We’ll be heading to the wild ramp supper in West Virginia this weekend to celebrate one of the first wild foods of spring. On the way, we’re stopping to see a friend who may not be able to go to the supper. We’re packing a frozen block of ramp butter in our bag to leave with him in case. It’s one of the best ways we know to make the most of a small amount of ramps,
Read MorePause Button DIY (Maurizio Cattelan)
In an Illustrated Interview, the New York Times asked artist Maurizio Cattelan What would you invent to make life easier? His answer: A pause button.
YES! We all desperately need the ability to pause. But until an instant pause button is invented, here are some we thought of…
Read MoreA 3-Word Practice for Expanding Possibilities
This photo of hunks of clay by Gentl and Hyers, made us wonder: What are we going to make today? And then we found this in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art:
Read MoreIron-Skillet Smoked Salmon
One of my most pleasurable challenges in the kitchen has been to cook like a farmer in a city apartment, curing hams, aging cheese, making butter, and best of all, smoking food. Hungering for the flavor of wood smoke but having no fireplace, years ago I devised a way of smoking in an iron skillet. The spectacular results belie its ease: it requires no special equipment and can be easily improvised.
Read MoreTrees Painted Colors + Transformed
After we stumbled on Amy Cropper’s Inverse —ash and hawthorn branches painted bright red —we wondered why more people didn’t simply paint dead trees and branches to tranform them, and turn them into…something else… form/artwork with a mysterious story. It sent us hunting for examples. And we found lots of inspiration…
Read MoreTried-and-True: Cool, Crisp Percale Sheets
Some time ago, we went on a hunt for great sheets. The sheets we love feel cool and crisp when you climb into bed. Combed or jacquard cotton won’t do it, neither does linen nor most of the million thread-count sheets we’ve tried. The only way we’ve found to guarantee ‘cool and crisp’ is with Supina cotton percale bedding from Garnet Hill. We wait for their 25% off sale, which is NOW…
Read MoreEco on Why We Make Lists + Some Favorites
Our friend Tim Slavin, of Kids, Code and Computer Science sent us this image, knowing that we write often about lists, a critical tool in managing a creative life. We discovered it was from a 2009 interview with Umberto Eco in Der Spiegel about his exibition at the Louvre on the essential nature of lists. Eco…
Read MoreTo Manage Projects (or Your Life) Do a Quarterly Review
My wife and I had been interested in small, micro-sized startup ideas for over 16 years, at one point pursuing six projects at once. As you can imagine, we were spread so thin, none of the ideas took off. So we began looking for a simple way to manage the chaos of startup ideas and…
Read MoreThe Art of the Hair: Creativity in Trump’s ‘Most Fantastic Feature’
In a New Yorker recently we found a short piece about Keith Allen Johnson, a sculptor from Flowery Branch, Georgia who created a bust of Donald Trump that he planned to present to Trump’s Georgia campaign office. Most notable was the artist’s acute description of Trump’s unique hairstyle:
Read MorePoetry Vending Machine DIY, with Mary Oliver, Rumi, Anne Sexton
As kids we loved old-fashioned vending machines that would drop a little plastic container holding a treasure — a ring, miniature toy, or candy — through the shoot when we put in a dime or a quarter. Lately, various iterations of poetry vending machines have been coming to our attention, perfect for our adult selves. Imagine…
Read MoreSuper-Quick Sweet or Savory Citrus Jams (After Mario Batali)
At Mario Batali’s restaurant Babbo, I had a simple, astonishing dish: a whole roasted fish served with Lemon Oregano Jam. The jam was a marvel, at once sweet, bitter and herbal in perfect balance, an inspired match for the fish. I decoded Mario’s brilliant recipe, extracting an essential formula into which I plugged different citrus fruit and flavorings, to take it from savory to dazzling sweet and back.
Read MoreArtfully Papered Collage Walls You Can Make Yourself
Images artfully-collaged can transform a wall, providing a unified field of pattern and often, meaning. Surround yourself with images you love to look at…reminders perhaps…
Read MorePractice Losing Farther, Faster (Elizabeth Bishop)
The other day we came across the shorn trunk of huge tree that had been taken down by the Parks Department. We looked close and tried to count the rings but got lost in the swirls and changes in its three-foot span. It is one of those everyday losses that reminded us of others, and of the Elizabeth Bishop poem “One Art”*, in which the antidote to loss lies hidden.
Read MoreWhat is YOUR Artist’s Studio?
A couple of weeks ago while we were compiling Artist’s Studios with Sofas + Rest Spaces, we stumbled on picture of earth artist Roy Staab‘s that had the notation: The Site Is My Studio. There was Staab creating in the Hudson River in 1989. IN THE HUDSON RIVER! It got us thinking about what our studio is. We realized…
Read MoreCompassionate Self-Criticism, in the Third Person
When performance coach Kate Conklin was teaching me Alexander Technique via Skype a couple of weeks ago, she mentioned that she often critiqued herself in the third person when she was assessing her own actions or work. She said that it made her kinder to herself, as she is when she works with a student. I’ve been trying this…
Read MoreAncient Trees: Portraits in Time, Change, Survival
“Ancient Trees: Portraits in Time” is one of the most beautiful and instantly transformative books we’ve seen in a long time. Photographer Beth Moon spent fourteen years traveling the world photographing ancient trees She describes her images as “Portraits of Change. Portraits of Survival. Portraits of Time” and interleaves them with the occasional perfect poem. It is a book we will leave open, to keep in our field of vision as we go about our day.
Read MoreBrown Sugar Coconut Layer Cake with Lemon or Dulce de Leche
Years ago, I developed a brown sugar-scented play on the classic American 2-egg /1 bowl cake known as Lightning Cake (because it only takes 15 minutes to throw together). Buttery, tender, and fragrant, its deliciousness and fine texture belies its ease. On a pretty plate and dusted with powdered sugar, it looks like the lovely…
Read MoreSilvery Woods from Low to High
We did a double-take during a virtual tour of a monochromatic home in Risskov, Denmark designed by haute-architecture firm Ardess: The luxurious silvery custom-made interior of Douglas fir, linoleum, and concrete looks curiously like the weathered silver-painted plywood door we spotted in Chelsea a couple of years ago, and fell in love with.
Read MoreAretha: How to Be A Soul Survivor
Soul Survivor, David Remnick’s moving profile of complex, mysterious, brilliant, notoriously infuriating singer Aretha Franklin, sent us looking for videos of the great diva in action. We stumbled on this rough beauty of seventy-something Aretha playing piano herself, in a mode that was more churchlike gospel – her roots — than theater performance. If you’re tired or troubled, or need uplift to your day, her groove will hearten you.
Read MoreWeakness of Strength + the Stength of Weakness
(Video link here.) This short animation describes the incredibly useful “Weakness of Strength Theory”: the flip side of a person’s strengths in one context—the qualities you love or admire them for — are often irritating weaknesses in another. “Every virtue has an associated weakness”; one can’t exist without the other. And no one is ALL strengths and virtues; we are…
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