the sourcerer: Addis Ababa

Showing posts with label Addis Ababa. Show all posts

Showing posts with label Addis Ababa. Show all posts

Monday, October 18, 2010

More things I like, including the Olympia Cafe.

I met an incoming plane from Ethiopia.

Have you noticed, The Man With The Generous Heart asked me. Have you noticed, that when you type Addis Ababa, it feels like you're playing the piano? (I type those words and always I hesitate before the last "ba")

In Addis Ababa, The Lip tells me, there is no litter on the streets. Most people don't have cars or tv's. They are poor, they walk and they are happy. They don't beg. Maybe it's because they don't have tv's that they don't wish for more uneccesary things. They weave and they beat silver.

All of a sudden it is Summer. Summer means fish and vegetables for supper.

I love the Olympia Cafe. Many don't. They complain about all manner of things. They say it's not so clean. They say it's overrated. They say it's for tourists, perhaps because it's a busy place. I have always been satisfied. We once had a seafood ragout that, if I could replicate it, I would die a happy woman. I've dreamt about it. The lemon brulée tart is a revelation.

Last night's fish was wonderful. Alaskan Salmon, moist and pink inside, served crispy skin side up - the skin like some kind of delicate crackling. Aioli, roe, small grilled tomatoes, skinny green beans, roasted almonds.

And in the morning: a big fruit salad. My first taste of an Asian pear - crisp and juicy. The miniscule green label reads: Delicious Pear to Gentle Pressure.

Then, a swim in the sea. It agrees with my hair and my skin is salty and covered in a faint sun blush.

❤ Cape Town in the Summer ❤
Olympia Cafe & Deli
134 Main Rd, Kalk Bay
021 788 6396

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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.