“Regarding the ‘what if’ to music. You must look at this video! Jarbas Agnelli, a Brazilian musician and film director saw these birds on electric wires that reminded him of the music staff, and wrote a song based on their configuration. It is great stuff, and right in line with your post today.”
It’s a beautiful example of the hidden potential within each moment, what scientist Stuart Kauffman called “the adjacent possible”. Perfect!
We spotted this very odd picnic table on Planetargonautes, a French blog whose most recent post was in January, 2010. We poked around its eclectic archive, around the several years of stuff, using our basic French reading skills to navigate the author’s charming, rather ‘out there’ writing. (Using a language translator turns it into a sort of poetry.) We had the feeling that an abandoned blog is a little like something found floating in space. You climb on board and look around for signs of life…take energy readings, wonder where everyone went, and follow the evidence…
Suddenly we fell through a hyperlink to the site of Daniel Gantes, who designed the picnic table. We really liked his statement “Who am I?”
“I think I’m one of the few colour-blind designer in the world. When I was child in the school I painted a tree with wrong colours, and all my schoolmates laughed in my face, that was cruel. Since that moment I started to fight against my problem, and I learned all about colour. At the end I developed a peculiar system to work with colours. I think I turned the problem into a virtue, and I learned there’s a solution for every problem.”
And we realized then that the dormant Planetaronautes is still sending its message out…
In 2009, artist Lee Walton exhibited his “destination specific” sculptures: brightly colored, asymetrically-shaped slabs of plywood, dated, with directions for being taken taken out of the gallery and “displayed elsewhere”. He drove one to a field and leaned it against a tree stump. From a distance: a winter field with a surprising blast of red.
We love the idea of placing a vividly-painted geometric shape…around… as a bit of pleasant subversion, say, read more…
…has a roof made of shade-making organic materials through which one can see the stars…
…
What would you build?
These are some of the Talmudic constraints that twelve design contest winners worked under to make their versions of a sukkah, the ephemeral, rough-hewn dwelling built to celebrate the Jewish harvest festival of Sukkot. The twelve unique structures are on display for two days in Union Square Park in New York City. Alerted by a friend, we ran over to see them, and to learn about the amazing idea of a sukkah, about which we knew nothing, and which expanded our ideas of both “shelter” and “celebration”. read more…
While in Shanghai a year or so ago, photographer Alain Delorme became fascinated by the extraordinary loads carried by migrants on their bicycles and other rigged vehicles: ”piles of stacked ‘made in china’ products which form unusual sculptures…loads of tires, water containers, office chairs, flowers…”
For us, these are images of crazy everyday ingenuity…(plus balance, innate and strange gifts for architecture and engineering, gumption and bungee cords)… read more…
Improv Everywhere is devoted to “causing scenes of chaos and joy in public places”. Over the years, they have invited anyone-who-wants-to to participate in their missions which have included Cell-Phone Symphonies to No Pants Subway Rides. In the latest, they instructed their agents to appear at Coney Island dressed in tuxedos and ball gowns bought at thrift stores or other cheap venues.
“We covered a mile-long stretch of beach with a diverse group of people of all ages (from babies to sixty-somethings) laying out, playing games, and swimming in the ocean, all in formal wear.”
We find this video curiously liberating to watch. (It totally changes the look and vibe of black tie in the best, most unexpected way possible..).
Until our recent vacation, we hadn’t been to the beach for so long that we’d forgotten what wonders lay there: raw materials free for the playing with…
…Our friend James brought a ball with him, then hunted for the perfect piece of driftwood, for a pick-up game of stickball
(and we realized that we never really thought about that form of rough-and-tumble baseball born of improvisation: Don’t have a bat? Use a stick!)… read more…
The Selby has run a really nice story-with-few-words about Andrew Field, chef of Rockaway Taco, in Rockaway Beach, Queens – right by the beach – who loves surfing and keeps bees on his roof (we are always heartened when we discover a New York City beekeeper; it reminds us that nature is here, even in the midst of the city…”build a hive and they will come!…)
We’ve been pondering what makes Todd Selby’s work so compelling. He’s not a great photographer in the usual sense; individual photos are not terribly well-composed or exposed or beautiful. But, man, does that guy have an eye for a story, which he always manages to tell in a compelling way, with lots of photos. He makes sure to choose interesting people in their very personal spaces, honing in on the details and surroundings, so you get a sense of where this person is living and what their life is like, some of what they see when they go about their day. Like this little detail that speaks volumes: read more…
…While we’re on the subject of bound dictionaries, largely considered an anachronism these days, we loved finding a dictionary on a stand at Zeitgeist Coffee in Seattle. We found ourselves flipping through randomly to discover a few odd words and ideas we never would have found otherwise: teeny surprises in our day, and a reminder read more…
We love Nina Saltman‘s and her husband James Bullock‘s pun of a paint job at their house in San Francisco: faux brick painted on a concrete and block wall!
We’ve spent the past ten days or so on the other side of the country, looking at everything but our laptops, and being nothing but lazy. Somehow doing NOTHING filled us up, gave us lots to think about and share…
Like this sign we saw (when Nina said LOOK UP!) in Balmy Alley in San Francisco, known for its wonderful murals, from one end to another…
(and which happens to be right around the corner from Humphry Slocum, our favorite ice cream place – more on that later)… read more…
Lately, we’ve been reading posts on some of our favorite blogs saying, in various ways, “we’re TIRED, burned out, so need to disappear for a while.” 2 or 3 Things I Know really nailed it:
working in the creative
field can be so demanding
for design is quite personal
…an extension of yourself.
for me,
it’s hard to separate
work from life
the blurring of
the lines is beautiful
but sometimes it can
be quite taxing
you never know
when to stop.
step away.
refuel.
That would be us. So we’re heading out of town for a week or so to rest and fill ourselves up again.
We thought we’d leave you with this beauty of a video: cooled out, fluid, dancing… improvising… in the rain. (We recommend turning the dubbed-over sound off to really SEE it…closer to how it might be if you were hanging out just down the street…)
When we were in Santa Cruz recently, a friend dragged us to a giant shopping mall. In no time, our senses were overwhelmed by TOO MUCH: stuff for sale, Cinnabon and Starbuck’s smells, piped music, people. Stumbling on the new Lego store made it all worth while. We loved its giant wall of help-yourself bins of Legos: we could buy the exact amount of whatever color(s) we wanted. Since we naturally seem to lean toward the monochromatic, we started imagining all the things we would devise with white Legos (maybe with one orange one stuck in to mess it up a little), or maybe these hot green ones… read more…
Although the title of this video is Jessica’s ‘Daily Affirmation’, we see it as a video of a little kid counting blessings. Not only does she list the stuff she has, she really LOVES it. Her fierce, slightly-playing-to-the-camera soliloquy is quite a celebration of the GREAT ordinary.
We find that counting blessings, though seemingly New-Agey, works: the practice changes your view from NOT (“enough”…”able”…”worthy”..) to appreciating the A LOT that’s there already, that has the potential to be used in different ways, to support what we want to do…
“The effect of a grateful outlook on psychological and physical well-being was examined… The gratitude-outlook groups exhibited heightened well-being across several, though not all, of the outcome measures across the 3 studies, relative to the comparison groups. The effect on positive affect appeared to be the most robust finding. Results suggest that a conscious focus on blessings may have emotional and interpersonal benefits.”
How do you count blessings? Just look around and name what’s in your life that you’re glad to have. Like Jessica does…HOUSE…HAIRCUT…COUSINS…
You can do it anywhere, anytime, in secret or out loud…it’s a good subway practice when you’ve got nothing to read…
Our friend Peggy Markel just got back from months of Culinary Adventures – her own, and facilitating those of the intrepid guests that embark on her “underground” tours of Tuscany, Elba, Sicily, Morocco. Peggy seems to know everybody, that is, anybody who is seriously into food in all the places she travels. She has a nose and and eye and an openness to find her way into the heart of a place, through its food. We love her reports on her Facebook page and on her blog, often in the form of teeny unedited videos that offer a glimpse into the rest of the world. (It was Peggy who sent us the clip of the Indian Water Music and the Sardinian Women Singing while they washed dishes.). Here is one of a Moroccan cook named Baijah crushing almonds for a traditional chicken pastilla at Jnan Tamsna in Marrakech, Morocco (one stop on Peggy’s Moroccan Adventure). Baijah just folds the almonds into a clean piece of cloth (or a dish towel) and whacks them with a rolling pin, a method she refers to as the “Berber food processor”.
It is a perfect strategy for when you’re staying in a bare-bones kitchen (like a summer rental) and have big ideas. read more…
