the sourcerer: Memory Road.

Saturday, December 18, 2010

Memory Road.

The Agent from Berlin is visiting. We took a meandering drive today - starting in Strubens Road, Mowbray. The wonderful house of Niki and Jude Daly. Niki was my lecturer at Stellenbosch University and is responsible for many of the threads in my fabric. The Agent and I lived next door to them many years ago. We were very young and poor in those days and I remember that we ate a lot of potatoes. At night we'd roam the streets looking for firewood. We had no tv, but Niki's piano would regularly entertain us through the shared wall of the terrace.

The Dalys' are moving to the seaside in the new year and today they had a studio sale of illustrations.

How difficult it was to choose!


A lucky girl is getting this one for Christmas.

These came home with me:

Also, a gift of his beautiful book, "A Wanderer In Og". Thank you Mister Inkman!

As always, I was rather distracted by bits of the house.

And while passing through Observatory afterward, the distractions continued.

We ended up at the Biscuit Mill for a bite. I'm not one for the herd feeling, but the coffee was very good, as was the cider and the flatbread.

Liked the cardboard plate,

impressed by the crepe man's array of half finished Nutella.

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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.