Pamela Hovland alerted us to a film to add to our list of must-see’s: ”No Impact Man”, a documentary about a NYC guy and his reluctant family to eliminate their impact on the environment for a year…They MUST have needed to improvise daily/hourly in order to keep up their commitment. Check out the trailer…”
Yikes! Just watching that short bit makes us realize how reliant/addicted we are upon so many things, as much as we try for good economies. And it sparks a lot of questions: Could we – would we- try such an experiment?
We invite your to send your improvs for these daily dilemmas:
1. How would you do without toilet paper?
2. In fact, how would you do without all paper?
3. What if you have to travel a long distance to visit a sick friend, as I have to next week? Hitch? Hop a freight?
4. This guy lives in New York City. What about roaches? We can’t give up roach traps (plastic, and they really work) for a whole year.
What would be the right balance?
We’re definitely going to see this film and look forward to you ideas.
The internet is awash in gorgeous videos like this one honoring – and illustrating – mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot’s mind-expanding research into fractals, rough geometric shapes, whose pattern splits into reduced copies of the whole, over and over. (That is our fumbling attempt at a description and doesn’t begin to tell you why they are important). Mandelbrot, who died on Thursday, gave the gist in the compelling TED talk, below. It’s about using fractal geometry to quantify the “roughness and irregularities” that are part of human life, apparent in objects in the natural world like a cauliflower, snowflakes, and coastlines.
The New York Times’ obituary describes Mandelbrot as outsider for much of his career in mathematics who applied fractal geometry to find patterns in the irregularities of many fields, including biology, physics, cartography and finance.
“When asked to look back on his career, Dr. Mandelbrot compared his own trajectory to the rough outlines of clouds and coastlines that drew him into the study of fractals in the 1950s.
‘If you take the beginning and the end, I have had a conventional career,” he said, referring to his prestigious appointments in Paris and at Yale. “But it was not a straight line between the beginning and the end. It was a very crooked line.’” read more…
Last March, we wrote about legendary graphic designer Stefan Sagemeister, who shutters his design studio every seven years to take a sabbatical, and explore new ideas. He recently spoke at Levi’s traveling print and design workshop; this video is a recap. The audio is not great but some terrific chunks come through. Here are some we love:
When asked what he thought all design students should experience once in their lives, he answered:
“Serious failure. I think you should experience going so way outside your comfort zone that serious failure is a possibility.”
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…”The fact is it’s unbelievably difficult for me to explore new things…”
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…”You can train your mind in the same way you can train your body.”
S-o-o, Can we/you train our minds to venture beyond our comfort zones, despite our fears and notions?
A few months ago, while I was clearing out a storage room in a lonely warehouse building, a friend called me on my cell phone in tears. She told me of the overwhelming fear and anxiety she was feeling about a trip she was to embark upon in a few hours, that held many potentially difficult situations.
Standing in a storage room amidst broken cardboard boxes and forgotten stuff, I listened and talked and listened, as my friend’s tears gradually subsided. “But, how will I make it through?” she asked. “What will I do if I start to panic on the long flight, or when I am in another time zone?”
I wondered what I could offer right then and there? What would be totally portable, that she could look at any time she needed to, to remind her of other ways of seeing things, the opposite of fear and sadness?
I found myself saying: “Get a pen. Now draw a heart in the palm of your hand. read more…
One of our favorite books about improvising is Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art by Stephen Nachmanovitch. It’s one of those enduring books that you can open randomly and find something useful or compelling…like this, which we found just now:
“…Sometimes we damn the limits, but without them art is not possible. They provide us with something to work with and against. In practicing our craft we surrender, to a great extent, to letting the materials dictate the design…”
Among the many jacket quotes praising the book is one by Keith Jarrett, the jazz pianist known for his astonishing improvisational work the Koln Concert. In four sentences, he totally nails what improvising is:
“You are called to an important meeting, the subject of which you are not told. It is of utmost importance that you ‘Be Yourself’. The meeting starts immediately and your clothes are in the laundry and you have no time to wash up or shave. Is this a ‘serious’ situation? Then so is improvisation…”
And that is what The Koln Concert was. In the video, Jarrett describes the impossible circumstances that made for a stunning creation.
That’s what Free Play is about.
We view them as an essential part of our toolBox.
(You can listen to samples of The Koln Concert, and/or buy it as an MP3, here.)
‘the improvised life’ needs a tagline on its HomePage so newcomers who jump onto the site with no introduction can get the gist quickly, and find their way more easily. We’ve been mulling possibilities for a while now and ask for your help in figuring out which of the phrases below describes the site best. OR send us your ideas and words for the best way to convey what’s going on here, in a flash…It would be placed below the title, where the Manifesto is now…
…resourcefulness as a daily practice…
…inspire your own creative ideas…
We invite you to scroll back through the archives, or the selection below, as you mull ‘the improvised life’ and see if a great tagline comes to mind.
Alastair Heseltine is a Canadian artist who makes art and objects by interweaving wood (he especially loves willow). We were knocked out by his woodpile and by his artist’s statement; we don’t know when we’ve seen one that said so much in so few words:
“I am a sculptor working with mixed media relating to the environment. Imagery is guided by the inherent nature of material and by construction systems evolved through mindful observation and play. I also draw from the full spectrum of routines and activities that support my practice: Design, craft production, farming and rural life.” read more…
The other day Reference Library posted an image from the Flickr archive of a brilliant junk collector and “seer” of things. It was of the UNDERSIDE of an old light bulb package: the red-striped ends of its six sides folded into an elegant overlapping “star” like some beautiful Japanese Packaging. The only editorial comment was in the form of the posts title, “Always Turn Shit Over”. Now there’s a life principle! Turn stuff over, on its side, inside-out, upside-down… to get a view you didn’t expect or might not have imagined on your own.
You can do the same thing with ideas: turn them over in your mind, every which way…
Recently, Lydia Wills alerted us to an entry from Howard Rheingold‘s astonishing blog Howard’s Butt “about his rectal cancer experiences –about being cracked open. He is an amazing person…one of the earliest internet folks who knew it was going to change the world.” Rheingold’s writing sent us to his website and Wikipedia to find out more about him, and then all over the web, as one thing led to another: Rheingold is a future-thinker who saw the power of the internet and wireless devices to create communities WAY before anyone else did, and then he started living that vision… He had a hand in the Millennium Whole Earth Catalog and early internet ventures like HotWired (Wired Magazine’s original web presence), wrote ground-breaking books about technology’s new paradigms and collective intelligence, gave a TED talk about collaboration, and lectures at Stanford and U.C. Berkeley.
In all the work that we came across, Rheingold shows enduring courage: to think for himself…say what’s what…and be comfortable being an outsider (which just about anyone who is himself is), not to mention writing a blog about rectal cancer and putting pictures of butts all over its home page.
Here’s a post Rheingold wrote in anticipation of the radiation oncologist’s verdict the following week. ”Feeling Like a Hard-Boiled Egg” is about the armoring we create to survive and that life cracks apart, and what that process is really about: read more…
A couple of years ago, we started a file called “bad ideas”. These are ideas featured in shelter/style magazines that look really good, but practically speaking, are really bad. They’d come back to haunt you in no time. Stacked magazines seem like a perfect, charming solution for a table leg, but have you ever TRIED to stack magazines more than a foot high, which, with their glossy paper, are nearly impossible to keep from sliding around, much less as a 2 1/2 foot support for a slab of glass? (Unless, maybe, you bore a hole through them and put a pipe through the center to secretly hold them together).
We’re got nothing against cool-for-the-sake-of-cool design. But we really mind design that masquerades as a practical idea and has a lot of back-end problems. read more…
One of the big fears (and realities) that can keep us from trying things out, taking them to the next step, or persevering with an idea, has to do with failure. We can judge ourselves like crazy for having failed at something in the past OR be terrified that we will fail in the future; both of those notions stymy improvisation and creativity and LIFE.
So, we’re always heartened when we hear the stories of real people who have failed terribly, learned a lot, found their way AND put incredible things into the world…like J.K. Rowling’s story of her “epic failure” years before writing the Harry Potter books, and what she learned from it, the unexpected gifts it brought. She shared it in her commencement speech at Harvard in 2008, which seemed to surprise everybody.
Here’s the video of the whole thing, and our edit of the essentials to read: read more…
This morning a reader wrote to alert me, very gently and carefully, to a glaring typo in yesterday’s post on self-publishing. I wrote “elicit” when I meant “illicit”. Yikes! It got me thinking about making mistakes, (in public, no less) like this one made last night, when I was writing the post late, blind after a long day, moving too fast…
Oh well. Having spent years as a perfectionist, these days I’m opting for less perfection, for trying to get to the point, get things out there, improvise, try stuff, make mistakes. (But then, this is not surgery or flying an airplane.) And when I make mistakes: own up, learn from them, correct them… and try to write enough ahead to give the work to a copy editor (a friend)…
The reader who corrected me this morning also wrote that she loved ‘the improvised life’ despite its typos, and told this story about how it has influenced her thinking: read more…
We were hoping that Constance Old would guest curate for ‘the improvised life’…here is her first (great) post:
“Emily Campbell works as Director of Design for a British think tank called “RSA” (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) which is committed to research and projects devoted to social progress. (http://www.thersa.org/home)
She wrote a terrific essay on her blog Design and Society; it’s called “You know more than you think you do.” The gist is that professional design has alienated the individual, and designers actually have an obligation to design better access for the user into their work: then the user could fix the thing themselves without a degree…Kind of a call to simplify things and empower the individual even in highly designed objects.”
Campbell also designed this poster with Anthony Burrill which should be on everyone’s wall (and in our heads).
by Stephen Nachmanovitch. It’s one of those enduring books that you can open randomly and find something useful or compelling…like this, which we found just now:
. In four sentences, he totally nails what improvising is:
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