the sourcerer: Jungle Jim comes to town.

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Jungle Jim comes to town.

The Book Lounge is simply my favourite book shop in the universe. I nipped in tonight for the launch of Jungle Jim and had to fight my way through the crowd of black-clad young hipsters to buy a copy. The shark and bone cookies with neon icing were gone in a flash, but the wine was still flowing when I left an hour later. Spotted Nikhil Singh in the crowd - enigmatic front man for The Wild Eyes and also a contributor to issue #1.

Jungle Jim is dark and obscure, printed on thick newsprint stock and true to the tradition of pulp fiction, smells deliciously of... ink. It's a smell that suffuses me with intense happiness. It's also all African, which equals more happiness.

ZAR 15 (alleenlik!) buys you all of this.

Another thing that made me smile today was a pair of door panels at Onsite Gallery.

For decades opened and closed by a stranger's hands and called by another name on the other side of the world...

Unfortunately thousands of ZARs.

2 comments:

Roy said...: cool!!!
sorry I missed you.; May 31, 2011 at 9:48 PM
Susan A. said...: oh - oh.
I want those doors!; June 1, 2011 at 11:12 AM

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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.