While rereading blogs from May of 2025, I was reminded of Nick Cave's newsletter, The Red Hand Files, which is a series of essays that are letters to fans' questions -- some irreverent, some emotional. Here's the post I made citing Cave's comparison of cynicism and hopefulness. Here's a more recent one:
Issue #347's question is: I don’t experience anything when I go to concerts anymore, but I still really enjoy music. Do you like going to concerts?
Two parts of his response I loved:
I engage in various spiritual activities – I swim in a lake, go to church, walk in nature, meditate – but none offer the transcendent opportunity of a live concert. It is a form of human activity that radiates goodness, working its way through the crowd and into the world as a reparative, cosmic force, improving matters, keeping the devil at bay. I believe Radiohead’s audience was responding not only to the music, which was astonishing, but also to the courage of the performers – the sheer nerve to stand before a crowd and offer up their souls. Like everyone else there, I was deeply moved and humbled.
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This is what the vast crowd at the O2 recognised, a band engaging in a remarkable act of ordinary courage, a distinctly human form of heroism – the audacity to stand before the world and declare, ‘This is what we think. This is what we feel. This is who we are.’
On This Day (12/24):
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