Until our recent vacation, we hadn’t been to the beach for so long that we’d forgotten what wonders lay there: raw materials free for the playing with…
…Our friend James brought a ball with him, then hunted for the perfect piece of driftwood, for a pick-up game of stickball
(and we realized that we never really thought about that form of rough-and-tumble baseball born of improvisation: Don’t have a bat? Use a stick!)… read more…
Manny Howard emailed this photo in response to our post on San Francisco street murals…The Subject Line read:
“the last mural to catch my eye was on the feed store in the bronx where i buy my chicken food”
Manny still keeps a few chickens from the days when he turned his Brooklyn backyard into a farm as an experiment. His book, My Empire of Dirt: How One Man Turned His Big-City Backyard into a Farm
We love that a feed store and a graffiti mural co-exist side by side, a swell Reality Sandwich*
*”Reality Sandwich” is from a work by the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, ‘a prime example of his use of startling verbal juxtapositions to suggest new ideas and connections.’” -Wikipedia…You can buy Ginsburg’s Reality Sandwiches here.
Related post: We’re Back! (Let’s Paint a Wall…)
The Selby has run a really nice story-with-few-words about Andrew Field, chef of Rockaway Taco, in Rockaway Beach, Queens – right by the beach – who loves surfing and keeps bees on his roof (we are always heartened when we discover a New York City beekeeper; it reminds us that nature is here, even in the midst of the city…”build a hive and they will come!…)
We’ve been pondering what makes Todd Selby’s work so compelling. He’s not a great photographer in the usual sense; individual photos are not terribly well-composed or exposed or beautiful. But, man, does that guy have an eye for a story, which he always manages to tell in a compelling way, with lots of photos. He makes sure to choose interesting people in their very personal spaces, honing in on the details and surroundings, so you get a sense of where this person is living and what their life is like, some of what they see when they go about their day. Like this little detail that speaks volumes: read more…
…While we’re on the subject of bound dictionaries, largely considered an anachronism these days, we loved finding a dictionary on a stand at Zeitgeist Coffee in Seattle. We found ourselves flipping through randomly to discover a few odd words and ideas we never would have found otherwise: teeny surprises in our day, and a reminder read more…
Shortly after we reported on Manny Howard’s experience drying out his water-logged cellphone out by burying it in rice, Valerie Sims emailed us this report:
Several weeks ago a minor water leak reached an old dictionary that has sentimental value for me. Within a few hours, a small amount of water had wicked up through all the pages of the dictionary from the bottom and half-way up. When I searched for suggestions, the techniques for drying books were more extreme than I was able to try at the time, so I put the dictionary in the freezer, a method said to buy time before the actual drying. Freezing does begin the drying-out process. Soon after, I read your story about Manny Howard drying out his iPhone with rice, and I tried it on the dictionary. Several pounds of cheap rice and the frozen dictionary in an air-tight container for two days resulted in a dictionary with no moisture, not any pages sticking together. And I live in a very humid climate. Thanks for the tip!
It looks like this rice antidote might be a nearly universal approach to drying out water-damaged goods; a cell-phone (fine electronics) and a dictionary (paper) HAVE to be pretty good tests…
(The photo by Cuban photographer Abelardo Morell is a water-damaged book that did not get rice therapy. Click here to see more of Morell’s compelling photographs.)
Thanks Valerie!
Related post: Impromtu Drowned Cell Phone Rescue (+ Life Lesson)
A quick glance of these paired photos on Emma’s blog made us unconsciously splice the two ideas together: ‘salvaged wood bedside or sofa side table’, we thought…fine idea. There is so much great salvaged wood around these days, that can be easily cut and stacked askew to great effect…
Related posts: Blog Find: Daniel Hales ‘Serendipity Rising’
We came across this coupling of essential quotes when we were poking around John Zernings blog about Garden Trellises and Architectural Space Frames.
“Applied to architecture and structure, the former is primarily an aesthetic position; the latter is a principle of economy.” wrote Zerning. We find both immensely useful, and made a sign to remind us…”
You might wonder how we ever came across Zerning’s site in the first place, living in the city as we do, with no garden, or even a terrace. We were following the trail of some images that have been flying around the blogs, of a beautiful architecture of wires… read more…
We have a whole list of things that fall under the heading of “Practical but Ugly”, and wonder why it can be so hard to find good-looking, affordable versions of certain everyday items…dish racks, for example, or file cabinets. USB Flash drives are one of those handy items whose ugliness we’ve marveled at and put up with because we need them. Then we saw LaCie’s wonderful flash drives shaped like a key, and thought “want one!” Like many well-designed objects, they cost more than the norm – roughly $10 bucks more by our figuring. And since we’re hard-pressed to hack our own usb flash drive design, we just might treat ourselves to one…
For sure, we will buy them to give as unexpected little gifts to give..say to the host of a dinner party, or a friend we want to thank…about $18 for 4 gigabytes, $27 for 8…and up, in round
via Core 77
A few weeks ago, we wrote about the artist Tom Sachs, whose amazing studio was featured in The Selby. When Todd Selby asked Sachs “What are the ten rules of your studio?” Number Ten was: “creativity is the enemy”. It is also the subject of an artwork Sachs created. Then, a reader wrote us an email that said: “I’d love follow up on why ‘creativity is the enemy’”. Good idea.
We figure the answer lies partly in the title of Sach’s artwork-sign:”Self-Fullfilling Prophecies”…It seems to warn of the danger of trying TOO hard, of being self-consciously creative and arty, rather than just…being…Maybe creativity is the enemy because it threatens the status quo, takes energy, takes us into various kinds of chaos and unknowing. Whew…We didn’t realize how Sach’s sign would make us think!
While we were mulling, we stumbled on New Liberal Arts, a free “book full of ideas” masterminded by Snarkmarket‘s Tim Carmody, and a collaboration of many. Aaron MCleran,”Generative Media Artist” wrote a section about Creativity, which we thought was SWELL even though we weren’t sure what “generative”* means. We’ve excerpted it here (underscores, ours):
“…creativity should be studied as a kind of martial art. You should train to be a ninja of creativity. read more…
One of our favorite early posts was about Andre Michelle’s visual music synthesizer, ToneMatrix which allows you to instantly improvise your own music by selecting any of the small boxes on the grid on his website. We have turned to it many times when we wanted a diversion to shift our mood or view, or to take our focus off an irritating noise. Now, we’re smitten with Michelle’s newest iteration on his make-your-own-music theme: Pulsate.
Click the black square in two are more places to generate pulsating circles and sound. Just four or five clicks make for a relaxing, meditative riff…click lots of circles within circles for elaborate (and energetic) composition.
Part of its beauty is how ephemeral it is; it’s music for the moment.
Whatever you do will be a surprise, and a shift.
via Kottke
Related post: Make Your Own Music
We love Nina Saltman‘s and her husband James Bullock‘s pun of a paint job at their house in San Francisco: faux brick painted on a concrete and block wall!
Related post: We’re Back! (Let’s Paint a Wall)
We’ve spent the past ten days or so on the other side of the country, looking at everything but our laptops, and being nothing but lazy. Somehow doing NOTHING filled us up, gave us lots to think about and share…
Like this sign we saw (when Nina said LOOK UP!) in Balmy Alley in San Francisco, known for its wonderful murals, from one end to another…
(and which happens to be right around the corner from Humphry Slocum, our favorite ice cream place – more on that later)… read more…
Lately, we’ve been reading posts on some of our favorite blogs saying, in various ways, “we’re TIRED, burned out, so need to disappear for a while.” 2 or 3 Things I Know really nailed it:
working in the creative
field can be so demanding
for design is quite personal
…an extension of yourself.
for me,
it’s hard to separate
work from life
the blurring of
the lines is beautiful
but sometimes it can
be quite taxing
you never know
when to stop.
step away.
refuel.
That would be us. So we’re heading out of town for a week or so to rest and fill ourselves up again.
We thought we’d leave you with this beauty of a video: cooled out, fluid, dancing… improvising… in the rain. (We recommend turning the dubbed-over sound off to really SEE it…closer to how it might be if you were hanging out just down the street…)
via BoingBoing
A bumper crop of summer vegetables, fruits and herbs might well take us into early October this year, and there is no more inspiring guide for enjoying it than Canal House Cooking Volume N°4
Years ago, I learned a wonderfully simple method for making a rustic freeform fruit tarts modeled after French galettes, whose charm lies in their rustic imperfection. The recipe involves little more than rolling flaky pie dough into a rough free-form round, piling cut-and-sugared fruits into the middle, and folding the dough up around it. It is the quickest method I know of creating a delectable fresh fruit pastry – about 20 minutes once you make the dough – akin to a pie but without the bother. Made with lush summer fruits like apricots, peaches, nectarines, plums and berries, it is the perfect summer house dessert. read more…
