(Video link here.) We can’t think of a better way to celebrate this lovely ordinary day than with this video of the great Maira Kalman – whose remarkable books are a blend of images and words into vivid stories – giving her two cents on what it is to be human. She covers a lot of ground: work, love, identity, life, death, THE POINT OF IT ALL.
Our favorite gem: read more…
photo: dese'rae l. stage
We recently discovered Instagram, one of the hottest photo sharing/social media apps for iPhone and Android. It’s a GREAT way to maintain a visual journal/daily diary on-the-go for the sporadic or time-restrained journaler or, alternately, the more visually-oriented person who wants to document their day-to-day. It’s quick and easy: you snap a picture with your phone and apply filters at will for a retro film “feel”. If you like, include a caption or the location where the image was captured, and share it across various social media platforms. You can also choose to maintain a public or a private feed, and follow your friends’ Instagram feeds. Or just keep the images as a personal journal on your phone or computer.
What we like the best about Instagram is that it’s a great hand-held improvisational tool for creatively exploring the world around you. read more…
tom sachs
We often post ideas on ‘the improvised life’ that we might never make, like the futurist cinder block artist Tom Sachs displayed at recent exhibition Space Program Mars. There is a simple, practical logic to this: these creations remind us of do-able possibilities that, had we the time or wherewithall, we COULD make ourselves.
Sach’s wonderful block is made with ordinary materials: plywood bored with holes, flat corner irons, flat-head screws, possibly a skim of concrete for texture. We find the image infiltrating our prejudices, shifting the notion of what a cinder block can be, offering up the possibilitiy that we can view our daily norms in radically different ways, and maybe, with stuff hidden in our tool chest or at the hardware store, create something new.
via Mondoblogo
Related posts: the possibilian explores time
design hacker: d-i-y concrete block bedframe
brick lust (where are cool bricks hiding?)
cinder block houses + studios (via alexander calder)
concrete block lovex
After we posted Tom Sach’s wonderful ‘love letter to plywood‘, and mentioned our idea to clad our ancient fridge in plywood, a reader sent us the results of her hungry search for MORE Tom Sachs. Somewhere along the line she stumbled on Sach’s video COLOR, about the strict paint color code he uses in his studio. But it goes way beyond that subject. It will really make you begin to notice colors – the particular color of the colors all around us.
The whole world as we experience visually comes to us through the mystic reality of color.
Yeah! read more…
UPDATE: Since we first published this post, Una Morera’s video has become inaccessable online, most likely because it was made an official selection for the New York Food Festival. Yay for Morera. So sadly for us, you’ll have to wait until it’s made public again. Fortunately, we sussed the video and its essential quotes, below.
When we first got wind of the Una Morera’s short documentary about Maurizio Negrini, a 3rd generation Italian baker, we callously thought “h-mm-m, bread…probably too specific …better suited for a food blog.”
We found that this beauty of a video goes way beyond its subject into much deeper realms…or perhaps it is that it reminds us what handmade bread is really about. “Artisan baker” is about bread as nourishment and as metaphor, bread as cosmic substance, thoughtfully expressed by Negrini: read more…
jumpinginartmuseums.blogspot.com
Lately, readers who have seen our ongoing, increasingly obsessive postings of people leaping – an obvious and beautiful metaphor for taking a leap – have been sending sightings on the theme of leaping and jumping. This morning, Cynthia Allen alerted us to the fab Jumping in Art Museums.
Sometimes, while visiting art museums and galleries, people get so excited by what they see that they have to jump for joy. They send photos of their Art Jumping to me and I post them to share with the rest of the art-loving world.
These are people jumping for pure joy, which great art can give in one big, often unexpected dose. It made people like Katie from Saginaw, Michigan jump for “The Divers” by Fernand Lèger at the MoMA in NYC (above) and read more…
pedro guerrero
Sleep doctors say that it’s important to wind down before going to sleep: no TV or computer that activates the brain, no magazines full of dire ‘reality’. Read fiction to get your mind in a quieter zone…
My solution is, often, to look at picture books of interiors, houses, furniture design: an adult version of a bedtime story. I’ve gathered a pile of favorites over the years that, like a kid, I never seem to tire of. They relax my mind, and seem to activate some dreamy center.
One of my favorites is Calder at Home: The Joyous Environment of Alexander Calder by Pedro Guerrero. read more…
meg hitchcock
If you look closely at this image, you’ll discover that it is composed of the Buddhist Prayer for Peace, each letter cut from the Methodist Hymnal. It is the work of artist Meg Hitchcock, who letter-by-letter, cuts up sacred texts and reformulates them into others, creating a compelling and transcendent fusion. read more…
In our hunt for material that resonates with ‘the improvised life’, we have decidedly subversive leanings. We love people who SEE the accepted order differently and put their mark on it, like this great, simple way designer Sebastrian Errazuriz transformed ordinary traffic lines into $$ signs, in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement.
If people feel impotent and cornered by how greed is transforming everything; I invite them to get a brush, a can of paint and go out and change their street lines into Dollar signs. People need to find new ways to remind others of the general discontent.
But then again, living improvisationally IS naturally rather guerilla-esque. It demands cultivating a more open lens with which to see the possibilities in the moment (like a $ sign in a street line) and a willingness to look for unexpected answers. read more…
holton rower
Last week we went to the opening of an exhibition of artist Holton Rower’s paintings, made by pouring gallons of vividly colored paints onto plywood forms. They are on display at The Hole in NYC, an immense space that Rower’s monumental work fills with reverberating color and energy.
The paintings are made of humble materials: plywood and acrylic paint transformed by Rower’s imagination and daring. Some are so big that they could only be photographed by laying them in the alley behind Rower’s studio and photographing from 3 stories up. Tonight, we went to see him pour a painting and witness liquid color becoming form (as you can, on YouTube). read more…
The great DVDP devised a gif out of origami artist Jun Mitani’s flickr photostream: a lovely reminder of the possibilities inherent in simple sheets of paper…
…which reminded us of Between the Folds, a wondrous video clip we posted about origami’s cosmic potential.
Related posts: origami’s cosmic potential
(de)creation (rhino origami rewind)
triangle letter how-to (mail for free)
origami made of anything (vic muniz’ birds of a feather)
folded paper chopstick rest
photo: Wallace G. Levison
It’s well known that one of our favorite visual themes is people leaping – an obvious metaphor for “taking a leap” into new territory, work, projects, endeavors that we might have thought fearful…life.
We came across an interesting trove recently on Retronaut, of New Yorkers in the 1890′s. Although there are some spectacular leaps… read more…
photo: xeni jardin/heather beschizza
Xeni Jardin, a writer for Boing Boing, has been generously open about her experiences with having breast cancer. (Check out “What do To When ‘Stuff Happens’ for her powerful words.) On Wednesday she shared this amazing needlepoint that she keeps on her desk for inspiration, made by Heather Beschizza. We echo the sentiment, and hope it strikes a chord with you or a loved one who has also, at one point or another, needed to say: “FUCK CANCER.”
Powerful words.
Related posts: the scar project
‘i had cancer’ = social networking with a purpose
‘lines written in the days of growing darkness’ (mary oliver)
emergency medicine
what to do when ‘stuff happens’
photo: imogen cunningham
When Mondoblogo published a post of Ruth Asawa’s extraordinary crocheted wire sculptures – with hardly any commentary – our first thought was: we want a house filled with that work, those forms hanging above. Then we looked her up. At RuthAsawa.com we learned:
When Ruth was 16, she and her family were interned along with 120,000 other people of Japanese ancestry who lived along the West Coast of the United States. For many, the upheaval of losing everything, most importantly their right to freedom and a private, family life, caused irreparable harm. For Ruth, the internment was the first step on a journey to a world of art that profoundly changed who she was and what she thought was possible in life. In 1994, when she was 68 years old, she reflected on the experience: ‘I hold no hostilities for what happened; I blame no one. Sometimes good comes through adversity. I would not be who I am today had it not been for the Internment, and I like who I am.’
It is an attitude we admire: the ability to move forward and live and find the gifts hidden in things that might seem devastating. read more…
marc johns
We like to check into Marc Johns’ website occasionally to see what he’s got for sale…
…like the infinite possibilities of a paper towel tube…
…or a stick… read more…
