Sometimes there’s no way around keeping a piece of furniture in your place that you’re not crazy about; you either need it (like a file cabinet or storage chest) or you can’t get rid of it just yet (you’re keeping it for the next place). Here’s an example of using a great fabric to hide a piece of furniture, from the fabulous house designed by the great Mexican architect Luis Barrigan that we blogged last week. Laying fabric upon wonderful fabric on the table and folding the corners in neatly makes it look interesting and intentional, rather than like a disguise (though we don’t imagine Barrigan is disguising anything in that house.)
We think, the example from Lonny Magazine, below, works pretty well, though it transmits subtle inklings of “disguise”. We think it would have been much more complete with another piece of fabric, or a runner (even placed front to back) draped over it, a la Barrigan.
After we took a look at Wikipedia‘s entry about Memorial Day, we realized that, for us and many folks, the day has come to mean “the beginning of summer” rather than a remembrance of people who had died fighting in wars. We imagined losing someone we love that way and got a different view of the day.
We wondered: what do you wish a person on Memorial Day? Happy Memorial Day doesn’t seem quite right. So we’ve posted this video by Tara Mann called Life’s Journey. I agree.
I was playing around with with rhubarb and strawberries which are in season now and discovered two delicious “base materials” for improvising. Simmering strawberries and rhubarb briefly in a sauterne-like white wine syrup released their flavor to make an intensely-flavored “juice”. When I strained it, I discovered that I had not only made strawberry-rhubarb syrup, but the leftover solids were in fact a delectable cross between a sauce and a compote – a velvety confit. Each inspired other improvisations… read more…
The PBS NewsHour recently issued a challenge: post your ideas for stopping and/or cleaning up the ongoing Gulf of Mexico oil spill on their YouTube site. They received 7,000 entries, with seriously good ideas woven through jokes about calling Macgyver and using duct tape. A few of the best are collected on the News Hours site: clever improvisational thinking by public citizens, along with homemade visuals to illustrate various strategies. Most of them didn’t pass muster by ‘expert’, Greg McCormack, director of the Petroleum Extension Service at the University of Texas, who explained why they wouldn’t work… all EXCEPT ONE…
Two heavily drawling guys from C.S. Roberts Contracting – one dressed in overalls – did a video-demo using kitchen utensils and stainless steel bowls to show that ordinary hay could be used to soak up the oil because oil readily sticks to hay. They figured out all sorts of aspects to the problem, from what kinds of hay to use and how to get it out to see, and what to do with the oil-soaked hay. You can hear their excitement at figuring out the problem: “This is about as green and as simple as it gets…”
We LOVE and are heartened by the folks that put their creativity and imagination and knowledge to this serious problem, and spent time figuring it out and struggling with it, then pulled together a video, and opened themselves and their idea up to criticism…
Thinking outside the box can be a really generous thing to do…
We are big fans of guerrilla activities of all sorts, from the making of art and theater to gardening and marketing. So we loved stumbling on this picture of a striking guerrilla action that took place in Berlin recently: While cars were stopped for green lights, a group of cyclists dumped 13 gallons of colored paint in large puddles onto the street in Berlin’s busy Rosenthaler Platz. As the cars drove through the puddles, their tires inadvertently became brushes to spread the paint, creating a constellation of colored lines. (The artworks’ masterminds posted signs nearby explaining that the paint wasn’t harmful and would wash off with water.) Like the best guerrilla actions, this one shakes up habitual thinking and seeing (and hence maybe living) in positive ways. read more…
Maria Robledo sent this photo from her iPhone with a short, expressive email: “Holton served these cheeries w the empty glass for the pits . Liked the improvised moment”
We like the improvised moment, too and the fun, useful little solutions that mysteriously come…
We’ve noticed that once we started thinking about the idea of improvising, we began to see it happening all around us; we began to DO it ourselves a lot more. Just a slight shift in view, really, turns it into a practice…
We discovered that improvising is really about following ideas as they connect one to another, even with the most ordinary things…like a blog post pointing in many directions – to a recipe for warm fresh cherries, or where to buy the glass, or Holton’s or Maria’s artwork, OR maybe your own brilliant, unexpected idea…
(BTW, you can click here to find out where to buy the swell, thin $3 glass that Holton used for cherry pits; it is useful for many things…we often use it as a vase for a small bunch of flowers, and for individual rice puddings…and Amontillado milkshakes…)
Because we know that so many reality TV shows are scripted, it would be easy to imagine that Britain’s version of American Idol, Britain’s Got Talent, might be a total set-up, were it not for the undeniable gifts of some of its contestants. Even if we hadn’t been taken by this promotional “docu-video” of 81-year-old Janey Cutler’s seemingly guileless manner on the show, we couldn’t help but be knocked out by her rendition of “No Regrets”, a bastardized version of the song Edith Piaf made famous in 1960, “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien”.
It reminded us just how forthrightly and fiercely Piaf – who was known for ballads that echoed her life – sang it in this famous video a few years before she died read more…
We never would imagined how beautiful and NON-kids room pink walls could be until we saw pictures of a house designed by the great Mexican architet Luis Barrigan in 1947. Pink upon pink balanced by yellow, wood, dark floors….read more…
This weekend, public radio’s The Splendid Table will be airing host Lynne Rosetto Kasper‘s interview with Sally about modular kitchen cabinets. Sally has been an inadvertent proponent of the European practice of owning your kitchen, installing it in a rental apartment and taking it with you to your next space. Years ago, she designed a kitchen in a space she thought she’d be in forever; when things changed, she took the kitchen with her. After all, a kitchen is really just an arrangement of individual cabinets bolted to the wall. (Click here to see check out the kitchen-related posts below. )
Since her new space was smaller, Sally also hacked the center island, read more…
Although we’d tasted many wondrous dishes in restaurant-going lives, there is only one that we felt compelled to order three times during the same meal, eating it as appetizer, main course, dessert. Fresh fava beans, dressed with extra-virgin olive oil and a fine dice of young Pecorino cheese, were offered as a “special appetizer” one warm spring night at a Tuscan-style restaurant in New York City. We knew that such a dish is a rarity on restaurant menus because fava beans are work to prepare in quantity; they require both shucking and peeling.”We’ll start with the favas” we said, “and then figure out the rest.”
We were stunned by that first simple dish of beans with their buttery, slightly bitter, “green” pea-like taste. So we ordered it for the next course, and then the next, without restraint or care for propriety. THAT was the dinner we needed. (When we returned the following evening hungering for more, we were told by our waiter that the favas were no longer available: “They were a losing proposition; the staff kept eating them…”)
This is the season for favas and it’s worth the effort to mine yourself and your loved ones a plateful. A fine solution to their laborious-in-quantity prep is read more…
We’re totally addicted to the History Channel’s “American Pickers” for many reasons but mostly because it taps into our primal need to hunt, hoard, share, trade, wander, and tell stories.
Antiques don’t magically appear in your local antique store or flea market. They are foraged and found and repaired by people like business partners Mike Wolfe and Frank Fritz, the shows unlikely stars. Mike is the thin buttoned-down Bud Abbott character while Frank is more Lou Costello with his day-old beard.
Together they wander the back roads of America in a white panel van in search of what most people see as “dumps”: broken down houses and garages you speed past on the way to the beach or the lake, that appear to be filled with junk. When Mike and Frank find one of these places, they’ll pull over and introduce themselves to the owner – older men, widows, daughters – who might be willing to let them forage through their stuff, hoping they’ll come across some treasures to buy, if not some compelling stories.
The result is great television full of improvisation. read more…
For the yearly fashion show given by Ethical Culture Fieldston School in the Bronx, Isabel Cohen wired together hundreds of metal washers to make the halter top for her floor-length attic insulation skirt (inspired by jellyfish tentacles). It was her answer to the show’s challenging theme: “Create an outfit made of anything but fabric”.
The show is the mastermind of Nancy Fried, the school’s sculpture teacher, who wanted a project that would really engage her twelve students. Now in its seventh year, it has become the event-of-the-year at Fieldson, with many students – and even some teachers – taking on the challenge to create outfits out of dot-candy papers, beads, condoms, fake and real money, Legos, Tic Tacs…
Everyone should have a teacher like Fried who encourages them to go way beyond the expected…
We also love Anne Kunstler’s jelly bean outfit… read more…
Whenever I go my artist friends Holton Rower and Maria Robledo‘s house, I see “everyday” things turned on their ear. Like this square bar of soap placed in a too-small bowl in such a way as to shift the usual view AND be a practical way to not have soap sit in water. It reminded me of a “soap dish” Holton made for his studio’s shop years ago: a block of wood with parallel saw cuts that allows the soap to drain. read more…
Since we first set out on our mission to find good looking clips to make shelving out of boxes, we came across Indie Furniture‘s site. (That’s what happens when you hold an idea in your mind: answers and iterations start to appear). The folks at Indie devised a clamp/joint that can fit different sizes of wood, with instructions for using them. They are so passionate about creating a do-it-yourself shelving system that would allow people to configure their own unique shelving, that they even published a manifesto: read more…
Alastair Heseltine is a Canadian artist who makes art and objects by interweaving wood (he especially loves willow). We were knocked out by his woodpile and by his artist’s statement; we don’t know when we’ve seen one that said so much in so few words:
“I am a sculptor working with mixed media relating to the environment. Imagery is guided by the inherent nature of material and by construction systems evolved through mindful observation and play. I also draw from the full spectrum of routines and activities that support my practice: Design, craft production, farming and rural life.” read more…
