We’ve long been fans of Canal House Cooking
We’ll be giving away a copy to the lucky winner of a random drawing (see details below). read more…
free + flea
book giveaway: ‘canal house cooks every day’
music to work by: bach’s goldberg variations (free)
(Click here to listen while you read.) We are always looking for music we can work – and write – to. So we were thrilled to learn of a free, open-source Goldberg Variations by J.S. Bach, from the newly-released recording by Kimiko Ishizaka, performed on a Bösendorfer 290 Imperial piano in Berlin.
The Variations are the quintessence of improvisation. A conversation with pianist Jeremy Denk on NPR describes the piece as beginning “with an initial melody, the Aria, followed by 30 short but brilliant variations built on eight notes that Bach appears to have borrowed from Handel.” Says Denk: ”One of the most beautiful thing about the Goldbergs is that Bach uses it as a canvas in which to draw this seemingly infinite world of possibility.”
Click here, to download or stream the entire work.
via Open Culture
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make music all weekend long!!!x
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free music to work by
diagram your life with diagram.ly
There are a lot of online drawing tools, but most of them feel too complicated to be of much use to us. Diagram.ly, on the other hand, couldn’t be easier. If you’ve ever needed to throw together a quick diagram for a report and been stymied by the lack of options or user un-friendliness of Microsoft Word, you’ll find this to be a great (and free!) alternative. We’ve been using it to sketch out some storage space, but see its potential for many free-form design projects. For the more business-minded, the folks at alternativeTo point out that it would be great for organizational and work-flow charts. And certainly kids who just want to play around with shapes could have some fun with it too! It’s a perfect combo-platter: practical AND playful…
Via the always great Swiss Miss, again
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65 modern art books online…for free!
guggenheim archive
Recently we wrote about the ins and outs of selling your books online; one comment inquired about our collection of old art books and whether or not we would sell them directly to readers. While we can’t delve into the world of online sales right now, we DO want to point you to this great FREE online art resource: the Guggenheim has put 65 gorgeous modern art books online for anyone to access.
We stumbled on a treasure right away: Calder, A Retrospective Exhibition from 1963: a wonderful range of his work, from monumental sculptures and mobiles to improvised objects he made for his home. read more…
j.s bach does Christmas: live-stream and free downloads
Ever since we discovered radio station WKCR’s annual Bach Festival years ago, we’ve can’t get through the holiday season without a big dose of the great composer. The festival features music of Johann Sebastian Bach exclusively from 3pm on Thursday 12/22 till midnight on Saturday 12/31, streamable live at the top right of their site…full of fat joy for a week, whenever you want it…
like….right….NOW!
If you are a serious Bach-o-holic, you can also download James Kibbie’s recordings of Johann Sebastian Bachs complete organ works, organized into 13 different groups for download, free.
Related posts: pates’ tapes: hours of terrific music – free
wishing you: joy!
ode to joy
pates’ tapes: hours of terrific music – free
just in time for the holidays: canal house cooking vol. 7
photo: christopher hirsheimer
We’ve loved Canal House Cooking since it launched in 2009. Created and self-published by two home chefs, each book in this cookbook series is made with care, beautifully presented with unique (and do-able) recipes. We treasure our copies, but we also like to give subscriptions as gifts–new books are released three times a year, but every little book is full of enough surprises to last throughout the months in-between. (Single books can also be purchased on amazon
chic rusty steel paperweight, via ‘the selby’
photo: todd selby
We have a fondness for rusted and/or corroded bits of steel, aged into a patina that no artist could produce (well…maybe Richard Serra). We find them lying in the street, along railroad trestles, near construction sites. They are sculptures unto themselves that often have great uses, like this stunning vintage nail – a railroad tie perhaps – used as a paperweight, spotted in a from recent photo-story from the Selby.
Our favorite rusted treasure is a three-sided box we found in the street (below, left); read more…
shipping pallet floors (d-i-y?)
photo: arctic plank
We never cease to be amazed at the uses people have come up for shipping pallets. Their boxy form naturally allows for building block type constructions of all kinds. DE-constructed, they afford an unpredictable variety of rustic, often beat-up woods, in roughly 2 or 3-foot lengths. The chicest application we’ve seen lately are these floors made by Arctic Plank.
Arctic Plank “upcycles” the salvaged wood boards, though doesn’t say exactly what that process entails. It looks to us like they sand, stain and finish the boards to create a unique patina. To deal with the short lengths of wood, they smartly cut the planks to make in zigzag, herringbone or parquet patterns. These look much more finished than aligning boards vertically, which makes for a rag-tag look that has a completely different kind of charm. Arctic Plank‘s floors got us thinking about just what the possibilities for shipping pallet floors might be… read more…
career change: mark givre reinvents the book business (and his life)
photo: david saltman
“People want to make a million dollars from my books,” Mark Givre says in the pause between rumbles from the elevated subway trains passing over his head. “They’re looking for rare first editions. But I just want to get people to read.”
Givre says he’s on his second life now, and it’s an improvised one. For the past three years he has outlasted Borders, Barnes & Noble and other bricks-and-mortar bookstores with his low-overhead alfresco nook on the corner of 231st Street and Broadway in New York City. read more…
weekend music and games: national jukebox + monopoly revised
Studio 360
Driving around the web recently, we found two swell free diversions for this weekend.
Public radio’s Studio 360 recently issued a challenge to its readers to redesign the classic game Monopoly to make it jive with our current economic conditions, from ponzi schemes to market crashes. Listen to the thinking here, and then download the board, instructions and game rules.
Meanwhile, the Library of Congress has created a digital National Jukebox from their archives of songs released by the Victor Talking Machine Company (between 1901 and 1925 (with the promise of more to come). Genres range widely 0pera, blues, yodeling, jazz, and include some extremely rare recordings, like Enrico Caruso singing Serenata (below), one of many from the great singer. read more…
let’s get lost: yale’s vast fabulous archive available online
We’ve just gotten lost….in the Yale Digital Commons, the wondrous archive that they’ve recently started making available online, for anyone to browse and USE without limits. We’re talking seriously amazing images here, from Brassai’s famous images of Paris and artists in their studio to obscure, rarely-seen snapshots and children’s book drawings by Andy Warhol. So far, 250,000 images have been uploaded to their new collection catalog, with more on the way.
The Yale treasures that are now accessible under the new policy are as wide-ranging as the collections themselves and include such diverse items as a small limestone stela with hieroglyphic inscription from the Peabody Museum of Natural History, a Mozart sonata in the composer’s own hand from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, a 15th-century Javanese gold kris handle from the Indo-Pacific collection of Yale University Art Gallery and a watercolor by William Blake from the collection of prints and drawings in the Yale Center for British Art.
We instantly fell into their photography archive, wandering by Matisse Drawing a Nude Model at Villa d’Alésia read more…
party favor/catalyst: random pairs of glasses
We found this compelling image on one of Tara Mann’s blogs, and followed it to photographer Jeanie Choi’s Tumblr. Don’t know what the story is but IMAGINED what a funny thing it would be to have a party and offer guests their choice of glasses (sans lenses, perhaps) as an instant change of identity plus conversation starter. (With lenses, they’d give guests a change of view.) You can find cheap vintage glasses at flea markets and thrift stores.
free map envelope app (+ an invite to governors island)
Map Envelope is a free online app that allows you to print paper envelopes lined with a Google Maps location of your choice, tagged with your message. You print the envelope, cut it out, fold and send; and whomever you send it to gets to open a lovely surprise.
We thought Map Envelope would be perfect for invitations or announcements of events…and our friend Leslie Koch, the visionary director of The Trust for Governors Island came to mind. Over several years, she’s led the development of the 172 acre island in New York Harbor into a unique public space, with bicycles and hammocks, stupendous views, an organic farm, and mind-expanding interactive events and art happenings. Since the island was a naval base and off-limits to the public for many years, a lot of people STILL don’t know about it. We’d love to do a giant mailing of this Governors Island map-envelope to spread the word.
BTW: Governors Island’s 2010 season ends of October 10th (it will re-open for visitors next June). There’s a free ferry…
You can watch a video about it here.
free guide for (secret) inventors
Leonarda Da Vinci
We’ve lost track of the inventions and products we’ve designed in our heads, or drawn, or even rigged a rough version of for our own use. We are, at heart, secret inventors, plotting ways to make the things we’ve looked for and can’t seem to find in stores or online. We love stories of ordinary souls, untrained designers, who actually brought their brilliant imaginings to fruition – making a prototype, figuring out the steps to having something fabricated, and then selling it – and wondered what the process is…the steps along the way.
Today, we found a free online guide for inventors – modeled on a FAC – from International Design Consultancy, a UK design consultancy, that runs through each step of the process from Assessing and Protecting Your Idea to patenting it to funding it. Even though it’s meant to be a subtle promotion for IDC, we found that the little guide has an amazing amount of good information, and helped to clarify our thinking.
via Core 77
al fresco music lessons and practice (what do you do in your park?)
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…
