the sourcerer: Another man's treasure.

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Another man's treasure.

The Victorian Doctor of Madness, aka GQ

I haven't seen my friend Guy in many years. According to the World Distance Calculator, we live 7817.03 miles apart. But every year around Halloween, I look forward to seeing what him and his wife are getting up to. I haven't met Sabrina yet, but I know that she is a make-up artist extraordinaire. The other day Guy posted an album of photos of these dressmaker's forms or Judies. I pored over them with delight.

Originally from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, and destined for the trash, thankfully they have been saved. Most of them are dated, so Guy has kept two for his office, with the date of his arrival in New York. The rest are looking for new homes. Objects worn by the ages and hundreds of hands, by pins and by scissors.

This morning I saw these photos of an abandoned movie theatre in Brooklyn.

Love old-time grandeur.

1 comment:

Chris said...: beautiful!; July 26, 2011 at 11:39 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.