Our friend Lisa Morphew recently sent us a photo of Rabah Belamri, an extraordinary Algerian poet we met many years ago in the south of France. Accompanying the photo were these words:
“It feels like this Christmas is about remembering the people that somehow changed my life.”
Rabah was blind; he lost his sight when he was a teenager living in a remote village in Algeria. He had a poet’s memory for the world, with a blind man’s acute senses: hearing, touch, smell, the “feeling” of a place.
Fearless, he would walk with us in the mountains, guided by his companion Yvonne, along rough dirt paths and steep inclines, through meadows of wild thyme, crossing streams by stepping trustingly on one rock after another, as Yvonne talked him across. Rabah and Yvonne, as though their senses were intertwined, would comment on scent of flowers we hadn’t seen, plucking wild fruits for us to taste that we hadn’t noticed. Writes Lisa:
When I saw ‘the improvised life’s recent post about christopher niemann’s fab color-tiled bathrooms, I immediately thought of the Metro Wine Map of France, created by architectural historian and wine buff Dr. David Gissen, which was introduced this past summer by De Long, a favorite resource of mine for beautiful wine region maps and clever viticultural charts.
I love how it riffs on the classic city subway map, and neatly organizes the mind-numbing number French wine regions and their myriad subregions, shown clearly in their relative positions. It also features major grape varieties shown in context with their corresponding appellations (think: place names, i.e. Rhone, Condrieu, St-Joseph), as well as major geographical features and architectural landmarks, too. read more…
We switched over to homemade food gifts for the holidays many, many years ago, and each year we find ourselves in the kitchen with the same tried-and-true recipes. But the repetition doesn’t come from a laziness or a lack of inspiration—over the years we’ve found that our friends and family look forward to these gifts, enjoying the tradition rather than hungering for something new. We’re getting ready to make this year’s batch, and hope some of these recipes and ideas serve you (and your loved ones) well, starting with our favorite: alt-malted milk balls (above)… read more…
A perfect sign, after our own hearts, via Imaginary Foundation. Replacing fear of the unknown with curiosity is something to PRACTICE. It reminds us of Eleanor Roosevelt’s great admonition: “Do one thing every day that scares you.”
(Video link here –sorry about the commercial). We long been a fan of working subtle smoky-pig flavors into our cooking by using a good wood-smoked bacon – even using it to perfume chocolate cakelets. And we’ve always LOVED Maialino‘s margarita made with guanciale-and-sage-infused reposado tequila. Recently, we came across a recipe we’d bookmarked from New York Magazine some time ago, for PDT Bar’s Bacon-Infused Old Fashioned. It gives the method for infusing spirits – bourbon, tequila, whatever – with bacon. Perfect for making special holiday cocktails (and we just though of eggnog spiked with a slightly smoky dark rum).
In the video, you can see how to infuse spirits with bacon at .55 secs. The recipe for the bacon-infusion AND the Old Fashioned are below, along with our method for rendering bacon fat and notations. read more…
Ever since we learned to drive, we wondered why sideview mirrors couldn’t be adjusted to avoid the blind spot that causes so many accidents, and kept us awkwardly looking over our shoulder to see if any cars were hiding in it. We never actually tried seeing if we could adjust the mirror, testing out possible solutions; we just went with the accepted wisdom. Until recently, when we read the about Society of Automotive Engineers’ simple solution to the blind spot issue, published in Car and Driver, that flies in the face of what has been considered gospel truth for ever:
“The paper advocates adjusting the mirrors so far outward that the viewing angle of the side mirrors just overlaps that of the cabin’s rearview mirror. This can be disorienting for drivers used to seeing the flanks of their own car in the side mirrors. But when correctly positioned, the mirrors negate a car’s blind spots. This obviates the need to glance over your shoulder to safely change lanes as well as the need for an expensive blind-spot warning system.”
The diagram above shows the simple shift.
Our big takeaway is that the experts – and accepted wisdom – ARE NOT always right. We question a lot (making our kitchen cabinets way deeper than the usual, making a “built-in tub” a modernist free-standing one after we saw that it had feet) and that questioning is one of the themes of ‘the improvised life’. We love this spectacular example.
From National Geographic’s 2010 Photography Contest. Perfect for now. We like remembering Christmas trees in the wild as we see them all spruced up around town.
It takes quite an eye for color to put together tiles in such a harmonious and charming manner, but if you’re not up to the task…just copy these great patterns… read more…
(Video link here.) In his riff on being broke, comedian Louis C.K. vividly echoes the Russian proverb: “A rich man in his fur coat cannot understand why a poor man feels cold”, as he addresses the many people he knows – a whole nation, in fact – who are broke.
Being broke is, in fact, an age-old dilemma which forces one to be creative to survive. The wonderful Chinese poet Su Tung-P’o lived in the eleventh century and made and lost many fortunes during his long life. He wrote this letter to his brother during one of his extended period of down-and-outness, describing his improvised method of budgeting, made all the more interesting by his unique point of view: read more…
We are curiously attracted to this loud, happy neon pink and orange graffitied doorway, patched together with an ill-fitting plywood floor. Could anyone have contrived such perfection, or could it only have evolved organically?
(Video link here.) Last year around this time, we wondered “WHY NOT make a modernist gingerbread house, rather than the usual Victorian style?” Making gingerbread houses and structures allows you to act out your architectural and sweet-tooth fantasies, and are a perfect holiday activity to do with friends or kids; they invite collaboration and the pushing of limits.
We have never seen anything that nailed gingerbread-building better than this video of the making of a geodesic dome gingerbread house: from the creation of a structure to the baking of walls to the final, wild, decorating with sugary delights of all kinds. It’s a way to vicariously experience the magical process…but…
…if you want to build your own geodesic dome and feel you need a little help, you can order a kit from Scout Regalia, with a template and complete instructions. (We’re thinking you could make a six-sided template to cut out gingerbread “tiles” and then use an inverted bowl to give the dome structure…)
We don’t know what we’d do without Cara de Silva, who almost daily sends us something moving and interesting. Even if we don’t post it, we feel like she threw a gift our way: something we would have otherwise missed. This weekend she alerted us to a stunning piece in the New York Times written by novelist Henning Mankell (famous for his dark and beautifully-rendered crime novels). Mankell writes about the art of listening and the importance of story-telling in everyday life, his great lessons from living in Africa for nearly 25 years. It is a quick, essential read: a perfectly written story in itself, rich with images and wisdom Henkell learned…by listening.
“…It struck me as I listened to those two men that a truer nomination for our species than Homo sapiens might be Homo narrans, the storytelling person. What differentiates us from animals is the fact that we can listen to other people’s dreams, fears, joys, sorrows, desires and defeats — and they in turn can listen to ours.
Many people make the mistake of confusing information with knowledge. They are not the same thing. Knowledge involves the interpretation of information. Knowledge involves listening.
So if I am right that we are storytelling creatures, and as long as we permit ourselves to be quiet for a while now and then, the eternal narrative will continue. read more…
(Video link here.) We were very late in posting today…and have been, here and there, for the past couple of weeks. We feel like the white rabbit, RUNNING, as we juggle and handle and make decisions…running ‘the improvised life’ while we work on a mind-boggling project (which we hope to start blogging soon.)
And all the while, we wonder if there’s something we’re doing wrong…all this rushing. Is there another way to manage all that we have taken on without letting something slip OR have our expectations become so unrealistic that we are just asking too much of ourselves? We can think of a lot of reasons for our busyness: perfectionism, ambition, hyper-focus on details…being a blogger (ha). We know so many people asking the same questions, we’re beginning to view busy-ness as the bane (or delusion) of our era.
After we posted a series of pictures of people leaping and flying – one of our favorite images and ‘the improvised life’s mascot – illustrator/motivational speaker Trevor Romain sent us this image for our collection. He took a picture of a father throwing his son into the air in shallow water in Hawaii and realized it looked like the child is flying. Indeed he is, completely relaxed, trusting, and happy.
We’ve loved Canal House Cooking since it launched in 2009. Created and self-published by two home chefs, each book in this cookbook series is made with care, beautifully presented with unique (and do-able) recipes. We treasure our copies, but we also like to give subscriptions as gifts–new books are released three times a year, but every little book is full of enough surprises to last throughout the months in-between. (Single books can also be purchased on amazon.) read more…
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