Nick Cave at the Ottawa Writers Festival
Most authors don’t make this type of entrance: confident, striding onstage to hoots and applause, wearing a funeral suit dissected by a splash of pink satin and gold chains hanging off paltry chest hair. The Author states that there will be two minutes only of pre-reading photography and preens and poses before a sea of flashing cell phones before tucking into an old-fashioned literary reading.
This was Nick Cave appearing at Ottawa’s Saint Brigid’s Centre for the Arts on September 17; the alternative musician who had happened to write a novel, his second, The Death of Bunny Munro.
His loyal fans are eager. They have packed the pews of a former church, their hands filled with pints of poured drink – Shit, can you believe Nick Cave finally came to Ottawa? ‘Course not to sing but to read. And where the heck do you rest a tumbler of whiskey when sitting in a pew? The answer becomes obvious – cradle it on your knees.
So Cave reads, flanked by statues of Mary and Saint Patrick, their heads crowned with an amber setting sun while Cave reads humorous profanity, literary enough to draw chuckles and nods – laden with “p” and “c”-words. Luckily the century-old Lowertown sanctuary for Irish Catholics is deconsecrated and Saint Brigid herself is hidden behind an Ottawa Writers Festival screen. Still…
Cave gives two 10-minute readings of Bunny Munro, which is two more than he gave his Toronto audience. Then he seduces the audience. He talks warmly of Avril Lavigne and her “patina of innocence” and wonders if her father happens to be in the audience. He apologizes for the tragic and piteous 1989 And the Ass Saw the Angel, a book bogged down in glorious language. But, as Mr. Cave, points out: “taking an enormous amount of amphetamines actually makes you feel that you wrote a lot.”
Message for future authors: coffee is better.
The recipe for Bunny Munro, or “How to write a novel in four weeks”, was much simpler:
- Go on tour with your band for the umpteenth time in 20-odd years. Write a book to escape the tedium.
- Base it on one of your unproduced but finished film scripts.
- Choose an improbable vocation for your anti-hero. In this case: hand cream salesman.
- Take inspiration from the SCUM Manifesto, the Gospel of Mark, British kitchen soup dramas and British filmmaker Nicolas Roeg.
- Give yourself four weeks.
(Caution: if you don’t belong to a band or have a finished script, this may take longer.)
But persevere! Narrative has apparently set Cave free, turning him into a happy go lucky card fielding introspection from host Dave O’Meara, internationally lauded local poet (and Lucky Bastard).
“There was nothing I could do to change the fact that people thought I was a gloomy old bastard,” he said, “People thought I was Lord of the Goths. So, I decided to get up out of my coffin…”
Has Saint Brigid’s heard this much laughter? Yes, he also dared audience members to join his band or meet him for a drink after, trashed poor old Charles Bukowski (Never give him a script copy of Barfly enthusing ‘OMG, you’ve got to READ this!’ You can, however, print out and present to him a copy of Gladiator 2, which he penned. See hilarious clip below for the synopsis.) and discussed the woeful state of the audio book which he addressed by writing with Warren Ellis, an evocative, gorgeous spatialized score set to his reading of the book.
And why not exude some joy? This is a man who jumped into the abyss only to find it came to his knees, shrugged, then got on with it.
December 31st, 2009 at 6:27 pm
[...] found in the Yorkie Islands of Northern Scotland. A recent highlight was an on-stage interview with Nick Cave at the local St. Brigid’s writer’s festival. [...]
December 31st, 2009 at 7:14 pm
[...] found in the Yorkie Islands of Northern Scotland. A recent highlight was an on-stage interview with Nick Cave at the local St. Brigid’s writer’s festival. [...]