Sunday's Cool: Cave Exploring

You guys ever heard of Nick Cave?

One of life’s little ways of keeping you humble is that every now and then, we all get very into something that most people have been into for a very long time. You start walking the streets, wild-eyed, looking for a stranger who’s ready to nerd out with you over De La Soul or Twin Peaks, only for most people to just sort of nod along because their fever already stabilized several years ago.

That’s a long way of saying I’m in my Nick Cave era, finally. Maybe you’ve already had your era. If so, thanks for nothing. You coulda told me! Maybe your era is yet to come. Let me know when you get there. I’d love to nerd out with you.

Anyway, in addition to his music, Cave is a wonderful writer. I highly recommend his Faith, Hope and Carnage, in which he discusses the loss of his son at great length. In a twist of fate almost too awful to be believed, he lost another son shortly after completing work on the book. Cave discusses all of this pretty regularly in his indispensable newsletter, and I was profoundly moved by this New York Times interview with him. I felt this quote in my bones:

“There’s always been this struggle between religious belief and my rational self’s skepticism of that, which I saw as a religious failing on some level. Something turned around in me so that I can now see that not as a failing but rather that the whole energy of my creativity was within this struggle. That struggle is perhaps the religious experience itself.”

Here’s a little Nick Cave mix I made a while back, for the uninitiated.

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Currently Reading: Tana French’s The Searcher, in which a former Chicago cop moves to a small Irish village to lick his existential wounds, but a chance friendship with a troubled kid gets him mixed up with some dangerous people. The book has the feel of a Western (Jack Schaefer’s Shane is a clear influence) but elevates its crime fiction trappings with some impressive craft. When I saw that Tana French’s dad’s name is David, I wondered the same thing you’re wondering right now. But it’s a different David French.

Currently Listening: I love Connor Goldsmith’s X-Men podcast CEREBRO. Every week, Connor has a guest on to talk about a different X-Men character, usually from a queer or otherwise marginalized perspective that has hugely deepened my appreciation for inherent themes of oppression inherent to the title. Recently, he was joined by Kaetun Khlynne to talk about Australian mutants Eden and Gateway, which doubled as a fascinating history lesson about part of the world most Americans know very little about.

Currently Watching: This week, I got to partner with Unrival to present at the Justice Film Festival in NYC, which also meant I got to watch a lot of great movies. See the full list here. I was especially moved by this short doc about a migrant family’s quest for asylum at the border. You can watch it free!