the sourcerer: The Kimberley Hotel

Showing posts with label The Kimberley Hotel. Show all posts

Monday, October 25, 2010

Parties and Wedding Bells.

The weekend passed in a swirl. MORE sushi at Minato. It was that good.

TWO birthday parties on one night. Mixed Doubles: fun to see who matched who. Ah... so the girl with the furry ears in the ladies room belongs to the guy at the bar, ditto furry ears. Behaving like naughty children in the parking lot. Dancing till 3h30 in the morning at the Kimberley Hotel.

Awoke on Saturday morn to fat plopping raindrops on the pool, but nary a cloud in the sky. Jakkals trou met Wolf se vrou. (The Afrikaans equivalent of a Monkey's Wedding - Jackal marries wife of Wolf.) And then off I zipped to the sleepy hamlet of Stanford, for the union of two lovely, gentle souls.

Where everything grows in lush abundance.

The Bride was what all brides should be. Angelic, ethereal, calm and graceful.

After the service, there was a procession across the green fields to the place of the party.

Many faces from long, long ago. Champagne and tiny gruyere tarts on the stoep, spilling onto the street. Then rooms leading into rooms, filled with beautiful things and chatter and laughter. Sweet potato and roast lamb with salsa verde. Chocolate cake. Conversations about typography and obscure music. Somewhere, hidden by clouds, a huge orange Harvest Moon. Rain on the tin roof.

Later on, my bed was high enough to warrant a step. A feather quilt and an almost dreamless sleep. A walk impeded by mud and breakfast with a favourite family. Home again, home again. Back to week days and crowds and traffic and of course, the morning visitor.

Thursday, August 12, 2010

"The Big Hole" at the Kimberley Hotel.

The blurb promised "a madcap art exhibition and party". Not. The art was badly displayed (ie. in piles on the floor) and badly lit.

And where were the Kentridges? No-one knew.

The Kimberley reminds me of those hotels in Grahamstown in the late eighties. Downstairs there are still signs of a grander heyday - pressed ceilings and beautiful old tiles. Then follow the brown carpeted stairway all the way to the top and see the refurbished bedrooms. In former days this was a brothel. We did an impromptu little shoot:

And discovered some psychedelia.

There was a good crowd of people, but I wouldn't call them revellers. Everyone seemed a little low. We're blaming it on solar flares and the proximity of Mars...

A photographer said to me: "August is the darkest month."
I said: "Bring on September."
Kimberley Hotel, Corner Roeland and Buitenkant Streets, Cape Town, Tel: 021 461 2160

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.