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Dig this wondrous display of succulents on an unused staircase (well, er, we assume it’s not used, otherwise it would quite an unusual challenge to navigate)!
It shouts JOY and a kind of uninhibited artfulness.
Succulents are in the wind…or are we just SEEING them now?
Maria Robledo brought us one as a house gift. We lifted it out of its plastic pot and plunked it into a jar. It looks like a sculpture… read more…
Greg Munson
Last Thursday, ‘improvised life’ reader Sue Anderson sent us these extraordinary photograph taken during the massive May blizzard that hit the Midwest last week, with this report:
This goose with a “can-do” attitude may be of interest to you. I suppose you have heard about the snow storm currently underway in the US Midwest. Here in southeastern Minnesota classes are cancelled, roads are closed, travel is not advised, but this mother Canada goose remains on the job. This photo sent to me by my friend Greg Munson who lives in Rochester, MN, where today’s record May snowfall amount will likely exceed a foot…..
The goose is nesting on a city-owned retention pond at the back of his property. Greg tells me that the goose still remains on the nest today, although some of the snow has melted from her back so she is not as deeply buried as before.
…while we are still getting light snow and sleet today, our temps are predicted to climb from near freezing up to around 70 degrees in the next 4 days with snow giving way to rain. Although it will be hard to learn if those diligently protected goose eggs end up being lost to flooding, we have to keep in mind that this is often nature’s way.
Here’s the first image Sue sent; the valiant goose’s head is just above the snowline: read more…
Sally Schneider
We were wandering through Saks Fifth Avenue the other day fending off smiling sales people trying to spray us with perfume, when we saw a surprising woman with a bold tattoo of the classic feminist Venus fist ; she was sitting at the Chanel counter checking out some makeup. We loved her style that was SO HER OWN and so completely the opposite of what you think Chanel person might be: she seemed totally comfortable in herself, shattering the mold, presonceived ideas, cliches… read more…
Clayton Cubitt
Spotted on Claton Cubitt’s tumblr and worth checking out full size: “cargo bike incorporating a shopping cart and chain link fence, with a blood-red wrought-iron cowcatcher (and cup holder), New Orleans.”
The awesomness of the human imagination! This practical AND aestheric considerations here are stunning…
Related posts: clever shelving configured for bicycle storage
bikes for hauling + great accessories
danny macaskill’s new video: what he thinks as he rides
sighting: improvised bike carriers
gifts + inspiration for bikers (and walkers)
I’ve been thinking a lot about birds lately, about the mystery of their migrations; their unerring return each spring.
Our Cooper’s hawk is back from the dry barrancas of Zapotecas, its familiar kek-kek-kek vying with argumentative crows and cooing mourning doves at dawn. Improvisatory arboreal architects are at work big time.
Humingbird hangs its timid sac of cat fur and melaleuca leaves on a spike of palm.
Crows strip fresh tar paper off a neighbor’s roof with giddy joy…Hawks cart heavier loads of urban detritus to the pines, creating castles of thatched twiggery.
There’s sex and magic in the air, a synesthesia of feathers and song. Guatemalan poet Humberto Ak’abal, lauded as a “Mayan Basho”, describes it in Poems I Brought Down from the Mountain
lambchop
Recently, we noticed a spike in traffic to our 2009 post d-i-y lace chain link fence. Ho, are people trying to figure out how to make chain link fences look better at last? What we loved in that early post was that someone had brilliantly seen that the metal grid of a chainlink fence is really a loom for weaving (think of those pot holder looms you used as a kid). The’d transformed ugly chain link with lacey crochet.
Looking around for more iterations, we found Michigan-based artist Lambchop’s Typographic Fences project. The Michigan-based artist weaves words and phrases into chain-link fences using ordinary flagging tape
(Video link here.) Above, a trailer for Deceptive Practice, the new documentary about brilliant sleight-of-hand master Ricky Jay. For a totaly entertaining read, check out this 1993 New Yorker profile of Jay by Mark Singer.
For those of us haunted by the instantaneous life changes that occurred to so many wounded in the Boston bombing, The Times’ heartening article about new technologies and therapies for amputees.
And a fund you can contribute to for those most affected by the bombing (prosthetics and rehab costs A LOT).
17 projects from Pinterest that people tried to do and FAILED
From beyond-brilliant chef Thomas Keller, the difference between passion and desire (via Swiss-Miss) read more…
?
When we first saw this sign, we though ‘Yeah, for sure’. Then we started thinking more critically about fear and realized it is not always a bad thing. We searched “antidote to fear” and found bits and pieces about love antidoting fear, and especially, being present antidoting fear. Then we stumbled on a rough draft of a speech called “The Mastery of Fear or Antidotes for Fear” by Martin Luther King Jr. in an archive at Stanford. Here’s an essential piece:
Fear is a powerfully creative force. read more…
Tibby Rothman
We SO love the crazy-imaginative prom dresses industrious students make to antidote and poke fun at over-the-top prom-ism. We’re adding this curiously-girlie-though-made-of-cardboard one to our collection that includes the divine…
duct tape and phone book dress
m&m wrapper dress (garbage is opportunity)
fishs eddy’s spoon dress
metal washer and attic insulation dress
vision break: a dress that makes music…
via Unconsumption
Simon Beck
As a spring snow storm sweeps through the midwest, it seems fitting to post these wondrous snow paintings by artist Simon Beck along the frozen lakes of Savoie, France. He creates the beautiful geometric patterns, some as large as 3 soccer fields, by plodding through the snow in snowshoes for hours at a time. How long the transient artworks last depends on the weather, although Beck often redesigns patterns as new snow falls; sometimes a work will go unfinished. Beck’s motivation seems entirely improvisational:
The main reason for making them was because I can no longer run properly due to problems with my feet, so plodding about on level snow is the least painful way of getting exercise. Gradually, the reason has become photographing them…
(Video link here.) Professional skydiver Erik Roner asked himself a question he’d wondered for a long time: what would happen if he sky-dived with an umbrella? Then he tried it, just to see what would happen. A man after our own improvisational hearts.
Question the “rule(s)”…
…ask “What would happen if…?
…and then TRY YOUR IDEA OUT!
Sometimes you break new ground, and sometimes you RE-discover what someone else already figured out, often years before… read more…
New York Times
Nearly 100 feet below Second Avenue in Manhattan, workers have been blasting into bedrock to build a new subway line in New York City, slogging through mud and muck daily. Yesterday, when a worker lost his footing, a frigid mud akin to quicksand began to swallow him up, creating an extraordinary rescue challenge and daring improvisations by the Fire Department. In the end, it would take an amalgam of improvised solutions: ropes attached to mechanical advantages, a backhoe, a manual griphoist machine and scores of firefighters crouched in the slop digging out the man by hand to finally release him from earth’s grip. The New York Times’ report headlined To Save a Life, a Tug of War With the Earth is riveting. Here’s an excerpt:
“It was a hell hole,” said Lt. Rafael Goyenechea, a paramedic who quickly reached the worker and stayed by his side for more than four hours. “I was definitely worried throughout about possible drowning.”…
Three firefighters suffered injuries during the rescue operation, including one who was hurt after getting stuck in the same mud that held the worker hostage.
….Battalion Chief Donald F. Hayde, who directed the rescue for the Fire Department, said he had never faced a more daunting rescue.
“It was the most difficult technical rescue I have seen,” he said, noting that around 150 emergency workers were called the scene.
In the end, both medical workers and firefighters had to improvise a solution for a problem none of them had ever encountered — mud so thick and viscous that it simply could not be cleared away.
“We basically had to try every different technique we have been taught,” Chief Hayde said. read more…
Library of Congress
Found on …Found, the great, full-of-amazing-things National Geographic Tumblr of images from its archives in honor of its 100 birthday: Alexander Graham Bell and Mabel kissing within a tetrahedral kite, October 1903.
It reminded us that kissing is probably one of the most improvisational things there is.
Related posts: a mantra from bill murray
