In January, after Improvised Life had been down for several days, I sent out a message to Friends with Benefits members. The message said, in essence: “The site is down, I hope it will be back and that years of writing and images have not been damaged; please send whatever personal magic you employ my way.” Then it seemed, my only option was to wait and practice Improvised Life’s principles…
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When Improvised Life went down over the holidays due to the web host’s mighty and prolonged fail, there was the possibility that data backups had been damaged and six years of work could be lost. Many readers responded with heartening messages and offers of help. Ever-wise performance artist Fast Forward (whom I became friends with years ago…
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Our friend Cara De Silva sent us a link to images of trees growing through concrete, with these words. …I was startled and grateful when I looked at these beautiful and inspiring photographs. But not only for the usual reasons. For months now I have been seeing such trees as a metaphor,
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(Video link HERE.) Recently we stumbled on this video of music made with rain drops. Rain as percussion instrument: MUSIC. It’s pretty swell, and very carefully thought out, with its haute technology and count of rain drops. We love Fast Forward’s Rain Music for it’s utter in-the-moment directness and accessibility. (Video link HERE.)
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This morning eight blocks south of here, two old apartment buildings had collapsed after a violent explosion, near a heavily-trafficked intersection of Harlem. I knew that for some people, as ordinary as me, their lives had been profoundly changed or lost in a moment this morning.
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Our friend Fast Forward sent us an email recently alerting us to Homedit’s 40 Creative ways of re-using old suitcases. Wrote Fast: Unfortunately there are not ’40 ways’ but some of them are ‘nice’ We like the settee iteration, above, and the especially cool storage possibilities,
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We like to stop in at our friend Fast Forward‘s Facebook occasionally to see what the eagle-eyed avant-garde sound artist has found in his travels. We can always count on an expanding view of things…
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The amazing avant-garde musician Fast Forward has joinged forces with his friend Elaine Sokolof to create a charming and illuminating Facebook page “Not Better Just Different”. (It’s public, so you don’t have to be a member of Facebook . Fast wrote us that they started the page just to “try something out and see what…
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photo: fast forward A while back, our friend Fast Forward showed us images of his recent trip to Hong Kong; many are annotated in true Fastian (or is it Forward-ian?) style, which show HIS unique way of seeing things, as an experimental/culinarian composer/artist . Beat-up drums full of something – cooking oil, perhaps – become…
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A couple of months ago, we received an interesting comment thanking us for a quote we posted from John Cage’s A Year from Monday: “Even though I have 2 copies of this book, knew JC and spent 30 years performing his music, it was still great to see”. It was signed ‘Fast Forward’. Well of course we…
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