“You have got to understand your limitations. It’s your limitations that make you the wonderful disaster that you most probably are.”
Nick Cave
When it comes to results of person’s Artistic Pursuit, I am not interested in sales numbers, chart positions or popularity trends. I also find people who Spew the importance of such numbers to actually be Boring and Uninspired people. Who themselves are Hiding behind those details.
I am mores interested in people who are creating despite the not have the Overwhelming numbers previous mentioned here. People who Charting their Own Course and Methods are far more interesting to me. Thus, they become more Enduring for me. They are really Characters within themselves. Not Charactures.
If you took the writers Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Miller, William Faulkner. And then combined them with Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley with a touch of Iggy Pop. You might come up with a person who resembles Writer/Singer Nick Cave. He has had a Cult-like following in music for more than 30 years now. In the mid 90’s/ early 2000’s his song Red Right Hand was used in many soundtracks. (The X-Files, Scream, Buffy the Vampire Slayer).
He is the focus of his own movie, 20,000 Days on Earth. In the movie, he makes an observation of how the Rock Star really should be that well known by the audience. The Rock Star should maintain a Sense of Mystery about himself. It is hard to say if that is true about this movie. It has the feel of a documentary film yet the structure is fictionalized in the terms of the action. The scenes with his therapist and the ones where he is talking with the people who run his archive are staged. However, he does reveal parts about himself within them. But we have to remember he is only allowing us to see what he wants. There is no Interviewer in this movie driving the Narrative.
In the movie, he talks to three different people with whom he collaborated with while he is driving in car. Yet the way they are edited in the film it seems like they are only there in dream. However, they are important to the narrative. First is the Actor Ray Winstone who appeared in the film The Proposition which was written by Nick Cave. (NOTE: The Proposition is one of the Best (and Least Known) Western of the last 20 years.) They talk about the Role and its Performance. And wonder about how and if a person can Reinvent himself. Second is former Bad Seeds guitarist Blixa Bargeld and they talk about the cause that ended their work relationship. Their biggest enemy was Time Itself. Finally, Pop singer Kylie Minogue who sung with him on the hit song Where the Wild Roses Grow. It was on the album Murder Ballads. Nick Cave admits a lot of people bought that a lot of people bought that album and “then decided to have nothing more to do with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds”. But here the two talk about Remembrance.
This is a movie about a man trying Examine his life in the search to understand his own Creative Nature. That he may never fully understand the Nature of the Muse he is searching of. He has to accept that and Continue on with the work.
This movie is about what he reveals and the parts he keeps Mysterious. And that keeps His Illusion of the Rock Star. This is where The Fact and The Fiction meet and how his life exists on the Borderline of the two Realms.
“All of our days are numbered. We cannot afford to be idle. To act on a bad idea is better than not to act at all. Because the worth of the idea never becomes apparent until you do it. Some times this idea can be the smallest thing in the world. A little flame that you hunch over and cup with your hand and pray it will not be extinguished by all the storm that hollows around it. If you can hold on to that flame. Great things can be constructed around it. Massive. Powerful. And world changing. All held up by the tiniest of ideas.”
Nick Cave
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