GoodCleanWholesome Fun Posts
OK, it’s the German edition of Rolling Stone (Sept 2008), but following hot on the heels of Leonard Cohen's induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame earlier this year, I have to believe that, especially if he were to do an American tour, this guy could be a star someday.
You heard it here first.
Credit Due Department: My thanks go to Henning of Tea-and-Oranges, who alerted me to the cover.
Tags: Leonard Cohen
I ran across an article asking (rhetorically) if Sarah Jessica Parker was Hollywood’s Newest Jew-Bu.
I won’t keep you in suspense - she is.
And you know what? It turns out Leonard Cohen is a JewBu too.
Also listed as JewBu examples from entertainment are Goldie Hawn, Kate Hudson, Jerry Seinfeld, Gwynneth Paltrow, Larry David, Jeff Goldblum, Al Franken and Whoopie Goldberg. Leonard, however, seems especially hard-core JewBu, given his rich Jewish family heritage and his five years sojourn at the Mount Baldy Zen Center.
Serendipitously, the article both asks and answers the question on my mind:
What’s a Jew-Bu? ‘It’s a synthesis of Judaism and Buddhism intended to grasp the best of both religions,’ explains one Hollywood power-player who has been a Jew-Bu for the past decade. ‘It combines Buddhist thought with Jewish theology and structure, in effect incorporating Buddhist traditions such as meditation and chanting into traditional Judaism.’
Of course.
The article even provides a historical perspective.
The first trickle of Jews began to convert to Jew-Bu practices about 50 years ago. The beat poet Allen Ginsberg was among them, and wrote, ‘Born in this world/ you got to suffer/ everything changes/ you got no soul.’ By the 1970s, there were enough Jewish Buddhists for Ginsberg’s guru, Chogyan Trungpa, to talk about forming the Oy Vey school of Meditation. Now Jew-Bu’s are the largest group of converts in the West, with all the hallmarks of an established movement. Armfuls of literature pay tribute to their conversion experiences: “The Jew in the Lotus,” “One God Clapping,” and, of course, “That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Buddhist!”
Although “JewBu” was unknown to me until I read the piece on Sarah Jessica Parker, it turns out that the term has been in use at least since 2002 (the earliest date of use I found in a six minute Google search).
It is chagrining to discover for the first time a word that designates a fifty year old movement and that is a prime descriptor of Leonard Cohen. It’s truly humbling, however, not to have known the meaning of a term so well established that it has spawned competing T-shirt designs.
That’s the kind of thing that is going to happen when you’re a kid from the Ozarks1 trying to stay current in the hip and trendy world of religiosity endemic to the world of entertainment.
Eternal vigilance - that’s the ticket.
Footnotes
Tags: Fascinations · Leonard Cohen
When the universe (or statistically inevitable coincidence) presents one with a cosmic joke, however hackneyed, obvious, or egregiously jejune, it seems only prudent to pause, listen attentively, and chortle with sufficient enthusiasm to deflect accusations of a merely polite response but stopping short of the over the top exuberance that smacks of insincerity in acknowledgment of the universe’s graciousness in sharing that nugget of jocularity.
So, get ready to yuck it up.
Everybody Knows, a Leonard Cohen song1 delivered in his
famously deep, raspy voice, the final result, according to Cohen himself,
of “about 500 tons of whiskey and millions of cigarettes,”
has been chosen as the music for a major anti-smoking ad.
According to The Sydney Morning Herald, New South Wales (NSW) residents tuning in to Sunday’s Beijing Olympics broadcast …
The casting is also notable because Leonard Cohen’s music is rarely used in commercials or public service announcements. I do not have access to an exhaustive list, but I would be surprised if, in Cohen’s 40 year career, the number of different ads using his work goes into double figures.2
As this excerpt from the same article indicates, the NSW anti-smoking campaign is not one of those wishy-washy, emphasize the sunny side of life sort of programs. Nope, it’s more along the lines of, say, Scared Straight, it’s more big stick than carrot, it’s less about Santa bringing gifts for good little boys and girls than about the boogyman whisking away naughty children to obliquely defined but unmistakably horrid torments.
An example of this style can be seen in the video below, which is produced by the same Australian Quit Program that will sponsor the stop-smoking ad broadcast tonight. It is by no means the most aggressive anti-smoking ad in this series (it is more somber than shocking, at least comparatively), but it may not be how more sensitive viewers want to start their Sunday.
Congruently, Leonard Cohen’s smoking was more than an incidental phenomenon. Consider these excerpts from interviews and articles.
In 1973, Alastair Pirrie described in Cohen Regrets3 Cohen’s behavior,
Similarly, in I never discuss my mistresses or my tailors, Nick Paton Walsh describes Cohen’s behavior during the 2001 interview in relation to his stay at a Zen monastery.
A July 20, 2008 Sunday Times Profile, describes the tobacco enhanced voice:
Cigarettes, once an obligatory accoutrement for Cohen, have apparently been vanquished. In a June 12, 2008 interview, Cohen discusses his drinking and smoking patterns on earlier tours and how he stopped smoking:
A: This way, without drinking and smoking, it’s a very, very different situation. Anyone who’s been a heavy drinker and heavy smoker and has the good future to survive that and give it up knows what a very different kind of daily existence one has. I was smoking a couple of packs of cigarettes a day. And I was drinking heavily on these tours.
Q: How did you stop drinking? Did you go into a program?
A: I lost my taste for it. Just like cigarettes. I lost my taste.
“I lost my taste for it.” Dramatic, eh?4
Losing his taste for excessive alcohol and tobacco does not, however, appear to have turned Leonard Cohen into an evangelist for the eradication of these societal demons. The following is an excerpt from “The Cigarette Issue” in The Book of Longing, published in 2006:
and Mumbai, like the Athens
of forty years ago
is a city to smoke in
And from the same volume of poetry comes the poem, “What Did It:”
Dance Me Go The End Of This Post
Depending on ones perspective on hermeneutics, the life, characteristics, and vision of the artist who has created a work may or may not have significance. Most of us, I suspect, operate as semi-deconstructionalists, albeit out of convenience more than conviction, so the implications of the music for a vehemently anti-smoking ad being provided by an artist known for his smoking through most of his career are trivial, a how-about-that sort of item.
Of course, if this anti-smoking gig is successful, it would open the door for other reverse-field jobs in advertising - I’m thinking
Footnotes
Tags: Leonard Cohen
Lian Lunson’s Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man is a stew comprising interviews with performers and individuals connected to Cohen, performances of Cohen’s music by an interesting mix of musicians, including Martha and Rufus Wainwright, Antony, Nick Cave, Jarvis Cocker (from Pulp), Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Beth Orton, and others, and interviews with Leonard Cohen.
This concoction has won the admiration of some viewers but many others find it off-putting. The participants’ commentary about Cohen (all of which strike me as dead-on) are so complimentary that even Bono, a world-class icon himself, sounds more like a pre-teen girl describing the wonders of the latest boy band to hit the charts than an accomplished musician describing a stellar artist in the same field.
The fundamental problem of Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man is Leonard Cohen.
Watching Leonard Cohen first extrapolate a rationale from an interviewer’s query to justify an exposition on the subject of his choice and then proceed to deliver a thoughtful, witty, well constructed verbal essay, complemented by a sequence of camera-worthy facial expressions and movements is a fascinating experience for the spectator (and usually, although not always, the interrogator). With the possible exception of Madonna, no one strikes a pose during interviews better than Cohen, and, arguably, no one in any profession offers more provocative, revealing, and accessible content. The man gives good interview.
It is my contention that enticing the viewer with packets of raw, uncut, high quality Leonard Cohen and then forcing that same viewer to also accept quantities of necessarily less potent product in the form of praise for Cohen or covers of his songs results, at best, in disappointment and perhaps resentment.
That ambivalent criticism now officially registered, it must be said that some of the covers are intriguing and assuredly worth watching. Almost everyone agrees on that. Almost no one agrees on which songs by which singers are successes and which are failures.
I chose these two videos1 because they surprised me. Antony (of Antony & The Johnsons) is known - and lauded - for a quavering yet full-bodied falsetto that has proved more likely to trigger annoyance and complaints of headaches than my praise. His version of If It Be Your Will was the first time I understood the quality his voice could lend a song. Teddy Thompson was all but unknown to me as was Cohen’s Tonight Will Be Fine; after watching this portion of the film, however, both became unforgettable.
If It Be Your Will - Antony
Tonight Will Be Fine - Teddy Thompson
Footnotes
Tags: Leonard Cohen · Media Mayhem
I realized today that, although I organized my posts offering fundamental information about Leonard Cohen under the rubric of “Big Little Golden Book” because I read batches of Golden Books as a child and adored them, using that title was a poor choice.
Happily, this was a spontaneous epiphany. I received no threatening letters from lawyers or publishers, no one opined that I might be sleeping with the fishes, nor was I beset with visions of Jesus lamenting my sins. I just had one of those moments of understanding, based on the 38,229 repetitions of the parental mantra, “How would you feel if that happened to you?” As it turned out, that mundane insight was sufficient to compel me to make the necessary changes.
I know, I would have preferred something more dramatic as well.
Anyway, the “Golden Book” moniker has been changed to
And the graphic has been transformed as well.
For those of you not up on your geologic term, “pyritic” is the adjectival form of “pyrite.” Pyrite, according to Wikipedia, “is an iron sulfide with the formula FeS2. This mineral’s metallic luster and pale-to-normal, brass-yellow hue have earned it the nickname fool’s gold due to its resemblance to gold.”
Golden Book imitation, Fool’s Gold, get it?
Pyrite, AKA Fool’s Gold
Readers may note that the subtitle of the Leonard Cohen Primer “The Not Too Big, Not Too Little Pyritic Book Of Leonard Cohen,” references the “Big Little Golden Book” appellation in homage to the original series that still evokes in me positive memories of early reading experiences. In addition to the inclusion of “pyritic” in the name, the spine of the book shown above is based on a collapsed graphic of a chunk of pyrite.
Tags: HOAG Site · Leonard Cohen
Leonard Cohen gives this account of a case for which the correct answer was D - All of the Above:
We wrote a polite letter suggesting we meet sometime, both signed it and placed my telephone number under it.
The girl answered. Unfortunately, her only interest was in leading profound conversations.
Let’s see - two stars of contemporary music team up to meet the exacting criteria listed by a woman in a personal ad. In return, the woman offers - heavy duty chat.
Well, that does explain a lot about my own previous online dating experiences.
Nonetheless, every time I read Leonard’s story about him and Iggy working in tandem to pick up a girl I can’t help but smile - and again ponder how to convince Leonard to sign on as my wingman.
Within an hour of drafting the above portion of this post, I came across The D-Bag Questionnaire, which the author describes as “a list of 50 questions … for all the girls out there who may or may not be sure if the guy they’re dating is a douchebag.” Sample items include
Happily, I am free of all listed signs of douchebaggery1 - except I’ve now publicly attested to a recurrent fantasy of Leonard Cohen serving as my wingman, a hope which qualifies as a condemnatory answer to the spirit if not the letter of another query on the D-Bag Questionnaire, Do you have a “wingman”?
On consideration, however, I’m willing to take that risk, especially since, as noted, this is my sole bad mark on the 50 item D-Bag Questionnaire.2 While being labeled a douche bag can’t be a good thing, the potential upside of having Leonard Cohen as my wingman would seem to rival, at least in the short run, the benefits of having God as my co-pilot.
So, Leonard, any time you’re ready to suit up, ….
Footnotes
