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

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The gum remained with him for twenty years; a sacred totem, his creative muse, growing in significance with every passing year.

When Belgian designer Ann Demeulemeester, for instance, encountered the gum, "it made her stomach tie itself in knots. She then began a performance that Ellis describes as “transformative” – both for her and the audience. 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.

simone <3 and i love you warren ellis for loving her and making it seem somehow an abstract observation on love overall and the mystical victory of feeling over and over again. 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. He spares no praise for the mentors who have encouraged him along his way, from his aspiring musician father in Ballarat, Australia, to a guy in Scotland named Charlie who helped him level up his violin busking game in Inverness in the late 1980s, cluing him into playing folk tunes to please pedestrians and giving him “one of the first real, communal experiences that I’d had playing music. The pair met in 1993 and have been through a lot together since, including coming off heroin at around the same time – “I don’t talk about it,” says Ellis, “because it’s the least interesting aspect of anything about my life.

I guess a lot of people must have noticed that she was chewing gum, because it was just the coolest thing,” says Ellis, “a small act of defiance that said so much about her whole fuck-you attitude. He compares his urge to have that effort documented to Dickinson’s Herbarium of flowers and plants which she collected and preserved over the years. Finding an accordion in a refuse dump, he learned to play it before moving on to other instruments, all the while collecting trivia with some personal meaning. Although by that late date Simone was unwell and in considerable physical and mental pain, Ellis documents the way she was buoyed by the audience’s “screams and adulation,” and how she began “tapping into the genius that had defined her all her life,” ultimately “[s]ummoning herself to her own rescue. It’s about true wonder, the sort that children have before they get too old – a love for the mysteries of the world, for things that seem useless to adults but which have a hidden power, invisible to anyone in double digits.

A] beautiful, strikingly idiosyncratic book — part memoir, part essay, part conceptual art project, all testament to humans at their strangest and best . On my days off from work, I like to lay in bed and just take my sweet time getting ready to join the rest of the world. In 2019, Cave - his collaborator and great friend - asked Warren if there was anything he could contribute to display in his Stranger Than Kindness exhibition. The story of the gum's journey from soft palate to marble plinth is tracked, but this is also a delightful diary of Ellis's musical life and friendships, as well as a consideration of how objects become meaningful when connected to memory. As the audience rose to its feet as one, cheering and applauding, she stood for a few moments at the front of the stage, one clenched fist raised, and glared out into the sea of adoring faces as if ready to do battle with them.

Kuo labiau kitas apsinuogina, kuo labiau pasako, kad rūpi, kad skauda, kad neramu, tinkamas partneris – gyvenimo, draugystės, profesijos – gali ne tik suprasti, bet ir atliepti, papildyti emociją, ją įgalinti ir patvirtinti jos reikšmingumą, net jei pats norėtum numenkinti. A captivating, often moving memoir - a tribute to the power of great art wrapped in an exploration of the minutiae gathered in the itinerant life of the nomadic musician. Marvel as Ellis’ collection of eccentric personal mementos morphs into a celebration of the intangible wonder of music. A] beautiful, strikingly idiosyncratic book - part memoir, part essay, part conceptual art project, all testament to humans at their strangest and best .Ellis was initially invited to play on a recording session by Cave, who was a fan of Ellis’s other band, Dirty Three, an instrumental group who came together in 1991 and are still going strong.