the sourcerer: Hanging with my honey.

Saturday, December 17, 2011

Hanging with my honey.

It was nice to walk around with the tallest man in Istanbul. He took me to see some of the places where they've been shooting. At one of the buildings near the Grand Bazaar, the caretaker unlocked the door of the stairwell and we went up to the roof. In the sixties, when the fabric trade moved to India and China, Istanbul suffered a big commercial blow. In a room up there is an abandoned Italian loom, probably around 150 years old, the last piece of fabric rotting away gently...

and then he brought us some tea.

In a courtyard not far away, there is a silver smelting business. A very jovial smith showed us around, explaining the process with laughter and huffs and puffs.

I don't want to go home.

3 comments:

D said...: Ohhhh.... so beautiful.; December 17, 2011 at 1:27 PM
the sourcerer said...: :-); December 17, 2011 at 6:09 PM
Marie said...: Stay.; December 18, 2011 at 12:35 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.