“[T]he luminous and shocking beauty of the everyday is something I try to remain alert to, if only as an antidote to the chronic cynicism and disenchantment that seems to surround everything, these days. It tells me that, despite how debased or corrupt we are told humanity is and how degraded the world has become, it just keeps on being beautiful. It can’t help it.”
— Nick Cave, in Faith, Hope and Carnage
far from me / nick cave & the bad seeds
Nick Cave on A.I.
If you persevere, in time you will have an entirely different problem – not that life is meaningless, but rather that life has almost too much meaning. As the scales fall from your eyes the world rushes into focus, presenting itself with a kind of vibrational eloquence that can, at first, be almost overwhelming. Everything shimmers, everything clarifies, everything wrestles for your attention. Trees feel super-real, their roots plunged into the earth, their branches stretching to the sky, birds are flesh and blood souls, fragile with life, the sky unfolds and rolls, the ocean crashes, people fascinate, books are beautiful, children are whirling dynamos of chaos, dogs bark and cats meow, flowers shout, your neighbour glows, and God runs like a helix through all things. The world awaits you, humming with meaning. You are alive with potential. You are not dead.
— Nick Cave on getting clean, Red Hand Files #258
And in that first post-heroin spring, my ageless dope body was gone. I’d traded it for a body that was like an empty hive. In the spring the missing swarms flew back through the sunset to fill it up again. [...] Not that I missed the dope body. I was sick of having the kind of problems that demons have—sick to death—but the scale of the human problem was breathtaking. It took my breath away, standing in front of those colossal sunsets. Red and purple. The memory of bedtime when I was four coming back in that color. The memory of my first kiss coming back. The way my bedroom smelled when I was ten and I was sick.
— Michael W. Clune, White Out
If you persevere, in time you will have an entirely different problem – not that life is meaningless, but rather that life has almost too much meaning. As the scales fall from your eyes the world rushes into focus, presenting itself with a kind of vibrational eloquence that can, at first, be almost overwhelming. Everything shimmers, everything clarifies, everything wrestles for your attention. Trees feel super-real, their roots plunged into the earth, their branches stretching to the sky, birds are flesh and blood souls, fragile with life, the sky unfolds and rolls, the ocean crashes, people fascinate, books are beautiful, children are whirling dynamos of chaos, dogs bark and cats meow, flowers shout, your neighbour glows, and God runs like a helix through all things. The world awaits you, humming with meaning. You are alive with potential. You are not dead.
— Nick Cave on getting clean, Red Hand Files #258
The thing about peaky blinders is that it is very open to interpretation. There are no clear distinctions between black and white. Where does the black end and the white begin? Where did the black take it roots and what right does the white have to judge it? How far does the white go? Where did it begin? The show doesn’t give an answer. There is no clarity, so many lines that can be read differently. There are no redemption arcs, no climax reckoning, sometimes even no justice. It’s quite arthouse and really deep, you can analyse it again and again. And this makes people uncomfortable. They are so quick to judge, blame events on certain characters, say that that one is psychopath and this one was manipulated. When they all most certainly are and were. When they all most certainly aren’t and weren’t. You see, we have this trend right now that consists of cancel culture and hiding all the uncomfortable parts of art. People want good-natured, fair characters who fight evil, they don’t want ptsd, injustice, the complexity of human relationships and societal problems, they don’t want to see violence explained because to them it sounds like excuses. Hence, such a popularity of superheroes. There are a whole lot of problems with modern cinema and literature trends that seriously distress me, but my point is that peaky blinders is too gray, too arthouse and too serious for such a huge audience. I might be wrong, of course, but I can’t get rid of the feeling that a lot of the points the show tried to capture and get across are not explored or understood enough.
