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

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Ellis’s book gives a similar sensation — that you are in the company of a person with immense joie de vivre, combined with great intelligence and vitality, who wants to pass some of it on to you. When Belgian designer Ann Demeulemeester, for instance, encountered the gum, "it made her stomach tie itself in knots. 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. A refreshing read, Nina Simone's Gum blends left-field impulses to the simple desire to communicate, resulting in one of 2021's most unusual yet gripping reads. I love the perversity of it, that it has become something almost sacred and spiritual, but, at the end of the day, it’s just this piece of chewing gum.

Ellis' opus is a lyrical reminder that the ephemera we collect in life, that ignite our imagination and memory-- become the things we leave behind. More recently, Ellis has become a soundtrack composer much in demand, working either alone or with Cave. 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. Thanks to Ellis’s willingness to share his revered item with the world, Simone’s gum provides an occasion for visitors to “marvel at the significance of this most ordinary and disposable of things,” as well as “how it could transform, through an infusion of love and attention, into an object of devotion, consecrated by Warren’s unrestrained worship, not just of the great Nina Simone, but of the transcendent power of music itself. Ellis marshals [ Nina Simone's Gum ] approach with intelligence and charm : you feel as if you've spent time in the company of a particularly perceptive raconteur.Warren Ellis is a multi-instrumentalist and frequent collaborator with Nick Cave as well as a member of The Bad Seeds and the trio Dirty Three among other music projects.

A] beautiful, strikingly idiosyncratic book — part memoir, part essay, part conceptual art project, all testament to humans at their strangest and best . Through writing the book, Ellis also reconnected with older brother Stephen, the two having drifted apart over the years. Someone compares it to a religious relic, which is exactly what it is - instead of the hair of a saint in a frame in a chapel somewhere, it's the chewing gum of a musical icon (the word icon invoking religion anyways) in a frame in an art exhibition.We're lucky that Warren Ellis saved this piece of gum, and shared that piece of gum and it's magic with the rest of us. As she played, you could see she was becoming energised by the music,” he says, “It was one of those rare events after which nobody was going to leave the same as they walked in.

Bu değer vermenin insanlar arasında paylaşılabilen, o nesnenin zamanla bir nevi "müritler" oluşturmasına olanak sağlayan toplumsal bir hadiseye dönüşmesi Nina Simone's Gum'ın da temel meselelerinden birisi. As Ellis notes, the entire experience of the show grows all the more wonderful when you consider that “its witnessing wasn’t a twenty-first-century phenomenon, loaded with iPhones and furious texting while the performance was taking place.In conversation, Ellis is, to say, the least, discursive, given to long tangential riffs on all manner of subjects that interest him, from the celestial music of Alice Coltrane, his all-time hero, to the similarity between making music and meditation.

This book follows not only the journey of the gum but also shows the various inspirations for artists and performers and also some of Warren’s life. 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. He recently announced the opening of Ellis Park, a wildlife sanctuary in Sumatra for bears and monkeys that cannot be released into the wild owing to the injuries they have suffered from abuse by humans.There are aspects of my behaviour that I assumed I shared with everyone else – the superstitions, the impulses and maybe the obsessions – but then I realised there is something a bit crazy about what I do. I want to build this big stone replica of the gum and place it in the middle of a water feature so that the bears and monkeys can play on it. The book features photographs, mainly of the gum’s various transformations, but is also punctuated by musings on subjects close to his heart, such as friendship, family, collaboration, loss, spirituality and superstition, as well as the role of risk and serendipity in his creative life. He seems like a person who goes about the world in a state of wonder, that he seems so grateful for the life he leads.