In case you haven’t heard, Harold Camping, the 89-year old billionaire owner of Christian Evangelist Family Radio, says the apocalypse is going to begin this evening at around 6pm EDT. What to do? We found rock-and-roll to be a good answer and have been tweeting songs for the apolcalypse. We recommend playing REM really LOUD.
It’s the end of the world as we know it
It’s the end of the world as we know it
It’s the end of the world as we know it
And I feel fine!
maria robledo
This weekend, Sally will be on public radio’s Splendid Table talking to Lynne Rosetto Kasper about her short list of favorite blogs and why she likes them. You can stream the interview or find out times it will air in area here. You’ll also find Sally’s recipe for Sugar Snaps with Extra Virgin Olive Oil and Shaved Parmigiano, a perfect, simple treatment for the sugar snaps in season now.
Related posts: strategies: fresh fava beans (or soy beans or peas) + recipe
Several people called us about HBO’s hour-long special “Talking Funny” in which four great comedians — Ricky Gervais, Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock and Louis C.K. — talk shop for an hour. Our friends were all struck by how the “inside” of comedy echoes the process of making just about anything truly creative. Before we got to watch it, we found Michael Beirut‘s insightful post on Design Observer: Seven Things Designers Can Learn from Stand Up Comics. We’d change “Designer” to “Any Creative Person Who Is Trying to Make Something Great”; these 7 principles apply to way beyond comedy and design. We’ve printed the whole thing here, highlighted the essentials AND left it to you to fill in blanks. But it’s WORTH reading every word, especially Louis C.K.’s riff on the F word and Corvette’s in #4. Illuminating and really funny. (If you don’t get HBO, you can watch Talking Funny in 4 parts on YouTube. We also recommend Louis C.K.s beautiful ‘everything is so amazing, but nobody is happy’)
We recommend taking 20 or so seconds to scroll down the great homepage Stockholm’s Berghs’ School of Communication exhibit of students’ work on the theme of Fear of Failure (click “Manifest” on the left). It is positively/actively therapeutic, a worthwhile digital affirmation/manifesto on the theme.
In honor of the exhibition, the Berghs’ made a series short videos of famous creatives talking about Fear of Failure. You’ll find the trove on Vimeo. Here’s the great Stefan Sagmeister giving his two cents: read more…
We can’t remember when we started mentally re-designing things in our heads; it’s been part of our thought process for years, made even more acute by ‘the improvised life’. We look at a design and mentally “try it on”, in an instant envisioning what it would be like to use actually use it, make it, change it. HACK IT.
When we saw Remodelista’s recent post about Commune designer Chau Truong’s cool bed base made from concrete blocks, we actually climbed into that bed – in our heads. We discovered that it has the major design flaw we wrote about a few weeks ago: bigger-than-the-mattress-platforms make it practically impossible to get in and out of bed without scraping your shin. And one made of concrete blocks would be especially painful. Yikes!
So we started our mental redesign: read more…
Lynda Barry
A friend recently alerted us to Lynda Barry‘s book What It Is
“ It is a book about writing that provides guidance on how you can re-discover skills you likely possessed before getting caught up in the notions of “good and bad”.
It’s more than a book. It’s a public service. Barry is trying to help everyone reconnect with lost creative capability and provides a path for doing it.
The book was published in 2008 and is a wonderful work of art in itself.”
We love it, and how daring, non-linear and honest Barry lets herself be…
Yumehara Hokume
We clipped this amazing photo from the New Yorker a few years ago and have had it on our wall ever since. It was taken by Yumahara Hokume in the early thirties (googling Hokume curiously turned up NOTHING, so he/she remains a mystery. See the comment below for a link.). The woman in the photo reminds us a little of the picture of Le Corbusier painting in the nude in that they both, somehow, seem to be involved in to be a deeply creative activity, sans clothes. Yet, Hokume’s nude seems only to be thinking, hanging out, mulling, resting… maybe even asleep: doing ‘nothing’, yet doing a great deal of living.
Related post: stripping things to their essence (le corbusier)
Stuart Mason Dambrot, ‘the improvised life’s resident concilientist|futurist has sent us many wonderful ideas since our first syncronous meeting on a New York City street corner. The latest, the work of designer Siren Elise Wilhelmsen, inventor of the Toast Spoons we recently blogged as well as Found, an oddly stylish stool put together from scraps found in a carpenter’s workshop. “Depending on which business and which projects they are working on, the waste will always be different and one stool will never look the same as the other; each item is unique.” read more…
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Cara de Silva alerted us to this beauty of a video, of Yale student Kevin Olusola pushing the limits of a cello, and taking the music it makes up a totally new path. He bows, plucks and strums his cello, while accompanying it with beatbox, a hip-top derived use of voice as percussive/musical instrument. The music is so integral, it seems like the two sounds are really one. Then you realize that Olusola is the instrument.
As AnimexAngell commented: “Utilizing everything you’ve got to the max! This is great!”
Ellen Silverman
Faced with the months-long renovation of their New York City coop kitchen, Josh Eisen, Ellen Silverman and their son Luca – who take eating and entertaining very seriously – devised a clever make-shift kitchen in their walled-off-from-the-construction living room. They had the workmen move in the read more…
Always on the lookout for more ideas for impermanent pop-up rooms within rooms, we were taken by a work by Zimoun, a sound artist/sculptor who builds different kinds of white noise into structures.We love his room of interlocking slabs of notched cardboard, made like a house of cards, and imagined building a smaller version that could be stored when no longer needed, stacked and tied in a bundle, in the closet. read more…
Sally Schneider
Ellen Silverman
It is high season for ramps, the pungent wild leeks that grow throughout the Appalachian and Catskill mountains. Ellen Silverman sent us photos of the sublime ramp butter she was given by a friend, with an utterly simple recipe that will keep you in ramp heaven for days. She wrote this in her email:
“Cyd McDowell is an amazing food stylist and lover of all things food. She picked the ramps on her property upstate she lives near Great Barrington. All she did was chop the ramps put them in the food processor with good salted butter (I think she used Plugra)… and process. She brought the butter to me when we met for a coffee; it was in a little glass bowl with a round of natural wax paper placed on the top.
We ate it on everything for three nights…on fish sauteed one night and panko-fried another, roasted chicken, steamed clams, bread, asparagus, potatoes; we licked the remains off of our fingers! Now, very regrettably, we have finished it…”
What a gift!!! We could imagine ramp butter in risottos, on pasta, on grilled meats, to cook scrambled or fried eggs in, and of course, on toast…
Here’s a rough little recipe that allows you to gauge the “rampiness” of the butter, and calibrate it as you wish: read more…
One week of the aurora borealis in 1:55 seconds…Nature’s special effects.
(Shot in and around Kirkenes and Pas National Park bordering Russia)
The Aurora from Terje Sorgjerd.
Sally Schneider
One of our favorite mindgames is to think about what we can do without, or perhaps better put: What do we really need? We started doing it rigorously in the kitchen when we had to downsize years ago, and began to ask ourselves,”What equipment is truly necessary for the way we cook”. Not only did we discover that we did NOT need the wealth of gadgets being touted as essential, but we didn’t even need some things that people take for granted, like an electric toaster. In our smaller space, we saw an electric toaster as a space glutton that we didn’t want on our counter. About the same time, we came across an inexpensive stovetop fish grill in a Japanese kitchenware store. Hmm, we thought, wonder if we could toast bread on this? It worked wonderfully and we’ve been using it to grill our bread on a burner ever since…(sometimes we put the buttered toast back on it to melt…)
So naturally we LOVED stumbling upon Ellen Lupton‘s pdf Are Toasters Necessary? from her book Design Your Life: The Pleasures and Perils of Everyday Things
