the sourcerer: October 2014

Sunday, October 19, 2014

Jungle style.

Having been an apartment dweller for many years, few things give me more pleasure than walking out the back door and picking an enamel bowl full of lettuce for the evening's salad. Knowing that there will be more tomorrow.

I love the way the vegetable garden is transforming itself - I allow plants to go to seed and the seedlings that grow from them are better than the mother plants. Strong, bushy coriander and vigorous mint. There are no neat rows in this place. A robust tomato plant has appeared in a sunny spot next to the compost maker - sheltered by a rocky wall. I have a feeling it's from a wrinkled, discarded salad tomato from Woolworths - perhaps Bella. The fruits are perfect, clusters and clusters of them - though they have yet to reveal their colour.

The giant lacy flower of a carrot - who would have thought?

Spring onions bloom.

The last of the boer bone. As I shelled the previous lot, I thought they were too much trouble. But then I made Yotam Ottolenghi's pan-fried meatballs with lemon and broad beans.

They will grow again...

Thursday, October 9, 2014

This is how it goes.

You start with a circle, like so:

Every day, more stalks of grass. Just weave 'em in.

Tinker's cuss. There's still a hole on the other side...

But five or six days later - left over right, right over left and Bob's your uncle.

And Nelly's your aunt.

So you make a big ruckus...

Call that broad over.

and if she doesn't like it...

Well.

You start with a circle.

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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.