(Video link here.) “Don’t sweat the small stuff
—Sarah Martino
via Andrew Sloat
rules for living
sweat the small stuff! (easy ways to be an eco warrior)
taking a break (we’ll be back next week)
Anselmo Lastra/everywhere.com
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’ll be back next week.
for amy winehouse
(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…
role model: fast forward on $$, improvising and music
A couple of months ago, we received an interesting comment thanking us for a quote we posted from John Cage’s A Year from Monday: “Even though I have 2 copies of this book, knew JC and spent 30 years performing his music, it was still great to see”. It was signed ‘Fast Forward’. Well of course we followed the trail.
We found ourselves on the website of a prolific New York city-based experimental composer who favors non-traditional percussion instruments made of…ANYTHING, from industrial paint cans to metal staircases (“basically one big piece of sonorous metal”). We instantly fell in love with Musique a la Mode in which all instruments were made from common kitchen items: pots, pans, bowls, cutlery, tools, food…(favorite moments: 1:40 mins where the spatulas seem to have a life of their own…2:45 a whisk in a metal sauce container….5:45 music made from pasta). We find ourselves running the video while we work just to listen to Fast’s music in the background.
Fast performs all over the world, created music for many of Merce Cunningham‘s event works, is the mastermind behind a participatory performance experience Feeding Frenzy (involving 5 cooks and 5 musicians, 5 waiters and an audience), teaches, photographs, makes art, and always, music. But what knocked us out, in addition to all this, was read more…
‘don’t say yes. be yes.’
‘beautiful oops’ lesson for all of us: mistakes are OK
(Turn the sound off to really SEE what’s inside this book.—The Management (Video link here.)
I was a child who drew inside the lines. I kept journals as a kid and, if I accidentally skipped a page, I would rip out the blank page rather than have an entry appear out of order. Only recently as a young-ish adult have I grown comfortable with the risk of something like—gasp!—going off-recipe. Clearly, they didn’t have books like Beautiful Oops!
This kids’ book by Barney Saltzberg, follows a simple, but for some, very challenging philosophy: “When you think you have made a mistake, think of it as an opportunity to make something.” read more…
wise words from stephen hawking
Sally Schneider
We’ve had this quote by Stephen Hawking on our fridge for years. He’s the brilliant British physicist who is paralyzed by motor neuron disease, yet continues to work vigorously in his field. He communicates via a computer screen attached to his wheelchair. As commonly used words run across it, Hawkins move a cheek muscle to signal an electronic sensor in his eyeglasses and transmit instructions to the computer, gradually, patiently building sentences…
When asked how he keeps his spirits up, he replied:
My expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21. Everything since then has been a bonus.
In a recent, rare New York Times interview, he continues to inspire with his acutely positive and productive approach to making the most of the hand we are dealt, whatever that may be (and we are ALL dealt some kind of rough hand):
I don’t have much positive to say about motor neuron disease. But it taught me not to pity myself, because others were worse off and to get on with what I still could do.
My advice to other disabled people would be, concentrate on things your disability doesn’t prevent you doing well, and don’t regret the things it interferes with. Don’t be disabled in spirit, as well as physically.
Related posts: signmark and the very loud message of deaf rap
the power of uncertainty -> ‘delicious ambiguity’
william kamkwamba: creating currents of electricity and hope
a reminder, via anne herbert (open doors!)
Sally Schneider
reminder: get out there an enjoy it
Mondoblogo
Mondoblogo recently published this cell phone shot of a “my cousin’s” house AFTER a tornado set down on Tuscaloosa, Alabama, with these words:
“He is a 1st year law student on full scholarship at U of A.
(Roll Tide)
He and his wife Ceci are lucky to be alive.
They were trapped in their bathroom until the Fire Department cut them out….
They literally have
NOTHING
left,
only the clothes on their backs…
I post this only because you never know
when something like this might happen to you
or someone you love.
So stop your griping, bitching and complaining
about the little annoyances in life
and get out there and enjoy it while you can,
for as long as you can.”
Then we came across this extraordinary Facebook pages of family pictures and documents found in the aftermath of the tornados, read more…
building -> growing -> alive (in memory of eleanor mailloux)
Our dear friend and heroine Eleanor Mailloux passed away peacefully this morning. Just a year ago we posted a film of her in full regalia (above) for the wild Fasnacht Festival in her tiny Appalachian settlement of Helvetia where folks dress up in homemade masks to scare away Old Man Winter (this year’s took place last Saturday). She was angry that we had included her age in the post. “It doesn’t matter what my age is. It just matters who I am.”
Who she was was a fiercely creative and original person. She had traveled the world but her great love and work was helping the tiny, unique village of her childhood thrive, preserving its Swiss culture and running the Helvetia’s only restaurant and inn. Over the thirty-plus years that we knew her, when times would be really tough she would say simply, “It’s all right. It’ll be all right.“ Somehow, it always was.
Her next project was to be a Museum to preserve the wonderful masks people made for Fasnacht. She wrote us this letter, full of her off-the-cuff wisdom:
I’m fevered with dreams for the Mask Museum. I wonder why.
I had a dear old Chinese friend on Guam. His name was Charlie Corn. One day I asked Charlie: “Charlie, why do you keep building on to your pavilion?” His answer was: “When I’m building, I’m growing and when I’m growing I’m alive.”
You’ll find Eleanor and Helvetia in these posts: Fasnacht: Wild + Creative Antidote for Winter and A Mind Game for Cultivating Resourcefulness.
We’re going to take some time off to remember her.
what a messy desk really means
Robert Blinn of Core 77 posted an extensive and very interesting review of Living with Complexity
In Norman’s view, Gore’s desk is the cluttered extension of an organized mind. Indeed, Norman interviewed many seemingly organized owners of messy workspaces and heard them repeatedly request, “Please don’t clean my desk.” The apparent disorder of the office was being carefully tracked in their minds. Norman explains that all of our desire for “simplicity” is a false hope because life is complex. Complexity, however, does not need to be confusing.
We find complexity amazingly interesting AND confusing; since starting ‘the improvised life’, we’ve have had to totally GET with our messy workspace, and it’s vast piles of ideas that we’ve found and can’t keep up with filing. We’re kind of obsessed with “messy” spaces of creative people, who clearly have their own unique mental filing systems. We find that so many people think they are somehow flawed for having an in-flux workspace, we love to post examples to antidote the notion. Here’s another favorite. read more…
tolstoy’s big rule for living
World History Archive/Alamy/Alamy
The Happiness Project recently posted Tolstoy‘s Ten Rules of Life, found in Tolstoy, Henri Troyat’s biography
“Have a goal for your whole life, a goal for one section of your life, a goal for a shorter period and a goal for the year; a goal for every month, a goal for every week, a goal for every day, a goal for every hour and for every minute, and sacrifice the lesser goal to the greater.”
We discovered that asking ourselves “What is our goal for this moment” can mean the opposite of the usual “goals-for-getting-ahead-and-keeping-tight-control-on-life” thinking. It makes us ask “What’s REALLY important here?”
francis ford coppola on risk and not knowing…
Steve Shapiro
We were knocked out by Ariston Anderson’s interview in 99% with the great director Francis Ford Coppola who made The Godfather, The Conversation and Apocalypse Now among other astonishing films. In talking about film, he talks deeply about making any kind of art, and about living. Here are some excerpts (read in context, they are even better):
Our favorite: “The cinema language happened by experimentation – by people not knowing what to do….”
“An essential element of any art is risk. If you don’t take a risk then how are you going to make something really beautiful, that hasn’t been seen before…” read more…
reminder: it’s not what you know…
Rebecca Gagnon
Related post: lucky biscuits + signs in cookies
