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…
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…
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…
(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.
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.
We are big fans of tattoos — permanent or impermanent — as a tool for living, and have posted quite a bit about them: to-do lists, uplifting signs, reminders of one sort or another. We recently tweeted about an 81 year-old woman who tattooed “Do Not Resuscitate” on her chest, so concerned was she about being kept alive against her wishes.
The Improvised Life’s remarkable assistant, Dese’Rae L. Stage, has A LOT of words and quotes tattoo’d on her body. We wondered if they were reminders or something else. So we asked her how she chose them, the story behind them, what they did.
(Video link here.) In this short TED talk, Graham Hill tells simple ways to start letting go of STUFF and getting rid of it. And why it is so essential.
1. Edit ruthlessly: clear the arteries of our lives, cut the extraneous out of our lives, think before we buy, ask ourselves, ‘Is that really gonna make me happier? Truly?’
2. New mantra: small is sexy. We want space efficiency, we want things that are designed for how they’re used the vast majority of the time–not that rare event. Why have a six burner stove when you rarely use three? So, we want things that nest, things that stack… we wanna digitize. You can take paperwork, books, movies, and you can make it disappear. It’s magic.
3. Think multifunctional spaces and housewares: a sink’s combined with a toilet, a dining table becomes a bed in the same space, a little side table stretches out to seat ten.
(Video link here.) Gangnam Style, South Korean hip hop artist PSY’s video was so insanely over-the-top, it went viral. But the original is not nearly as funny or amazing as this brilliant hack YouTube user Moto2h made with it: he took away the music and added in some sound effects to PSY’s a capella blather.
(Video link here.) Tracy Metro is a designer and the host of I Live with My Mom on SpacesTV, where she makes over bedrooms of twenty- somethings who are still living at home with Mom. “I rid them of their soccer trophies, Legos and stuffed animals in favor of an adult launching pad for life.”
She’s applied her own small-space thinking to The Retro Metro, a houseboat she and her husband bought a few years ago. When we saw the before-and-after photos, we had to know the story. So we interviewed Tracy and spliced-in pictures and plans to show you just how big a project it was. read more…
Zen Habits recently published the very useful Finding Peace with Uncertainty, about one of our favorite subjects. It made us go back and leaf through the great Maira Kalman’s wonderful book The Principles of Uncertainty. We clipped this image from it imagining, for sure, she naturally applies Zen Habits’ 8 practices herself (we’ve summed them up below):
Try something new, but small and safe. When you mess up, don’t see it as painful failure. See the wonder and opportunity in change. Ask “what’s the worst-case scenario”? Develop a change toolset. Become aware of your clinging. See the downsides of clinging. Experience the joy in the unknown.
These days, we know A LOT of people who are in the middle of a seachange, ourselves included: NOT yet knowing what exactly we’re in the process of creating, or where we’ll end up. So stumbling on this quote by T.S. Eliot was heartening and affirming. It’s just THE DEAL: in creating something new, we can’t control the process, and need to endure the discomfort of not having the answer, yet...and faith that it will come.
I woke up this morning to discover a tiny birch tree rising amidst my city quasi-garden, having overcome unthinkable odds to float its seed over heaps of concrete and glass, and begin a life in a meager oasis of soil. And I thought, my god*, what a miracle. What magic. What a reminder that life does not await permission to be lived.
We love the simple white-on-concrete? stencils designer Paola Navone put in her Greek summer home. They act like rugs, and can be done on wood floors as well. We’ve seen this done before, but not quite so beautifully. read more…
The amazing avant-garde musician Fast Forward has joinged forces with his friend Elaine Sokolof to create a charming and illuminating Facebook page ”Not Better Just Different”. (It’s public, so you don’t have to be a member of Facebook .
Fast wrote us that they started the page just to “try something out and see what happens”, our mantra.
We love it because there’s lots of quick hits that shift our view, like read more…
by the great Chilean poet 
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, 
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 
, Sam Anderson of the
. We clipped this image from it imagining, for sure, she naturally applies Zen Habits’ 8 practices herself (we’ve summed them up below):
