‘the improvised life’ needs a tagline on its HomePage so newcomers who jump onto the site with no introduction can get the gist quickly, and find their way more easily. We’ve been mulling possibilities for a while now and ask for your help in figuring out which of the phrases below describes the site best. OR send us your ideas and words for the best way to convey what’s going on here, in a flash…It would be placed below the title, where the Manifesto is now…
…resourcefulness as a daily practice…
…inspire your own creative ideas…
We invite you to scroll back through the archives, or the selection below, as you mull ‘the improvised life’ and see if a great tagline comes to mind.
After we took a look at Wikipedia‘s entry about Memorial Day, we realized that, for us and many folks, the day has come to mean “the beginning of summer” rather than a remembrance of people who had died fighting in wars. We imagined losing someone we love that way and got a different view of the day.
We wondered: what do you wish a person on Memorial Day? Happy Memorial Day doesn’t seem quite right. So we’ve posted this video by Tara Mann called Life’s Journey. I agree.
The PBS NewsHour recently issued a challenge: post your ideas for stopping and/or cleaning up the ongoing Gulf of Mexico oil spill on their YouTube site. They received 7,000 entries, with seriously good ideas woven through jokes about calling Macgyver and using duct tape. A few of the best are collected on the News Hours site: clever improvisational thinking by public citizens, along with homemade visuals to illustrate various strategies. Most of them didn’t pass muster by ‘expert’, Greg McCormack, director of the Petroleum Extension Service at the University of Texas, who explained why they wouldn’t work… all EXCEPT ONE…
Two heavily drawling guys from C.S. Roberts Contracting – one dressed in overalls – did a video-demo using kitchen utensils and stainless steel bowls to show that ordinary hay could be used to soak up the oil because oil readily sticks to hay. They figured out all sorts of aspects to the problem, from what kinds of hay to use and how to get it out to see, and what to do with the oil-soaked hay. You can hear their excitement at figuring out the problem: “This is about as green and as simple as it gets…”
We LOVE and are heartened by the folks that put their creativity and imagination and knowledge to this serious problem, and spent time figuring it out and struggling with it, then pulled together a video, and opened themselves and their idea up to criticism…
Thinking outside the box can be a really generous thing to do…
We are big fans of guerrilla activities of all sorts, from the making of art and theater to gardening and marketing. So we loved stumbling on this picture of a striking guerrilla action that took place in Berlin recently: While cars were stopped for green lights, a group of cyclists dumped 13 gallons of colored paint in large puddles onto the street in Berlin’s busy Rosenthaler Platz. As the cars drove through the puddles, their tires inadvertently became brushes to spread the paint, creating a constellation of colored lines. (The artworks’ masterminds posted signs nearby explaining that the paint wasn’t harmful and would wash off with water.) Like the best guerrilla actions, this one shakes up habitual thinking and seeing (and hence maybe living) in positive ways. read more…
The other day, Maria Robledo sent over some cookbooks with a note: “2 women are doing this lovely diary type home cooking book and one is CHRISTOPHER HIRSHEIMER.”
Maria and I both worked with Christopher years ago when she was the food editor of Metropolitan Home and then Saveur. Christopher is famous for having become a superb photographer, with no formal training, just…like…that! having been a highly regarded editor and writer. (How she did it is a story in itself which we’ll post later.)
Christopher, along with her friend and colleague Melissa Hamilton, has again defied the usual notions of how things work and created an ongoing series of utterly charming, absolutely usable cookbooks without a mainstream publisher. It’s called Canal House Cooking.
“We are home cooks writing about home cooking for other home cooks…Everyday we cook. Starting in the morning we tell each other what we made for dinner the night before. Midday, we stop our work, set the table simply with paper napkins, and have lunch. We cook seasonally because that’s what makes sense. So it came naturally to write down what we cook…”
The books are so compelling and such a pleasure, and so beautifully produced, that I called Christopher up to find out the story behind them (which I want to know whenever someone does something amazing, in a completely unexpected way). read more…
We found ourselves so burnt-to-a-crisp after an all-day photo shoot, we couldn’t write a word about the millions of wonderful ideas in our files…We were about to call-it-a-day, secretly wondering if something would come at the very last minute to be our post for tomorrow (it often does, mysteriously)… In one last jump onto the laptop, we found this amazing video on our friend Peggy Markel‘s Facebook page. She travels the world leading culinary adventures and has an eye for wild beauty of all sorts…like this…
…which became the perfect Friday post. TGIF….GIFT…
Recently, Lydia Wills alerted us to an entry from Howard Rheingold‘s astonishing blog Howard’s Butt “about his rectal cancer experiences –about being cracked open. He is an amazing person…one of the earliest internet folks who knew it was going to change the world.” Rheingold’s writing sent us to his website and Wikipedia to find out more about him, and then all over the web, as one thing led to another: Rheingold is a future-thinker who saw the power of the internet and wireless devices to create communities WAY before anyone else did, and then he started living that vision… He had a hand in the Millennium Whole Earth Catalog and early internet ventures like HotWired (Wired Magazine’s original web presence), wrote ground-breaking books about technology’s new paradigms and collective intelligence, gave a TED talk about collaboration, and lectures at Stanford and U.C. Berkeley.
In all the work that we came across, Rheingold shows enduring courage: to think for himself…say what’s what…and be comfortable being an outsider (which just about anyone who is himself is), not to mention writing a blog about rectal cancer and putting pictures of butts all over its home page.
Here’s a post Rheingold wrote in anticipation of the radiation oncologist’s verdict the following week. ”Feeling Like a Hard-Boiled Egg” is about the armoring we create to survive and that life cracks apart, and what that process is really about: read more…
A few years ago, Manny Howard was enticed by New York Magazine to try growing food in his Brooklyn backyard and sustain himself on it for a month. At the time, Manny wasn’t really committed to exploring the meaning of “locavore” (the magazine’s tack); he loves wild challenges of just about any kind (hunting boar or bear, making a film in Afghanistan…) and New York Magazine knew they had their sucker. In trying to create “the farm”, Manny got SO deep into something he had no clue about that he almost lost his marriage (and a finger). He spent months preparing land that had not grown a thing in decades, nurturing seedlings under make-shift grow lights, rigging coops, building an irrigation system, learning to geld and kill chickens, trying to get rabbits to breed… learning on the job. Everything that could go wrong did, including a hurricane landing in Brooklyn – right on the farm. He lost 29 pounds.
In a recent interview in Elle Magazine, Manny described the biggest challenge:
“Well, I could break it down to most miserable, or most discouraging, or generated the most self-loathing. Those are probably the categories. I was so crazy and myopic. I was dedicated to finishing the project. I really became a lunatic. Fix what’s broken, heal what’s sick, feed what’s hungry-which was the real gift of the whole project: Apply work to a problem and the problem would be gone for, you know, seven hours. Nothing ever actually got fixed or healed.”
This weekend, I will take a few days off to go down to West Virginia to the Ramp Supper in Helvetia, West Virginia, a feast served family style in the community hall by the Farm Women’s Association – ham, beans, cornbread, slaw, applesauce, hash browns, ramps raw and cooked. Depending on the weather, the raw ramps – like a lily of the valley with a scallion bulb - could range from fiercely peppery to sweetly pungent riffs on garlic-leek-shallot-chive. Fried with rendered bacon in an iron skillet, they melt into garlicy greens, their flavors deeply mellowed. The supper is followed at dusk by a square dance that rocks the hall for hours with fiddle music whose wild strains reverberate throughout the valley. These people mean it. The yearly ramp supper is in celebration of the first living thing to poke through the ground in spring and the end of a long, harsh winter. read more…
Outside my apartment door recently, I found a glass plate covered by an inverted pyrex bowl; inside was a slice of a four layer torte, with a little fork. The card read “It’s probably better thawed out. (me too…).”
It was from my neighbor Matthew Sporzynski, a paper artist whom we’ve blogged; he likes to leave surprises for his friends, and has left quite a few for me: huge bouquets of flowers (a moment-past-their-prime, rescued from a florist friend), a little plastic box of hilarious labels (below), the amazing “hope you feel better” gift of a couple of months ago, and the torte, made by his mom: layers of complex flavors: nuts, coffee, apricot jam, cocoa, with an underlacing of a liqueur.
I’ve left Matthew things too, in a shopping bag right outside his door to reciprocate the gesture: some excellent extra-virgin olive oil, a book of type faces I thought he’d like, a little jar of Apricots in Cardamom Syrup held back from a batch I made for a dinner party. Another neighbor, who lived in the top floor penthouse where he kept a rose garden, occasionally left me a vase with fragrant heirloom roses.
The premise of a little gift left secretly outside of the door or on a porch of a friend is a great one. read more…
If you go to Webpages as Graphs, you can type in the URL of any website and see it slowly plotted as a graph, in a kind of magical animation. We did it with ‘the improvised life’ and watched in astonishment at the graphing of its nine months of life: it “blossomed” into what looks like a strange flower, bud by bud, one slowly emerging from another, like watching a time-lapse nature video. We remembered when this blog was only an idea, and the unfolding graph reminded us of the step-by-step process (full of doubts and blindness, setbacks and zig-zags), one thing leading to another, that got us HERE, where we are right now, and all the people we are connected to.
We graphed the New York Times’, and a couple of other websites, just to see if there was any real difference. And there is. Each site made its own unique pattern and vibe: each the product of many forces. This is ‘the improvised life’s. Amazing.
A couple of weeks ago in the New York Times, Lawrence Downes wrote a beautiful report from Haiti called The Kite Makers that painted a vivid picture of the devastated country in a few short paragraphs. He described the resourcefulness at play everywhere for those “with skills, strength and luck”. At the Petionville Club camp – donated tarps forged into houses – someone made an ingenious door hinge from the torn sole of a plastic sandal, fastened by nails hammered through bottle caps, which act as washers to prevent sandal from tearing. “Making do with next to nothing is the way of life in Haiti”.
Haitian children make small kites out of whatever they can find – twigs, dry cleaning bags, thread spooled on a can or bottle . Flying homemade kites is relief from their harsh reality. read more…
We wish there were a way to beam ourselves (a la Star Trek) to a conference taking place in Lahti, Finland on March 24 to 25, called “Designing Slow Life”
“…international experts of design, service design and wellness talk about and develop services under the main theme of better, slower and more meaningful life...The Slow Life conference will try to solve how to develop our surroundings in future in order to support slower life.”
We’re dying to know where the challenge will take them, and how design (and designers) can help “support slower life”.
Are there ways to create environments to help us slow down? (Isn’t that what a park is?) We’d like some software that would limit our computer use for a start…because that’s something we feel powerless over, and we love the internet so much! Or is SLOW really something that each of us has to figure out for her/himself, a practice or discipline to be consciously embraced?….
A commenter at Core 77, where we read about the Slow Life Conference, wrote: “Can we offer ‘slow life’…suggestions? e.g. slow life sport = yoga?”
Good question!
Although we’re (sadly) not going to Finland, we’re going to mull the this idea of designing a slow life and see what we come up with.
In the vast Times Square subway station in New York City, there are always lots of musicians busking for money, many of them pretty great. (We love the old guy who plays a saw; it echoes through the tunnels to sound like a high soprano…). Everybody is in such a hurry getting where they need to go down there, it isn’t easy for the best of musicians to get a lot of people to stop and listen. When that does happen, it almost always takes the form of spectators silently watching the act, at a safe distance. So we’d love to know how this extraordinary event came about: a circle of strangers in the subway singing “Hey Jude” full out.
Life is SO amazing!
The video was made by by 39forks “artist in ny” on Vimeo.
