I promise that I won’t overdo the tabletop puns, but here we are at À La Carte No. 1 (!) and I can’t help myself. So have a seat (I’m sorry) and I’ll read you this week’s specials (I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry):
Creative suggestion: This inaugural creative suggestion is in response to a question that’s been coming up a lot in my one-on-ones (the personalized mentorship sessions I offer.) And it’s a pretty simple one: where do you find inspiration besides Pinterest?
We already know the obvious answers (books, traveling, museums, libraries, the rest of the internet), but I think it’s more of a problem of remembering and recalling inspiration than finding it. I can go to a great restaurant and have a great time and leave feeling energized by the experience, but if I don’t notice the details that made that experience special, it’s hard to catalog it in my brain and dig it out later.
A lot of times I just snap a quick photo of something (I’m going to talk more about this another week because I have a ~process~), but today I’m going to talk about WRITING STUFF DOWN.
I keep a long, long list (creatively titled “?”) in my notes app of things that I might want to look into or remember later — something I saw, just remembered, or was recommended. The list includes specific topics (“Welsh blankets”, for instance), people I want to learn more about (Elsa Peretti, Agnes Varda), an allusion to something in my camera roll that I want to go back and look at (“Horses horse painting”, lol), or random ideas (“marigold garland”). When I’m starting a project or I’m bored or I have an itch to learn about *something*, I go to the “?” note and take a scroll. It does a good job of kicking me down a road to somewhere else.
Personal recommendation: This week’s unsponsored, from-my-heart recommendation is Blue Bottle’s Instant Espresso, which I was highly skeptical of and am now an unofficial spokesperson for. I’d like to preface this by saying that I am a very particular type of coffee snob, the kind that doesn’t know anything about coffee or how to make it but has the compulsion to buy a $6.50 iced latte at some point every day and is very picky about it.
Anyway, it comes in a jar and you mix a teaspoon of it with some hot water, add some milk, and voilà…a latte. It tastes just like what I’d get at Blue Bottle IRL and is saving me a lot of money — not buy-a-house-you-coffee-addicted-millennial money, but money nonetheless. I can’t do the math but just take my word for it.
Person to know: Sarah Nsikak, an incredible textile artist and the creative director of the brand La Réunion. Sarah is a Nigerian-American in Brooklyn who makes beautiful woven pieces, from the dresses La Réunion has become known for to the incredible patchwork tapestries she shows in galleries.
Take a peek at Sarah’s work at @sarahnsikak and @lareunionstudio and give her a follow if you love it as much as I do. And if you’re in NYC, Sarah’s show “Luck Comes Before Love” is on view at the Ace Hotel New York from February 5 through March 27, so go for me!!!
This concludes the first installment of À La Carte! To receive emails like these every week, upgrade to a paid subscription below. For $1-ish a week you’ll get weekly ÀLCs, plus the occasional extra interview, essay, and more.
See you next time,
Ali
P.S. — I’m still learning how to really use Substack, so if anything seems funky to you, you can let me know by replying to this email. Thank you!!
I love this Ali, and I’m stealing the long list.
So good to have you here! I’m stuffed! 😛
Perhaps we start having a google like inspiration behaviour. For instance if you want to get suggestions you look for something like "blue elephant" and see if some answer make sense for you. It's like throwing a sticky ball to the wall and wait if it holds or drops.