inspiration

boston: we will finish the race!

The cover of the May 2013 issue of Boston Magazine shows battered shoes in the shape of a heart

photo: mitch feinberg

This image of sneakers worn during the Boston Marathon is the cover of the current Boston Magazine. It was the idea of the magazine’s design director Brian Struble; the magazine sent out tweets and Facebook posts asking runners to submit images of their shoes, along with personal stories. Here’s Brian’s thinking:

To me the cover is about two things: perseverance and unity. By itself, each shoe in the photograph is tiny, battered, and ordinary. Together, though, they create something beautiful, powerful, and inspirational. Remove just one shoe and you begin to diminish, in some small way, the overall effect. Collectively, they are the perfect symbol for Boston, and for our response to the bombings.

photo courtesy Mitch Feinberg
with thanks to Michael Reichart of Hafele USA

05.02.13 | comments | in art, community, inspiration |

maira kalman’s real apartment and her fantasy one

maira kalman's real apartment and her dream apartment

photo: thomas loof

In the new Spring Design Issue of New York Magazine, artist Maira Kalman talks to longtime neighbor and friend Isaac Mizrahi about how Tel Aviv has influenced her New York apartment. The two images of Kalman’s apartment shows a warm, personal, comfortable, loose space, very different from the stark interiors of so many other designer’s homes. Kalman calls her apartment a “cabinet of curiosities” and indeed it appears to be. The suit hanging in the picture below was worn by Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini.

keith stewart’s books on farming + 20 points to ponder

Chris Ramirez/New York Times

Keith Stewart is a writer despite himself. Even with the massive responsibilities and demands of his organic farm with it’s hundred or so varieties of produce, he has written regularly and wonderfully about the inside of farming and living a rural life, from numerous magazine articles to It’s a Long Road to a Tomato: Tales of an Organic Farmer Who Quit the Big City for the (Not So) Simple Life.

A couple of years ago, Keith embarked on summing-up the essentials he’d learned over decades of farming, having started from-scratch as an escapee from the city. It was a massive undertaking on top of the ever-changing, improvisational, exhausting, gratifying realities of farming. Storey’s Guide to Growing Organic Vegetables & Herbs for Market is the 500+ page result, a curiously compelling read for anyone with farm fantasies (realistic or not).

Reading Keith’s book, I find myself an avid armchair farmer, as much from happily learning about Seed Germination and Potable Water Tests as by the more general life principles scattered throughout the book (the hallmark of all of Keith’s writing), like Surprise, Excesses of Youth, Competing Forces and Looking After Number One. The honest, methodical thinking behind Twenty Points to Ponder before becoming a farmer, which include Deal Makers and Deal Breakers, could be applied to just about any business. I especially like Question Marks, which make for illuminating self-analysis. Here are a few: read more…

05.02.13 | comments (2) | in garden, how-to, inspiration, learn, outside, paths + processes, people, resources books + zines |

the power of introverts + their collaboration w extroverts

(Video link here.) There’s been a lot of buzz lately about Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.

Author Susan Cain shines a spotlight on introverts and reveals how over time our society has come to look to extroverts as leaders. Not suggesting that one is better than the other, Susan argues that the world needs an equal space between introverts and extroverts; that an innovative, creative world wouldn’t be the same without the two coming together.

We were really heartened to see it, and this charming little movie about it, being serious introverts ourselves — OURSELF? — happy to hide out for days at a time writing and making things, being in the world in less usual ways.

Introverts work differently than extroverts, read more…

04.30.13 | comments (4) | in paths + processes, quotes, resources books + zines |

improvisation in the natural world

I’ve been thinking a lot about birds lately, about the mystery of their migrations; their unerring return each spring.

Our Cooper’s hawk is back from the dry barrancas of Zapotecas, its familiar kek-kek-kek vying with argumentative crows and cooing mourning doves at dawn. Improvisatory arboreal architects are at work big time.

Humingbird hangs its timid sac of cat fur and melaleuca leaves on a spike of palm.

Crows strip fresh tar paper off a neighbor’s roof with giddy joy…Hawks cart heavier loads of urban detritus to the pines, creating castles of thatched twiggery.

There’s sex and magic in the air, a synesthesia of feathers and song. Guatemalan poet Humberto Ak’abal, lauded as a “Mayan Basho”, describes it in Poems I Brought Down from the Mountain

tuna melt: domino-theory in a Rube-Goldberg universe…

(Video link here.) This is even more amazing with the sound OFF: traveling via the domino-theory through a kinetic Rube-Goldberg universe…

…to make a tuna melt

(we can relate)

With thanks to Susan Dworski via The Browser

04.26.13 | comments | in music, paths + processes, video |

3 improvs: pilgrimage, kickstarter win, poetry practice

We are constantly knocked out by the wonderful endeavors our readers are involved in, committed to, CREATED out of nothing, improvised. Here are a few from the past week:

David Downie and Alison Harris set out from their home in Paris to walk across France to the Pyrenees, the French portion of El Camino de Santiago de Compostela. David wrote about the journey and Alison photographed it in Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James.

David was interviewed by NPR. When asked what he found, out came this fab nugget:

I talked to a monk in a monastery … and I asked him, ‘You see tens of thousands of people coming through here; is there one thing that unites us all that we all have in common, whether we’re atheists or believers?’ And he said, ‘Yes, actually there is. Anyone who does this pilgrimage — or any pilgrimage — is driven by an irresistible urge to do it, and they don’t know where it comes from. And sometimes they figure it out while they’re walking, or afterward, or never.’ And, you know, the more I thought about it, the more I realized he was right. I set out with a zillion questions in my head, and I didn’t come back with a lot of answers; I came back with more questions. But I really do think that the question is the answer. read more…

04.26.13 | comments | in art, inspiration blogs + sites, inspiration books + zines, paths + processes, people, signs, video |

e.b. white on how to plan your day

Dig this brilliance from E.B. White, author of the great Charlotte’s Web. He starts his day plan with a Principle — “…change the world and have one hell of a good time” — instead of a schedule, and knocks all the day-planning strategies and productivity experts on their heads. Yay!

via French by Design

what happens if you say ‘yes, and…’ (instead of ‘no’)?
how to do more in less time: pulse and rest
xwe test drive the pomodoro time management technique
productivity tip: display completed to-do’s

04.25.13 | comments (3) | in paths + processes, people, principles, rules for living, signs |

chris weyant’s perfect new yorker cartoon for boston

Christopher Weyant

The New Yorker routinely assigns a cartoon artist to draw a cartoon based on the day’s events. Christopher Weyant managed to express what is in everyone’s hearts…in a CARTOON!

04.25.13 | comments | in people |

obsessive wingsuit flight through a hole in a mountain

(Video link here.) Wingsuit pilot Alexander Polli saw a hole in a mountain’s rocky outcropping and just had to try flying through it. He practiced aiming and controlling his flight over and over until he just went ahead and…flew…right…..THROUGH…

…at 155 miles per hour.

Polli “hopes his success will inspire others not only to ‘climb over their mountains,’ but to also fly right through them!”

via Kottke

04.24.13 | comments | in leaping + flying, paths + processes, people, quotes |

the virtues of doubt (paul zelevansky)

(Video link here.) In the annals of self-helpism, doubt is considered something to overcome, to find ways around, to MASTER. We’ve discovered time and again that that is easier said than done. Doubt seems to come with territory of being creative, and most of the people we know just find ways to soldier through…or be felled by it periodically, only to pick themselves up and keep going.

Just as we were navigating another wave of it ourselves, wondering ARE WE CRAZY?!!, we came across artist Paul Zelevanzky’s curious antidote: a 40-second video offering a very different view of doubt:

Doubt is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.

We can’t say exactly how Zelevansky’s somewhat zen-like video works, but it definitely helped to SHIFT our view. It reminded us read more…

04.23.13 | comments (3) | in paths + processes, people, principles, rules for living, video |

remembering richie havens + ‘follow’

We were very sorry to hear that singer Richie Havens passed away. He was born in Bedford Stuyvasant, Brooklyn and we used to see him in Greenwich Village in the old days, around the time his intense improvised opening of the Woodstock festival which made him famous (see video below). Here’s one of our favorite songs: Follow (Words by Jerry Merrick). It will open in a separate page so you can surf while you listen.

He was SOMETHING!

sister corita kent’s enduring rules for making + her art

When we were first planning ‘the improvised life’, we were inspired by this now-famous set of rules by Sister Corita Kent, artist and renown educator. They speak directly to the process of creating…ANYTHING. Here are our favorite essential rules:

Find a place you trust and then try trusting it for a while.

Consider everything as an experiment.

Nothing is a mistake. There’s no Win and no Fail. There’s only Make.

The only rule is work. If you work, it will lead to something…

Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.

And finally, Kent quotes this beauty by John Cage: read more…

04.22.13 | comments | in art, paths + processes, people, rules for living, signs |

weekend: ricky jay, thomas keller, digital public library +

(Video link here.) Above, a trailer for Deceptive Practice, the new documentary about brilliant sleight-of-hand master Ricky Jay. For a totaly entertaining read, check out this 1993 New Yorker profile of Jay by Mark Singer.

For those of us haunted by the instantaneous life changes that occurred to so many wounded in the Boston bombing, The Times’ heartening article about new technologies and therapies for amputees.

And a fund you can contribute to for those most affected by the bombing (prosthetics and rehab costs A LOT).

17 projects from Pinterest that people tried to do and FAILED

From beyond-brilliant chef Thomas Keller, the difference between passion and desire (via Swiss-Miss) read more…

04.19.13 | comments | in inspiration, projects + play, quotes, resources, sightings, video |

bungee cord chairs + furniture (rene herbst)

Recently we’ve been noodling around with the idea of with making a Murphy Bed with a lift-system of bungee cords. We haven’t heard of such a thing, but having seen the realm of industrial bungees available, thought it might be possible.

Then, with the simultaneity we’ve come to expect when we have an idea, we stumbled on some images of beautiful bungee cord chairs designed by René Herbst, a contemporary of Robert Mallet-Stevens and Le Corbusier, in the 1930′s. They illustrated the part of our idea that had been eluding us: how to make our improvised solution be visually appealing as well as practical, two qualities we strive for in all of our home improvisations (travel and emergencies are another matter): read more…

04.18.13 | comments (1) | in copy this!, d-i-y, furniture, inspiration books + zines, materials, people, resources |