We found ourselves comforted by the words-gone-viral of kindly old Fred Rogers —Mr. Rogers — advocate and true friend of children for eons. It is our experience that there are indeed helpers all around, and that in each moment, there is the possibility of light, unimaginable perhaps, until it appears. read more…
(Video link here.) We find this video of guys throwing balls with their “other hand” is both hilarious and curiously illuminating. It’s really funny how cockeyed throwing with the other hand makes these guys, and how off their aim. But intentionally switching handedness — or any practice we do routinely — can be a kind of training. It forces you to be present, see things differently and engages different parts of the brain. We’ve found that writing with our “other hand” produces a very different kind of writing: wilder, more personal, another voice within us.
Some time ago, Michael Druzinsky, an acquaintance of mine who is a composer, emailed his friend Mark Bernstein, who created the idea-mapping softwear Tinderbox, to ask if he’d mind talking to me about his very interesting software. Michael forwarded Mark’s reply: “Sally Schneider’s book, A New Way to Cook, changed my life. I’ve given it to lots of people. I’d be delighted to meet her.” Wow. There is NOTHING like a good unsolicited compliment. Then I discovered that Mark had devoted a blog post to the A New Way to Cook, unsolicited. Mark GOT the book so well, I’ve excerpted his post.
I happened across Sally Schneider’s A New Way to Cookin a chain bookstore one day, just about three years ago. It’s very big and very broad, and The Joy of Cooking is clearly not far from its mind.
But while Joy of Cooking is a vast collection of recipes,A New Way to Cook is trying to explain a much smaller core of ideas, expressed in the form of recipes with variations. We have, for example, a core recipe for “braising small fish” or “rustic fruit tart”, and then examine a host of ingredients that we can add or subtract — and the changes that these additions and subtractions will require. In the fruit tart, for example, we might use apples or pears or strawberries (less water, more flour, add rhubarb) or blueberries (try a little thyme) or raspberries (even frozen — add more flour because they’re wet) or reconstituted dried apricots. It’s all the same idea.
This surprising kitchen is the brainchild of Austrian conceptual artist Thomas Feuerstein. It is an artwork, but like many artworks we come across, it contains wonderful ideas to be had and used, like scrabble tiles on the walls.
Just for the hell of it, we started hunting down scrabble tiles. We didn’t find any ceramic ones, but found vinyl ones in Sweden at Bokstavskakel…We thinking they’d make a fine floor.
Then when we looked into it, it turns out to be part of a marketing campaign the CocoCola Company did around its soda OK Cola. Trying to market to Gen X and Y markets, Coke Cola tried to create “a counter-intuitive advertising” campaign that intentionally targeted people who did not like advertising. The campaign, and the soda, failed after a year (apparently the flavor of the soda itself was pretty bad) though its unique and varied can design and advertising have since gained something of a cult following. read more…
We’re not big on bought gifts, preferring to donate money to charity in our friends’ name, or give food gifts we’ve made. That being said, it’s nice to have an arsenal of useful, well-designed, not-too-expensive treats to give on the holidays or otherwise — our favorite gift-giving is just for the hell-of-it when we’ve found just the right thing for someone we love. Mostly those gifts are things we’d love to have ourselves, like these this set of numbered, Bauhausian espresso cups designed by Arne Jacobsen (he also did letter cups; the letter of your choice for $21). They’re available from The Finnish Design Shop which has all sorts of swell stuff. A pack of four is $55.
Although the idea of turning the great Louise Bourgeois‘s fabric drawings into placemats might seem a travesty, the geometric patterns are so beautifull, read more…
Recently, New York Magazine published a photo essay by Henry Leutwyler Behind the Curtain at the New York City Ballet. We can’t help viewing his image of a ballerina’s feet — one pointe shoe on, and one off — as a powerful metaphor for the often-hidden and difficult “inside” of a creative work that appears effortless and in control on the “outside”. The ballerina’s unadorned foot speaks volumes about the harsh realities, discipline, suffering and committment she (we) must sometimes experience to do what she (we) loves.
A number of people we showed it to thought otherwise. read more…
(Video link here.) Susan Dworski alerted us to this stunning video, in an email with the subject line: “ah, the improvisational human spirit”. It’s about a remarkable orchestra from a remote village in Paraguay — a slum built on landfill — where its young musicians play with instruments made from foraged trash. The village’s inhabitants eke out a living by culling saleable items and materials in the huge dump. When a half-destroyed violin was found, Nicolas Gomezhad the idea to rehabilitate it using found materials; the improvisation of other instruments followed.
It is astonishing to hear the wondrous first strains of Bach’s Suite No.1 in G major Prélude played on a cello improvised out of “an oil can, wood that was thrown away in the garbage…its pegs made out of an old tool used to tenderize beef and to make gnocchi…”
…And to hear how these kids lives have been changed by music: “When I listen to the sound of a violin, I feel butterflies in my stomach.” Says Music Director Favio Chavez, “The world sends us garbage. We send back music.” read more…
It turns out it’s built with a javascript library called D3. As far as I can tell it’s a library that uses data to render graphics in a compu-magical sort of way. I guess the original intent was to help make charts, visualizations and other forms of information graphing.
A reader recently alerted us to Bea Johnson, creator of the website Zero Waste Home, who challenged herself to wear a single man’s shirt in 50 different iterations, as part of her committment to a zero waste lifestyle:
Great inspiration, and many iterations look so wearable and comfortable. Reminds me of Audrey Hepburn and her oversize shirts with tails wrapped around her waist and tied in front. A great look and a fresh perspective at the same time.
Bea posted images of her many stylish shirt improvisations on Zero Waste Home. Unfortunately, the black-and-white photos don’t show all the detail we’re dying to see, nor does Bea describe the fabric and style of the shirt she chose: But we got a sense of it in this photo: read more…
(Video link here.) You could say that the renowned artist Alexander Calder, the creator of the mobile, was a major influence on ‘the improvised life’. When I was 13 or so, I babysat his grandkids, and first saw his work around their house: a mobile casually placed on a dining table, household objects made of wire and tin (sometimes a tin can): lamp, tea ball, ashtray, all with his inimitable style. They CHANGED the way I saw things, and opened my mind possibilities inherent in ordinary things, though I didn’t know it at the time.
The Calder Foundation‘s redesign of their website reminded me of that time because it provides such stunning access to the Calder’s life and work, starting with a mobile-in-action on the home page (much better than my iPhone video of it, above). Once you enter the site, you can move sideways and up-and-down to navigate through the artist’s stunningly varied work, by subject or period of his life. (Check out Household Objects, Jewelry, and Toys to see how Calder applied his creative vision to practical matters.) He is, to my mind, one of the most inspiring of improvisers.
There are lots of unexpected bits to discover, read more…
The first couple of pages of a 2010 GQ interview we stumbled on intimates that Murray is not all sweetness and light, but he is an acutely original and honest guy whose thought a lot about how he wants to live, and what, exactly, the point is. (If you want to reach him, you leave a message on an 800 number; if he wants to speak to you he’ll call you back!)
Here’s are a few potent life lessons we clipped from the Times piece:
Q. There seems to be so much serendipity in your life. Are you actively cultivating these moments or just hoping that they come to you?
A. Well, you have to hope that they happen to you. That’s Pandora’s box, right? She opens up the box, and all the nightmares fly out. And slams the lid shut, like, “Oops,” and opens it one more time, and hope pops out of the box. That’s the only thing we really, surely have, is hope. You hope that you can be alive, that things will happen to you that you’ll actually witness, that you’ll participate in. Rather than life just rolling over you, and you wake up and it’s Thursday, and what happened to Monday? Whatever the best part of my life has been, has been as a result of that remembering.
Q. Are there days where you wake up and think: “Nothing good has come to me in a little while. I’d better prime the pump”? read more…
Recently, we stumbled on an article about StoryCorps, a nonprofit organization that records personal stories, airs some of them on NPR, and archives them at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. It’s a way to preserve personal histories as well as histories of the time, and of cultures. We imagined using it to document and preserve the memories of our ancient friends in Helvetia, a unique Swiss settlement in the West Virginia Appalachians. Although we DID record the memories of some of the folks there, we were somehow never able to get StoryCorps involved.
That got us thinking about many elderly family members and friends whose stories could easily pass by the wayside…like the 92-year-old woman we know who lived through the Great Depression, worked for Oscar Hammerstein, and had an uncle who ran the Tunnel of Love in Coney Island. When the great comic actor Zero Mostel danced with her once, he swooned and said “You smell like a newly sharpened pencil”. How could we let those memories slip away? read more…
We found Emily Johnson through an architect a friend was working with. Emily’s drawings and plans were stunning. And although her focus was public spaces, the high level of her problem-solving abilities and imagination were apparent at the first meeting. We discussed our ideas with her. She suggested clever solutions to some of our design quandaries as well as people she knew that might help, from licensed architects to sign-off on final plans, to concrete floor finishers. She GOT what we were thinking.
Here’s what impressed us about Emily (and what to look for when interviewing any architectural plan-maker): read more…
, changed my life. I’ve given it to lots of people. I’d be delighted to meet her.” Wow. There is NOTHING like a good unsolicited compliment. Then I discovered that Mark had devoted 
.
