The recent post on innovative goody bags elicited some wonderful ideas from readers about gifts to send home with guests. Here’s ‘the improvised life’ contributor Lydia Will’s surprising variation on the theme:
“Your post on Page Goolrick’s ingenious goody bags really hit home: It shifts the whole idea of a hostess gift and says to your guests ‘Here’s something for making my night so wonderful’, while sending them off into the night with their own trick-or-treat bag to rifle through when they get home. The pleasures of the evening don’t end with that night: the gifts are an ever-present reminder of a great time, now a memory…the host’s secret pleasure is the joy of giving again.
It reminded me of my wedding – we had a very small wedding at a back yard garden with a home-cooked dinner after. And when dinner was over, we pulled out the presents. Not for my husband and me: we had a for real No Present policy. Instead, my mother and I spent many hours searching for the right gift for each guest, something that said to them: “you are the reason this day is special; it only has meaning because you’re witnessing it”… And finding just the right gift for someone, the gift that really gets them and what they’re about, that’s the trick, and there’s nothing better when you pull it off. read more…
Amidst the images of devastation and loss coming out of Haiti yesterday were some symbols of of hope. Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres), whose medical facilities in Haiti were destroyed during the earthquake, were able to set up remarkable inflatable hospitals as triage centers ministering to devastated Port au Prince. They were there, even as other relief workers were finding it almost impossible to get through. It seems as though Doctors Without Borders is always “there” somehow.
In Greece many years ago I met a women who volunteered as a nurse for MSF. She would leave her life on the beautiful island of Chios on a moments notice to give service in the most dire of situations. What fierce stuff she is made of, I thought, unable to imagine having the strength to experience all that she had.
And although I often hear people talking about doing something rather than “just giving money”, sometimes giving money is the most effective thing we can do for the moment: a way of giving support to those who are there helping those in such dire need. read more…
My friend Peggy Markel, who designs unique food and culture adventures, recently went on a scouting trip in Rajasthan India. She traveled from luxurious palaces to rustic countryside, taking in its monumental contrasts.
For Peggy, food is always about context, and this little film shows a fragment of the culture she was exploring, as revealing as its food, and as essential to understanding it.
Here is the story Peggy told me of how she stumbled on these street musicians and their improvised instrument made of bowls of water. read more…
Every winter around this time, hyacinths appear at my corner market: three just-sprouting bulbs nestled in dirt in an ugly plastic pot wrapped in gaudy paper. I treat myself to them because, liberated from their tacky dressing, they offer a glimmer of spring for a few dollars.
Once home, I remove the shiny paper, hold the base of the green sprouts firmly in one hand and tip the pot upside-down. I pull the sprout gently and the entire molded form of dirt and roots comes out in one neat piece. Then I place it in a shallow bowl… read more…
Kevin Kelly recently wrote about Anne Herbert, a writer he knew in the early ’80′s who edited CoEvolution Quarterly, the companion magazine to Whole Earth Catalog. She is most known for coining the phrase, “Practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty.”
Kelly hadn’t been in touch with her in all this time, but remembered her writing:
“…it was telegraphic, lyrical, abbreviated, evocative, extremely personal and mystical. She wrote in short bursts. Like proverbs from a secret bible…It was not like any writing I had encountered…
Everything he says about Herbert’s writing is true. It is often like haiku (without the constraints): tiny meditations that caste a unique light on everyday things. Here are some: read more…
Working Big is a remarkable book about large-scale art projects for kids. Written in 1975, it is long out-of-print, but available these days as a free, downloadable pdf from Public Collectors. It gives an expansive view (with how-to’s) of discovery projects to do with your own kids, or fantasize about for your (grown-up) self.
Working Big’s essential premise is that kids and artists often take similar approaches in exploring and working with their environment. Its chapter titles – ”Kids’ Space Equals Artists’ Space” and “The Artist Shapes as the Child Shapes” – should be printed on tee shirts, or scrawled on walls. Pictures of kids working away with obvious pleasure are interspersed with images of works by notable artists, like Robert Smithson‘s earthworks, The Broken Circle and Amarillo Ramp. This inspiring book holds a lot of wisdom about kids AND the creative process in general:
“When nature itself provides the medium, children are eager and intuitive artists. They need no one to tell them that the moist grittiness of sand is just right for sculpturing or read more…
Hunter Gatherer is a blog that is appears to be about STUFF: enticing pictures of cool things for sale (no words) that it is not selling (it just points to the place that is): like the simple desk for sale at Iko Iko with a lovely curved base that looks like you could make it yourself out of really good plywood. This curiously curated selection is almost always rich with interesting, if inadvertent, ideas, like Iko Iko’s concrete block shelving (totally unlike college dorm ones)… read more…
MacGyver is a 1980′s TV series about a cute, soft-spoken secret agent who doesn’t carry a gun or hi-tech tools; he uses ingenuity and science and whatever is at hand to invent solutions. Over the course of seven seasons, MacGyver fixed a truck with a pen spring, fashioned a harpoon out of a rod and electrical cord, used milk chocolate bars to stop a sulfuric acid leak, and faked musical notes with wine-filled goblets to open a lock…to name of few of hundreds of off-the-cuff macgyverisms. As MacGyver said:
“A paper clip can be a wondrous thing. More times than I can remember, one of these has gotten me out of a tight spot.”
I watched this 7-minutes clip showing the ingenious ways MacGyver used a map to get him out of scrapes, and was smitten. read more…
Recently, I was a guest at a dinner party hosted by architect Page Goolrick. She not only designs beautiful spaces, but lighting (for Nessen) and cool desk accessories (for MOMA), and shawls (for Takashimaya).
At the end of an evening being wonderfully fed and welcomed by Page, each guest received a goody bag filled with treasures she had curated. Traditionally, goody bags are shopping bags of samples or gifts that PR people give out at the end of an event to promote something, whether a new food item, or a movie, or a fashion line. Page took the notion and turned it on its ear. She gave her guests little things she loves: a bag full of surprises that was like opening a Christmas stocking – for grownups! read more…
In the often-surprising “Lives” page of last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Robin Black told the story of how her family’s dilapidated home was scouted by a reality tv producer for a show about houses so “spectacularly unkempt” that they make their neighbors mad. At first Black and her husband are shocked and somewhat embarrassed, then they warm to the idea. Caught up in the idea that “our failings would turn us into stars”, they convince themselves of a pat sitcom-ish pitch for the audition tape as towhy their place is so untended: of good-natured overachievers – lives rife with interest and accomplishment – who couldn’t possibly do it all. It was a far cry from the actual reasons for their house’s disrepair, which she and her husband see all too clearly when they weren’t chosen for the show after all:
Years ago, New York photographer Maria Robledo designed this simple, functional and really cool-looking storage for her studio. A few hours before she moved to a new space, I ran over to photograph them for ‘the improvised life’ because they are so smart and great, even though she’d emptied them out. They once held an impressive amount of office and photographic supplies, and linens and props for shoots.
Maria’s wall of cabinets is an unfussy, easy-to-duplicate approach that would translate well to all sorts of spaces. read more…
This simple photo gives an unexpected shift of view – perfect for a new year. It’s from Scattered Light a participatory photo project and exhibition designed to
“re-acquaint the viewer to his/her surrounding environment and introduce another way of seeing and interpreting the things around them.”
It is the brainchild of ASDF: a series of posters generated from photos created by anybody who wants to respond to the theme, like ”A view of a flat horizon line over land or water.” Right-side-up, the photo, above, is pretty ordinary; sometimes turning things on their head is what does the trick.
That’s what ‘the improvised life’ set out to do when it launched six months ago: inspire you to create, invent, be resourceful, make it up as you go along…turn things upside-down or sideways or inside out to see what might be possible. We are incredibly grateful and counting big blessings on our half-year birthday, for the readers who have been ‘in there’ with us with comments, moral support, emails and growing numbers that say “YES!”.
In return, we’re shouting our heartfelt THANKS!. We’re looking forward to the next six months, and hatching big plots for ‘the improvised life’.
