Sometimes we are just completely knocked out by the connections of ideas and people we make daily writing ‘the improvised life’. Like Matthew Levesque, a reader from San Francisco who runs Building Resources, a not-for-profit depot of re-usable and re-manufactured materials for building and landscaping….
b) and the EXTRAORDINARY website and work of the Campana Brothers, the Brazilian design team. Their website needs Flash to run and will try your computer’s resources. And once you enter, it will eat at least a half hour of your time, a fabulous example of what’s possible in a website. Somehow, in the oddest ways possible, the Campanas give you a sense of the process/origins of their furniture and housewares. On the main page, click Projects, and then click on the project you want to see. Prepared to be surprised…
Mashable recently posted a great round-up of iPhone Apps for the Great Outdoors. You can download guides to trees, wild mushrooms, birds, and butterflies, not to mention ‘scat and tracks’ and the constellations overhead. Given our survivalist ‘what would I do if?’ sort of mentality, we love the US Army Survival Guide ($1.99) which blends a little of everything, from Edible and Poisonous Plants to Temporary Shelters and Basic First Aid: the full book downloads onto your phone so you don’t need to be connected to read it. We browse through it when we have a few minutes on the subway or in a waiting room and always find useful info. Today on the E Train, we read about “Field Expedient Cooking and Eating Utensils” (useful for camping in woods, and at sparely equipped cabins), and “Direction Finding” (we especially love “Making Improvised Compasses” ), and “Clouds, Foretellers of Weather” which would be helpful anytime. Pretty cool.
We especially love the section called “Improvise”:
“Learn to improvise. Take a tool designed for a specific purpose and see how many other uses you can make of it.”
We just heard about the highly rated SAS Survival Guide ($6.99) which includes videos of the author, a former SAS instructor, showing techniques…
Over the years, I’ve furnished my living spaces with second-hand furniture, scavenged from flea markets, thrift stores, Ebay, and occasionally, found on the street. Early on, I didn’t really know what I was doing; I just bought stuff whose look I liked, that I could use, that seemed well-made. I’d clean the wood with Briwax, or lightly rub some stain into worn spots…add a brush of paint..I’d figure out ways to bring my purchase back to life. Then I found George Grotz’s classic book The Furniture Doctor and used his brilliant, tried-and-true techniques for repairing veneer, or masking scratches.
In the process of scouting second-hand furniture, “my eye” and understanding inadvertently read more…
Steven Berlin Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation is so full of smart thinking, fat salient bits, illuminating stories and revelations…so full of deep understanding of the true flux-and-flow of ideas and innovations, and so compellingly written, that we are knocked out. We’ve dog-eared and marked-up our advance copy to remind ourselves of ideas to revisit or blog about. Rather than spin-our-wheels trying to give the gist, we offer this terrific video.
Read Johnson’s book from beginning to end, and/or open it anywhere to find a nugget, like why, for example,
“Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces us to explore.”…
…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…
A few weeks ago, we wrote about the artist Tom Sachs, whose amazing studio was featured in The Selby. When Todd Selby asked Sachs “What are the ten rules of your studio?” Number Ten was: “creativity is the enemy”. It is also the subject of an artwork Sachs created. Then, a reader wrote us an email that said: “I’d love follow up on why ‘creativity is the enemy’”. Good idea.
We figure the answer lies partly in the title of Sach’s artwork-sign:”Self-Fullfilling Prophecies”…It seems to warn of the danger of trying TOO hard, of being self-consciously creative and arty, rather than just…being…Maybe creativity is the enemy because it threatens the status quo, takes energy, takes us into various kinds of chaos and unknowing. Whew…We didn’t realize how Sach’s sign would make us think!
While we were mulling, we stumbled on New Liberal Arts, a free “book full of ideas” masterminded by Snarkmarket‘s Tim Carmody, and a collaboration of many. Aaron MCleran,”Generative Media Artist” wrote a section about Creativity, which we thought was SWELL even though we weren’t sure what “generative”* means. We’ve excerpted it here (underscores, ours):
“…creativity should be studied as a kind of martial art. You should train to be a ninja of creativity. read more…
A bumper crop of summer vegetables, fruits and herbs might well take us into early October this year, and there is no more inspiring guide for enjoying it than Canal House Cooking Volume N°4. The indie cookbook series’ beautiful hardcover ‘Farm Markets & Gardens’ issue delves deeply into tomatoes, potatoes, herbs, the grill and cocktails, to name a few. The evocative writing, photographs and drawings are so charming, the book will work find for armchair cooks as well. The recipes tend to be unfussy, to-the-point, and delicious, like Tomatoes Take a Warm Oil Bath, which has the look of a children’s story about it. read more…
In 1996, when I was about to take an extended trip to Italy, Fred Plotkin’s Italy for the Gourmet Traveler was my guide. Plotkin, who had been traveling in Italy since 1973, forged the guide from years of passionate traveling, living and eating there – over 700 pages crammed with personal notations and insider views on wonderful restaurants, trattorias, coffee bars, farms, cooking schools, festivals, and markets. He is at his best with small towns and off-the-beaten path places, like the Mushroom Market in Trentino…
“In season this is the place to buy freshly picked mushrooms. If you have any fears, you can look for the police officer who is the designated mycologist on duty. This piazza also has orderly stands selling cheese, meats, fruits, vegetables, beans, honeys, and flowers.”
In Plotkin’s guide, you will find essential bits of history and architecture and opera, as well as terrific, insightful writing. His chapter on Napoli begins:
“Fasten your seat belts! One can stand absolutely still in Napoli and feel like a spinning top.”
The guide has been so good and so reliable that it has gone through several printings; an updated edition was just published by Kyle Books. Like its predecessors, it suffers from only one problem: it is heavy, a 3-pound brick of solid information, particularly daunting in these times of overweight-luggage fees. Unwilling to travel Italy without Fred’s book, I improvised a solution (and figured out how to hack a guidebook): read more…
Improvisation requires focus and time, two commodities few of us possess. And when you’re waist deep in alligators, it is hard to remember you came to drain the swamp. How can we get focus and time?
Many people we know have read The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss. The title appeals to our inner escapist; we dream of an easier life where the focus is on what we really want to be doing, on our family and friends, on what matters most in our lives. The book describes how anybody can be a Lifestyle Designer, and fund their life with only four hours of work a week. That seems a stretch at best. If you have a “hot cakes” book and an online supplement business like Ferris does, maybe it’s plausible. But we’re too distracted and exhausted to start a business. Is such a radical shift necessary to be happy?
We think the real value of this book is as a set of tools that can help you make time to improvise a more enjoyable, less stressful life. Here are our favorite, truly do-able ideas to fight off the alligators and keep focus on what matters: read more…
The other day, Maria Robledo sent over some cookbooks with a note: “2 women are doing this lovely diary type home cooking book and one is CHRISTOPHER HIRSHEIMER.”
Maria and I both worked with Christopher years ago when she was the food editor of Metropolitan Home and then Saveur. Christopher is famous for having become a superb photographer, with no formal training, just…like…that! having been a highly regarded editor and writer. (How she did it is a story in itself which we’ll post later.)
Christopher, along with her friend and colleague Melissa Hamilton, has again defied the usual notions of how things work and created an ongoing series of utterly charming, absolutely usable cookbooks without a mainstream publisher. It’s called Canal House Cooking.
“We are home cooks writing about home cooking for other home cooks…Everyday we cook. Starting in the morning we tell each other what we made for dinner the night before. Midday, we stop our work, set the table simply with paper napkins, and have lunch. We cook seasonally because that’s what makes sense. So it came naturally to write down what we cook…”
The books are so compelling and such a pleasure, and so beautifully produced, that I called Christopher up to find out the story behind them (which I want to know whenever someone does something amazing, in a completely unexpected way). read more…
Constance Old recently alerted us to Crispina ffrench’s work:
“Crispina ffrench is an artist/crafter who makes terrific “improvised’ work. She is author of a recent book called The Sweater Chop Shop: Sewing One-of-a-Kind Creations from Recycled Sweaters which teaches how to cut and felt cast-off sweaters to make them into cool new things: like mufflers, blankets, pillows, and…even other sweaters. I have a really beautiful blanket she made (below). She has her own website www.crispina.com and sells work through Etsy.”
Felting is essentially a controlled way of washing knitted wool until it shrinks and tightens, changing both texture and color. We started to imagine huge possibilities right then and there (and in the inadvertently shrunken sweaters we may have mistakenly given away)…
We also remembered Page Goolrick telling us about the black turtleneck she made into a cardigan; she cut it right up the front with a scissors and had her local tailor sew in a big stainless steel zipper…
We started to deconstruct our notions about cut knit unravelling unmercifully, and started to think about old sweaters completely differently… read more…
Gever Tulley, founder of Tinkering School for Kids, has published Fifty Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do), a book we’ve been waiting for, not just to give to the kids we know, but us adults as well, because the same idea applies: By exploring the world (maybe doing things we never got to do as kids) we learn and get ideas and new develop parts of ourselves. I want to:
throw a spear…
…make a bomb in a bag…
…spend an hour blindfolded…
…construct my own flying machine…
…melt glass…
Tulley isn’t cavalierly sending your kids (or you) into danger. He gives detailed instruction and explanations about the why’s and how’s things work, as well as possible dangers. He figures, wisely, if your kid really understands how something works, she will be more able to navigate its challenges herself, use it creatively AND stay safer.
About a year ago, Tulley gave a taste of his book-to-be in a TED talk called “Five Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Children Do”. It’s full of wisdom about learning, creativity and danger safety. Here’s the video, and the transcript, along with a page from the new book:
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…
Working Big is a remarkable book about large-scale art projects for kids. Written in 1975, it is long out-of-print, but available these days as a free, downloadable pdf from Public Collectors. It gives an expansive view (with how-to’s) of discovery projects to do with your own kids, or fantasize about for your (grown-up) self.
Working Big’s essential premise is that kids and artists often take similar approaches in exploring and working with their environment. Its chapter titles – ”Kids’ Space Equals Artists’ Space” and “The Artist Shapes as the Child Shapes” – should be printed on tee shirts, or scrawled on walls. Pictures of kids working away with obvious pleasure are interspersed with images of works by notable artists, like Robert Smithson‘s earthworks, The Broken Circle and Amarillo Ramp. This inspiring book holds a lot of wisdom about kids AND the creative process in general:
“When nature itself provides the medium, children are eager and intuitive artists. They need no one to tell them that the moist grittiness of sand is just right for sculpturing or read more…
or 
…
, or lightly rub some stain into worn spots…add a brush of paint..I’d figure out ways to bring my purchase back to life. Then I found George Grotz’s classic book 
and used his brilliant, tried-and-true techniques for repairing veneer, or masking scratches.
is so full of smart thinking, fat salient bits, illuminating stories and revelations…so full of deep understanding of the true flux-and-flow of ideas and innovations, and so compellingly written, that we are knocked out. We’ve dog-eared and marked-up our advance copy to remind ourselves of ideas to revisit or blog about. Rather than spin-our-wheels trying to give the gist, we offer 
. The 
was my guide. 
by Tim Ferriss. The title appeals to our inner escapist; we dream of an easier life where the focus is on what we really want to be doing, on our family and friends, on what matters most in our lives. The book describes how anybody can be a Lifestyle Designer, and fund their life with only four hours of work a week. That seems a stretch at best. If you have a “hot cakes” book and an online supplement business like Ferris does, maybe it’s plausible. But we’re too distracted and exhausted to start a business. Is such a radical shift necessary to be happy?
which teaches how to cut and 
, a book we’ve been waiting for, not just to give to the kids we know, but us adults as well, because the same idea applies: By exploring the world (maybe doing things we never got to do as kids) we learn and get ideas and new develop parts of ourselves. I want to:
is a series of books - with a companion 
