the sourcerer: Dog days.

Thursday, December 13, 2012

Dog days.

Overtaken by great fatigue, I nap at odd times of the day and sleep for hours, hours every night. The fan whirrs and brings forth dreams of flying contraptions, lemonade stands by the seaside, trickery and deceit.

Finally, tomorrow, this job is over as well. Storms large and small dismissed to a hazy past. The broken axles, the car stuck on the tree stump, the Teutonic alarm clocks...

Man down on one of the final shoot days: we lost our strapping truck driver to a tummy ache. He disdained the on-set medic and insisted on traditional herbs. Perhaps an offering to Mami Wata, as one does in Cameroon. You try explaining that to a Cranky German Director.

Said CGD left South Africa in a huff, never to return. I was happy to see the back of him and his horses, his temper tantrums and stories of sexual prowess between takes having worn thin particularly fast.

So here's to the return of normality, to cooking, to spending time with the ones I love.

To peace.

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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.