the sourcerer: A weekend in the week.

Saturday, July 24, 2010

A weekend in the week.

There's something so appealing about playing hooky... leaving the mad rush of town on a wednesday morning and coming back on a friday evening. We went to Arniston - the Production Designer, the Architect, his Dog and I.

On the drive there, I thought about the previous time I'd been there. It was the Architect's birthday and George J. cooked a suckling pig on a mechanized spit, over a huge fire. It took hours and was exciting in a primal kind of way. I can't remember exactly what was in the stuffing - apple, prune, rosemary, ginger? It was grand.

This time we stopped in Bredasdorp for provisions. The new Checkers has some exotic fare: grapples ( looks like an apple, smells like fanta grape.) Also some very misshapen peaches from Micronesia. (really Mr O'Hara? this is what the people want in the platteland?)
But alas, no cumin seeds. When I asked the lady packing the shelves she said to me: "dis 'n teer puntjie, mevrou." (that's a sore point madam) The lamb and lentil soup was pretty good nonetheless.

We made fires. We laughed a lot. Someone did some drawings. We made big plans.

We went for a walk and had a glass of wine on the grass in front of Willeen's.

Went to see the catch of the day in the harbour.

Windswept walks along the cliffs of Waenhuiskrans.

and I lost my heart to the Collie.

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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.