A couple of weeks ago while we were compiling Artist’s Studios with Sofas + Rest Spaces, we stumbled on picture of earth artist Roy Staab‘s that had the notation: The Site Is My Studio. There was Staab creating in the Hudson River in 1989. IN THE HUDSON RIVER! It got us thinking about what our studio is. We realized…
Read More
(Video link here.) This short animation describes the incredibly useful “Weakness of Strength Theory”: the flip side of a person’s strengths in one context—the qualities you love or admire them for — are often irritating weaknesses in another. “Every virtue has an associated weakness”; one can’t exist without the other. And no one is ALL strengths and virtues; we are…
Read More
The extraordinary silvery wig above is $13.88 worth of identity experiment: a bargain. Having discovered that searching “wigs” at Amazon, yields an astonishing array of styles and colors, I bought the 32″ Long Curly Hair Lolita Custom Party Wig (Grey) to see what would happen if I went from brown to gray in a flash. I discovered way more.
Read More
We know many people who work hard at jobs they don’t love in order to pay for the lives or creative work they do. Our role model for how to do both kinds of work is the great poet Wallace Stevens, who was an insurance executive for much of his life; many of his greatest poems were written…
Read More
What if Age is Nothing But a Mind-Set in The Sunday Times Magazine describes the astonishing results of Harvard social psychologist Ellen Langer‘s studies into the way routines and mental habits determine our behavior. We are especially taken with Langer’s unique practice of mindfulness, achievable without meditation:
Read More
(Video link here.) We can think of no better way to start a new week than with this interview with Patti Smith at the Louisiana Literature festival August 24, 2012 at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. She talks about self-expression, having an audience or not, suffering, happiness, perfection, expression, politics, technology. But she really builds…
Read More
(Video link here.) This compelling 2-minute video for is based on The School of Life‘s Alain de Botton’s writings about the uses of envy, and the information that often-difficult emotion holds. It offers a kind, rather gentle approach to an emotion we often hold against ourselves as being bad.
Read More
The past few mornings, our reading has been Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews with the poet Allen Ginsberg. Most of the interviews are very long, except one It asked a single question about how to balance working for obvious fortune and the creative life, concerns that resonate with just about everyone we know. Ginsberg’s answer totally blew us away. (We recommend…
Read More
When a friend sent us this image of Greta Oto, a wondrous butterfly with transparent wings, we thought immediately of “The Butterfly Dream” from an ancient Chinese text written by the Daoist sage Chuang-Tzu:
Read More
(Video link here.) This video about 23-year-old Kanya Sesser, born without legs and abandoned as a child, says it all. She’s a wise woman. Here are our favorite bits:
Read More
In response to A New View of Losing Years of Work, a reader named Ann sent us this perfect cartoon and commentary: I’m not sure this link* will take you to the place I intend. I want to link you to the cartoon that shows a man tied to a chair while masked men steal…
Read More
Linda Rodin, a late-sixty-something former model and fashion stylist is known for her signature style that revolves around a simple three element-formula: her long silvery gray hair, oversize glasses and red lipstick — always. She created her popular Olio Lusso Face Oil, which sells for $170 per ounce, by mixing the oils she used frequently “in a coffee cup…like salad dressing,…
Read More
(Video link here.) Stoney Emshwiller was 18 years old when he recorded himself interviewing his older self in 1977. Thirty-eight years later, a 56-year-old Stoney answered his younger self’s questions, on film. Here’s a trailer of “Later That Same Life“, the astonishing film he is raising money to finish.
Read More
Improvised Life part-time assistant editor Mira Keras wrote this spot-on description of a writer procrastinating…as a way of procrastinating herself. But she discovered something essential in the process.
Read More
(Video link here.) We just heard the astonishing news that Lego, a company whose product we have featured numerous times as a symbol of possibility, has refused to fill a large order of its plastic bricks — an art material — for Chinese artist’s Ai Weiwei upcoming exhibition at in Australia. Their reason: They don’t provide bricks…
Read More
Patti Smith is very much in the news these days, largely due to the release of her new memoir M Train, which New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani called “An eloquent — and a deeply moving — elegy for what she has “lost and cannot find” but can remember in words.“ Penelope Green in the Times…
Read More
Lately we’ve come across two compelling photographers whose images boldly portray an essential message about Instagram: the pretty picture you see is not the WHOLE picture. They show the unpleasantly real context from which the pretty photo was plucked, to become an aspirational ideal that messes with our heads. They help to antidote social media’s portrayal of the perfect lives we don’t have.
Read More
Inspired by Alain de Botton’s idea that Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall be adapted in new ways for modern times, digital storytellers Alan Donohoe and Steven Parker created “The Waiting Wall” in a busy English train station during the Brighton Digital Festival. The huge display projected the deepest fears and most personal confessions of travelers who submitted them anonymously for…
Read More
Sixty-eight-year-old author and singer, 70’s Punk star Patti Smith is one of the subjects of the 2015 Pirelli calendar — considered fashion’s sexiest – celebrating female achievement. With her hair grown out gray, no makeup or face lift, and her singular uniform, she presents a very different kind of role model then the usual Pirelli pin-up. New…
Read More
Amy Pence-Brown, a 40-year-old Idaho mother of four and founder of the Boise Rad Fat Collective Facebook, stood stripped down to a bikini in a busy Boise market, blindfolded herself and invited people to write on her body. Her mission statement was scrawled in chalk on the board beside her: “I’m standing for anyone who has struggled…
Read More