In the wee hours of Monday morning, our server went down, causing the morning’s post to go undelivered and Improvised Life to be offline for most of the day. This was the worst of a number of outages that occurred during the past month. Although it wasn’t our fault (it was a DDoS attack designed to…
Read MoreLucio Fontana: The Forthright Mark
We keep an image of artist Lucio Fontana approaching a blank canvas in our workspace. He holds a utility knife, ready to make a first cut into the pristine surface, a radical act, as was his puncturing of canvasses with a thick steel pick. Although he made his slashed and punctured works in the 40’s and 50’s,…
Read MoreBrilliant Plywood: Stair Chair DIY
Now that it’s getting to be THAT time of year — the trees will soon be in bud, and warm weather upon us —we yen to hang out on stoops and stairs. We’re smitten with this StairChair that solves the problem of back support or needing a wide enough surface to lie down and snooze…
Read MoreFound Objects Music + Attitude for Monday
At Under the Sun we stumbled on this reminder of the many objects around us that can be used to make music. Type in Found Objects Music into YouTube’s Search and you’ll find A LOT of interesting improvisations. Here’s a favorite, with a great beat for Monday morning, and a long list of found objects…
Read MoreMystery Wine Dinner Parties + an “Off” Wine Improv
When friends ask, “What can we bring?” to my dinner parties, lately, I’ve been asking them to bring the “mystery” bottles of wines languishing in their “wine cellars”. Those are the bottles that promised to be great —once; since they’ve languished for years, it’s impossible to say if there’s something delicious inside, or a wine that’s past its…
Read MoreTrees as Decorating Elements in a ModernUruguayan Home
In his eco-friendly country home in Uruguay, artist Pablo Reinoso embellished the spare modern decor with tree trunks and branches from the surrounding landscape. He is a man after our own hearts; our NYC laboratory is full of sculptural tree parts foraged from the neighboring park. We especially love the bathroom with a huge trunk embedded in the polished concrete…
Read MoreLemesoff’s Weapon of Mass INSTRUCTION + Other Brilliance
(Video link here.) We are smitten with Buenos Aires-based artist Raul Lemesoff’s brilliant ‘Weapons of Mass Instruction’, a 1979 Ford Falcon transformed into a military-style vehicle/traveling library with a serious function of peace. Lemesoff tours through Argentina’s cities, towns and rural communities, offering free books to anyone interested in his a varied collection of poetry, novels and biographies. But…
Read MoreTransforming Wall Bed-Bookshelf-Storage Unit
Last May I posted the life-size prototype I made out of FoamCore to help me design a complex combination of berth-style (sideways) wall bed, storage and bookshelves for my space in Harlem. I had been struggling with the design problem for some time: how to make the massive volume of the wall-bed blend into the structure, so you…
Read More‘Create Dangerously’ (Camus), ‘Every Wall is a Door’ (Emerson)
In the final paragraph of Camus’ last published essay, Create Dangerously, we found this radical idea: One may long, as I do, for a gentler flame, a respite, a pause for musing. But perhaps there is no other peace for the artist than what he finds in the heat of combat. ‘Every wall is a door,’ Emerson correctly said.…
Read MoreFab Color-Tinted Plywood
As fans of plywood for its economical, elemental, very modern possibilities for stylish interiors, we are smitten with bright blue-stained plywood used in Vancouver’s Kin Kao Restaurant. Local Scott & Scott Architects choose plywood to use in tandem with readily available materials, including painted concrete, soaped beech, and galvanized metal. Their clever technique of using construction-grade…
Read MoreChris Burden’s Beam Drop: steel, concrete + CHANCE
Video link HERE. Artist Chris Burden used some of our favorite materials — concrete, steel beams, a construction crane…and…chance — for his Beam Drop. For us, the crazy power of the piece is in watching it: pure gravitational and other mysterious forces violently plunking the beams into wet concrete, fueled by Burden’s vision.
Read MoreEverBlock: Life Size Modular Lego-ish Building Blocks
We’ve written numerous posts wishing out loud for a life-size building block that would allow us to create with the ease of a Lego; over the years, we’ve featured some “close-but- not-quite-right iterations“. Our wish has come true, at last. Serial entrepreneur Arnon Rosen applied his knowledge of modular flooring to create the technology to produce 12-inch…
Read More‘The Good Life…Gives No Warning’ (Mark Strand)
Usually we think that only difficulties come without warning. It hadn’t occurred to us that harmony and abundance can seem to come without warning as well, until we read this from the Selected Poems of Mark Strand:
Read MoreYogurt Sauce with Toasted Spices, Lime Peel and Basil
While I was putting together the recent post about mortars and pestles, I came across Maria Robledo’s beautiful image of one of my favorite mortar-made sauces. I learned the deceptively simple recipe from chef Grey Kunz years ago and it has been enduringly great: an example of the magic of a few well-chosen ingredients artfully combined by…
Read MoreAnnals of Invention: Poop Spray (to Buy or DIY)
(Video link here.) When a grieving friend came for dinner, the conversation eventually turned from sadness to LOL hilarity. He told us that he had recently heard that an entrepeneur was making a fortune selling “poop spray”, a scented liquid that you spray in the toilet “before to go” to literally prevent your shit from stinking. You’re kidding, we…
Read MoreDoes Your Apartment Vibrate? Fixes that Help Tame Vibration
Here’s a summary of all the fixes I’ve found to dampen irritating, sleep-depriving vibrations coming from machinery and other mechanicals.
Read MoreOwl Poem, via Mary Oliver + Vine
A convergence of two owl poems: one, wordless, at Vine…one by Mary Oliver, when we opened Blue Horses: Owl Poem One has to say this for the rounds of life that keep coming and going; it has worked so far. The rabbit, after all, has never asked if the grass wanted to live. Any more…
Read MoreCalder-esque Improvised Olive Fork
Looking through our photo archive of the Laboratory renovation, we came across this image of an olive fork improvised by Roberto, a stunningly-outside-the-box-creative of a carpenter who was part the construction team. Being Portuguese, he loved olives and bought a jar for his lunch one day. Having no fork with which to spear them, he…made one…
Read MoreCuriously Beautiful: Sheetrock with Metal Stud Wall
We stumbled on this curiously beautiful sheetrock wall at the always illuminating Under the Sun. It appears to be a way an art gallery displayed a show. Sheets of uncut 4 x 8′ sheet rock were nailed to a carefully constructed wall of ordinary sheet rock studs with plenty of space between. Not great for sound…
Read MoreKlee’s Pink Spring in Deep Winter
(Video link here.) A camera mounted to an umbrella captures the experience of walking down the snow-covered streets of New York City in winter in this short video from the New York Times. We saw it not long after we heard a mother reassuring her little girl, as they walked through the frigid, still-snowy park across the way, that…
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