Since we posted The Oil Spill: What You Can Do, we’ve seen lots of websites offering solutions that echo a common sentiment: whether we like it or not, we are all in this together; the risky actions of oil companies are fueled by demand, which we all contribute to. That reminded J.P. Townley of the World War II strategy of conservation in a time of crisis, when EVERYONE had to pitch in, cut back, live with less. Posters asked “Is your trip necessary? Needless travel interferes with the war effort.” “Is your trip necessary” applies now more than ever, so Townley designed an updated poster..
We view “Is your trip necessary” as code words for an even bigger question: read more…
Pamela Hovland alerted us to a wonderful essay posted on Design Observer recently, called The Subtle Technology of Indian Artisanship; it is about how “everywhere you look in India you will find evidence of the maker’s hand.” A sign painter, faced with a drain opening smack in the middle of his underwear ad, transformed it into a “navel”. The bucket of a massive backhoe (below) is embellished with a welded pattern of metal strips, a bit of beauty in a most unlikely place. Ken Botnick and Ira Raja explore the ways these kinds of embellishments are ”a means of celebrating life” in India; they also explore what it means to be “a maker” – anywhere.
…”on India’s streets, the act of making functional things — cups, chairs, signs, books — is creativity at its most direct expression; meeting a need. Embellishing that object, making it special, requires that the maker take time with the thing to ask more questions, not only about its function, but also about the person who will use it, and about how to distinguish that object from the universe of things that surround it. Embellishing… simultaneously makes the object more reflective of the maker’s distinct personality and brings it into the shared cultural values of beauty and function. Embellishment delights because it surprises. It is found in completely unsuspecting places, like the bucket of a backhoe. It takes ordinariness and celebrates it as if to say, “Hah! You didn’t find this beautiful, this lump of dung, but here it is and it is beautiful.”
We loved learning things you can do with saris that we never imagined, which made us see them in a new way, like this fence made of saris… read more…
We were walking through Prospect Park in Brooklyn one twilight evening when we heard the mellow sound of saxaphones reverberating “a capella” through the trees. We came upon two men standing in a leafy clearing. We stopped to listen, then asked where they were from. The confident man strolling slowly with his alto soprano sax had been a professional musician in Africa and was teaching his friend to play, in the park, where no neighbors would be disturbed. His friend tentatively played notes scribbled on a religious pamphlet propped on the side of his case; the title of his tune “Music in the Air”… read more…
Our feeling of powerlessness over the continuing oil spill in the Gulf Coast has made us feel just terrible… Until today, when the ever-wonderful Manhattan User’s Guide has published a long list of actions you can take in response to the Gulf Coast Oil Spill “large and small, short- and longterm”, from participating in a Hands-Across-The-Sand Protest to texting WILDLIFE to 20222 to make a $10 donation to the National Wildlife Federation (NWF says 97% of the donation will go to Gulf region recovery efforts), to supplying life vests needed by the Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Volunteer Program. Check out the whole list here.
Last week, we sent out a call for help in creating a tagline for ‘the improvise life’ and were knocked out by the response we got, both as Comments and as emails: an amazingly wonderful and wide array of descriptors and points of view + some disagreement (which we embrace). Pamela Hovland, who has been an essential part of the website from the start wrote : “Taglines are so…… conventional. Why not let people explore the blog until they figure out what the site is about? Perhaps the investigation/perusing/discovering is more in the spirit of the blog”
We totally agree that “investigation/perusing/discovering ” is deeply in the spirit of the blog. Our thinking is that a tagline might invite folks who are moving fast to slow down and do just that: discover what is here. We thought we’d try the idea out and see what happens: our evolution is trial-and-error and learn-as-you-go…Perhaps the question is: Would having a tagline do any harm? (As always, we welcome your two cents…)
Here’s the list of the taglines contributed over the last week (please let us know if we missed any) in addition to our original one …resourcefulness as a daily practice… With big THANKS for your help and thought: read more…
We know quite a few people who are working so hard these days, under the constant pressure of all there is to do, that they can’t seem to stop until they hit a wall: they get cold and need to go to bed, or find themselves sitting in front of a computer trying to write and nothing comes. Like us last week. We’ve learned our lesson…
Suddenly, that old Rolling Stones song popped into our head:
From on-the-the road in California and Seattle, in hotel rooms, and in flight, we’ve been reading your thoughtful ideas for taglines, posted in Comments or sent via email – lots of them! Even far from our home base, we feel connected by the community that has grown up around ‘the improvised life’ and awed at the generosity of its readers.
We were putting together a big post about it, with a list of ‘improvised life’ descriptors and taglines that happily boggle the mind, when we found ourselves exhausted, jet-lagged, running-on-empty. We need a rest, we thought…which is part of the deal, of writing, blogging, or making ANYTHING. You’ve got to give yourself permission to stop, and rest, in order to restore the flow. So we are, for a few days. We’ll be back on Thursday, having wandered around the Pike Place Market in Seattle, and drunk some excellent coffee, and recuperated from the red-eye home.
(Meanwhile, we’ve been taking notes on setting up a hotel room “camp” and strategies for surviving on the road. Stay tuned.)
We offer this photo of duct-tape Converse All-Stars as a symbol of what is possible in any given moment.
‘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.”
