99. Nick Cave’s Shining Devils
I.
One immediately notices how the gold glitters on Nick Cave’s ceramic sculptures. And how vivid the red-coloured parts are. In seventeen works, Nick Cave tells the life story of the devil. As a child, the horned boy poses with a little monkey; as an old man, he dances his final dance. In between, he sets off to war, returns battered, and slaughters his child. Ultimately, he begs for forgiveness. The devil begs for forgiveness – what more could you want from Nick Cave?
In the 2022 film This Much I Know To Be True Cave shows early versions of the footage. They haven’t been glazed yet, let alone painted. But the concept has already been realised; the story is in his head.
Because Cave tells a chronological story, you trudge neatly in a line of people past the sculptures. In the adjacent space, the Voorlinden Museum is broadcasting an interview with the artist. “The Devil gave me a sort of disguise,” says Cave. “I didn’t realise it at the time I made them, but it was a way of coming to certain realisations about things that were happening in my life. So I was never the Devil, but in the end I was very much so.” You recognise Cave most clearly in the sculpture The Devil In Remorse. Black suit, long hair combed back.
The exhibition The Devil: A Life is on display at Voorlinden until 9 March. I highly recommend it, though I am a fan of Nick Cave. It’s enviable how someone who writes and composes so beautifully also has a stunning series of ceramic sculptures within him. Gorgeous devilish kitsch.
II.
It doesn’t get much more MTV and 1990s than Tom Green. Before all the YouTube channels and Jackass did it, Green let himself be filmed in public whilst performing absurd and gory stunts. He painted porn on his father’s car, who then decided to take the bus to work. Tom Green then picked him up at the bus stop in the slutmobile, much to his father’s embarrassment and the hilarity of bystanders – and viewers at home.
Green hung pieces of meat from his head, went wild on a dead moose and trashed his own TV studios on more than one occasion. You either hated him or loved him. And yes, I watched his programmes as a young teenager, exactly the right age to appreciate someone getting away with the most disgusting antics.
You should never let the subject of a documentary direct it, says Green in his recently released film This Is The Tom Green Documentary. Because then you can whitewash the past. Which is exactly what he does as director. The documentary is an amusing but uncritical string of ‘greatest hits’ that Green still lives off. Not much has happened around Green in recent years. Perhaps because twenty years ago there was a bit more room for his brand of shock and provocation. Perhaps because he himself has mellowed a bit. Perhaps because these days he talks a bit too often about UFOs.
In any case, Amazon Prime Video thinks it’s time for a Greenaissance. This week saw the release not only of his documentary, but also a comedy special (in which he, too, frequently falls back on references to old successes). And there is a four-part series about how Green turned his back on Hollywood – after it may well have been the other way round – by returning to his native Canada. There he began a new life that is the polar opposite of his time in the spotlight: with two donkeys on a farm.
---PS.
This is a brilliant essay by Bas Heijne in which he draws on the book The Extinction of Experience and the film Babygirl to make the point that we could certainly do with taking a stronger stand against Big Tech. “We’d rather watch someone cooking on a screen than cook ourselves; we’d rather watch racy porn than seek out awkward sex. In any case, we prefer to watch others, for hours on end. We let our inner selves be filled with images because we’ve outsourced our feelings to apps that promise to make us even better.”
Is this the best idea ever for a Chrome extension? TabBoo adds random scare moments to the websites you don’t really want to visit but keep going back to, like Facebook. That’ll teach you.
Botsbotsbots is an online game in which you try to convince five robots that you are not human. Creator cnnmon calls it a reverse Turing test. The game uses a version of ChatGPT.
Meanwhile, The Author’s Guild (the largest and oldest organisation for writers in the United States) has introduced a new certificate for books. “Human Authored means that the text of the book was written by a human and not generated by AI,” the organisation states. “With the exception of minimal, trivial use, such as AI applications that check spelling and grammar or assist with brainstorming and research.” This seems like the world turned upside down to me, but never mind.
The Veils are back. This time, the band is keeping it small and intimate with some strings and plenty of piano work. Asphodels is the first album of 2025 that’s on repeat.
---A new Pebble smartwatch is coming from the original creator, Eric Migicovsky. I’m definitely ready for a cheaper and funkier alternative to the Apple Watch. The Pebble Time was my favourite years ago, then the Pebble brand was taken over by Fitbit and then Google, and no new models were released. The new smartwatch will once again feature an e-ink screen, long battery life and physical buttons, Migicovsky promises on his website.
The Fingerdama is a smaller version of the Japanese Kendama, where you try to swing a ball on a string onto a holder. Looks like a lovely fidget toy. Now on Kickstarter.
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