the sourcerer: a real holiday

Showing posts with label a real holiday. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Let me count the ways.

The names of the Karoo towns are spelled out in white stones upon the hills. Not only the names, but also slogans: DRA WOL. Wear wool.
For this is sheep country.

Many have come this way, then left again.

At sunset we crossed the Orange River and passed some locals drinking cocktails on the bridge.
Later we had a cold beer under a loquat tree at the Bethulie Hotel, bats flitting and swooping through the leaves above us.

It was very hot and during the night it rained.
I had forgotten how much I like this warm summer rain and the smells and the sounds that go with it.

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Christmas Turkey.

In between running around, changing the CTICC into an airport in Vienna, turning a farm building into an orphanage somewhere in deepest darkest Africa, miles of curtains and furniture and wind pumps and graveyards and and and... the lists continue into eternity and I dream of them at night. In between all of that, I dashed to the travel agent during lunch today and bought a ticket to Istanbul. Just like that!

There is a Turkish photographer/film director whom I admire greatly. It's not so common to find photos of Istanbul in Winter, but Nuri Bilge Ceylan has taken some beauties.

He won the award for best director in the 2008 Cannes Festival for his film Üç Maymun (Three Monkeys). At the end of his acceptance speech, he said: "I dedicate this award to my beautiful and lonely country, which I love passionately."

Simmering excitement.

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.