Hopefulness Is the Warrior Emotion

The musician Nick Cave was on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert earlier this week (full interview) and he read a letter from his Red Hand Files, an AMA project where fans write in with questions and he answers them. The question was:

Following the last few years I’m feeling empty and more cynical than ever. I’m losing faith in other people, and I’m scared to pass these feelings to my little son. Do you still believe in Us (human beings)?

In a lovely letter in response (which he reads in the video above), Cave writes that “much of my early life was spent holding the world and the people in it in contempt” and that “it took a devastation to understand the idea of mortal value, and it took a devastation to find hope”. That devastation was the death of his 15-year-old son in 2015, which he talks more about in this interview and in this book. Cave’s response concludes:

Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position either. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like, Valerio, such as reading to your little boy, or showing him a thing you love, or singing him a song, or putting on his shoes, keeps the devil down in the hole. It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending. It says the world is worth believing in. In time, we come to find that it is so.

I promise, your day will be better if you take a few minutes to watch or read this letter. And the entire interview is worth watching as well — there is no better interviewer on the topic of loss and grief than Stephen Colbert.

• interviews
• Nick Cave
• Stephen Colbert
• video

Dancing NYC Subway Mosaics by Nick Cave

Oh, I really like this new NYC subway mosaic installed in the corridor between Times Square and Bryant Park designed by Nick Cave.¹ It’s based on Cave’s Soundsuits project, full-body suits that “camouflage the shape of the wearer, enveloping and creating a second skin that hides gender, race, and class, thus compelling the audience to watch without judgment”. From a NY Times piece on the mosaic:

The Soundsuits have always been an amalgam of cultural references, Cave explained: the concepts of shamans and masquerade, obscuring the race, gender and class of the wearer and forging a new identity. They contain ties to Africa, the Caribbean and Haiti.

“It’s very important that you can make references, you can connect to something,” Cave said. “In one of the mosaics in the corridor, there’s a sneaker. So that brings it to this urban, right-now time.”

From beneath a pink-and-black cloak of raffia, carefully crafted out of glass shards, pokes a contemporary sneaker in shades of salmon, white and maroon. Cave likes the play that’s happening here: The form is sometimes figurative, sometimes abstract. “Sometimes it’s identifiable and sometimes it’s not,” he said. “But that’s the beauty of it all.”

(thx, caroline)

1. No, not that Nick Cave.↩

• art
• Nick Cave
• NYC
• subway

Nick Cave’s letter to MTV

In 1996, Nick Cave was nominated by MTV for Best Male Artist. This was an award he was not interested in winning, so he wrote MTV a letter. “I am in competition with no-one.” Click through to read the sincere thanks in the first paragraph, and the loony bin muse protection in the third.

(Via Stellar and @Lettersofnote)

• MTV
• Nick Cave