My brother is a huge Bill Murray fan so recently having had the “experience” of working with him I asked him if he wouldn’t mind signing a Birthday card for him. Inside he wrote, “grab this day by the neck and kiss it”…my new mantra for life.
WOW!!!! Yeah. Perfect mantra (whether Bill Murray actually said it or not.)
And now here’s the quote we clipped, Murray talking about his teacher Del Close (more WOW!): read more…
(Video link here.) We are always on the lookout for people, books and sites that give an honest view of what it takes to make or do or be something. So were intrigued by this video trailer for The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking. The book is Oliver Burkeman’s exploration of various kinds of ”inspirational, success-oriented thinking” and new research that posits that “positive thinking” might not be as useful as we thought. It lead him to a radical take on happiness and success: the power of negative thinking, in which we learn to “bathe in insecurity, uncertainty and failure.”
We’re definitely gonna check it out as we’ve long thought that these principles are actually keys to the creative process. This Guardian piece distills a chunk nicely. read more…
We were stunned at the news of Nora Ephon‘s passing, wondering how could it be? It seemed like she would always be here. As columnist Liz Smith wrote: “What the hell will we do without you?”
Fast Company recently published Failure Does Not Suck, an interview with Sir James Dyson, who spent 15 years inventing the world’s best-selling vacuum cleaner, among other paradigm-altering housewares. Here’s a potent snippet:
You once described the inventor’s life as “one of failure.” How so?
I made 5,127 prototypes of my vacuum before I got it right. There were 5,126 failures. But I learned from each one. That’s how I came up with a solution. So I don’t mind failure. I’ve always thought that schoolchildren should be marked by the number of failures they’ve had. The child who tries strange things and experiences lots of failures to get there is probably more creative. read more…
The harsh reality of white-painted floors like the ones in our ‘laboratory’ is that they are prone to scratching and losing their pristine look FAST. Since our plywood floors were painted a beautiful oyster shell white (THAT story to come in a later post), it has been our personal challenge to GET OVER the fact that they will get nicked, scratched, stained and who knows what else…
The solution: to view them as a canvas to paint as we wish, when we wish, WHAT we wish. We’ve started a mental file of possibilities. The zig-zag pattern on this rug would translate easily to being painted on the floor read more…
(Video link here.) Thomas Roebers film ‘Foli’ shows the rhythmic daily life of Baro, a Malinke village in Guinea; it is entralling. Almost eleven minutes long, it can be a lot to watch in a busy day. Break it up, watch bits over the course of a day. It will bring into focus the rhythm’s of your life.
A man who we assume to be one of the tribe’s leaders speaks occasionally throughout. His words form a kind of mantra, poem, prayer, with a rhythm of their own: read more…
Recently, two friends described the deeply challenging situations they were going through as “really interesting”. They are both artists, and we thought, ‘Ah-h-h just like them to view difficulty from a different lens’.
We’ve been trying on the idea, with which we’ve become increasingly comfortable since we started writing ‘the improvised life’. Instead of just reacting, we’re trying to really LOOK at the difficult situations we find ourselves in, shift the view, see what possibilities they hold, what is interesting about them.
Easier said than done.
Then we read The Good Short Life, an astonishing essay that appeared last July in the New York Sunday Times. Dudley Clendinen, a former national correspondent and editorial writer for the Times wrote candidly about his diagnosis of ALS, a painfully fatal disease: read more…
UPDATE: Since we first published this post, Una Morera’s video has become inaccessable online, most likely because it was made an official selection for the New York Food Festival. Yay for Morera. So sadly for us, you’ll have to wait until it’s made public again. Fortunately, we sussed the video and its essential quotes, below.
When we first got wind of the Una Morera’s short documentary about Maurizio Negrini, a 3rd generation Italian baker, we callously thought “h-mm-m, bread…probably too specific …better suited for a food blog.”
We found that this beauty of a video goes way beyond its subject into much deeper realms…or perhaps it is that it reminds us what handmade bread is really about. “Artisan baker” is about bread as nourishment and as metaphor, bread as cosmic substance, thoughtfully expressed by Negrini: read more…
After Scott McDowell attended a class in theatrical improvising with Charlie Todd, founder of Improv Everywhere, he faced a quandery: how to reconcile a basic tenet of productivity – saying “No” and setting limits – with the essential principle of improvising – saying “Yes, and…”.
“Yes, and” is a protocol that allows for anything to happen, and it goes like this: No matter what your fellow actors present to you, instead of negating it, belittling it, or disagreeing with it, your job is to say, “Yes, and…” Accept the scenario as it’s presented to you (regardless of where you wanted it to go), and then to add to it.
Having found this excercise compelling, McDowell decided to see what happened if he practiced “Yes, and…” in the “real” world of work, family and obligations for 24 hours. He summed them up recently in a post on 99%. Although he found saying “Yes, and…” doesn’t work all the time, it is a powerful tool. Our favorite revelation: read more…
In response to our many LEAP photos, and the recent one of a woman wading in (a slow leap) – a definite obsession – reader Maia Tabet emailed us this adage…with her tiny comment.
It’s perfect – charmingly old-fashioned, almost children’s rhyme-ish – and speaks to the practice we work to cultivate, of having faith in the process of doing something new and perhaps frightening, that a “net” or answer will appear. (The quote is by John Burroughs, a nineteenth century author and naturalist who also said: “A somebody was once a nobody who wanted to and did.”
The other swell piece of the exchange was learning about one of our readers, whom we’ve never met… read more…
About a year ago, we wrote a post called “On Things ‘Not Looking Good While You’re Working on Them”, about the difficult – and often ongoing – “middle” of a project when things haven’t come together. We were heartened by artist John Currin‘s revelation about the creative process: the ONLY way to make thing anything happen is if you are able to endure the uncomfortable mid-point period of chaos and disorder, when things don’t look good.
Which is what we found on moving day 10 days ago. Despite our best efforts to complete our “simple” renovation (home of ‘improvised life’s new laboratory) and have things all pulled together when we moved into our new space, the movers arrived at the new space with a giant restaurant stove that was, inexplicably read more…
Last week we went to the opening of an exhibition of artist Holton Rower’s paintings, made by pouring gallons of vividly colored paints onto plywood forms. They are on display at The Hole in NYC, an immense space that Rower’s monumental work fills with reverberating color and energy.
The paintings are made of humble materials: plywood and acrylic paint transformed by Rower’s imagination and daring. Some are so big that they could only be photographed by laying them in the alley behind Rower’s studio and photographing from 3 stories up. Tonight, we went to see him pour a painting and witness liquid color becoming form (as you can, on YouTube). read more…
A few weeks ago, The New York Times Magazine ran Peter Dinklage Was Smart to Say No, a story about Peter Dinklage, the 4-foot-5 actor who, after years spent saying NO to playing stereotype elves and leprechauns – and consequently often living in poverty – won both a Golden Globe and an Emmy for his character Tyrion Lannister in HBO’s Game of Thrones. A quote from Dan Kois’ interview with Dinkelage really made us think:
“I feel really lucky,” he said, then added, “although I hate that word — ‘lucky.’ ”
When I asked him why, he mulled it over for a moment, looking away. Then he focused back on me.
“It cheapens a lot of hard work,” he said. read more…
We found this quote (punctuation ours) on French by Design this morning and have been mulling it all day. It was unattributed. When we did a search to see where it might have come from, we found Weight Watchers and Islam and a bunch of other sources.
What do we want MOST? Can we subject the wants of the moment for the WANTMOSTS?
We’re not that simple… Sometimes the WANTMOSTS aren’t clear. Sometimes the Wants-of-the-Moment turn out to be a path read more…
. The book is Oliver Burkeman’s exploration of various kinds of ”inspirational, success-oriented thinking” and new research that posits that “positive thinking” might not be as useful as we thought. It lead him to a radical take on happiness and success: the power of negative thinking, in which we learn to “bathe in insecurity, uncertainty and failure.”
