Right after news of Gourmet Magazine’s demise hit the food world like a missile, Lydia Wills sent us an article written by Stefany Ann Golberg, an artist, musician, and founding member of the art collective Flux Factory. She writes really smart, thoughtful, acute articles for The Smart Set and is worth following. Buried within her article about Gourmet and the American way of eating, is a perfectly-contained piece about M.F.K. Fisher, perhaps America’s greatest food writer. In writing about food, Fisher wrote about love, hunger, and real life with an stunningly original voice. In two paragraphs Golberg GOT what Fisher was doing, and why she resonates so strongly today. (And why she’s been a major influence on ‘the improvised life’.)

“In 1942 the celebrated writer was heartbroken by the sparse offerings of wartime rationing. Ten years earlier, Fisher had her own culinary love affair in France. She returned to America wanting… to inspire in its citizens a similar passionate relationship with great food. Rather than offering her readers a fantasy, though, she responded to the times with How to Cook a Wolf. The book synthesized reality and joie de vivre by encouraging an appreciation of daily living. The chapters were at once practical and joyous: “How to Greet the Spring,” “How Not to Boil an Egg,” “How to Be Content with a Vegetable Love,” “How to Be Cheerful Through Starving.” It excoriated the (unnamed) magazines that “set up a fantastic ideal in the minds of family cooks” and instead promoted this: ‘Now, of all times in our history, we should be using our minds as well as our hearts in order to survive…to live gracefully if we live at all.’ Even though written in wartime, the sentiment is the heart of Fisherian ethos, which looks more contemporary and relevant than ever.

Fisher’s oeuvre fills the gap between traditional European sophistication and American heartiness. She created a signature brand of unpretentious decadence, a decadence that turns simplicity into luxury just by exploring it.”

The Art of Eating, a collection of five of Fisher’s works including How to Cook a Wolf, continues to be reprinted. I leafed through my dog-eared copy, through ”How to Keep Alive”, and “How to Rise Up Like New Bread”, revisiting Fisher’s “mystic materialism of a hungry woman” that had, long ago, changed the way I view things. It still has the power to strip things down to essentials, and remind us of the path.

You can read the entire text of Fisher’s Alphabet for Gourmets, courtesy of Gourmet online…

“S is for sad…and for the mysterious appetitie that often surges in us when our hearts seem breaking and our lives too bleakly empty…

I is for Innocence…and it’s strangely rewarding chaos gastronomically”…

In the vast Times Square subway station in New York City, there are always lots of musicians busking for money, many of them pretty great. (We love the old guy who plays a saw; it echoes through the tunnels to sound like a high soprano…). Everybody is in such a hurry getting where they need to go down there, it isn’t easy for the best of musicians to get a lot of people to stop and listen. When that does happen, it almost always takes the form of spectators silently watching the act, at a safe distance. So we’d love to know how this extraordinary event came about: a circle of strangers in the subway  singing “Hey Jude” full out.

Life is SO amazing!

The video was made by by 39forks “artist in ny” on Vimeo.

Via BoingBoing, via Making Light…

Constance Old

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…

Constance also had an interesting take on Etsy:

“Etsy is improvisational too in a way. I’m sure you are familiar with it–the craft site where individual crafters are able to sell their products. The basic model is that the artist rents space on Etsy and in exchange Etsy organizes and presents work by category to make it easily accessible to visitors to the etsy site. Commerce is conducted directly between buyer and maker. A beautiful melding of the timeless (handmade) and the contemporary (technology)…”

Crispina  teaches workshops sweater re-use and other crafts. For info, write alchemy.initiative@gmail.com.

Thanks, Constance!

Thomas Ashcraft

For several years, this sign from Thomas Ashcraft’s site Heliotown has been my browser’s home page. In all that time, I’ve never tired of it, nor become blind to it (though Tom has since made it invisible on his site, having moved on to other things). Every once in a while, a friend will be over and use my computer to check their email or look something up. When Tom’s sign pops-up they invariably say “That’s SO great; can you email it to me?”. It seems Tom’s words are ones we would all do well to remember. They are another way of saying “answers always come“…”the moment provides“…

You can still enter Heliotown through the sign, a sort of back door…

Related posts: Ashcraft’s Music: D-I-Y Recordings of Sun + Planets

Thomas Ashcraft: Artist as Electroreceptor

Their new video is nothing but brilliant and silly ideas, one after another, so good, I wish I could watch it in slow motion (watching it without any sound is a whole other experience). It was designed and built by Syyn Labs who describe the amazing constraints they had to work under on their website. They call it “Rube Goldberg Machine”. It’s an homage to the work of Rube Goldberg, after whom an adjective was named; he was a cartoonist known for his wildly-elaborate inventions designed to accomplish some simple task, like this “Simplified Pencil Sharpener”:

Rube Goldberg

For Goldberg, machines were “a symbol of man’s capacity for exerting maximum effort to achieve minimal results.”

It makes us think about all the ways we do things the hard way, and wonder if there’s a more direct path to where we want to go…

…but then we realize that all those switchbacks and seemingly circuitous routes often lead us to learn what we need to, to unexpected revelations and meet-ups, and places we were meant to be that we never imagined…

Via Boing Boing

Ellen Silverman sent this image* to us in response to yesterday’s post about four-year-old Marco Giglio’s snow being. The subject of her email read: “Two Feet of Snow.”

…All that effort and imagination for this fabulous, fleeting sculpture that had to make people smile and think:

Human creativity is so amazing!

*There was no photographer’s name to credit. If anyone knows who stopped to make this amazing image, please let us know.

Related post: Snow Into Being

Thanks, Ellen!

“A snowman is an anthropomorphic snow sculpture of a human. They are customarily built by children… in celebration of winter. ” –Wikipedia

Anthony Giglio’s four-year-old son Marco spent last Sunday afternoon improvising his first snowman in Jersey City’s Overlook Park.

Once he had rolled and stacked three giant snowballs, he hunted for natural scraps around the park to bring it to life. Here is the mysterious process of Marco shifting his original creation into one that more fully expressed his vision:

“The first smile he fashioned was from the thickest stick, and he described it as a mustache covering a smile…

…Then, as we searched for bigger branches for arms, he found this u-shaped branch and yelled: Daddy, this is the smile branch!

…After he swapped the ’stache for the smile, he said the mustache could be the corn-cob pipe. Also, we found a piece of coconut shell (no idea how THAT got into the park since there are no palm trees in Jersey City),  that he said was a beret.”

…a snow man with a beret!

A few days ago, when I took a walk down quiet street to view the new snow almost a foot deep on everything - trees, fences, cars -  I was looking through the eyes of a lone adult at all that beauty. Marco reminded me of a whole other view: of the possibility for expression with this amazing free - and fleeting - art material that drops from the sky. I could easily have made a little sculpture right then and there…

The next big snow, what are you gonna make?

Thanks Anthony!

The other day, I found myself following links to MORE great Japanese masking tape (some printed with numbers, some made of old book pages.) until I found myself at nothingelegant, an Etsy store with ALL SORTS of surprising and useful items for sale, like this set of alphabet and number stamps, along with a handy four-color stick ink pad, (think of the messages, poems and designs you could stamp onto stationary, gift wrap, a hand or a cheek or nails…). There are fabrics printed with a calendar or a map of the Paris metro…

…to make pillowcases with, or cover books, or dishtowels…

…

…and Kraft paper stickers with a zen “hand made”…

and more… a trove of materials (and possibilities)…

Related post: Japanese Masking Tape in Cool Colors + Patterns

via elizabethaquino.blogspot.com

In 2003, Bobby McFerrin and Richard Bona did this ten-minute improvisation at the Montreal Jazz Festival. McFerrin is known for using his fluid voice and body as instrument, making many levels of sound and beat simultaneously. Bona is a Cameroon-born guitarist and musician. At the beginning, you can see and hear the two musicians feeling each other out, listening to each other closely and a bit tentatively; gradually they find a groove, playing off each other and taking ideas in various directions to make a wonderful piece of music. It’s a fine example of the way collaboration works: one person has an idea that makes the other person imagine something, and that idea inspires the other, and they move back and forth building and weaving their ideas together (leaving some behind as they go), to create something unique.

If you open a new web page or tab, you can listen to it as background music while you surf or explore other things.

Oven mitts are an example of a good idea with serious design flaws: shaped like a giant mitten, they are unwieldy and stiff, and don’t really allow for grasping hot things securely with one hand. But it never occurred to us to envision an alternative, other than ordinary pot holders. That is, until we got an email from Stephen Peters who wrote:

“Why do people use oven mitts when there are perfectly good inexpensive welding gloves with FOUR fingers per hand available?”

…my wife uses welding gloves I gave her, and loves them… The simple thin leather or goatskin style work fine. “

Stephen is an electrical field service technician who travels around Pennsylvania, Maryland, the Virginias and the Carolinas installing and repairing battery backup systems…and who obviously thinks outside-the-box.

We poked around welding glove possibilities. On the whole, they are way more stylish than oven mitts, and make grasping searing-hot pots and casseroles, or odd pieces like baking stones oven racks, MUCH easier. Stephen recommends the gloves from Harbor Freight ($6.49). We were smitten by the handsome Predator Raven welding gloves ($10.99), above…

…and these bright blue cowhide gloves ($6.94)…

…and then there’s these swell red leather hearth gloves from Lodge ($21.00)…not technically welding gloves but…so beautiful…

Thanks Stephen!

Some time ago, our friend James Bullock, who is a cable car gripman in San Francisco, was followed for twenty-four hours by a video crew. The video of James’ day - all 24 hours of it - will be shown simultaneously with videos of nine other people from around the world, in a specially-designed pavilion on February 26th in San Francisco; you’ll be able to move at will from one screen (or life) to another to get a unique view of what’s going on in daily lives all over the world. All are part of the Global Lives Project, an international collaboration of filmmakers, architects, designers, programmers, photographers, and artists working to document the diversity of human life experience around the planet. They are building, and inviting others to contribute to, a video library of individual “twenty-four hours”. Much of it will be available online, with subtitles in a host of languages.

“There is no narrative other than that which is found in the composition of everyday life, no overt interpretations other than that which you may bring to it.

By extending the long take to a certain extreme and infusing it with the spirit of cinema verité, we invite audiences to confer close attention onto other worlds, and simultaneously reflect upon their own…

…This project is designed to remain a work-in-progress.We continue to accept new footage for our expanding archive -  fresh additions to an evolving visual conversation. “

There’s been an immense amount of effort, and enthusiasm and money put into this project, as well as sponsorship, and media coverage. We have some questions: If there is a camera present, are we really viewing an authentic day? We wonder what the effect of watching so much unedited footage would be like, since parts of people’s day are pretty boring when viewed from the outside. Or are they?  Or will the effect these videos, running and viewable at the same time, be extraordinary, way more than the sum of its parts?

We’ve watched footage here and there, and found some made us want to fast-forward, while others were amazingly interesting, especially the different ways people try to rouse themselves from sleep. Perhaps the real idea is this: How each of these lives resonates with a viewer is a totally personal thing, depending on our history or concerns or interests or…

Watching a clip of Edith Kaphuka’s twenty-four hours in Ngwale Village, Malawi, above, we found that it does, indeed, make us reflect upon our own.

Here’s more about the Global Lives Project:

(And one day, the Global Lives Project archive will act as a record, of days and ways of life gone by…)

I was walking across 125th Street in Harlem the other day and noticed a guy standing outside of a store, wearing really surprising earrings in one ear. “Wow, cool earrings” I said, “Did you make them?”

“Yeah, and they’ve got a story…”  He said with a smile. He told me he dreamed them, dreamed of earrings made of mailbox keys, etched with his astrological sign, Aries.  So, he took a couple of mailbox keys to a jeweler and had them etched…in silver.

He was really proud of them.

…Original and beautiful, with a backstory I never would have guessed...

Thanks Fuad (sp)!

In an email yesterday morning, a reader mentioned that her experiences living in developing countries led her to develop an approach similar to ‘the improvised life’s. We asked where she had lived and what that approach was and were knocked out by her answer:

“I lived in Vietnam for four years and Bolivia for three - amazing and fantastical places, where I learned many, many things, not least of which is how to view objects neutrally, so that you can see what they can really do beyond their stated purpose..Like the woman in a market in Hanoi who was peeling carrots and other ingredients, to sell as ready-made ingredients for folks to buy and make their own lotus blossom salad, and what did she use as a peeler? A chopstick, a razor blade and a cleverly-deployed rubber band: voila, vegetable peeler, third-world style….”

The jerry-rigged vegetable peeler reminded us of Kevin Kelly’s wonderful blog Street Use, about ingeniously improvised solutions, customizations and contraptions he and his friends have spotted in their travels around the world:

“In short — stuff as it is actually used, and not how its creators planned on it being used. As William Gibson said, ‘The street finds its own uses for things.‘”

Kelly blogged an exhibition called Global Street Food, “dedicated to the fascination with improvised kitchens in public places,”; it was presented by Dornbracht, a German manufacturer of bath and kitchen fixtures. The exhibition is a beauty and its online slideshow will make you smile with wonder. To view, click here, then click on “Passengen 2009″ on on the left column; when a new page shows, click on “Slideshow” (there appears to be no direct route; it’s worth the three clicks to get there).

This morning a reader wrote to alert me, very gently and carefully, to a glaring typo in yesterday’s post on self-publishing. I wrote “elicit” when I meant “illicit”. Yikes! It got me thinking about making mistakes, (in public, no less) like this one made last night, when I was writing the post late, blind after a long day, moving too fast…

Oh well. Having spent years as a perfectionist, these days I’m opting for less perfection, for trying to get to the point, get things out there, improvise, try stuff, make mistakes. (But then, this is not surgery or flying an airplane.) And when I make mistakes: own up, learn from them, correct them… and try to write enough ahead to give the work to a copy editor (a friend)…

The reader who corrected me this morning also wrote that she loved ‘the improvised life’ despite its typos, and told this story about how it has influenced her thinking:

“I thought of you this weekend when I was in the 99-cent store and briefly considered buying a three-piece basting set for some pastry I was planning to make, because I had misplaced my pastry brush in a move. Then I said to myself ‘No, you don’t need to buy some ‘throwaway’ set with two other pieces you don’t need; just use a paper towel or something.’  It’s how I think about things now - use what you have instead of buying something that you really don’t need that just promotes more production of unnecessary cheap items…

…Your daily reminder in my inbox keeps it front and center in my head. Thank you for that. It’s an orientation I have long subscribed to…but one that is easy to push to the back of your head when you are bombarded with ‘it-only-costs-99 cents-it’s-easier-to-get-something-quickly attitude’ that surrounds us.

Just so you know that your blog has all sorts of positive effects in this world, and this is just one small one. Thank you so.”

So, I’m gonna work on the typos and keep writing… and THANK YOU all for bearing with…

…and ask: what is it like to find typos in the midst?  What do you think about mistakes?