Blu Dot is offering a surprisingly compelling clock widget you can download to your computer. It is a one inch square that sits anywhere on your screen you like; with each new minute, a new number image appears. The effect is constant surprise and little jostles to your mind about change and possibilities. For free!
Thanks, Pamela!
The other day we got lost in a website that is so useful and inspiring, it has become a sort of role model. “THAT’s some of what we’d like ‘the improvised life’ to do for people”, we thought, and put it in the file of bits and pieces that mirror what we imagine for its future.. Kevin Kelly, who has had his finger in a million visionary pies, has eleven websites under KK.org; one of our favorites is Cool Tools.
“Cool tools is a web site which recommends the best/cheapest tools available. Tools are broadly defined as anything that can be useful…”
We love it because we’re always looking for ways to DO the ideas that our in our head, and we need tools to do that. There are 37 or so categories of tools that you can delve into depending on your interest or need, like Materials, Design, Homestead, Learning, Consumtivity, Vehicles, Craft, Dwelling, Living on the Road, Life on Earth, Play, Big Systems…
We found – and learned about – all sorts of stuff, like Oblique Strategies, One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas, a boxed set of cards created by Brian Eno read more…
Yosemite, California 7:48 a.m.
Andrew Sullivan of theatlantic.com is the huge-traffic blogger of The Daily Dish; its often fierce content ranges from politics, to heart-breaking illicit tweets from Iran’s recent election protests, to grim pictures of torture. For a couple of years now he’s broken up the intensity of his writing and opinion with an ongoing post category called A View from Your Window, a simple photo inserted into the midst of the day’s many posts with a caption indicating time and place, that one of his readers around the world sent in. It is just that: what one person sees when he/she looks out the window.
These photos have a curious effect: of giving instantly a different point of view, and a reminder of the very similar and very different dailyness of lives around the world. They are somehow both refreshing and heartening.
But what is really interesting is the book Sullivan made them into. read more…
Bella Foster
Why not send Valentine’s type messages any day of the year?
We love Kate Spade’s e-cards, designed by some wonderful artists…(free and instant) read more…
Pamela Hovland
We were hoping that Constance Old would guest curate for ‘the improvised life’…here is her first (great) post:
“Emily Campbell works as Director of Design for a British think tank called “RSA” (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) which is committed to research and projects devoted to social progress. (http://www.thersa.org/home)
She wrote a terrific essay on her blog Design and Society; it’s called “You know more than you think you do.” The gist is that professional design has alienated the individual, and designers actually have an obligation to design better access for the user into their work: then the user could fix the thing themselves without a degree…Kind of a call to simplify things and empower the individual even in highly designed objects.”
Campbell also designed this poster with Anthony Burrill which should be on everyone’s wall (and in our heads).
Thanks for the photo, Pamela!
Related post: Creative Reuse: Constance Old’s Hooked Rugs
Ellen Silverman
Ten years after it was built, my kitchen still looked great EXCEPT for the counter tops. The speckled black-white-and-gray granite that seemed so right at the time looked dated, and its pattern was too busy to use as a surface for the food photography we did in my space. My friend Holton, who is an amazing artist, designer, and gifted improvisor said “Why don’t you make a top to fit over the one you have?…Make a form out of plywood that will fit over the granite, and cover it with a soft-ish metal that can wrap around the form…”
I remembered the old burnished zinc bars and cafe tables I’d seen in France, and thought that zinc’s soft luster would be make a beautiful surface to photograph food on. So I looked up ZINC FABRICATORS in the Yellow Pages, and found a guy in Brooklyn who would make me what I wanted. All I had to do was send him a plan… read more…
Transmaterial: A Catalog of Materials That Redefine Our Physical Environment
Paper Softwall, lightweight, freestanding honeycombed paperwalls that can be arranged in almost any shape to make instant room dividers and walls…(imagine an instant “clear” space for meditating, or just plain thinking… read more…
Ellen Silverman
Our Alt-Malted Milk Balls have been featured all week on The Splendid Table, the terrific public radio food show hosted by Lynne Rosetto Kasper. They are a recent improvisation on Homemade Chocolates for Improvising, a really easy method for making shards of chocolate flavored with whatever crosses your mind, from Marcona almonds to curry powder. Mixing malted milk powder into a great, fragrant chocolate like Valhrona makes for a peak malted milk ball experience (even if they are in a radically different form). Click here for the recipe, or listen to Sally’s interview with Lynne.
Related Posts:
Food gifts: Homemade Chocolates for Improvising
Our Homemade Food Gifts on ‘The Splendid Table’
Ellen Silverman
This weekend on public radio stations across the country, The Splendid Table, Lynne Rosetto Kasper’s wonderful food radio show, will be airing an interview with Sally about ‘the improvised life’ approach to Homemade Holiday Food Gifts. Check out Splendid Table’s website for show times in your area, download podcasts or stream the show. You’ll find Sally’s recipes for Dried Apricots in Cardamom Syrup, Roasted Dried Apricots with Cardamom, and Alt-Malted Milk Balls. Holidays with the Splendid Table has loads of resources for entertaining and gift-giving.
This weekend ‘the improvised life’ will feature Homemade Chocolates for Improvising, another great food gift and staple for holiday parties.
We are beside ourselves. Corby Kummer, editor and journalist par excellence of The Atlantic wrote a big, generous RAVE of ‘the improvised life’ in his column Fresh Feeds. So we’re printing the whole thing here, because we’re so proud and thrilled, and honored:
Who really wants to go shopping at the holidays? Okay, it can be fun, especially when kids are aching to go, or children come back to visit and actually view expeditions as fun (like my cool stepdaughter, who lives in cool Park Slope).
But too often it’s forced, and not when you want it. So for relief, I recommend our contributor Sally Schneider‘s site The Improvised Life, which includes posts about the marvelous food she makes in places likely and un-, like the corn cakes with slow-cooked meat she recently and satisfyingly scrounged together in a friend’s cabin in the West Virginia Appalachians.
But the meat of the site is reports from her eye, and it’s enormously wide-ranging. read more…
AP
‘the improvised life’ is proud to be included in NYC Bloggers Do the Holidays, a group blog by “the city’s coolest bloggers”*. If you haven’t already, I recommend checking out the sites below for all the fun and illuminating holiday ideas they’ve come up with…
I found a lot of great non-New York-centric links while poking around these sites. To check them out, scroll to the second half of this post.
Brooklyn Based: Home for the Holidays
Give and Get NYC: Tis The Season to Volunteer
the improvised life: unwrapping the holidays
Manhattan User’s Guide: The Gift Guide
Mommy Poppins: Offbeat and Multicultural Family Holiday Events
NY Barfly : It’s the Holidays, Time to Drink
NewYorkology: Big-ticket holiday shows
offManhattan: Ten Holiday Getaways Near NYC
Patell & Waterman’s History of NY: A little history with your holidays
the skint: 30 days of skintmas
The Strong Buzz: Holiday Eats Old and New
WFMU’s Beware of the Blog: Happy Freakin’ Holidays Playlist
Walking Off the Big Apple: The Thin Man Walk read more…
Marjorie Winslow/Erik Blegvad
One of my favorite recipes is called Fried Water:
Melt one ice cube in a skillet by placing it in the sun. When melted, add 1 cup water and saute slowly — until water is transparent. Serve small portions, because this dish is rich as well as mouth-watering.
It’s from a book I had as a kid called Mud Pies and Other Recipes by Marjorie Winslow. “This is an outdoor cookbook,” reads the Foreword, “The market place, then, will be a forest or a sand dune or your own back yard.” It’s a cookbook for a kid’s world outdoors, even if the kid, like me, never actually acted out the recipes. Like the best children’s books, it fueled my imagination and painted a world rich with possibilities: read more…
Not yet four months old, ‘the improvised life’ got its first public mention today, in Manhattan User’s Guide, a daily, often surprising, newsletter and website that is THE word on what’s happening in New York and beyond. Here’s what it said:
“NYC journalist, chef, and author Sally Schneider has launched, with several cohorts, a new, zeitgeist-perfect website that we love called The Improvised Life. From its immediately engaging design to its thoroughly appealing idea of ‘improvising as a daily practice’, a way of taking each day with a flexible, open-mind, we can’t get enough of the discoveries, observations, and tips therein, covering food, design, DIY, and more.”
…we are thrilled and proud and happy….
Thanks a million, MUG!
www.dinnerwithjulie.com
Once the door to an idea opens, information often miraculously seems to appear. There’s some sort of attunement that seems to happen when you hold a question in mind and start trying to figure it out; perhaps it’s simply a shift in awareness that makes us see the answers around us.
Right after I wrote about d-i-y pizza-ovens, I started to stumble upon books and websites with in-depth instructions and resources for building and using wood-fired ovens, a change in name that expands the content considerably (beyond pizza – just about any food benefits from being cooked in a wood-fired oven). Even if you don’t actually have a space to build a wood-fired oven right now, these resources can help you formulate ideas for when you do, or for when you’re out camping and want to apply some of its principles to a make-shift oven. Some books, like the definitive The Bread Builders: Hearth Loaves and Masonry Ovens
Catherine Tighe
Remodelista posted some terrific pictures of my friends Suzanne Shaker and Pete Dandridge’s perfect summer house on Shelter Island, 2 hours from New York City. Suzanne, an interior designer and stylist, and Pete, an art conservator, worked with Deborah Burke & Partners Architects to build the 1250 square foot from-scratch house. It seems incredibly spacious, due in part to large glass doors and picture windows (one whole side of the house) that bring in the surrounding woods and nature, and a 20-foot dining/living/kitchen area. Ample storage keeps the minimalist house from looking cluttered.
What Remodelista doesn’t mention is that the house was made on a strict budget – less than half of what a house in this part of the world would normally cost. Every design decision was meant to be both beautiful and practical, if not always easy; the budget demanded that Suzanne and Pete give up some ideas they’d seen as essential, and become more resourceful in finding solutions. They went with inexpensive materials in many places, to spend more on others. read more…
