My favorite rescue for leftover roasted or grilled meat or poultry is hash, by which I mean a mess of skillet-cooked onion, potatoes and/or root vegetables into which I toss the diced leftovers. Last night’s hash was rare steak tossed it into a caramelized braise of diced onions, turnips and celery root, brightened with thyme and slivers of lemon zest. I
When my friend saw photo of my hash, and then asked how to make it, I took it as a sign to publish the method on Improvised Life.
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At Carnegie Mellon University’s yearly Lunar Gala Fashion Show, Industrial Designer Miriam Buchwald showcased COCOON, her line of dresses made totally of hot glue. She didn’t hot glue fabric. She MADE the textiles out of hot-glue, which has expanded our view of hot glue’s possibility greatly, way beyond crafty Martha Stewart.
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Our friend Pamela Hovland is an extraordinary designer who helped us create the original look for Improvised Life. Our first year in business, we wrote about her clever use of ripped-out pages from magazines as her envelopes. Recently she sent us this beauty with the message “this wrapper had your name all over it“. Indeed…
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We’ve come upon this passage about saying grace before a meal many times while flipping through The Gary Snyder Reader and each time have thought, We need to do that, to at least think it if not say it aloud. Snyder’s view is just right. He puts eating in a bigger context that we find deeply connecting and comforting. His grace is about taking a moment to think about our food and to express gratitude for the hugely creative force behind it.
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(Video link HERE.) We’ve been working hard. Let’s chill and go surfing in slo-mo…a lovely meditation on motion, nature, challenge, the rewards of practice and risk… …and the joy of flying…. …by the amazing how-does-he-catch-that? Chris Bryan via Kottke
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Being very sensitive to spaces, we have long been big on tailoring hotel rooms to our own sensibility and personal feng shui. Photos of the newly renovated Hôtel Baume in Paris made us think of the many strategies we’ve developed over years of traveling to shift the feeling of not-quite-right, often OVER-decorated hotel rooms and make them more comfortable. Here are our tricks and tips, with examples:
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For the past couple of months, we’ve been participating in Essex Farm’s innovative CSA experiment. Curious about its origins, we’ve been reading The Dirty Life: A Memoir of Farming, Food, and Love, ex-journalist/city girl Kristin Kimball’s tale of her unexpected transformation into a farmer and partner of Mark Kimball, whose vision drove Essex from the start. He is a man after our own hearts (and hers, after some wild adventures)…
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I saw this old dhow (wooden boat) in the harbor at Lamu in 1988 and took a quick shot of the transom. It was a lousy photo and I always regretted not getting a better shot. Then I found this one of the very same boat in Bibi Jordan’s book, Swahili Chic: The Feng Shui of…
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(Video link HERE.) Barclay Moore is a woodworker who was fed up with broken sawhorses. So he designed is own and knocked prototypes out of plywood. Then he created a Kickstarter to raise money to sell his invention. The project, he says, developed out of necessity (as many great inventions do). What interests us most are all the constraints…
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Maira Kalman’s strange little book My Favorite Things is an enduring beauty on our morning reading pile, a meditation really, on the ways rooms, hats, shoes, things of all sorts, resonate in our lives, inside and out.
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I’ve been collecting a stash of graffiti images for a while. They range from cutie kitsch to angry gangbanger to political harangues. The ones I like best combine existing natural foliage with painted images and play around with scale—large and small—creating an improvised, witty, public art gallery.
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As great admirers of the infinite possibilities of ordinary cardboard, we love British designer Torsten Sherwood‘s simplified single-component system that encourages instinctive building. Noook are colored, double-faced cardboard disks that slot together to create overlapping formations that can create unique structures. Inspired by Legos, Noook offer’s infinite possible combinations. Designed for children, we see it as a wonderful…
Read MoreIn this beautiful video, Morgan Meis visits Chapelle du Rosier de Vence, the chapel Matisse called his “masterpiece”. The short film is a wonderful interplay of the chapel itself and clips of Matisse working. Meis’ commentary illuminates what it’s like to experience the spare space, as well as Matisse’s process and motivations:
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As fall turns inexorably toward winter, the Day of the Dead festivities serve to help us re-experience
a powerful and sustaining truth: that the intense sorrow of death and the intense joy of living are indivisibly
and forever, One.
Harlem where we’re headquartered has some seriously inspired Halloween action going on…
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Recently, we came across a portfolio of images created by legendary photographer Inge Morath in collaboration with the ever-illuminating Saul Steinberg. In the Mask Series. paper bags and pieces of cardboard totally change ordinarily dressed people into OTHER….
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Haven’t gotten your Halloween act together? Here are some alternatives to the traditional carved pumpkin that you can do in time for Halloween, one of the BEST holidays for the wild creativity that is in evidence everywhere. A re-envisioned pineapple makes the perfect scary face… …Traditional Cornish jack-o’-lanterns were carved from turnips. Dig this baby:
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French artist Didier Faustino created this spiky red wall reminiscent of a cartoon explosion as an art installation on the grounds of a 1950’s villa designed by architect and sculptor André Bloc . We love it for the ideas it gives us about doorways and walls: a wall painted that fab red/orange would make a wondrous “welcome” OR…
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Japanese decluttering expert Marie Kondo’s book “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing has taken Japan and Europe by storm. And it seems, it is in the US as well. What sets Ms. Kondo off from other decluterring experts is her underlying philosophy that dictates the work of “tidying”. An…
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(Video link HERE.) For over 100 years,some of the 20th century’s most significant artists and performers lived and worked in the 165 studios that lay hidden atop Carnegie Hall. The studios were rented by creative people of all stripes, from fashion designers to painters and ballerinas, an eccentric mix to be sure. Some lived there.…
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