Right after news of Gourmet Magazine’s demise hit the food world like a missile, Lydia Wills sent us an article written by Stefany Ann Golberg, an artist, musician, and founding member of the art collective Flux Factory. She writes really smart, thoughtful, acute articles for The Smart Set and is worth following. Buried within her article about Gourmet and the American way of eating, is a perfectly-contained piece about M.F.K. Fisher, perhaps America’s greatest food writer. In writing about food, Fisher wrote about love, hunger, and real life with an stunningly original voice. In two paragraphs Golberg GOT what Fisher was doing, and why she resonates so strongly today. (And why she’s been a major influence on ‘the improvised life’.)
“hey jude” full-out in times square subway station
In the vast Times Square subway station in New York City, there are always lots of musicians busking for money, many of them pretty great. (We love the old guy who plays a saw; it echoes through the tunnels to sound like a high soprano…). Everybody is in such a hurry getting where they need to go down there, it isn’t easy for the best of musicians to get a lot of people to stop and listen. When that does happen, it almost always takes the form of spectators silently watching the act, at a safe distance. So we’d love to know how this extraordinary event came about: a circle of strangers in the subway singing “Hey Jude” full out.
Life is SO amazing!
The video was made by by 39forks “artist in ny” on Vimeo.
Via BoingBoing, via Making Light…
crispina ffrench’s re-imagined sweaters
Constance Old recently alerted us to Crispina ffrench’s work:
“Crispina ffrench is an artist/crafter who makes terrific “improvised’ work. She is author of a recent book called The Sweater Chop Shop: Sewing One-of-a-Kind Creations from Recycled Sweaters
which teaches how to cut and felt cast-off sweaters to make them into cool new things: like mufflers, blankets, pillows, and…even other sweaters. I have a really beautiful blanket she made (below). She has her own website www.crispina.com and sells work through Etsy.”
Felting is essentially a controlled way of washing knitted wool until it shrinks and tightens, changing both texture and color. We started to imagine huge possibilities right then and there (and in the inadvertently shrunken sweaters we may have mistakenly given away)…
We also remembered Page Goolrick telling us about the black turtleneck she made into a cardigan; she cut it right up the front with a scissors and had her local tailor sew in a big stainless steel zipper…
We started to deconstruct our notions about cut knit unravelling unmercifully, and started to think about old sweaters completely differently… read more…
tom ashcraft’s sign: cures arise, remedies appear
For several years, this sign from Thomas Ashcraft’s site Heliotown has been my browser’s home page. In all that time, I’ve never tired of it, nor become blind to it (though Tom has since made it invisible on his site, having moved on to other things). Every once in a while, a friend will be over and use my computer to check their email or look something up. When Tom’s sign pops-up they invariably say “That’s SO great; can you email it to me?”. It seems Tom’s words are ones we would all do well to remember. They are another way of saying “answers always come“…”the moment provides“…
You can still enter Heliotown through the sign, a sort of back door…
Related posts: Ashcraft’s Music: D-I-Y Recordings of Sun + Planets
ok go channels rube goldberg: “having good ideas and making cool shit”
OK Go is the band that made that hilarious treadmill video a few years ago. Their frontman Damian Kulash has issued tiny mission statements here and there: “We’re trying to be a DIY band in a post-major label world” …and the essential: “Our whole bag is having good ideas and making cool shit.”
Their new video is nothing but brilliant and silly ideas, one after another, so good, I wish I could watch it in slow motion (watching it without any sound is a whole other experience). It was designed and built by Syyn Labs who describe the amazing constraints they had to work under on their website. They call it “Rube Goldberg Machine”. It’s an homage to the work of Rube Goldberg, after whom an adjective was named; he was a cartoonist known for his wildly-elaborate inventions designed to accomplish some simple task, like this “Simplified Pencil Sharpener”: read more…
post-script: snow as art material
Ellen Silverman sent this image* to us in response to yesterday’s post about four-year-old Marco Giglio’s snow being. The subject of her email read: “Two Feet of Snow.”
…All that effort and imagination for this fabulous, fleeting sculpture that had to make people smile and think:
Human creativity is so amazing!
*There was no photographer’s name to credit. If anyone knows who stopped to make this amazing image, please let us know.
Related post: Snow Into Being
Thanks, Ellen!
snow into being
“A snowman is an anthropomorphic snow sculpture of a human. They are customarily built by children… in celebration of winter. ” –Wikipedia
Anthony Giglio’s four-year-old son Marco spent last Sunday afternoon improvising his first snowman in Jersey City’s Overlook Park.
Once he had rolled and stacked three giant snowballs, he hunted for natural scraps around the park to bring it to life. Here is the mysterious process of Marco shifting his original creation into one that more fully expressed his vision: read more…
a trove for d-i-y brilliance
The other day, I found myself following links to MORE great Japanese masking tape (some printed with numbers, some made of old book pages.) until I found myself at nothingelegant, an Etsy store with ALL SORTS of surprising and useful items for sale, like this set of alphabet and number stamps, along with a handy four-color stick ink pad, (think of the messages, poems and designs you could stamp onto stationary, gift wrap, a hand or a cheek or nails…). There are fabrics printed with a calendar or a map of the Paris metro… read more…
music for monday: bobby mcferrin improvises with richard bono
In 2003, Bobby McFerrin and Richard Bona did this ten-minute improvisation at the Montreal Jazz Festival. McFerrin is known for using his fluid voice and body as instrument, making many levels of sound and beat simultaneously. Bona is a Cameroon-born guitarist and musician. At the beginning, you can see and hear the two musicians feeling each other out, listening to each other closely and a bit tentatively; gradually they find a groove, playing off each other and taking ideas in various directions to make a wonderful piece of music. It’s a fine example of the way collaboration works: one person has an idea that makes the other person imagine something, and that idea inspires the other, and they move back and forth building and weaving their ideas together (leaving some behind as they go), to create something unique.
If you open a new web page or tab, you can listen to it as background music while you surf or explore other things.
welding gloves as oven mitt
Oven mitts are an example of a good idea with serious design flaws: shaped like a giant mitten, they are unwieldy and stiff, and don’t really allow for grasping hot things securely with one hand. But it never occurred to us to envision an alternative, other than ordinary pot holders. That is, until we got an email from Stephen Peters who wrote:
“Why do people use oven mitts when there are perfectly good inexpensive welding gloves with FOUR fingers per hand available?”
…my wife uses welding gloves I gave her, and loves them… The simple thin leather or goatskin style work fine. “
Stephen is an electrical field service technician who travels around Pennsylvania, Maryland, the Virginias and the Carolinas installing and repairing battery backup systems…and who obviously thinks outside-the-box.
We poked around welding glove possibilities. On the whole, they are way more stylish than oven mitts, and make grasping searing-hot pots and casseroles, or odd pieces like baking stones oven racks, MUCH easier. Stephen recommends read more…
reality-scope: global lives project
Some time ago, our friend James Bullock, who is a cable car gripman in San Francisco, was followed for twenty-four hours by a video crew. The video of James’ day - all 24 hours of it - will be shown simultaneously with videos of nine other people from around the world, in a specially-designed pavilion on February 26th in San Francisco; you’ll be able to move at will from one screen (or life) to another to get a unique view of what’s going on in daily lives all over the world. All are part of the Global Lives Project, an international collaboration of filmmakers, architects, designers, programmers, photographers, and artists working to document the diversity of human life experience around the planet. They are building, and inviting others to contribute to, a video library of individual “twenty-four hours”. Much of it will be available online, with subtitles in a host of languages.
“There is no narrative other than that which is found in the composition of everyday life, no overt interpretations other than that which you may bring to it.
By extending the long take to a certain extreme and infusing it with the spirit of cinema verité, we invite audiences to confer close attention onto other worlds, and simultaneously reflect upon their own…
…This project is designed to remain a work-in-progress.We continue to accept new footage for our expanding archive - fresh additions to an evolving visual conversation. “
There’s been an immense amount of effort, and enthusiasm and money put into this project, as well as sponsorship, and media coverage. We have some questions: read more…
mailbox key earrings (from Fuad’s dream)
I was walking across 125th Street in Harlem the other day and noticed a guy standing outside of a store, wearing really surprising earrings in one ear. “Wow, cool earrings” I said, “Did you make them?”
“Yeah, and they’ve got a story…” He said with a smile. He told me he dreamed them, dreamed of earrings made of mailbox keys, etched with his astrological sign, Aries. So, he took a couple of mailbox keys to a jeweler and had them etched…in silver.
He was really proud of them.
…Original and beautiful, with a backstory I never would have guessed.. read more…
improvised street kitchens + utensils
In an email yesterday morning, a reader mentioned that her experiences living in developing countries led her to develop an approach similar to ‘the improvised life’s. We asked where she had lived and what that approach was and were knocked out by her answer:
“I lived in Vietnam for four years and Bolivia for three - amazing and fantastical places, where I learned many, many things, not least of which is how to view objects neutrally, so that you can see what they can really do beyond their stated purpose..Like the woman in a market in Hanoi who was peeling carrots and other ingredients, to sell as ready-made ingredients for folks to buy and make their own lotus blossom salad, and what did she use as a peeler? A chopstick, a razor blade and a cleverly-deployed rubber band: voila, vegetable peeler, third-world style….”
The jerry-rigged vegetable peeler reminded us of Kevin Kelly’s wonderful blog Street Use, about ingeniously improvised solutions, customizations and contraptions he and his friends have spotted in their travels around the world:
“In short — stuff as it is actually used, and not how its creators planned on it being used. As William Gibson said, ‘The street finds its own uses for things.‘” read more…
on making mistakes (in public, no less)
This morning a reader wrote to alert me, very gently and carefully, to a glaring typo in yesterday’s post on self-publishing. I wrote “elicit” when I meant “illicit”. Yikes! It got me thinking about making mistakes, (in public, no less) like this one made last night, when I was writing the post late, blind after a long day, moving too fast…
Oh well. Having spent years as a perfectionist, these days I’m opting for less perfection, for trying to get to the point, get things out there, improvise, try stuff, make mistakes. (But then, this is not surgery or flying an airplane.) And when I make mistakes: own up, learn from them, correct them… and try to write enough ahead to give the work to a copy editor (a friend)…
The reader who corrected me this morning also wrote that she loved ‘the improvised life’ despite its typos, and told this story about how it has influenced her thinking: read more…
self-publishing your own… point of view
Andrew Sullivan of theatlantic.com is the huge-traffic blogger of The Daily Dish; its often fierce content ranges from politics, to heart-breaking illicit tweets from Iran’s recent election protests, to grim pictures of torture. For a couple of years now he’s broken up the intensity of his writing and opinion with an ongoing post category called A View from Your Window, a simple photo inserted into the midst of the day’s many posts with a caption indicating time and place, that one of his readers around the world sent in. It is just that: what one person sees when he/she looks out the window.
These photos have a curious effect: of giving instantly a different point of view, and a reminder of the very similar and very different dailyness of lives around the world. They are somehow both refreshing and heartening.
But what is really interesting is the book Sullivan made them into. read more…
