(Video link here.) To give his quadriplegic friend, Pascale Honore, the experience of surfing, Ty Swan, rigged a simple Kmart backpack (with leg holes cut out) to be a harness with which he could carry Pascale. Then he strapped her onto his back with duct tape. The video, pure gumption, valor and generosity, had us in tears.
Said Swan:
We were just sitting around one night having a few beers when I thought, `yeah, I reckon I could surf with Pascale on my back’.
Everyone said we were crazy. Even the loosest people I know said we were crazy. read more…
How important do you think a sabbatical is for replenishing creativity?
Stefan: On a scale from 1 – 10, 12.
We take Sagmeister’s idea to heart and put it into practice in small ways: a week-or-two’s sabbatical here-or-there.
Our self tells us when it’s time. When ideas and energy feel mired, and the daily disciplines of writing and foraging ideas become curiously daunting, we know it’s time to take time out of our usual routine (which we mostly LOVE). We’ve learned the hard way that creativity depends on rest as much as it depends on action.
Then we STOP. Take stock. See what happens….
….We’ll be back on June 10th, possibly sooner.
Meanwhile, we encourage you to poke around ‘improvised life’s huge archive, by search term or random visits. And we’ll continue to post content of Facebook (you don’t need to have an account) and Twitter.
This Memorial Day weekend has us thinking about extraordinary friends who have passed away over the years, and the many gifts and resonances they left behind. For us, Memorial Day becomes Memory Day, rich with memories of lives lived BIG and generously. Each of the people we remember was completely unique, one-of-a-kind, original and taught us valuable lessons about living gamely and courageously. They were indeed warriors.
Maria’s Robledo‘s instagram of ramps reminds us that the wild leek that grows throughout the Appalachian and Catsill mountains in spring won’t be around much longer. Like many truly wild foods, they possess mighty powers to fortify the body and lift the spirit. Buy ‘em while you can get them. If they’re in good shape, they’ll keep a couple of weeks in the fridge with their roots in a jar of water, and the whole bunch covered loosely with a plastic bag.
We’re heading to the farmer’s market Saturday morning to get a mess, to braise them with olive oil or bacon or pancetta fat to serve as a side dish or with pasta OR to whip up a huge batch of Ramp Butter, which we’ll eat now on great bread, or throw on peas, asparagus, pasta, eggs, mashed potatoes or… We’ll freeze the rest, rolled into logs and wrapped in plastic wrap, to enjoy for months to come.
If you don’t know about the wild West Virginia ramps festivals, check out our post here. At one many years ago, a ramp-intoxicated friend was inspired to throw a ramp into a bottle of good bourbon. He brought the ramp-infused bourban back the following year. Under the Appalachian stars, we swigged a strange new moonshine that tasted of onion, chocolate, caramel, earth.
(Video link here.) Balance is a mesmerizing video of Rigolo Swiss Nouveau Cirque artist Maedir Eugster, creator and master of the “palm rib balance”, in which he builds a living mobile out of palm ribs and a single feather. It had to have been carefully plotted (the palm ribs appear to be notched) and rehearsed over and over (with many spills and failures). Still, it has the feeling of improvisation because Eugster has to be so IN THE MOMENT, feeling every air current and movement, adjusting himself constantly to maintain…perfect balance.
I see these outdoor junkyard tubs featured here and there, but I liked the rustic simplicity of this one, from a diy featured at Houzz: salvage transformed into elemental luxury.
We had one years ago on our back deck in Malibu. I found an old tub for $5 in a junk yard with a flaking ocean scene painted on the rusty sides. I bought a rubber stopper for a dollar,propped it up up on a couple of bricks to level it, and filled it with a garden hose. Helluva a lot cheaper than a hot tub. Or a real pool. No humming filters burning electricity day and night, no chemicals. In fact, no plumbing at all! When we pulled the plug, we watered the surrounding trees.
If you like, skip the stilted, overlong 2:22 minute set-up of this video about the food International Space Station astronauts eat…Jump right to 2:23 and Momofuku chef David Chang improvising with pouches of freeze dried shrimp, asaparagus and cheese grits (among other things) in an attempt to jazz up the fare for astronaut Chris Hadfield. It is the ultimate in the always-entertaining chef’s challenge: “make a dish out of what’s in the fridge” (in this case, pouches).
And then stay tuned while Hadfield shows the one constraint Chang didn’t factor in: lack of gravity…and watch him gobble weightless asparagus.
While walking in the park across the way, I passed a tree stump left behind after Hurricane Sandy. Overwhelmed with fallen trees, the Parks Department had done their best to remove the huge tree bodies with chain saws that struggled against massive trunks; the cuts were often roughly-made or incomplete like this one: a tusk was left protruding from the akimbo trunk. I’d walked by it dozens of times and never seen the possibility that had been right in front of me all the time. I had only to turn our head at an angle to see, ready-made, a chair. read more…
Recently, we went looking for a 24-inch round metal bistro table for our Harlem terrace and hit a dilemma: whether to buy the pricey classic Fermob table (top photo), made in France, (THE table used in many public spaces), whose durable finish we’ve tested in the guise of a rectangular table we’ve stored outdoors for 2 years OR
…a good-looking knockof (bottom photo), made in China and $100 cheaper. It’s 2 pounds lighter, a concern due to the high winds up here, and we have no idea how the finish would hold-up, or how it looks in person as opposed to a photograph. If it looked cheesey or flimsy, sending it back would be expensive. On the other hand, Terrain, the store that sells it guarantees it for a year. Reviews we read for other Fermob knock-offs complain of easily-scratchable powder coating and flimsy construction. Terrain claims their matte, powder-coated finish is really durable.
Part of our improvised life is making the most of our money, and we LOVE finding less expensive routes to well-designed stuff. It’s a personal challenge we find immensely gratifying WHEN we succeed. But we’ve learned the hard way that going cheap can often be expensive read more…
(Video link here.) Paulo Goldstein sees himself as a craftsman in his approach to repair. It seems to us, he has the viewpoint of an artist, and certainly his repairs reflect a rare sensibility. We found this short video incredibly illuminating, for the many levels of living he addresses. Here’s the gist, but there’s way more in this 5 minutes:
REPAIR IS BEAUTIFUL began with the idea of solving frustration. A broken object delivers frustration because it doesn’t achieve its functionality, but the same principle applies to a broken system that caused the financial crisis, which has affected our lives since 2008. In a time of uncertainty, taking things into our own hands and having the feeling of control back can be very therapeutic. Repair is Beautiful aims to give back this feeling of control – by scaling down a major society problem to a human size and projecting frustration upon broken objects that can be repaired through design and craftsmanship. The final outcome is a collection of intriguingly repaired objects imbued with new meaning and functionality. The once rejected objects reflect the environment that created them and call us to question our society as a whole.
Check out Goldstein’s director’s chair repair inspired by a suspension bridge:
There is something really charming about the patches of “freesyle” painting on the entranceway walls of this Los Angeles home. It “breaks” the expected symmetry in a lovely way.
(And we have a thing for breaking with the expected…)
(Video link here.) We’ve written in the past about the virtues of hula-hooping as exercise. But we’ve never seen SUCH an inspiring example as Grace Jones, age 65-ish, performing Slave to the Rhythm at Roseland. Amazing body, energy, joy…
If you crank the music up and have a hula hoop on hand (or just feel like a dance break), it’s the perfect rhythm to be a slave to for a while… read more…
We found this wonderful image on Maria Robledo’s Instagram. Ohhh, what a great method of storing receipts (emptying pockets or bag then-and-there.) Thrown into a space between books —some amazing ones at that— they take on a curious beauty.
We have a box in an easily-accessible file cabinet that we throw them into to collate later. Whose got time to scan and organize ‘em?
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