Sally Schneider
Shift two letters of ‘worrier’ (and your thinking, slightly) and you become…
….WARRIOR!
January 2011
‘the improvisational cook’ coming soon
Here’s a first look at the new cover of The Improvisational Cook, Sally’s award-winning cookbook; it will be released in paperback on February 8th. It’s shows you the way ‘in’ to cooking improvisationally, more freely and with what’s on hand. Find out more about the book and look inside here, sample an improvised riff on Roasted Pears on Harper Collins’ blog here, or pre-order on Amazon.
evocative ideas from “the best of the selby 2010″
The Selby recently posted its favorite photos of 2010. So we choose our favorites of its favorites: all have an idea that we can put to use (or at least make us think), like stacking books horizontally as well as vertically on our library shelves: the flow and visuals are totally different. The wall of book in the picture looks almost like a patchwork quilt…
We love the idea of making a cloth or paper panel printed with a big view, as a kind of trompe l’oeil, to expand a space, like this (though we’d probably not choose convenience store shelves, as funny as it is).. read more…
storing firewood indoors = firewood as storage unit
Studio St. Paul
If you’ve got a wood-burning fireplace in a city apartment and use it a lot, you have to come to terms with a firewood storage system. Do you store it in the basement and lug batches up flights of stairs (which we once did), or do you find a nook inside to pile it up (below)? We love the possibilities in Studio St. Paul‘s clever firewood storage, made by nestling wooden crates randomly amidst the pile of wood. They use it to display their textile goods. We’d store kindling and paper, little paintings, a lamp, maybe some books. read more…
painted floors with a surprise
We love painted floors, especially white ones because they expand and brighten a space AND are a great inexpensive solution to dealing with not-great floors. We never thought of painting a little patch of colorfully painted boards to break up the expanse, as interior designer Annette Verkuyls did in her home in an early twentieth century warehouse…
…unexpected and charming…
via French By Design
anyone can whistle (via anita ellis)
Whenever I find myself struggling to write and imagining harsh scrutiny and criticism, I listen to Anita Ellis singing Anyone Can Whistle. (Click to play in a separate page while you read.)
Steven Sondheim‘s lyrics about the desire to overcome one’s limits echoes Ellis’ own story. She was a vocalist of great renown in the 40′s and 50′s whose stage-fright was so overwhelming, she rarely sang in public. Instead, she sang on radio shows where no one could see her, and was the “voice” behind non-singing stars like Rita Hayworth and Shelley Winters. And she would sing privately, often a capella, for friends.
I was lucky enough to have been at a rare concert she gave in the 1980′s when she attempted once again to overcome her paralyzing fear of performing publicly. On stage early into the first song, she froze as she looked out into the audience, the moments passing in silence. Suddenly, her brother Larry Kert rose from his seat in the orchestra and called out: “Somebody lo-v-v-v-es you!”.
As though woken from a dream, Ellis began to sing. read more…
nothing on tv? watch movies online for free
Hope and Glory, via sixmartinis.blogspot.com
The GREAT OpenCulture has compiled a list of 275 movies you can watch online, for free. They include classics like The Third Man and To Kill a Mockingbird…and the hypnotic, disturbing Koyaanisqatsi: Life out of Balance.
You’ll also find extraordinary short-subject documentaries (a category of Oscar that are all but impossible to find) like A Story of Healing, and Warhol Cinema… not to mention feature length treasures like Buena Vista Social Club.
There is The Night of Counting Years, considered one of the greatest Egyptian movies ever made…
…and all the films of the rule-changing Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky.
Perfect for a winter’s weekend!
via OpenCulture
why not design a stove hood like a sculpture?
Being a cook with ongoing kitchen design fantasies, I’m always on the lookout for solutions that are wonderful to look at and completely functional. I LOVE this stove hood by Architects Lhoas & Lhoas that looks like a modern sculpture; I imagine its lovely asymmetry subtly shifting the way I feel – and cook – in the kitchen. Since many range hoods have to be custom-made by a metal fabricator, it doesn’t seem like it would be such a stretch, or that expensive, to make one with more unusual lines, like this one. It would be beautiful in plain aluminum or steel, which could probably be powder-coated in a color, OR could easily be covered in wood to make painting it easy (changing colors as your mood changes).
Here’s another gorgeous hood we found on Lhoas & Lhoas site: read more…
a brilliant tagline for emails
During our email correspondence with the strangely visionary Howard Rheingold, whom we haven’t met but blogged about a while back (about “shoes and my butt” as he wrote in a Tweet), we discovered a little tag line at the very end of each email: “What it is — >is –>up to us.” He came up with it in 1985 (twenty-five years ago!) for a conference about The Well, one of the first online communities. We made a sign out of it because it reminds us of SO much in so few words: about the choices we have in how we view things, what we do with what we’ve got… from teeny to global.
Thanks Howard!
Related posts: howard rheingold: on becoming (“life…forks every day, in every moment”)
“why doesn’t everybody paint their own shoes?”
a better version of calder’s amazing ad + our thanks
After we published A New Year’s Wish Spirals On, with our not-great scan of a copy of the crumbling 45-year-old page from the New York Times, Laura Scott, a reader we have never met, wrote us. A librarian with access to the Historical New York Times Database, she hunted down the original astonishing ad that Alexander and Louisa James Calder placed on New Year’s Day so long ago, and offered to send us a pdf. It deserves a second posting.
That generous offer is a sampling of what comes to our Inbox daily, and the kind of people who have become the hackneyed-but-apt word “community”, linked together by ‘the improvised life’.
It made us realize that with our new years wishes, we neglected to say THANK YOU. We are so glad that you are here.
Related post: a new year’s wish spirals on
what’s the perfect desk (for you)?
toilet paper as design element
No need to hide supplies of toilet paper in the closet…
Toilet paper as objet…
‘the idea of potential and possibility’ (marni stern)
We’d never heard of Marni Stern before we read about her in the New Yorker last week, in Sasha Frere Jones’ “Note by Note: Marni Stern’s rapturous guitar“. Something she said made us go to Amazon to check out her music:
“The idea of potential and possibility is the only thing that drives me to keep going with music.”
We can totally get with that.
Stern’s music is loud, wild, nervy and powerful (be warned); she’s known as a guitar shredder because her playing is so FIERCE. At first she can seem like a tidal wave, then you begin to notice what’s going on INSIDE the music. Yet her lyrics are full of little gems like…
“The future is yourself. Fill this part in___”…
from the song Transformer, on the album This Is It & I Am It & You Are It & So Is That & He Is It & She Is It & It Is It & That Is That
copy this: leather strap catch-all
Evert Collier
An image we saw on Ancient Industries put us on the trail of Evert Collier, the 17th century Dutch still-life and trompe l’oeil painter. Several of his works show strips of leather tacked onto a board or wall to make a kind of catch-all, into which you could slide or hang all sorts of essential objects. A centuries-old great idea. read more…
creative pursuit as deep sea dive (dave eggers)
1951, via Ebay
The other day, Kerri Smith’s blog featured a potent bit of a Guardian interview with Dave Eggers, about his writing process:
“I procrastinate worse than anybody. Writing is so hard. I need eight hours to get maybe 20 minutes of work done. I had one of those yesterday: seven hours of self-loathing.
…Writing is a deep-sea dive. You need hours just to get into it: down, down, down. If you’re called back to the surface every couple of minutes by an email, you can’t ever get back down. I have a great friend who became a Twitterer and he says he hasn’t written anything for a year.
As one of Smith’s reader’s commented: “It’s not just writing; it’s any creative pursuit” and went on to describe the problems programmers have with interruptions. read more…
neil gaiman’s benediction for new year’s (or any other time)
Neil Gaiman‘s New Year’s Wishes from LAST year are surely some of the best wishes to bestow on those you love at ANY time of year…
As wonderful to hear, as to read:
May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art – write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. May your coming year be a wonderful thing in which you dream both dangerously and outrageously. I hope you’ll make something that didn’t exist before you made it, that you will be loved and you will be liked and you will have people to love and to like in return. And most importantly, because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now – I hope that you will, when you need to be, be wise and that you will always be kind. And I hope that somewhere in the next year you surprise yourself.
via Open Culture
