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photo: anthony giglio
Anthony Giglio, a regular contributor to ‘the improvised life’ — his wine-friendly grape “ice cubes” remain a perpetual hit — recently posted on his website about his dad Tony Giglio’s unexpected, found ‘career’ in retirement. He makes walking sticks, and his story is pure ‘improvised life’:
About a year ago my father found inspiration in a friend-of-a-friend’s collection of hand-carved walking sticks and had a thought: “I could make those! And I could make ’em even better!”
And so his journey began, walking all over town, in and out of parks, neighbors’ yards, scavenging and harvesting enormous fallen branches, and then figuring out the process day by day. read more…
11.01.12 |
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in d-i-y, gifts, materials, nature, paths + processes, people, repurpose |
maira kalman/new york times
We really love Maira Kalman‘s picture of her worn, old-fashioned boots and it’s simple, insightful, refreshingly real-life annotation. It affirms something we practice many times daily: imagining, fantasizing, trying-on scenarios in our heads that we ultimately will never do because the reality is, well, something we don’t really want to deal with, or can’t deal with. Sometimes we can’t get with the ‘reality sandwiches’ at hand, to coin Allen Ginsberg‘s brilliant phrase from a famous poem in his famous book
of the same name.
We DON’T make all the ideas we have, but we DO do some of them. Sometimes the one’s we don’t do lead to outcomes or paths we don’t expect. Just being willing to try on ideas in our heads helps us figure out which ones we really want or need to do.
As we mull making something out of shipping pallets or a cool idea for painting a wall or imagine riding a bike like Danny McAskill, we embrace possibilities,’the adjacent possible’ that lives in every moment…
Check out Kalman’s And the Pursuit of Happiness here.
via The New York Times
Related posts: possibilities in everyday things (piano as 5+ instruments)
what happens if you start your day with a poem?
improvisation is a guerilla action
the possibilities of folded paper
the creative possibilities for being ‘on hold’ via christophe neimannx
11.01.12 |
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in inspiration books + zines, paths + processes, people, principles, quotes |
photo: manny howard
Yesterday had us jumping all over the web checking out reports of Hurricane Sandy, including the startling report on Manny Howard‘s startling FB page about a Brooklyn chicken coop being mauled by the storm. (As you may remember from My Empire of Dirt: How One Man Turned His Big-City Backyard into a Farm
, Manny’s fledgling chicken coop was obliterated by a tornado that picked it as its place to land in Brooklyn.)
While we were poking around Manny’s page we came across this photo of the aftermath of an al fresco dinner party — Manny is the master of fabulous impromptu, out-of-control parties. We post it as a relief from the dire reports of Sandy’s havoc and a reminder of other days to come, of ease and joy.
Thanks Manny!
Related posts: …after the storm…
summer tubing party: out-there al fresco entertaining
stout + ice cream floats (for grownups)
smoky, bacon-infused spirits for holiday cocktails
‘what’s not wrong?’ and other ways to start your day
10.30.12 |
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in celebrations, entertaining, inspiration books + zines, nature, outside, people, sightings |
jane hammond
Some time ago, Marella Consolini of the Chinati Foundation alerted us to the poignant sculpture of artist Jane Hammond. Since it is about fall and leaves, it seems the perfect time to post it. Called Fallen, Hammond’s installation comprises leaves: “each unique handmade leaf has been inscribed by the artist with the name of a U.S. soldier killed in Iraq.”
The work started with 4229 leaves; Hammond continued to add leaves and names as the war went on. We find that the work has greatly expanded our view of fall/change/life, and especially, what happens when we really focus our attention on something. Hammond describes it well in her Artist’s Statement: read more…
10.25.12 |
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in art, nature, outside, paths + processes, people, quotes |
photo: courtesy of tillett and rauscher inc
We were instantly smitten with this kitchen, for its spareness and simplicity (on the upper East side of Manhattan no less), but especially for the marble slab table with a rough, unfinished edge. Such a simple detail to leave undone, yet the effect is bold and surprising. It could be done with any stone surface.
It is the vision of D.D. and Leslie Tillett, influential post-war textile designers whose townhouse on the Upper East side of Manhattan served both as family space and workspace for the textile design and printing. They are the subject of a retrospective that has just opened at the Museum of the City of New York. “D.D. liked surfaces to have broken edges. She had a ‘Wabi-sabi’ aesthetic,” says her son Seth in a recent New York Magazine interview.
We’re going to run over and see it as the house appears to be full of adventurous design ideas. In addition to rough-edged table tops… read more…
10.24.12 |
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in cool spaces, copy this!, floors, furniture, hard, inside, materials, paths + processes, people, textiles, why not? |
photo: heidi swanson
Not long after we posted about kintsugi, the artful repair of damaged things, we came across these photos of a worn wide-plank Douglas Fir floor patched with tin in Mindy Marin’s renovated barn Bluewater Ranch. A perfect example of modern-day kintsugi: the undisguised tin becomes part of the design on floors whose age and wear makes them both interesting and beautiful. read more…
10.23.12 |
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in cheap + great, d-i-y, floors, people, principles, solutions |
photo: jill krementz
Although our borrowed cabin in the country was not quite as spare as Charlotte’s Web
author E.B. White’s enviable makeshift work space (in his boat shed overlooking Allen Cove in 1976, pre internet), we are refreshed by going minimal for a week, in nature and quiet.
We were so intrigued by White’s utterly simple, focused space, that we browsed some of his essays
. We were amused and heartened to read of White’s eloquent stuggle with “stuff” in “Goodbye to Forty-eighth Street:
For some weeks now I have been engaged in dispersing the contents of this apartment, trying to persuade hundreds of inanimate objects to scatter and leave me alone. It is not a simple matter. I am impressed by the reluctance of one’s worldly goods to go out again into the world. During September I kept hoping that some morning, as if by magic, all books, pictures, records, chairs, beds, curtains, lamps, china, glass utensils, keepsakes would drain away from around my feet, like the outgoing tide, leaving me standing silent on a bare beach. But this did not happen… read more…
10.23.12 |
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in furniture, inside, paths + processes, people, quotes, solutions, working |
We were knocked out when we saw this picture of sculptor Giuseppe Penone‘s sapling within a tree that he says is about “the hidden life within.”
We thought of many things at once, many of them corny, but true nevertheless…of the origins and emergence of ideas, and the little kid that remains within each of us (yikes!)
We went looking for more about Penone’s work and found this astonishing image: read more…
10.11.12 |
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in art, paths + processes, people |
We’ve recently discovered a new series of photographs by Amy Friend called Dare alla Luce:
Through small deliberate interventions, I altered these vintage images, allowing light to pass through them. (After all, photographs are made possible with light.) In a literal and somewhat playful manner, I aimed to give the photographs back to the light, hence the title of the series, Dare alla Luce, an Italian phrase used to describe the moment of birth.
We couldn’t help seeing the lights as connectors, between people, ideas, feelings, memories, the past and present: those subtle-body kinds of communication and experiences that happen all the time, that we’re made of, and out of which we make things.
read more…
10.10.12 |
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in art, identity, people |
photo: william abranowicz
In this Sunday’s NY Times T magazine, we were happy to see the cover story on John Derian’s East Village apartment photographed by our old friend Bill Abranowicz (whose beauty of a book on Greece we featured some time ago.)It starts with a photo of the naked, as-is space, rife with possibilities. We realized we were relieved we were to see an undone, unslick, unmodern, messy space, tired as we are of clinically modern interiors-porn that are everywhere. Derian had the courage and vision to leave the essentials be.
We loved imagining how we would handle the space were it ours, and then looking at the photos of what Derian did (swell befores-and-afters here), and seeing how our sensibilities differed or grooved with his (we’d nix the dark armoire between the windows blocking all that light and sense of space…but yeah, what about storage?) read more…
10.09.12 |
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in before + after, cool spaces, inside, inspiration, paths + processes, people, reimagine |
photo: city-furniture
Le Cabanon by Le Corbusier – Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France
Being weak (but learning) in the interior color department, we’ve loved Flavorwire’s recent round-up of the Surprisingly Colorful Homes of 10 Famous Architects. Although we’ve actually been inside Le Corbusier’s Le Cabanon in the south of France, we hadn’t quite realized just how much color he’d incorporated into his largely plywood interior. The slideshow covers a lot of territory, including the fabulous use of pink Luis Barragán made at Casa Barragán in Mexico City, the wonderful seemingly impromptu way Ray Kappe placed painting right next to the bed at his house in Los Angeles, and Albert Frey’s cool use of a corrugated metal ceiling in his house inPalm Springs. We especially love Finn Juhl’s understated home in Ordrup, Denmark. read more…
10.09.12 |
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in cool spaces, elements, inside, inspiration blogs + sites, materials, people, solutions |
A while back, we accidentally ordered a book of poems
by the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. We love his poetry, especially his odes, but weren’t crazy about the selections in this particular book. Or so we thought. We’ve discovered that opening it randomly often yields treasures we could have sworn weren’t there when we first looked through it.
Recently, we stumbled on a poem about how poetry “arrived” in Neruda’s life one day. To us, it perfectly describes the way the creative process often happens: an idea appears, sparks…tiny often at first… but if listened and attended to — however tentative and bumpy the start — it can become an illuminating and nourishing path. read more…
10.09.12 |
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in inspiration books + zines, paths + processes, people, quotes |
(Video link here.) Ever since we saw this 3 minute bit from comedian Louis C.K.’s amazing tv series Louie
we’ve been looking for a video clip to post; we FINALLY found one. As Louie drives his daughters to visit their ancient aunt in the country, The Who‘s ”Who are You?” comes on the CD player. The valiant, crazy vision of Louie playing air guitar as he drives and his daughters cringe knocked us out.
Commenter named Alonso summed it up perfectly: ”this this is beautiful. natural yet risky.”
Louie totally went with the jammin’ music of his youth at the risk of making a fool of himself. As we all should, and often do. Natural yet risky.
Louie is some kind of wiseman (which we discovered years go from his (“Everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy” riff on Conan). At another point in the Country Ride episode, he admonishes his daughters: read more…
10.08.12 |
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in music, people, quotes, rules for living, sightings, why not? |
We are big fans of Junot Diaz, whose novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
was so original, we didn’t want to give it away (as we usually do with fiction we’ve read); we knew we’d go back to it to dive back into its wild language. With the release of Diaz’ latest book This Is How You Lose Her
, Sam Anderson of the New York Times interviewed Diaz about his writing process. Diaz describes his “creative metabolism” as being SLOW and painful — he often throws out whole hunks of work he’s slaved over — and admires writers who seem to write both quickly and well. Since we consider ourselves SLOW compared to the “real” world in all sorts of ways— and know a lot of people who feel the same way about themselves — we found Diaz’ words heartening:
The thing is, you try your best, and what else you got? You try your best, really, that’s all you can do. And for me, my best happens really so rarely. I was so always heartened by people like Michael Chabon who write so well and seem to write so fast. Edwidge Danticat writes really well and really fast. I was always heartened by them. I keep thinking one day it’ll happen. It might.
Now we’re going to check out our free sample first chapter of This Is How You Lose Her…
Related posts: t.s. eliot on the creative process
how to slow down, via leo widrich and bill murray
isamu noguchi’s creative process
the role of magic in the creative processx
10.04.12 |
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in inspiration books + zines, paths + processes, people, quotes |
