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.”
While visiting Pam Hunter who was in New York starting her sabbatical a few weeks ago, I was spellbound by the blue tape art works on several of the windows of the apartment she was staying in. They were nothing more than rough-torn, inch-or-so pieces of blue painter’s tape arranged as permeable rounds – clouds, flowers? – through which you could view the distant urban landscape. They were so brilliantly simple and seemingly impromptu, by an unknown artist who changed the view using the most ordinary of materials. read more…
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…
Last December, Pam Hunter, the mastermind behind Studio 707, THE Public Relations firm in Napa Valley, closed its doors to take a sabbatical. On her website’s last post, she told the story of meeting two artists over the years whose practice of taking long sabbaticals from their work had impressed her deeply. Spain’s Fernan Adria, considered one of the world’s greatest chefs, shutters his restaurant El Bulli for five months each year, and told Pam how the experimental months of his sabbatical revitalizes his creative alchemy in the restaurant. Brilliant Austian-born designer Stefan Sagmeister, closes his design studio for at least a year every seven years, so that he and his staff can explore projects the don’t have the time to do when they are working. Pam had almost worked with him on a project but he was about to go on sabbatical, to which he is committed.
“Possessed as I was by the approach of both Adria and Sagmeister, I couldn’t bring myself to take the leap off the treadmill. That is, until late one afternoon in June 2009 when I received the telephone call that reframed everything instantly. ’You have cancer,’ said the voice on the other end of the line. By February I hope to be in remission and ready to begin my first sabbatical.”
Pam included a link to a Sagemeister’s riveting TED talk about why he insists on the year-long break for himself and his staff, and how it works…what it is really like, the kind of discipline needed. Pam’s post got us thinking read more…
Constance Old recently alerted us to Crispina ffrench’s work:
“Crispina ffrench is an artist/crafter who makes terrific “improvised’ work. She is author of a recent book called The Sweater Chop Shop: Sewing One-of-a-Kind Creations from Recycled Sweaters which teaches how to cut and felt cast-off sweaters to make them into cool new things: like mufflers, blankets, pillows, and…even other sweaters. I have a really beautiful blanket she made (below). She has her own website www.crispina.com and sells work through Etsy.”
Felting is essentially a controlled way of washing knitted wool until it shrinks and tightens, changing both texture and color. We started to imagine huge possibilities right then and there (and in the inadvertently shrunken sweaters we may have mistakenly given away)…
We also remembered Page Goolrick telling us about the black turtleneck she made into a cardigan; she cut it right up the front with a scissors and had her local tailor sew in a big stainless steel zipper…
We started to deconstruct our notions about cut knit unravelling unmercifully, and started to think about old sweaters completely differently… read more…
Anthony Giglio’s four-year-old son Marco spent last Sunday afternoon improvising his first snowman in Jersey City’s Overlook Park.
Once he had rolled and stacked three giant snowballs, he hunted for natural scraps around the park to bring it to life. Here is the mysterious process of Marco shifting his original creation into one that more fully expressed his vision: read more…
The other day, I found myself following links to MORE great Japanese masking tape (some printed with numbers, some made of old book pages.) until I found myself at nothingelegant, an Etsy store with ALL SORTS of surprising and useful items for sale, like this set of alphabet and number stamps, along with a handy four-color stick ink pad, (think of the messages, poems and designs you could stamp onto stationary, gift wrap, a hand or a cheek or nails…). There are fabrics printed with a calendar or a map of the Paris metro… read more…
Andrew Sullivan of theatlantic.com is the huge-traffic blogger of The Daily Dish; its often fierce content ranges from politics, to heart-breaking illicit tweets from Iran’s recent election protests, to grim pictures of torture. For a couple of years now he’s broken up the intensity of his writing and opinion with an ongoing post category called A View from Your Window, a simple photo inserted into the midst of the day’s many posts with a caption indicating time and place, that one of his readers around the world sent in. It is just that: what one person sees when he/she looks out the window.
These photos have a curious effect: of giving instantly a different point of view, and a reminder of the very similar and very different dailyness of lives around the world. They are somehow both refreshing and heartening.
But what is really interesting is the book Sullivan made them into. read more…
The snow is almost melted in New York but you can bet another blizzard is waiting in the wings. We thought we’d write about sleds so you can be prepared when you’re faced with a nice snowy hill, or know someone on the East Coast who is.
The reason most people don’t keep a real sled is that it takes up too much room for most of the year when there is no snow. That means resorting to make-shift which can yield unpredictable results (see list below for ideas). OR you can buy a Rocko Flake Sled from Sweden for about $12 bucks. It about exactly fits your butt with your legs in the air or tucked in tight, as you pull up the handle slightly to insure a good slide. It weighs next to nothing, so it’s easy to carry to a sledding hill or hide unobtrusively in the back of a closet while you wait for snow. Perfect design!
They’re available by mail-order at the fabulous Kiosk. We sent one to friends who just moved near Prospect Park… read more…
One of those anonymous chain emails arrived in our Inbox today, with a subject line that read “Playing With the Moon”. It’s a series of photo illusions that someone went to great pains to create. It LOOKS LIKE real – not Photoshopped – photos that they made with their kids, out on some beachy dune over several nights/days when the moon was out. The most beautiful ones look like silhouettes and have a strange, curiously old-fashioned magic…
…We were wondering who made them…and where they got the idea…and why… read more…
We were just dreaming of making a sign on the office wall the said YES! when we stumbled on a webstore call Happy Tape. It sells nothing but Japanese masking tape: slightly translucent tape made of washi paper that comes in beautiful colors and patterns. It made us wonder “Why didn’t anybody think of this before?!!!” read more…
Ely Kim‘s video BOOMBOX was his response to an assignment in a graduate level design workshop at Yale: document something for one hundred days. All he used was a video camera and his ability to dance to create his brilliant, funny, totally original film with high levels of uninhibited joy, which is what you will feel as you watch it.
If you want to speed things up, you can use the horizontal control to “scroll through” Kim’s amazing dance forms (after the video has loaded); my favorite is #80, like a disco Dance of the Seven Veils. The video’s Vimeo page also includes a playlist in case you want to track down the music.
arranged as permeable rounds – clouds, flowers? – through which you could view the distant urban landscape. They were so brilliantly simple and seemingly impromptu, by an unknown artist who changed the view using the most ordinary of materials. 
which teaches how to cut and 
