Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell: Just One Of Those Things

From Take This Waltz To Joni Mitchell

I’ve been overanalyzing Leonard Cohen’s Take This Waltz intermittently over the past few weeks, amassing enough data bits to put Heck Of A Guy readers at risk for one of my rambling posts with the length and detail of those New Yorker non-fiction feature articles on water filtration technologies in Saudi Arabia but without the cachet. I have also manufactured a bucketful of fascinating, insight-laden hypotheses, all of which are mutually exclusive. Consequently, the Take This Waltz post, until it matures into coherency, remains a coming attraction.

But, it is only a short leap from Take This Waltz to Lorca. OK, make that “a very short leap.” Heck, given that Cohen himself has explicitly announced numerous times in concerts and interviews that Take This Waltz is his adaptation of Lorca’s “Little Viennese Waltz,” make that “it is only a baby step from Take This Waltz to Lorca.”

From Lorca, it’s – oh, let’s call it a leap, a hop, two skips, and a jump to Joni Mitchell, a connection I’ll explain in a moment. In any case, I have accumulated a few dollops of information about the relationship between Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen that has no significant association with Take This Waltz.

Then, this morning I found that Mimus Pauly at Mockingbird’s Medley had written that [Joni] Mitchell is [Leonard] Cohen’s female equivalent, going on to note that “not only do they write wonderful songs, they engage in other forms of art as well. Cohen writes poetry and likes to draw. Mitchell likes to paint.” [Note: Both portraits at the top of this post are by Joni Mitchell]

And that, at least when I began this peregrination, seemed a good enough excuse to unload my Joni and Leonard tidbits (waste not, want not) into a casual Saturday post.

Just One Of Those Crazy Flings

The widely accepted story is that Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen had a fling in the 1960s that, for unspecified reasons, was short-lived, with Cohen instigating the parting.

Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song

Mitchell’s Rainy Night House¹ is said to be her farewell account of that liaison. The second verse is poignantly bittersweet:

I am from the Sunday school
I sing soprano in the upstairs choir
You are a holy man
On the FM radio
I sat up all the night and watched thee
To see, who in the world you might be


According to Brian Hinton’s 1996 biography, “Joni Mitchell” (and other sources), Cohen appears in at least two other Joni Mitchell songs, That Song About The Midway and The Gallery. These lyrics, to my ear, seem more bitter than sweet.


These excerpts from That Song About The Midway,² seem telling:

I met you on a midway at a fair last year
And you stood out like a ruby in a black man’s ear
You were playing on the horses, you were playing on the guitar strings
You were playing like a devil wearing wings, wearing wings
You looked so grand wearing wings

You were betting on some lover, you were shaking up the dice
And I thought I saw you cheating once or twice, once or twice


And the sentiment behind these words from The Gallery³ seems clear:

When I first saw your gallery
I liked the ones of ladies
Then you began to hang up me
You studied to portray me
In ice and greens
And old blue jeans
And naked in the roses
Then you got into funny scenes
That all your work disclose

Lady, please love me now, I am dead
I am a saint, turn down your bed
I have no heart, that’s what you said
You said, I can be cruel
But let me be gentle with you

Hinton’s “own uninformed guess is that A Case Of You⁴ is also about Leonard Cohen,” and, indeed, the chorus does have a Cohen sort of ring to it.

Oh you are in my blood like holy wine
And you taste so bitter but you taste so sweet
Oh I could drink a case of you
I could drink a case of you darling
Still I’d be on my feet
And still be on my feet

He Said; She Said

Hinton’s book also has some direct quotes from Mitchell about Cohen:

I think I’m rather Cohen influenced. I wrote “Marcie” and afterwards thought that it wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for “Suzanne.”

My lyrics are influenced by Leonard. After we met at Newport last year (1967) we saw a lot of each other. Some of Leonard’s religious imagery, which comes from being a Jew in a predominantly Catholic part of Canada, seems to have rubbed off on me too.

Leonard didn’t really explore music. He’s a word man first. Leonard’s economical, he never wastes a word. I can go through Leonard’s work and it’s like silk.

Finally, Hinton notes that, in 1969, Joni is also catching up on her reading. Herman Hesse, Leonard Cohen –”her favourite poet”– and Rod McKeun. …

In a 2001 interview for Border Crossings with Robert Enright, Words and Pictures: The Arts of Joni Mitchell, this exchange takes place:

It does not require a hot-shot psychiatrist to infer Ms. Mitchell’s point of view from this excerpt of a New York Magazine interview:

In that same interview, Mitchell also slammed poets and poetry in general:

Leonard Cohen, on the other hand, appears to have been more circumspect about his relationship with Joni Mitchell. One of the few pertinent comments I’ve found is from a 1984 interview with Robert Sward :

Insight From Today’s Post

Being reminded that most songs dealing with relationships are written about real relationships rather than abstractions, although the most successful works are those that speak to feelings and reactions shared by others, is useful.

Knowing about the origins and referents of a song may make it more meaningful. The realization that the model for a holy man On the FM radio is Leonard Cohen, for example, enhances these lyrics for me.

Finally, on a personal level, I’m incredibly grateful that the audiences for any disparagements, deserved or not, broadcast by my Ex’s are limited to a few friends and family members. Watching a song depicting me as, say, a devil wearing wings become a best seller on iTunes could, one supposes, prove unsettling.

Updated 14 April 2008
1. I only recently found this brief excerpt from As a New Generation Discovers Leonard Cohen’s Dark Humour Kris Kirk Ruffles the Great Man’s Back Pages by Kris Kirk (Poetry Commotion, June 18, 1988), and it’s just too good not to include here, however belatedly. For reference, Cohen is 53 at the time of the interview.

2. It is worth noting that on Herbie Handcock’s River: The Joni Letters, the 2007 Album of the Year, Leonard Cohen is a featured artist, reciting the poetic lyrics to “The Jungle Line.”

Footnotes

1. The complete lyrics to “Rainy Night House” can be found at http://www.twin-music.com/artist_j/joni_mitchell_lyrics/rainy_night_house_lyrics.html ~back~
2. The complete lyrics of “That Song About The Midway” can be found at http://jonimitchell.com/musician/song.cfm?id=ThatSongAboutTheMidway ~back~
3. The complete lyrics of ” The Gallery” can be found at http://www.lyricsfreak.com/j/joni+mitchell/the+gallery_20075297.html ~back~
4. The complete lyrics of “A Case Of You” can be found at http://www.lyricsfreak.com/j/joni+mitchell/a+case+of+you_20075257.html ~back~
5. This quotation was the connection that took me from Lorca to Joni Mitchell ~back~

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Anjani Interview and Concert Online Today

Thanks to apolinary polek for alerting Heck Of A Guy to the Anjani interview and concert available online today via a comment to yesterday’s post, DrHGuy’s Cyber-Bookmarks: 30 March 2007.

Lest anyone miss that comment, however, I’m duplicating it here:

___________________________

Heck Of A Guy Coverage Of Anjani’s Warsaw Concert

This post turned out to be the first of a sequence of Heck Of A Guy blog entries dealing with the Leonard Cohen Presents Anjani concert that took place at the Agnieszka Osiecka Studio in Warsaw, Poland on 31 March 2007 and was broadcast live on Trójka Radio. Apolinary POlek alerted readers to the availability of the broadcast and provided links to photos and a recording of the pre-concert interview with Anjani and Cohen on the Trójka Radio site; he has also graciously shared his recordings of the concert itself.

Later Posts

Anjani-Leonard Cohen March 31, 2007 Interview and Photos

Online: Leonard Cohen’s Introduction Of Anjani’s Warsaw Concert

The Best Leonard Cohen - Anjani Duet You’ve (Probably) Never Heard

Tomorrow: The Other Leonard Cohen - Anjani Duet

Another Leonard Cohen - Anjani Duet You’ve (Probably) Never Heard

Anjani and Anjani Thomas: An Aside On Names
Anjani and Anjani Thomas are, for the purposes of the Heck of a Guy blog, synonymous names, both of which refer to the exotically lovely, dulcet-voiced singer best known for her Blue Alert CD and her long-term relationship with Leonard Cohen. I include this clarification on posts about Anjani-Anjani Thomas in part for the purpose of what the folks at Wikipedia call disambiguation (i.e., to positively identify for the reader and remove any doubts the reader might have about which Anjani of all the possible Anjanis is being discussed) and in part to aid and abet the search engines. While a rose is, famously, a rose is a rose, a “tea rose,” for example, is not exactly the same as a “rose” - especially to a search engine. Searches that include “Anjani” as part of the search terms may not produce the same results as the same search terms other with “Anjani Thomas” substituted for “Anjani.” Should any other Anjani, say one who has not produced a CD called “Blue Alert” or one who has not been associated with Leonard Cohen for the decade, I promise to do my best to make that identification clear as well.

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DrHGuy’s Cyber-Bookmarks: 30 March 2007

Memoirs: The Fine Art Of Improving History Through Memory

A sporadically promulgated annotated listing of arguably worthwhile, recently published online reading, new or revised websites of potential utility or ostensible interest, and other internet-accessible experiences that, were it not for the casually collected, cavalierly collated, & capriciously collocated components comprising these posts, could easily be overlooked - which would be, in some cases, a shame

This is Memoir Week at Slate.com. As the introduction points out, “many memoirs these days are anything but coming-of-age stories; instead, they tackle issues and subjects larger than the self.” This hardly seems a historically unique turn of events, given that the commonly accepted differentiation between autobiography and memoir (or at least the one I was taught in my sophomore English Lit course at Missouri Southern College) is on the lines of the explanation given by the Britannica “Memoir” article:¹

In any case, this Slate.com Memoir section considers confessional poetry, the involvement of children in civil war, and “why autism has become a metaphor for our times,” among other issues.

How To Lose Friends and Alienate People

More fun, if less profound, are the responses to this Slate.com premise:

This ~Memoir Week~ link leads to Slate.com page with links to a dozen or so essays and columns on the topic. I’ve included three examples to give a flavor of the offerings:

The Liars’ Club: How I told my friends I was writing about my childhood—and what they said in return,” by Mary Karr. Posted March 27, 2007

Publish, Then Flee: How to tell your family you’re writing about them,” by Sean Wilsey. Posted March 28, 2007

Collateral Damage: How I told a former lover I had written about him,” by Edmund White. Posted Mar. 29, 2007.

My interest in this subject may be disproportionate, given that Julie² often found me a handy, readily adaptable blank slate she could, and did, develop into whatever kind of character she needed for her story (For examples and my response to this literary kidnapping, see You Don’t Know Me), and I often write about friends and family in this blog.

Certainly, however, anyone with authorial aspirations could benefit from reading these pieces. Moreover, those with an interest in contemporary culture, the literary process, or memoirs and novels (almost all of which seem to contain significant autobiographical features) would find this issue and these pieces at Slate.com thought provoking. Finally, anyone who appreciates thoughtful, introspective writing should give these short essays a look.

Footnotes

1. Gore Vidal, in his memoir Palimpsest, wrote that “a memoir is how one remembers one’s own life, while an autobiography is history, requiring research, dates, facts double-checked.” ~back~
2. Julie Showalter was the fiercely intelligent, sexy, and loving woman and prize-winning author, with whom I had a outrageously wonderful 20 year marriage that ended with her death in late 1999 from cancer diagnosed the week of our wedding nearly 20 years earlier. Many posts on this blog are about her, our unlikely romance, and our life together, and still others consist of her writings. Information can be found at Julie FAQ. ~back~

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DrHGuy’s Cyber-Bookmarks: 03 April 2007

The Answer Is - Things With Feathers

What are the hope for Spring,¹ two ducks, and a golden pheasant?

Today’s Dickinson-flavored, Jeopardy-formatted lust for warm weather post not only entreats the powers that be for the immediate onset of a true Spring season but also serves to point out that Mr. Science is not the only observer of our feathered friends.

Duck Duck

Waterfowl of all sorts frequently stop for a layover in this area in the Spring on their return leg of their Fall flight to southern climes.

These two ducks were especially thoughtful in their choices of roosting places. They promenaded the width and breath of the roof, finally perching on its ridge so that I didn’t even have to rise from my desk chair to keep an eye on them.

The Complete Catalog Of The Colorful Flying Creatures Of Northern Illinois

I discovered this specimen one June morning as I strolled out my front door to pick up the newspaper.

Even someone innocent of any ornithological knowledge, such as myself, recognizes that this bird just doesn’t have the look of a long-time resident of northern Illinois.

My two alternative theories follow:

1. No longer willing to tolerate its role as the mascot of the similarly colored hot air balloon (see below) that wandered close enough to my office shortly after daybreak that I could hear the conversation of the folks in the basket, the bird was making its break for freedom
2. It was an ordinary Illinois bird dressed for the Chicago gay pride parade scheduled for later that same day

The less intriguing but doubtlessly more accurate explanation, proffered by the two available correspondents I was able to poll, Mr. Science and Mindspinner, is that this is a Golden Pheasant, native to forests in mountainous areas of western China and one of the most popular of all pheasant species kept in captivity, who, upon escaping such captivity, dropped in at Heck Of A House for a visit.

Footnotes

1. Real Spring, not calendar Spring ~back~

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And Things Continue To Change

Hong Kong Egg Cakes From Reading Calvin Trillin’s About Alice

About Alice - and Ida and Julie

Reading Calvin (Bud) Trillin’s¹ About Alice, his loving portrait of his wife, Alice, who died September 11, 2001 and the life they shared, triggered my recall of Studs Terkel’s lament on the loss of his wife, Ida,² less than three weeks after Julie’s³ death,

I know what you mean, Studs. And, I’d wager, so does Bud.

An Audience Of One

The notion of an audience of one is promoted by many fundamentalist Christians who focus their energies exclusively on pleasing God and by a number of marketing consultants who instruct clients and devise campaigns to communicate with the individual consumer.

For some of us, however, the audience of one is the person with whom we share our bed and raise our family.

Consider this passage from a column written by Garry Wills two weeks after the death of Ida Terkel:

Studs also gave Ida his drafts to read prior to submitting them to the publisher and featured her, under pseudonyms, in his stories.

But one reason About Alice is, after all, the subject of this post is this excerpt that resonates with me so intensely that reading it becomes emotionally disorientating:

For one reason or another, I barely got to speak to her that evening [at the party where they first met]. Two weeks later, though, after doing some intelligence work and juggling some obligations and dismissing as hearsay the vague impression of one mutual acquaintance that Alice was virtually engaged, I dashed back from a remote suburb to a party that I figured she’d be attending. So I couldn’t claim that I just wandered into that second party; in romantic matters, even those who need to depend mainly on dumb luck are usually up to one or two deliberate moves. At the second party, I did get to talk to her quite a lot. In fact, I must have hardly shut up. I was like a lounge comic who had been informed that a booker for The Tonight Show was in the audience. Recalling that party in later years, Alice would sometimes say, “You have never again been as funny as you were that night.”

“You mean I peaked in December of 1963?” I’d say, twenty or even thirty years later.

“I’m afraid so.”

But I never stopped trying to match that evening—not just trying to entertain her but trying to impress her. Decades later—after we had been married for more than thirty-five years, after our girls were grown—I still wanted to impress her. I still knew that if I ever disappointed her in some fundamental way—if I ever caused her to conclude that, after all was said and done, she should have said no when, at the end of that desperate comedy routine, I asked her if we could have dinner sometime—I would have been devastated. …

I showed Alice everything I wrote in rough draft—partly because I valued her opinion but partly because I hoped to impress her. If the piece was meant to be funny, the sound of laughter from the next room was a great reward. The dedication of the first book I wrote after I’d met her, a collection of comic short stories, said, until I decided that the last few words were too corny, “These stories were written for Alice—to make her giggle.” When I wrote in the dedication of a book “For Alice,” I meant it literally. In that sense, the headline on her obituary in the Times was literally true, as well as in the correct order: it described her as “Educator, Author and Muse.” When Alice died, I was going over the galleys of a novel about parking in New York—a subject so silly that I think I would have hesitated to submit the book to a publisher if she hadn’t, somewhat to her surprise, liked it. When the novel was published, the dedication said, “I wrote this for Alice. Actually, I wrote everything for Alice.”

Because About Alice is only 78 pages long, appeared as a modestly shorter essay, “Alice, Off the Page,” in the March 27, 2006 New Yorker, and has been heavily reviewed, readers are likely to have already been exposed to this portion of the book. This familiarity may attenuate the importance of these paragraphs as the fulcrum of About Alice. That would be a loss for the reader.

What About Alice Is And Is Not

About Alice is not about Alice’s lung cancer, its first remission, its recurrence, the probability that her parents’ almost constant smoking may have been a causative factor, her forbearance of the debilitating treatment, or any of the other details of her disease or treatment, although that information is provided in the book.

Nor is About Alice a biography of Alice, although her accomplishments, her friendships, and even her physical beauty are laid before the reader.

Nor does About Alice fit on the thanatological bookshelf. The Five Stages Of Grief Elizabeth Kübler-Ross specified (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance) appear to be insufficient for some who require one additional step enroute to psychological equilibrium: Publication.

About Alice has little in common with the exhaustively detailed and excruciatingly painful intrapsychic excursion Joan Didion describes in The Year of Magical Thinking, written after the death of her husband, novelist John Gregory Dunne.⁴

Nor is About Alice the kind of elegant discourse on desolation, loss, and disease represented by the lovely poetry (that I treasure) written by Donald Hall after the death of his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon.

And, wonderfully enough, About Alice is almost devoid of advice, a crucial differentiation from the genre in which Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays With Morrie and The Five People You Meet in Heaven currently star, the set of spiritual instructions manuals, and the more sectarian didactic books such as the Handbook of Death and Dying (2 Vol. Set). ⁵

Striving To Impress and Happy Marriages

My contention is that spending ones days striving to win the admiration of an altogether admirable wife (or, I suppose, the admiration of an altogether admirable husband although I’m less sure of that) may not guarantee an outrageously happy marriage but does make that status extraordinarily difficult to avoid.

Striving to impress that one beloved individual also ensures a certain focus. I noted at the beginning of this post that Alice Trillin died on September 11, 2001. It happened that she died in New York. That others in that city perished that day is, appropriately and tellingly, never referenced by Trillin in About Alice.

About Alice is a glorious book that anyone who has been or wants to be in love deserves to read.

About Julie

My only bitterness from reading About Alice is that Trillin’s skills and audience far exceed my own. Julie played George to my Gracie as Alice did for Calvin, and I’ve spent the more than 30 years since I met Julie, including the years we were both married to others and the years since her death, trying to win her admiration, sometimes managing to do so. My whinging regarding About Alice is limited to my realization that Julie deserves, but I can’t provide, accolades of the sort Trillin bestows on Alice in this book.

Outrageously happy marriage,⁶ not so incidentally, is the phrase I’ve habitually used to describe my life with Julie in conversations, in this blog, and even as part of my online dating profile.

I’m willing to share it with Calvin and Alice.

The Title
Those familiar with the Heck Of A Guy blog know that I routinely title posts dealing with books in the format of “Madeleines From Reading X,” referencing Proust’s culinary memory stimulator. In this case, the title would have been

I once read, however, in Trillin’s book, Family Man, about “… Hong Kong egg cakes - delicacies whose taste I [Calvin Trillin] once described as what a madeleine would taste like if the French really understood such things.”

Given my long-standing fondness of Trillin’s writing and my rapture with About Alice, I decided that, for today only, a menu substitution was called for.

Besides, that’s the kind of clever gesture that would amuse and, maybe, impress Julie.

Hong Kong Cakes, also called gai daan jai, are a bit like waffles.

Proust’s emblematic pastry:

Trillin’s preference:

Footnotes

1. As most readers know, Trillin is the author of more than a dozen books as well as innumerable columns, essays, and magazine articles, others serious discourses, and still others rather silly and delightful fiction. ~back~
2. Ida (Goldberg) was a compassionate and energetic activist who worked for political and social causes, in relief efforts, and with children. She was known for her fearless stances against those forces she considered oppressive. Studs, in fact, reported that he was jealous that her FBI file was thicker than his own. Two online eulogies from the Chicago Sun-Times provide a concise summary of her life and work: A bright spirit we can only hope will live on and Ida Terkel, 87, social worker ~back~
3. Julie Showalter was the fiercely intelligent, sexy, and loving woman and prize-winning author with whom I had a outrageously wonderful 20 year marriage that ended with her death in late 1999 from cancer diagnosed the week of our wedding nearly 20 years earlier. Many posts on this blog are about her, our unlikely romance, and our life together, and still others consist of her writings. Information can be found at Julie FAQ. ~back~
4. Calvin Trillin is a close friend of Joan Didion and spoke at John Dunne’s funeral. Dunne, in fact, in his memoir, Harp, wrote that he had at one time arranged that, should he suddenly die, Calvin Trillin was to inform his and Didion’s only child, Quintana. According to a review of About Alice Didion noted that “Trillin was one of the few people who understood how she felt, able to laugh with her at the remarks others would make. She remembers him coming over to console, not with advice, but with food.” ~back~
5. I am willing to stipulate that these inspirational and “how-to” books are helpful to some since I can’t otherwise explain the 5-star ratings on Amazon. Personally, however, I find them cloying and counterproductive. Go figure. ~back~
6. Actually, there was a rotation consisting primarily of “outrageously happy marriage,” “phenomenally happy marriage,” and “outrageously wonderful marriage.” ~back~

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The Heartland Spa Photodocumentary

The Queens Of The Heartland

Lawanda brought home photos from the week she spent with Hippie With Tiara, Princess of Peds, and a half-dozen other friends at the Heartland Spa. Most, alas, included those friends and are consequently not appropriate for this blog - as long as the protection fees are paid in a timely fashion.

Four pictures, however, are of interest.

The top photo, for example, portrays a landscape that, despite the pre-Spring setting, appears quite wonderful.

While I was regaled by descriptions of delectably healthy meals, I note that the only photo that showed food other than tea focused exclusively on items that appear suspiciously similar to cookies.

The Clothes Fairy Search Continues

Readers may recall an earlier post, In Search Of The Heartland Spa Clothes Fairy, which included a laboratory simulation of a Clothes Fairy visitation.

While there were no confirmed sightings of the Clothes Fairy, Lawanda did capture the actual results of her exertions. The guest simply deposits the dirty clothing on the heart-shaped mat, thusly,

Shortly thereafter, the Clothes Fairy whisks away the nasty duds, replacing them with a clean, neatly folded outfit, thusly,

Très cool, eh?


The Clothes Fairy is yet another reason that

Credit Due Department
The Heck Of A Guy blog issues a hearty thank-you to Lawanda for the pix.

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