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Monday, April 11, 2011

Hy Sê Sy Sê goes live today.

Hy Sê Sy Sê (He Says She Says) is a bilingual e-mag and I'll be writing over there once a month, in a column called Kos Manewalus.

Read my musings about Dim Sum here.

Wishing my friend Elsibe and the rest of the HSSS team double luck and prosperity!

Thursday, March 24, 2011

He says, she says.

I woke up at four and realized with quite a shock that it's almost April. It's all still under wraps, but a bunch of us are collaborating on an exciting new project and I need to do my bit.

So last night I met the photographer extraordinaire at Hesheng (which happens to be a he plus a she with an ng for luck) and we picked up some Dim Sum to go.

She did a bit of styling, he did a bit of shooting, and then they ate the props.

Photo by Karl Lilje.

Later today I'll be sharpening my knives and having my portrait taken. Slightly petrified.

maybe I liked being photographed when I was small...

but now that I'm big, not so much. Wish I could go back in time and tell that eight year old some important stuff. Anyway. It's all about that thing I promised myself at the beginning of the year -
pushing the boundaries of comfort and living a different kind of life.

Left foot, right foot.
With some dancing along the way.

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.