Halloween Costume Inspiration from Artists + Designers

We spent a number of Halloween’s outfitting ourselves in improvised costumes, usually at the last minute, and LOVED suddenly taking on a whole other persona for one magic night. If you haven’t gotten your Halloween act together yet, and want some inspiration, here’s a compendium of  forage-able ideas from artists and designers…Salvador Dali offers loads of…

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More Signs + Blessings on Ephemeral Walls

We were walking by an empty storefront on Manhattan’s Upper East Side when we noticed that someone had written intriguing, inspiring, philosophical signs on the blank walls that were, no doubt, destined for renovation. Who had taken their marker and, with such bold strokes, written signs all over the place? We pressed our nose against…

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Signs and Blessings Hidden In Floors or Walls

When you look at the image of the bathroom in Improvised Life’s budget renovation, you’d never guess what lies hidden under the tumbled marble floor tiles the contractor generously donated. While I was choosing just the right mix of tiles —marble itself is so varied, each tile was different — I thought of a slight addition I’d…

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Martha Antidote: Visit Alexander Calder in His Studio

(Video link here.) After we wrote about artist Tom Sachs’ practice of knolling, simple, incredibly effective steps he takes to neaten is very busy work space, we got an interesting comment from Kevin Neff, the engineer who helped us reason-out some of our vibrating bed experiments ages ago. He wrote: So interesting. I had been wrongly…

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Bernie Sanders Plays the Congas + Nails It about ART

(Video link here.) In this season of unlikely presidential candidates, we like to imagine what a real, deconstructed, unarmored, groovey president might look like. The Huffington Post gave us a joyous taste with their brilliant edit of the Democratic Presidential Debate that has Bernie Sanders playing conga drums. It’s like they all took off their girdles. Whew. Sanders, after all, is the…

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A Brilliant Idea Found in a Second Hand Book

Whenever someone we know has a baby, we go on the hunt for our favorite kid’s book, the enduringly great, zennish, out-of-print, A Hole Is to Dig by Ruth Krauss with illustrations by Maurice Sendak. We buy used copies, doing our best to find clean ones, but we never really know what we’ll get. Recently, we found…

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A Machine that Wakes You Up and Gets You Dressed

(Video link here.) At the consistently wonderful The Kids Should See This, we found kinetic artist Joseph Herscher‘s machine for getting himself out of bed and dressed on a sleepy morning. The chain-reaction is astonishing for its creativity, imagination and mesmerizing practicality, everything that Rube Goldberg‘s own inventions embodied. We love (and share) Herscher’s view of the world,

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How to Neaten Up Stuff via Sachs’ Practice of Knolling

(Video link here.) At Things Organized Neatly, a website about exactly THAT, we found this terrific except from Ten Bullets, artist Tom Sachs‘ essential principles — “his code” — for employees working in his studio. Here he outlines something he called “knolling”, an action we’ve always done but never had a word for. Sachs’ interpretation is…

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Inexpensive Urban Shelters Solve a Housing Crisis

As apartments in urban areas become prohibitively expensive, young people in Oakland, California have been developing innovative, grassroots strategies to provide homes for themselves, and for homeless people in their communities.  The New York Times recently article and slideshow samples new ways of thinking about “home”, “a social experiment in stripping down to the basics.”

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Morning Poem: Walt Whitman Read to You + Animated

(Video link here.) London-based animator Sophie Koko Gate’s chose the 2nd stanza of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself to animate in her cool 2 minute video. You can read along below. What we like best about the little video is having the poem read to us, with a jazzy beat and its wonderful last two lines.

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Improvised Life’s Community IS Gold

I’ve been bowled over by raft of new Friends with Benefits subscriptions and the most astonishing, deeply-heartening praise from readers in response to my writing about Improvised Life’s Illusory Wealth. Well, not completely illusory. I should have qualified it.

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