geoMp3 of The Week: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ “Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!”
(backdated to 2008.March.31
Last week I spit out a little vitriolic blurb about Chris “Alexander Supertramp” McCandless, that wandering suburbanite who got the better of us house-dwelling locksteppers by striking out into the wild of Alaska. Where he fairly promptly died. This week’s track will mock another mystic whose vanity-turned-lunacy is even less defensible than McCandless’ teen-angst-turned-intellectual-vanity. And if you don’t buy that you certainly can’t help but dig the song.
I don’t feel compelled to even bother describing Timothy Treadwell, as it will suffice if you just watch Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man. Let me just quickly write out the connection between Treadwell and the track that remids me of him: the excellent, excellent “Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!” by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds (a song that comes with at least two ready-made meaningful narratives – Lazarus and Houdini – but is wide and kick-ass enough to accommodate a little Treadwell-bashing here, too). It’s pinned to the location of Treadwell’s grisly demise (I refuse to acknowledge the pun). Treadwell is Cave’s “Larry” if Larry had found some hook upon which to hang his drooping, lifeless, spineless personality that would have kept him out of the soup queue but still not out of the trouble he pretty certain to get into anyway.
Treadwill found a fount of attention in being Grizzly Man, presumably in two ways. 1) He could anthropomorphize those bears in any way he wanted, so whereas in real life Treadwell was no doubt constantly met with indifference and the rolling eyes of people who don’t really like to put up with endless amounts of narcissistic bullshit, out there with his bears he was able to ascribe to them feelings about himself that were unempirical (except for that last day when they emperically ripped him up but good). And 2) it certainly paid to be an eccentric liver-among-the-bears, if for no other reason than nobody else had quite adopted that hook.
Anyway, about the link between Treadwell and this song. Just listen and see if you can’t locate Treadwell in Larry. It’s easier than it sounds. It’s literal, for one thing, as Larry is described in ways that transfer easily to Treadwell. But it’s psychological, too, right down to the easily-imaginable infantile confusion of a young Treadwell who “don’t know what it is, but there is definitely something goin’ on upstairs,” representing exactly the kind of adult-level living Treadwell eschewed out in his fantasy life among the bears. Too late he learned that the wild and troubling life among bears is as adult as it gets. “Oh, poor Larry” indeed.
So, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds with “Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!”
And the kml link to all mp3s of the week
