In 2003, Bobby McFerrin and Richard Bona did this ten-minute improvisation at the Montreal Jazz Festival. McFerrin is known for using his fluid voice and body as instrument, making many levels of sound and beat simultaneously. Bona is a Cameroon-born guitarist and musician. At the beginning, you can see and hear the two musicians feeling each other out, listening to each other closely and a bit tentatively; gradually they find a groove, playing off each other and taking ideas in various directions to make a wonderful piece of music. It’s a fine example of the way collaboration works: one person has an idea that makes the other person imagine something, and that idea inspires the other, and they move back and forth building and weaving their ideas together (leaving some behind as they go), to create something unique.
If you open a new web page or tab, you can listen to it as background music while you surf or explore other things.
Oven mitts are an example of a good idea with serious design flaws: shaped like a giant mitten, they are unwieldy and stiff, and don’t really allow for grasping hot things securely with one hand. But it never occurred to us to envision an alternative, other than ordinary pot holders. That is, until we got an email from Stephen Peters who wrote:
“Why do people use oven mitts when there are perfectly good inexpensive welding gloves with FOUR fingers per hand available?”
…my wife uses welding gloves I gave her, and loves them… The simple thin leather or goatskin style work fine. “
Stephen is an electrical field service technician who travels around Pennsylvania, Maryland, the Virginias and the Carolinas installing and repairing battery backup systems…and who obviously thinks outside-the-box.
We poked around welding glove possibilities. On the whole, they are way more stylish than oven mitts, and make grasping searing-hot pots and casseroles, or odd pieces like baking stones oven racks, MUCH easier. Stephen recommends read more…
Some time ago, our friend James Bullock, who is a cable car gripman in San Francisco, was followed for twenty-four hours by a video crew. The video of James’ day – all 24 hours of it – will be shown simultaneously with videos of nine other people from around the world, in a specially-designed pavilion on February 26th in San Francisco; you’ll be able to move at will from one screen (or life) to another to get a unique view of what’s going on in daily lives all over the world. All are part of the Global Lives Project, an international collaboration of filmmakers, architects, designers, programmers, photographers, and artists working to document the diversity of human life experience around the planet. They are building, and inviting others to contribute to, a video library of individual “twenty-four hours”. Much of it will be available online, with subtitles in a host of languages.
“There is no narrative other than that which is found in the composition of everyday life, no overt interpretations other than that which you may bring to it.
By extending the long take to a certain extreme and infusing it with the spirit of cinema verité, we invite audiences to confer close attention onto other worlds, and simultaneously reflect upon their own…
…This project is designed to remain a work-in-progress.We continue to accept new footage for our expanding archive – fresh additions to an evolving visual conversation. “
There’s been an immense amount of effort, and enthusiasm and money put into this project, as well as sponsorship, and media coverage. We have some questions: read more…
I was walking across 125th Street in Harlem the other day and noticed a guy standing outside of a store, wearing really surprising earrings in one ear. “Wow, cool earrings” I said, “Did you make them?”
“Yeah, and they’ve got a story…” He said with a smile. He told me he dreamed them, dreamed of earrings made of mailbox keys, etched with his astrological sign, Aries. So, he took a couple of mailbox keys to a jeweler and had them etched…in silver.
He was really proud of them.
…Original and beautiful, with a backstory I never would have guessed.. read more…
In an email yesterday morning, a reader mentioned that her experiences living in developing countries led her to develop an approach similar to ‘the improvised life’s. We asked where she had lived and what that approach was and were knocked out by her answer:
“I lived in Vietnam for four years and Bolivia for three – amazing and fantastical places, where I learned many, many things, not least of which is how to view objectsneutrally, so that you can see what they can really do beyond their stated purpose..Like the woman in a market in Hanoi who was peeling carrots and other ingredients, to sell as ready-made ingredients for folks to buy and make their own lotus blossom salad, and what did she use as a peeler? A chopstick, a razor blade and a cleverly-deployed rubber band: voila, vegetable peeler, third-world style….”
The jerry-rigged vegetable peeler reminded us of Kevin Kelly’s wonderful blog Street Use, about ingeniously improvised solutions, customizations and contraptions he and his friends have spotted in their travels around the world:
“In short — stuff as it is actually used, and not how its creators planned on it being used. As William Gibson said, ‘The street finds its own uses for things.‘”read more…
This morning a reader wrote to alert me, very gently and carefully, to a glaring typo in yesterday’s post on self-publishing. I wrote “elicit” when I meant “illicit”. Yikes! It got me thinking about making mistakes, (in public, no less) like this one made last night, when I was writing the post late, blind after a long day, moving too fast…
Oh well. Having spent years as a perfectionist, these days I’m opting for less perfection, for trying to get to the point, get things out there, improvise, try stuff, make mistakes. (But then, this is not surgery or flying an airplane.) And when I make mistakes: own up, learn from them, correct them… and try to write enough ahead to give the work to a copy editor (a friend)…
The reader who corrected me this morning also wrote that she loved ‘the improvised life’ despite its typos, and told this story about how it has influenced her thinking: read more…
Andrew Sullivan of theatlantic.com is the huge-traffic blogger of The Daily Dish; its often fierce content ranges from politics, to heart-breaking illicit tweets from Iran’s recent election protests, to grim pictures of torture. For a couple of years now he’s broken up the intensity of his writing and opinion with an ongoing post category called A View from Your Window, a simple photo inserted into the midst of the day’s many posts with a caption indicating time and place, that one of his readers around the world sent in. It is just that: what one person sees when he/she looks out the window.
These photos have a curious effect: of giving instantly a different point of view, and a reminder of the very similar and very different dailyness of lives around the world. They are somehow both refreshing and heartening.
But what is really interesting is the book Sullivan made them into. read more…
Andrea Raisfeld whose location rental website is full of inspiring photos, alerted us to the kitchen of “one of my cleverest homeowners, Harley Swedler, an architect, interior designer, designer, blogger…” It follows the train of thinking started in Pascal Anson on (Cheap) Kitchen Cabinets – making unique configurations of base cabinets and then figuring out cool doors – in a charming and original way.
Pascal Anson sussed out kitchen cabinets and discovered that cabinet makers earn their serious money from the doors, which cost much more than the base cabinets. So he bought base cabinets from IKEA and then bought a mish-mash of doors that had been marked way down. Easy and cheap. There’s a caveat though:
“The rule with this kind of thing is…if you’re going to use a mix of doors, make sure it is a REAL mix and looks really really wrong, not just a little bit wrong.”
We love the idea of REALLY REALLY WRONG as design concept…when you push dissonance to cool…
We also love that Anson’s little video wakes your head up to the way kitchen cabinets work: read more…
Constance Old sent this account of her unexpected walkabout through Philadelphia, when she followed one thing after another, after another, after another…to discover a neighborhood full of food and cool people doing their thing. It reminded us how hunger and curiosity can cause the road to open up in the most unexpected way. And how plain old wandering is an essential element in a creative life…(not to mention all the things you can use a well-designed notecard for)….
” I went down to Philadelphia a couple of weeks ago to drop off work at Da Vinci Art Alliance at S. 6th and Catharine Streets. Although I grew up in Philadelphia, I have not spent much time there in the past twenty years. I had heard from my daughter’s twenty-something drum teacher from Brooklyn that Philadelphia is called the “sixth borough” at the moment because apparently there is a pretty happening music scene there.
Anyway, after I dropped off the work, I ambled along Catharine Street and immediately happened upon what looked like a gem of a restaurant: Little Fish. I went in and discovered that Little Fish holds about 16 people and serves the most delicious, you guessed it, fish. When I asked for a piece of paper to record the delicious food I had eaten, I was presented with the lovely note card (see photo), which is the same paper on which they write out the menu for the night.read more…
A good deal of our inspiration comes from seeing how other people improvise to get where they need to go, build what they need, figure out solutions. We also benefit mightily from things that remind us that there is a huge, endlessly creative universe out there, and that we are a part of it. Tom Ashcraft is one of those people whose work gives both views at once.
We wrote about Tom a few months ago and keep an eye on what he is up to. He is one of those ahead-of-his-time people who keep following their path whether one or hundreds of people come along with him.We were thrilled to see that thousands of folks have their eyes on him these days: Recently, Wired posted DIY Recordings of Awakening Sun and last weekend NPR’s All Things Considered interviewed Tom. read more…
The snow is almost melted in New York but you can bet another blizzard is waiting in the wings. We thought we’d write about sleds so you can be prepared when you’re faced with a nice snowy hill, or know someone on the East Coast who is.
The reason most people don’t keep a real sled is that it takes up too much room for most of the year when there is no snow. That means resorting to make-shift which can yield unpredictable results (see list below for ideas). OR you can buy a Rocko Flake Sled from Sweden for about $12 bucks. It about exactly fits your butt with your legs in the air or tucked in tight, as you pull up the handle slightly to insure a good slide. It weighs next to nothing, so it’s easy to carry to a sledding hill or hide unobtrusively in the back of a closet while you wait for snow. Perfect design!
They’re available by mail-order at the fabulous Kiosk. We sent one to friends who just moved near Prospect Park… read more…
Pamela Hovland, who teaches design at Yale, emailed us about Objectified, a documentary by Gary Hustwit (who made Helvetica, a riveting film about a font). It’s about what REALLY goes into designing the things we take for granted around us, from toothbrushes to chairs to cars, and the ways design – both good and bad – impacts our lives. Objectified moves fast, is totally entertaining and has great music; it will change the way you look at even the most ordinary pack of gum.
Pamela also included this great quote by Rob Walker, New York Times columnist, speaking in Objectified:
“If I had a billion dollars to fund a marketing campaign, I would launch a campaign on behalf of things you already own. Why not enjoy them today? Because we all have so many things that are just around – they’re in the closet, they’re in the attic, whatever… read more…
One of those anonymous chain emails arrived in our Inbox today, with a subject line that read “Playing With the Moon”. It’s a series of photo illusions that someone went to great pains to create. It LOOKS LIKE real – not Photoshopped – photos that they made with their kids, out on some beachy dune over several nights/days when the moon was out. The most beautiful ones look like silhouettes and have a strange, curiously old-fashioned magic…
…We were wondering who made them…and where they got the idea…and why… read more…
