Nina Simone's Gum: A Memoir of Things Lost and Found

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Nina Simone's Gum] is a metaphor for [Ellis'] creativity - the blossoming of a small idea into something bigger and bolder - but also a journey inside the impulsive, improvisatory mind of Warren Ellis, his passions, obsessions and superstitions. There is a completely natural focus on love and respect, without the ethereal superfluousness that is all too often observed to accompany these emotions. Arguably the most important teacher he pays tribute to is Mick Geyer, the guy who introduced him both to the music of Nina Simone at a time when “you couldn’t just look up ‘Nina Simone live in ’69’ on YouTube” and to Nick Cave in person in 1994, a meeting that would change both musicians’ lives. So instead, we get a story about a piece of discarded gum, which broadens out into a meditation on lucky charms, on the revivifying nature of enthusiasms; on the powers of transitory things, and of the incredible hold of music and friendship.

Many of those people have since passed on, including David McComb, lead singer of Australian band the Triffids – “a quiet, beautiful and incredibly literary soul” – and Mick Geyer, a friend who shared his considerable musical knowledge with the young Ellis before introducing him to Nick Cave. Touching briefly on some of the expected tropes of the rock star genre, including the rigors of touring and the ravages of substance abuse, Ellis refreshingly refuses to dwell on any glorification of bad-boy anti-social behavior, instead favoring wholesome sincerity and unrestrained love, exploring the huge questions of “finding the right people to work with,” asking, “How does that happen? The 66-year-old star slowly made her way to the piano, sat down, took the gum from her mouth and stuck it on a towel atop the Steinway. Of course he did, it had been lying around safely with the other trivia that marked his life, busking across Europe, playing with Nick Cave's bands, writing film scores and playing concerts with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. He turned up to his first recording session “wearing a purple jumbo-cord bomber jacket and a pair of shorts that my girlfriend, who was a speed freak, had made for me out of old flour bags.She came up with the idea to make a beard oil with my face on it and all the money from that went to the orangutans. By the time I finished reading, I felt as though I could say the same about him — the astonishing care he has for music, for the belief we place in other people and have placed upon us, for “[p]eople following their best intentions,” and for the way “[o]ur actions have repercussions whether immediate or years later. Gelgelelim Nina Simone's Gum bırakın sıkıcı olmayı her sayfasında tutkuyla dolu hissettiren harika bir metin.

It sort of reminded me of Patti Smith's books a little (I know I said this about The Sick Bag Song too, but I'm not just trying to relate everything to Patti Smith I promise), not just because of the hero worship but because of the guardianship of things that the author's personal icons used to own. The love and devotion surrounding Doctor Nina Simone's piece of gum that Ellis appropriated and took care of for twenty years is beyond words.

EVERYBODY HAS THEIR celebrity stories: chance encounters with the very famous in which somebody regular sees somebody renowned, recasting the day with a patina of enchantment. This book is Ellis' exploration of magic in found object, such as his first Accordion, a thing he found in the garbage; or the magic his first violin held, and continues to hold inside it and how that magic took him to a place where he could preserve a strange little bit of the Almighty Nina Simone's magic. Worrying the gum would be damaged or lost, Warren decided to first have it cast in silver and gold, sparking a chain of events that no one could have predicted, one that would take him back to his childhood and his relationship to found objects. Unvarnished honesty coupled with a yearning interest in trying to understand the creative process [. Ne tik dėl milžiniško tikėjimo žmonijos gerumu užtaiso, bet ir dėl to, kad istorija neeilinė, o ir apie ją dar išgirsime.

Nick Cave’s introduction captures the talismanic nature of the titular gum: the way that it became a charm, an object of veneration for Ellis; a thing that brought good luck by dint of it just being there, a thing that’s imbued with a power that surpasses what it actually is. the small, specific thing is a piece of gum: a piece of gum chewed by Nina Simone before her final London performance, in 1999, placed on a towel on top of a piano, and taken by Ellis after the show and kept for over two decades. Nick Cave provides an introduction, written on the occasion of the installation of the gum in the Hallway of Gratitude, part of his Stranger Than Kindness exhibition at the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen, commemorating the moment when “the chief conservator places the little piece of grey gum on the plinth. After a Nina Simone performance in 1999 Warren climbed on the stage and collected the gum that she had taken out just as she started and put in her towel at the side of her piano.

In it, Ellis tracks the unlikely journey of that small piece of gum since he folded it in the towel and carried it backstage at the Royal Festival Hall. What a thrill to see a person whose work gives a little extra beauty and meaning to our lives casually inhabiting the same physical space!