the sourcerer: The Milnerton Market

Sunday, June 5, 2011

The Milnerton Market

When I started writing here, my idea was to have a place to talk about all the things I have to find for my job as a set decorator/props master/art director and often end up buying, either for work or myself. Of course, as these things do, it evolved into something else - though it's still about finding stuff,
tangible or not.

I do a good deal of shopping at the boot sale in Paardeneiland. (It started on a field in Milnerton and the name stuck) I've been going there for years and often it's quite sociable - one tends to bump into people that you know and have a bit of a chat.

Today is one of those big weather days in Cape Town - rain, sun, puddles and cauliflower clouds with silver linings. Perfect. I was so happy to see my friend Dave Southwood peddling his wares - some camera equipment and also his beautiful book about the market - he's been photographing it for the last ten years. The collector's edition is priced at ZAR 10 000, but the good news is that he's signed a standard book deal, so pretty soon all of us will be able to buy one.

Yay!

2 comments:

Helen said...: I have only been to the milnerton market twice, and both times in summer.. where I ended up horribly sunburned :(

I'm definitely going in winter! I got the most incredible upright lamp the last time I was there for a mere R50.; June 6, 2011 at 8:58 AM
the sourcerer said...: and Helen, for the best stuff - go early. 9ish.
:); June 6, 2011 at 10:45 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.