This Vancouver house carved out of stumps in the early 1900′s is our idea of swell, the perfect eccentric, elemental, minimalist retreat:
“…3 rooms.The lower stump on right was the kitchen, the lower part of the highter stump on the left was the living room. The bedroom, doorless, was reached by a ladder removed in daytime to the kitchen…”
It reminds us a favorite young adult novel we’ve read a million times: read more…
Recently I took an ancient friend to visit her doctor. He’s famously late keeping appointments because he famously spends A LOT of time with each patient, whatever he feels is necessary to really hear and address their concerns, which, as we all know, is pretty unusual these days. His patients are happy to wait.
At the end of the visit, he unexpectedly wrote me a prescription. “Check this out”, he said.
“Can I blog it?”
“Sure”, he said, “spread it around.” read more…
sofia rower
We LOVE Sofia Rower’s half a mustache!!!
We want one! It makes us wonder why we never see men sporting half a mustache…what a surprise that would be.
(Sofia was in Peru this summer with 100 clowns from all over the world. They were painting murals in poor villages and working/transforming the vibe in clinics. GO Sofia!)
Related posts: invent to thrive: plastic bottles of daylight
egypt’s continuing signs of a revolution
reality sandwich*: street mural, bronx-style via manny howard
photo: sally schneider
Lush, fragrant summer strawberries are in their last week or two at farm stands. We bought some home and were inspired to serve them in the giant horn spoon Maria Robledo had given us, for an unexpected presentation. We ate them right off the stems, no powdered sugar necessary. It reminded us that there are all kinds of charming and unexpected vessels you could use for serving summer berries. We imagined an our collection of big odd serving spoons filled with berries and arrayed on the table.
If you decide to remove the hulls before serving the berries or cooking with them, don’t throw them away: they can make a great instant flavoring for balsamic vinegar. read more…
gorden ammermann
While we were away, we got a very succinct, very cool email from reader Gorden Ammermann, with photos of the wonderful shipping pallet bed he made:
hi,
maybe i´ve something for your site. be free to post it: my new diy-pallet-bed
greetz
gorden
We not only love the white painted bed, but the deliciously rumpled linens in a very simple room as well. You can get the gist of Ammermann’s creation from the other two photos he sent: read more…
Since it’s the last week of summer and most folks are off frolicking, and since we’re still not quite up-to-snuff, we’ll be posting once a day (or so) on ‘the improvised life’ through Labor Day.
In addition, you’ll find 5 short, illuminating posts daily on our Facebook page, like this great quote from artist Alina Szapocznikow (follow the link to read the whole post; her elaboration on it is surprising.)
Look around you. Creation lies just between dreams and daily work.
For NON-SOCIAL MEDIA readers, YOU DON’T HAVE TO HAVE A FACEBOOK ACCOUNT to check out our page. Just click our link and read.
We snapped the photo above while by the water in Seattle. If you look closely, read more…
(Video link here.) We returned from a pretty difficult time away to a pretty difficult time coming back: a serious health issue, jet-lag, a computer with a kaput hard drive, and the discovery that the trusted carpenter we had working on the Laboratory while we were away decided to “go rogue”, doing the opposite of what we had carefully planned. There were so many whammies it made us made us look up the word…
We realized, once again, that read more…
We’re taking some unscheduled, unexpected time off due to a family matter. Although we hope to back by August 20th or SOONER, we’re not exactly sure how long we’ll be gone due to many unknowns. For sure we won’t have the where-with-all to write our regular extensive posts.
Instead, we’re going to try an experiment: we’ll Tweet and post clips and finds to ‘the improvised life’s Facebook page from Monday to through Friday morning (starting this afternoon Wednesday, August 8th). Since improvised marvels are EVERYWHERE, we figure we should come up with quite a few things daily to check out, albeit with minimal commentary and connectors.
We invite you to check in daily to our Facebook page: facebook.com/theimprovisedlife. While you’re there, please be sure to “like” us (numbers count).
Or follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/improvised_life
And don’t for get our Pinterest page. It allows you to navigate our archives through pictures: pinterest.com/improvisedlife/
And of course the years worth of posts in our Archive.
Related posts: the healing powers of ipads…laptops…computers…
explore ‘the improvised life’ through images, via pinterest
music for whatever mood you’re in – free
rules for living: just one from pablo picasso
the creative possibilities for being ‘on hold’ via christophe neimann
make MORE of your own music
It’s August and in real time the city of Paris is virtually deserted; everyone is away. But that doesn’t stop us from taking a virtual tour of Paris in our heads, and reveling in that magic city, and refreshing our overworked brains. Researchers are now saying downtime is ESSENTIAL to creativity (which we knew all along.) So take two minutes to get off the schedule and GO!
via Open Culture
Related posts: vacation (or weekend) mental prep
slowing down and counting blessings
weekend road trip: ‘address is approximate’
improvising at the beach
visual vacation: the encyclopedia of life
photo: sally schneider
We recently found some photos that we took in the fabled Chelsea Hotel’s a few months before anyone knew it would be closing. (Click here to listen to Leonard Cohen singing Chelsea Hotel,which he wrote for Janis Joplin, while you read on). We’d been to artist John Wellington’s birthday party in one of the rooms there, and as we were clumping down the iron stairwell on our way out, we couldn’t help but admire the wild graffiti that adorned the fire extinquishers in the corner of each landing: an ubiquitous, essential tool made into something grander than it’s usual self… read more…
I recently wrote that the first step in planning our renovation was to hang out in the space and dream. That’s not quite true. That step ran concurrently with friends coming over to give their 2-cents and help us explore how exactly the place was made. By explore I mean busting holes in ceiling and walls I thought about demolishing to actually see what lay hidden in them — elecrical wiring, support columns, pipes — in order to plot possibilities.
The first thing several friends noticed was how low the ceiling felt at 8’2″. (This proved to be largely due to the way the place was painted and the height of the doors). My friend Holton Rower decided that it was imperative that we see if there was any space above them hoping it might be possible to raise them. In lieu of a ladder, Holton rigged a platform with what was around: read more…
This is how we feel sometime, mulling the vast wild creation all around…wondering where we fit in.
And this is another mood, when we dance right on the edge: read more…
Recently, quite out-of-the-blue, we contrived a surprisingly chic garbage can. In the course of moving apartments, we had found 6-gallon bottle of “emergency” water stowed away in the back of a closet. It was housed in a rectangular black plastic crate . When we pulled the bottle out, the box suddenly looked wonderfully Bauhausian, a perfectly-designed garbage can for our needs. It fits under the new sink cabinet in the renovated apartment, has a low profile, and holds a good amount, and looks fine when sitting out on the kitchen floor during serious cooking sessions (visitors have actually admire it. Where did you get that cool garbage can?).
When we went to photograph it, we became conscious of a dilemma: we line our garbage can with a plastic bag (below). What else could we use? We’re wondering what a viable nonplastic way to deal with garbage is if you live in a city and are unable to compost and haul other stuff to the dump. New York City’s recycling bags are even made of plastic.
The famous scene from the 1977 film The Graduate came to mind. (Video link here.) read more…
We often post videos,profiles or quotes of artists because of the courage they exhibit in producing work that breaks from the norm, and that many would consider dangerous. Their example helps us to have a bit more courage in our own life and work, in whatever small matter terrifies us.
Among the most poweful is Chinese artist AiWeiwei. He is a dissident, who has forthrightly spoken out against the Chinese Government, and endured imprisonment, surveillance, and the shut down of his blog, which has become one of his most provocative works (If you click on aiweiwei.com, no page will load: it’s a very real example of what censorship means. )
Weiwei’s artwork spans many media, and blends politics and art in profoundly moving ways. His simple ethos:
If you don’t speak out and you don’t clear your mind, then who are you? read more…
We were thrilled to see the play that the video of Sally making herb salt on Splendid Table got, including a big fat mention on Apartment Therapy’s The Kitchen. From that post we discovered that a year ago during cherry season, they’d riffed on Sally’s improvised cherry vinegar from The Improvisational Cook
