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, square or triangularheads. (The connectors come with a cover.)
One of our favorite early posts was about Andre Michelle’s visual music synthesizer, ToneMatrix which allows you to instantly improvise your own music by selecting any of the small boxes on the grid on his website. We have turned to it many times when we wanted a diversion to shift our mood or view, or to take our focus off an irritating noise. Now, we’re smitten with Michelle’s newest iteration on his make-your-own-music theme: Pulsate.
Click the black square in two are more places to generate pulsating circles and sound. Just four or five clicks make for a relaxing, meditative riff…click lots of circles within circles for elaborate (and energetic) composition.
Part of its beauty is how ephemeral it is; it’s music for the moment.
One of our favorite books about improvising is Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art by Stephen Nachmanovitch. It’s one of those enduring books that you can open randomly and find something useful or compelling…like this, which we found just now:
“…Sometimes we damn the limits, but without them art is not possible. They provide us with something to work with and against. In practicing our craft we surrender, to a great extent, to letting the materials dictate the design…”
Among the many jacket quotes praising the book is one by Keith Jarrett, the jazz pianist known for his astonishing improvisational work the Koln Concert. In four sentences, he totally nails what improvising is:
“You are called to an important meeting, the subject of which you are not told. It is of utmost importance that you ‘Be Yourself’. The meeting starts immediately and your clothes are in the laundry and you have no time to wash up or shave. Is this a ‘serious’ situation? Then so is improvisation…”
And that is what The Koln Concert was. In the video, Jarrett describes the impossible circumstances that made for a stunning creation.
That’s what Free Play is about.
We view them as an essential part of our toolBox.
(You can listen to samples of The Koln Concert, and/or buy it as an MP3, here.)
We find something incredibly compelling about Marjin Van der Poll‘s Do hit chair: hammering a chair out of a metal cube with all one’s strength, testing it out, and then pounding and hammering and testing over and over until it takes shape. The cube is smashed full force with a hammer, until it becomes… something else, a solution.
“Do hit… is an interpretation of a chair by Italian designer Enzo Mari, the ‘sof-sof chair’. Its complex looking frame to me seemed a result of good craftsmanship but as it turned out it was one of the first examples of spot welding in the furniture industry. This contradiction between craftsmanship and mass production became the concept for the chair. Do hit started as a small copper model which I beat into a tiny chair with the pointed part of a hobby hammer. The cube would be easy to produce industrially and would be moulded into a chair using a hammer. Repetition of the beating only strengthened the concept…
The Do hit can either be shaped by its owner or by me. I have shaped many Do hits and look for an expressive object with large folds which I then polish to make them stand out. Each Do hit therefore is different as I can only create the global shape of seat and backrest and have to react to the detailed form taken on by the metal as it is being shaped. This is a great challenge every time.”
Of course, we followed the trail back to Enzo’s Mari inspiring chair, designed in 1971 read more…
Although the title of this video is Jessica’s ‘Daily Affirmation’, we see it as a video of a little kid counting blessings. Not only does she list the stuff she has, she really LOVES it. Her fierce, slightly-playing-to-the-camera soliloquy is quite a celebration of the GREAT ordinary.
We find that counting blessings, though seemingly New-Agey, works: the practice changes your view from NOT (“enough”…”able”…”worthy”..) to appreciating the A LOT that’s there already, that has the potential to be used in different ways, to support what we want to do…
“The effect of a grateful outlook on psychological and physical well-being was examined… The gratitude-outlook groups exhibited heightened well-being across several, though not all, of the outcome measures across the 3 studies, relative to the comparison groups. The effect on positive affect appeared to be the most robust finding. Results suggest that a conscious focus on blessings may have emotional and interpersonal benefits.”
How do you count blessings? Just look around and name what’s in your life that you’re glad to have. Like Jessica does…HOUSE…HAIRCUT…COUSINS…
You can do it anywhere, anytime, in secret or out loud…it’s a good subway practice when you’ve got nothing to read…
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…
One day, I devised a coarse olive paste as a way of using up several kinds of olives that were a little past their prime. I spread them on the counter and pitted them by tapping them lightly with a rock, one of the many pounding devices I’ve collected over the years to mash garlic, make pestos and aiolis, crush spices…The olives’ flesh broke open making the pit easy to remove. Then I kept gently pounding to smash the olives further and worked in a scrap of mashed garlic and some fresh herbs and orange zest. I use this versatile olivada as a topping for rustic bread, pizzas, and focaccias, as a sauce for pasta, even stirred into mashed potatoes When heated, the flavor of the olives becomes more complex and aromatic.
To pit the olives,tap them with something heavy-ish that has one flatish side: a pestle, a stone, a tin can, a hammer, rolling pin… read more…
Improvisation requires focus and time, two commodities few of us possess. And when you’re waist deep in alligators, it is hard to remember you came to drain the swamp. How can we get focus and time?
Many people we know have read The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss. The title appeals to our inner escapist; we dream of an easier life where the focus is on what we really want to be doing, on our family and friends, on what matters most in our lives. The book describes how anybody can be a Lifestyle Designer, and fund their life with only four hours of work a week. That seems a stretch at best. If you have a “hot cakes” book and an online supplement business like Ferris does, maybe it’s plausible. But we’re too distracted and exhausted to start a business. Is such a radical shift necessary to be happy?
We think the real value of this book is as a set of tools that can help you make time to improvise a more enjoyable, less stressful life. Here are our favorite, truly do-able ideas to fight off the alligators and keep focus on what matters: read more…
At a dinner party at wine writer Anthony Giglio’s house one evening, we saw him scribble the name of each guest on their wine glass with a white marker: a chic way of helping guests keep tab of their glass in a crowd (and avoiding unnecessary pours – and washing – of fresh glasses).
There’s a brilliant idea, we thought. So we asked Anthony what that marker was and where to get it.
Here is the story of his big fat improvisation, and the many ways you can use it :
“The China Marker is my secret weapon: I bring them to dinner parties as host gifts.
It is not really a marker; it’s a wax or grease pencil - sort of tacky when you write on paper with it – and writes perfectly on glass or china.
When we need a table in a hurry for a project or a bigger-than-expected-crowd-for-dinner, we pull out a pair of folding aluminum saw horses we keep the closet. We lay on a top made out of a hollow-core door or a slab of plywood cut to whatever size we like (we’ve got a small version and a larger one…) to make an instant trestle table. If you don’t have room to store the top(s) under or behind the sofa, in the closet or in the basement, take a cue from Spanish Designer Tomas Alonso’s 5 Degree Table, and store the top propped against a wall in plain sight, like a sculpture. Alonso laminated the top of his table a bold green. You could laminate or paint yours any color you like. (We’re thinking blackboard paint …so we can create brilliant transient artworks, or our dinner guests could have fun marking up the table…).
Our recent call for accessible clip/clamp ideas for securing stacked boxes (wood, cardboard, plastic) to make d-i-y clipped-together shelving got a big response, all offering the same solution: large binder clips. These cheap, ubiquitous clips seem to be the go-to solution for many niggling problems. Wine writer Anthony Giglio wrote:
“I have improvised with these binder clips for years. Currently they clamp open a window that won’t stay up, and clamp those brackets flaps on the window air conditioner in place. For those shelves you would but the extra large, clamp them on and them squeeze/remove the wing handles for aesthetics. Voilà!”
“I agree that the binder clip is a magical tool. The metal wire looking handles not only fold forward as Joan mentioned but can actually be taken off once you position them in the desired place by squeezing the handles and taking them off their hinges. I think this would create a better look from the side at the vertical connections of these shelves.”
Two inches seem to be about the right size; their one-inch opening would sandwich two half-inch (or thinner) boards. Now we’re hunting for two-inch binder clips in white or colors, rather than the usual black clip. read more…
Last December, Pam Hunter, the mastermind behind Studio 707, THE Public Relations firm in Napa Valley, closed its doors to take a sabbatical. On her website’s last post, she told the story of meeting two artists over the years whose practice of taking long sabbaticals from their work had impressed her deeply. Spain’s Fernan Adria, considered one of the world’s greatest chefs, shutters his restaurant El Bulli for five months each year, and told Pam how the experimental months of his sabbatical revitalizes his creative alchemy in the restaurant. Brilliant Austian-born designer Stefan Sagmeister, closes his design studio for at least a year every seven years, so that he and his staff can explore projects the don’t have the time to do when they are working. Pam had almost worked with him on a project but he was about to go on sabbatical, to which he is committed.
“Possessed as I was by the approach of both Adria and Sagmeister, I couldn’t bring myself to take the leap off the treadmill. That is, until late one afternoon in June 2009 when I received the telephone call that reframed everything instantly. ’You have cancer,’ said the voice on the other end of the line. By February I hope to be in remission and ready to begin my first sabbatical.”
Pam included a link to a Sagemeister’s riveting TED talk about why he insists on the year-long break for himself and his staff, and how it works…what it is really like, the kind of discipline needed. Pam’s post got us thinking read more…
Blu Dot is offering a surprisingly compelling clock widget you can download to your computer. It is a one inch square that sits anywhere on your screen you like; with each new minute, a new number image appears. The effect is constant surprise and little jostles to your mind about change and possibilities. For free!
The other day we got lost in a website that is so useful and inspiring, it has become a sort of role model. “THAT’s some of what we’d like ‘the improvised life’ to do for people”, we thought, and put it in the file of bits and pieces that mirror what we imagine for its future.. Kevin Kelly, who has had his finger in a million visionary pies, has eleven websites under KK.org; one of our favorites is Cool Tools.
“Cool tools is a web site which recommends the best/cheapest tools available. Tools are broadly defined as anything that can be useful…”
We love it because we’re always looking for ways to DO the ideas that our in our head, and we need tools to do that. There are 37 or so categories of tools that you can delve into depending on your interest or need, like Materials, Design, Homestead, Learning, Consumtivity, Vehicles, Craft, Dwelling, Living on the Road, Life on Earth, Play, Big Systems…
. In four sentences, he totally nails what improvising is:
.)
by Tim Ferriss. The title appeals to our inner escapist; we dream of an easier life where the focus is on what we really want to be doing, on our family and friends, on what matters most in our lives. The book describes how anybody can be a Lifestyle Designer, and fund their life with only four hours of work a week. That seems a stretch at best. If you have a “hot cakes” book and an online supplement business like Ferris does, maybe it’s plausible. But we’re too distracted and exhausted to start a business. Is such a radical shift necessary to be happy?
(back in 2009; I’ve since written 2010 and am writing 2011). 
. 
