2015 - Page 9 of 23 - Improvised Life

Kanaat: “Knowing that You Have”

Along with the wisdom of the MANY books we spent leisurely, thoughtful time with during our recent two week hiatus, THIS sign is among the most transformative things we read:

Sol LeWitt’s Instruction for Wondrous Walls

One of our practices is to look at artist’s work carefully to see what ideas we can steal apply in/on our own lives/walls/spaces. We take the do-able kernel and make it our own. We’ve discovered that conceptual artist Sol LeWitt actually left instructions for making his work (which became the works themselves). Why not follow LeWitt’s instruction in our own space, we wondered, to make a wonderful wall?

A Breathtaking, Life-Affirming 60 Countries in 3 Minutes

(Video link here.) In 2011 Walter Chang quit his job after saving up for a couple of years to travel around the world. I trekked amazing landscapes, checked off the bucket list, hitchhiked, slept anywhere I could, and made countless friends. These are my memories. His video, We Call this Home, is a fine reminder of the wonders…

How to Never Overcook Fish Again? Slow Roast It!

I was pleased as punch when the great Food 52 told me they were going to feature my Slow Roasted Salmon recipe as a GENIUS recipe. Their words: “The most foolproof way to cook any fish—and a petition for a new cooking term” since slow-roasting fish can take as little as 15 minutes. I learned the…

Stylish Fashion from Your Fridge + Market

Virginia del Giudice sent us these utterly fab, seriously-stylish fashions made of fruits, vegetables and a few strokes of a brush. Gretchen Roehrs, who has reinterpreted Givenchy and Sonia Rykiel, has some serious X-ray vision, to SEE the possibilities in the most ordinary vegetables and fruits.

We wish that getting dressed were as easy as opening our refrigerator and grab a leaf of chard or kale to wear. We’ve discovered that…

Louis C.K. on Bad Thoughts + A Practice for Healing with Them

Louis C.K. brilliantly, hilariously and barebones-honestly nails the competition we all have going on in our heads between good thoughts and bad ones: I have like the thing I believe, the good thing, that’s the thing I believe and then there’s this THING. And I don’t believe it, but it is there. It’s always this thing, and…

Recipe for Desperate Times: Pasta with a Fried Egg + Parmigiano

I’ve written a great deal about the ability of a simple fried egg to transform just about any food, especially warmed leftovers — oven-roasted peppers or sweet onions, mashed or hashed potatoes, ratatouille, polenta, warmed over risotto, fried bread, asparagus, spinach, potato chips, to name a few — and raw greens, from dandelion to spinach, into a meal.…

Your Mind Has the Amazing Ability… (Ellen Silverman)

We found this wondrous sign at Ellen Silverman’s Instagram. She stood at the chaotic corner of Broadway and 94th Street and made it into a cosmic little film. Check it out here (we couldn’t make the embed code work). A perfect reminder as we ponder the many ideas we have and find and the very…

Brilliance: Email Signature with a Poem Attached

Today I got an email from a Rachel Fleishman, a therapist I met recently. Attached to the usual email signature with her name and link to her website, was a short poem by Antonio Machado in tiny print. Ahhhh…such a swell idea: to send along some image-producing/light-bearing poetry, or a particularly great quote, that would surprise…

Are You a Feng Shui Survivalist?

Over the years,I have discovered I am part of a secret underground of people who quietly shift spaces they stay in to bring them closer to their personal sense of harmony, or to infuse beauty into the downright ugly, improvising using whatever was at hand. Here are some recent adjustments I made to the lovely country house a friend and I stayed in recently, and the logic behind them. My friend said they made the place better. What do you think?

DIY Tree Churches (Our EASY Method)

New Zealand Artist Barry Cox spent four years building a chapel out of trees. He planted and carefully guided the growth of Cut Leaf Alder and other trees, weaving their branches together to create the framework. Then he used shrubs like Copper Sheen to create leafy walls. We LOVE the idea and found it thrilling to walk in, via…

Pink Balloons: The New Mood Therapy (+ Party Installation)

Want to change your mindset and/or your space? Or devise a SERIOUS JOYFUL installation for a party? Create a floating sea of pink balloons, as Margaux Rodot, Mickaël Martin & Benoit Tastet did at the recent Lively Architecture Festival in Montpellier, France. They filled the courtyard of the Hotel de Griffy with balloons in varying shades of pink…

A MOST Astonishing Message from a New Voice

The past two weeks on vacation yielded many wonders: an anonymous heart forged of pebbles and the incredible Fairy Sanctuary made of bits of this and that, below, both stumbled upon while wandering beautiful Omega Institute in upstate New York (Who MADE them, we wondered?). But MOST astonishing was this message we received via text message: It…

The New Luxury (Who Ever Guessed It Would Come to This?)

Offline IS the new luxury for sure and we need some of it. We’re going to take some for our annual two-week vacance: a one-week retreat AWAY from everything, and one -week of catching up with all the projects and people that get pushed aside by….LIFE and our commitment to Improvised Life. In the meantime,…

Plum and Cherry Tart with Thyme + other fast tart improvs

Ellen Silverman, who LOVES to improvise radically on my recipes, recently posted her iteration of my Improvisational Fresh Fruit Tart Formula on Instagram: a sensational Plum Cherry Tart with Thyme. She said it was a huge HIT at her dinner party. Made with lush summer fruits, freeform fruit tarts are the perfect summer dessert (though you can make it all year round). Here’s the simple formula:

Laura Handler’s Checkered Duct Tape AC Surround

Designer Laura Handler, whose chic Montana cabin and cool teeny ‘everything’ vial we’ve featured, sent us images her latest brilliance. The Harlem building in which she recently renovated her apartment is having the bricks repointed, which is seriously messy work. To keep dust OUT, Laura first made a barrier of blue painter’s tape around her (very cool)…

F*ck That: A Guided Meditation (Curiously Works!)

(Video link here.) Resistent to meditation? Jason Headley helps you let go of the realities of the world and relax with F*ck That: A Guided Meditation, a radical new reality-embraced, LOL-based technique… That…is….curiously….effective. via Laughing Squid

Rubber Stamp Brilliance: Yoko Ono’s Peace Map

We found this image on Yoko Ono’s instagram. “The hand is stamping “PEACE” on the map. Yes. We try. yoko” Wonderful words. Part of Ono’s Peace Maps, in which you… Stamping PEACE all over town would make lovely graffiti. via Yoko Ono’s Instagram; peace stamp image via Mikihiko Hori’s Flickr

Inspiration: Le Corbusier’s Envisions a Paris Rooftop Garden

In the 1920’s, Le Corbusier designed Carlos de Beistegui’s apartment in Paris. The rooftop garden, with a very grand rococo fireplace one would usually find indoors, turns the usual outdoor space on its head. Here, he elaborates on it, with a mirror, candlesticks and an ornate sideboard, on grass.

Instant Gratitude Shift via a Powerful Data-Driven Song

(Video link here.) We are haunted by Brian Foo’s strange data-driven song and animated video. It was made by assigning sounds to the movement of refugees fleeing their homelands around the world, from 1975 to 2012, and then animating their paths of flight. Writes Foo: As the song progresses, more instruments are added and the…

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