April 2009

mexico’s brilliant make-shift

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One of things I love about Mexico is the country’s embrace of the make-shift; people are great at rigging what they need with whatever they have access to. Inventive solutions to all kinds of problems and needs are everywhere, as I discovered on a recent vacation in Sayulita, Mexico, a fishing village-cum-surfer-paradise about 35 miles North of Puerto Vallarta on the Pacific coast. On a riverbank, away from the touristy bustle of Sayulita’s central plaza, I came upon a Mexican woman cooking on an inventive, multi-use wood-fired stove rigged out of loosely-placed bricks, stones, and metal parts repurposed from other appliances.

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rule for living: apologize every day

Sally Schneider
My friend Holton Rower, who is an amazing artist, created this sign on his studio door using colored tape. It’s a really great reminder that instantly shifts your perspective: about being more mindful of the potential to hurt someone’s feelings, including your own, maybe especially your own. Just about everybody I know judges themselves harshly, with unspoken words they would never inflict on anyone else.

It’s also a fine example of using colored tape to create an instant reminder anywhere. Blue masking tape, used for room painting, is particularly good: a bright color that won’t damage walls if you change your mind down the line.   read more…

catalogue your storage with snapshots

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A picture of some gorgeous ceramic paper plates by designer Virginia Sim sent me to her website, an odd mix of her advertising and art works, and practical inventions. My favorite, filed under “Passionately Curious”   is her system for catalogueing her shoes by pasting a polaroid image of the shoe right on the box. You don’t need a polaroid camera to do this; take pictures with a digital camera or your cellphone, email it to yourself, print the email out and cut out the image. Then paste it on your shoe box. Or any box where you can’t see in: Fill the box with stuff and snap a photo of what’s inside, to paste on the outside. An image is worth a thousand words.

blank-canvas furniture

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Phil Mansfield for The New York Times

A while back, the N.Y. Times reported on a stylish mom whose muslin-covered John Derian sofa became a canvas for her daughter and her seventh grade class to decorate with markers. The article didn’t say whether she’d intended the white muslin sofa to be painted on or whether the blank canvas she’d meant only to be chic and minimal inspired a fit of improvisation. No matter, I suppose. It IS a great idea, and was taken a step further by her son, who embellished two muslin-covered arm chairs with Fabric Paint clearly an incredibly fun thing for a kid to do.

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awesome music made from you-tube videos

Out of clips of musicians downloaded from YouTube, Israeli musician Kutiman (Ophir Kutiel) cut and mixed more than a hundred performances into original music. As Sasha Frere-Jones put it: “total strangers collaborating on what sound like live songs”.  Hear the album and watch the videos (with attribution) at thru-you.com.   read more…

a mantle as furniture (no hearth)

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Ellen Silverman

Many years ago, I bought an amazing yellow mantle, salvaged from an old house in Maine, to surround the fireplace in an apartment I thought I’d live in forever.   Then things changed (life’s operating principle) and I had to leave that beautiful space, and make a new home amidst the the harsh realities of the New York real estate market. My new apartment had no fireplace. Still, I thought: Why not have a mantle without any notion of a fireplace at all?

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