the sourcerer: Ode to Vicky Leandros.

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Ode to Vicky Leandros.

In South Africa, ownership is a really big deal. People want to own their houses and their land. You grow up thinking that it's really important, and you feel a lack when you don't.

But what do you do when you just can't afford to buy a house or an apartment in the place where you want to be? You rent from friends with trust funds, you find something in the paper. You live in a place you could never afford to buy, not in a million years.

I'm the kind of person who likes a bit of space around me, especially over my head. Low ceilings are the Devil's work. I rent a place in the city that would cost close to R 2 000 000 to buy. It has skylights that leak when it rains and I can hear the neighbors sneeze. But it's up in the clouds and surrounded by giant trees and when I walk in the door, I sigh with happiness.

I have friends who rent a house on a curve in the road, overlooking the bay of Fish Hoek. When I walked into their house the other day, everything seemed to fall into place and make sense. This is why we do it. It's a dream, but we're living it.
The garden slopes up the mountain, seemingly forever. Covered in fynbos, with birds darting in and out. There's a serenity there that I would find very hard to leave in the mornings.

And for dessert, there was pumpkin pie.

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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.