The best way we’ve found to feel the old year pass into the new is at the Big Apple Circus‘ New Year’s Eve show. This is an old-fashioned one-ring circus that began in 1977 as the dream of two young street jugglers. The acts are RIGHT THERE in front of you, vivid and thrilling. You can see the sweat on an juggler’s forehead and the look of intense focus on the aerialist’s face. We gather together around the ring to watch astonishing performances in a ancient form of theater and witness perfect, ephemeral moments that will later live only in our hearts and memory.
Just before midnight, circus people pass out clown noses, paper hats, noisemakers and glasses of champagne.The audience is transformed in the silly get-up – even the shy Japanese couple sitting behind us one year had those big red noses on. And then the count-down begins of the last moments of the year : 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-ONE and suddenly, before we could even catch the change, we’re sitting in the New Year, with the circus band playing raucously as though to stay keep pace with the joy that is all around…
Then, we always call friends who live in earlier time zones where it is still last year, so we can say “Hi, we’re calling from the New Year!” and transmit its wild din and celebration. Our minds open to the strangely thrilling idea of a call from the future…
After discovering the unlikely and delicious combination of leftover mousse of foie gras smeared onto potato chips (we were out of toast), I started making mental notes of the delectable combinations you could make with this ordinary ingredient. Good potato chips – cut slightly thick, fried in olive oil, and seasoned with sea salt – are easy to find many supermarkets these days, so I’ve found myself breaking my rather unrealistic assumption that I should make everything myself. I buy them instead.
And then I imagine what they’d be good with, that is, just about anything that goes with fried potatoes, which opens up a vast world of possibilities. Many of these combos would make a perfect hors d’oeuvre to serve with cocktails or champagne, for New Year’s Eve, let’s say…Just fill the cavity of the chip and serve or let people do it themselves.
Here are some of recent potato chip improvisations: read more…
Voting for the Homies Home Design Award nomination has ended and ‘the improvised life’ was officially nominated, thanks to your votes, though it didn’t make the finals. No worries; we did great!
Your steady barrage of votes kept ‘the improvised life’ on Apartment Therapy’s Hot Movers list for a day and a half, right up front. It made many people so curious about ‘the improvised life’ that they came to check us out; many left enthusiastic comments. Our traffic numbers were HIGH, meaning LOTS of people visited, which helps to expand ‘the improvised life’s visibility, and get the message out – essential fuel for a young blog.
Entering ’the improvised life’ into the awards involved no strategy on our part other than to say “Why not see how we’d do?”, and put ourselves out there. And we got back wonderful, and unexpected, rewards.
So a heartfelt THANK YOU for taking the time to vote, and for being in there with us!
The Known Universe is an amazing video that takes you from the Himalayas to the far reaches of space, to experience the afterglow of Big Bang, constellations, planets, quasars, the Milky Way, our solar system, and more…
It is compiled from the Digital Universe Atlas, a four-dimensional map of the universe maintained by the American Museum of Natural History, so it is all astronomically accurate. It is mind-expanding and beautiful, especially viewed full-screen.
It is one of the treasures I’ve found during the past year on kottke.org, one of my favorite blogs. I stop by daily to see what Jason Kottke has found, and although I may pass several posts by, just scanning the titles opens my view until I hit BIG with the likes of The Known Universe.
ApartmentTherapy’s Homie Awards honors the best in home blogs for 2009, and I’m thinking “Why NOT see if the 6-month old ‘the improvised life’ could have a chance for a nomination at the last minute. The voting for nominating a blog ends on December 29th, so there are only a couple of days to get this going. If we are nominated, then there will be another round of voting to narrow down the category; and one more to choose the absolute winner.
To nominate ‘the improvised life’, or any other blog, go to The Homies Page. You need to sign in (easy), then vote. Although ‘the improvised life’ seems to cover a lot of the categories – food, kids, tech, etc, I think “Home Design” encompasses it enough (though “Life Design” would be more like it…)
So please vote. Let’s see what happens…
…at the very least, maybe some more folks will join our growing community…
On Christmas day, I received a totally unexpected and mind-boggling gift: an email alerting me that my 2001 cookbook A New Way to Cook is included on the Guardian’s “The Best Food Books of the Decade” list. It is such an honor; please bear with me for tooting horns and telling a tale. From UK foodwriter Richard Ehrlich:
“This is the intelligent person’s guide to healthy cooking. The New York based Schneider has rethought the culinary use of fats, sugar etc from the ground up, and this vast book is all about how to go on using them but using a bit less by deploying techniques that maximise their impact. One of the few truly original cookbooks of the last decade; I wish it had made more of a splash on this side of the pond.”
A New Way to Cook is where I first starting testing the idea of writing recipes that encouraged readers to improvise (with some sometimes radical techniques I’d improvised for cooking healthfully); it took nine years to bring to publication (a long story)… The theme of improvisational cooking resonated so strongly with people that
This is ‘the improvised life’s first Christmas and we’re going to take off starting NOW, Christmas Eve, to wander around the city and look at all the wonderful hoopla, have a cocktail, cool out, count blessings. We’ll be back on Monday for the run-up to the New Year…
Until then, we are wishing you a big barrel of JOY!
The theme of current New Yorker is “World Changers” and the magazine is fat with mind-expanding reports. The gist of the issue, and of vast creative streams and ideas that seem to be appearing everywhere these days, are expressed in its amazing cover by Javier Mariscal.
Sometimes when I’m sitting on the subway looking at my fellow passengers, I wonder what they are thinking: What is in their heads? Mariscal’s cover is one possible, deeply heartening, view: unique visions going on quietly all around us.
Yikes! Christmas is on Friday?!!! With New Year’s soon on it’s heels…
If you are as unprepared as I am, here’s an annotated list of some past posts from ‘the improvised life’ to help with the holiday crush… from recipes and gifts to strategies, and decorations… read more…
At the farmer’s market this weekend, Keith Stewart was selling beautiful Christmas trees from his farm, as well as “wall trees” which are tall sculptural branches cut from huge trees. Keith recommended leaning them against or affixing them to a wall and decorating them like a regular Christmas tree (at much less cost).
There are lots of possible plays on the idea of “wall Christmas trees” that would make for fun-to-improvise (if last-minute) trees. The elaborate one above appeared on in The Style Files last year, the brilliant inspiration of Jane of All the Luck in the World; she used her collection read more…
Giorgio Carbone, known to his loyal subjects as has “His Tremendousness” passed away in November in Seborga, the country he created through a masterful feat of improvisation. In 1963, Carbone, a former mimosa farmer, was seized by what the NY Times called “a glorious vision:” that Seborga, five square miles nestled between the Italian Riviera and the Alps, was not part of the surrounding nation of Italy. read more…
In an attempt to figure out what I might like for Christmas, my sister Susy sent me a list of fun, oddly brilliant gift ideas I would never have thought of:
-cable tv subscriptions for premium channels
-night vision binoculars or goggles
-flash paper to make sparks fly from your hands
-devices to measure volume, area, distance in rooms
-an assortment of thrift store oddity books (ventriloquism, etc.)
-a Flip 60-minute mini camera w/usb
-a cheese-stick sized recorder that transfers voice files to your computer
-a telescope to view the stars from your apartment
-a voice synthesizer that makes you sound like a man on the phone
I’d like any one of these gifts (though am curiously compelled by the flash paper).
Susy is an incredibly imaginative person. A few years ago, she re-invented herself. read more…
Our Alt-Malted Milk Balls have been featured all week on The Splendid Table, the terrific public radio food show hosted by Lynne Rosetto Kasper. They are a recent improvisation on Homemade Chocolates for Improvising, a really easy method for making shards of chocolate flavored with whatever crosses your mind, from Marcona almonds to curry powder. Mixing malted milk powder into a great, fragrant chocolate like Valhrona makes for a peak malted milk ball experience (even if they are in a radically different form). Click here for the recipe, or listen to Sally’s interview with Lynne.
(Video link here.) This clip of the the comedian Louis C.K. riffing on Conan O’Brien’s show is a rare combination of REALLY funny and totally wise/smart/true. It is about looking around at what we have, recognizing miracles, counting blessings…
via the Technium, part Kevin Kelly’s vast and amazing site.
is included on the Guardian’s “
