“A jack of all trades, a master of none.” When an artist branches out into forms of artistic expression other than those they were initially known for, we don’t always follow where they go. Think: Madonna in Swept Away (2002), for example.
It’s almost as if we cannot accept that someone can be a genuine genius at more than one or two things, or that they wouldn’t be as profound or meaningful if they spread themselves across several genres. Yet if that really was the case, we’d catch nothing but a fleeting glimpse of the universes created by Nick Cave. The musician, painter, writer, crafter, T-shirt producer, even life coach, if you will, is just that: A jack of many trades and master of all.
Nick Cave, whose career spans six decades, has found yet another way to process, alchemise, translate and yes, monetise, his inner worlds with cavethings.com, an online boutique which the Australian established in 2020, offering various items from the Cave thought factory.
As I browse through objects ranging from comic prints, to coffee mugs and doggie apparel, I at times feel as if I’m lifting rare gems from a sunken ship wreckage. Other times, these artefacts feel just like other pieces of pop culture, things you’d pick up in a souvenir shop on your way to the airport. I wonder what is it that allows Cave to be at once deep and profane, soulful then flippant. Doesn’t it get frightening, at least schizophrenic or lonely inside Nick Cave’s head?
“I spend much of my time alone; I always have”
“I spend much of my time alone; I always have,” he wrote on his blog, The Red Hand Files, in September 2019. “I have learnt that being alone, as bereft as it perhaps feels to some, is busy with meaning and disclosure. For me, it is an essential place that intensifies the essence of oneself, in all its rampant need. It is the site of demons and sudden angels and raw truths; a quiet, haunted place and a place of unforeseen understandings. A place of unmasking and unveiling. It can be industrious or melancholic or frightening, sometimes all at the same time, yet within it there is a feeling of a latent promise that holds great power.”
And yet, it’s not all unfiltered wisdom and unity inside this Cave. In the summer of the first year of the pandemic … wait that feels strange ‘the first year’, like we’ve already copped on to the fact that there are more to come. Well the good news is, with Cave at least, there are always more ‘summers’ to look forward to – even in the middle of winter. As Christmas last year approached amid the onset of pandemic-exhaustion, The Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds singer took to the pages of The Spectator to criticise political correctness and cancel culture. But how does he – an older, white man – get to discount an entire movement?
“Cancel culture is mercy’s antithesis,” he said. “Without mercy, society grows inflexible, fearful, vindictive and humourless. Political correctness has grown to become the unhappiest religion in the world. Its once-honourable attempt to reimagine our society in a more equitable way now embodies all the worst aspects that religion has to offer (and none of the beauty) – moral certainty and self-righteousness shorn even of the capacity for redemption. It has become, quite literally, bad religion run amuck. A force that finds its meaning in the cancellation of these difficult ideas hampers the creative spirit of a society and strikes at the complex and diverse nature of its culture.”
“It is our responsibility to reach beyond our lesser selves to the brightest version of what we can be and breathe life into these ideas”
With this edition of SLEEK focusing on desire, I dig deeper into his Red Hand Files, trying to discover what he thinks about the word’s physical and creative associations, wondering if he thinks it is always something immediate and animalistic or if it can be gentle and aspirational as well. In an entry from March 2019 I find my answer.
“It is our responsibility to reach beyond our lesser selves to the brightest version of what we can be and breathe life into these ideas,” he wrote.“This act of reaching is almost always accompanied by the wretched homunculus and its dreary anthem of personal incompetence, but it is our sacred duty, to turn around and kick this little fucker in the balls. The fight with the dark force inside us is the forge in which true art is formed.”
I go back and forth on Cave. The more I think about him – waiting at the red light, unmasking after my subway ride, in my favorite chair, my morning coffee smell wafting up in my nose – the more I can’t figure him out. Just when I think maybe his view of women, for example (check out the Hyatt girls wallpaper on cavethings.com) seems a little sexist or at least antiquated, the more I’m challenged by his ability for self-reflection, evident in the following that he wrote online three years ago:
The truth is I have very little understanding of women at all, they remain deep mysteries containing multitudes – and this is exactly why I enjoy writing about them. It is their feral energy and their seemingly limitless capacity for wonder that, for me, is their undying attraction, both on the page and off. As to the recent “cultural sea changes” affecting women, I feel that they are in danger of eroding those bright edges of personhood, and grinding them down into monotonous identity politics – where some women have traded in their inherent wildness and sense of awe, for a one-size-fits-all protestation against a uniform concept of maleness which I’m not sure I recognise.
See what I mean? Is this a tired white man talking who’s late to the ‘woke party’, or a prophet who has already begun to anticipate the fallout of the ‘post-new-feminism’ and identity politics era? I simply can’t decide. I’m kind of hoping I don’t have to. Maybe the whole mission of ‘caving in’ what is constantly evolving and ephemeral in nature is a futile, anachronistic one anyway. Or, perhaps it’s a lot simpler than I want to believe. Last October, Pat from Chicago wrote to him, asking how he copes with “mean messages”. The response he published on his digital journal was practically a toolkit for navigating life in the 21st century.
“There is much in our world that is in need of change,” he responded. To be set to rights, and clearly humanity is complex, conflicted and full of faults, but at this moment in time, when our very existence hangs in the balance, we need to come together not just in good faith and consolation, but also in a spirit of creativity and invention. Our existence depends upon offering the best of ourselves. Negativity, cynicism and resentment will not do. “We must love one another or die.”