Good morning. Hello. How are you? #754
Way too much about Nick Cave, Aging, Elon could learn from my laundry chores.
Good morning! Hello, there. How are you? I am good. I just read the most beautiful piece of writing: The Last Traces of Elizabeth Wurtzel by Choire Sicha. I mean, my god, look at this sentence:
“She was one of those women who used scent as another means to aggressively assert her presence; it was part of what could make you unable to decide, as the hour got late, if you were her honored guest or her hostage.”
How are you supposed to get up, get out of bed, go sit down and write after reading a sentence like that? How are you supposed to not? Also, what use of a semicolon. The judges are swooning. Except the Russian one.
Still reading this Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan book. O’Hagan is a very good interviewer, and man, he really knows his subject. Nick’s been a part of my life for, oh, thirty years, maybe more, and I have read at least one of his biographies, maybe two, but O’Hagan’s knowledge vastly supercedes mine. Of course, I am younger, I never saw Nick and Anita walking down Portobello Road as a young couple in the Birthday Party era from time-to-time. I never saw the Birthday Party. But man, O’Hagan is so good. I can see why Nick felt compelled to do this project with him. It is a gift to have someone tease this kind of conversation out of you. It feels like Seán is the perfect man for this book. He gets more out of Nick than anything else I’ve ever seen or read, and that probably includes Nick’s own songs. I do admire Nick’s commitment to the project, to answering questions fully, to talking about his friends and loved ones honestly. It’s a fine line: he talks about people he’s had huge ruptures with, he talks about private individuals. It never feels malevolent or gossipy, but I bet it causes him a few problems. But it’s the right thing to do, it makes it feel honest. I learned more about Anita Lane in one chapter than I’ve learned in decades. She seemed amazing, amazing until the end.
At the core, though, it has to be said that Nick Cave is an inconsistent fellow who mainly operates by gut and has, to a large extent, lost touch with the very people he devotes his life to feeling empathy for. His approach to being apolitical in his art is probably fine — everyone can’t be a culture warrior — but his both-sidesing of politics is very, very trying. When he out of the blue reaches for the “example” of Portland protesters going too far, as one of the very few examples of politics that he pulls up well, I mean, come on. Out of the universe of misery and horror that has happened to us in the last few years. Come on. It’s somewhat stunning someone so into the bible has not come to terms with the fact that there is evil in the world. There seems to have been a big shift in his life at some point — perhaps catalyzed by a necessity for survival after the death of his child — where he migrated from old testament to new. Okay, you see the good in everyone now. Fine. But to say the left and right are equally responsible for where we are is really something.
It is probably for the best that Nick Cave left social media. I shudder to think what Twitter would have done to him with time if Portland statue-burning is at the forefront of his mind when he talks about politics. It is somewhat disconcerting to find Nick to be so weak-minded in this regard.
There’s a part where he looks back on his life, his earlier junkie punk rock self and he does a bit of analysis and says that young Nick’s disdain for the world was a luxury and a privilege. True enough. Yet he seems blind to the fact that old Nick’s disdain for, and abstention from, the political realm is that selfsame privilege. For what is politics other than exactly what Nick professes to be his dominant interest: how humans treat one another?
That being said, there is much beauty in this book. There should be: Nick tends to say, at any given moment, whatever he can think up that is most interesting and profound. And he has a stellar success rate at doing this, inconsistency with past statements be damned. I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that in the end Nick, and his life, is as much of a tone poem as his music. Beautiful, thought provoking, emotionally cathartic yet often ultimately empty. Nick himself would debate that something can be “emotionally cathartic” yet “ultimately empty,” because to him, the catharsis is the point. Maybe its the puritain in me critiqing the fiery Christian orater in him, but I disagree.
I gave Ghosteen another chance yesterday. He’s just so proud of it. And, yeah, in a lot of ways it’s a remarkable record. It’s beautiful, so beautiful. It’s got emotion all over the place, it’s lousy with emotion, dripping with it. But, I mean, come on. It doesn’t make any sense! And some of it just leaves me totally cold. Nick is totally off narrative now, he talks about it constantly in this book.
But is this later work really non-narrative? Read this book and you start to think maybe not! O’Hagan will say “this song’s great” and Nick will go “oh yeah thanks that song where I sing about being on a balcony is a song about me sitting on a balcony.” Like in the end, actually, the lyrics seem to be, oftentimes, shockingly literal. It is confusing! Is the opposite of narrativism osbcurism, not poetry? If you just make the narrative so opaque people can't tell where it came from, in some attempt to make it more universal, does that make it poetic? I don’t know. But I can’t believe “Balcony Man” is literally about a man sitting on a balcony WTF.
I don’t know why I’m talking about this so much. Most of you don’t care about Nick Cave at all. Andy and I used to talk about the enigma of late-period Cave fairly frequently. Reading this book is hard. The biographical revelations alone would have been stunning to Andy. I wish we could talk about it. It is very weird to be so upset with this guy and still so compelled by him.
I think I also see some of myself in this? Not, like, “oh I’m a genius like Nick Cave” or anything, but more, like, the act of aging, the act of changing, leaving your younger self behind. I’ve been having a bit of a hard time with it lately. It really eats me up that the extraordinary amount of effort I have put into tempering my ambition and capitalist cravings appears on the outside like a descent into mediocrity. I really can’t handle that when I think about it. Still care too much about what other people think. I wrote this note recently: “I’m getting old and doubting technology’s power and potential and it fucking sucks because I’m getting smarter and more enlightened and I was wrong and I’m correcting, but all it looks like is that I’m getting old and out of touch.”
(I am shocked at how people are giving their lived over to TikTok but that is a topic for another day).
I wrote another note recently that seems related, and they’ve just been sitting in the topic list forever, and I have no idea how to link them, so what the hell, let’s just throw it in here while we’re at it: “The constant humiliation of humility.”
You get older, you put so much work into being a better person, and 99% of that work is invisible, and most people out there are just still jerks and don’t even notice.
Or something.
For the longest time I had this terrible habit. Emma would ask me “if I wanted to do” some chore. I did not want to do the chore. I felt a compulsion to honesty, so I would say something like “I do not want to do this chore, but I will do it.” And then I would go do it. We had a discussion about this. Emma didn’t love it because it made her feel like she was nagging a bit. But even more compellingly, she pointed out that while she understood my urge to honesty, it was accomplishing nothing. I ended up doing the chore anyway, and I significantly decreased the amount of appreciation or credit I got for doing the chore, and she did not feel all thankful and happy that her husband was so helpful, but rather, she felt like she was annoying me. There was nothing to be accomplished by saying “no, I don’t want to do that, but I will.” I still have that problem a little bit, but I’ve gotten a lot better about it since we’ve had those conversations.
I am reminded of this as I think of Elon Musk’s approach to Starlink in Ukraine. Dude really made himself look like a complete tool. He is paying something like $80 million out of pocket, himself, toward the Ukrainian war effort. And now he looks stingy and an asshole for doing it. He completely squandered the goodwill from Ukraine, from the US Government — who is, of course, that libertarian’s biggest customer (shocking).
He really fucked that one up. Genius.
Another Shoegaze mix for you. There are so many new shoegaze bands. I keep thinking maybe eventually I’ll get to the bottom of this rabbit hole but it never ends. More and more and more. Really into the Stargazer Lillies at the moment. I used to salt these with old shoegaze too, but nah, not now, not while I’m trying to find the limits to this giant pool. All new stuff, all new bands.
Until tomorrow, friend.