the sourcerer: And Dancer and Prancer and Vixen and Comet.

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

And Dancer and Prancer and Vixen and Comet.

In the library of the long-legged man (well-ordered, comprehensive, quite wonderful), I came across this photograph by Elliot Erwitt:


The Collegiata di Santa Maria Assunta, San Gimignano, Tuscany, 1965.

I spent a distant birthday in this place, just off to your left. A theatre troupe would practice on the steps in the afternoons and I'd sit and watch them while rekindling my love for ice cream.

I think of places in Italy and associate them with ice cream flavours. Bologna is blackberry, Assisi: candied orange peel and fig. San Gimignano is pistachio, served by a friendly white-haired man with no English, but we understood each other just fine.

Before my trip, Aida invited me for breakfast and gave me a copy of Elizabeth David's Of Pageants & Picnics, to read on the plane. I thought of her as I sat on that shell-shaped piazza in Sienna, which is lemon and lime.

After she died, Braam gave me her ice cream machine. Italian: of course!

No instruction booklet.

But research reveals that the machine's paddle is called a dasher. I'm liking that, a lot.

Experiment 1: mango/chili/mint

Thrilling. Good.

Experiment 2: avocado/banana/honey

The gelato of my dreams.

There is a freezer in my future.

2 comments:

Petro said...: Beautiful, soos altyd.; January 10, 2013 at 12:26 PM
the sourcerer said...: dankie Petro!; January 10, 2013 at 5:07 PM

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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.