The Wishbone Project is Improvised Life’s campaign to crowdsource hundreds of thousands of wishbones for a monumental artwork Holton Rower plans to make out of this unusual art material. Reader BCE just sent him the first batch.
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Stool, Reitveld Chair and Other Plywood DIYs, Via X-ray Vision
An essential practice of improvising is developing x-ray vision: you gradually train your eye, or mind to identify the essential structure of a thing, to understand how it works and how it is made. We learned about plywood construction by scrutinizing some cool simple furniture.
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You Are Not Lost + Beat Wisdom + an un-Kerouac Road Map
This great sign reminded us of the Gary Snyder Poem, Off the Trail, which we think is an essential place to be at times. It is the opposite of the 45-page manual of driving instructions to follow the EXACT 17,527-mile road trip that Jack Kerouac documented in On the Road, his great, transformative, UNPLANNED odyssey
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How to Carry Anything (It’s all About Balance)
Balance will handle just about anything.
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Gary Snyder’s Instant Perspective Expander
This instant perspective-expander is from The Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry, and Translations one of our favorite books, where we ALWAYS find something illuminating.
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Entertaining Tip: Write Guest’s Names On Their Wine Glass
A couple of years ago, we posted about wine and spirits writer Anthony Giglio’s inspired practice of writing the name of each guest on his/her wine glass to cut down on “lost” glasses (and the attendant OMG-there-aren’t-enough-glasses stress). Anthony uses a china marker, a wax or grease pencil that writes perfectly on glass or china…
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Paint Dipped Wooden Spoons to DIY or Buy
Over the past few months, we’ve seen a spate of paint-dipped wooden spoons, with instructions to diy or just buy, like these Etsy ones from Living Embellished. Wanting them for ourselves, we realize that they’d make great inexpensive gifts. Here is all you need to know to diy or buy.
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What Victor Hugo’s Manuscript Tells Us About Editing Work and Life
Victor Hugo’s handwritten manuscript of Les Misérables is full of crossed out passages, arrows and inserts of new text. It’s a fine symbol of the requirements for any inventive work.
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skype is a tool for learning, helping, teaching, connecting
As we compile many innovative uses for Skype and FaceTime, we realize how “virtual” really CAN allow us to “be there”.
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5 Famous ‘Nap Takers’ Give Us Permission to Rest Midday
Need permission to take a nap in the middle of your day? Check out the ever-illuminating Daily Routines, a website about how various famous writers, artists, designers and other brilliant creatives organize their day. Practices include drinking, drug-taking, rising early, exercising, working late into the night, and procrastinating, among others. Perhaps the most eccentric nap routine:…
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Dan Winters’ photographs: ‘Masterpieces Happen Each Moment”
In “The Gray Ghost”, photographer Dan Winters’ Portfolio in the recent New Yorker, he shares his realization that “Countless potential masterpieces happen each moment the world over and go unphotographed.” His work reminds us to open our eys and LOOK.
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Which Techniques Really Do Keep Your Brain Limber?
New research about techniques said to increase your IQ yield some surprising findings. A simple practice will keep your brain limber.
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pan fried olive rescue + warm olivada recipe
Lawrence Durrell famously described the taste of olives as “a taste older than meat, older than wine. A taste as old as cold water.” That flavor was definitely NOT present in the watery-great-looking olives I planned to serve a friend coming for drinks the other night. A quick improvisation turned them into a delcious hors d’oeuvre.
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fern berman: “turn loss into something else”
Finding her capacity to walk diminishing due to MS, artist Fern Berman’s practice became to “turn loss into something else…and generating creativity”. With each photograph she wants to make, she must ask: How can I make that happen?
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diy or find: charming multi-use wood cutting boards
My favorite cutting boards are odd-size rather sculptural wooden boards that I’ve collected, or been given, over the years. Some are surprisingly small — 10-x-6 inches. I might use 2 or 3 at a time. There is just something about their “feel” that makes them fun to use, and they are wonderful to look at.…
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design + diet lessons in an oddly-cut apple
One of the central principles of improvisation we follow is to turn things on their side, or upside-down, a simple shift that often yields unexpected results. It’s a practice you can do in your imagination just about anywhere, and in practice with everyday things. Recently, instead of the usual way of cutting an apple (slicing…
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the tweet powered car
(Video link here.) Under the guidance of innovative education organization MindDrive, thirty at-risk students in a Kansas City, Missouri neighborhood once called the “killing zip code” , built an electric car that successfully converted social media into fuel for a road trip from Kansas City to Washington D.C. A tweet was 5 watts; a Facebook like, 1 watt;…
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awesome architectural principle: urban acupuncture
In May 2007, a tornado two miles wide traveling 200 miles an hour destroyed nearly the entire town of Greensburg, Kansas, killing 11 people. After the tornado, the city council passed a resolution stating that all city buildings would be built to LEED – platinum standards, making it the first city in the nation to…
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peter beard: learn how to benefit from accidents and chances you take
Peter Beard: A Wild Life is a lovely little film of photographer Peter Beard working on a collage at his studio on Montauk, Long Island. He is widely known for his photographs both of pop stars like Mick Jagger and Andy Warhol and of the tragic destruction of elephant herds in Africa. Here at age 75,…
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drink from your own well…and the current within
“Drink from your own well.” I take those words on board whenever I’m struggling to create. I believe they mean that each of us has to dig deeply into our authentic self as the wellspring for our best work. If we search outside ourselves we may neglect something that is essential to our art. Poet William Stafford‘s wrote this…
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