OMFG JUBILEE STREET

New podcast with Daniel Clowes, Cave exploration, + a little art

Podcastery

This week, I posted Episode 558 of The Virtual Memories Show, feat. a conversation with legendary cartoonist Daniel Clowes about his amazing, haunting, hilarious new graphic novel, MONICA (Fantagraphics)! We talk about how MONICA it grew out of his attempts at trying to figure out his childhood, the ways in which the book is haunted by the deaths of cartoonists Richard Sala and Gary Leib (oh, and those of Daniel’s brother and mom), what art, community and mortality have come to mean to him, and how Clowes has pushed the limits of his storytelling and art to make one of the great graphic novels of the decade. We get into what he’s learned from using multiple genres within a single book, the artists who influenced him and the ones he had to escape, the 7-year gap from his previous book, PATIENCE, and what’s changed, and his late-stage depression at finishing MONICA. We also discuss how he was always awaiting the shift from pamphlet-comics to hardcover original books, how thankful he was to not be good enough to get work at Marvel or DC in his youth, what it’s like writing and drawing his books without any editorial input, his only takeaway from writing for movies, the Americanness of his comics, why he prefers drawing over writing even though A) he’s a really good writer and B) would never draw from someone else’s script, the only advice he would ever give young artists, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read MONICA!

Last week, I posted Episode 557 of The Virtual Memories Show, feat. Rachel Shteir for a conversation about her fantastic new biography, Betty Friedan: Magnificent Disrupter (Yale University Press). We get into how Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique is being erased or glossed over by contemporary writing about women, how the 50th anniversary of TFM sparked this biography, the challenge of balancing Friedan with her work and threading her life and the massive shift in women’s rights she helped cause. We talk about Friedan’s involvement in Esalen & Human Potential Movement and how it influenced her later work, why knowing her midwestern family upbringing is key to understanding her choices (good and bad), the battle between equal rights and sexual politics and how feminism got away from her, and the intersection of Judaism and feminism. We also discuss “What Would Betty Do?” in relation to today’s politics and the Me Too movement, where Rachel finds synergies between biography and dramaturgy, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read Betty Friedan: Magnificent Disrupter

Other recent episodes: Patrick McDonnell • Keith Knight • Brett Martin • Peter Rostovsky • Bill Griffith • Jerome Charyn

Spelunking

I read Stephen King’s On Writing without ever having read any of Stephen King’s fiction, which may explain the mindset of someone spending $200 to see a Nick Cave ‘solo’ concert (on piano, with Colin Greenwood of Radiohead accompanying on bass) despite only knowing a handful of Cave’s (recent) songs.

Earlier this year, I wrote a few pieces here about watching the movie 20,000 Days On Earth and reading Faith, Hope & Carnage, and my interest in Cave’s approach to art (music, writing, visual stuff), catastrophe (the death of his 13-year-old son), and religion (nuanced and fervent). The hook for me was the ending of 20,000 Days . . ., with a piece of a concert performance of the song Jubilee Street, belting out its refrain (?) of “I am transforming / I’m vibrating / Look at me now”, with quick cuts of decades of Cave’s live performances, giving the (this) viewer a sense of time and the relationship of artist and audience.

I signed up for his Red Hand Files (do that), and picked up a few of his recent albums, but never went into his back catalog, for the same reason I never checked him out over the years: I didn’t know what a good entry point would be.

(Of course, that was silly and I should’ve just plunged in. That said, I have been using the Ghosteen album as my yoga workout soundtrack (don’t laugh) the last few months.)

Then I got the email about this solo tour, with 2 nights at the Beacon Theatre the weekend after my pharma conference, so I splurged on a good seat for Sunday night.

I got into the city way too early, stumbled into a Japanese/Asian food street fair, got some coffee so I could stay up past my bedtime (the show was supposed to start at 8, but he came onstage at ~8:30), walked around a bookstore, & let the death-flame draw me to the building where we found Michael Denneny’s body back in April.

And then I walked back to the Beacon, made banter on line, took my seat, heard the one of the older ushers at my entrance tell her pal that I’d win a Jim Carrey lookalike contest (she apologized later, but I said it was a fun comparison), bought a tour T-shirt, did some sketches, and waited for the show.

Even for someone with not even passing knowledge of most of the songs, I was floored by the concert. Cave (gray suit, white shirt, gray tie) was loose in his banter with the audience, getting up between some songs to talk, other times introducing the songs from the piano. If anything, he seemed more self-conscious on the bench than standing before us. But when he & Greenwood played, it was magic.

My frantic mind resisted letting me live in the moment, picking away at silly things, like the people who were holding up their phones up to shoot videos, the car trouble that led to my taking my wife’s car into the city that day, my reflexive snideness toward people who were waving their arms in the air or getting up to dance during their favorite songs. But I fought that off as best I could, trying to appreciate the now of a man way past his 20,000th day on earth taking his songs apart and reconstituting them on the piano.

(I compared it favorably to when Springsteen et al. had their midlife crises in the ’90s and started playing slow acoustic versions of their rock & roll hits.)

While some of his pre-song intros went into life experiences, he avoided discussing The Heavy Stuff that comprises his written work — tragedy, religion, etc. — in favor of a fun evening with fans. He said at the outset that he & Greenwood were there to play “reduced versions of the songs you love,” and the audience, largely my age & older, was There For It.

Still, I felt a degree of distance much of the time, even when he played a few songs from Ghosteen. And then he got to the penultimate song of the main set, Jubilee Street, and sonofabitch if I wasn’t on fire from within. I felt that rush, that sway in my bones. Even as I wondered how he’d approach those closing, repeated lyrics, I was swept up in the song and the players. The restraint from piano and bass and vocals made the communion even more intense. I was transforming and vibrating, only no one was there to look at me now; we were all there to look at him.

It was joyous, and I thought about how meh the album version of Jubilee Street is, and how its magic comes from the performance, not just of Cave & the musicians, but of the audience. Of us.

They finished the main set with Push The Sky Away, followed by an encore of 8 more songs (here’s the setlist). I stuck around for it all, song after song I didn’t know but someday will, and then I walked back to the garage on 79th, T-shirt in hand, and drove home in record time.

Art

Between my conference & everything else, I didn’t get much time to sketch last week. But I brought my big & little sketch-pads to the Nick Cave show, along with a Micron 01 & my trusty pocket-brush. I made a few squiggles, including this mini-pad Micron sketch of one of the statues near the stage at the Beacon Theatre. The statue was upstanding but I accidentally made it a little slatternly. But the best thing I did was take the 6”x8” pad & my pocket-brush and try to capture the scene before Cave came on. The three elements were the mist curling in the spotlight, the black piano on the stage, and the black curtains behind. I’m happy with it. You should go to the Flickr album of most of the art I’ve made & find something you like.

Until Next Time

Thanks for reading this far! I’ll be back on Sunday with links, books, & workout craziness, and Wednesday with a new episode, maybe some art, & who knows maybe a little profundity or something.

An eye for an eye / And a tooth for a tooth / And anyway I told the truth / And I'm afraid I told a lie,

—Gil Roth
Virtual Memories
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