the sourcerer: Wonders of the Modern Age.

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Wonders of the Modern Age.

I used to send this Cyanide and Happiness cartoon to my friends with iphones.

A small case of sour grapes perhaps, because now that I have one I'm hooked. (I still think it's really funny when a bunch of people are together socially and they're all glued to their phones instead of talking). One of the most fun things to play with is the Hipstamatic app. It's so easy to take atmospheric photos without spending hours in Photoshop. The square format, the colours - it all appeals to my sense of nostalgia. Of course the Canon is still my baby, but for capturing quick images and being unobtrusive, the phone wins.

The pincushions were birthday flowers from my honey - they turn electric at night. The toilet bowl is at the Daily Deli, around the corner from where I live - it's ancient and very beautiful. The Liberty lawn turned into pillow slips on Sunday night. They are so smooth and soft - I highly recommend. As I sewed them I thought of my grandmother telling me that her mother forbade her to sew on a Sunday - it would be like poking a needle in God's eye! What a thing to tell a child...

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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.