the sourcerer: through thick and thin

Showing posts with label through thick and thin. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

The way we live.

My friends I & J have grown themselves a remarkable and happy home, full of colours and layers of interesting things. Over the years I have: eaten many a scrumptious meal with them - indoors and out (there is a pond with a frog, a pool filled with salty water, a sunny stoep with sculptures), played ping pong in the basement, deejayed at parties in the lounge, had lessons in eyeshadow and lashes, splashed in the attic bath, slept over in the spare room a-dreaming of Italy...
these friends of mine are a constant in an
inconsistent world.

I could have spent a day and a night taking pictures, but my camera ran out of juice.

Saturday, June 11, 2011

Girlfriends are the business.

She's been working on a long project and I haven't seen much of her. Yesterday we went for a brisk walk on the promenade and last night we went out for sushi. I looked across the table at this lovely small person and realized that we've known each other for twenty years or more. A winding road with frequent stops for parties and swimming and cooking and laughing. Lean times and fat. She is a constant in an inconsistent world.

❤

As for the sushi... I have very good news.

Papa San is back in town.

Hatsushiro Muraoka (ex Tokyo, ex Minato) has opened up shop in Park Street.

He is as eccentric as ever and the sushi is as fantastic as ever. (The avocado tempura was an unexpected delight.) The interior is minimalist but warm, the handiwork of my friend, architect Toni Unterberger of Rivets and Rockets. Be sure to book.

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.