that is, it melts in your mouth. Maria…
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We laughed out loud at this week’s New Yorker’s Shouts & Murmur’s page by Paul Simms. It envisions God blogging the newly-created earth. God writes: UPDATE: Pretty pleased with what I’ve come up with in just six days. Going to take tomorrow off. Feel free to check out what I’ve done so far. Suggestions and…
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Funny how this clever chalked welcome mat seems to to be more seriously-welcoming than most of the “real” welcome mats we’ve seen. As does this rather vehement chalk welcome:
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We’ve written many times before about the fantastic Canal House Cookbook series, but this summer Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton took their work to a new level by hosting the first annual Smallholding Festival in Ottsville, Pennsylvania. The festival featured a number of skill-shares and do-it-yourself exhibitions including cheese-making, beekeeping, canning, bread-baking, and spit-roasting. Also on-hand was Margo True, the…
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This picture of a young Merce Cunningham came from a stunning series of photos of Black Mountain College Dance on Mondoblogo. Man, could that guy FLY! We’re going to try flying in our heads, with Merce-like imagination and grace, and see what happens. Related posts: practice flying (via the uganda skateboard union) danny macaskill’s bike…
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