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
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
Ever since an alarming number of readers reported NOT getting a video in their July 23rd Daily Email, we’ve been working to fix the glitch. When we found the clip of Martin Van der Poll’s Do hit chair, we thought it would be the perfect test to see if things have resolved. We’re asking subscribers to PLEASE let us know two things: if the image of the open book and the Do hit chair video have comes through in your morning Daily Email.
With thanks!
Quite a few readers wrote us to say that Monday morning’s video did not go through to their Daily Email. Although the information means we have a problem on our hands, we THANK ALL OF YOU who wrote with this essential feedback. We’re working on fixing it.
Now we’d love to know if there is anybody whose daily emails might be coming through without pictures, and for how long? (a possible subset of this problem). We welcome your emails to info@theimprovisedlife.com.
(We LOVE technology but when it goes wrong, it really goes wrong…)
LOL: the real world!
…a little balance for that Keep Calm and Carry On sign that’s everywhere…
Whew!
We got an email from Manny Howard this morning about an improvised save for water-logged digital appliances (and a great general approach to take when the #$%!! is hitting the fan). We know Manny to be prone to minor disasters from his book My Empire of Dirt: How One Man Turned His Big-City Backyard into a Farm and love him for it, because he so forthrightly throws himself into things (as, it seems, do his kids):
“kids doused my iPhone with water the day before a 5-day work trip to southern France.
In a panic I called up my buddy Norman Vanamee (my best bud who I always turn to him for automotive clunker advice)…
…So the screen’s all mottled in some places, faded completely in others, the apps keep switching without my input. it shuts off and then comes back on occasionally. clearly digital cardiac arrest.
I asked Norm: So, do I go to apple store buy new phone in case this one dies while i’m on the road in France?
No way, he says, read more…
We love David Galbraith’s post about his search for EXACTLY where the World Wide Web got started. He spoke to visionary computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee who wrote the original proposal and early coding for “the global hypertext product that would allow people to work together by combining their knowledge in a web of hypertext document”. If you enlarge the photo, above, you’ll see a tiny notation scribbled at the top of the proposal: “Vague but exciting”. That was in 1989, over twenty years ago.
It all took place in ordinary-looking surroundings at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva. What’s curious and strangely charming is Berners Lee’s acute memory of the color of the linoleum on each floor of the building, which was not so ordinary after all… read more…
July 3rd a year ago, we decided to take our own advice and “forgo the idea of being ‘done’, ‘ready’, or ‘perfect’: we launched ‘the improvised life’. It is still a work-in-progress, as improvisations can be, one thing leading to another to another…surprising us daily. The best part has been the community that’s grown up around it, checking in daily, sending emails and comments: you are some kind of amazing fuel that makes us search out daily posts and hatch plots for the future . We thank you, deeply!
Now we are going to disappear for a few days, and celebrate July 4th, and a million blessings. See you on Wednesday (though we might slip in a post or two before!)
Since we posted The Oil Spill: What You Can Do, we’ve seen lots of websites offering solutions that echo a common sentiment: whether we like it or not, we are all in this together; the risky actions of oil companies are fueled by demand, which we all contribute to. That reminded J.P. Townley of the World War II strategy of conservation in a time of crisis, when EVERYONE had to pitch in, cut back, live with less. Posters asked “Is your trip necessary? Needless travel interferes with the war effort.” “Is your trip necessary” applies now more than ever, so Townley designed an updated poster..
We view “Is your trip necessary” as code words for an even bigger question: read more…
Pamela Hovland alerted us to a wonderful essay posted on Design Observer recently, called The Subtle Technology of Indian Artisanship; it is about how “everywhere you look in India you will find evidence of the maker’s hand.” A sign painter, faced with a drain opening smack in the middle of his underwear ad, transformed it into a “navel”. The bucket of a massive backhoe (below) is embellished with a welded pattern of metal strips, a bit of beauty in a most unlikely place. Ken Botnick and Ira Raja explore the ways these kinds of embellishments are ”a means of celebrating life” in India; they also explore what it means to be “a maker” – anywhere.
…”on India’s streets, the act of making functional things — cups, chairs, signs, books — is creativity at its most direct expression; meeting a need. Embellishing that object, making it special, requires that the maker take time with the thing to ask more questions, not only about its function, but also about the person who will use it, and about how to distinguish that object from the universe of things that surround it. Embellishing… simultaneously makes the object more reflective of the maker’s distinct personality and brings it into the shared cultural values of beauty and function. Embellishment delights because it surprises. It is found in completely unsuspecting places, like the bucket of a backhoe. It takes ordinariness and celebrates it as if to say, “Hah! You didn’t find this beautiful, this lump of dung, but here it is and it is beautiful.”
We loved learning things you can do with saris that we never imagined, which made us see them in a new way, like this fence made of saris… read more…
We were walking through Prospect Park in Brooklyn one twilight evening when we heard the mellow sound of saxaphones reverberating “a capella” through the trees. We came upon two men standing in a leafy clearing. We stopped to listen, then asked where they were from. The confident man strolling slowly with his alto soprano sax had been a professional musician in Africa and was teaching his friend to play, in the park, where no neighbors would be disturbed. His friend tentatively played notes scribbled on a religious pamphlet propped on the side of his case; the title of his tune “Music in the Air”… read more…
Our feeling of powerlessness over the continuing oil spill in the Gulf Coast has made us feel just terrible… Until today, when the ever-wonderful Manhattan User’s Guide has published a long list of actions you can take in response to the Gulf Coast Oil Spill “large and small, short- and longterm”, from participating in a Hands-Across-The-Sand Protest to texting WILDLIFE to 20222 to make a $10 donation to the National Wildlife Federation (NWF says 97% of the donation will go to Gulf region recovery efforts), to supplying life vests needed by the Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Volunteer Program. Check out the whole list here.
Related post: PBS’ Oil Spill Challenge: What’s Your Solution?
Last week, we sent out a call for help in creating a tagline for ‘the improvise life’ and were knocked out by the response we got, both as Comments and as emails: an amazingly wonderful and wide array of descriptors and points of view + some disagreement (which we embrace). Pamela Hovland, who has been an essential part of the website from the start wrote : “Taglines are so…… conventional. Why not let people explore the blog until they figure out what the site is about? Perhaps the investigation/perusing/discovering is more in the spirit of the blog”
We totally agree that “investigation/perusing/discovering ” is deeply in the spirit of the blog. Our thinking is that a tagline might invite folks who are moving fast to slow down and do just that: discover what is here. We thought we’d try the idea out and see what happens: our evolution is trial-and-error and learn-as-you-go…Perhaps the question is: Would having a tagline do any harm? (As always, we welcome your two cents…)
Here’s the list of the taglines contributed over the last week (please let us know if we missed any) in addition to our original one …resourcefulness as a daily practice… With big THANKS for your help and thought: read more…
