the sourcerer: The Shop.

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

The Shop.

I have always wanted a shop. It's in my blood. My Great-Grandfather had a wagon-making business in Elim. My Grandfather had a general dealers in the Eastern Cape, called Rademeyer & Saffrey. My Great Aunt Lil had Haskings Bottle Store and Tobacco Depot. I loved the smell of those cloth bags filled with Boxer Tobacco.

So, the other day, I opened a shop. It's virtual for now (though it lives in my head in sparkling technicolor... and is packed away in my
Grandfather's wardrobe).

And who knows...

the way to climb a mountain and all of that.

Horror Vacui - the shop to fill your empty spaces.

4 comments:

Marie said...: Perfect name. When you get your physical shop, could it have a stoep, so that when I'm old I can come and sit and drink coffee and skinner on it?; June 1, 2012 at 4:49 PM
the sourcerer said...: Deal!
and by the way, for a little while, I considered calling it "Boeretroos"; June 1, 2012 at 5:56 PM
tanjawilmot said...: did I say it, or did I just think it. the shop is perfect in every way. the archivist and the auctioneer are there alongside the artist, the photographer and the designer. the shopkeeper reigns supreme I imagine. either way, you have one helluva team, I hope they all have coffee together first thing on a monday morning. a stoep would be perfect, one with ferns growing out the cracks in the flagstones by the leiwater.; June 11, 2012 at 11:45 AM
the sourcerer said...: thank you Ms T!
and just so you know, there's always a cup of coffee with your name on it, and perhaps a dish of apple crumble.; June 11, 2012 at 11:54 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.