photo: galenfrysinger.com
While looking at images of Taliesin West for our string light post, we came across this sign of Frank Lloyd Wright’s “The Organic Commandment”. We’re not sure if it’s one or four, or ‘commandment’ rather than principles, but we find it worth mulling…
Related posts: string lights as everyday indoor lighting
a dance lesson from zorba + anthony quinn
tolstoy’s big rule for living
rules for living: just one from pablo picasso
how to be yourself in 10 simple steps
The great blog Ouno recently documented a visit to Taliesin West, Frank Lloyds Wright’s winter home and the main campus of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture. A photo of the “dinner cabaret room” caught our eye: strings of tiny lights glowe3d on the ceiling. We don’t know if this is a Wrightian touch or an innovation of the current caretakers (more images below). But it got us thinking about using string lights as actual indoor lighting…not Christmas lights, but strings of lights with bigger, more illuminating bulbs.
So, we went on the hunt for ideas and sources, to explore the possibilities.
We love these lights hung vertically to make a partition and define a room… read more…
(Video link here.) It’s been an eerily snow-less winter in New York City. With the exception of a single January snowfall there has been nothing—and we kind of miss it. This post is in honor of the snow we think may be on its way…and the possibilities it brings with it.
We wrote a couple of summers ago about artist Jim Denevan and his large-scale sand drawings which totally transformed how we think about playing in the sand. Now our attention has been called to his work with snow and ice. In 2010, Denevan made the largest piece of artwork in the world on the surface of Lake Baikal in Siberia. This nine-mile spiral of circles over the ice is stunning and allows us to once again completely re-imagine the possibilities of using snow as/in art. read more…
photo: sally schneider
We received this letter via snail mail recently with a generous check enclosed and have been flying high off it ever since. Not only is the admiration flattering, but the knowledge that all the work that goes into this blog is meaningful to people sustains us in a big way. A true gift.
This little website we started three years ago on a hunch that it would resonate with people is growing, and we have some new projects on the way we think you’ll enjoy. But as we continue to grow, we still face the reality that maintaing the site has a financial component. We know you want us to avoid cluttering up the site with ads (and we want that too!). But there is often a cost to doing what you love, and we hope that if you love what we’re doing, you’ll consider becoming a friend with benefits and supporting us on a monthly basis, or making a one-time donation. Thanks dear readers. Look out for announcements soon…
With big thanks to Vaughan Greene.
Related posts: friends with benefits
thanks and wow! (friends w benefits)
guggenheim archive
Recently we wrote about the ins and outs of selling your books online; one comment inquired about our collection of old art books and whether or not we would sell them directly to readers. While we can’t delve into the world of online sales right now, we DO want to point you to this great FREE online art resource: the Guggenheim has put 65 gorgeous modern art books online for anyone to access.
We stumbled on a treasure right away: Calder, A Retrospective Exhibition from 1963: a wonderful range of his work, from monumental sculptures and mobiles to improvised objects he made for his home. read more…
illustration by melinda josie
Every year, New York Times’ publishes a special issue of the Sunday magazine called The Lives They Lived, usually famous people who passed away the year before. The 2011 issue was subtitled “These American Lives: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Stories.”.
We read the stunning issue cover-to-cover, deeply moved, often in tears, haunted by what we read. We’ve been meaning to write about it ever since.
The most insanely beautiful piece is Uneasy Rider, an interview with comedian Mike DeStafano’s in which he describes the unplanned gift of a motorcycle ride to his girlfriend who was in hospice care. If you haven’t readyyour quota of free Times articles, this is the one to read, though it is well worth paying for. This excerpt is only a fraction of the astonishing story: read more…
photo: sally schneider
Just before Christmas, I posted my best-ever butter cookie recipe: Ethereal Brown Sugar Butter Cookies, along with many variations. The versatile cookie dough recently inspired yet another improvisation on the basic theme. Actually, it’s an improvisation on my Tuscan Herb Salt Recipe, that I then used on the butter cookies, to make a double-improvisation: Brown Sugar Butter Cookies with Thyme-Rosemary-Lavender Salt…
I used the essential Herb Salt method to make a fragrant salt using classic Herbes de Provence: rosemary, thyme and lavender (instead of the usual garlic, rosemary and sage). After I cut out the raw cooky dough, I sprinkled each disk with some of the aromatic salt, hoping that the combination would make for a subtle, surprising and delicious cookie. It did, and has become a new favorite.
That’s what happens when you start improvising: one idea links and layers with another, until you have improvisations made of improvisations…
The basic method is simple… read more…
photo: sally schneider
We recently stumbled on a cool Japanese site that will instantly transmute any photo you upload to an aged version “like over 100 to 150 years old.”
On the upper right corner of the site you can ‘English’ to see a translation. You choose the file where it says to, and then click the blue box below it to upload. Wait a minute and you’ll your photo transformed.
The photo above is the vintage-ized version of this one we took of Palais Royale in Paris a couple of years ago:
A satisfying find from the recently-redesigned Remodelista: Anthropologie’s Ephemera Clip. Made of distressed iron (wonder if it will rust…then it might get REALLY beautiful), with a hole in one handle so you can hang it, it is like a little sculpture…Endlessly useful for clipping together receipts, papers, closing food bags…
Related posts: holiday gifts: cheap + fun/useful/cool…
role model: kevin kelly’s cool tools
11 questions to ask before buying something
keeping holiday gift-giving ‘real’: our 12 fave gifts to give
mimimalist book bar/paperweight (d-i-y or buy)
anne herbert
Two recent bits of brilliance by the mysterious Anne Herbert of Peace and Love and Noticing the Details.
Related posts: xanne herbert’s wise + teeny meditations
going from “can’t” to “can”
fling and be flung (jackson pollock)
ann herbert: unaccumulateann herbert: unaccumulate
a reminder, via anne herbert (open doors!)
The image of a Khan market storefront in Delhi spotted on Ouno got us thinking about strangely beautiful walls of stacked logs can be. We’ve blogged some in the past, but recently found some new iterations of the great, elemental and possibly practical idea. Check out this chic wall in Alpenstueck restaurant in Berlin: read more…
christophe niemann for the new york times
A revelation from last weekend’s New York Times’ Magazine: the great Christophe Niemann doodle made while he was ‘on hold’ forever, waiting for a person to pick up, listening to Clair de Lune. Click to listen while you follow the amazing path Niemann wandered and the many discoveries he made…
(Our strategy for being “on hold” is to wear an old-fashioned telephone headset
What do you do while you’re on hold?
Related posts: christopher niemann’s fab color-tiled bathrooms
christophe niemann map: my (your) way
doing ‘nothing’ can be doing a lot
(Video link here.) A reader sent us this lovely little video her friend Julia Warr made. It is about 95-year-old Maia Helles, a former Russian ballet dancer who she met on a plane four years ago. Warr became convinced that Maia “remains resolutely independent, healthy as a forty year old…through the benefits of her daily exercise routine, which Maia perfected, together with her Mother, over 60 years ago, long before exercise classes were ever invented.”
Towards the end, Maia reveals the keys to her long life:
“My secret for a long life is simplicity and work and enjoyment. “
And we would love to know her exercise routine.
Related posts: role model: lucien freud, 82, painting
advanced style: doing your thing at any age
aging as an invitation to reinvent oneself
m.f.k. fisher’s “mystic materialism of a hungry woman”
This video came from a CD/book called Graceful Passages: A Companion for Living and Dying
Thanks Maria!!
Related posts: reminder: shooting stars all around us (gif)
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sagan’s mixtape of the human experience – for aliens
photo: sally schneider
Like everyone we know, we have a growing pile of books that we’ve been wanting to sell, to cut down on clutter and make a few bucks in the process. We recently discovered BookScouter, a website that tells you how much your used books are worth to a variety of online retailers.
The best part is that they pay for shipping (book rate) and provide labels, making selling books fairly simple—you just have to pack them up and drop them off when you are making a trip to the post office. We decided to test the process out to see if it’s really that easy. If you’re looking to sell, here’s the deal, start to finish: read more…
