The PBS NewsHour recently issued a challenge: post your ideas for stopping and/or cleaning up the ongoing Gulf of Mexico oil spill on their YouTube site. They received 7,000 entries, with seriously good ideas woven through jokes about calling Macgyver and using duct tape. A few of the best are collected on the News Hours…
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We are big fans of guerrilla activities of all sorts, from the making of art and theater to gardening and marketing. So we loved stumbling on this picture of a striking guerrilla action that took place in Berlin recently: While cars were stopped for green lights, a group of cyclists dumped 13 gallons of colored paint…
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Maria Robledo sent this photo from her iPhone with a short, expressive email: “Holton served these cheeries w the empty glass for the pits . Liked the improvised moment” We like the improvised moment, too and the fun, useful little solutions that mysteriously come… We’ve noticed that once we started thinking about the idea of…
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Because we know that so many reality TV shows are scripted, it would be easy to imagine that Britain’s version of American Idol, Britain’s Got Talent, might be a total set-up, were it not for the undeniable gifts of some of its contestants. Even if we hadn’t been taken by this promotional “docu-video” of 81-year-old…
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We never would imagined how beautiful and NON-kids room pink walls could be until we saw pictures of a house designed by the great Mexican architect Luis Barrigan in 1947. Pink upon pink balanced by yellow, wood, dark floors…. expanded our view of a color we’d inadvertently made short shrift of… With thanks to the…
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This weekend, public radio’s The Splendid Table will be airing host Lynne Rosetto Kasper‘s interview with Sally about modular kitchen cabinets. Sally has been an inadvertent proponent of the European practice of owning your kitchen, installing it in a rental apartment and taking it with you to your next space. Years ago, she designed a…
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Although we’d tasted many wondrous dishes in restaurant-going lives, there is only one that we felt compelled to order three times during the same meal, eating it as appetizer, main course, dessert. Fresh fava beans, dressed with extra-virgin olive oil and a fine dice of young Pecorino cheese, were offered as a “special appetizer” one…
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We’re totally addicted to the History Channel’s “American Pickers” for many reasons but mostly because it taps into our primal need to hunt, hoard, share, trade, wander, and tell stories. Antiques don’t magically appear in your local antique store or flea market. They are foraged and found and repaired by people like business partners Mike…
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For the yearly fashion show given by Ethical Culture Fieldston School in the Bronx, Isabel Cohen wired together hundreds of metal washers to make the halter top for her floor-length attic insulation skirt (inspired by jellyfish tentacles). It was her answer to the show’s challenging theme: “Create an outfit made of anything but fabric”. The show…
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Whenever I go my artist friends Holton Rower and Maria Robledo‘s house, I see “everyday” things turned on their ear. Like this square bar of soap placed in a too-small bowl in such a way as to shift the usual view AND be a practical way to not have soap sit in water. It reminded…
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Since we first set out on our mission to find good looking clips to make shelving out of boxes, we came across Indie Furniture‘s site. (That’s what happens when you hold an idea in your mind: answers and iterations start to appear). The folks at Indie devised a clamp/joint that can fit different sizes of…
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Alastair Heseltine is a Canadian artist who makes art and objects by interweaving wood (he especially loves willow). We were knocked out by his woodpile and by his artist’s statement; we don’t know when we’ve seen one that said so much in so few words: “I am a sculptor working with mixed media relating to…
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It is peak pea season and we can’t think of a better, easier, more delightful way to eat them than this simple recipe from Canal House Cooking Vol. 3 “The idea is to pull the peas out of the pods with your teeth, just as you would eat an artichoke leaf. The charred bits of…
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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…
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The other day Reference Library posted an image from the Flickr archive of a brilliant junk collector and “seer” of things. It was of the UNDERSIDE of an old light bulb package: the red-striped ends of its six sides folded into an elegant overlapping “star” like some beautiful Japanese Packaging. The only editorial comment was…
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Makeshift is a wonderfully expressive term for “making a shift”: shifting your thinking to come up with a creative solution that accomplishes the task at hand in a unexpected way. When you find you don’t have something you need, you improvise a substitute or “shift” what you are making to accommodate it. Makeshift is one…
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In a 2008 New Yorker profile, artist John Currin said something about the process of painting that knocked us out because it is SO much about improvising, about making anything where you’re not entirely sure where you’re going: “…a big part of painting is getting used to things not looking good while you’re working on them. “…
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(Video link here.) We found ourselves so burnt-to-a-crisp after an all-day photo shoot, we couldn’t write a word about the millions of wonderful ideas in our files…We were about to call-it-a-day, secretly wondering if something would come at the very last minute to be our post for tomorrow (it often does, mysteriously)… In one last…
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When we are feeling tapped out and need an instant break, we often turn to the Encyclopedia of Life, a collaborative database intended to document the world’s 1.9 million species. It is the vision of biologist E.O. Wilson who was invited to share his “dream” in a moving 2007 TED talk: to catalogue species as…
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