the sourcerer: waiting for gorilla

Showing posts with label waiting for gorilla. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Shoot days 2-5 including curry.

The days passed in a whirl of early mornings and late nights, split shifts, helicopter dust, flat tires and finicky props. At the stone cottages we left behind a field of crushed snowdrops.

Somehow I managed to fit in the August dinner club at The Cookshop on friday night. 'A Feast of Curries'. They keep these affairs small - it was like going to eat at someone's house. The okra was really good and the chutney the best I've EVER tasted - tamarind/date/chili/ginger, thick and jammy.

I like The Cookshop and the people who run it. Definitely be going back there for breakfast.
The Cookshop 117 Hatfield Street, Gardens 021 461 7868

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Apes and Heels.

We need a full-body gorilla suit for the commercial I'm working on. I went to a costume place this morning that has the separate bits. Head R450.00, hands R125.00, feet R125.00.

They also have self-adhesive chest wigs. I heard the other day that the majority of women have something in their wardrobe that they have never worn. I wear my clothes to threads, but after some thought I remembered that I have this pair of shoes... they are still wrapped in green tissue and I've had them for more than a year. Maybe I'm saving them for a date with a gorilla.

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.