Marc Berenson sent us some snaps of magazine wallpaper he spotted at Steiner Studios at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The subject line read: I thought you might have an opinion on this homemade wallpaper from old magazine pages, it’s improvised For sure we have an opinion: Although it kinda works in a public stairwell with that…
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(Video link here.) 2:39 minutes of brilliant perspective from comedian Louis C.K, from his recent HBO special “Oh My God“. WARNING: Adult content. If you’re not ready for it, save for later. Related posts: louis c.k. on ‘putting the time in’ the collected wisdom of louis c.k. louis c.k. car dances ‘who are you?’ +…
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Truth be known, I have been composing food right on my kitchen worksurface for many years. As a food writer, I enjoyed the big palate the worksurface offered, perfect for combining elements and creating new combinations, both visual and gustatory. So when I renovated ‘the improvised life’s laboratory kitchen, I chose white Corian for the…
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Last Thursday, ‘improvised life’ reader Sue Anderson sent us these extraordinary photograph taken during the massive May blizzard that hit the Midwest last week, with this report: This goose with a “can-do” attitude may be of interest to you. I suppose you have heard about the snow storm currently underway in the US Midwest. Here…
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This weekend when we go to the farmer’s market, we will have Tubetti Pasta with Asparagus, Morels and Fava Beans from Sally’s award-winning cookbook A New Way to Cook in mind. It the perfect spring-into-summer pasta recipe because it lends itself to endless improvisation, depending on what look’s best in the market, or how much energy we have. It plays…
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This image of sneakers worn during the Boston Marathon is the cover of the current Boston Magazine. It was the idea of the magazine’s design director Brian Struble; the magazine sent out tweets and Facebook posts asking runners to submit images of their shoes, along with personal stories. Here’s Brian’s thinking: To me the cover is…
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In the new Spring Design Issue of New York Magazine, artist Maira Kalman talks to longtime neighbor and friend Isaac Mizrahi about how Tel Aviv has influenced her New York apartment. The two images of Kalman’s apartment shows a warm, personal, comfortable, loose space, very different from the stark interiors of so many other designer’s…
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…good ideas…bad ideas…doubt…more doubt…no, no, no….fear…talent…self-loathing…concepts…scribbles… imagination… What a mash-up! Anyone we know? ….Meanwhile, what about that left brain/right brain thing?
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Keith Stewart is a writer despite himself. Even with the massive responsibilities and demands of his organic farm with it’s hundred or so varieties of produce, he has written regularly and wonderfully about the inside of farming and living a rural life, from numerous magazine articles to It’s a Long Road to a Tomato: Tales of an Organic…
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Over the years, just about every place we’ve lived has had hardwood floors. They’ve ranged from prewar bleached and polyeurathaned oak to white “pickled” new oak and lately, off-white, high-gloss painted slightly rough plywood. For all those years, we’ve searched for the best way to clean our floors without damaging the protective surface. Since New York…
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Being smitten with rusty steel, we love this solution to a rather homely exposed brick fireplace: cover it in sheets of intentionally-rusted corten steel (also known as weathering steel) and paint the flue blue. via Japanese Trash Related posts: lust for rust: in a modern house and our own experiments nina’s tool bucket: essentials for doing-it-yourself d-i-y…
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We were wandering through Saks Fifth Avenue the other day fending off smiling sales people trying to spray us with perfume, when we saw a surprising woman with a bold tattoo of the classic feminist Venus fist ; she was sitting at the Chanel counter checking out some makeup. We loved her style that was…
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For the renovation of my 1,000-square-foot ‘Laboratory’ in New York City, my mission was to open up the space to the spectacular park view AND fluidly accomodate an open kitchen, workspace, dining area, and living area. To do this, I removed a small bedroom to dramatically expand the main room and built an office area along one 15′ wall…
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(Video link here.) There’s been a lot of buzz lately about Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. Author Susan Cain shines a spotlight on introverts and reveals how over time our society has come to look to extroverts as leaders. Not suggesting that one is better than the other,…
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We’ve written about the unexpected stylishiness of stacked logs before but love this particularly charming and effective storage for firewood and fallen timber: a fence of stacked logs (snapped by Susan Jacobson as she drove by in her car). Related posts: storing firewood indoors = firewood as storage unit d-i-y stacked wood fireplace mantle woodpile…
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Spotted on Claton Cubitt’s tumblr and worth checking out full size: “cargo bike incorporating a shopping cart and chain link fence, with a blood-red wrought-iron cowcatcher (and cup holder), New Orleans.” The awesomness of the human imagination! This practical AND aestheric considerations here are stunning… Related posts: clever shelving configured for bicycle storage bikes for hauling…
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I’ve been thinking a lot about birds lately, about the mystery of their migrations; their unerring return each spring. Our Cooper’s hawk is back from the dry barrancas of Zapotecas, its familiar kek-kek-kek vying with argumentative crows and cooing mourning doves at dawn. Improvisatory arboreal architects are at work big time. Humingbird hangs its timid sac of…
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(Video link here.) This is even more amazing with the sound OFF: traveling via the domino-theory through a kinetic Rube-Goldberg universe… …to make a tuna melt (we can relate) With thanks to Susan Dworski via The Browser Related posts: rube goldberg summer camp ok go channels rube goldberg: “having good ideas and making cool shit” “can…
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We are constantly knocked out by the wonderful endeavors our readers are involved in, committed to, CREATED out of nothing, improvised. Here are a few from the past week: David Downie and Alison Harris set out from their home in Paris to walk across France to the Pyrenees, the French portion of El Camino de…
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Recently, we noticed a spike in traffic to our 2009 post d-i-y lace chain link fence. Ho, are people trying to figure out how to make chain link fences look better at last? What we loved in that early post was that someone had brilliantly seen that the metal grid of a chainlink fence is really a loom for weaving…
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