the sourcerer: I know a Sugarman.

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

I know a Sugarman.

Photograph courtesy of a very tall man.

A performance by Rodriguez last week thoroughly warmed the cockles of my heart. By song number two, tears were rolling down my cheeks. Around us people young and old sang along. A man behind me yelled: you can do anything - we love you man!

Exactly.

Because, you see, it wasn't just an old man
singing his songs.

It was my eight-year-old self playing with the family hound, a grumpy daschund, outside my brother's bedroom window, listening to Cold Fact.

It was my eighteen-year-old self, leaving home, taping that vinyl record to take with me to university. On the other side of Moondance.

It was my nineteen-year-old self posing my boyfriend cross-legged in a hat and a purple vest, for Photography 101.
(He told me I looked fat
in my favourite cheesecloth dress)

It was countless parties and barbeques and trips
in a car.

It was hours of sulking on my bed.

It was wondering, wondering... is there someone who will understand me, is he listening too?

In this job I do, I have built up a network of people and many have become loved ones. I visited a couple yesterday, both in their late seventies. They own a small antique shop and often help me to find the things that I need. Now and then I am invited to their beautiful home - a large stone house next to the sea, with very high ceilings. It is filled with two lifetimes of collecting.

They have recently lost a good friend - a young artist. His self-portrait is on display in the living room and music spills through the house. Was it a huntsman or a player that made you pay the cost...

Rodriguez again. She has her own memories - we were driving to the coast and playing this song, we were laughing so much. And then she winks at me and says: oh that man - he has such a sexy voice - ahhhhh!

5 comments:

tanjawilmot said...: oh tart, yes. that's how it goes, only you make it real and velvety and dreamy melancholy real. enjoying reading, so I am.; February 27, 2013 at 12:00 PM
the sourcerer said...: thank you ms T dear. xx; February 27, 2013 at 2:22 PM
Petro said...: Lily,

Lovely story.

Firstly, Cheesecloth dress. My oh my. That brings back memories. Four years at varsity with all sorts of cheesecloth dresses. Try and explain that whole idea to my student daughter.
But.... she found Mr Sugerman and she loves his music.
Life goes in circles.
I love your stories.; February 27, 2013 at 8:33 PM
Marie said...: Appropos of the movie - Searching for Sugarman - there was an in-depth story on the local public radio here, WNYC, or maybe it was NPR (broadcast nationallY) about the phenomenon of his popularity in South Africa, and just about nowhere else...

Movie: http://www.tribecafilm.com/filmguide/searching_for_sugar_man-film42737.html#.US5hGzBcivQ; February 27, 2013 at 9:41 PM
the sourcerer said...: Petro - I wish I still had that dress. It was navy blue (slimming!) with some embroidery.
Marie - you know the documentary won an Oscar! really a worthwhile watch...

xxL; February 28, 2013 at 8:14 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.