(Video link here.) This video features the great natural history documentarian, Sir David Attenborough, reading lines from the Louis Armstrong song “What a Wonderful World” as stunning scenes from Attenborough’s documentaries fill the screen. While we watched, we were both delighted and a bit stymied. The video was both beautiful and perspective-broadening, while bordering on being precious and slightly manipulative. It was in fact made by the ad agency RKCR/Y&RH as a tribute to the aging Attenborough and a promo piece for his latest, and possibly last series, Frozen Planet. That explains alot.
As often happens, we held off on posting it until something came along to point it in an unexpected direction. We found it on the strange and beautiful blog Rolu, in a poem by James Broughton. If you mute the video’s corny soundtrack and keep the poem in mind as you watch, you get a WHOLE other experience…
photo: herbert matter, courtesy of the calder foundation
Of all the brilliant artists we feature on ‘the improvised life’, Alexander Calder holds a special place in our hearts. In addition to his monumental artworks and legendary mobiles, he was a prolific creator of household objects for everyday use. If he or his wife Louisa or a friend needed something utilitarian, he would devise a solution on the spot, with whatever was at hand.
The trove of his improvisations is vast and inspiring; each invites rethinking of common objects we often take for granted: tin cans, pie tins, wire, bits of scrap wood. His creations were not only useful, but visually stunning.
Here is the artist telling how he created a barbeque grill out of an iron garden chair after his son-in-law Jean Davidson invited a horde of people over for a party: read more…
Film Maker/ProducerLauren Malkasian recently sent us this email:
“We love your daily inspirations and have very much been taken, moved and forever changed by ‘the improvised life’; it’s like a magic tonic everyday. So here is a little something from us, all the way from LA, that we thought you might enjoy.
We live on a street just out side Griffith Park. Our house is set on a hill and our daughter along with most of the kids in our neighborhood have little or no yard space to play in so she came up with this… read more…
As much as we love the vertical shipping pallet garden we wrote about in May, it’s flaw is that if you needed to move it off your balcony, you might be in some trouble. Enter the milk crate farm! When the bad economy stalled construction at New York City’s Alexandria Center for Life Science, Chef Sisha Ortuzar and business partner Jeffrey Zurofsky had a brilliant idea: use the stalled site as a farm. There they grow fresh veggies to use at Riverpark, the restaurant next door.
While rooftop gardens are popping up all over the city (see the Brooklyn Grange for example), this one presented a special challenge: it needed to be portable read more…
This photo entitled simply “Curious Photo” (from the George Eastman House collection), reminded us of the many possibilities for wearing clothes backwards. We remembered a chic woman we knew that used to wear ordinary cardigans backwards, turning them into a something ELSE…
…then we thought: Ohhh, THAT’S what we can try with an Issy Miyake shirt out made out of unbelievable fabric that doesn’t seem to work as a button-down anymore. We put in on backwards, and voila: a strangely beautiful drape to the collar now worn in front.
Wearing clothes backwards can be something to try before getting rid of a piece of clothing that no longer seems to fit. It’s a reason we love Rick Owen’s clothes; sweaters are meant to be worn backwards, frontwards, upside down…a strange liberation.
We went on the hunt for some images. Our favorite: read more…
Dutch Interior magazine VT Wonen recently commissioned stylist Frans Uyterlinden to create interesting ‘show house’ using an eclectic mix of materials. (Check out a preview at VosgesParis). Our favorite bit: a bench/sideboard made by lashing together recycled boards. We see big possibilities in this idea… read more…
When Style-Files recently posted about furniture maker and interior designer Katrin Arens, we couldn’t help seeing a shipping pallet in her rustic dish rack. Or vice versa…
…h-m-m-m…take a slat or two away, or pull the whole thing apart to build with the slats you like…it’s a simple configuration…
…there appears to be no end to what a shipping pallet can be.
“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…
Since we’ve been hanging out with our friend Ana, helping her fix up her place in Harlem (more on that soon), we’ve noticed that people in the neighborhood love to hang out on the street. We see men sitting on folding chairs at card tables playing poker, and families on stoops, and there’s alway a crowd around the bike repair place, where a chess game goes on in the midst of the fixing and conferring.
Recently we spotted these makeshift seats: boards cleverly wedged under the fence along Marcus Garvey Park to create a leverage effect and seats with backs. Someone even thought to bring a pillow. It’s the perfect, impromptu way for two friends to hang out on a summer day.
Recently, we came a cross an old hard drive that we had swapped out of a computer long ago; who knows what revealing bits of information were on it? We searched the internet to learn how to dispose of a hard drive without leaving ourselves open to industrious hackers. We could either wipe it clean by ways that were way beyond our competence or…DESTROY IT. A friend of ours took it onto the street and smashed it to bits on the sidewalk using a $9 hammer we’d bought on Amazon. She returned with the twisted wreck, which had become was curiously beautiful…an inadvertent sculpture. read more…
Charles McFarlane, a friend who is a student at the Rudolf Steiner school (and who provided the material for the great post on World War II improvisations recently), sent us this inspired improv he spotted at school.
“…when a friend’s canvas shoes started to separate at the sole, he used dental floss to chain stitch them back together.”
We always admire people who fearlessly take things apart on the way to REconfiguring them in a new way. So we love the antique table Faye from You are the River hacked, to give it a rustic/modern look; she salvaged rough-hewn top and added moderne legs. “I picked up a super funky table on Craigslist for $50, removed all the rusty screws, sanded it down, removed the legs and voila, I have yet another dining table!” It’s the legs that make it (They remind us of the one Sally designed out of black steel some time ago. read more…
A friend called us recently to ask our thoughts on containers for planting her 10′x5′balcony in New York City. She wanted to have her plantings along one side of the terrace only, to leave the rest of the space clear to see the view and do tai chi. Attuned we started spotting some nice looking rectangular and square containers in catalogues. AND we stumbled on Fern Richardson’s charming blog Life on the Balcony, which addresses the many balcony garden related issues, from how to reduce noise, to how to make a screen between you and ugly sightlines. We love her great how-to on turning a shipping pallet into a vertical container. It’s one of the few vertical gardens that’s appealed to us visually; we instantly wondered about painting or staining the wood really dark to chic-it-up a bit*. Anyway, the gist seems easy and doable… read more…
On the lookout for flower pots with sleek modern lines, we love this one made from a hacked Ikea lamp. Says creative hackeress Heloisa Fiasco of Raleigh, NC:
“I bought this ceiling lamp at the AS IS section of Ikea. When I saw it I thought it would be the perfect modern flower pot that is so hard to find for an affordable price.
It already has an opening in the bottom where the wire would normally go. Instead the water can make an exit through there now.”
