There's not much that
you can put into writing. If we are being entirely honest, few of us can go
beyond that one percent that art has mined and milked all through its history.
Nick Cave documentary, the one he agreed to do simply to avoid talking to hacks,
is not something you are supposed to grasp. It's not even a film. It's a state
of a fractured, pained, broken mind.
So what I'm going to
say is this.
You don't really want
the world to change. You wanted that once, when you were seventeen (unless you
fell in love and begged the planet to stop), but with age you just want to keep
it as it is. More than that - you don't want people to change. You want to hold
on to them and the memories that were somehow significant. Like that first time
I heard "As I Sat Sadly By Her Side". Like that concert in Moscow.
Like that freak incident in Brighton when I saw Warren Ellis.
For me, the biggest
thing about the documentary was that I did find it all yesterday, amid the
songs that should have never been written and amid the images I should never have seen. The man I recognised,
because the man persists, and shrouds himself in harrowing metaphors, and lives
on, and fights against the 'elastic time' we all, somehow, try to resist. I
found that man. Beneath the sorrow and the cracks in the voice, he came back.
So for a moment you
create this illusion, and the world doesn't change. That's good. And also,
there's all this white colour.
