Pamela Hovland alerted us to a wonderful essay posted on Design Observer recently, called The Subtle Technology of Indian Artisanship; it is about how “everywhere you look in India you will find evidence of the maker’s hand.” A sign painter, faced with a drain opening smack in the middle of his underwear ad, transformed it into a “navel”. The bucket of a massive backhoe (below) is embellished with a welded pattern of metal strips, a bit of beauty in a most unlikely place. Ken Botnick and Ira Raja explore the ways these kinds of embellishments are ”a means of celebrating life” in India; they also explore what it means to be “a maker” – anywhere.
…”on India’s streets, the act of making functional things — cups, chairs, signs, books — is creativity at its most direct expression; meeting a need. Embellishing that object, making it special, requires that the maker take time with the thing to ask more questions, not only about its function, but also about the person who will use it, and about how to distinguish that object from the universe of things that surround it. Embellishing… simultaneously makes the object more reflective of the maker’s distinct personality and brings it into the shared cultural values of beauty and function. Embellishment delights because it surprises. It is found in completely unsuspecting places, like the bucket of a backhoe. It takes ordinariness and celebrates it as if to say, “Hah! You didn’t find this beautiful, this lump of dung, but here it is and it is beautiful.”
We loved learning things you can do with saris that we never imagined, which made us see them in a new way, like this fence made of saris… read more…
We were walking through Prospect Park in Brooklyn one twilight evening when we heard the mellow sound of saxaphones reverberating “a capella” through the trees. We came upon two men standing in a leafy clearing. We stopped to listen, then asked where they were from. The confident man strolling slowly with his alto soprano sax had been a professional musician in Africa and was teaching his friend to play, in the park, where no neighbors would be disturbed. His friend tentatively played notes scribbled on a religious pamphlet propped on the side of his case; the title of his tune “Music in the Air”… read more…
…love that someone took the time to make this sign that makes us look again, shakes up our thinking, makes us laugh…for no obvious return: stealthy, anonymous public gift-giving.
From on-the-the road in California and Seattle, in hotel rooms, and in flight, we’ve been reading your thoughtful ideas for taglines, posted in Comments or sent via email – lots of them! Even far from our home base, we feel connected by the community that has grown up around ‘the improvised life’ and awed at the generosity of its readers.
We were putting together a big post about it, with a list of ‘improvised life’ descriptors and taglines that happily boggle the mind, when we found ourselves exhausted, jet-lagged, running-on-empty. We need a rest, we thought…which is part of the deal, of writing, blogging, or making ANYTHING. You’ve got to give yourself permission to stop, and rest, in order to restore the flow. So we are, for a few days. We’ll be back on Thursday, having wandered around the Pike Place Market in Seattle, and drunk some excellent coffee, and recuperated from the red-eye home.
(Meanwhile, we’ve been taking notes on setting up a hotel room “camp” and strategies for surviving on the road. Stay tuned.)
We offer this photo of duct-tape Converse All-Stars as a symbol of what is possible in any given moment.
We are big fans of guerrilla activities of all sorts, from the making of art and theater to gardening and marketing. So we loved stumbling on this picture of a striking guerrilla action that took place in Berlin recently: While cars were stopped for green lights, a group of cyclists dumped 13 gallons of colored paint in large puddles onto the street in Berlin’s busy Rosenthaler Platz. As the cars drove through the puddles, their tires inadvertently became brushes to spread the paint, creating a constellation of colored lines. (The artworks’ masterminds posted signs nearby explaining that the paint wasn’t harmful and would wash off with water.) Like the best guerrilla actions, this one shakes up habitual thinking and seeing (and hence maybe living) in positive ways. read more…
Maria Robledo sent this photo from her iPhone with a short, expressive email: “Holton served these cheeries w the empty glass for the pits . Liked the improvised moment”
We like the improvised moment, too and the fun, useful little solutions that mysteriously come…
We’ve noticed that once we started thinking about the idea of improvising, we began to see it happening all around us; we began to DO it ourselves a lot more. Just a slight shift in view, really, turns it into a practice…
We discovered that improvising is really about following ideas as they connect one to another, even with the most ordinary things…like a blog post pointing in many directions – to a recipe for warm fresh cherries, or where to buy the glass, or Holton’s or Maria’s artwork, OR maybe your own brilliant, unexpected idea…
(BTW, you can click here to find out where to buy the swell, thin $3 glass that Holton used for cherry pits; it is useful for many things…we often use it as a vase for a small bunch of flowers, and for individual rice puddings…and Amontillado milkshakes…)
We’re totally addicted to the History Channel’s “American Pickers” for many reasons but mostly because it taps into our primal need to hunt, hoard, share, trade, wander, and tell stories.
Antiques don’t magically appear in your local antique store or flea market. They are foraged and found and repaired by people like business partners Mike Wolfe and Frank Fritz, the shows unlikely stars. Mike is the thin buttoned-down Bud Abbott character while Frank is more Lou Costello with his day-old beard.
Together they wander the back roads of America in a white panel van in search of what most people see as “dumps”: broken down houses and garages you speed past on the way to the beach or the lake, that appear to be filled with junk. When Mike and Frank find one of these places, they’ll pull over and introduce themselves to the owner – older men, widows, daughters – who might be willing to let them forage through their stuff, hoping they’ll come across some treasures to buy, if not some compelling stories.
The result is great television full of improvisation. read more…
We found ourselves so burnt-to-a-crisp after an all-day photo shoot, we couldn’t write a word about the millions of wonderful ideas in our files…We were about to call-it-a-day, secretly wondering if something would come at the very last minute to be our post for tomorrow (it often does, mysteriously)… In one last jump onto the laptop, we found this amazing video on our friend Peggy Markel‘s Facebook page. She travels the world leading culinary adventures and has an eye for wild beauty of all sorts…like this…
…which became the perfect Friday post. TGIF….GIFT…
This weekend, I will take a few days off to go down to West Virginia to the Ramp Supper in Helvetia, West Virginia, a feast served family style in the community hall by the Farm Women’s Association – ham, beans, cornbread, slaw, applesauce, hash browns, ramps raw and cooked. Depending on the weather, the raw ramps – like a lily of the valley with a scallion bulb - could range from fiercely peppery to sweetly pungent riffs on garlic-leek-shallot-chive. Fried with rendered bacon in an iron skillet, they melt into garlicy greens, their flavors deeply mellowed. The supper is followed at dusk by a square dance that rocks the hall for hours with fiddle music whose wild strains reverberate throughout the valley. These people mean it. The yearly ramp supper is in celebration of the first living thing to poke through the ground in spring and the end of a long, harsh winter. read more…
We find ourselves inadvertently collecting images of fabulous dresses made out of unlikely materials, like this beauty made by Cristina Liedtke from discarded peanut M&M wrappers. It’s on display at TerraCycle’sGreen Up Shop, a pop-up shop set up in empty retail space in Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City.
“To create the gown, more than 1,800 flowers were individually cut and sewn from 600 Peanut M&Mwrappers, a time-consuming process that took over 100 hours of labor. (Five yards of silk charmeuse and silk shantung were used for the lining.)
Liedtke’s wearable artwork depicts flowers in bloom: The top of the dress displays the initial budding, while the middle portrays a ‘landscape of blooming vibrant poppies,’ according to the designer. ‘Finally, the bottom of the dress expresses a collage of fully bloomed mature flowers,’ she adds.
Terracycle is a company who makes useful products out of garbage, like an Oreo Wrapper Kite and planters made out of crushed computers and fax machines. They package the products in “garbage” as well: used/recycled bottles, boxes etc. Terracycle seems to have figured out ways of recycling that have stymied city governments.
One of my favorite house gifts (to give or to get) is an of-the-season treasure from a good local market, like perfect cherries in early summer, or a bunches of lemon verbena for tea in August, or Meyer Lemons in late winter… These gifts require an eye on the market and a bit of luck, which is part of their great charm to people who like to cook. Recently, I discovered an unlikely treasure in Whole Foods’ normally risk-averse produce section: fresh chickpeas, for a few bucks a pound. They look like a cross between a fat, blunted pea and an edamame (soybean in its shell). Standing in the aisle, I shucked one and ate it, to discover its vegetal pea-like flavor and crunchy texture. I realized that I never considered what the fresh form of a dried chickpea might be.
I scooped some into a bag and took them to a friends’ dinner party. read more…
While visiting Pam Hunter who was in New York starting her sabbatical a few weeks ago, I was spellbound by the blue tape art works on several of the windows of the apartment she was staying in. They were nothing more than rough-torn, inch-or-so pieces of blue painter’s tape arranged as permeable rounds – clouds, flowers? – through which you could view the distant urban landscape. They were so brilliantly simple and seemingly impromptu, by an unknown artist who changed the view using the most ordinary of materials. read more…
We’ve been a fan of the amazingly inventive artist/designer JooYoun Paek since we came across a picture of her pillowig a few months ago. We’re thinking we should just make a practice of stopping into her website periodically to see what she’s up to and GET OUR HEADS CHANGED in a flash. That happened when we saw two little videos of her wearable inflatable chair dress which made us LAUGH and THINK and IMAGINE all at once.
It’s a polyethylene a dress that’s connected to shoes that pump air into an inflatable bubble attached to its rear part on each step. With each step, the dress slowly transforms into a chair (the view from behind is hilarious). The wearer can sit down when she likes; her body weight slowly deflates the chair back into the original dress. Paek calls her Self-Sustainable Chair a “conceptual garment”:
“…it motivates users to consistently switch between walking and sitting as a loop behavior on the street. The balance between exercise and rest would be maintained by wearing this suit. The purpose of this project is to transform the humdrum experiences produced by routine walking commutes into an amusing interactive performance.”
The effect of Paek’s little videos are really surprising… read more…
This picture is of the salt flats in the amazing Mojave desert in California. If you didn’t know it, you’d think it was a sparkling sea: a perfect visual antidote to March (which is going on way too long)….
It was taken by Morgan Satterfield, during a road trip/break from her blog The Brick House, which is about renovating her mid-century cement house on-the-cheap. Morgan has a $100 Rule: “Do not spend over $100 on any ONE item.” That seems like a thrifty challenge that would make for some interesting improvisations (which you can check out by searching the categories ”before” or “after” on her site)…
The best thing about The Brick House is you get to see the slow process, and the way stuff stays UNDONE for a pretty long time until she and ‘The Boy’ can get it together, with limited resources and time, to tackle each project. We need to be reminded that renovating a house, creating a blog, bringing ANY idea to fruition takes time… step-by-step with lots of switchbacks and unexpected delays…and much needed breaks…until the sum of many small successes and steps completed = SOMETHING SWELL!
arranged as permeable rounds – clouds, flowers? – through which you could view the distant urban landscape. They were so brilliantly simple and seemingly impromptu, by an unknown artist who changed the view using the most ordinary of materials. 
