Los Angeles--Airplane sick bags may be the ultimate symbol of travel discomfort, with a journey interrupted by an outpouring that is both sudden and disgusting. For Nick Cave, the image seems intended.
The Australian rock icon has authored a quasi-memoir in the form of a collection of sick bags, on which he jotted down ideas as he flew across North America on a 2014 tour.
In a storyline with hints of Homer's Odyssey, the 57-year-old rocker on "The Sick Bag Song" seeks his way home and reminisces about his past as he, symbolically, vomits out his inner thoughts.
In entries that drift between poetry and journal entries, Cave describes the haze of his life as a performer. He writes of walking on stage at the Bonnaroo festival in Tennessee to "become an object of great fascination to almost no one" and, after the show, "I will sit outside on the steps of our trailer and smoke."
The book reproduces images of the sick bags on which Cave scribbled his observations, which range from seeing rock legend Lou Reed's face appearing on the napkin of a New York bar to, simply, "Masturbated at the W Hotel, Austin."
The outlook -- bleak, but with strong religious undertones and sexual fixations -- is no surprise considering the music of Cave, one of the darker figures to emerge from the 1970s punk scene and whose most famous song, "The Mercy Seat," he narrates from the perspective of a man facing execution.
Cave, who earlier published two novels, suggested that "The Sick Bag Song" was the closest he would come to a memoir, other than a film on his life released last year, "20,000 Days on Earth."
AFP
