Our intrepid friend Peggy Markel just arrived in India to prepare to lead one of her amazing culinary adventures, Tasting Royal Rajasthan. She sent us this amazing picture of an ironing board computer table and the story behind it:
“We’re staying with a new friend, Rajiv Jani, friend of a friend. It is his rig, was already here. I knew you would love it. I thought to call it ‘permanent press’. Here’s how it came about:
Rajiv lived in Atlanta for 10 years and had all of his stuff shipped back to Delhi. He set up the ironing board in a spare room for his ironing. But he found out that he could have his shirts ironed for 2 rupees each. (1/2 a penny.) 25 shirts? $1.00.
He was looking for a place to set up his home computer and set a few things down on the ironing board until he found the right place. His electronics started growing there as that was where the internet connection was and the wiring was getting too complicated to move.To buy a new table from Ikea would cost $150. Then you need a chair. read more…
Last week Mondoblogo posted two photos taken at Art Basel of wonderful geometrically-painted walls with doors (they are part of the blog’s illuminating challenge to identify what is actual “art” and what is not). The top is “Final Cut” by artist Ernst Caramelle. The second “a random door”…
We’re putting them in our file of cool ideas for painting a room with a door. read more…
photo: herbert matter, courtesy of the calder foundation
Of all the brilliant artists we feature on ‘the improvised life’, Alexander Calder holds a special place in our hearts. In addition to his monumental artworks and legendary mobiles, he was a prolific creator of household objects for everyday use. If he or his wife Louisa or a friend needed something utilitarian, he would devise a solution on the spot, with whatever was at hand.
The trove of his improvisations is vast and inspiring; each invites rethinking of common objects we often take for granted: tin cans, pie tins, wire, bits of scrap wood. His creations were not only useful, but visually stunning.
Here is the artist telling how he created a barbeque grill out of an iron garden chair after his son-in-law Jean Davidson invited a horde of people over for a party: read more…
At the end of designer Reuben Miller‘s clever riff on the extreme repurposing movement, some readers commented that that a fly swatter face protector and a paint brush door stop were “stupid’; other’s thought Dada. Some, like us, dug the IDEA that you can make something out of just about anything.
But we fell in love with one repurposing idea for real: stamps as nail “polish”. We’d just come back from the post office where we’d bought some pretty groovy stamps: a tiny Edward Hopper sailboat scene: read more…
Conceptual Artist Myeongbeom Kim makes eerily beautiful and evocative work that fuses manmade things with big doses of nature. We can totally see ourselves lying down on this bed, and feeling like we are in a mossy woods…
…we can imagine how we’d feel riding an elevator like this one: read more…
(Video link here.) Our friend Maureen Rolla sent us this email; it is so expressive, it became a post:
“I am writing to tell you about a person and documentary that you should know about – it is called “Citizen Architect: Samuel Mockbee and the Spirit of the Rural Studio” – about an amazing architect, thinker, dreamer who ran a program called the Rural Studio at Auburn University in which architecture students designed and built homes, churches, and other structures for the residents of the very poor Hale County, Alabama. It is perhaps the best statement about the transformative power of architecture on regular human beings lives that I’ve ever seen (as opposed to big name, star power architecture that pretty much only benefits the star architect…) The students use some ordinary materials (hay bales, tires) in innovative ways to create some simple yet soaring projects. The film is available on Netflix (disk only, unfortunately). Unfortunately Mockbee died in 2001, only in his early 60s.”
We found a trailer for Citizen Architect (above) that makes us hungry to see the film. Check out this moving interview with Mockbee read more…
(Video link here).We have long admired musician/artist Björk, so were happy to stumble on this YouTube video of her giving a house tour, even though it’s clearly years old and from another era of her life. No matter; it is so full of quirky charm and ideas, it seemed like a fitting post to come back with.
We also recommend checking out Björk’s website. The first page is really beautiful, and there’s a compelling little track of her speaking that you can click on at the bottom…
A couple of months ago, we received an interesting comment thanking us for a quote we posted from John Cage’s A Year from Monday: “Even though I have 2 copies of this book, knew JC and spent 30 years performing his music, it was still great to see”. It was signed ‘Fast Forward’. Well of course we followed the trail.
We found ourselves on the website of a prolific New York city-based experimental composer who favors non-traditional percussion instruments made of…ANYTHING, from industrial paint cans to metal staircases (“basically one big piece of sonorous metal”). We instantly fell in love with Musique a la Mode in which all instruments were made from common kitchen items: pots, pans, bowls, cutlery, tools, food…(favorite moments: 1:40 mins where the spatulas seem to have a life of their own…2:45 a whisk in a metal sauce container….5:45 music made from pasta). We find ourselves running the video while we work just to listen to Fast’s music in the background.
Fast performs all over the world, created music for many of Merce Cunningham‘s event works, is the mastermind behind a participatory performance experience Feeding Frenzy (involving 5 cooks and 5 musicians, 5 waiters and an audience), teaches, photographs, makes art, and always, music. But what knocked us out, in addition to all this, was read more…
Public radio’s Studio 360 recently passed out fill-in-the-blank cards to their audience that said: “In my next life, I will be_____________.” Check out the slideshow of some of the responses they got.
It makes us wonder: When could our ‘next life’ start? Was George Elliot right when she said, It’s never too late to be what you might have been. read more…
A few months ago we clipped this picture of Steve Sauer sitting in the 182 square foot Seattle apartment he had renovated, creating three levels, and nooks for different uses, including two beds, a full kitchen with a dishwasher, bathroom with a shower, a soaking tub set into the floor, closet space, a dining table and storage for two bikes. An airplane interiors engineer at Boeing, Sauer cleverly designed his space to accommodate his lifestyle EXACTLY, without a drop of wasted space, which he felt would be the problem with anything larger. Even more interesting than Sauer’s design, is the thinking behind it:
“I wanted to compress my home to squirt me back out to the community. That was one of the philosophical reasons. I want to be able to shop daily, not store a lot and eat really well.” said Seattle’s Steve Sauer.
It one of the most interesting reasons for living in a tiny space that we’d heard: to choose and create a space that would force you to live a certain way. read more…
We are completely smitten with Variations on Normal, Dominic Wilcox’s blog about his inventions and simple,”out there” solutions to everyday needs and wants. Wilcox is a self-described “artist, designer, inventor and ‘thinkeruper’ who works within the territory of the ‘everyday’.” That’s our favorite territory.
Each of Wilcox’s concepts and inventions is annotated. To make his room more welcoming, he carpeted it with Welcome mats. “You can even wipe your feet wherever you want. Oh and there is a patch of floor where the door mat should be.”
“ …to avoid the squeezing at wrong end arguments” he invented Two WayToothpaste, with a cap on each end.
Wilcox has gained some notoriety of late for his phallic and practical Finger-nose stylus for touchscreen technology… read more…
Our friend Maria Robledo LOVES her garden and makes the most astonishing, impromptu arrangements from her cuttings. We were charmed and delighted by the arrangement we found on her dining table recently: no vase, no water, just a spray and a cluster of flowers placed directly on the tabletop. The flowers stayed fine throughout several hours of dinner, and Maria gave them to us to take home. We put them in water and they are just fine, two days later. The gist: read more…
Always on the lookout for more ideas for impermanent pop-up rooms within rooms, we were taken by a work by Zimoun, a sound artist/sculptor who builds different kinds of white noise into structures.We love his room of interlocking slabs of notched cardboard, made like a house of cards, and imagined building a smaller version that could be stored when no longer needed, stacked and tied in a bundle, in the closet. read more…
We fell HARD for artist Max Lamb‘s work after we sat on a Lamb stool owned by our friend A.S.C. (Sandy) Rower, President of the Calder Foundation (more on that big adventure soon). The stool was beautiful and comfortable and made by an ancient process of sand casting: Lamb goes to the beach and makes a mould in the wet sand, then pours molten pewter (heated on a camping stove) into it, waits for it to set, then digs out the strangely elegant stool with its roughly granulated legs.
Lamb embarked on his ad hoc method of sand-casting after he was unable to afford to have a professional foundry do the casting process for him. He remembered building sand castles as a kid, and knew he could figure out sand casting himself. He publishes videos of his work process, because he wants other people to know how he does it. Watch the sand-casting video here (making the mould runs until about 2:40 when Lamb pours the liquid metal; he digs out the work at 3:37).
Then Sandy showed us a picture of some incredible library shelves he’d commissioned Lamb to make for him (below). They were based on another classic Lamb technique: carving polystyrene (think packing materials and take-out coffee cups) into a usable form (like the chair, above), then spraying it with a polyurethane rubber finish. We love it because, as Lamb says: ”A variety of simple tools and a reasonable amount of energy is all that is required…”He makes us believe WE could do something like that,read more…
which measures 21″ x 16″. Imagine IT with flip-down legs… 
