Inspired by Anthony Giglio’s instagrams using my herb-salt on pork, here’s the basic herb salt method and a recipe for Herb Salt Lamb, whether racks or leg (or cookies for that matter), along with a dazzling presentation…Enough in advance of the coming holidays to get shop and enjoy a stress-free celebration.
Read MoreCelebrating Spring with Dark Ambiguity of Maximón
Easter, Passover and the innumerable rites of spring used to make me anxious and defensive. Tales of death, rebirth, joy and sorrow, suffering and salvation, history recited, vows reaffirmed, sacred foods eaten: traditions created to allow tribes to regroup, bond, and go forth again into an uncertain world. Part of me bridled; I wanted to…
Read MoreA Clever Split Two-Tone Shelf w Still Life
In one of the images on the feature 1st Dibs did about interior designer Suzanne Shaker recently, we spotted this clever long shelf made of two different materials, which makes for an unexpectedly interesting shelf unto itself, whether or not it holds objects or art. It was designed by Rogers Marvel Architects for a row of modern townhouses built in…
Read MoreJimi Hendrix From Here to THERE
(Video link here.) If you look closely, you’ll see Jimi Hendrix in the backline of Buddy & Stacy doing “Shotgun” on a 1965 Night Train Television Show: a curiously invigorating Monday morning wakeup. In just a few years, Hendrix came a LONG way to his wild, passionate, loud, bluesy, no-holds-barred, pushng-all-limits, seriously-amplified music,
Read MoreTesting! Testing! with a Fab Basquiat Inspired GIF
After a series of hair-raising technical glitches and outages, our server has been majorly upgraded. Just to make sure everything’s working fine, we’re sending this fab gif out as a test. TESTING TESTING! DO YOU READ ME? via Dezeen
Read MoreEasy-Peasy Vinegar at Home: Making, Blending, Flavoring
I’ve discovered that —perhaps due to misunderstanding the loaded word “mother” — many people believe that vinegar is some mysterious substance, difficult-to-make, and too holy to mess around with. I’ve been making vinegar in my down-and-dirty, small-space, defying-the-accepted-wisdom-way for years. Not to mention, blending vinegars, as well as flavoring them.
Read MoreFran Lebowitz’s Wise, Hilarious Views on Fashion (and Life)
We have Jason Kottke to thank for chosing the choicests bits of Elle’s hilarious interview with Fran Lebowitz about fashion. But even then, it’s worth reading every bit of her unique LOL commentary.
Read MoreAnnals of Bad Design: Strangely Phallic Coffee Table
Although we are huge fans of using tree parts and the natural world as furnishings, we were stunned to see this wildly impractical coffee table made of what appears to be bundled branches or driftwood of some sort. Is it just us or do they have strangely phallic shapes? (Not that we don’t like phallic shapes but…er..seems a bit…
Read More‘Be a Spot of Ground Where Something Might Be Planted’
Stumbling on this fragment from Rumi’s wondrous poem The Fragile Vial got us thinking about seeds… Try and be a sheet of paper with nothing on it. Be a spot of ground where nothing is growing, where something might be planted, a seed, possibly, from the Absolute. Images of seeds viewed through an electron microscope…
Read MoreMagazine Page Envelopes + the PERFECT Multipurpose Business Card
Pamela Hovland, who designed Improvised Life’s first site design, periodically sends us notes in improvised envelopes she makes out of pages torn from magazines and catalogs, whenever she comes across a compelling visual. We were charmed to get her Spring greeting in the form of two letters, both with images of people LEAPING on the outside,…
Read More5+ Happiness Generating Questions
As ever, Neil Gaiman nails it. But there’s a question in his wonderful words, one that many people we know have been asking themselves: What Do You Have that Nobody Else Has? What is the particular flavor/quality/aspect/talent/vision unique to you? And even more importantly, what are ways it can thrive in the world? Ko Im over at…
Read MoreDIY Idea-Capturing Desks
Kirsten Camara’s Analog Memory Desk has a holder embedded in its legs for scrolling huge rulls of butcher paper over the desk’s surface to make “a sort of tablecloth of memory”. It can record months, possibly years of ideas, drawings, doodles, mind maps, phone numbers, calculations etc. She has made detailed blueprints so you can build your own. Or you try these other methods of analog idea-capturing.
Read MoreWe’re BACK from Yesterday’s Outage w Apologies + Thanks
In the wee hours of Monday morning, our server went down, causing the morning’s post to go undelivered and Improvised Life to be offline for most of the day. This was the worst of a number of outages that occurred during the past month. Although it wasn’t our fault (it was a DDoS attack designed to…
Read MoreLucio Fontana: The Forthright Mark
We keep an image of artist Lucio Fontana approaching a blank canvas in our workspace. He holds a utility knife, ready to make a first cut into the pristine surface, a radical act, as was his puncturing of canvasses with a thick steel pick. Although he made his slashed and punctured works in the 40’s and 50’s,…
Read MoreBrilliant Plywood: Stair Chair DIY
Now that it’s getting to be THAT time of year — the trees will soon be in bud, and warm weather upon us —we yen to hang out on stoops and stairs. We’re smitten with this StairChair that solves the problem of back support or needing a wide enough surface to lie down and snooze…
Read MoreFound Objects Music + Attitude for Monday
At Under the Sun we stumbled on this reminder of the many objects around us that can be used to make music. Type in Found Objects Music into YouTube’s Search and you’ll find A LOT of interesting improvisations. Here’s a favorite, with a great beat for Monday morning, and a long list of found objects…
Read MoreMystery Wine Dinner Parties + an “Off” Wine Improv
When friends ask, “What can we bring?” to my dinner parties, lately, I’ve been asking them to bring the “mystery” bottles of wines languishing in their “wine cellars”. Those are the bottles that promised to be great —once; since they’ve languished for years, it’s impossible to say if there’s something delicious inside, or a wine that’s past its…
Read MoreTrees as Decorating Elements in a ModernUruguayan Home
In his eco-friendly country home in Uruguay, artist Pablo Reinoso embellished the spare modern decor with tree trunks and branches from the surrounding landscape. He is a man after our own hearts; our NYC laboratory is full of sculptural tree parts foraged from the neighboring park. We especially love the bathroom with a huge trunk embedded in the polished concrete…
Read MoreLemesoff’s Weapon of Mass INSTRUCTION + Other Brilliance
(Video link here.) We are smitten with Buenos Aires-based artist Raul Lemesoff’s brilliant ‘Weapons of Mass Instruction’, a 1979 Ford Falcon transformed into a military-style vehicle/traveling library with a serious function of peace. Lemesoff tours through Argentina’s cities, towns and rural communities, offering free books to anyone interested in his a varied collection of poetry, novels and biographies. But…
Read MoreTransforming Wall Bed-Bookshelf-Storage Unit
Last May I posted the life-size prototype I made out of FoamCore to help me design a complex combination of berth-style (sideways) wall bed, storage and bookshelves for my space in Harlem. I had been struggling with the design problem for some time: how to make the massive volume of the wall-bed blend into the structure, so you…
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