the sourcerer: Green Glass & Flags

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Green Glass & Flags

The boot sale has been miserable lately, but I did find another green wine goblet. In the past I have always been on the look-out for red glass, but lately the green has had more appeal. My mom bought the place mat in Swaziland when I was a baby. I'm lucky enough to have three. I rather like the Tretchikoff boobies in the background.

Patriotism is even extending to fruit juice these days.

In my mind the colours of South African sport have always been green and yellow. It's an imprint from my childhood. I'm not a sport-nut nor have I ever thought of myself as patriotic - I'm one of those people who only gets the feeling when I'm far, f-a-r away from home. And then only after quite some time has passed.
BUT.
The World Cup has made people do strange things - I go down to the Gardens Centre for some shopping and all the cars have small flags fluttering from their windows. Their mirrors have funny little flag socks pulled over them. The other day I walked past a small navy blue Renault and in the back window, on the dash, was a South African flag, neatly laid out and folded in at the edges. I got a lump in my throat.

Some people are obviously batting for more than one team.

No comments:

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

You could tend a garden at night, only at night, pouring dark water onto leaves, and into the earth, like pouring midnight onto midnight. You could hold your soil-stained hands up to the moon. The stars would gleam on the bottom of the shovel. It would smell the same as a daytime garden - it would smell green, violet, red, white. But come back, in daylight. Come back, to see the colours without closing your eyes.
- Sean Michaels. Accompaniment to the song "Immune" by LOW. Said the Gramophone

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don't bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: "It's not where you take things from - it's where you take them to."
Jim Jarmusch (1953- )

You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to go was the Luxembourg gardens where you smelled and saw nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l'Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard. There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought that Cézanne was probably hungry in a different way.
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) - from A Moveable Feast.