When our friend Andrea Raisfeld sent us a compelling scan from Malcolm Gladwell’s piece Creation Myth in the May 16th issue of The New Yorker, we went online to find the story and explore its ideas more fully. In the process, the post we intended to write about the creative process turned into a post about bad design.
While trying to use the New Yorker’s digital archive (as print subscribers, we theoretically have access) we inadvertently encountered an avalanche of ill un-considered technology. Our established password didn’t work, even when we reset it; the website didn’t recognize the email address we’ve used for years. Our first three emails to Customer Service went unanswered (There is no phone number for Customer Service on their Contact Us page). Then we began to receive robo-messages repeating the same instructions after each subsequent email asking for help. When we finally created a NEW account on our desktop, it would not work on our iPad.
Finally, we sent a very specific email outlining our experience and wrote HUMAN BEING PLEASE in the subject line. We got another non-sequitur robo-message, repeating previous instructions, this time signed “Shar”.
For ten days running, the digital New Yorker broke the record for website glitches, ineffective instructions, horrific customer service and pure wasted time. Bad design.
Our experience mades us hate a magazine we love. That’s REALLY bad design. But it also made us realize the simple key to good design (of anything): read more…
(Video link here.) We recently came across this great talk by Joshua Foer that explores the success of “experts.” The video is 17 minutes, which we know is long, so we’ve culled the gist for you, hoping you’ll listen at some point; we think it’s truly useful and super interesting.
According to Foer and the scientists he draws from, becoming an expert has a whole lot more to do with psychology than innate ability. We generally push ourselves to achieve at a given skill only up to the point at which we can get the job done. Foer uses the example of typing—most of us type for at least an hour a day, yet we don’t get measurably faster…we settle into a speed we think is good enough. We hit an “OK plateau.”
Psychologists who study skill acquisition have found that experts across a wide variety of fields know that you can’t improve at something as long as you’re stuck on the OK plateau, and routinely use the four strategies below to ensure that their minds continue to climb uphill, so to speak. Even if you’re not striving to become an “expert” in your field, we think these strategies are helpful for anyone trying to pick up a new skill or practice, or get better at an old one. Here they are: read more…
(Video link here.) Here’s a glimpse of the interactive iPAD app that Björk recently created to be part of her recent album, as she tries to give create ever more dimensions in her music. Its introduction, narrated by David Attenborough, is a strange combination of beautiful, inspiring and ever-so-slightly hokey, in a good way. We like what she’s trying to do and the sentiment behind it…especially the idea of our selves as gateways:
Forget the size of the human body. Remember that you are a gateway between universal and the microscopic, the unseen forces that stir the depths of your innermost being and nature who embraces you and all that there is.
Lately we’ve been enjoying the phenomenon of succinct self-expression. A friend turned us on to SMITH Magazine and the six-word memoir revolution they’ve started, which reminded us of Studio 360’s one-line obituary challenge. (Sally’s one-line obit: “Sally Schneider, 107, Drowns in Surfing Mishap”.) Before both of these there was PostSecret, where folks anonymously share secrets that fit on the back of a post card. We live in a world where more and more people have the space online to tell their stories; sometimes you can say a lot with quite a little.
We thought that this would be a perfect way to officially introduce Sarah M., who has been helping out behind the scenes here for a few months but recently started writing posts as well. We asked Sarah to write her own six-word memoir, seen above, inspired by the idea of an improvised life. Sarah says, “I’m someone who is extremely taken with a lot of the ideas featured on ‘the improvised life,’ but sometimes have to push through old anxieties and fears to put them into practice. That tension is where my six-word memoir comes from.”
What are your six-word memoirs? Tweet-length obituaries? Anonymous secrets?
While we were away, a reader left a Comment in response to our post about Constantino Nivola’s Tinkertoy lamps. She described a trellis she had made out of vintage Tinkertoys bought on Ebay. She devised it to display her tillandsia, which are also known as air plants because they grow without soil and can be placed just about anywhere.
We wrote back asking if she had any photos. In a follow-up Comment, she sent us these photos which knocked us out: Tinkertoy as naturally sculptural, Bauhausian trellis! She also wrote:
Obviously, I’m no master of the Tinkertoy (or the photographic, for that matter) medium. And truth be told, I pretty much lack artistic ability, in general. However, one of the great things about Tinkertoys is that, even despite a complete lack of talent, you can at least count on being able to create something with some structural integrity. And with the size and overall shape you’re looking for. So, that’s good.
We were struck by her opinion of herself has lacking artistic ability and talent. read more…
Recently, during a birthday celebration for a friend at Eleven Madison Park, we were invited to see the kitchen of what is, arguably, one of New York’s best restaurants; the number of staff on any given day roughly equals the number of diners – THAT’S how attentive the service and complex the menu. While cooks in crisp white toques worked with great concentration around us, we were treated to some culinary sleight-of-hand in honor of our friend.
This photo of artist Lucio Fontana reminded us how central that concept of “blank canvas” is to ‘the improvised life’. Getting up in the morning, the day ahead is our first blank canvas. Each post we write starts as one as well: blank space that is pure potential; we often don’t know where it will go, but we know for sure that something will appear; it always does. That might be one of the most wonderful lessons we’ve learned from ‘the improvised life’.
A blank canvas is where all the things around us started: tea cup, computer, lamp, clothes, writing. Each moment has that blank-canvas potential. Amazing! read more…
It has been such a wild and busy few months, we find ourselves running out of gas. So we’re going to take a week’s break (and another at the end of August), to catch up with ourselves, our work, and the many projects we’ve got on the burner.
We were poking around for a picture of “taking a break” and stumbled on this one of Asaro Mud Men in Papua New Guinea, relaxing after a long day of performing at a cultural festival in Goroka. It seems somehow just right.
If you’re hungry for ‘the improvised life’, we recommend poking through the archive at the right. The drop-down menu will show months and years, and you can pick one at random to find a slew of posts you might have missed, approximating a bit of the usual morning surprise. Or type a word into SEARCH and see what happens…music, Legos, recipes, art…There are all sorts of goodies in our attic.
We laughed out loud at this week’s New Yorker’s Shouts & Murmur’s page by Paul Simms. It envisions God blogging the newly-created earth. God writes:
UPDATE: Pretty pleased with what I’ve come up with in just six days. Going to take tomorrow off. Feel free to check out what I’ve done so far. Suggestions and criticism (constructive, please!) more than welcome. God out.
And then God starts getting Comments, twenty-four of them. Our favorites:
Unfocussed. Seems like a mishmash at best. You’ve got creatures that can speak but aren’t smart (parrots). Then, You’ve got creatures that are smart but can’t speak (dolphins, dogs, houseflies). Then, You’ve got man, who is smart and can speak but who can’t fly, breathe underwater, or unhinge his jaws to swallow large prey in one gulp. If it’s supposed to be chaos, then mission accomplished. But it seems more like laziness and bad planning. read more…
This picture of a young Merce Cunningham came from a stunning series of photos of Black Mountain College Dance on Mondoblogo. Man, could that guy FLY! We’re going to try flying in our heads, with Merce-like imagination and grace, and see what happens.
(Video link here) The fashion industry is not kind to those who it doesn’t consider its target audience. Having spent the last couple of years on the plus-size end of the spectrum I know a lot about walking into stores or flipping through magazines and feeling defeated. But I’ve also found a lot of joy in recognizing the subtle (and not so subtle) acts of resistance around me. Take for example the subjects of Ari Seth Cohen’s blog, Advanced Style: older women who prove, without a doubt, that style is not just a young person’s game. read more…
(Video link here.) With or without the music: lovely, valiant life, which keeps happening ANYWAY, despite all the dark stuff going on. We can’t help thinking that ideas emerge into the world in a similar fashion…given even minimal nurturing, their natural impulse is to grow…
One of our favorite pieces by experimental composer Fast Forward is this zen wonder, created by Fast holding a drum in the rain. (Video link here.) We asked him how it came about:
Not far from my house is a fantastic riverbed rock quarry. The acoustics down there are incredible. One day, my friend and I went to play there and on came a rain shower…a frame drum played by the heavens…
Boy, is THAT living in the moment, making the most of what is on hand!
(Video link here.) We were really sad to hear of Amy Winehouse’s passing at the age of 27. We were aware of her wild descent in the corner of our consciousness, through tabloid headlines mainly. When we read the news of her death, we found ourselves watching one YouTube video after another, trying to piece together her story. Over seven or so years of videos, the change from her early appearances at the age of twenty to later concerts is startling, as she gradually morphed from patently ladylike to crazily beehived and tattooed, as she became thinner and thinner. We saw, in hindsight, a person crashing and burning. The constant in all the videos was a look in her eyes, a mix of fear and uncertainty and…what?
In an interview, Winehouse said the lyrics she wrote were autobiographical. The haunting refrain from You Know I’m No Good is one we’ve heard echoed by many people we’ve known, who’ve struggled with addiction of various kinds, or fought simply to live in the world being themselves: to just BE without tearing themselves down: read more…
