On a recent trip to Pittsburgh, I stopped at the Carnegie Museum of Art to wait for a friend who worked there. In my short rambling, I saw some wonderful works ‘in person’ that I’d previously only seen online, including On Kawara’s date paintings. Reading the little info cards alongside the works often gave me…
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(Video link here.) Two minutes of crazy brilliance: DJ Kalan aka DJ Stove in his kitchen in the Philippines spins his fantasies along with Tiesto’s Catch ‘Em By Surprise —sung by Busta Rhymes— using TWO PROPANE BURNERS AS IMAGINARY TURNTABLES. It is the ultimate example of
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We hunt for ideas everywhere, walking around, scrolling through websites, leafing through books and magazines often…in the quiet of the bathroom. A compelling article in the New York Time’s T Magazine made us hunt for a bookmark there. Et voila: we discovered that toilet paper is thin enough to not make a mark on any publication, wide…
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We’ve always loved J.S. Bach’s 24 Preludes and Fugues for Well Tempered Clavier and found one of our favorites this video animation. It is wonderful music to start your day —or week— and
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When I was a young cook, Roger Vergé, who died last week at age of 85, was one of a handful of chefs who changed the way I thought about food, pioneering the innovative style that became known as “nouvelle cuisine”. He taught me his simple, delicious sauce for grilled or roasted fish that I have relied on over the many years since.
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Over the years, one of the very best purchases I have made were two bamboo Wave Room Screens made of thin bamboo slats that unfurl to create an organic wave shape. I have had mine at least 15 years in two spaces and they have proven to be endlessly useful. They are an inexpensive, stylish alternative to the classic Eames plywood screen I could not afford. Here are SOME of the ways I’ve used them…
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At Grant Snider’s very wise Incidental Comics, we found THIS brilliant idea: take a day to do nothing. Only we’d change one word in the last panel of Snider’s comic about the worthy “pursuit of aimlessness”…
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Improvised Life is a space that celebrates creative living to the fullest degree. We work hard to collect great ideas from artists; inspiring thoughts from poets; stylish, useful home upgrades; and yummy recipes…and present them with thoughtful commentary and unexpected leaps and associations. A tribe is a community with a similar mindset for living, and we want you in…
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(Video link here.) The outlets of the “charging station” in the little foyer of my Harlem space are seriously overtaxed by devices and too many visible cords snaking out of the countertop outlet. So I was happy to discover the Portiko Extension Cord, a 6-foot extension cord with two outlets and two USB ports. I can…
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Designer Stefan Sagmeister has been obsessed with HAPPINESS for a decade or so, doing massive research, giving talks, making a film, and mounting an exhibition called The Happy Show, An Exploration of Happiness. You can visit it virtually at his tumblr. It’s worth it. Sagmeister’s tested a lot of “happiness” theories on himself. The very…
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Throughout my school age years I kept ratty composition notebooks with me at nearly all the time to record lists, illustrations, ideas, and poetry: a way to combine artistic enjoyment and organization. Google Keep app is my modern version of that, a canvas for lists and notes-to-be color-coded, archived, tagged, and illustrated. My categories vary from the very practical to very playful.
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When I was a little girl in the sixties, my mother to used occasionally take me to the St. Regis hotel for lunch in the little lounge next to the famous King Cole Bar. Across the room, we often saw Salvador Dali lunching with his pet ocelot Babou, who lived with him in his suite upstairs. At the time, I had no concept of what I was witnessing: eccentricity in full glory, a practice I would come to admire.
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Cow hide rugs are so ubiquitous these days, that we’ve gotten pretty tired of seeing them in interiors. That is, UNTIL we saw one speckled with gold. It seems that painted, spattered, striped, embellished hides have become something of a trend. Apartment34 has a great DIY that gives the gist (and there are lots of…
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One of the most wondrous website’s we’ve seen lately is Cloudreporter, a site of cloud images that readers have submitted, with an unobtrusive sliding note that tells who took it, the location and date. Some of them have titles like Clouds Hanging Low or Summer in SF, or a poetic notation like “evening sky over…
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When Essex Farm, my sensational CSA, delivered a fat bundle of rhubarb stalks in the midst of a crazy-busy week, I employed my super fast, super simple rhubarb recipe. It results in a rustic, velvety rhubarb stew that is divine as is with heavy cream, creme fraiche, ice cream or yogurt; sandwiched between Foolproof Cream Biscuits with…
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As we scroll through design sites, we periodically spot some new gadget for keeping ugly computer wires in check: reels that wind them up, dongles that collect them behind your desk… Perhaps the BEST improvisation we’ve seen is in Christoph Niemann’s workspace. The inspired illustrator/artist/author disguised an ugly black cable by placing a black and white image…
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Derek Donahue found all of the tautologies —phrases in which the same thing is said twice —from the great, gritty HBO series The Wire and supercut them into one video. When we wrote a few down, they seemed more like some seriously ‘street’, existential koans: succinct paradoxical statements used for meditation in Buddhism. Here are our favorites, ESPECIALLY the rather cosmic ones at the bottom. They can be reshuffled to form curiously illuminating poems.
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Unlike many folks using recycled materials, WILL Holman of Object Guerrilla has an eye for style, as evidenced by the inspired Zip Tie Lounge Chair, above, a flat-pack armchair made of plywood panels sewn together with zip ties. His new book Guerilla Furniture Design contains chapters on Guerilla History, Sustainability, Philosophy, The Guerilla Workshop and Design Fundamentals,…
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Along with the rest of the world, I’ve been watching the transformation of Olympic gold medal decathlon winner Bruce Jenner into ultra-femme Caitlyn Jenner, culminating in Annie Leibovitz’s Vanity Fair cover portrait. Having worked with Leibovitz years ago I know that, beyond the 10-hours of facial-feminization surgery, Caitlyn has been styled to-the-hilt by makeup, hair and…
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We’ve posted about Japanese artist Yoyoi Kusama a number of times in the past, so taken were we with her view of art as medicine; losing herself in making art — “self-obliteration”— is her way of relieving illness. We have been especially transfixed by her repetitive use of dots in her artwork. In “The Obliteration Room”, currently on view…
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