When we saw the cover of this week’s New Yorker, we laughed out loud. THAT’S US!! we thought. We may be making a Pollack-esque painting inadvertently on the side of the house, but we’re DEFINITELY out of control and off balance. We’re juggling too much while trying to hold up our pants and keep from…
Read Morean astonishing video (made from Tedtalks)
(Video link here.) Cara de Silva sent us an email with this video and one sentence: “Four plus minutes of extraordinary nourishment for the mind, eyes, and heart.” We thought it would make a fabulous breakfast/start to your day, in the first days of Spring. (We found it to be even lovelier with the corny…
Read More(de)creation (rhino origami rewind)
(Video link here.) We love this 20-second finish-to-start folding of an origami rhino; For us, a simple reminder of the process of creation: a rhino that once started as a simple square of paper. Via Neatorama Related posts: origami made of anything (vic muniz’ birds of a feather) origami’s cosmic potential blizzard improvisation: divine stop-motion snow…
Read Moremore writing on the walls (indoors)
Some time ago, Desire to Inspire ran a post called Room Porn. It wasn’t our idea of room porn (which we’re very into, but for a totally different sensibility) EXCEPT for the scrawled writing across the top of the room; it segues with our strange lust/love of signs. It’s do-able by mere mortals and holds lots of…
Read Moreoutstanding in the field (true farm to table)
We’ve been so impressed with Jim Denevan’s amazing sand and snow creations, that we forgot he’s also is the mastermind of a fantastic traveling food project. Outstanding in the Field is a “roving culinary adventure” meant to connect people to the land where their food originates and the people who work hard to produce it.…
Read Morewine and food pairing 101: do charts work?
Recently, a reader sent us link to an interactive wine-and-food-pairing website called Italian Wine Pairing 101 wondering what we thought about it. You choose a food group – say beef, or shellfish or fruit tarts – then recommended wines appear in a list below. (It’s one of many food-and-wine pairing charts and sites on the…
Read Morecool lighting: stacked globes and paper shades
In a recent post about 50’s shopping centers at the Paris Review’s oddly wonderful blog, we spotted these George Nelson bubble lamps stacked one on top of another to make wondrous sculptural lighting. Copying this would be pretty expensive…but we saw an alternative in another picture. Various organic shapes of vaguely Noguchi-esque modernist paper shades stacked and…
Read Moreinsta fridge fix: dalmation spots
There are a million of us who don’t have a $6,000 built-in refrigerator with wood panels etc. And we find ourselves often mulling ways to make our homely white fridge look like SOMETHING (more on that later). We LOVE this jazzy fix we saw on Japanese Trash of a totally ordinary refrigerator…it could be done…
Read More‘the pleasures and terrors of levitation’ (aaron siskind)
Leafing through the current New Yorker, we came across this image by Aaron Siskind in an advertisement for Swann Gallery’s upcoming photography auction. It is called ‘Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation #99’. Loving images of people flying and leaping, we poked around, to discover that in the 60’s, Siskind made a series of divers suspended…
Read Morethe first day of spring gift (x-ray tulip + a haiku)
Yesterday was the first day of spring. We were wandering around in the strangely warm weather, enjoying pure spring, not realizing that it was, technically the first day, until evening. X-rays of flowers by Brendan Fitzpatrick made us think of it. Daffodils and tulips are up. Cherry trees are in bloom. We found this haiku…
Read Morepegboard 101: for tools, jewelry and beyond
We’ve been mulling the idea of using a pegboard on the inside of a tool closet door, the cleaning closet door (to hang mops, brooms, vacuum cleaner hose) and perhaps even in a walk-in clothes closet where it would be useful for hanging jewelry for jewelry, belts etc. We can’t stop thinking about Julia Child’s…
Read Morecarpenter sentayehu teshale re-envisions ‘disability’
(Video link here.) This morning we received an email from a reader with a Vimeo link and these few intriguing words: This man is the epitome of the improvised life daily and he has achieved this with a grace that makes me rethink my own daily life. So we watched and were knocked out, and…
Read Moreaccess your inner jackson pollock
This morning, a friend alerted us to the great flash site jacksonpollock.org where you can make your own Pollockesque action paintings with clicks and whorls of your mouse. We found it strangely relaxing, like some high-brow video game; it took our mind totally OFF what we’ve been worrying about to follow (our own) unexpectedly wild…
Read Moregiving subtle color life to shelves
Lately, we’ve stumbled on some cool ways to bring color to shelves. We saw BM’s Junior line of furniture and thought: why don’t we just paint the backs of our shelves in color blocks to wake them up a bit? And then we saw the reverse in action: just the edges painted a color…
Read Morechris hackett’s brooklyn ‘obtainium’ mine
The most inspiring article in last weekend’s New York Times was about Chris Hackett and his workshop in Gowanus, the epicenter of Brooklyn’s burgeoning underground of artists, inventors, chefs, carpenters, urban gardeners, hackers, fabricators, scavengers, repurposers, live-free-or-die,and prepare-for-the-shit-to-hit-the-fan proponents. On Chris Hackett’s personal periodic table, the world’s most interesting, and abundant, substance is an element he…
Read Moredaily tonic: johnny cash, the carter family + louis c.k.
(Video link here.) “Keep on the Sunny Side”, written in 1899 by Ada Blenkhorn, made famous by The Carter Family… …if that’s not your cup of tea, let Louis C.K. inspire you to ROCK OUT (even if everyone else thinks you’re an idiot)
Read Moresending easter eggs (+ other oddly-shaped gifts) by mail
We’d figured we had alt-easter gift covered for this year with our seedling-filled Easter eggs, when Cynthia from 50Years50Recipes sent us ANOTHER swell, novel gift. She stuffed plastic eggs with goodies and sent them through the mail, as an invitation to her her niece and nephews to come for an Easter visit (She got the…
Read Morefrida kahlo’s body cast paintings (art transforms)
We’ve just discovered The Paris Review’s blog, and some cool and illuminating posts. A recent one by Leslie Jaimison is called Frida’s Corsets: Frida Kahlo wore plaster corsets for most of her life because her spine was too weak to support itself. She painted them, naturally, covering them with pasted scraps of fabric and drawings of…
Read Morestout and vanilla ice cream float (reprise)
In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, we thought it fitting to reprise the Stout and Ice Cream Float post we published a year or so ago. It is a one line equation-of-a-recipe adapted from Coleman Andrews: Into a big glass, spoon really good vanilla ice cream like Haagan Daz’ Five Vanilla Bean, then pour over Guinness…
Read MoreSushi Master Jiro Ono’s Philosophy of Work and Art
Our friend Fast Forward sent us an illuminating post from Gilttaste called “What Makes Sushi Great”. It’s about newly released film, “Jiro Dreams of Sushi”, about Jiro Ono, 85 years old, a revered sushi chef and one of Japan’s Living National Treasures who runs a tiny, legendary restaurant inside a Tokyo subway station: “…the movie…
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