The Improvised Life

favorite escapist blog: cabin porn

Sally — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 10:47:09 +0000

photo: stephan tamiesie

Many of the blogs we read have direct practical applications to our lives; they give us ideas we can use in our home, office, traveling, relationships, work, self-image…

One category of blog is really for pure escapism; they offer us a break from our usual routine and vision. Of late, our favorite is Cabin Porn, pictures of cabins all over the world. Some of the images are accompanied by a bit of interesting commentary, like The Best Hut built by Jono Williams (and friends) in New Zealand.

“Built for less than $1500 using mostly scavenged or donated materials, the treehouse includes solar panels, rainwater collection, a gas-fired outdoor bathtub and a radio-controlled drawbridge.”

photo: the modern cabin

Others have little commentary, allowing us to overlay our own fantasies and imaginings…

…we really love this Maine fishing village shack:

photo: greg hartford

…the perfect virtual weekend escape!

Top photo: Stephen Tamiesie

via Manhattan User’s Guide

sighting (india): ironing board computer table

Sally — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 23:00:13 +0000

photo: peggy markel

Our intrepid friend Peggy Markel just arrived in India to prepare to lead one of her amazing culinary adventures, Tasting Royal Rajasthan. She sent us this amazing picture of an ironing board computer table and the story behind it:

“We’re staying with a new friend, Rajiv Jani, friend of a friend. It is his rig, was already here. I knew you would love it. I thought to call it ‘permanent press’. Here’s how it came about:

Rajiv lived in Atlanta for 10 years and had all of his stuff shipped back to Delhi. He set up the ironing board in a spare room for his ironing. But he found out that he could have his shirts ironed for 2 rupees each. (1/2 a penny.) 25 shirts? $1.00.

He was looking for a place to set up his home computer and set a few things down on the ironing board until he found the right place. His electronics started growing there as that was where the internet connection was and the wiring was getting too complicated to move.To buy a new table from Ikea would cost $150. Then you need a chair.

He just sort of crouched over the computer, standing up. But when his father came to visit, he liked to play solitaire on the computer. With bad knees and being 72, he thought, ‘why not lower the ironing board down?’ He found a stool that was home to a piece of art and nicked it for a chair so that he could sit crossed-legged (Indian style) on the floor.

‘Why do I need to buy a table?’ thought Rajiv. ‘In two years I have to move again’.

This was an innovative solution to not buying what you don’t need. (and had nothing to do with money)…

He is a doll. He made us a hot porridge of semolina and spices last night at 1:40 am, which we drank with Old Monk Rum (made here in India). His chai is to die for.”

…her first few hours in India and the adventure has already started via the brilliance and generosity of a “friend of a friend”; what a welcome! And we got the great story behind the ironing board computer table, which came about by Ravi asking himself “Why not?”, our favorite question.

photo: peggy markel

We look forward to more revelations from Peggy on her travels (and wish we could taste that chai)…and Indian rum…who knew?!!

photo: peggy markel

rough, hand-painted stripes on walls

Sally — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 20:02:41 +0000

photo: paul raeside

Spotted in a long post on Desire to Inspire showing work of interiors photographer Paul Raeside: walls with roughly painted stripes. Right up our alley: graphical, imperfect, charming, do-able…though perhaps not as easy as it looks (we’d practice first on some scraps sheets of plywood or walls we plan to paint over, or even heavy paper tacked on the wall).

artful body painting with mud and a bottle

Sally — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 00:02:18 +0000

We found this startling image on Roy Arden’s blog...as usual, no provenance. Oh, but the beauty you can create with some mud and a (Coke) bottle…like this curiously chic, modernist pattern stenciled right on.

(We love the idea of our bodies as a canvas).

help kickstart ‘jam in the van”s new venture

Sally — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 23:59:58 +0000

(Video link here.) When we’re introduced to a venture, our first impulse is always to ask: what’s the story behind it? What were the seeds of the idea that grew into a fully realized project? It’s the stories that win us over, which is why we’re are so taken with Jam in the Van.

Based in Venice, CA, Jam in the Van is the project of music fans looking for an uncommercialized, authentic music experience. Armed with an old Winnebago that they’ve turned into a state-of-the-art recording studio, these guys invite musicians to perform, film the unique performances, and put much of it online for free (scroll down for the current list of musicians). Music fans get to discover new artists or check out fantastic live-versions of their favorite tracks, and small independent artists get amazing free publicity. It’s such a rare and beautiful thing to see a project come together sheerly out of passion and drive.

photo: abran rubiner/rubinerphoto.com

The Jam in the Van crew have decided to take their project on the road to “find the great music that we know is hiding out across the American landscape,” filming all the way. We like the sound of it:

We will capture those musical interludes in life that don’t yet pop up on our televisions and computers everyday. We will seek out those hard to reach places that great people are sitting in, but whom we may never see unless we go out and chronicle them within our Jam Van Journey. This project will show and promote the talents and lives of the artists that we meet, while simultaneously creating a story about life on the open road in America.

When we asked Jake Cotler, one of Jam in the Van’s founders, where they wanted to take the idea, he told us: “From the beginning, it’s evolved organically. Maybe we’ll become a record label, maybe a TV show, or maybe just a bunch of stories. The idea is to keep having fun.”

If you’re equally as intrigued, you can donate to their kickstarter project to help them make it happen. Check out the quality of Jam in the Band performances with this one from Family of the Year.

the wirecutter’s trustworthy technology reviews

Sally — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 19:34:28 +0000

We find ourselves spending a lot of time sifting through product review websites as we try to make smart purchases. This can be a tedious process, and often we end up more unsure of what we’re looking for than when we started. That’s why we were really excited to discover The Wirecutter ,”a list of only great technology”. Run by Brian Lam, a former Gizmodo and Wired writer, the site lists “the best” in gadgets, from phones and TVs to cables and wireless music, to vacuum cleaners and electric toothbrushes.

We came across the site while researching portable hard drives, and really loved the layout of Lam’s reviews.Lam names the Lenovo Thinkpad USB 3.0 Secure Hard Drive as the best, but gives a thorough explanation of his choice and offers a couple of cheaper options that he still recommends. At the end of his write-ups, he includes a list of the “best sources” on his product choices, so you have easy access to a few other reputable reviews and his evaluation process.

Best of all, we like the way he thinks. He has a big-picture sensibility, writing about the different aspects of what makes a given gadget valuable, and thinking two steps ahead of the consumer (like when he suggests a cheap online back-up storage plan on top of a hard drive). We compared our past purchases of things like a flat-screen and wireless speakers and found our sensibilities match, much more than Consumer Reports. We’re gonna keep this one bookmarked, and hope you find it helpful too.

what are you reading that inspires?

Sally — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 11:23:15 +0000

gahan wilson/the new yorker

Lately we’ve been wanting to expand our fields of vision a bit. We’re always on the lookout for new inspiration for the blog, but also just for shaking up our own thoughts and routines. After asking a couple of friends for some book and blog recommendations, we realized that we have the greatest resource in our own readers!

So tell us: what are you reading that inspires you? Whether it’s a new favorite book or one you return to often, a blog you keep tabs on or one you just discovered we want to hear about it. Obviously we’re most interested in texts that encourage improvisational living or out-of-the-box self and home invention, but even inspiring fiction would be welcome. Share up to five books and five blogs in the Comments and we’ll start checking them out. We’re hoping the whole ‘improvised life’ community will get a trove of new ideas…and perhaps for a minute (here and) there, it will all makes sense.

cartoon: The great Gahan Wilson via The New Yorker

the organic commandment of frank lloyd wright

Sally — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:55 +0000

photo: galenfrysinger.com

While looking at images of Taliesin West for our string light post, we came across this sign of Frank Lloyd Wright’s “The Organic Commandment”. We’re not sure if it’s one or four, or ‘commandment’ rather than principles, but we find it worth mulling…

string lights as everyday indoor lighting

Sally — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 21:16:16 +0000

photo: blog.ounodesign.com

The great blog Ouno recently documented a visit to Taliesin West, Frank Lloyds Wright’s winter home and the main campus of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture. A photo of the “dinner cabaret room” caught our eye: strings of tiny lights glowe3d on the ceiling. We don’t know if this is a Wrightian touch or an innovation of the current caretakers (more images below). But it got us thinking about using string lights as actual indoor lighting…not Christmas lights, but strings of lights with bigger, more illuminating bulbs.

So, we went on the hunt for ideas and sources, to explore the possibilities.

We love these lights hung vertically to make a partition and define a room…

…These work as ceiling lights if you don’t have recessed lighting…

There are a number of string and bulb styles to consider. If you want to keep it simple, Pottery Barn sells 18′ sets that take 7-watt, type G bulbs (though we’re not crazy about the green wires):

The best source we’ve found is PartyLights.com, which offers a huge variety of cord sets and bulbs that you can configure as you please (including for LED, solar, outdoor and commercial use - commercial ones comes in green, white and hard to find black). We especially like their globed sets with clear bulbs, like the images above (though you can get them in a wide range of colors and sizes)…

Here are a couple more images of Taliesin’s string lights:

….

jim denevan and the possibilities of snow

Sally — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 11:20:00 +0000

(Video link here.) It’s been an eerily snow-less winter in New York City. With the exception of a single January snowfall there has been nothing—and we kind of miss it. This post is in honor of the snow we think may be on its way…and the possibilities it brings with it.

We wrote a couple of summers ago about artist Jim Denevan and his large-scale sand drawings which totally transformed how we think about playing in the sand. Now our attention has been called to his work with snow and ice. In 2010, Denevan made the largest piece of artwork in the world on the surface of Lake Baikal in Siberia. This nine-mile spiral of circles over the ice is stunning and allows us to once again completely re-imagine the possibilities of using snow as/in art.

While Denevan’s art is based on an intricate mathematical formula (the golden ratio, above), just as with sand this is the kind of art anyone can be inspired by and make their own. All you need is a good pair of gloves and some snow boots.

(Video link here.) Denevan’s work at Lake Baikal is now the subject of a documentary that started screening this fall. Learn more about it here .

Via The Anthropologist

a reader’s gift

Sally — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 02:45:17 +0000

photo: sally schneider

We received this letter via snail mail recently with a generous check enclosed and have been flying high off it ever since. Not only is the admiration flattering, but the knowledge that all the work that goes into this blog is meaningful to people sustains us in a big way. A true gift.

This little website we started three years ago on a hunch that it would resonate with people is growing, and we have some new projects on the way we think you’ll enjoy. But as we continue to grow, we still face the reality that maintaing the site has a financial component. We know you want us to avoid cluttering up the site with ads (and we want that too!). But there is often a cost to doing what you love, and we hope that if you love what we’re doing, you’ll consider becoming a friend with benefits and supporting us on a monthly basis, or making a one-time donation. Thanks dear readers. Look out for announcements soon…

With big thanks to Vaughan Greene.

65 modern art books online…for free!

Sally — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 19:12:37 +0000

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.

guggenheim archive

This news comes to us via Open Culture, who also have a handy explanation of how to best view the books:

1.) Select a text from the collection. 2.) Click the “Read Catalogue Online” button. 3.) Start reading the book in the pop-up browser, and use the controls at the very bottom of the pop-up browser to move through the book. 4.) If you have any problems accessing these texts, you can find alternate versions on Archive.org, which lets you download books in multiple formats – ePUB, PDF and the rest.

Enjoy browsing!

‘ordinary people, extraordinary lives’

Sally — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 10:52:42 +0000

illustration by melinda josie

Every year, New York Times’ publishes a special issue of the Sunday magazine called The Lives They Lived, usually famous people who passed away the year before. The 2011 issue was subtitled “These American Lives: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Stories.”.

We read the stunning issue cover-to-cover, deeply moved, often in tears, haunted by what we read. We’ve been meaning to write about it ever since.

The most insanely beautiful piece is Uneasy Rider, an interview with comedian Mike DeStafano’s in which he describes the unplanned gift of a motorcycle ride to his girlfriend who was in hospice care. If you haven’t readyyour quota of free Times articles, this is the one to read, though it is well worth paying for. This excerpt is only a fraction of the astonishing story:

She’s holding the pole! Marc, it was a pole with four wheels on the bottom, and we’re riding around this hospice, and you could hear the goddamn wheels jangling and banging; it was insane.

And then I pass the front door, and all these nurses are standing out front, and they’re all crying. They’re watching us, and they’re crying. And I didn’t know why they were crying. I was like, Why are they crying? I didn’t get what they were seeing. I didn’t know. Because I was just in it; I was living it. I knew my wife who had suffered, she was a prostitute, she was a freakin’ heroin addict, she was beaten by pimps — this was her past — and then she ends up with AIDS, and she’s dying, and all she wants is a goddamn ride on my motorcycle.

So the next thing you know we’re on I-95, because women, it’s never enough for them. We’re on I-95, and she unhooks the pole, and she’s holding the morphine bag over her head with her gown that’s flying up in the air so you could see her entire naked, bony body with the morphine bag whipping in the wind, and we’re passing by these guys in their Lamborghinis, and I’m looking at them like, What the hell kind of life are you living? Look at me, I’m on top of the world here.

Every story in the issue has some incredible nugget. Among other treasures:

…a thoughtful story about several “stars” of reality tv that met with tragic and unexpected deaths. On Dr. Phil, Nancy Staley, mother of Layne Staley who died of an overdose in 2002, spoke about her son’s passing:

“You can live, and you can live a long life. You don’t have to live a fantastic incredible celebrity life. You can have a boring predictable life. And you cannot believe how rich that is, until your in it.”

…a poem by Ruth Stone, a relatively unknown poet:

Things will be different.
No one will lose their sight,
their hearing, their gallbladder.
It will be all Catskills with brand
new wrap-around verandas.
The idea of Hitler will not
have vibrated yet.
While back here,
they are still cleaning out
pockets of wrinkled
Nazis hiding in Argentina.
But in the next galaxy,
certain planets will have true
blue skies and drinking water.

The story of Keith W. Tantlinger, who developed the modern stacking shipping container, which changed international commerce.

“There was no breakthrough in terms of material,” says Marc Levinson, the author of “The Box,” which tells the story of containerization. “There was a breakthrough in thinking through the entire process and coming up with a neat and economical solution.”

u.s. patent office

Illustration at top by Melinda Josie.

brown sugar butter cookies with thyme-rosemary-lavender salt

Sally — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 11:37:53 +0000

photo: sally schneider

Just before Christmas, I posted my best-ever butter cookie recipe: Ethereal Brown Sugar Butter Cookies, along with many variations. The versatile cookie dough recently inspired yet another improvisation on the basic theme. Actually, it’s an improvisation on my Tuscan Herb Salt Recipe, that I then used on the butter cookies, to make a double-improvisation: Brown Sugar Butter Cookies with Thyme-Rosemary-Lavender Salt…

I used the essential Herb Salt method to make a fragrant salt using classic Herbes de Provence: rosemary, thyme and lavender (instead of the usual garlic, rosemary and sage). After I cut out the raw cooky dough, I sprinkled each disk with some of the aromatic salt, hoping that the combination would make for a subtle, surprising and delicious cookie. It did, and has become a new favorite.

That’s what happens when you start improvising: one idea links and layers with another, until you have improvisations made of improvisations…

The basic method is simple…

photo: sally schneider

Follow the recipe for Ethereal Brown Sugar Butter Cookies. While the dough is chilling, make the Herbes-de-Provence Salt:

Pick the leaves off fresh thyme and rosemary sprigs until you have 2 1/2 to 3 tablespoons. Add a pinch of dried lavender flowers. Chop the herbs with about 1 teaspoon of kosher salt until finely minced. Transfer to a small bowl.

As you cut and arrange the cookies on a baking sheet, sprinkle a little of the herb salt onto each one, pressing it in gently. Then bake the cookies as directed.

Of course, you could always add grated Meyer lemon zest to the salt…or mince lavender flowers with sugar for a topping, as Andrea Raisfeld was imagining in a Comment she left.

‘vintage’ photo generator will transform your photos, free

Sally — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 00:17:05 +0000

photo: sally schneider

We recently stumbled on a cool Japanese site that will instantly transmute any photo you upload to an aged version “like over 100 to 150 years old.”

On the upper right corner of the site you can ‘English’ to see a translation. You choose the file where it says to, and then click the blue box below it to upload. Wait a minute and you’ll your photo transformed.

The photo above is the vintage-ized version of this one we took of Palais Royale in Paris a couple of years ago:

photo: sally schneider

When we look at our transformed photos, it’s curiously like looking at our lives as people 100 years from now might, at a time long past.

photo: sally schneider

Beautiful and strange…

via Fine Little Day