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…
Joaquin Baldwin‘s beautiful little animated film is a reminder of how the creative process often works – in completely unexpected ways. We also love Baldwin’s story about how the film came to be:
“This film was inspired while driving back from a trip to Palm Springs, when my partner said that it must take them forever to plant and grow so many windmills. I wrote down the title The Windmill Farmer for an idea to explore later, and about a year later I started developing it into a character and story. This film took 4 months to complete from the first boards until the final mix.”
You never know where a simple idea might lead…
(Watching with the sound off is a completely different experience, which we recommend.)
Via BoingBoing
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?
The PBS NewsHour recently issued a challenge: post your ideas for stopping and/or cleaning up the ongoing Gulf of Mexico oil spill on their YouTube site. They received 7,000 entries, with seriously good ideas woven through jokes about calling Macgyver and using duct tape. A few of the best are collected on the News Hours site: clever improvisational thinking by public citizens, along with homemade visuals to illustrate various strategies. Most of them didn’t pass muster by ‘expert’, Greg McCormack, director of the Petroleum Extension Service at the University of Texas, who explained why they wouldn’t work… all EXCEPT ONE…
Two heavily drawling guys from C.S. Roberts Contracting – one dressed in overalls – did a video-demo using kitchen utensils and stainless steel bowls to show that ordinary hay could be used to soak up the oil because oil readily sticks to hay. They figured out all sorts of aspects to the problem, from what kinds of hay to use and how to get it out to see, and what to do with the oil-soaked hay. You can hear their excitement at figuring out the problem: “This is about as green and as simple as it gets…”
We LOVE and are heartened by the folks that put their creativity and imagination and knowledge to this serious problem, and spent time figuring it out and struggling with it, then pulled together a video, and opened themselves and their idea up to criticism…
Thinking outside the box can be a really generous thing to do…
Thanks David Saltman!
When we are feeling tapped out and need an instant break, we often turn to the Encyclopedia of Life, a collaborative database intended to document the world’s 1.9 million species. It is the vision of biologist E.O. Wilson who was invited to share his “dream” in a moving 2007 TED talk: to catalogue species as a way of protecting and understanding them. His dream is coming true: not long after, $$ started rolling in to fund it.
Although the Encyclopedia is meant for both scientist and layman, we haven’t quite wrapped our minds around its organization. So we just click “More Species” in the Explore section at the top of the page until we find an image that grabs us. Then we discover that what looks like a lovely man-made design is really read more…
A few years ago, Manny Howard was enticed by New York Magazine to try growing food in his Brooklyn backyard and sustain himself on it for a month. At the time, Manny wasn’t really committed to exploring the meaning of “locavore” (the magazine’s tack); he loves wild challenges of just about any kind (hunting boar or bear, making a film in Afghanistan…) and New York Magazine knew they had their sucker. In trying to create “the farm”, Manny got SO deep into something he had no clue about that he almost lost his marriage (and a finger). He spent months preparing land that had not grown a thing in decades, nurturing seedlings under make-shift grow lights, rigging coops, building an irrigation system, learning to geld and kill chickens, trying to get rabbits to breed… learning on the job. Everything that could go wrong did, including a hurricane landing in Brooklyn – right on the farm. He lost 29 pounds.
In a recent interview in Elle Magazine, Manny described the biggest challenge:
“Well, I could break it down to most miserable, or most discouraging, or generated the most self-loathing. Those are probably the categories. I was so crazy and myopic. I was dedicated to finishing the project. I really became a lunatic. Fix what’s broken, heal what’s sick, feed what’s hungry-which was the real gift of the whole project: Apply work to a problem and the problem would be gone for, you know, seven hours. Nothing ever actually got fixed or healed.”
The article Manny wrote for New York was great, and his book about the year or so spent farming in Brooklyn is even better – riveting actually. read more…
Of late we are smitten with a rather homely blog whose content is so good, and its straightforwardness so compelling, that it overcomes its strangely distracting design and ads for cutting down belly fat. Hunter Angler Gardener Cook is Hank Shaw‘s site about being just that:
“I fish. I dig earth, raise plants, live for food and kill wild animals…But most of all I think daily about new ways to cook and eat anything that walks, flies, swims, crawls, skitters, jumps – or grows…Honest food is what I’m seeking…I am especially interested in those meats and veggies that people don’t eat much any more, like pigeons or shad or cardoons.”
Shaw blogs his “wanderings in the edible world” and explorations of foods that strike his fancy – explorations that invariably lead to improvising and figuring things out himself. The blog is a good place for learning about what’s REALLY in season, and what to do with foods you’ve foraged one way or another, or have just wondered about. We like his step-by-step instructions (with photos) of how to break down a (game) bird, and make bottarga (salt-cured fish roe), and are impressed with his thoughts on Wild Game Fat and Flavor, which we haven’t seen written about elsewhere. And even though we can’t get with his use of garlic powder and Instacure No.2 (sodium nitrite) in what looks like an otherwise fine recipe for Lardo, we love his original voice and take and insights into the process of sussing out a new ingredient; the guy is game to learn and get his hands dirty.
The blog is a fine reminder of what is out there, from acorns and borage, to elderflower and shad: all the fabulous possibilities for eating in the natural world… read more…
In a recent New Yorker Talk of the Town, we came across this surprising image: a Japanese ukiyo-e print by Utagawa Kuniyoshi made in 1842 (from a show at the Japan Society). It’s called “Haysuhana Prays Under a Waterfall”. The idea knocked us out: of praying, meditating, thinking… just plain sitting… under a waterfall, for a while.
(One hundred and fifty years ago Kuniyoshi created hundreds of wild woodblock prints of giant spiders, skeletons, women warriors, ghosts and samurai…Apparently his work has had a major influence on today’s manga and anime artists. You can see more here.)
Brasilian musician Hermeto Pascoal is famous for making music with unconventional objects. (Miles Davis called him “the most impressive musician in the world.” ) Here’s Pascoals astonishing Musica de Lagoa, made in a lagoon…the lagoon made into a instrument…
According to his bio, Pascoal is self-taught:
“Fascinated by the sounds of nature since he was a little boy, from a pumpkin mammon pipe he made a fife with which he used to play for the birds. He liked to spend hours in the lake playing sounds with the water, and also to pick every piece of scrap metal in his grandfather’s blacksmith shop to hang them in a rope to take sound of them. When he reached the age of 7-8 years old, he decided to try his father’s 8-bass accordion, and never stopped.”
Of course, it got us thinking about making our own music, somehow, and then we opened up a favorite book (that’s worth a post unto itself) to this: read more…
“A snowman is an anthropomorphic snow sculpture of a human. They are customarily built by children… in celebration of winter.” –Wikipedia
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…
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…
Amidst the images of devastation and loss coming out of Haiti yesterday were some symbols of of hope. Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres), whose medical facilities in Haiti were destroyed during the earthquake, were able to set up remarkable inflatable hospitals as triage centers ministering to devastated Port au Prince. They were there, even as other relief workers were finding it almost impossible to get through. It seems as though Doctors Without Borders is always “there” somehow.
In Greece many years ago I met a women who volunteered as a nurse for MSF. She would leave her life on the beautiful island of Chios on a moments notice to give service in the most dire of situations. What fierce stuff she is made of, I thought, unable to imagine having the strength to experience all that she had.
And although I often hear people talking about doing something rather than “just giving money”, sometimes giving money is the most effective thing we can do for the moment: a way of giving support to those who are there helping those in such dire need. read more…
The Known Universe is an amazing video that takes you from the Himalayas to the far reaches of space, to experience the afterglow of Big Bang, constellations, planets, quasars, the Milky Way, our solar system, and more…
It is compiled from the Digital Universe Atlas, a four-dimensional map of the universe maintained by the American Museum of Natural History, so it is all astronomically accurate. It is mind-expanding and beautiful, especially viewed full-screen.
It is one of the treasures I’ve found during the past year on kottke.org, one of my favorite blogs. I stop by daily to see what Jason Kottke has found, and although I may pass several posts by, just scanning the titles opens my view until I hit BIG with the likes of The Known Universe.
So this is a shout-out: Thanks a million Kottke!
One of my favorite recipes is called Fried Water:
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…
Maria Robledo
Photographer Maria Robledo emailed me this picture of a winter crocus taken with her i-Phone, with the message: “Needs nothing but light to illuminate us.”
She was given crocus bulbs bought from the local farmer’s market as a house-warming present. She had only to place one root-side down in a bowl and expose it to light to awaken the flower within.
Several kinds of bulbs hold the potential to valiantly bloom in winter; the easiest are those that do not need a period of cold before exposure to sun. These include crocuses, hyacinths, paperwhites and daffodils. Here’s the simple method from Ed Hume Seeds: read more…
