Somewhere along the way we came across artist Ernst Caramelle‘s wonderful painted walls. They were actually installations in various art galleries: walls as artworks. We want to take them home, or the idea at least…paint some of our space in his fabulous fashion. We notice, that his color blocks can dramatically change the proportions of a room, as you’ll see from this riff of pictures we found on the Mary Mary Gallery website. read more…
We’re always on the lookout for inexpensive housewares that LOOK expensive and stylish. We think these cotton Vilmi Figur pillow covers from Ikea do just that. Throw pillows can be crazy amazingly expensive, so at $10 each (inserts $2.99 to $6.99), these are a bargain (and wash and wear to boot). There’s a jazzy contrasting polka dot version from the same line. read more…
One of our favorite pieces by experimental composer Fast Forward is this zen wonder, created by Fast holding a drum in the rain. (Video link here.) We asked him how it came about:
Not far from my house is a fantastic riverbed rock quarry. The acoustics down there are incredible. One day, my friend and I went to play there and on came a rain shower…a frame drum played by the heavens…
Boy, is THAT living in the moment, making the most of what is on hand!
Recently, we came a cross an old hard drive that we had swapped out of a computer long ago; who knows what revealing bits of information were on it? We searched the internet to learn how to dispose of a hard drive without leaving ourselves open to industrious hackers. We could either wipe it clean by ways that were way beyond our competence or…DESTROY IT. A friend of ours took it onto the street and smashed it to bits on the sidewalk using a $9 hammer we’d bought on Amazon. She returned with the twisted wreck, which had become was curiously beautiful…an inadvertent sculpture. read more…
(Video link here.) We were really sad to hear of Amy Winehouse’s passing at the age of 27. We were aware of her wild descent in the corner of our consciousness, through tabloid headlines mainly. When we read the news of her death, we found ourselves watching one YouTube video after another, trying to piece together her story. Over seven or so years of videos, the change from her early appearances at the age of twenty to later concerts is startling, as she gradually morphed from patently ladylike to crazily beehived and tattooed, as she became thinner and thinner. We saw, in hindsight, a person crashing and burning. The constant in all the videos was a look in her eyes, a mix of fear and uncertainty and…what?
In an interview, Winehouse said the lyrics she wrote were autobiographical. The haunting refrain from You Know I’m No Good is one we’ve heard echoed by many people we’ve known, who’ve struggled with addiction of various kinds, or fought simply to live in the world being themselves: to just BE without tearing themselves down: read more…
A post in Zen Habits echoed what we’ve been thinking lately:
I don’t do boring exercise. If I hate doing something, I stop doing it. I don’t have enough life left to waste doing stuff I hate.
A big part of blogging is sitting on your ass, surfing thrillingly, but virtually; we don’t get enough exercise because we hate the gym thing and we don’t have much time these days, nor the $$ to pay a trainer to make us work out. We need exercise that we can do easily, that’ll get our heart rates up and really work some muscles and be fun, and that we’ll be self-motivated to do.
We’ve had Mary Delany lingering in the back of our minds since reading about her in the New York Times Book Review two months ago, in a review of The Paper Garden by Molly Peacock. Delany is the artist behind over 1000 beautiful botanical collages, like the one seen above, which use nothing but paper and a few found bits to recreate flowers and other plant-life in astonishing detail.
What speaks to us about Delany, however, is not just the richness of her work but the sadness and triumph in the story behind her art. read more…
This unattributed image posted on You Are the River recently was accompanied by the words “I’m so hungry.” Yeah we are too. It reminds us of the endless possibilities for making fried eggs into a compelling meal any time of day – breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner, or a late supper.
Fried eggs are great on just about anything, providing a cheap, satisfying, easy-to-make hit of protein. They’re the reason Sally’s cookbook The Improvisational Cook features Spaghetti with a Fried Egg and Parmigiano Reggiano on the cover (recipe here). Often finding herself tired, hungry and too crazed to cook, she’s riffed endlessly on the theme. A whole section of The Improvisational Cook is devoted to it, and includes oven-roasted peppers or sweet onions, mashed or hashed potatoes, ratatouille, polenta, warmed over risotto, fried bread, asparagus, spinach, potato chips… As a life strategy, she makes sure she’s got organic eggs on hand when the larder is low.
Maria Robledo has a way with flower arranging, or perhaps we should say: off-the-cuff displays of just about any fresh branch, or flower or bunch of leaves. The other evening at her house, we were smitten with the huge green vase into which she’d poured a shallow pool of water; she simply floated a few flowers that she picked one of the bushes growing in her Brooklyn backyard. read more…
A couple of months ago, we received an interesting comment thanking us for a quote we posted from John Cage’s A Year from Monday: “Even though I have 2 copies of this book, knew JC and spent 30 years performing his music, it was still great to see”. It was signed ‘Fast Forward’. Well of course we followed the trail.
We found ourselves on the website of a prolific New York city-based experimental composer who favors non-traditional percussion instruments made of…ANYTHING, from industrial paint cans to metal staircases (“basically one big piece of sonorous metal”). We instantly fell in love with Musique a la Mode in which all instruments were made from common kitchen items: pots, pans, bowls, cutlery, tools, food…(favorite moments: 1:40 mins where the spatulas seem to have a life of their own…2:45 a whisk in a metal sauce container….5:45 music made from pasta). We find ourselves running the video while we work just to listen to Fast’s music in the background.
Fast performs all over the world, created music for many of Merce Cunningham‘s event works, is the mastermind behind a participatory performance experience Feeding Frenzy (involving 5 cooks and 5 musicians, 5 waiters and an audience), teaches, photographs, makes art, and always, music. But what knocked us out, in addition to all this, was read more…
In honor of the conclusion of our Artists’ Handmade Houses giveaway contest, here’s one final photo from the book: some lovely chalky walls at Paolo Soleri’s Cosanti .
Six small sleeping areas, located along the east side of Cat Cast (so named because the earth pile on which the concrete was cast was mounded with a Caterpillar tractor) are divided by tilt-up concrete panels, which were cast onto carved earth. The colors, painted onto the earth forms prior to casting, adhere to the surface of the panels.—Michael Gotkin
We’re wondering if we could possibly create such an effect by rubbing pastel chalks over the surface of stucco or plaster…one of the endless ideas the book has given us. read more…
The only time we read Esquire magazine is in the dentist’s waiting room where we turn right to the “What I’ve Learned” column: to-the-point, full-of-insight interviews with notable artists, writers, actors, athletes, celebrities, entrepreneurs, musicians, scientists, thinkers. Now Esquire’s published a book of 64 of “the best of” from the column called Esquire, The Meaning of Life: Wisdom, Humor, and Damn Good Advice from 64 Extraordinary Lives. We hate the title but think that a compendium of “What I’ve Learned” columns would be the perfect bathroom read: short and illuminating. You can also find an archive of them on Esquire’s site. Here’s some favorite bits we found there:
The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up. —Mohammed Ali
Get yourself in trouble. If you get yourself in trouble, you don’t have the answers. And if you don’t have the answers, your solution will more likely be personal because no one else’s solutions will seem appropriate. You’ll have to come up with your own. —Chuck Close
Food is much better off the hand than the fork.–Mario Batali read more…
BoingBoing recently posted a compelling video (below or link here) of a toupeed fellow named Augustus Gladstone giving a tour of the room he lives in in an abandoned hotel, in some unnamed city. Gladstone’s apartment is an eccentric, strangely homey place decorated with what appears to be mostly found stuff and collections of bric-a-brac. There’s some question as to the authenticity of the video but no matter. It’s really interesting either way.
What caught our eye (in addition to two old TV’s placed one on top of the other) was an ingenious shelving unit using stacks of books as bricks to hold boards. It’s clever, and in another setting, could be pretty chic. Just for the hell of it, we typed “books as bricks” into google images and found some beautiful iterations of the idea, like read more…
by Molly Peacock. Delany is the artist behind over 1000 beautiful botanical collages, like the one seen above, which use nothing but paper and a few found bits to recreate flowers and other plant-life in astonishing detail.
features Spaghetti with a Fried Egg and Parmigiano Reggiano on the cover (
giveaway contest, here’s one final photo from the book: some lovely chalky walls at Paolo Soleri’s 
