the sourcerer: I yearn to be a sailor

Showing posts with label I yearn to be a sailor. Show all posts

Sunday, September 12, 2010

Coral sets sail.

A very civilized affair. First a little stroll to go and see Elliot, the giant fanman. He is 18m tall and made of 4200 Coca Cola crates. Then a coffee at Bascule.

The sailing was sublime. An outrageous feeling of bonhomie amongst the people. Twinkly smiles and laughter. Orders from the Skipper in his fine Scottish brogue. Top speed: 10 knots, including large amounts of sea spray and scary angles.

I came home feeling windswept, salty and hungry. And now for the first time I understand how people get the sea in their blood and become sailors.

Friday, September 10, 2010

A Schooner named Coral.

That's her, circa 1926. A gaff-rigged schooner built in England in 1902, the mistress of her captain for the last twenty years. A pleasure vessel. A day tripper. The Captain: Ozzie Osbourne in casual Friday form. The Birthday Girl: a Polish beauty dressed in black.

The crowd: mostly architects, eating crostini with salmon, lemon & capers. Carpaccio with roasted peppers and artichokes. All garnished with fat mulberries and Sweet William petals.

Overheard snippets of conversation about Kenyan houseboys and difficult vegan children.

We didn't leave the marina. Sunday promises a sail proper. November, a long cruise. Crew needed. I have offered my services as cook. Only half in jest.

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.