Pamela Hovland told us an amazing story she had heard about the great violinist Itzhak Perlman, and forwarded a version that she found online:
Childhood polio left Isaac Perlman able to walk only with braces on both legs and crutches. When Perlman plays at a concert, the journey from the wings to the center of the stage is long and slow. Yet, when he plays, his talent transcends any thought of physical challenge.
Perlman was scheduled to play a difficult, challenging violin concerto. In the middle of the performance one of the strings on his violin snapped with a rifle-like popping noise that filled the entire auditorium. The orchestra immediately stopped playing and the audience held its collective breath. The assumption was he would have to put on his braces, pick up his crutches, and leave the stage. Either that or someone would have to come out with another string or replace the violin. After a brief pause, Perlman set his violin under his chin and signaled to the conductor to begin.
One person in the audience reported what happened: “I know it is impossible to play a violin concerto with only three strings. I know that and so do you, but that night, Isaac Perlman refused to know it. You could see him modulating, changing, and recomposing in his head. At one point it sounded as if he were re-tuning the strings to get a new sound that had never been heard before. When he finished, there was an awesome silence that filled the room. Then people rose and cheered. Perlman smiled, wiped his brow, and raised the bow of his violin to quiet them. He spoke, not boastfully, but quietly in a pensive tone, ‘You know, sometimes it is the artist’s task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left.” read more…
The maker of this cool little video saw a sewer grate and made the connection to a skeleton’s ribcage, and went from there: one of the many tiny miracles of vision and association that happen daily.
And then he/she took that revelation, and the technique of stop-motion, and made something wonderful …
A number of people alerted us to this compelling video about Viviane Meier, who, while working as a nanny in Chicago during the 50′s and 60′s, was secretly photographing life the street-life of Chicago during her time off. It was not until years after her death that her enormous body of photographic work was found.
Maier was private, eccentric, and determined in her pursuit: a true artist committed to her singular vision, which she quietly funded through her work as a nanny, and which few people seemed to know about. Her work is an evocative and beautiful record of a time long gone, and of a truly improvised life.
You can view Maier’s work on the site created by the young man who found, and is archiving, her work.
After we published A New Year’s Wish Spirals On, with our not-great scan of a copy of the crumbling 45-year-old page from the New York Times, Laura Scott, a reader we have never met, wrote us. A librarian with access to the Historical New York Times Database, she hunted down the original astonishing ad that Alexander and Louisa James Calder placed on New Year’s Day so long ago, and offered to send us a pdf. It deserves a second posting.
That generous offer is a sampling of what comes to our Inbox daily, and the kind of people who have become the hackneyed-but-apt word “community”, linked together by ‘the improvised life’.
It made us realize that with our new years wishes, we neglected to say THANK YOU. We are so glad that you are here.
We were wandering around 20×200, gallerist Jen Bekman‘s site of limited edition work for sale and stumbled on this painting by artist Jane Mount, who paints people’s ideal bookshelves. Right in the center of it is Sally’s striped A New Way to Cook, among very good company. Wrote Mount:
This set is actually a “Super-Ideal” bookshelf, in a sense. It contains all the cookbooks most often included in people’s sets of favorites, plus a few of my personal favorites I couldn’t leave out.
It made us wonder: What would be on your ideal cookbook shelf? (And then there’s the question of Why? What does a good cookbook do?)
From Sally: The first book I’d put on my shelf is the cookbook that has influenced me the most: Simple French Food by Richard Olney. Olney was a spectacularly good writer, and could describe the inner workings and logic of a dish – and it’s possibilities for improvisation – better than anyone I’ve ever read. He believed that a cook’s creativity could be unleashed by their understanding of how things worked; he was meticulous in conveying ‘the rules-’ the intricate framework of limitations’ – essential to cooking creatively and freely. In his mind cooks, like artists, need constraints to push against. If I could have one cookbook on the proverbial desert island, it would be Simple French Food; the writing is as nourishing as food.
On New Year’s Day forty-five years ago, the sculptor Alexander Calder and his wife Louisa James Calder took out this full page ad in the New York Times. It was a fierce statement made in protest of the Vietnam War and caused quite a stir at the time. It is still a fierce statement and resonates as much today as it did then.
(With apologies for the not-great quality of the image. It is a scan of a photocopy of the yellowed-and-falling-apart original, clipped from the Times by Sally in 1966, and found in a forgotten archive. The ad was signed “Louise James Calder, Alexander Calder”, details that got lost in copying. We have been unable to find images of it elsewhere.)
Wishing you a wondrous New Year. We’ll be back on Tuesday…two thousand and ELEVEN!
(After the late show in the one-ring circus in a tent, just before midnight, clown noses, hats, noise makers and champagne are passed out to the audience…
…then, in a moment, the old year turns to new: JOY as clowns, performers – aerialists, acrobats, contortionists, jugglers - and audience crowd into the ring to dance)…
The Museum of the City of New York’s amazing photography archive is a wondrous place to browse on a winter day. Among many treasures, you’ll find Shadow Man, a graffiti persona that appeared all over New York City in 1983, photographed by Andreas Feininger…
…the image of the city after a blizzard, its creative heart as vivid as ever.
We were sad to read that Don Van Vliet, once known as Captain Beefheart, passed away recently. He was a complete original, a rare being in any era. Coilhouse described him as “one of the most singularly strange, goading, galvanizing musicians of the 20th century”. His band broke every rule in the ’70s and laid the groundwork for much that came after. His music, epitomized by the epic album Trout Mask ReplicaTrout Mask Replica, would at first seem impossible to listen to, and then suddenly illuminating. It is still wild stuff.
…an excerpt of a letter from Rilke to Rodin on the power of time off:
“I have often asked myself whether those days on which we are forced to be indolent are not just the ones we pass in profoundest activity? Whether all our doing, when it comes later, is not only the last reverberation of a great movement which takes place in us on those days of inaction…”
We love the eloquent reasoning for being lazy dogs…and imagining that, were we Rodin, it could lead to this… read more…
We find this teeny video of artist Shinichi Maruyama hurling water to make his evanescent sculptures strangely refreshing. We imagine ourselves doing it,too, in slow motion to catch the moment…
Our neighbor Stuart Williams, who lives down the hall from us, sent us a holiday e-card that he designed : a great example of swell d-i-y greetings makable with design, drawing, or photo software. Use photos or graphics to design your PDF and SEND IT OUT via email, to say HELLO to lots of folks easily.
Stuart’s card also reminded us about the connectivity of ideas that happens in an apartment building or a neighborhood, when folks start talking to each other and asking “What are you up to these days?” On elevator rides in our building, we’ve gotten make-up lessons from a professional make-up artist, and learned about the Secrets of Paris Department Stores. We became friends with Couturier de Cardboard Matthew Sporzynski, and the recipient of his stealth gift-giving.
Stopping to chat one day, we discovered that our neighbor Stuart is a site-specific, environmental artist. He created the Luminous Earth Grid, a vast array of 1,680 fluorescent lamps, which swept over the undulating landscape north of San Francisco (in an expanse equal to eight football fields), like an immense electrified quilt: read more…
Photographer William Abranowitc has been in love with Greece for as long as we can remember, constantly making time to go there to do his personal work amidst amidst his busy schedule as a lifestyle/landscape/still-life photographer. Hellas, his second book of photographs of Greece has just been published: 160 pages in full color. Most of the images are NOT what you would expect or normally see, ALL definitely give you a feeling of being swept away. For the land-locked-in cold climates, it’s the perfect gift.
by Richard Olney. Olney was a spectacularly good writer, and could describe the inner workings and logic of a dish – and it’s possibilities for improvisation – better than anyone I’ve ever read. He believed that a cook’s creativity could be unleashed by their understanding of how things worked; he was meticulous in conveying ‘the rules-’ the intricate framework of limitations’ – essential to cooking creatively and freely. In his mind cooks, like artists, need constraints to push against. If I could have one cookbook on the proverbial desert island, it would be Simple French Food; the writing is as nourishing as food.
