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Republicans don’t trust women.

The problem people have with Biden’s age is the color of the VPs skin.

This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

Bad news for Ron DeSantis is great news for America.

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

I didn’t have alien invasion on my 2023 BINGO card.

The revolution will be supervised.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

SCOTUS: It’s not “bribery” unless it comes from the Bribery region of France. Otherwise, it’s merely “sparkling malfeasance”.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

If West Virginia and San Francisco had a love child.

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

People are weird.

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Consistently wrong since 2002

I am pretty sure Katy Tur wasn’t always such a bootlicking sycophant.

Shut up, hissy kitty!

Relentless negativity is not a sign that you are more realistic.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Because of wow. / Excellent Long Read: “Leonard Cohen Makes It Darker”

Excellent Long Read: “Leonard Cohen Makes It Darker”

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Suspect there may be a few here who also admire this spiritual seeker / musician. David Remnick, in the New Yorker:

… Leonard Cohen lives on the second floor of a modest house in Mid-Wilshire, a diverse, unglamorous precinct of Los Angeles. He is eighty-two. Between 2008 and 2013, he was on tour more or less continuously. It is highly unlikely that his health will permit such rigors ever again. Cohen has an album coming out in October—obsessed with mortality, God-infused, yet funny, called “You Want It Darker”—but friends and musical associates say they’d be surprised to see him onstage again except in a limited way: a single performance, perhaps, or a short residency at one venue. When I e-mailed ahead to ask Cohen out for dinner, he said that he was more or less “confined to barracks.”

Not long ago, one of Cohen’s most frequent visitors, and an old friend of mine—Robert Faggen, a professor of literature—brought me by the house. Faggen met Cohen twenty years ago in a grocery store, at the foot of Mt. Baldy, the highest of the San Gabriel Mountains, an hour and a half east of Los Angeles. They were both living near the top of the mountain: Bob in a cabin where he wrote about Frost and Melville and drove down the road to teach his classes at Claremont McKenna College; Cohen in a small Zen Buddhist monastery, where he was an ordained monk. As Faggen was shopping for cold cuts, he heard a familiar basso voice across the store; he looked down the aisle and saw a small, trim man, his head shaved, talking intently with a clerk about varieties of potato salad. Faggen’s musical expertise runs more to Mahler’s lieder than to popular song. But he is an admirer of Cohen’s work and introduced himself. They have been close friends ever since…

Marianne’s death was only a few weeks in the past, and Cohen was still amazed at the way his letter—an e-mail to a dying friend—had gone viral, at least in the Cohen-ardent universe. He hadn’t set out to be public about his feelings, but when one of Marianne’s closest friends, in Oslo, asked to release the note, he didn’t object. “And since there’s a song attached to it, and there’s a story . . .” he said. “It’s just a sweet story. So in that sense I’m not displeased.”

Like anyone of his age, Cohen counts the losses as a matter of routine. He seemed not so much devastated by Marianne’s death as overtaken by the memory of their time together. “There would be a gardenia on my desk perfuming the whole room,” he said. “There would be a little sandwich at noon. Sweetness, sweetness everywhere.”

Cohen’s songs are death-haunted, but then they have been since his earliest verses. A half century ago, a record executive said, “Turn around, kid. Aren’t you a little old for this?” But, despite his diminished health, Cohen remains as clear-minded and hardworking as ever, soldierly in his habits. He gets up well before dawn and writes. In the small, spare living room where we sat, there were a couple of acoustic guitars leaning against the wall, a keyboard synthesizer, two laptops, a sophisticated microphone for voice recording. Working with an old collaborator, Pat Leonard, and his son, Adam, who has the producer’s credit, Cohen did much of his work for “You Want It Darker” in the living room, e-mailing recorded files to his partners for additional refinements. Age and the end of age provide a useful, if not entirely desired, air of quiet.

“In a certain sense, this particular predicament is filled with many fewer distractions than other times in my life and actually enables me to work with a little more concentration and continuity than when I had duties of making a living, being a husband, being a father,” he said. “Those distractions are radically diminished at this point. The only thing that mitigates against full production is just the condition of my body.

“For some odd reason,” he went on, “I have all my marbles, so far. I have many resources, some cultivated on a personal level, but circumstantial, too: my daughter and her children live downstairs, and my son lives two blocks down the street. So I am extremely blessed. I have an assistant who is devoted and skillful. I have a friend like Bob and another friend or two who make my life very rich. So in a certain sense I’ve never had it better. . . . At a certain point, if you still have your marbles and are not faced with serious financial challenges, you have a chance to put your house in order. It’s a cliché, but it’s underestimated as an analgesic on all levels. Putting your house in order, if you can do it, is one of the most comforting activities, and the benefits of it are incalculable.”…

Reader Interactions

41Comments

  3. 3.

    tobie

    I love Leonard Cohen but didn’t know the story about Marianne Ihlen till your post prompted me to look her up. What an incredible and beautiful letter he wrote her on her deathbed. I didn’t need more proof that he’s a mensch but he is a mensch.

  4. 4.

    Bonnie

    Thank you for that posting. It is good to read something like this on one of my long time favorites as I just turned 71. Thank you, again

  5. 5.

    bupalos

    What is the context of the two sides he’s talking about, some struggling for freedom and some for safety? I can’t figure if there would be some specific 1985 event he’d be talking about.

  7. 7.

    the Conster, la Citoyenne

    Saw Leonard Cohen a few years ago touring with the Webb Sisters in Boston – it was sublime. Tall, lean and fedora’ed, and his version of Democracy gives me goose bumps every time because I played it in the lead up and election of Obama, after the Bush clusterfuck.

  8. 8.

    Steve Finlay

    That video is a wonderful choice. “If It Be Your Will” was never one of his hits, but I think it is the most perfect expression of real religious faith that I have ever heard.

    I’ll never forget watching the opening ceremonies of the 2010 Winter Olympics — with next to zero interest. Then it happened: a pudgy bull dyke in a man’s suit and a horrible haircut stood alone, on a barren stage standing 30 or 40 high in the centre of the empty stadium, and let loose with the best, most overpowering performance of any song that I will ever see and hear as long as I live. Of course, it was Cohen’s “Hallelujah”, sung by kd lang.

  10. 10.

    the Conster, la Citoyenne

    @Steve Finlay:

    That’s lovely. kd lang does not get enough credit or exposure – doesn’t fit the pop star mold, but man, her voice is next level.

  14. 14.

    Comrade Colette Collaboratrice

    @Major Major Major Major: We were at the same show, then! I also saw him several months later in San Jose. He sang, and sang, and sang. I’m almost 30 years younger than he is and couldn’t believe his stamina. Sad to see it fade, but he’s diminishing with grace.

  15. 15.

    Anne Laurie

    @bupalos: Context, from a Pole:

    …It was a thrill for a number of reasons. First of all PRL (Polish People’s Republic, as the state was called while under a Soviet regime) was not a concertgoer’s heaven. Quite the opposite. Foreign stars of popular music did not visit our country on regular basis and the memory of The Rolling Stones show in 1967 never seemed to fade. Another important thing: it was a sad and very dark period in our contemporary history. A martial law imposed on 13th of December 1981, only a year after an outbreak of “Solidarity” (the first semi-free trade union in the Eastern Block and also a major social movement) has deepened the economical and spiritual crisis in our country and it seemed there were no realistic solutions at hand. It was generally believed the Soviet Union would invade the country — as it did in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968 — at the first sign of a real uprising. The spirits hit the bottom…

  16. 16.

    trollhattan

    O/T Make it a Verizon Christmas. Verizon just announced they’re closing the local (Sacto region) customer service center in January and are offering potential relocations to the thousand folks getting the boot. How bad could it be? How do Irving, Texas; Greenville, S.C.; or Tampa, Fla sound? Poor bastards.

  17. 17.

    cain

    Man ‘#repealthe19th’ is trending on twitter. Although, that hashtag has been around at least since august. Never thought such a thing would trend in this day and age.

  18. 18.

    Johannes

    I saw Cohen at MSG a few years ago. The show started a little late, but went til 12:00 am with one intermission. What struck me, beyond loving his music, was his generosity to his fellow artists, each given multiple chances to shine, while he remained silent, or, as with Sharon Robinson, sang backup.

  19. 19.

    CaseyL

    @Steve Finlay: i cannot hear that song without puddling up. lang’s version is maybe the best, though I’m also very fond of Jeff Buckley’s (which was the bg music during one of West Wing’s many heart wrenching scenes).

    Cohen is amazing. I like the description of his home space, how spare it is; how spare he is. I wonder how much of it is his Buddhism and how much of it is his focus on “putting his house in order.”

  22. 22.

    Matt McIrvin

    @cain: Ann Coulter has been advocating repealing woman suffrage for many years, and getting laughs and selling her horrible books with it.

  24. 24.

    Cacti

    O/T but holy puke-fest.

    Miss Teen Arizona and Miss Teen Vermont go on record confirming that perv Trump liked to waltz into the dressing room unannounced, especially when they were changing into bikinis.

    Also said they were encouraged by pageant staff to flatter and suck up to him when he did.

    Miss Teen USA contestants are as young as 15 years old.

    Link to story.

  25. 25.

    Starfish

    @cain: Twitter is for trolls. I mentioned this to my spouse, and he said “Honestly, do you think Trump supporters know what the 19th Amendment is?”

  34. 34.

    oldster

    “… a gardenia on my desk perfuming the whole room/
    There would be… a little sandwich at noon/
    Sweetness/
    sweetness/
    everywhere.”

    Unbelievable. The guy just opens his mouth, and lyrics come out.

  39. 39.

    Lyrebird

    @Mike J: Seconded on the EWWWWWW!!! I’m, uh, about JG Cole’s age, so very similar to the wannabe-dictator’s age back then. I teach ~18-22 year olds, and they are babies. When someone’s 70 I don’t think a 20-ish year difference in age is nearly the same thing, but 10? EW!

  40. 40.

    low-tech cyclist

    You who stand above them now,
    your hatchets blunt and bloody,
    you were not there before,
    when I lay upon a mountain
    and my father’s hand was trembling
    with the beauty of the word.
    -“Story of Isaac”

    Leonard Cohen has always had a gift for finding light in the darkest places. I’m looking forward to hearing his latest work.

  41. 41.

    laura

    @Comrade Colette Collaboratrice: I was at that show too. Man, can he take a knee or what!?!
    Style, gravitas, deeply soulful/mournful.
    That he took up smoking again at 80, and still records and tours is something, and he’s living the life of his choosing.

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