April 2012

caine’s arcade: a miracle of cardboard, tape, imagination

(Video link here.) This morning, we found several emails from readers alerting us to this video that is flying around the internet like wildfire. It’s about 9-year-old Caine who devised an elaborate arcade out of cardboard, great quantities of packing tape, plastic toys – whatever he could find – over the course of a summer vacation hanging around his dad’s used auto parts store. You can read the backstory here.

Though for us a bit too long and treacly toward the end, it is really worth checking out the first 6 or so minutes to witness the work of a truly inventive mind, and BIG spirit, who made a great deal out of what was at hand. ”No” does not appear to be in his kid’s vocabulary.

One of the best lines is from Caine’s dad, when his son said he wanted to buy a claw machine: “Why don’t you just build it?”… a perfect question. So Caine did.

We can only imagine what a kid like Caine might grow up to be, and do.

04.12.12 | comments (2) | in dream houses, kids, materials, paths + processes, people, projects + play, video |

yves klein’s curiously inspiring shirt

yves klein

We’ve always loved Yves Klein‘s shirt printed with hand prints, foot prints and question marks: a mysteriously chic, primal cosmic design that makes us want to get some plain white shirts and paint whatever comes to mind. It would be like wearing a flag of a personal country.

Mondoblogo reminded us of it.

04.12.12 | comments | in apparel, art, d-i-y, inspiration, materials, people, resources, textiles, why not? |

why not send a virtual bunch of flowers?

photo: Beatrice da Costa

We came home last night world weary after a long day. In our Inbox we found…a virtual bunch of flowers from our friend Beatriz da Costa…

…and our whole mood changed!

Bia sent us her own photo, but it’s easy enough to do with found ones to brighten someone’s day or wish them

“SPRING ….PRINTEMPS….PRIMAVERA…..Happy days to All !!!!!!!!”

as Bia did. read more…

04.12.12 | comments (1) | in art, cheap + great, copy this!, d-i-y, family + friends, gifts, resources |

a crash course in finance via 11 TED talks

(Video link here.) Vicki Celestines, one of our readers, sent us this great compilation of “compelling TED Talks on Money.” Together, the eleven videos make up a unique “crash course in economics and personal finance” which we can certainly use. They cover topics such as putting a value on nature; raising kids to be entrepreneurs; poverty, money, and love; and investing in a post-crash world.

Our hands-down favorite though is Matt Weinstein’s talk about “What Bernie Madoff Couldn’t Steal from Me.”

It puts the fear of loss in another light.

04.11.12 | comments (2) | in business, learn, people, principles, rules for living, video |

fab orange-frame mirror, inspired by a work of art

painting: winston roeth

Today, not for the first time, we mistook an artwork for a household object – a mirror actually. We saw this work by Winston Roeth at YouHaveBeenHereSometime right after seeing some images of mirrors and our brain said: “Wow, what a great deeply-orange painted mirror! Why don’t we make one of those?!!” Then we scrolled down and read the copy. We looked back and realized there was no shiny mirror surface after all, but pure geometry on canvas.

Beautiful. So we read about Roeth and looked at some pictures.

We still loved the idea for a deeply orange-framed mirror, inspired by Roeth (whose work we can’f afford) and went hunting around for how to make, or get, one. read more…

04.11.12 | comments (1) | in art, cheap + great, copy this!, d-i-y, elements, inside, materials, people, resources |

chuck close’s ‘note to self’ (eight perfect rules for living)

(Video link here.) Sue Anderson, an ‘improvised life’ reader, sent us this GREAT video of artist Chuck Close‘s powerful, simple, forthright words-to-live-by from an ongoing CBS series “Notes to Self”. It’s well-worth suffering through the 30-second commercial for its memorable four minutes of pure wisdom (don’t bother with the last minute of news anchor blather). In the course of the video, Close outlines eight perfect rules for living…as true as we’ve ever seen: read more…

04.11.12 | comments (3) | in art, inspiration, inspiration blogs + sites, paths + processes, people, quotes, rules for living, video |

how to stop junk mail

bob zahn for the new yorker

Even though it’s not our fault, the vast amounts of junk mail we get makes us feel frustrated and guilty. So much paper going to waste. Try and warp your head around this: the Wall Street Journal reports that 82.5 billion pieces of “advertising mail” were delivered by the U.S. Postal system in 2010.

Years ago there was an internet service that would alert catalog companies that you wanted to opt-out, although it seems to have disappeared. But Unconsumption has just alerted us to a next-generation service that might do something similar. PaperKarma is a new app (for iPhones, androids, and Windows phones) will contact the source of your junk mail and “remove you from their mailing list.” All you have to do is a take a photo of the piece of junk mail in question. The key is to take a picture that highlights the name of the company sending the mail, like in the photo below. read more…

04.10.12 | comments (2) | in how-to, resources blogs + sites, services, technology |

cool and surprising uses for pegboard

photo: todd selby

In The Selby’s recent photo essay of Coffee Supreme in Auckland New Zealand, we spotted some very cool uses for pegboard, a material with which we’ve become enamored when we saw a pegboard headboard.

Practically, pegboard is masonite (tempered hardboard) with holes punched in it to hold metal tool holders. Visually, pegboard is polka dot masonite that can be painted any color. It is cheap, strong and light (a 4′ x 8′ sheet costs around $20). At Coffee Supreme, they use pegboard in all sorts of ways: as a surface, above or as a simple, polka dot wall…

google street view as time machine + aide memoire

Usually we hear people talking about Google StreetView as a virtual armchair travel tool. You can “visit” all sorts of exotic places you’ve never been to without actually traveling to them, like Stonehenge and other UNESCO World Heritage sites. With the exception of artful manipulation like The Wilderness Downtown, for me these visits remain mostly abstract and at a distance; for all their seeming-immediacy, too much information is missing: the quality of air and scent and temperature, the vibe…

That is, unless you’ve visited the place already. Then StreetView can take you back into the forgotten past, and spark surprising memories that enliven the image.

When I stumbled on their latest project: documenting the Amazon River and the Rio Negro via Street View, a vivid image of a flooded tree cast me BACK into a trip I has taken many years ago up the Amazon River Basin. I’d forgotten the particular quality of sunsets over the river, the sensual aliveness of the rain forest, how close the shore could be in some tributaries and how vast and oceanic others were. I remembered passengers on the boat I was traveling sleeping in layered hammocks, sharing the dinner of rice and black beans and sausage, the absolute dark of the jungle at night, clever houses built on stilts along the shore to keep them above the flood waters. Google Street view became an aide memoire, that activated old sense memories better than many photographs I had. read more…

04.10.12 | comments | in outside, paths + processes, resources, resources blogs + sites, travel |

san francisco graffiti turns the sidewalk into a fish pond

photo: maria robledo

Another shift of view from Maria Robledo: a fish pond illusion graffiti spotted in San Francisco. The graffiti there is very different than the often cryptic signage we follow in New York. It’s still reverberates with sweet 60′s-ish light:

almost vaseless flower arrangement

photo: sally schneider

Our friend Maria Robledo has an ever-improvisational way with “flower” arranging. Here, she cut sprigs of a fragrant vine from her garden and arranged them running down the center of her dinner table, placing the cut ends in shallow ceramic bowls of water to keep them fresh. Perfect. Come to think of it, jar lids, especially the glass lids from French canning jars would work as well….

04.09.12 | comments | in cheap + great, copy this!, entertaining, nature, strategies |

blaise cendrars: art from easter ashes

amedeo modigliani

The Henry Miller video we posted on Friday has led us to an Eastertime revelation. It can be summed up in two words: Blaise Cendrars.

Miller praised the French writer as “my idol,” and says, “what a writer learns from Cendrars is to follow his nose, to obey life’s commands, to worship no other god but life.”

Cendrars’ poem “Easter in New York,” written exactly one hundred years ago, is one of the foundation texts of modern literature. (You can hear it being read in the original French here; English translation here.)

Relatively unknown in this country, Cendrars has been called “the son of Homer.” He’s considered by many writers to be the poetic genius of the age, the creator of modernism, the chief influence on giants of literature. Just to name a few of his friends and admirers: Hemingway, Picasso, Leger, Matisse, Apollinaire, Cocteau, Delaunay, Braque, Modigliani, Eisenstein, et al.

With all that, he once told an interviewer he did not consider himself an artist. “I’ve had thirty six professions and I’m ready to start something entirely different tomorrow morning.” read more…

04.08.12 | comments (3) | in art, paths + processes, people, principles, quotes |

happy easter from ‘the improvised life’!!

120301

Gif by the great dvdp

04.08.12 | comments (1) | in celebrations |

last minute ways to get your easter act together

ohjoy.blogs.com

If you didn’t get it together to send plastic goody-filled Easter eggs by mail, or sprout little plants in egg shells, we thought we’d offer some solutions for last-minute Easter egg decorating:

There’s still time to make your own plant-based dyes for truly gorgeous Easter eggs (it’s totally fun). We especially dig the moderne neon dip-dyed egg above, which you can do with neon food dye available at the supermarket; here’s how to.

And don’t forget, eggs are a blank palette; you can just write or paint right on them with markers. read more…

04.06.12 | comments (2) | in celebrations, copy this!, d-i-y, food, how-to, materials, projects + play, strategies |

henry miller’s microcosmic bathroom

(Video link here.) In 1975, film maker Tom Schiller made a documentary of Henry Miller. A full 35 minutes of it takes place in Miller’s astonishing bathroom after he had woken up. We found all 35 minutes riveting, though the first 3:35 give the big gist: Miller decorated his bathroom in a break-the-mold way that has nothing to do with the usual concerns of style and luxury, that takes you WAY beyond the little room:

People often come in here and get lost as it were…they get fascinated with these pictures. I often myself, to tell you the truth if it, I spend long minutes in here reviewing them all, wondering why did I get them, why did I put them up there. They run a gamut from the Buddhists to the whores to the maniac that made that beautiful castle up there.

In a way, it is very much like a sort of voyage. I look upon it, a voyage of ideas. We’re traveling not around the world but around my bathroom which is a little microcosm like the world…that’s one of the beauties about it, that it can take you anywhere. You let your mind roam. As we way, one thing leads to another. If you sit here and you are relaxed, why you’re free to make free associations. read more…

04.05.12 | comments (2) | in cool spaces, inside, paths + processes, people, reimagine |