We found this wonderful fragment on Rolu a few weeks back, attributed to Jorge Luis Borges; he’s one of our favorite writers, so we tried to find out more about it.
We discovered that it is from a poem called Instants (Instantes), which in fact, may not have been written by Borges after all. There’s an unresolved dispute about it on the internet.
Nevertheless, Rolu’s distillation of the poem is perfect New Year’s Eve inspiration for thinking about what’s past and what’s ahead, as is the errant poem, below. We’re not crazy about making resolutions (failure seems built in), but we like the thought process. For us, it involves asking “What if…” and imagining possibilities, unfettered.
We discovered that if you change ‘resolution’ to ‘wish’, or ‘goals’, the whole vibe changes, as in this Tweet from Yoko Ono:
270 films from 2010 were spliced into one single, fabulous, illuminating 6 minute video, by genrocks (“I’m a girl by the way”)
“This year’s movies have legitimately transformed my idea of what is creatively possible. To commemorate, I’ve remixed 270 of them into one giant ass video.”
It’s amazing how much this video makes you “see” the past year.
About a year ago we wrote a post about all the things you could eat on, or with, potato chips. One, of course, is onion dip. In our version, it’s made with REAL onions, caramelized until brown (easy), cooled, and stirred into sour cream. It’s from Sally’s award-winning cookbook The Improvisational Cook, which will be relaunched in paperback on February 8th. We’re reprising the recipe here because it’s the perfect New Year’s Eve-and-after accompaniment to champagne and celebration; serve with excellent potato chips (we recommend rosemary-and-olive oil). read more…
I confess that a couple of times I’ve followed hipster guys wearing precariously sagging pants down the street just to see how they handled the balancing act, as the pants began to inch down past mid-crack. Sometimes their gait would turn cowboy-ish, as they bowed their legs trying to keep the pants at the perfect level. It amazed me how long these guys could go without hiking their pants up, which seemed to be some sort of personal challenge. They could go for blocks, walking the line between cool and the embarrassment of pants around ankles. “How does this work?” I’d ask myself, and wonder if they weren’t wearing some kind of secret suspender. What an amazing fashion statement!
I read in Fashion Bomb Daily that “Sagging, which originated in US prisons due to oversized uniforms and the banning of belts to prevent suicide and other violent acts, somehow parlayed itself into mainstream attire.” Pretty complex stuff going on here.
The New York Daily News recently reported today that Andrew Lewis, 43, of Hamilton Heights in Harlem, had invented a solution to almost-falling-down pants. read more…
Since we wrote about hanging classic zig-zag task lights from the ceiling, we’ve been finding images of their very non-office uses. They make a great, flexible wall lights, and are terrific in the kitchen, for directing light where you want, or need it… read more…
The Museum of the City of New York’s amazing photography archive is a wondrous place to browse on a winter day. Among many treasures, you’ll find Shadow Man, a graffiti persona that appeared all over New York City in 1983, photographed by Andreas Feininger…
…the image of the city after a blizzard, its creative heart as vivid as ever.
We were sad to read that Don Van Vliet, once known as Captain Beefheart, passed away recently. He was a complete original, a rare being in any era. Coilhouse described him as “one of the most singularly strange, goading, galvanizing musicians of the 20th century”. His band broke every rule in the ’70s and laid the groundwork for much that came after. His music, epitomized by the epic album Trout Mask ReplicaTrout Mask Replica, would at first seem impossible to listen to, and then suddenly illuminating. It is still wild stuff.
It is amazing what a little paint can do to transform a shipping pallet. It even makes the rough grain and embossed printing look good. Add some industrial wheels (which you can get in colors) and you’ve got a swell coffee table (with magazine storage built in)… read more…
…an excerpt of a letter from Rilke to Rodin on the power of time off:
“I have often asked myself whether those days on which we are forced to be indolent are not just the ones we pass in profoundest activity? Whether all our doing, when it comes later, is not only the last reverberation of a great movement which takes place in us on those days of inaction…”
We love the eloquent reasoning for being lazy dogs…and imagining that, were we Rodin, it could lead to this… read more…
This blizzard came with perfect timing; we’ve been working so hard, we need more time to recharge. We’re gonna take a snow day…and maybe actually play in the snow, while we mull some new ideas. We’ll be back on Tuesday.
Here is the astonishing event that occurred on the eve of the Winter Solstice (December 21st), compressed into a perfect two minutes via time-lapse photography (It’s better, we think, with no sound…so it’s as quiet as a moon). A nice thing to watch on a lazy holiday weekend, and be reminded of what is going on all around us…
Cara de Silva sent us this fab video as a gift after watching our Ode to Joy post. It’s the great Django Reinhardt performing “Christmas Swing” (December 1937, Paris) set to footage from “The Night Before Christmas,” a television special from the 1950′s, sponsored by the Bell Telephone Company, PA., featuring the Mabel Beaton Marionettes. Dig that swingin’ Santa!
We recently watched a strangely strident video called “Every Day of Our Lives Should Advance the Plot”, about taking control and making sure you move toward your dream everyday, as though your life were a movie and you were in charge of every detail “to advance the plot”.
We wondered how “advancing the plot” works when life throws in a monkey wrench and puts the kibosh on “the plot” you were imagining, and you realize that you’re not in control of it all…that the plot is advancing without your say so.
We’ve been thinking about this a lot lately as we see friends around us struggling with extreme and unexpected plot changes in their lives, like a diagnosis of a fatal cancer, or an illness that changes the game radically for a while. Then an email from our wise friend Margot Wellington put it into perspective:
I’ve had to learn that life has both sadness and joy. One has to accept sadness as part of living. And one has to help make joy, learn to recognize joy, and live for the intermittent experience of joy which comes and goes and never stays.
THAT’S the plot we would like to further each day: “to help make joy, AND learn to recognize it…” even when all hell is breaking loose…
One of the most compelling holiday trees we’ve seen in a public space is Yoko Ono‘s Wish Tree, versions of which have been installed around the world. She conceived of the idea in 1996 – though it’s actually an a very old practice – and it continues to reverberate. People are invited to write their wish on a paper tag and tie it to the tree. It can be done with any tree, anywhere, with any group of people. It’s much more powerful than a wishing well, maybe because you can read other people’s wishes…there’s an intimacy and connectedness to it. read more…
, which will be relaunched in paperback on February 8th. We’re reprising the recipe here because it’s the perfect New Year’s Eve-and-after accompaniment to champagne and celebration; serve with excellent potato chips (we recommend rosemary-and-olive oil). 
(which you can get in colors) and you’ve got a swell coffee table (with magazine storage built in)… 
