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?
The Vegetable Orchestra in Vienna, Austria performs original music made and inspired by instruments made of vegetables. Cucumberophones, celery bongos and leek violins might seem like something out of a Max Fleischer cartoon, but they are very real. They yield original sounds and music, with an ephemeral quality because of the living – and fleeting – nature of vegetables…
“The reason why our music is kind of fresh is…because we are forced to make something new on stage to improvise …our musical instruments don’t stay the same…”
Members of the Orchestra forge original instruments using knives, drilling machines, and various other tools. Their work is really about unleashing the possibilities inherent in the most ordinary of things around us.
“You can make music out of nearly everything, each thing contains a very specific acoustic quality and represents an intricate universe of sound…each thing could be a tool to open up that point of view”. read more…
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…
The snow is almost melted in New York but you can bet another blizzard is waiting in the wings. We thought we’d write about sleds so you can be prepared when you’re faced with a nice snowy hill, or know someone on the East Coast who is.
The reason most people don’t keep a real sled is that it takes up too much room for most of the year when there is no snow. That means resorting to make-shift which can yield unpredictable results (see list below for ideas). OR you can buy a Rocko Flake Sled from Sweden for about $12 bucks. It about exactly fits your butt with your legs in the air or tucked in tight, as you pull up the handle slightly to insure a good slide. It weighs next to nothing, so it’s easy to carry to a sledding hill or hide unobtrusively in the back of a closet while you wait for snow. Perfect design!
They’re available by mail-order at the fabulous Kiosk. We sent one to friends who just moved near Prospect Park… read more…
One of those anonymous chain emails arrived in our Inbox today, with a subject line that read “Playing With the Moon”. It’s a series of photo illusions that someone went to great pains to create. It LOOKS LIKE real – not Photoshopped – photos that they made with their kids, out on some beachy dune over several nights/days when the moon was out. The most beautiful ones look like silhouettes and have a strange, curiously old-fashioned magic…
…We were wondering who made them…and where they got the idea…and why… read more…
Gever Tulley, founder of Tinkering School for Kids, has published Fifty Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do), a book we’ve been waiting for, not just to give to the kids we know, but us adults as well, because the same idea applies: By exploring the world (maybe doing things we never got to do as kids) we learn and get ideas and new develop parts of ourselves. I want to:
throw a spear…
…make a bomb in a bag…
…spend an hour blindfolded…
…construct my own flying machine…
…melt glass…
Tulley isn’t cavalierly sending your kids (or you) into danger. He gives detailed instruction and explanations about the why’s and how’s things work, as well as possible dangers. He figures, wisely, if your kid really understands how something works, she will be more able to navigate its challenges herself, use it creatively AND stay safer.
About a year ago, Tulley gave a taste of his book-to-be in a TED talk called “Five Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Children Do”. It’s full of wisdom about learning, creativity and danger safety. Here’s the video, and the transcript, along with a page from the new book:
A friend emailed this cell-phone photo of a kindergarten room. HLP HATE is not a strange coded statement about “hate” as it might seem at first glance, but a child’s spelling of “HELP HAITI”: a thoughtful attempt to help, in whatever way possible …pennies, nickles, dimes, quarters…
Working Big is a remarkable book about large-scale art projects for kids. Written in 1975, it is long out-of-print, but available these days as a free, downloadable pdf from Public Collectors. It gives an expansive view (with how-to’s) of discovery projects to do with your own kids, or fantasize about for your (grown-up) self.
Working Big’s essential premise is that kids and artists often take similar approaches in exploring and working with their environment. Its chapter titles – ”Kids’ Space Equals Artists’ Space” and “The Artist Shapes as the Child Shapes” – should be printed on tee shirts, or scrawled on walls. Pictures of kids working away with obvious pleasure are interspersed with images of works by notable artists, like Robert Smithson‘s earthworks, The Broken Circle and Amarillo Ramp. This inspiring book holds a lot of wisdom about kids AND the creative process in general:
“When nature itself provides the medium, children are eager and intuitive artists. They need no one to tell them that the moist grittiness of sand is just right for sculpturing or read more…
Melt one ice cube in a skillet by placing it in the sun. When melted, add 1 cup water and saute slowly — until water is transparent. Serve small portions, because this dish is rich as well as mouth-watering.
It’s from a book I had as a kid called Mud Pies and Other Recipes by Marjorie Winslow. “This is an outdoor cookbook,” reads the Foreword, “The market place, then, will be a forest or a sand dune or your own back yard.” It’s a cookbook for a kid’s world outdoors, even if the kid, like me, never actually acted out the recipes. Like the best children’s books, it fueled my imagination and painted a world rich with possibilities: read more…
Designer Pamela Hovland sent this image of her son Henry’s costume, a family collaboration. It’s amazing what recycled cardboard boxes and some paint can become…
Helvetia is a tiny town in the West Virginia Appalachians where I‘ve learned a great deal about improvising over the nearly forty years I’ve been visiting there. Settled by Swiss-German immigrants in 1869 who started from scratch in its wilderness valley, a strong tradition of resourcefulness courses through the town. “If you don’t got it, you don’t need it” is a common saying, a way of everyday survival for folks who are a forty-five minute drive on winding mountain roads from the nearest store. If you don’t got it, you figure something else out…like baking a souffle in an iron skillet (no souffle dish), or using a door knob as a pestle, or a wine bottle to roll out dough…I once saw a man use a pitchfork to stir a huge cauldron full of boiling ramps (wild leeks) set over an open fire…
When my friend Eleanor Mailloux, who grew up in Helvetia, got around to looking at my blog, she wrote that it reminded her of a game she played as a kid. That old Appalachian game was a simple way to cultivate an improvisational mindset, and still is: read more…
Gever Tully started a Tinkering School for kids, an exploratory curriculum designed to teach kids how to build the things they think of. By exploratory he means setting kids loose in a shop full of tools and materials (with supervision) and encouragement to “fool around”. In his wonderful TED talk, Tully describes the “deep internal realization” kids have from the experience, which happen to be the same ones you get (at any age) from improvising:
“that you can figure things out as you fool around”…
…nothing turns out as planned – ever…
…all projects go awry…
…success is in the doing (failures are celebrated and analyzed; problems become puzzles)…”
As I watched Tulley’s talk, I thought: I want to go there! I want a tinkering school for grownups! read more…
Ruth Fankushen Kunkel wrote An Alien Robot’s Cookbook for her boys who were picky eaters; she needed to find a way to engage them in eating and making wonderful food. It begins:
”Due to a random mechanical error, I traveled to Earth without warning…I finally
crash-landed in a North American backyard. ”
So it was the Alien Robot Model #4U82 came to write a cookbook as a gift for an Earth boy named Eddie.
The book has the friendly feel of a homemade cookbook made by a thoughtful mom to engage her young kids in the kitchen. (Why not make a cookbook for or with your kids?) read more…
, a book we’ve been waiting for, not just to give to the kids we know, but us adults as well, because the same idea applies: By exploring the world (maybe doing things we never got to do as kids) we learn and get ideas and new develop parts of ourselves. I want to:
