What a sing-song dance

What a performance. What a cheap tent show.

I watched a clip yesterday of Nick Cave lying on a couch, talking to some British fashion ‘icon’ named Bella Freud, who has an Instagram account called @fashionneurosis_bellafreud. In it, she psychoanalyses celebrity guests through their deepest thoughts on fashion-adjacent topics. At first I was slightly fascinated by it, especially the oddly jarring sight of famous and well-put-together people lying on their backs and talking into a microphone a few inches from their face.

In this particular clip, Nick Cave was immaculately dressed in one of his Savile Row suits, giving either morally bankrupt barrister or hyper-groomed serial killer. Potentially both.

The clip was less than a minute long (read the full interview at link in bio, Freud implores) and Cave is talking about “the job”, that is, being an artist. He recalls his days at art school, when the wild and impetuous older painters would go off doing their wild and impetuous things all night but always return, to show up, to do the job, to appear for ‘work’ every morning. Freud thinks this is quite profound, and sighs admiringly before being interrupted by her subject who is not finished speaking. He says it is vital, or words to that effect, to show up and do the work even when there is no inspiration or motivation, and Freud says breathily that her father was just like that too. I don’t know who her father was, and it’s information that’s surplus to my requirements.

Maybe it’s Cave’s attire, so sharply dressed as to be dangerous, but I suddenly have this image of all these men dressing in their suits of armour and lining up to go to ‘work’. They line up to have their egos fed and their calamitous minds calmed by a drug called self-importance, which they crave more and more as time goes on. But to be real men, to be considered flesh and blood and apex creators in the holy fucking patriarchy, they must be seen to be doing ‘the work’. Picasso was mentioned, I think in the comments, and that was it for me.

Because, you see, in this whole scenario not one woman is mentioned. The creative people, the artists and writers and thinkers and songmakers, are men who have to justify their existence. In my head, I was screaming into the abyss on behalf of all the women who are creators too, who would never have the luxury of “going to work” or “just doing the job” like some fucking nine-to-five automaton. We might, for years on end, have children to wake and feed and get to school, gardens to water, dishes to wash, bins to empty, laundry to load and hang and unhang and fold and redistribute. It is the work too, and it almost always gets in the way of creative work which is also work, only it gets relegated by the human impulse to care for others, even when you’re exhausted and resentful and even when you’re not either of those things.

The galling and patently fucking obvious thing is, if this invisible caring work wasn’t done there would be whole generations of men like Nick Cave and Pablo Picasso who would not have the unhindered luxury of dressing in their finest and heading into their sanctified soul-space every single day in pursuit of the silent, gruelling and uninterrupted toil of finding themselves. And where would the patriarchy be then?

Headline: The Boys Light Up, Australian Crawl