We were looking for a little gift to leave on the blog this last day of summer and thought The Wilderness Downtown would be just right…It is one of the very best things we’ve seen on the internet: crazy beautiful, imaginative, really surprising and moving…
…click here, have patience while it loads, and watch to the end…
Wishing you a wonderful Labor Day!
Improv Everywhere is devoted to “causing scenes of chaos and joy in public places”. Over the years, they have invited anyone-who-wants-to to participate in their missions which have included Cell-Phone Symphonies to No Pants Subway Rides. In the latest, they instructed their agents to appear at Coney Island dressed in tuxedos and ball gowns bought at thrift stores or other cheap venues.
“We covered a mile-long stretch of beach with a diverse group of people of all ages (from babies to sixty-somethings) laying out, playing games, and swimming in the ocean, all in formal wear.”
We find this video curiously liberating to watch. (It totally changes the look and vibe of black tie in the best, most unexpected way possible..).
What strange delight!
via BoingBoing
Related post: Improvising at the Beach
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…
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…
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
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
Leigh Fazzina was lost in a 300-acre Connecticut wood, racing downhill on her mountain bike looking for the main road, when her front wheel hit a tree root. She flew over the handlebars and slammed into the ground, to find herself bloodied and unable to walk…and panicking. She tried screaming and calling for help on her cellphone but couldn’t connect. Then she tried Twitter, the social networking site, hoping that one of her 1000 followers might see her tweet:
“I’ve had a serious injury and NEED Help! Can someone please call Winding Trails in Farmington, CT tell them I’m stuck bike crash in woods.”
At least half a dozen people, many of them strangers, responded; the Farmington Fire Department got calls from California, Chicago and New York. A few minutes after sending her tweet, an EMS team found her.
Twitter, so often maligned for being a frivolous time-waster, proved to be an unexpectedly useful emergency tool; tweets, and text messages, will often go through in areas with spotty cell phone coverage, like state parks. Fazzina seems to have broken new ground in her improvised solution; there are no records of Twitter being used to call an ambulance before.
It reminds us though of other potent ways Twitter has been used by people in dire straits to connect, like the heart-rending tweets that came out of Iran during its recent revolution, when text messaging and phone service was cut off by the government…
PS: The amateur mini-triathlon cyclist thankfully had no serious injuries, just bad scrapes and bruises. She is grateful she didn’t have to spend the night in the woods.
via USA Today via BoingBoing
Related post: An Amazing Amount of Improvising Going on in Iran
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…
When we read that Centre Pompidou in Paris was offering a Cardboard Carton Workshop, we wanted to beam ourselves there, a la Star Trek, to see what more we could add to our overflowing file and minds about this wonderfully versatile material. We were stunned by a photo of an archway made of cardboard sheets combined in layers and compressed; it flies in the face of the usual ways of building with cardboard, of using the flat sides as walls. It is the work of Tadashi Kawamata who is known for the spare structures he builds out of humble materials – pine boards, cardboard, packing materials, chairs – in unlikely places. They seem impromptu (though they take a great deal of work and planning), and speak of temporariness and informality; they somehow question the spaces and structures we take for granted. Now wonder his workshop has lines around the block.
When we saw pictures of Kawamata’s art at the Pompidou’s site, we realized we had seen his work before and had a vivid unattributed memory of it: of beautiful, odd, slapped together-looking nests and houses perched high up in the ancient tress of Madison Square Park, in the center of New York City. They made us LOOK with wonder and, for a moment, imagine ourselves hiding out in one of them but we never stopped to find out who had made them. Now we know, and are inspired by a central theme of Kawamata’s art: read more…
When we were in Santa Cruz recently, a friend dragged us to a giant shopping mall. In no time, our senses were overwhelmed by TOO MUCH: stuff for sale, Cinnabon and Starbuck’s smells, piped music, people. Stumbling on the new Lego store made it all worth while. We loved its giant wall of help-yourself bins of Legos: we could buy the exact amount of whatever color(s) we wanted. Since we naturally seem to lean toward the monochromatic, we started imagining all the things we would devise with white Legos (maybe with one orange one stuck in to mess it up a little), or maybe these hot green ones… read more…
Whenever we need a business card to introduce ‘the improvised life’ or ourselves (with address and phone), we peel off a printed-at-our-local-copy-shop sticker and stick it onto…something. Pamela Hovland dreamed up the idea one day when we were trying to figure out an alt-business card that would say what ‘the improvised life’ is in a flash, and get people curious enough to go to the site. We began to imagine things that would be cool made into cards, like the oddly-printed discards and tests that printers routinely put in the recycling bin, or cereal boxes…or leather, bits of fabric, thin sheets of metal, used subway cards. Our favorite so far is the ribbon we bought at Hyman Hendler in the garment district, that we originally bought to make the ribbon on the Surprise Box. read more…
