The Proposition

At first glance, The Proposition looks another tale of the hard-scrabble men who kill to live and live to kill. But to the trained eye, the eye that has LEARNED to SEE, it is so much more. What is that name under “written by”? Well, bless my soul its NICK fucking CAVE.

CAVE’s heady style of Americana Gothic Rock and Roll has blessed this earth for nigh on five and twenty years. If you haven’t heard it, I pity you. All he does is so gloriously violent and frighteningly over the top that it almost seems as if he jests. But don’t you DARE laugh, by god, for CAVE speaks WORDS that you MUST hear.

For when that day of rapture comes, Those Who Follow CAVE will be taken in the right hand of THE MASTER, while those who do not shall be cast DOWN, DOWN past the fires of hell to a place where all is screaming wind and wet, ever-grasping darkness. I can offer only a poor attempt to ape CAVE’s words, here is the real thing.

From CAVE’s novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel

“It was his brother who tore the caul on that, the morning of their birth, as if that sole act of assertion was to set an inverted precedent for inertia of his life to come, Euchrid, then unnamed, clutched ahold of his brother’s heels and slopped into the world with all the glory or an uninvited guest.

The noon-day sun spun in the sky like a molten bolt that hammered down upon the tin roof and tarred plank sides of the shack. Inside sat Pa, at this table, surrounded by his ingenious contraptions of springs and steel, sweating midst the bleeding heat while greasing his traps and trying, in vain, to closet his ears from the drunken ravings of his wife, who lay sprawled and caterwauling in the back seat of the old burnt-out Chevy. Pride of the junk-pile, that car, sitting of bricks out back of the shack, like a great shell shed in disgust by some outsized crawler.

There, in the squirms of labour, his bibulous spouse shrieked against the miracle that swelled and kicked inside her as she sucked on a bottle of her own White Jesus, rocking the Chevy on its stilts and moaning and screaming, screaming and a-moaning, 'Pa! Pa-a! Pa-a-a!,' until she heard the shack door open and then the shack door shut, whereupon she took leave of the morning and passed into unconsciousness.

‘Too pissed to push,’ Pa would tell Euchrid later.”

Get excited.