We stumbled on this crazy-great painted floor artist Matthieu Lavanchy on the very out-there/interesting 2thewalls by New York designer Keehnan Konyha (Slide show of his apartment here; we couldn’t find any actual info about him.) + (Warning, 2thewalls has been likened to “falling down the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland”. It’s easy to get lost looking at all the wild stuff.)
We see it as a picture of big ideas happening…actually how we feel when an idea ignites…like it has a life of its own and we get to “sureness”…like all we have to do is follow it along…
…
…it’s like nothing else!
(For more of Kalman’s posts, scroll down to the very bottom of the Times post.)
(Video link here.) This week I’ve been contemplating the challenge of saying yes. I was sent a TED Talk from last year in which Sasha Dichter discusses a neat experiment: for a full month, every time he was asked for something, he said yes. Dichter works in philanthropy, so cultivating personal generosity and connecting it to his work has a very particular meaning. But he raised an interesting point that we think is worth thinking about in our own lives. As a philanthropist, Dichter grew very comfortable saying “no,” but found that
“…pretty soon no becomes who you are and what I realized is, I needed a new habit and a new reflex. When I want to teach my kids to say please and thank you, it requires repetition and it requires practice.”
I started thinking about this idea of saying yes as a practice; what saying yes more often might look like. What’s buried beneath all the No? read more…
After reading yesterday’s post “What is Failure?”, a reader alerted us to the compelling TED talk, “On Being Wrong” by Katherine Schulz, a”wrongologist”, who studies what it means to make mistakes. Schulz has some interesting ideas about where “feeling right” and “being wrong” intersect; it’s worth listening to whole 10 minute talk to follow the flow. (We’re still mulling the idea that “feeling something is right” is an erroneous notion.)
What’s great about TED talks is that you can read the transcript as you go, or afterwards to revisit ideas. We’ve culled some essential nuggets from Schulz talk: read more…
As we were writing about Occupy Wall Street and We Are the 99 Percent, Cara de Silva sent us a compelling and very timely story she spotted in the New York Times. “Back to the Land, Reluctantly” by Susan Gregory Thomas, is about how the 42 year-old Brooklyn mother of three, having found herself divorced, flat-broke, with a dwindling livelihood, figured out how to “live off the land” from her urban garden and kitchen. “Luckily, my late father hammered into me that grit was more important than talent…I figured, if peasants in 11th-century Sicily did all this, how hard could it be?”
It was survival, not any particular love of artisan cheese or the notion of self-sufficiency, that motivated her to learn how to raise chickens, grow vegetables and herbs, make her own granola, bread, perfume and cleaning products, harvest edible weeds, and stretch a single piece of cheap meat into a week’s worth of dinners, until she discovered she could and her family could live on $100 a week.
IT is a lot of work. You have to be organized and able to improvise on your feet. But, frankly, it’s awesome. read more…
Walking over to the HighLine the other day, we came upon this amazing scene…
…the King of Cans was so absorbed in his book, he didn’t notice us, or the traffic zooming past. We wondered how long it took him to collect all those cans, and what the pay-off would be. We saw him as a city survivalist, foraging for the resources around him, taking care of himself…
For a long time, it was our habit to jump out of bed and start working: reading blogs, news, emails, writing. We were, literally, swept away each day by the virtual world we love to wander around in; there were no real breaks and downtime, no time to turn inward, quiet. Every morning, we simply jumped in.
Then a friend told us that he made a practice of always reading something uplifting or illuminating first thing in the morning – NOT firing up the computer and NOT reading the news, but rather taking the time to read a bit of poetry or a philosophy, something that was more about ‘being’ rather than ‘doing’. We decided to try it, turning to books that we valued but hadn’t looked at for years – Wherever You Go, There You Are… Neruda’s Garden: An Anthology of Odes… reading as we drank a cup of tea in the quiet of the morning. It changed everything; the books we read have the effect of centering us for much of the day, while teaching us a new perspective.
(Video link here.) We’ve been at a loss for words to write about Steve Jobs’ passing, so thought we’d publish a few really potent ones from our friends and colleagues, along with the original “Think Different” ad from the 90′s, sent to us by Pamela Hovland: ”…it expressed his vision for the company (Apple) but embodied his own way of thinking/creating as well. “
“He thought differently, and now we do too.” –Tara Mann
(Video link here.) We’ve long been a fan of Elizabeth Streb, an “action architect” whose wondrous choreography interweaves risk, action, danger, and flow into a thrilling experience; her dancers interact with swinging concrete blocks and giant wheels where the potential is full-on hurt if they make a mistep; they often run into walls and fall flat on their faces, artfully, an amazing thing to see.
We were knocked out by Streb’s answer, in a recent 99% interview to the question: Why is risk necessary in art?
“When you are attempting to create new languages, the investigations can get stuck in the brain and often find no escape there, especially when the idea is invisible as it is while contending with extreme actions, forces, and time.
I have found it to be a fruitful idea to agree to get hurt a bit or more than a bit, in the search for a real move.This “real move” is the holy grail of the act, the heart of the machine, the virus in the Petri dish. This alone tells the truth of where, when, what, and how. read more…
A few years ago Suzanne Shaker made the decision to change her path, from stylist par excellence to interior designer. She quickly became known for “a unique style that combines modern, traditional, and custom-designed furnishings, using natural materials and the sculptural qualities of light, personal objects and art” to make serene, minimalist spaces. Soon, she was invited to be in Remodelista’s coveted Designer Directory, where you can view some of her work.
Also check out the recent story and slideshow in the New York Times about the house she and her husband Pete Dandridge built from scratch on Shelter Island, under fierce budgetary constraints. The story of her struggle to make hard choices to stay within her budget is a compelling one. read more…
We’ve long been fascinated by Burning Man, the annual “art event and temporary community” in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. Every year our friend Kim Sykes participates in the infamous festival firsthand. This year she sent us photographs and a report.
To those that aren’t familiar with it, Burning man might seem like a 70′s style hippie gathering full of drugs and body paint, but Kim found a great deal more: “There are large scale art projects, unique and wonderful art cars, small intimate art pieces, a camp for everyone - young and old, amazing, loving, people to meet! It is a wonderful array of inspiring creativity, some planned some improvised.” read more…
(Video link here.) Our friend Maureen Rolla sent us this email; it is so expressive, it became a post:
“I am writing to tell you about a person and documentary that you should know about – it is called “Citizen Architect: Samuel Mockbee and the Spirit of the Rural Studio” – about an amazing architect, thinker, dreamer who ran a program called the Rural Studio at Auburn University in which architecture students designed and built homes, churches, and other structures for the residents of the very poor Hale County, Alabama. It is perhaps the best statement about the transformative power of architecture on regular human beings lives that I’ve ever seen (as opposed to big name, star power architecture that pretty much only benefits the star architect…) The students use some ordinary materials (hay bales, tires) in innovative ways to create some simple yet soaring projects. The film is available on Netflix (disk only, unfortunately). Unfortunately Mockbee died in 2001, only in his early 60s.”
We found a trailer for Citizen Architect (above) that makes us hungry to see the film. Check out this moving interview with Mockbee read more…
One of the best virtual “house tours” we’ve seen of late was designer Scott Newkirk’s Brooklyn, NY apartment featured on Remodelista via An Afternoon With. Newkirk’s place is beautiful, completely unfussy and full of smart, do-able ideas that make great use of limited space. He’s culled many of his treasures at flea markets, transforming them in interesting ways. Newkirk “finds beauty in the ordinary”, evidenced by dramatic curtains made from rough burlap. We love his stacks of books that double as display shelf.
Details of the apartment are well noted, so you’ll find great information about materials you can apply to your own space… read more…
Charles McFarlane alerted us to these pictures of makeshift chairs. They were taken by a reporter embedded with Marines deployed in Afghanistan in 2010, using his iPhone. Improvised out of wreckage, in a war zone, the chairs have a moving and strangely beautiful sculptural quality; they force us to imagine the stories behind them. read more…
, is about how the 42 year-old Brooklyn mother of three, having found herself divorced, flat-broke, with a dwindling livelihood, figured out how to “live off the land” from her urban garden and kitchen. “Luckily, my late father hammered into me that grit was more important than talent…I figured, if peasants in 11th-century Sicily did all this, how hard could it be?”
: 
