Nick Cave – PHAWKER.COM – Curated News, Gossip, Concert Reviews, Fearless Political Commentary, Interviews….Plus, the Usual Sex, Drugs and Rock n' Roll

CINEPHILE: Let Us Now Praise Cormac McCarthy

Phawker — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 05:59:48 +0000

BY EGINA MANACHOVA This week Cinephile pays homage to a living literary legend and the film adaptations his work have inspired. The mighty Cormac McCarthy is an eminent author and playwright in the Southern Gothic and Western tradition who is often compared to William Faulkner — which is a little like being compared to Picasso if you’re a painter or Mozart if you’re a composer. In short, McCarthy is an American master. While much of his work deals with the ethical development — or the lack thereof — between life and death, physical landscape plays as much of a role in his fiction as the characters themselves. The unforgiving landscapes in McCarthy’s fiction — the severe beauty of desert panoramas, the endless, lonely vistas of the prairie — serve as a moral proving ground where good men die every day for no good reason while others get by on their cynical intuition or a cold, pragmatic brutality.

To date, there have only been two adaptations of his work: No Country For Old Men and All The Pretty Horses. While the former was made into an instant-classic by the Cohen Brothers, the latter can be charitably described as ‘not great, but not terrible.’ All the Pretty Horses is a dark coming of age tale about a boy setting out for Mexico to develop his own identity as a man. Removed from parents who are incapable of raising him due to their own demons, he finds himself falling in to trouble and love which are one in the same in his case. Directed by Billy Bob Thorton, and starring Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz, Pretty Horses gets into trouble when it deviates too far from the source material (i.e. the first installment of Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy) The film sticks to the narrative arc of the novel but somehow gets lost in translation along the way. The result is mushy romance, played by leads twenty years the senior of the characters in the book, that glosses over the harsh lessons learned by a boy who is teaching himself how to become a man that was so central to the novel. A novel, it should be pointed out, called “one of the greatest American novels of this or any time” by the Guardian.

The must-see big screen representation of Cormac McCarthy’s work is the Cohen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men, a harrowing meditation on the cruelly arbitrary nature of violence that instills the viewer with an ominous sense of dread that stays with you even long after the film is over. No Country.. follows the brutal exploits of Anton Chiguhr (a Beatles-haired Javier Bardem) a sociopathic angel of death as he wreaks havoc between the border of Texas and Mexico in 1980 in search of a missing suitcase full of drug money. Chiguhr operates on his own esoteric system of ethics that are beyond good and evil, and for that matter any sense of mercy. Nothing is sacred besides imparting his perverse justice on all equally. Bardem portrays Chiguhr as an unknowable cipher seemingly unburdened by emotion. His utter lack of facial expression is what won him the Oscar. As the film opens on the vast, arid plains of west Texas, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) relates with some bewilderment the story of how he once sent a remorseless boy of fifteen to his death by electric chair. The film ends as it begins with the same sense of bafflement. Sheriff Bell tells of a dream where in his late father builds a fire across a river calling him towards the resting place, letting him know that the only country safe for old men is found in death.

The Coen Brothers’ razorwire irony is the perfect complement to Cormac McCarthy’s macabre humor, and all three build their art upon the centrality of place. Like McCarthy, the Cohens tend to make their sets a central character in the plot (SEE the heat-warped noir hotel of Barton Fink ), which is why they were able to render the vibe of early 80’s border Texas so palpable. McCarthy spent a good portion of his time in the 80’s writing in motel rooms throughout the South, barely getting by on grant money, which made for some great literature rich in local color and a few angry ex-wives. Safe to say that most if not all the colorful characters that people No Country… were based on real people met along the way during that mad period of motel wanderlust. As a recent transplant from The Lone Star State, I can assure you that west Texas is stranger than fiction, or at least as strange as. And much of it still looks like it does in the movie, especially along the border, where change comes slow or not at all and the only thing more certain than death or taxes is that a strip mall will show and take root sooner or later.

John Hillcoat has big shoes to fill when his screen adaption of McCarthy’s The Road is released later this year, starring Viggo Mortensen, Charlize Theron and the always-awesome Robert Duvall. Judging by his CV, he seems like the right man for the job. His direction of The Proposition, the Australian Western written and scored by Nick Cave, was beyond rebuke. The Road is a post-apocalyptic saga set in the near-future about a father and son’s quest to survive after an unexplained (but presumably nuclear) disaster wipes out the majority of the Earth’s population, leaving behind a few survivors to fend for themselves Lord Of The Flies-style. (McCarthy was reportedly inspired to write The Road after having a child late in life.) While the premise and the narrative is a distinct departure from McCarthy’s hyper-realist regionalism, thematically it is of a piece with his back catalog of rugged south western tales: Limited resources in the control of a few people, land difficult if not impossible to cultivate and the confrontation of death all haunt the father and son as they hike the road to doom — which is to say, even though the Earth is destroyed and almost everyone is dead, not that much really changes. The novel was well received and became a bestseller almost instantly. When The Road won the Pulitzer and found its way into Oprah’s book club, the media-shy McCarthy was pressed more-than-a-little unwillingly into a stiff and awkward interview — only the third he has given in 73 years — with the Queen herself.

As his third screen adaptation is about to be released a fourth, Blood Meridian, is in pre-production. Much is unknown about the film except that Todd Field will be directing it. The novel is a dense, violent allegory about a runaway known only as the “kid” and his entanglement with the Glanton Gang, a group of scalp hunters who massacre Indians across the Appalachian trail. A highly symbolic, richly-detailed epic, Blood Meridian is the kind of novel that could easily get away from all but the most skilled and visionary of directors. Some say it’s un-filmable. Here’s hoping Field is up to the task. And here’s where we give the old man the last word. From Blood Meridan:

NPR 4 THE DEF: Giving Public Radio Edge Since 2006

Phawker — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:00:10 +0000

[Photo by JONATHAN VALANIA]

FRESH AIR

Love, violence, death and America have always been themes for Australian-born singer-composer Nick Cave — Murder Ballads and Abbatoir Blues are just two of his album titles — so he was perhaps a natural to compose the soundtrack for last year’s epically paranoid Western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Cave also wrote the screenplay and soundtrack for the Australian epic The Proposition, which Roger Ebert described as “pitiless and uncompromising, so filled with pathos and disregarded innocence that it is a record of those things we pray to be delivered from.” Cave appeared in Wim Wenders’ 1987 film Wings of Desire, and he’s written both plays and novels. Now Cave has released a new CD with his band the Bad Seeds. The title? Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! The inspiration, he says, is the Biblical story of Lazarus’ return from the grave.

RELATED: In the beginning, there was The Birthday Party. And it was good. Rock n roll as sonic aneurysm: screeching, cataclysmic and cruel. The Birthday Party was scary, but not in the corny Count Chocula way of most of the Kabuki-faced goths that followed in its wake, but, like, Exorcist scary. Danger was the Birthday Party’s business, and in the early ’80s business was good. Nick Cave was the human cannonball at the microphone, and the band would just light his fuse and run for cover. When the audience demanded blood, Cave would open up and bleed with the best of them. When he got bored with that, he would lunge into the crowd for a good punch-up and casually drop kick any skull that dared to violate the sacred space of the stage. Needless to say, there was much weeping and gnashing of teeth. The Birthday Party nicknamed one tour ‘Whoops, I’ve Got Blood On The Tip Of My Boot’ Tour.

And then there were drugs — bags and bags of drugs. The worst drugs money can buy. It wasn’t long before Cave was willing to cut off his leg to feed his arm, and things only grew more ghoulish and dastardly. He was literally scrawling song lyrics into his notebook with a blood-filled syringe. Until one day when the Birthday Party ran out of blood and the willingness to extract it from others. All things move towards their end, Cave would later sing, and the Birthday Party had stopped moving. So ends the first chapter in the Gospel of Nick. […]

Along the way, something miraculous happened: Nick The Ripper transfigured into old Saint Nick and he became…wait for it…capital-G great. While many still probably assume he sleeps in a coffin and others have convicted him in absentia for the fashion crimes of a million po-faced goth twinks, the standard by which he measures himself as an artist is the work of Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, and Leonard Cohen — before which, he will tell you if you bother to ask, he feels humbled. Although he’ll deny it, the music he has been making since, oh I dunno, at least as far back as 1996’s Murder Ballads, breathes the same rarefied air those artists once exhaled. At times stripped nearly to the bone of silence — and devoid all the pretense, posturing and dark intent that could sometimes mar his earlier work — these psalms of love and devotion lift their skinny arms toward heaven, where they once pounded the sands of the abyss. And it was good. Very good. — Jonathan Valania

RADIO TIMES

Hour 1
Is peace possible between Israel and the Palestinians? We talk with AARON DAVID MILLER author of The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace. For the previous two decades, he served at the Department of State as an adviser to six Secretaries of State, where he helped formulate U.S. policy on the Middle East and the Arab-Israel peace process, most recently as the Senior Adviser for Arab-Israeli Negotiations. Miller is currently a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC. Listen to this show via Real Audio | mp3

Hour 2
This Sunday through Thursday PBS will air a 10-part series filmed aboard the USS Nimitz a nuclear aircraft carrier during a six month deployment to the Persian Gulf in 2005. We talk about the history and future of aircraft carriers and their role in American naval strategy with NORMAN POLMAR, naval analyst and consultant. Listen to this show via Real Audio | mp3

THE WORLD CAFE

Melody Gardot didn’t start her musical career out of a grand artistic vision. While riding her bicycle, she was hit by the driver of a Jeep making an illegal turn. Hospitalized for months, Gardot used music for recovery therapy, at doctors’ suggestion. In the ensuing months, Gardot took up the guitar — it was hard for her to sit at the piano — and recorded what would become the Some Lessons EP. Determined to make more music, she independently recorded and released Worrisome Heart, a jazzy singer-songwriter affair that brings to mind Laura Nyro, Joni Mitchell, and Eva Cassidy. The CD has since been reissued by a major label.

MELODY GARDOT: Worrisome Heart

Click here to view the video on YouTube.