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Allen Ginsberg: How to Be
The past few mornings, our reading has been Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews with the poet Allen Ginsberg. Most of the interviews are very long, except one It asked a single question about how to...
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Use Envy (+ Other Dark Emotions) To Your Advantage
(Video link here.) This compelling 2-minute video for is based on The School of Life‘s Alain de Botton’s writings about the uses of envy, and the information that often-difficult emotion holds. It...
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Patti Smith: Advice For ‘A Pioneering Time’
(Video link here.) We can think of no better way to start a new week than with this interview with Patti Smith at the Louisiana Literature festival August 24, 2012 at the Louisiana Museum of Modern...
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What if Age, Mood, or Worldview are Nothing but a Mind-Set?
bigthink.com What if Age is Nothing But a Mind-Set in The Sunday Times Magazine describes the astonishing results of Harvard social psychologist Ellen Langer‘s studies into the way routines and mental...
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Wallace Stevens: Patron Saint of Creatives Held Captive by Work
(Video link here.We’ve excerpted a perfect bit; it you can’t watch it here, please click on the link.) We know many people who work hard at jobs they don’t love in order to pay for the lives or...
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The Transformative Powers of Cheap Wigs
Sally Schneider The extraordinary silvery wig above is $13.88 worth of identity experiment: a bargain. Having discovered that searching “wigs” at Amazon, yields an astonishing array of styles and...
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Weakness of Strength + the Stength of Weakness
(Video link here.) This short animation describes the incredibly useful “Weakness of Strength Theory”: the flip side of a person’s strengths in one context—the qualities you love or admire them for —...
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What is YOUR Artist’s Studio?
A couple of weeks ago while we were compiling Artist’s Studios with Sofas + Rest Spaces, we stumbled on picture of earth artist Roy Staab‘s that had the notation: The Site Is My Studio. There was...
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The Art of the Hair: Creativity in Trump’s ‘Most Fantastic Feature’
In a New Yorker recently we found a short piece about Keith Allen Johnson, a sculptor from Flowery Branch, Georgia who created a bust of Donald Trump that he planned to present to Trump’s Georgia...
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Eco on Why We Make Lists + Some Favorites
Marco Raaphorst Our friend Tim Slavin, of Kids, Code and Computer Science sent us this image, knowing that we write often about lists, a critical tool in managing a creative life. We discovered it was...
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Freedom Means Letting Go of Shame
Greg Keras From very early on in my life as an amputee, I’ve loathed using crutches or a wheelchair. I am a very autonomous person. I have blue hair and tattoos. I don’t think too much about the...
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Tattoos As Self Reclamation
Greg Keras As a tattoo artist I witness the myriad reasons and kinds of people who get tattooed. I have tattooed a mourning 64-year-old-man transforming his grief, a Hasidic jew wanting to secretly...
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Work with Hands, not Brands
Sally Schneider/Mira Keras In conversation, I never call Improvised Life a blog. The Blogging world is an ubiquitous, saturated and aspirational one. We are trying to do something different. (more…)
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What You Can Do When You Are Too Challenged To Do Anything
Greg Keras Last week I was supposed to write some articles for Improvised Life and couldn’t do it. I am a few weeks post-op from a serious surgery. Healing at am unexpectedly glacial place is wearing...
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An Unusual Memorial for a Loved One: Hair
Hairstory Studio in downtown Manhattan calls itself "part think-tank, photo studio, art space, and production house...challenging beauty stereotypes through the art of cutting, coloring, and styling...
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Lumineer’s Cleopatra: Ode to Ordinary Life
(Video link here.) The Lumineers’ short, moving video Cleopatra tells many stories as a woman-of-a-certain ages wends through her day: (more…)
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Stuart Ringholt: ‘Can Art Be Super Practical and Improve My Life?’
Stuart Ringholt This compelling chair made of a sawed-in-half bathtub is the creation of artist Stuart Ringholt who, in the throws of hashish psychosis, wondered if art can be practical. In making...
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‘Soy Yo’: A Joyous Anthem of Personal Liberation
Soy Yo is an astonishing visual anthem about a young girl's small powerful acts of personal expression and liberation. As she encounters a morning's worth of possible "girl prisons" —humiliations and...
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Dressing for Camouflage or Self-Expression w Rumi
Sally Schneider Walking around the park recently, we saw a man leaning on a fence, minding his own business, wearing an astonishing hat: a baseball cap turned backwards and interleaved with fresh...
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Opulent Mobility Antidotes What We All Fear
Michael Garlington When a friend of artist Laura Brody had a stroke, Laura began to take notice of assistive devices that are 'almost insultingly ugly' and impersonal. She set out to understand why...
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