April 2010
Johnny Shoepainter via Flickr*
The bold and many-faceted Howard Rheingold, who we blogged about yesterday, once did a little internet art piece that asked: “Why doesn’t everybody paint their own shoes?” Yeah, why doesn’t everybody? we wondered. Shoes are basically a blank palette; it would be easy enough to do. Then you could look down and see…
Rheingold has been painting his shoes since 1994:
“ I wasn’t quite sure why I was doing it. Over the years that have passed since then, it has become clear that I was preparing my travelling shoes. I’ve been around the world in them a dozen times.”
We love that he did it not knowing why, and gradually the answer was revealed. There’s a man who listens to himself and the signs around him…
Rheingold published a great How To of his technique which he learned from Jessica “the mother-goddess of the paint your shoe anarchult”. He gives the thinking behind shoe-painting, which is helpful when improvising, and also gives suggestions for How To Paint If You Can’t Draw, which we appreciate. For inspiration, check out his Gallery of Painted Shoes and his Flickr series of his painted shoes in venues all over the world…
read more…
04.30.10 |
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in apparel, copy this!, how-to, identity, materials, outside, people, why not? |
Recently, Lydia Wills alerted us to an entry from Howard Rheingold‘s astonishing blog Howard’s Butt “about his rectal cancer experiences –about being cracked open. He is an amazing person…one of the earliest internet folks who knew it was going to change the world.” Rheingold’s writing sent us to his website and Wikipedia to find out more about him, and then all over the web, as one thing led to another: Rheingold is a future-thinker who saw the power of the internet and wireless devices to create communities WAY before anyone else did, and then he started living that vision… He had a hand in the Millennium Whole Earth Catalog and early internet ventures like HotWired (Wired Magazine’s original web presence), wrote ground-breaking books about technology’s new paradigms and collective intelligence, gave a TED talk about collaboration, and lectures at Stanford and U.C. Berkeley.
In all the work that we came across, Rheingold shows enduring courage: to think for himself…say what’s what…and be comfortable being an outsider (which just about anyone who is himself is), not to mention writing a blog about rectal cancer and putting pictures of butts all over its home page.
Here’s a post Rheingold wrote in anticipation of the radiation oncologist’s verdict the following week. ”Feeling Like a Hard-Boiled Egg” is about the armoring we create to survive and that life cracks apart, and what that process is really about: read more…
04.28.10 |
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in community, identity, inspiration, inspiration blogs + sites, paths + processes, people, principles |
Jim Dine "Optional Autostar"
The sentiment around Mother’s Day is a nice one but we’ve never been crazy about all the marketing of flowers, cards, candy that can go with it; they often seem in contradiction to the gist – of honoring and thanking your mother – by blending in the desperate shelling out of $$ to buy a token, fueled by guilt and/or obligation (We’re talking about grown-up kids, here; the little ones seem to delight in making breakfast-in-bed and homemade cards and gifts…)
We were delighted to see The Robin Hood Foundation‘s great idea for an alt-Mother’s Day gift that is easy-to-send, personal, and speaks volumes: a beautiful card telling your mama that you’ve given a donation in her name to a charity. read more…
04.28.10 |
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A few years ago, Manny Howard was enticed by New York Magazine to try growing food in his Brooklyn backyard and sustain himself on it for a month. At the time, Manny wasn’t really committed to exploring the meaning of “locavore” (the magazine’s tack); he loves wild challenges of just about any kind (hunting boar or bear, making a film in Afghanistan…) and New York Magazine knew they had their sucker. In trying to create “the farm”, Manny got SO deep into something he had no clue about that he almost lost his marriage (and a finger). He spent months preparing land that had not grown a thing in decades, nurturing seedlings under make-shift grow lights, rigging coops, building an irrigation system, learning to geld and kill chickens, trying to get rabbits to breed… learning on the job. Everything that could go wrong did, including a hurricane landing in Brooklyn – right on the farm. He lost 29 pounds.
In a recent interview in Elle Magazine, Manny described the biggest challenge:
“Well, I could break it down to most miserable, or most discouraging, or generated the most self-loathing. Those are probably the categories. I was so crazy and myopic. I was dedicated to finishing the project. I really became a lunatic. Fix what’s broken, heal what’s sick, feed what’s hungry-which was the real gift of the whole project: Apply work to a problem and the problem would be gone for, you know, seven hours. Nothing ever actually got fixed or healed.”
The article Manny wrote for New York was great, and his book about the year or so spent farming in Brooklyn is even better – riveting actually. read more…
04.26.10 |
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in community, food, garden, identity, nature, outside, paths + processes, people, projects + play |
lauriesmithphoto.com
This weekend, I will take a few days off to go down to West Virginia to the Ramp Supper in Helvetia, West Virginia, a feast served family style in the community hall by the Farm Women’s Association – ham, beans, cornbread, slaw, applesauce, hash browns, ramps raw and cooked. Depending on the weather, the raw ramps – like a lily of the valley with a scallion bulb - could range from fiercely peppery to sweetly pungent riffs on garlic-leek-shallot-chive. Fried with rendered bacon in an iron skillet, they melt into garlicy greens, their flavors deeply mellowed. The supper is followed at dusk by a square dance that rocks the hall for hours with fiddle music whose wild strains reverberate throughout the valley. These people mean it. The yearly ramp supper is in celebration of the first living thing to poke through the ground in spring and the end of a long, harsh winter. read more…
04.22.10 |
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in community, food, outside, recipes, sightings, travel |
Pamela Hovland, who is our BEST scout, found this cardboard box shelving system on Etsy. It’s a variation of the clipped-together shelving idea we wrote about earlier. It is to our mind a brilliant use of an ordinary cardboard box (which we’re thinking, could even be painted with rubber paint…) It seems to be the same deal as the other clipped-together systems we’ve found: to get the clips, you’ve got to buy the box. So we’re continuing our call for HELP finding something that will do as a clips to make sturdy shelves out of boxes. read more…
04.21.10 |
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in cheap + great, hard, inside, materials, resources, storage |
We are always amazed by how we’ll have an idea and start thinking about it, trying to figure it out, and then start to stumble on echoes and iterations of it. We’ve been thinking about modular shelving that looks good and sleek and is sturdy but do-able, not too expensive…Why not stack boxes in various ways, we wondered, why not CLIP them together? In the course of a week, we came across some interesting versions of the idea, from chic http://muuto.com/##mce_temp_url#‘s architect-designed – and expensive – shelving to shelving units made with clipped-together crates, and even cardboard boxes (see pt 2). What figure we can find the box pretty easy to find or make; what we want is the clip so we do this our own way, on-the-cheap.
The problem with this great idea is that we haven’t been able to find affordable clips – or any that would work on 1/2 or 3/4-inch thick boards (two put together). So we’re calling on you to help us find them, by expertly or uniquely googling, or keeping eyes peeled in hardware stores or websites that might sell clips for a totally other use that would work here. We’re asking for HELP…
read more…
04.21.10 |
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in copy this!, eating, inside, materials, resources, share, storage, why not? |
Andrew Nixon
Of late we are smitten with a rather homely blog whose content is so good, and its straightforwardness so compelling, that it overcomes its strangely distracting design and ads for cutting down belly fat. Hunter Angler Gardener Cook is Hank Shaw‘s site about being just that:
“I fish. I dig earth, raise plants, live for food and kill wild animals…But most of all I think daily about new ways to cook and eat anything that walks, flies, swims, crawls, skitters, jumps – or grows…Honest food is what I’m seeking…I am especially interested in those meats and veggies that people don’t eat much any more, like pigeons or shad or cardoons.”
Shaw blogs his “wanderings in the edible world” and explorations of foods that strike his fancy – explorations that invariably lead to improvising and figuring things out himself. The blog is a good place for learning about what’s REALLY in season, and what to do with foods you’ve foraged one way or another, or have just wondered about. We like his step-by-step instructions (with photos) of how to break down a (game) bird, and make bottarga (salt-cured fish roe), and are impressed with his thoughts on Wild Game Fat and Flavor, which we haven’t seen written about elsewhere. And even though we can’t get with his use of garlic powder and Instacure No.2 (sodium nitrite) in what looks like an otherwise fine recipe for Lardo, we love his original voice and take and insights into the process of sussing out a new ingredient; the guy is game to learn and get his hands dirty.
The blog is a fine reminder of what is out there, from acorns and borage, to elderflower and shad: all the fabulous possibilities for eating in the natural world… read more…
04.20.10 |
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in food, garden, how-to, nature, outside, recipes, strategies |
Hans Namuth
Lately, we’ve noticed several odd and very expressive permutations of the word “fling”. Fling/flang/flung aren’t about flinging some THING across the room, but rather describe a PERSON being catapulted, by life…allowing ourselves to being flung, learning lessons, making discoveries, really living. First we read Anne Herbert’s wonderful post in Peace, Love and Noticing the Details:
“Jackson Pollock’s paintings were painted in a time and place where it often seemed that the job of being human was to walk along a straight line that already existed and that other people had walked on.
There was more than one straight line one might choose to walk on, but not many more than one.
Maybe you are trying to find your straight line when actually you are about curving, wiggling streams of many different colors and about drops that are nothing like a perfect circle and exude beauty.
Jackson Pollock didn’t micromanage paint. “Lighten up” can mean let more of the colors in that white light can break into, if asked. Finding your lines, your squiggles, your life might include inventing a new skill and getting good at it, as Jackson Pollock was good at flinging paint.
Fling and be flung and find the life in your life.”
…It reminded us of the incredible use of “flang” we read years ago read more…
04.19.10 |
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in inspiration blogs + sites, inspiration books + zines, paths + processes, rules for living, signs, strategies |
We find ourselves inadvertently collecting images of fabulous dresses made out of unlikely materials, like this beauty made by Cristina Liedtke from discarded peanut M&M wrappers. It’s on display at TerraCycle’s Green Up Shop, a pop-up shop set up in empty retail space in Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City.
“To create the gown, more than 1,800 flowers were individually cut and sewn from 600 Peanut M&M wrappers, a time-consuming process that took over 100 hours of labor. (Five yards of silk charmeuse and silk shantung were used for the lining.)
Liedtke’s wearable artwork depicts flowers in bloom: The top of the dress displays the initial budding, while the middle portrays a ‘landscape of blooming vibrant poppies,’ according to the designer. ‘Finally, the bottom of the dress expresses a collage of fully bloomed mature flowers,’ she adds.
Terracycle is a company who makes useful products out of garbage, like an Oreo Wrapper Kite and planters made out of crushed computers and fax machines. They package the products in “garbage” as well: used/recycled bottles, boxes etc. Terracycle seems to have figured out ways of recycling that have stymied city governments.
Says CEO Tom Szaky: “Garbage is opportunity.”
Check out this video about Terracycle: read more…
04.18.10 |
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in apparel, before + after, gifts, housewares, reclaim, repurpose, sightings, stores, strategies |
Maria Robledo
One of my favorite house gifts (to give or to get) is an of-the-season treasure from a good local market, like perfect cherries in early summer, or a bunches of lemon verbena for tea in August, or Meyer Lemons in late winter… These gifts require an eye on the market and a bit of luck, which is part of their great charm to people who like to cook. Recently, I discovered an unlikely treasure in Whole Foods’ normally risk-averse produce section: fresh chickpeas, for a few bucks a pound. They look like a cross between a fat, blunted pea and an edamame (soybean in its shell). Standing in the aisle, I shucked one and ate it, to discover its vegetal pea-like flavor and crunchy texture. I realized that I never considered what the fresh form of a dried chickpea might be.
I scooped some into a bag and took them to a friends’ dinner party. read more…
04.15.10 |
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in cheap + great, family + friends, food, gifts, recipes, share, sightings |
Sally Schneider
Outside my apartment door recently, I found a glass plate covered by an inverted pyrex bowl; inside was a slice of a four layer torte, with a little fork. The card read “It’s probably better thawed out. (me too…).”
It was from my neighbor Matthew Sporzynski, a paper artist whom we’ve blogged; he likes to leave surprises for his friends, and has left quite a few for me: huge bouquets of flowers (a moment-past-their-prime, rescued from a florist friend), a little plastic box of hilarious labels (below), the amazing “hope you feel better” gift of a couple of months ago, and the torte, made by his mom: layers of complex flavors: nuts, coffee, apricot jam, cocoa, with an underlacing of a liqueur.
I’ve left Matthew things too, in a shopping bag right outside his door to reciprocate the gesture: some excellent extra-virgin olive oil, a book of type faces I thought he’d like, a little jar of Apricots in Cardamom Syrup held back from a batch I made for a dinner party. Another neighbor, who lived in the top floor penthouse where he kept a rose garden, occasionally left me a vase with fragrant heirloom roses.
The premise of a little gift left secretly outside of the door or on a porch of a friend is a great one. read more…
04.15.10 |
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in community, family + friends, food, gifts, share |
If you go to Webpages as Graphs, you can type in the URL of any website and see it slowly plotted as a graph, in a kind of magical animation. We did it with ‘the improvised life’ and watched in astonishment at the graphing of its nine months of life: it “blossomed” into what looks like a strange flower, bud by bud, one slowly emerging from another, like watching a time-lapse nature video. We remembered when this blog was only an idea, and the unfolding graph reminded us of the step-by-step process (full of doubts and blindness, setbacks and zig-zags), one thing leading to another, that got us HERE, where we are right now, and all the people we are connected to.
We graphed the New York Times’, and a couple of other websites, just to see if there was any real difference. And there is. Each site made its own unique pattern and vibe: each the product of many forces. This is ‘the improvised life’s. Amazing.
Related post: Video Meditation: A Year in 2 Minutes (or Even 40 Secs)
04.13.10 |
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in community, inspiration blogs + sites, paths + processes |
