Just as my Nick Cave infatuation was starting to fade

1. I finally watched 20,000 Days on Earth.
   
   
2. I saw Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds this summer in New Orleans and it was the most transformative concert I've seen in a decade. Cathartic, climatic, catastrophic, loud as a gun, precise as a scalpel. Just as my Nick Cave infatuation was starting to fade, someone mentioned
   
   Post by Andrew Toups.
   
   
   and it pulled me right back into it. I came up with the first three verses of a blatant Nick Cave ripoff tune called "Demon! Demon! Demon!" while walking the dog this morning.
   
3. I'm in love with his studio. A while back,  New York Magazine ran a discussion between Sufjan Stevens and Stephin Merritt on the comparative values each puts on pop music, and the question of fame came up:
   
   Do you crave massive fame and popularity?
   STEVENS: No. [Laughs.] I wouldn’t mind being popular in other ways, but not with music.
   MERRITT: I don’t care if I’m famous. I want to be rich. I want to be able to do what I’m doing on a bigger scale, and if I feel like having an orchestra, I’d like to be able to snap my fingers and have it happen that day. I don’t particularly like orchestral music, so it’s not much of a constraint for me. But it is a constraint not to have an enormous apartment with reverb chambers and an empty swimming pool where I can record the drums if I want to.
   STEVENS: You want an empty swimming pool?
   MERRITT: Yeah. I want the facilities that Abba had. I may not use them like Abba, but I want to have the creative freedom to do what only a lot of money would allow me to do. So I don’t really care about fame, but I do care about money.

In the world of this movie, Nick Cave has some Abba-grade digs. Pianos all over the place, fancy rugs, lots of light. he and Warren Ellis loll around intoning into microphones with engineers floating in the dust motes to catch some genius.


4. The resources of the studio are Nick Cave's amanuensis, a word-of-the-day from 2011 that has stuck with me.
   
   • amanuensis
   • 
   • \uh-man-yuh-WEN-sis\
   • DEFINITION
   noun
   : one employed to write from dictation or to copy manuscript
   • EXAMPLES
   Marco worked as an amanuensis for a judge who needed to compose his opinions orally while recovering from cataract surgery.
   
   "As early as the 1840s and 1850s, the Ohio Cultivator published women's columns that spoke vividly for women's rights and honed the talents of two important abolitionist feminists, Hanna Maria Tracy Cutler and Frances Dana Gage, who is now best remembered as the amanuensis for Sojourner Truth's 'Ain't I a Woman' speech." -- From Frances W. Kaye's 2011 book Goodlands: A Meditation and History on the Great Plains
5. The recurring themes of Nick Cave's creative life is transformation and memory, which he taps into quite well. I'd like to have some financial advice - for a guy who hasn't exactly been a huge pop star he's doing quite well in houses and cars and studios. Plus, that would be a hilarious investment advice show.
   
   But the whole thing is about transformation, his whole gig maybe. Maybe it is the human gig. Anyway, he makes it seem graceful and terrific and you should see this film even if Nick Cave is kind of a clown to you. Baton Rougeans, 20,000 Days on Earth is playing at the Manship Theatre on Nov. 29. (Facebook event)