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…
(Video link here.) When we’re introduced to a venture, our first impulse is always to ask: what’s the story behind it? What were the seeds of the idea that grew into a fully realized project? It’s the stories that win us over, which is why we’re are so taken with Jam in the Van.
Based in Venice, CA, Jam in the Van is the project of music fans looking for an uncommercialized, authentic music experience. Armed with an old Winnebago that they’ve turned into a state-of-the-art recording studio, these guys invite musicians to perform, film the unique performances, and put much of it online for free (scroll down for the current list of musicians). Music fans get to discover new artists or check out fantastic live-versions of their favorite tracks, and small independent artists get amazing free publicity. It’s such a rare and beautiful thing to see a project come together sheerly out of passion and drive. read more…
We love things that change our view. With the wind howling and the temperature cold, we found ourselves delighted with a little book that has taken us on an armchair trip through Paris, showing us the city through new eyes: the eyes of a pastry-o-phile. Pastry Paris: In Paris, Everything Looks Like Dessert grew out of a teeny film graphic designer Susan Hochbaum created a couple of years ago, which we posted here (sadly, it has since been taken down.) It was perfect, with a sweet story behind it: “I came to Paris middle-aged, divorced, and newly in love. Granting myself a sabbatical and renting out my suburban home, I moved with my beau to this romantic city for a year of living shamelessly…Abandoning restraint, and with the appetite of a teenager…”
Hochbaum ate her way through the pastry worlds of Paris, seeing pastry everywhere she looked…
(Video link here.) The weekend is here. Time to take a road trip cross country with this little desk toy, using a toy car and Google Maps Street View. A little beauty of homemade animation by Tom Jenkins.
The streets of Tangier in North Africa are a mix of the ancient and the contemporary but some traditions still hold fast. Outdoor cafes are populated with men who seem to sit for hours on end, drinking strong coffee or Moroccan ‘whiskey’ – gunpowder green tea with loads of fresh mint and sugar. Passing the day in conversation or sitting quietly is normal. But every day? Don’t they work? I wondered.
“They are working”, said our friend Said. “Did you see the paint bucket sitting on the side of the street? read more…
We’ve long been fascinated by Burning Man, the annual “art event and temporary community” in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. Every year our friend Kim Sykes participates in the infamous festival firsthand. This year she sent us photographs and a report.
To those that aren’t familiar with it, Burning man might seem like a 70′s style hippie gathering full of drugs and body paint, but Kim found a great deal more: “There are large scale art projects, unique and wonderful art cars, small intimate art pieces, a camp for everyone - young and old, amazing, loving, people to meet! It is a wonderful array of inspiring creativity, some planned some improvised.” read more…
A while back, our friend Fast Forward showed us images of his recent trip to Hong Kong; many are annotated in true Fastian (or is it Forward-ian?) style, which show HIS unique way of seeing things, as an experimental/culinarian composer/artist . Beat-up drums full of something – cooking oil, perhaps – become “percussion instruments” in his eyes. We especially love these potentially chic “seaweed scarves” read more…
Our friend Ellen Silverman traveled twice to Cuba in the past year, and came back with some amazing photographs of daily life there, in particular the kitchens of families she met. They are invariably improvised, deeply makeshift spaces, reflecting extremely limited resources coupled with extraordinary resourcefulness and spirit. Ellen’s images tell the story. read more…
Our friend Charlie Allenson had a big birthday a few days ago, and we had big plans to give him a shout out that day and find ourselves, THE DAY AFTER, having been swept away by..everything. Damn. Charlie’s at the jazz festival in New Orleans so we thought we’d publish some of the very cool photos he sent us when he was in Vietnam recently. They are right up our alley of totally, seriously, charmingly improvised LIFE that seems to happen everywhere there, like the floating villages of Ha Long Bay. This house, above, appears to be floating on oil drums and styrefoam block. There is no supermarket; a market boat makes regultrips to each floating house.
In the past month, two dear friends from the tiny hamlet of Helvetia in the West Virginia Appalachians passed away. With them goes a great deal of memory and wisdom and beauty. We’re heading down there to pay our respects, and… just be for a while…in Appalachia’s astonishing spring, as we remember their wild, rich, completely original lives.
“Rage, rage at the dying of the light”. Eleanor Mailloux wrote us this fragment of the famous poem by Dylan Thomas when she was diagnosed with a deadly cancer. She didn’t rage, though. At age 94, she opted for no treatment, spent time with her many friends, and made no bones about the fact that she was dying, which, we realize once again, is a process of pure improvisation.
We thought it fitting to post this wondrous video of a walk along all 2200 miles of the Appalachian Trail, that spans from Georgia to Maine. Using stop motion, Kevin Gallagher condensed a six month journey into five minutes. Watch full screen for a mesmerizing and enlivening walk.
We’ll be back on Monday or Tuesday, depending on the state of our hearts.
Objectified cinematographer Luke Geissbühler and his 5-year-old son Max made a homemade spacecraft out of a Thai food takeout container and a weather balloon, and outfitted it with an HD video camera and an iPhone. Last August, they sent it into space.
“The mission was…was send it up into the upper stratosphere to film the blackness beyond the earth…Eventually, the balloon will grow from lack of atmospheric pressure, burst, and begin to fall…It would have to survive 100 MPH winds, temperature of 60 degrees below zero, speeds of over a 150 mph, and the high risk of a water landing….To retrieve the craft, it would need to deploy a parachute, descend through the clouds and transmit a GPS coordinate to a cell phone tower….Then we have to find it.”
The video gets really suspenseful as the balloon approaches the breaking point. We find it really inspiring to ride along with homemade spacecraft.
Photographer William Abranowitc has been in love with Greece for as long as we can remember, constantly making time to go there to do his personal work amidst amidst his busy schedule as a lifestyle/landscape/still-life photographer. Hellas, his second book of photographs of Greece has just been published: 160 pages in full color. Most of the images are NOT what you would expect or normally see, ALL definitely give you a feeling of being swept away. For the land-locked-in cold climates, it’s the perfect gift.
A few months ago, while I was clearing out a storage room in a lonely warehouse building, a friend called me on my cell phone in tears. She told me of the overwhelming fear and anxiety she was feeling about a trip she was to embark upon in a few hours, that held many potentially difficult situations.
Standing in a storage room amidst broken cardboard boxes and forgotten stuff, I listened and talked and listened, as my friend’s tears gradually subsided. “But, how will I make it through?” she asked. “What will I do if I start to panic on the long flight, or when I am in another time zone?”
I wondered what I could offer right then and there? What would be totally portable, that she could look at any time she needed to, to remind her of other ways of seeing things, the opposite of fear and sadness?
I found myself saying: “Get a pen. Now draw a heart in the palm of your hand. read more…
We were trying to figure out what to bring back from a trip to a place we loved, something that would be able to remind us in a FLASH what it was like. Pamela Hovland suggested we bring back a jar full of its beautiful air, so we did, capturing it in a small canning jar. Back at home, we find that jar hold holds more than the air; it seems to hold the very place in our hearts. read more…
grew out of a teeny film graphic designer 
