the sourcerer: Make your feet happy.

Monday, January 3, 2011

Make your feet happy.

A friend told me about Happy Feet about four years ago. I've been going there sporadically ever since. I like taking people there - it's a good place to catch up over a cup of tea. So today we sat there in a row with our feet soaking in wooden tubs of warm water: dog baby, pig baby and rooster baby, while the masseuses told us all about the Chinese Horoscope.

These girls come here, or go to Europe or the States, because they get paid in a month what they would earn doing the same work for a year back in China. They leave family and friends behind and Tina, who worked on my feet, says it feels like a strange kind of jail. She doesn't understand the culture and she feels she can't walk around safely, especially at night. But the money is very nice, she says.

The old catch 22.

Notice my friend's stylish Missibaba sandals.

Be that as it may, it was lovely as always. Your feet get kneaded and stretched and slapped until they're rosy and soft. Afterward, you walk on air. They're open from eleven till eleven every day, except Christmas. And it's one of life's great pleasures to go there after an early dinner. Just make sure to book.

The wallpaper mesmerises...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...: Lily! How lovely! XXX; January 16, 2011 at 9:31 PM

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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.