August 2021 – Nik Dirga

The cosmic horror of being Nicolas Cage

There have been many different Nicolas Cages.

There was the offbeat comic who emerged in movies like Moonstruck and Raising Arizona, the Oscar winner or nominee of Leaving Las Vegas or Adaptation, the askew popular action hero in Con Air and Face/Off, and the somewhat lost jobbing actor who appeared in an seemingly endless parade of barely-noticed flicks with titles like Rage, Arsenal and Kill Chain. He’s appeared in well over 100 films.

No matter what the material, Cage is always at least a little interesting even in the worst of movies, and a well-deserving cult has formed around him. I’ve been a fan at least since the Vampire’s Kiss days, when I rented a somewhat random VHS tape and ended up staring slackjawed at the screen, wondering what the hell I’d just seen.

It’s hard to see a pattern sometimes in Cage’s relentless productivity, allegedly at least some of which is due to money troubles.

But one clear underlying theme has developed in some of Cage’s recent work – one man facing the cosmic horror of an uncaring universe, an idea straight out of H.P. Lovecraft. There’s been a string of movies in recent years where Cage takes his abilities to the outer limits, portraying a string of gruff, stoic men fighting against the random chaos and carnage the universe can produce. In movies like Mandy, Color Out Of Space, Willy’s Wonderland and Pig, Cage has morphed into a kind of bronzed icon of the doomed hero, a figure out of myth and horror who simply fights back, the best he can.

Not all of these movies are created equal – Willy’s Wonderland is a goofy B-movie lark while Pig is a surprisingly touching drama – but what they all feature is Cage, uncaged, taking bold chances that didn’t seem possible in the days when he was doing fluff like Honeymoon In Vegas. He’s done his share of unmemorable generic action flicks, but when he wants to, Nicolas Cage still surprises you.

In 2018’s Mandy, an almost unbearably dark slice of psychedelic horror, Cage’s wife is murdered by a Satanic cult and he amps up for a run of heavy-metal vengeance. In Willy’s Wonderland, he’s a mute janitor who ends up fighting animatronic cartoon characters in a haunted funhouse. In Color Out Of Space, a loose adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s groundbreaking cosmic horror tale, Cage and his entire family are overwhelmed and transformed by a malign presence from beyond the stars. And in Pig, what seems to be yet another riff on John Wick, about a recluse whose pet pig is stolen, turns into a surprisingly melancholy, affecting meditation on revenge and acceptance that doesn’t go anywhere you expect it would. Pig isn’t steeped in fantasy like the other three films, but at its heart we still have Cage as a man fighting back against fearful, overwhelming forces – in this case, all of modern society.

In all four of these movies, Cage is a solid, looming figure – he’s bulkier, beardier than he was in his lanky 1990s stardom, a hulking presence. And in each of them, he faces a world that’s out to hurt him, in which fate is unpredictable and often malign. He does more with his eyes and a piercing stare than a lot of the excitable gestures of his earlier career.

It’s a good fit for Cage in his latter years (he’s now 57), because he’s channeled that quirky likability of his earlier films into a more ominous allure. Even in a strange experiment like Willy’s Wonderland, where his character is mute the entire film, he holds your attention in a movie that would be fairly unmemorable without him. And in something like the justly well-reviewed Pig, where he’s also highly restrained, he’s still very capable of breaking your heart a little bit as a hermit who is also kind of a sage.

I’m digging Cage’s cosmic horror phase. I know there’ll be several more Nicolas Cages to come before his career is done – I’m particularly looking forward to seeing an elder statesman Cage – but in a world where everything we knew seems to be a bit uncertain and shaky these last few years, Nicolas Cage staring into the void and fighting back against its horrors seems like the perfect man for the times.

My favourite guitar god: Richard Thompson

My favourite guitar player isn’t a household name.

The thing about music criticism I’ve realised over the years I’ve dabbled in it is, all criticism is fundamentally a very personal thing. You can look at something in the broader cultural context, you can use all the fancy words you want to describe it, and yet in the end you often have to go with your gut. Does this move you?

There’s many guitar players out there who I dig, whose technical mastery is next to none. You can’t ignore Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, B.B. King, Joni Mitchell or Nancy Wilson, Django Reinhardt, George Harrison or Stevie Ray Vaughan, Prince or Frank Zappa, Chuck Berry or Pete Townsend. And I like pretty much all of ‘em.

But when it comes to the guitarist who moves me the most, who evokes pictures in my brain that none of the rest do, it’s Richard Thompson I turn to every time. He is a comfort for me in troubling times.

Thompson is not a rock god celebrity, although among a certain brand of music fan he’s certainly well loved. And for me, he’s among the most soulful of guitar players, his work reaching deep into some kind of elemental place. From his early days with folk-rockers Fairport Convention to his stunning collaborations with his former wife Linda Thompson and on to his venerable solo career, Thompson’s distinctive yearning sound is one I turn to again and again in life to get a break from the world.

I first cottoned on to Thompson with his 1991 album Rumor and Sigh, full of gently askew humour and pathos, with the cutting observations and forensic bits of detail in his songwriting that also make him one of our best lyricists. The “hit” single from that album, “I Feel So Good,” with its chorus, “I feel so good I’m going to break somebody’s heart tonight” – sums up Thompson’s worldview – happy, yet a bit bitter, nostalgic, yet optimistic. When I listened to that cassette I picked up at a shopping mall somewhere in suburban California years ago, I was transported to a new place. I’ve been going back there ever since.

Most of those who we think of when we think of the greatest guitar players are men, and the vast majority of them play with a very masculine, dominating swagger – picture Eddie Van Halen soloing, Pete Townshend windmilling. Swagger is a very big part of the rock guitar sound and hey, I love it, too.

Yet Thompson, unlike a lot of guitar gods, doesn’t play with a lot of ego. There’s little boasting in his sound, but instead a kind of cathartic release, whether he’s finger-picking a gentle ballad or soaring into dazzling long rides. There’s a great quote about the legendary Howlin’ Wolf attributed to producer Sam Phillips that I often think of whenever I listen to Thompson: “This is where the soul of man never dies.”

There’s deep riches in Thompson’s catalogue over his 50-year career I never stop enjoying exploring. The heartbreaking character portraits of “Beeswing” or “Vincent Black Lightning 1952,” or the explosive release of “Wall of Death” or “Calvary Cross,” where you can feel Thompson getting lost in the song’s story, his guitar jams a pivotal cog in the machine of songcraft rather than just being showy.

“I like playing guitar to accompany a voice, or if there is a solo, then extending the narrative of the song,” he once told The Guardian. The slow stair-stepping chord progression of “Calvary Cross,” with its building tension and release, floors me every time I listen to it, and when I dive into the never-ending joys of sprawling live versions of it.

Look, I’m not any kind of technical music critic. I’m a listener, who’s darned clueless when it comes to the ins and outs of how gorgeous sounds are made. Hendrix made amazing, unmistakable sounds with the guitar, but how he made ‘em, I couldn’t tell you.

So with Richard Thompson, for me, it’s all about how the music hits the gut. And he moves me.

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the internet…

I’ve had a few posts half-written but life has kind of been overtaken by events here in New Zealand this week and it’s been a bit crazy as we deal with an unfortunate outbreak of the Delta variant. It’s been the first time in more than 6 months for any lockdown here and this is the strictest one since April 2020, but it’s a persistent beast of a disease out there…

Hopefully things will improve soon and most of us haven’t forgotten for a second how incredibly fortunate/lucky/grateful we’ve been not to have it as bad here as so many other places in the world have, and so many friends and family have suffered in the past 18 months or so.

In the meantime, I’ve been busy doing a lot of work with Radio New Zealand, and in bloggable content I wrote about 10 recent (and a couple not-so-recent) shows to watch during lockdown, which is applicable in an awful lot of places in this troubled world at the moment. Go and have a read!

Charles Schulz and Peanuts: He walked the line

Like pretty much every cartoonist who ever picked up a pen, I worship at the feet of Charles M. Schulz, the master of the simple line.

I’ve written before about my love for the rapidly vanishing newspaper comic. After a steady diet of them as a kid, classic Peanuts strips are embedded in my brain. Even if I last read them 20, 30 years ago, they seem like familiar friends. I read them now less with an eye for the gags (although Schulz could be side-splittingly funny, especially when it came to depicting rage), and more with an eye on the craft.

They say that writing is often the art of chipping away, scraping off the excess to find the truth underneath all those fluttering words. In my work as a journalist, you’re trained to get to the point. Every single panel by Schulz feels like the point – comic art stripped to the barest essentials.

When I first started drawing my own little silly comics years ago, I took my inspiration from superhero superstars Neal Adams, John Byrne and particularly the insanely detailed crosshatch-filled black-and-white work of Dave Sim and Gerhard on Cerebus. I did a fairly awful job of imitating these far better artists, because I didn’t have the base of skill underneath.

Even though I loved Peanuts, if you’d asked scribbling young Nik if Schulz was a great artist, he might’ve said no, but he was a good cartoonist. But now I see clearly the detail in his design, how he could dash off a few lines to clearly delineate a house, a brick wall, a kite-eating tree, a doghouse, and it worked.

Have you ever tried to actually draw Charlie Brown, or Snoopy, like Schulz did? Most budding cartoonists give it a try, and it’s harder than it looks. I’ve done a few Peanuts pastiche/homage comic strips over the years, and every time it’s like learning to draw with a new limb:

You look at his earlier strips, and there was a more ornate feeling to the art, with some tricky perspective shots and more detailed backgrounds that were gradually abandoned as the strip shrunk in scope, but widened in its emotional palette. By the time Schulz hit his stride by the mid-1960s, he’d refined Peanuts to the point of abstraction. Things got weird – a kite-eating tree? A bird who spoke in scratch marks? Snoopy becomes a helicopter? – but because of Schulz’s humble everyman style, the surrealism of Peanuts always seemed downright cozy.

There’s other cartoonists who went equally spare, like Crockett Johnson’s Barnaby (Barnaby surely a distant relative of Charlie Brown?). More recently, Jeff Smith’s Bone always dazzled me with its simple, clear lines. Yet many other remaining gag cartoons like Wizard Of Id or Family Circus or Dennis The Menace were simply drawn, but never quite managed the deep control and deceptive depth Schulz could with his art.

Schulz’s smooth line got sadly shaky in his final years of Peanuts, due to health problems. The easy effortless lines of the strip’s peak gave way to an old man’s more hesitant form. Yet the DNA of a master craftsman was still there in every panel, despite his struggles.

But boy, when he was at his best – which to be honest, was for most of Peanuts’ staggering 50-year-run – Charles Schulz laid down a line that many would imitate, and few would ever better.

This is not a blog post about The Fall.

I keep trying to write a blog post about The Fall, and failing.

This is not a blog post about The Fall.

The Fall were a post-punk band from industrial Manchester who were insanely prolific, yet the very definition of a cult act. Frontman Mark E. Smith stomped, snarled and muttered his way through an endless sea of clattering albums over 40 years until his death at age 60 in 2018.

For some people, The Fall are everything. For some, if they’ve even heard of them, they’re just annoying noise.

I have a greatest hits collection, the ironically titled 50,000 Fall Fans Can’t Be Wrong. The first song on it is “Repetition,” and it sums up the band’s gritty ethos with the first words Smith utters – “Right noise!”

Prior to 2018, I liked The Fall, and had a couple of their albums, but I wasn’t what I’d call a super-fan. There’s people who devote a giant chunk of their lives to The Fall.

When Mark E. Smith died, I started listening to them more and more and scooping up albums any time I saw them. I often do that when someone famous dies, I go back to their work, and get a bit obsessive about them for a spell. It’s morbid but I bet I’m not the only person who does it.

The Fall has a song on their 2001 Album Are You Missing Winner? I listened to like five times yesterday. That’s not their best known or loved album, and the song, “Crop-Dust,” is probably not even in their 100 best songs. I kind of love it.

It swirls in and out like a deranged anthem from another world, distorted and spooky, hypnotic, and Smith starts barking away like a lost dog. A YouTube commenter says, “It sounds like a drunk Mark E. Smith phoned the vocal in after getting trapped inside a telephone box.” It really does.

At least 60% of people I know would hate that song.

The late John Peel memorably summed up The Fall by saying, “They are always different; they are always the same.”

Smith was fascinating, querulous and eccentric, but I don’t imagine I’d have liked him much in real life. In his final years he looked like a melting wax figure of himself.

In January 2018, the same month Mark E. Smith died of cancer, I nearly died of something I didn’t even know I had. I’ve kind of divided my life since then into “before, and after.” I began listening to The Fall a lot that year, spurred on by editing news stories about Mark E. Smith’s death, and listening to 50,000 Fall Fans Can’t Be Wrong over and over and over. It was a weird time in my life, and the snarling chaos of The Fall seemed to help it make sense.

Every time I turned around, there was a new album to discover. There’s still a dozen or two I haven’t listened to. I like The Fall a lot, but I wouldn’t call me expert enough in their strange universe to write about the sweep of their career, of their deeper meaning.

Music is weird because it’s like a fingerprint on your brain. The things I see when I hear Peter Gabriel’s “Don’t Give Up” or Crowded House’s “Distant Sun” aren’t the things you see; the soothing void “Crop-Dust” plunges me into might just give you a migraine.

Sometimes you want right noise, you want a secret language that you feel like only you can understand.

I listen to The Fall a lot, and I’m nowhere near the bottom yet.

This was not a blog post about The Fall.