Since Valentine’s Day, we’ve gotten some wonderful emails of Valentine’s images and stories, so we thought we’d share a couple (and save the others for later). Maria Robledo made this improvised valentine for her husband, artist Holton Rower whose wondrous Pour Paintings we blogged last week. Since Holton uses clothes pins for his artwork made with money, she wanted to get him some much-needed new ones, and decided to make a Valentine out of them.
Then, we read this “a good little valentine story” from a sweet mama-in-law we know: one thing leads to another in connection, exchange, curiosity, joy, kismet…
Hi honey, so we went to that little Peruvian place last night, right across the street from the Prep Kitchen in Del Mar. Very small & decrepit, 6 tables all filled and all outside, in front of this little old used to be a store maybe & now a kitchen…with a few heaters. Food was marvelous, we both had fish dishes…mine a chowder that was a complete meal, & then a lime pie, but that’s not the story. read more…
William Morrow, the publisher, has been busy blogging, tweeting and facebooking about Sally Schneider’s The Improvisational Cook, newly launched in paperback. They recently blogged a “Conversation” with Sally, with questions like “What’s your Mantra”, and “If you could have dinner with three people, living or dead, who would they be?” They are tweeting it as the “juicy details of her culinary private life”. You can read it here.
We love her juicy details but we were most interested to read about the experience that changed her life:
“Waking up from a dream KNOWING that I should cook professionally. I quit my job and started working as a prep cook, eventually becoming a restaurant chef…running a catering business…working as a food editor… as a food stylist…magazine columnist…contributing editor….radio commentator…cookbook author (three times)…”
One thing led to another and then another and another, eventually leading her HERE: ‘the improvised life’.
We’ve discovered that our email subscription service seems to be sending out our daily posts in the early afternoon rather than between 7 and 9 am. We’re hoping we’ve got it fixed. We intentionally sent one out late this afternoon to test it. But as a further test: If you subscribe by email and live on the East Coast, we’d appreciate your letting us know if you don’t receive a double post in your Inbox between 7 and 9 in the morning. You can do it as a Comment, below, or shoot us an email via Contact.
Living in New York City, we are obsessed with space: how much can we pack into not enough of it and still have it look clean and spare? Having 900 square feet, we imagine living in 450, to challenge our ingenuity. So we were smitten with last week’s New York Times article with slideshow that featured a 200!!! square foot apartment that is both clever and charming. It is the home of Malena Georgieva, a young interior design-smitten emigre from Bulgaria, done on a budget of $1,500.
First great idea: just about all the seats in the apartment swivel, to face either the “dining area” or “living room”. read more…
At Reference Library, we read about a unique service designed to change your life. New Daily Dance is “a service that choreographs personalized, contemporary rituals and happenings that bridge the gap between where you are now and your most desired future.” Their theory is that the secret to your most desirable future is hidden in your daily routines – that the way we move affects the direction of our lives. Daily Dance will create a routine/ritual that aids in shifting your life toward where you want it to go, an idea we find incredibly intriguing. Here’s an example:
“A recent client asked for a New Ritual to relieve some of the anxiety of her daily urban commute… For the mornings, we choreographed the “zip up dance” based on zipping in good feelings from her home environment, and provided a sachet for her to gather fresh herbs from her garden to take into the subway for holding and smelling. For the evening, we choreographed a happening where a masseuse met her at a specified place and time on the subway platform where she then received a hand, arm, shoulder, and neck massage while waiting for her train. She reported a great sense of emotional and physical relief in her daily commute, now having both the ongoing sachet collection morning ritual to take into the train, plus a reason to smile on the subway platform in the evenings with the massage memory. Both activities added to the memory of the space.”
We found the photo above on New Daily Dance’s website, under the header CONSUME TIME INSTEAD OF SPENDING IT,an idea that stopped us in our tracks. read more…
For years we’ve wondered why extension cords and power strips have to be SO ugly; we’ve secretly been waiting for an alternative that we won’t want have to hide under rugs or behind pictures propped on the floor. So we were thrilled to discover Multi Line, an almost perfect solution.
It’s essentially an extension cord that has plugs placed along the whole length rather than at just one end. It allows you to plug things in where you need them, leaving the vividly-colored cord exposed. Because it’s like a long, slender wire, it can be neatly arranged. It’s a cool looking thing unto itself. read more…
We found this wonderful Tubby comic (a character in the great Little LuLu comics of the ’30′s and ’40′s) during our weekly visit to Accidental Mysteries on Design Observer.
Artist Ethan Greenbaum‘s work gave us lots of idea for home works made of concrete block. He has figured out ways to make them seem both light and somehow charming, by using plasticine and colored acrylics instead of cement as grout. Plasticine is a kind of clay that won’t harden so maybe it actually IS a good idea for certain homemade pieces where you don’t want the commitment of concrete, or it’s permanence. We love the idea of painting the cement grouting with Greenbaum’s whimsical colors, to transform a dreary block wall.
We also love Greenbaum’s plasticine-covered block structures; although the always-soft plasticine might not be feasible in the long run, it makes us wonder what would be: what could we coat concrete blocks with to give them a surprising and less heavy look, while preserving blocks’ elemental form ? And his idea of combining blocks of different sizes is a revelation, making us see ever more possibilities for “random” assemblages of concrete blocks as table bases, bed platforms, odd storage units… read more…
At the Harper Collin’s blog The Secret Ingredient, Tavia posted her experience with Sally’s just-released-in-paperback The Improvisational Cook. The gist: Tavia considered herself an improvisational cook until she realized that…
“…it…doesn’t quite mean the person who leans into the fridge and whips up a stir fry with the crudités that are left from the Super Bowl dip tray. (I will neither confirm nor deny if I have assembled such a meal.) What Sally is getting at in The Improvisational Cookbook… is building a repertoire of recipes that we know by heart so that we can then begin to tweak and adapt them to use for different dishes and meals. It means asking why not,it means pairing flavors courageously, it means knowing when a culinary accident is in fact a happy one. Sally wants us all to be fearless improvisers in the kitchen—and I am touched by her confidence and support.”
The Bittersweet Black Pepper Brownie Cake (also known as Essential Chocolate Cake for Improvising) is an example of the kind of culinary riffs that occur once you understand the inner logic of a recipe. Sally devised it when she was fooling around with a recipe she’d made as a chef, for an over-the-top chocolate cookie read more…
A valentine doesn’t have to be for someone you are lovers with. We’ve discovered that the commercial “lovebird” notion pretty much shuts out the millions of unattached folks and can make them feel pretty alone. Why not send alt-valentines to people you care about, like the sweet card we just got that says “Valentine’s Day is a good time to remind special people that they are loved. So, Happy Valentine’s Day and consider yourself reminded!”
We’re thinking impromptu email valentines made with found digital images. Any one of the series of Hearts of the Earth at Obvious.org, like the one above, would be lovely to receive in an email.
Search “heart” at Flickr, Google Images, or and you’ll find a trove. Here is one of our favorites: read more…
Artist Holton Rower is constantly innovating, shifting, moving his work into new territory, too fast even to get an accurate answer to the question “What’s he into these days?” We’ve marveled at his works out of locks, money, fish hooks for years…Lately, we’ve been smitten with his Pour Paintings (which may in fact be sculptures), cup after cup of vividly-colored acrylic paint poured over stacked structures made of plywood, to make liquid, multiplying patterns that are truly delicious to look at. As one critic noted:
“This work is troubling. I want to lick it.”
This video by Dave Kaufman is a montage from Pours being made as Rower choreographs his assistants’ and colors, one moving in with a styrofoam cup of a new color to replace one who has just carefully poured a custom-mixed color onto the tall wooden structure. The patterns made are luminous and unpredictable, the results unbelievably sensual. It is mesmerizing.
Kaufman has a YouTube channel of videos of various aspects of Rower’s work. Here’s a video of a single “Tall” painting being made, a half hour or so of constant movement compressed into 3:12 minutes. read more…
This week’s TimeOut New York features “The Most Stylish New Yorkers”, a study in sartorial imagination and possibility. We were happy to see our old friend Fritz Karch, Director of Collecting at Martha Stewart Living, wonderfully dressed head to toe in plaids. And we loved Lori Goldstein, stylist and designer for Logo Instant Chic,’s wise view of what fashion really is:
“Clothes and accessories are the paint, and you are the canvas. Experiment and play.”
But what shifted out heads the most is Malcolm Harris, Creative Director of the One Dress Project talking about the $14.99 army hats he buys at Uncle Sam’s Army and Navy: ”
“My hat serves as crown, battle cap, halo or horns, and most important, protector of my psyche.”
Lately, we’ve been seeing some wonderful rough plays on the idea of “faucet”. Our favorite is this sublime one made from a gracefully bent copper pipe spotted in a house tour at French by Design…though we are totally charmed by the “shovel faucet” devised by Evan and Oliver Haslegrave, two brothers whose seriously imaginitive d-i-y renovation was featured in New York Magazine last fall… read more…
