My friend Holton Rower, who is an amazing artist, created this sign on his studio door using colored tape. It’s a really great reminder that instantly shifts your perspective: about being more mindful of the potential to hurt someone’s feelings, including your own, maybe especially your own. Just about everybody I know judges themselves harshly, with unspoken words…
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A picture of some gorgeous ceramic paper plates by designer Virginia Sin sent me to her website, an odd mix of her advertising and art works, and practical inventions. My favorite, filed under “Passionately Curious” is her system for cataloguing her shoes by pasting a polaroid image of the shoe right on the box.…
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A while back, the N.Y. Times reported on a stylish mom whose muslin-covered John Derian sofa became a canvas for her daughter and her seventh grade class to decorate with markers. The article didn’t say whether she’d intended the white muslin sofa to be painted on or whether the blank canvas she’d meant only to…
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Out of clips of musicians downloaded from YouTube, Israeli musician Kutiman (Ophir Kutiel) cut and mixed more than a hundred performances into original music. As Sasha Frere-Jones put it: “total strangers collaborating on what sound like live songs”. Hear the album and watch the videos (with attribution) at thru-you.com.
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Many years ago, I bought an amazing yellow mantle, salvaged from an old house in Maine, to surround the fireplace in an apartment I thought I’d live in forever. Then things changed (life’s operating principle) and I had to leave that beautiful space, and make a new home amidst the the harsh realities of…
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When in a weakened state from anxiety, an impending cold or working too hard, I take solace in butter. I stand at the kitchen counter and eat shavings of cold butter on toast, or even crackers, with a few grains of sea salt. Good butter is like a perfect cheese to me but better at…
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My friend Holton Rower made me a cutting board from a hard wood log called Arbutus that he found on his land in the Pacific NorthWest. He had the board cut by a friend who has a saw mill, then carved “Golly’s Food” into it with a chisel, Golly being my nickname. Holton’s cutting board…
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I expected the recent N.Y. Times Magazine’s Women’s Fashion issue to have little of interest for me. I’ve become too practical to care about fabulous bags that are too heavy to carry all day, and clothes that defy my curvy, aging body. But I flipped through it anyway while I waited for water to boil…
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There’s been a lot on the internet lately about guerrilla gardeners, people from all walks dedicated to stealthily transforming blighted, barren or plain ugly urban spots into planted oasis’s. These are often ordinary, middle-class souls fed up with the lack of nature and beauty in their urban landscape, and willing to break the law, shell…
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Among Ikea‘s constantly updating home furnishings offerings, are a handful of constants that represent perfect, enduring, truly practical design at a really good price, and that don’t scream Ikea. My favorite is the Frosta stool***, a $12.99 birch veneer version of Alvar Aalto’s classic mid-century stool. I have four in my office and they are…
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Hidden within Kate Spade’s shopping site, there once was a surprising little gold mine called Things We Love. It was an ever-evolving stream of icons you can select to zero in on something cool you might not have found or thought about otherwise, from books to music to artists to websites…
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One thing lead to another and I stumbled on Esopus Magazine’s website. The magazine presents content from all creative disciplines in a seriously non-commercial format. It is a swell magazine, living its mission of trying to connect artists with a broader public. Each issue includes a free online MP3 player of music created by various artists…
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For years, my office was a corner of my 20-x-17-foot bedroom. I managed to write a 700 page book there, and numerous articles, as well as pay bills. The problem was that I really never left my work; it was always in view, always calling me to do more. For an urban freelance person, having…
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January 26th was the start of Chinese New Year, a celebration that is taken way more seriously in China than most of us know, and which lasts for 14 days. A way to get a sense of it (and all sorts of other things in the world’s news) is to stop in at the Boston…
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Bob Staake, creator of the charming children’s book Donut Chef and dozens of New Yorker cartoons, draws with a mouse using an ancient version of Photoshop. This video speaks volumes about the virtues, and humanity, of computer-generated art, and how fluid the process can be, once you loosen your head up (which this video will do).…
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Really big bags are essential for all sorts of projects, like hauling food home from the farmers market, or a brick or two or a piece of pipe from a construction site, or [rocks] from out of town. I’ve had a variety of bags over the years, some which are still with me, though pretty…
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Pamela Hovland, the extraordinary designer who has been so essential to the design for The Improvised Life, often uses pages from magazines as her envelopes. Periodically, she culls compelling images from magazines, cuts them out with an Exacto knife and straight edge (or just rips them out, leaving a pleasingly rough edge), and folds each…
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Here’s simple, pretty solution to those ugly generic plug chains. There’s infinite possibilities for stringing beads (waterproof) or using other materials like waxed string,which often comes in beautiful colors. (The friend that sent this to me didn’t remember where she found it. So we’re unable, yet, to give credit.)
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A pleasurable antidote to the nothing-out-of-place, perfect fabulousness of mainstream interiors magazines is The Selby which blogs photographs (by Todd Selby) of creative people and their spaces, sometimes with a brief, handwritten interview attached. It is a relief to see real, un-styled totally personal spaces. Scroll down the page of notated images of people in their…
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I’m always on the lookout for great children’s books to give as gifts to my friend’s kids; books are inexpensive, and can be enjoyed over and over again, not to mention inspiring who-knows-what? in those young brains and imaginations. BoingBoing‘s recommendation of Donut Chef, written and illustrated the brilliant Bob Staake, is dead-on. It’s the…
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