Recently, during a birthday celebration for a friend at Eleven Madison Park, we were invited to see the kitchen of what is, arguably, one of New York’s best restaurants; the number of staff on any given day roughly equals the number of diners – THAT’S how attentive the service and complex the menu. While cooks…
Read More
Ellen Silverman is traveling with her family in Venice, sending us the occasional wonderful photo. First came this one of the Grand Canal – like a teeny vacation for us. Then came a few-line story of the clever idea she learned while visiting friends: We were invited to an impromptu lunch on our first day…
Read More
Those of you who have been following ‘the improvised life’ are familiar with our love of colored tapes, both for pure decoration and for dressing up a practical application. So you can imagine how excited we were to stumble upon the above zebra duct tape at Target last week. We went in search of more…
Read More
This photo of artist Lucio Fontana reminded us how central that concept of “blank canvas” is to ‘the improvised life’. Getting up in the morning, the day ahead is our first blank canvas. Each post we write starts as one as well: blank space that is pure potential; we often don’t know where it will go,…
Read More
It has been such a wild and busy few months, we find ourselves running out of gas. So we’re going to take a week’s break (and another at the end of August), to catch up with ourselves, our work, and the many projects we’ve got on the burner. We were poking around for a picture…
Read More
Maria Robledo sent us this iPhone photo of a recipe she’d made by improvising with one of Sally’s and marrying it one a friend taught her. The Sally recipe is a endlessly mutable Brown Sugar Butter Cookie dough made with so much butter that it is SHORT, that is, it melts in your mouth. Maria…
Read More
We laughed out loud at this week’s New Yorker’s Shouts & Murmur’s page by Paul Simms. It envisions God blogging the newly-created earth. God writes: UPDATE: Pretty pleased with what I’ve come up with in just six days. Going to take tomorrow off. Feel free to check out what I’ve done so far. Suggestions and…
Read More
Funny how this clever chalked welcome mat seems to to be more seriously-welcoming than most of the “real” welcome mats we’ve seen. As does this rather vehement chalk welcome:
Read More
We’ve written many times before about the fantastic Canal House Cookbook series, but this summer Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton took their work to a new level by hosting the first annual Smallholding Festival in Ottsville, Pennsylvania. The festival featured a number of skill-shares and do-it-yourself exhibitions including cheese-making, beekeeping, canning, bread-baking, and spit-roasting. Also on-hand was Margo True, the…
Read More
This picture of a young Merce Cunningham came from a stunning series of photos of Black Mountain College Dance on Mondoblogo. Man, could that guy FLY! We’re going to try flying in our heads, with Merce-like imagination and grace, and see what happens. Related posts: practice flying (via the uganda skateboard union) danny macaskill’s bike…
Read More
(Video link here) The fashion industry is not kind to those who it doesn’t consider its target audience. Having spent the last couple of years on the plus-size end of the spectrum I know a lot about walking into stores or flipping through magazines and feeling defeated. But I’ve also found a lot of joy in…
Read More
Speaking of tinkering, while we were culling photos from Artists’ Handmade Houses for our recent giveaway, we came across a photo of Constantino Nivola’s living room in his house on Long Island (see photo below). In the back corner, partially blocked by a chair, is an intriguing light made of Tinkertoys and shiny rolled paper. OMG, Tinkertoys! Unbelievably…
Read More
(Video link here.) With or without the music: lovely, valiant life, which keeps happening ANYWAY, despite all the dark stuff going on. We can’t help thinking that ideas emerge into the world in a similar fashion…given even minimal nurturing, their natural impulse is to grow… Filmed by Neil Bromhall. via Imaginary Foundation Related posts: video…
Read More