Last weekend, we walked around Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem, on the homestretch of the New York City Marathon, to look at the signs local school kids had hung up to cheer tired runners on to the finish line. We found an astonishing one that summed up the whole thing.
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Buried in a photo series about C-Mine design center in Genk, Belgium at Vosges Paris is an image of someone rubber stamping what we thought at first were paper placemats or cloths. Wonderful idea!
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(Video link here.) In 1983, James Brown and band were playing the Beverly Theatre in Los Angeles with legendary blues man B.B. King. Halfway through the set, Brown asked “another fantastic people” to join him onstage: 25-year-old Michael Jackson watching the show ignognito in the audience. Brown’s words are as astonishing as Jackson’s 30…
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A number of readers wrote to say that hadn’t been receiving their Daily Emails…and WHAT HAPPENED!!!! It was yet another manifestation of what appears to be our own private Mercury retrograde: planetary or other influences that have made our technology spin out of control, one thing after another. We were reminded of Thich Nhat Hanh’s great…
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(Video link here) At Improvised life, we often preach saying YES….but here’s the catch: Sometimes saying yes to what’s right for us also means saying no to things we feel obligated to do…things we may do because of some old-fashioned guilt, or because others are making us feel like we “have to”. In a recent talk…
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We passed Ateliers Dubois Antiques in Harlem a number of times in the evening when it was closed, pressing our nose against the window to look in and marvel at…its wallpaper: roughly painted sheets or ordinary 8.5-x-11-inch paper. Last weekend, we found the store open and wandered in to take a closer look. We got…
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The Wall Street Journal has a series called “My Week” and we can think of no better to way to start off our week than a week in the life of artist Maira Kalman.
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We spent a number of Halloween’s outfitting ourselves in improvised costumes, usually at the last minute, and LOVED suddenly taking on a whole other persona for one magic night. If you haven’t gotten your Halloween act together yet, and want some inspiration, here’s a compendium of forage-able ideas from artists and designers…Salvador Dali offers loads of…
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While planning the office portion of the Laboratory’s renovation, I had to be lean and efficient, having spent some serious money on a sliding wall to make it all disappear. I happily used a strategy that had served me (and about a million designers) for years: a desk made of pedestal file cabinets and a…
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We were walking by an empty storefront on Manhattan’s Upper East Side when we noticed that someone had written intriguing, inspiring, philosophical signs on the blank walls that were, no doubt, destined for renovation. Who had taken their marker and, with such bold strokes, written signs all over the place? We pressed our nose against…
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Our friend Virginia del Giudice recently sent us another of her wonderful teeny gifts: a little colorfully wrapped bonbon of some sort. Only an inch across, it is an example of the power that even small gift can have in making the recipient feel appreciated, considered, cared for. We wondered what was in the mysterious cloth wrapping…
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Improvised Life part-time assistant editor Mira Keras wrote this spot-on description of a writer procrastinating…as a way of procrastinating herself. But she discovered something essential in the process.
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Over the past months, we’ve been collecting an illuminating array of chair images over at the great site Aqqindex. Each one has made us think, look into its structure, opened our mind to the many possibility of “chair”. All are so startlingly simple, it makes us think we could make them ourself:
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(Video link here.) We just heard the astonishing news that Lego, a company whose product we have featured numerous times as a symbol of possibility, has refused to fill a large order of its plastic bricks — an art material — for Chinese artist’s Ai Weiwei upcoming exhibition at in Australia. Their reason: They don’t provide bricks…
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When you look at the image of the bathroom in Improvised Life’s budget renovation, you’d never guess what lies hidden under the tumbled marble floor tiles the contractor generously donated. While I was choosing just the right mix of tiles —marble itself is so varied, each tile was different — I thought of a slight addition I’d…
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(Video link here.) After we wrote about artist Tom Sachs’ practice of knolling, simple, incredibly effective steps he takes to neaten is very busy work space, we got an interesting comment from Kevin Neff, the engineer who helped us reason-out some of our vibrating bed experiments ages ago. He wrote: So interesting. I had been wrongly…
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(Video link here.) In this season of unlikely presidential candidates, we like to imagine what a real, deconstructed, unarmored, groovey president might look like. The Huffington Post gave us a joyous taste with their brilliant edit of the Democratic Presidential Debate that has Bernie Sanders playing conga drums. It’s like they all took off their girdles. Whew. Sanders, after all, is the…
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Whenever someone we know has a baby, we go on the hunt for our favorite kid’s book, the enduringly great, zennish, out-of-print, A Hole Is to Dig by Ruth Krauss with illustrations by Maurice Sendak. We buy used copies, doing our best to find clean ones, but we never really know what we’ll get. Recently, we found…
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(Video link here.) At the consistently wonderful The Kids Should See This, we found kinetic artist Joseph Herscher‘s machine for getting himself out of bed and dressed on a sleepy morning. The chain-reaction is astonishing for its creativity, imagination and mesmerizing practicality, everything that Rube Goldberg‘s own inventions embodied. We love (and share) Herscher’s view of the world,
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As soon as we saw Mc&Co’s irregularly shaped mirrors we thought WANT. We’ve been thinking for some time that our very angular Laboratory could use some organic forms to soften it, and have been mulling how we might do that with mirrors. Mc&Co’s mirrors look like portals into other rooms. Swell! Although we’ve written about irregularly…
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