On Nick Cave, Greta Thunberg, and our changing sense of urgency.

Nick Cave, September 2019 (Thomas Ehretsmann for The Washington Post)

Nineteenth-century Americans used to gather at the docks for the arrival of the ship that would bring them the latest installment of a Dickens novel. The story had gone to print months before—their presence wouldn’t hasten its arrival or change its outcome—but still, the fans stood on the wharf. In my youth, music lovers used to queue around the block, itching to be among the first to buy an album on its day of release. There was a fear that all copies might be snaffled up and there’d be none left for latecomers. Fans of Led Zeppelin or Nirvana would gather in the predawn dark, clutching their thermos and sandwich, prepared to wait as long as it took to show that they just couldn’t wait. Patient impatience.

On October 3, 2019, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds unveiled their latest album, Ghosteen. Not in a record store, but on YouTube. It was described as a “global premiere,” and presented as a sort of cinema screening, with solemn subtitles and an intermission. By the time I caught up with it, a week after its debut, 625,130 people had already watched it. By the time I wrote this, a few days later, that number had risen to 660,436. I cannot know, of course, how many of those extra 35,306 were the same people coming back to listen to the album again (and again). Anyone who owns an internet-enabled gadget can listen to Nick Cave’s labour of love whenever they want: Ghosteen is in the machine.

“There’s nothing wrong / With loving something you can’t hold in your hand,” sings Cave in one of the songs. He’s referring to the love we feel for those who will become estranged from us or move to far-off places or die (Cave’s son Arthur fell off a cliff in 2015). He may also be referring to God.

But the lyric can mean something else, too. Compact disc and vinyl versions of Ghosteen are scheduled for release in November 2019, a month after the album’s virtual premiere. Those physical releases—things you can hold in your hand—are statements of the music’s tangible existence. Yet many people will be happy to listen to Ghosteen on YouTube without ever “owning” it. Critics or advertisements will tell them that the album is profound and heartbreaking, so they’ll check it out, verifying that it is indeed profound (especially in the shallow attention they can spare to give it) and that it is indeed heartbreaking (or would be if they had a heart available to break while listening to some stuff on YouTube through their phone). And Cave himself seems to be reassuring them that there’s nothing wrong with that.

I listened to Ghosteen one Thursday morning, in the spare couple of hours before tackling my VAT returns. I confess: during the song cycle, I briefly answered a few emails, made a cup of tea, and sampled two blocks of peculiar dairy-free vegan chocolate whose flavors were “ginger ale” and “avocado,” trying to judge if I could taste any ginger ale or avocado. But the bulk of my attention, I swear, was on Nick Cave’s meditations on mortality.

I noted how much more supple and well-controlled his voice has become. He used to have a narrow range, not quite the two-note bleat of John Lydon, but certainly a voice that was liable to falter, flatten, and crack when approaching the notes hit easily by the great singers he admires. He’s been taking lessons, it seems, or maybe just practicing a lot. The higher notes are unstrained, adding new potential for grace and intimacy to his artistic toolbox. The songs strike me as a kind of devotional chanting, similar to lullabies, the Muslim call to prayer, the humming to oneself that one does in deeply preoccupied solitude. I’m not convinced that any of them is a classic in the craftsmanly sense, a candidate for a busker performance to a public that might recognize the tune. The songs on Ghosteen seem more mercurial, less structured than that. Cloud patterns or unfurling flowers rather than architectural buildings. I like them a lot.

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Protesters link arms in front of the International Hotel in San Francisco in an attempt to prevent the police from evicting elderly tenants on August 4, 1977. Photo: Nancy Wong. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Imagine that you’re a sullen, sheltered kid from Manila who thinks she knows everything there is to know about the United States of America. But as soon as you and your broken family land in San Francisco, life slaps you hard in the face. Did you emigrate or immigrate? You don’t know. Are you mestiza or brown? You don’t know. In fact, you realize you don’t know anything.

Your first year in America, John F. Kennedy is assassinated. Five years later, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. War rages in Vietnam and on television. You are reminded of the Philippines every time you see footage of Vietnam in flames. The universe is shrinking right before your very eyes. Marvin Gaye croons “What’s Going On” and breaks your heart.

Mother, mother
There’s too many of you crying
Brother, brother, brother
There’s far too many of you dying

KSOL! KSAN! KJAZ! It’s funky, glorious, scary, druggy 1972. Martial law has been declared in the Philippines, Angela Davis has finally been released from prison, and Salvador Allende has not yet been assassinated in Chile.

Who and what and where are your people? Read More

The Noguchi Museum (Image © NYCGO)

When I lived in New York many years ago, I used to go to the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City. It was his studio, and now is a series of rooms full of sculptures and drawings, short films, the akari lanterns for which he is probably most famous. There are polished stones inside the museum as well as out in the garden. It’s one of my favorite places. Even describing it now I can feel what it was like to be there, the cool darkness and occasional brightly colored shapes. I miss it intensely.

I had the idea to go repeatedly and take notes and write a long poem. It turned out to be terrible. I see now, looking at that old document, that I took a lot of it and repurposed it for a long poem I eventually wrote later that year, “Brooklyn with a New Beginning.” In that newer poem, I was writing from a lonely place. I was coming out of a deep and debilitating depression, and felt that I was freeing myself of certain negative relationships to the world and to people that had led me to the same bad places over and over. I did not know exactly how, but things were changing. Read More

Gail Scott.

I’ve been gloriously wandering through Gail Scott’s Heroine for a month. I brought it with me to Norway where I created a temporary reading space in order to make my residency be something social. About twenty of us were seated in the beautiful room silently reading for a few hours. At the midpoint of our activity, about a thousand young people began marching right below us framed by a wall of windows that faced the lake in the middle of Bergen. Their cheers distracted us and we happily looked up at one another and then some of us actually got up from our chairs and looked out, standing by the window.

The spirit of that moment (and I knew it then) is the perfect flow through to Gail, whose writing is one you want to tell things to. The only way to read Heroine is to be in it. A few days later I was in London and I made a note to tell Gail (the book) about the people praying in the cafe this evening.

So what I mainly want to assert is that Heroine is more a work of reading than of writing, it is all studio, by which I mean it’s something fabulously risky and alive. It’s literature and the possibility of it. Though I might do better stating it in the more eloquent and humble way Gail Scott does:

Refusing to explain how I’m using this place for an experiment of living in the present. Existing on the minimum the better to savour every minute. For the sake of art. Soon I’ll write a novel.

And that is her character speaking, in the book. Read More

Photo: Frank Vincentz (CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)). Via Wikimedia Commons.

From inside a circle made of shards of glass in front of Porto Alegre’s Public Market, a scrawny man, little more than a twig of skin, fired a bottomless question at me point blank:

“Miss, tell me something. Do you think I should keep on eating glass or give it up, go back home, and put in some crops?”

I remained stock-still, not knowing what to say, utterly mute. Should he continue eating glass or not? It was a question and a half. Then I understood. Jorge Luiz Santos de Oliveira, thus christened thirty-five years ago, had a dream, the dream of making a living by eating glass. Because eating glass is Jorge Luiz’s art. From early on, it was what set Jorge Luiz apart from the sad hordes of all the Jorges, from the long line of country people from São Jerônimo, his land, coal land, dark and pungent. By masticating his rocky ground, Jorge Luiz discovered he is a unique being in the world, despite the sameness of his melancholy face, of skin stretched over bones. By gnawing on stones to frighten off the worms crawling around his insides, he blazed the trail of his art. For someone who regurgitated stones, glass wasn’t scary. Read More

Alice Mattison reckons with the impacts of macular degeneration …

Rembrandt, self-portrait, 1660 (modified)

My mother thought children should visit museums, and back in the fifties, the Metropolitan Museum of Art was free. The Egyptian tomb was satisfyingly frightening if I pretended it was large enough to get lost in; a knight on a horse pointed a huge lance straight at me. I didn’t exactly get interested in art, but I picked up the notion that looking at it is something people do, something I could do. When I was old enough to take the subway from Brooklyn by myself, I went to museums alone. They were conducive to fantasy life. Or I went with friends. We knew museums had a snobbish distinction. I liked being someone who didn’t travel to Manhattan only to shop.

As a college student, I continued to live with my parents and sister in an apartment not big enough for everyone’s opinions. In museums, I could think alone in a warm place. I found the Frick Collection, also free. Soon my friends and I owned that imposing nineteenth-century mansion, and were annoyed when a painting was moved. We once walked through with our backs to the art, holding up the hand mirror I used to put on lipstick. We wanted to see how the paintings looked when seen backward. Not as good.

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