We really love the message of this drawing from Marc Johns. Apparently quite a few folks have used his drawings for their tattoo design, so he’s selling it as a temporary (stick-on) tattoo. With all that’s been going on in the world, we think it’s the perfect reminder…easily done with a nontoxic pen. via…
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The Twin Towers have a strange presence still, a memory that intrudes into every day of my life in New York City like some phantom limb. On September 11th, while standing at my window holding a frilly pastry I’d made for a photo shoot, I saw the towers engulfed in smoke and flames; they crumbled…
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Announcing our latest book giveaway: Leslie Williamson’ Handcrafted Modern: At Home with Mid-century Designers, published by Rizzoli. Photographing with only natural light, Williamson documented details of the homes of fourteen mid-century designers, artists and craftspeople, including Jens Risom, Eva Zeisel, Harry Bertoia and Walter Gropius. We love that the photos show the homes exactly as they…
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Even though many of us are on email all day, there is absolutely no substitute for coming home to an actual letter or postcard you can hold in your hand. We recently tried out Postcardly, a service that melds our online lives with the magic of good old-fashioned mail. You upload a photo or graphic, add…
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We rely on the Boston Globe’s The Big Picture – current stories told through powerful photography – for a periodic reality check. The latest of the desperate famine situation on the Horn of Africa, centering around Somalia. As we find ourselves focused on HOME here, we were struck by images of makeshift shelters made out of sticks,…
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photo: fast forward A while back, our friend Fast Forward showed us images of his recent trip to Hong Kong; many are annotated in true Fastian (or is it Forward-ian?) style, which show HIS unique way of seeing things, as an experimental/culinarian composer/artist . Beat-up drums full of something – cooking oil, perhaps – become…
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(Video link here.) “Don’t sweat the small stuff “has become a self-help mantra that we often tend to agree with. It’s easy to get caught up in unnecessary details or minor challenges and lose sight of the big picture. However, occasionally we’re reminded that every piece of conventional wisdom has its foil. The above video from…
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Business cards can be so unimaginatively designed, that we are happy to post about innovative ones when we find them, as a reminder of the possibilities. We love this utterly succinct business card by Boris, although he got a good amount of flack about it on his site: some commenters complained that it doesn’t let…
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While we were away, we discovered that SayMedia has included Sally and ‘the improvised life’ Say 100: The Voices that Shape Opinion. They polled ten category experts to identify ‘100 Voices that Matter’. Thanks to Julie Carlson, founder of Remodelista, we share the Shelter category with the likes of The Selby, Desire to Inspire, and…
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(Video link here).We have long admired musician/artist Björk, so were happy to stumble on this YouTube video of her giving a house tour, even though it’s clearly years old and from another era of her life. No matter; it is so full of quirky charm and ideas, it seemed like a fitting post to come…
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Practically every wine-loving American I meet – even those who say they don’t know much about wine – is sure of one universal “truth” that couldn’t be farther from it: Red wine should be served “room temperature.” What does that mean? And who said so? Poking around in old British wine books from the Victorian…
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Our friend Anthony Giglio is a journalist, sommelier, and the author of many acclaimed books on wine and cocktails, including the Food & Wine Magazine’s Wine Guide 2011. He travels around the country leading wine tastings and helping people navigate the vast world of wine, cocktails, and “what goes with what”. He does all of this with…
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We found this photo of a beach ball suspended in air on the New York Times’ slide show of Hurricane Irene pictures. That’s us, we thought, as we take some time to….stop…let ourselves be suspended…for this last official week of summer. We leave you with a swell post by our new contributor Anthony Giglio, perfect…
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photo: david saltman When we last left our New York City taxi farmers – the car service drivers who plant “crops” in vacant patches of land around the Bronx – they were gamely waiting for their urban garden to grow, even as they waited for calls from the dispatcher. Well, it’s been a tough harvest in the…
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…the Great Hurricane of 1938 roared ashore while Katherine Hepburn was out playing golf in Fenwick, Connecticut: there was no radar or satellite to warn of what appears to have been a Category 4 hurricane. Somehow, she rode out the storm, although it destroyed her family’s summer home. Most of her belongings were lost or destroyed;…
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photo: andrew moore We LOVED this piece from the last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine: After the Japanese Earthquake in March, the nonprofit Bezos Family Foundation invited children to mail origami cranes to the Seattle headquarters of its Students Rebuild program. Each would trigger a $2 donation, up to $200,000. The group received more than 2…
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(Video link here.) Hans Namuth‘s Jackson Pollock 51 is ten illuminating minutes of the abstract expressionist painter at work at his studio on Long Island. Pollock’s sparse words annotates his process in real time: simple declarative statements that give wonderful insight into an original, creative mind, like the idea that reacting against someone or something…
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We totally love this collection by of elements and connectors for making whatever you want, designed by Louise Cohen. It is like a perfect fusion of built-it-yourself Lego/Tinkertoy/K’nex/ErectorSet-esque material for adults. The CREATE YOUR OWN Collection is a building system consisting of 18 galvanized elements and 5 kind of connectors. According to individual desires unique living…
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Since we’ve been hanging out with our friend Ana, helping her fix up her place in Harlem (more on that soon), we’ve noticed that people in the neighborhood love to hang out on the street. We see men sitting on folding chairs at card tables playing poker, and families on stoops, and there’s alway…
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For a fat, liberating dose of inspiration, check out the long riff on Mondoblogo of chairs Italian Designer Gaetano Pesce painted in the nineties for his kids. His “Open Sky” chairs are out-there, fun, wild, loose, and awesomely beautiful…
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