We take the quiet last week of the year between Christmas and New Years to relax, unhook from many normal routines, and reflect on the year that has passed so we can envision the New.
Read MoreA Surrealist’s Typewriter Holiday Card
A typewriter and paper is all it took for surrealist artist and poet Kay Sage to make a holiday card for her friend Eleanor Howland Bunce in 1958. Evidence of an imaginative improvised life after our own hearts.
Read MoreMusic Break From All the Action: Sonnymoon
Tired and need a break from all the holiday action? This lovely song by Sunnymoon appeared out of nowhere on Spotify while we were working. And is, curiously, just the thing.
Read MoreHoliday Decorations for Lazy People
Being short on time and living space, I’ve honed my holiday decorations to be spare but potent, using tried-and-true materials — some found — in different ways each year.
Read MoreUnique, Cheap, Full-of-Wonder Last Minute Gift: Improvised Life
If you’re looking for an instant, inexpensive, totally unique last-minute gift that is full of wonders, give your brilliant someone a subscription to Improvised Life: a month —$1.99— or a year —$18— of view-shifting tools and ideas…
Read MoreAlt Universe We Want to Inhabit
This New Yorker cartoon nailed in in the most surprising way. It completely changed our view.
Read MoreWrite Guest’s Names On Their Glasses (And Save Your Sanity)
One of the simplest, hottest tips for holiday entertaining can be done with what you’ve got on hand and will cut down on busy work and stress.
Read MoreImprovised Life’s Not Shopping Holiday Gift Guide
Years ago, having burned out from years of overdrive in holiday giving, I devised a strategy for pleasurable, stress-free giving that avoids combing through “holiday gift guides” for cool things nobody needs.
Read MoreSu Tung Po Shouts Across a Thousand Years
A poem by Su Tung Po, written a thousand years ago, made us realize that good poetry is like speaking to a close friend.
Read MoreClassic Chicken Liver Pate + An Artfully Lightened Version after Michel Guerard
My Classic Liver Pate, deeply enriched with butter, cream and cognac, makes a divine and satisfying appetizer or hors d’oeuvre. For those that don’t want such richness, I came up with a lightened version achieve with the same luxurious effect.
Read MoreHoudini Unbound: How A Novel Changed Its Author’s Life
When David Saltman randomly opened a biography of Houdini in a dusty second-hand book store, he had no idea it would change his life, leading him down an unexpected life path that would become Houdini Unbound.
Read More2 Posters About Peace, One You Can Buy
In our travels online today we came two powerful posters about peace, the rarest of commodities these days. One is by designer Frank Chimero. The other by artist/photographer Nancy Burson can be had for a bargain $100…
Read MoreLiana Finck Makes Beautiful Interiors Out of Cast-Off Furniture
Liana Finck has x-ray vision, or perhaps better put, x-ray imagination. She photographs cast-off furniture and overlays her completely other vision of what they might be, providing them with a kind of redemption.
Read MoreZach Lieberman’s Poetry of Code + A Six Year Old’s Astonishing Words to Live By
Every minute of Zach Lieberman’s AIGA talk is full of amazement. We excerpted our favorite two minutes: the book his stepdaughter River made when she was six year old, called I Am Art.
Read MoreSublime Murmuration of Starlings, ‘The Great Scarf of Birds’ (Updike)
Scientists have found many ways to explain what remains largely mysterious: the astonishing murmurations of starlings Jan van IJKen captured in this sublime short video. The best description of that mystery is John Updike’s The Great Scarf of Birds.
Read MoreHow To Have Your Cake and Serve It Too (Fran Black’s Revelation)
Fran Black, known in Australia as Dr. Fran, for her wise counsel on health matters, is an unusually outside-the-box thinker on everyday matters. Recently, she shared her revelation about the dessert she’d made for guests who were coming to dinner, and her breaking of a social taboo.
Read MoreProductivity Principle: Doing Nothing Can Help Get Things Done
My big lesson in productivity, learned the hard way, flies in the face of the accepted wisdom.
Read MoreIdeas from Artists: Gift Boxes with Jazzy Interiors
Over the past 25 years or so, a number of artists have taken to embellishing the INSIDES of ordinary cardboard boxes to great effect. Barbarians that we are, we take their work as inspiration for novel holiday gift boxes…
Read MoreMary Oliver’s Anthology Devotions: Hymns to Possibility
We often weave poetry into Improvised Life’s articles, taking John Ashbery’s view that The poem is a hymn to possibility. Of the many poets we publish, Mary Oliver is probably the most frequent. We’ve been delighting in her five-decade-spanning anthology of poems, called Devotions. Excerpts here…
Read MoreAbdullah Ibrahim: How Improvisation Saves My Life
In this lovely animated film, legendary composer Abdullah Ibrahim tells how improvising guided him during dangerous run-ins with white police, an active practice throughout his life and music.
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