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…
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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.
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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(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…
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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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In the final paragraph of Camus’ last published essay, Create Dangerously, we found this radical idea: One may long, as I do, for a gentler flame, a respite, a pause for musing. But perhaps there is no other peace for the artist than what he finds in the heat of combat. ‘Every wall is a door,’ Emerson correctly said.…
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As fans of plywood for its economical, elemental, very modern possibilities for stylish interiors, we are smitten with bright blue-stained plywood used in Vancouver’s Kin Kao Restaurant. Local Scott & Scott Architects choose plywood to use in tandem with readily available materials, including painted concrete, soaped beech, and galvanized metal. Their clever technique of using construction-grade…
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Video link HERE. Artist Chris Burden used some of our favorite materials — concrete, steel beams, a construction crane…and…chance — for his Beam Drop. For us, the crazy power of the piece is in watching it: pure gravitational and other mysterious forces violently plunking the beams into wet concrete, fueled by Burden’s vision.
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We’ve written numerous posts wishing out loud for a life-size building block that would allow us to create with the ease of a Lego; over the years, we’ve featured some “close-but- not-quite-right iterations“. Our wish has come true, at last. Serial entrepreneur Arnon Rosen applied his knowledge of modular flooring to create the technology to produce 12-inch…
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Usually we think that only difficulties come without warning. It hadn’t occurred to us that harmony and abundance can seem to come without warning as well, until we read this from the Selected Poems of Mark Strand:
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While I was putting together the recent post about mortars and pestles, I came across Maria Robledo’s beautiful image of one of my favorite mortar-made sauces. I learned the deceptively simple recipe from chef Grey Kunz years ago and it has been enduringly great: an example of the magic of a few well-chosen ingredients artfully combined by…
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(Video link here.) When a grieving friend came for dinner, the conversation eventually turned from sadness to LOL hilarity. He told us that he had recently heard that an entrepeneur was making a fortune selling “poop spray”, a scented liquid that you spray in the toilet “before to go” to literally prevent your shit from stinking. You’re kidding, we…
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Here’s a summary of all the fixes I’ve found to dampen irritating, sleep-depriving vibrations coming from machinery and other mechanicals.
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A convergence of two owl poems: one, wordless, at Vine…one by Mary Oliver, when we opened Blue Horses: Owl Poem One has to say this for the rounds of life that keep coming and going; it has worked so far. The rabbit, after all, has never asked if the grass wanted to live. Any more…
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Looking through our photo archive of the Laboratory renovation, we came across this image of an olive fork improvised by Roberto, a stunningly-outside-the-box-creative of a carpenter who was part the construction team. Being Portuguese, he loved olives and bought a jar for his lunch one day. Having no fork with which to spear them, he…made one…
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