Tag Archives: Taste Of LC

Leonard Cohen’s Comics

The video featured in yesterday’s post, “Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man,” contains a number of interesting performances by various artists and comments from Leonard Cohen, but the segment that stands out for me is this brief statement by Cohen about his early reading.

The first poetry that ever affected me was in the synagogue, in the liturgy, and the Bible stories. And that would send shivers down my spine. The stories I was reading, in those days, mostly came from Marvel Comics. Captain Marvel, Superman, Aquaman, Spider Man, the various heroes. I thought I could write. I was never very sure. I knew I could write something. I started writing poetry to girls. Tried to get girls interested in my mind. [emphasis mine]

Leonard Cohen, comic book reader

As it turns out, I have a certain affection for comic books, as noted in this excerpt from a previous Heck Of A Guy post, Eight Great Books & A Clinker:¹

One book that changed your life: Uncle Scrooge Comics

Learning to read the 200 or so comic books² I had accumulated by age five was my sole motivation for attending school. I’m told I was bitterly disappointed on arriving home from the first day of school only to find I was still unable to read my comics. But, I did learn, and reading became – and continues to be – a central and essential element of my life.

Consequently, I feel an affiliation with young Leonard as a fellow comic book aficionado despite his publication brand  faux pas (Superman and Aquaman are affiliated with DC Comics, not Marvel Comics). ³

The Comic Book Influence On “Beautiful Losers”

Leonard Cohen put some of his superheroes  to work, albeit in isolated camped-up paragraph-ghettos, in his novel, “Beautiful Losers:”

You disdained the coupon because of the sin of pride, didn’t you. Charles Axis wasn’t enough for you. In your greedy brain you cherished an unspeakable desire. You wanted to be Blue Beetle. You wanted to be Captain Marvel. You wanted to be Plastic Man. Robin wasn’t even good enough for you, you wanted to be Batman.

You’re breaking my back!

You wanted to be the Superman who was never Clark Kent. You wanted to live at the front of the comic. You wanted to be the Ibis the Invincible who never lost his Ibstick. You wanted SOCK! POW! SLAM! UGG! OOF! YELP! written in the air between you and all the world. To become a New Man in the fifteen minutes a day meant absolutely nothing to you! Confess!

This tension does resolve:

Charles Axis wants to be our uncle. He is one of us slobs who dwells pages behind Plastic Man. But can’t you see that he has made his peace with Plastic Man? With Blue Beetle? With Captain Marvel? Can’t you see that he believes in the super-world?

And, reading preferences are long-lived. In response to the question, “Why Catherine Tekakwitha [in "Beautiful Losers"]?” in An Interview with Leonard Cohen Conducted by Michael Harris,⁴ Cohen explains,

A friend of mine, Alanis Obamsawin, who’s an Abenaquis Indian, had in her apartment a lot of pictures of Catherine Tekakwitha around. I inquired about them and over the years I began to know things about her and then she lent me this book, which I lost, a very rare book on Catherine Tekakwitha. I had it with me in Greece and I also had a copy of, I think it was a 1943 Blue Beetle’s comic and several other books that just were on my desk. And I sat down in this very desolate frame of mind and I said, well, I don’t know anything about the world. I don’t know anything about myself, I don’t know anything about Catherine Tekakwitha or the Blue Beetle, I said, but I’ve just got to begin, and I began and wrote the book. [emphasis mine]

In his biography of Cohen, “Various Positions, Nadel extends that list of books:

In Beautiful Losers F., a young Montreal poet, asserts that “the texts had got to me,” This was true of Cohen himself, who based his novel on several core readings: P. Edouard Lecompte’s Une vierge iroquoise: Catherine Tekakwitha, le lis de bords de la Mohawk et du St. Laurent (1656-1680) (1927); Kateri of the Mohawks by Marie Cecilia Buehrle; a volume entitled Jesuits in North America; an American comic book from 1943, Blue Beetle; a farmer’s almanac; a passage from Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols; and Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha.

The Impact Of Comic Books On The Work Of Leonard Cohen – Further Questions

While I am delighted to discover the role of comic books in the development of Leonard Cohen’s literary sensibilities, I am appalled that this aspect of Cohen’s influences has received so little attention. The significance, for example, of Catherine Tekakwitha is a focus of papers, book chapters, and seemingly every review of “Beautiful Losers.” Heck, as far as I can determine, Ms Tekakwitha has never had her own comic  book or even been a continuing character in one. Where are the scholarly studies, the ground-breaking re-interpretations of Cohen’s oeuvre based on the trinity of iterations of Blue Beetle, the almost  but never quite completed “Leonard Cohen As Superman: The Nietzschean Vs DC Comics Dichotomy”  PhD dissertation by that University Of Chicago 12th year graduate student, …

And, did Leonard’s mother cavalierly throw out his comic book collection as did the mother of a certain Cohen-centric blogger?

1. My  childhood experience also resembled Leonard Cohen’s in that I was, like him, immersed  in biblical stories. In my case, that was the unsurprising result of growing up in  the literary desert that was my home town. During summer vacation (when the school libraries were unavailable) and between monthly bookmobile visits, my reading choices were my comic books (read and re-read many times), the Bible, my mother’s collection of Reader’s Digest condensed books, and the World Book Encyclopedia, which some fast-talking door-to-door salesman had, thank goodness, convinced my parents was the key to their children’s intellectual growth. I read my way through the World Book volumes a couple of times.  In this setting, the only source of evocative prose and poetry that was always available was the church. [↩]
2. I had batches of Superman, Batman, other assorted DC Comics heroes, Donald Duck, Looney Tunes, and even the occasional Archie, but Uncle Scrooge was my favorite [↩]
3. The Spider-Man reference is a tad suspect, given that the web-slinging superhero first appeared in August 1962 – when Cohen would have been a month shy of his 28th birthday, living on Hydra with Marianne. While it is, of course, possible he may have been reading Spider-Man then (see the section later in this post about Cohen’s “core readings” that informed “Beautiful Losers) , he was not, as implied in the “I’m Your Man”  documentary, reading it as a child. [↩]
4. “An Interview with Leonard Cohen Conducted by Michael Harris” was published in Duel, Winter 1969 [↩]

Leonard Cohen At Ease

I serendipitously discovered this photo¹ of Leonard Cohen shot by Annie Leibovitz on Speaking Cohen while searching for – well, now I forget what it was I thought I wanted to find.

It doesn’t matter; an Annie Leibovitz  portrait of Leonard Cohen is better.

This photo, shot at Cohen’s Los Angeles home, graced the Music Issue of Vanity Fair in November 2001, not long after he returned from his five year stay at the Mount Baldy Zen Center and just following his release of Ten New Songs.

The panel containing the text in the graphic above is shown enlarged below.

Click on images for best viewing

1. I have altered the photo a tad. The original image was printed across two facing pages of the magazine, and as anyone who has tried to scan such graphics knows, matching the sizes and angles of both pages is extraordinarily difficult. I performed some PhotoShop adjustments for aesthetics. (I’m always happy to do what I can to help out Annie and, for that matter, Leonard.) [↩]

The caption translates to “The ex-writer – Leonard Cohen, mutated into a musician and songwriter already, during a party in 1979″

I can’t think of anything to add to the visual experience.

Credit Due Department: Photo from December 8, 2009 Süddeutsche Zeitung, scanned and caption translated by Ann-Kristin Aschenbrenner

The Leonard Cohen Post-Financial Loss, Pre-World Tour Interview, 2006 Montreal Norwegian TV Version

Those who have read or viewed other Leonard Cohen interviews of this period will notice they have certain elements in common with this 2006 video done for Norwegian TV in Cohen’s Montreal home with reporter, Helle Vaadland.  Examples include,  but are not limited to the following:

• A female interviewer with the obligatory crush on Cohen
• Comments on and explications of: Book Of Longing, the loss of Cohen’s retirement fund, Zen and Mount Baldy, growing old, …
• The anecdote re Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan discussing how long it took Cohen to write “Hallelujah” Vs how long Dylan required to write “I And I”

Of course, while having previously heard these tracks from the Leonard Cohen’s Greatest Interviews album may blunt the novelty of the lyrics, it does not diminish the charm of their delivery.

And, there is some unique material.

Cue The Squirrel

For those viewers who treasure the unique, this is, I believe,  the only Leonard Cohen  interview in which he is known to introduce a squirrel (seen in the above screenshot exiting stage left behind the smitten interviewer) or, indeed, any rodent.

Cut To The Cooking

The video also showcases Leonard Cohen as casually gracious host, opening a bottle of wine and topping  fig slices with cheese to share with the interviewer.

Viewers also have the opportunity to observe Cohen’s furnishings in the room in which the interview is conducted, including the wooden table (which he points out with pride), microwave, table radio, paper plates, small refrigerator,  jar of almonds, …

… and the item in the cabinet at the top right of the screenshot below that looks suspiciously  like a knickknack.

Lines Of A Potential Song That Became A New Yorker Poem

After discussing the “half-dozen” songs of quality he has written, Cohen reads, in response to the interviewer’s query about his new album, his recently scribbled lines directly from his pocket-sized Selectum 100 page spiral notebook:

It’s gonna be September now
for many years to come
Every heart adjusting
to that strict September drum
I see the ghost of culture with numbers on its wrist
Salute some new conclusions
that all of us have missed
So let’s drink to when it’s over
and let’s drink to when we meet
I’ll be standing on the corner
where it used to be a street.

After which, Cohen notes, “That’s one of the new songs.”

While those lines may or may not be part of the new album that may or may not be recorded after the Tour, they have already reappeared nearly intact as part of “A Street,” a poem which appeared in the March 2, 2009 New Yorker:

A Street
by Leonard Cohen

I used to be your favorite drunk
Good for one more laugh
Then we both ran out of luck
And luck was all we had

You put on a uniform
To fight the Civil War
I tried to join but no one liked
The side I’m fighting for

So let’s drink to when it’s over
And let’s drink to when we meet
I’ll be standing on this corner
Where there used to be a street

You left me with the dishes
And a baby in the bath
And you’re tight with the militias
You wear their camouflage

I guess that makes us equal
But I want to march with you
An extra in the sequel
To the old red-white-and-blue

So let’s drink to when it’s over
And let’s drink to when we meet
I’ll be standing on this corner
Where there used to be a street

I cried for you this morning
And I’ll cry for you again
But I’m not in charge of sorrow
So please don’t ask me when

I know the burden’s heavy
As you bear it through the night
Some people say it’s empty
But that doesn’t mean it’s light

So let’s drink to when it’s over
And let’s drink to when we meet
I’ll be standing on this corner
Where there used to be a street

It’s going to be September now
For many years to come
Every heart adjusting
To that strict September drum

I see the Ghost of Culture
With numbers on his wrist
Salute some new conclusion
Which all of us have missed

So let’s drink to when it’s over
And let’s drink to when we meet
I’ll be standing on this corner
Where there used to be a street

Video – Leonard Cohen, 2006 NRK Montreal Interview

Video contributed by kaarekjohnsen

Leonard Cohen, 2006 NRK Montreal Interview (Part 1)

Leonard Cohen, 2006 NRK Montreal Interview (Part 2)

Leonard Cohen, 2006 NRK Montreal Interview (Part 3)

And if you want a doctor
I’ll examine every inch of you
- From “I’m Your Man” by Leonard Cohen

Leonard Is Huge (And Resolute) In Portugal

If you’ve had the inclination to examine every inch of Leonard Cohen but are willing to be content with a close visual view of his face and hands, this may be your chance.

mnkyface at LeonardCohenForum has pointed the way to a huge (2592 x 3888  pixels), high resolution  closeup of Leonard Cohen at Leonard Cohen Is Huge (And Resolute) In Portugal.¹

As a sort of demo of the full photo (which shows Cohen from the waist up, dressed in concert apparel, singing into the microphone), I’ve excerpted the familiar view of Cohen’s hands cradling the microphone.

To constrain just this subsection of the complete photo within the boundaries of this blog’s format, I had to reduce the size. Clicking on the image brings it to its original proportions.

How big is the full photo? To make it fit the narrow confines of this column, it would have to be reduced to just less than 20% of its original dimensions.

How good is the resolution?  Well, if you ever wanted to see Leonard Cohen sweat, …

Leonard Cohen’s Bolo Tie

I was not, by the proverbial bye, looking for tremendously large photos of Leonard Cohen when I happened across this link to what can only be a photo shot to be used to create a 3-D model of Leonard Cohen’s face preparatory to it being carved into Mount Rushmore

Looking for tremendously large photos of Leonard Cohen would be silly.

Instead, I ran across this link while following the ongoing research on the significance of the symbols on Cohen’s bolo tie slide.

It turns out that this photo is big enough to clearly show even the slide on the tie Cohen is wearing.

For those now enthralled with this issue , the investigation of the bolo tie slide is part of a larger discussion of Cohen’s apparel which can be found at Clothing Time.

Update: This photo was taken in Lisbon by  James Petinga in 2008

1. A name I derived from the photo’s qualities and from the URL which indicates the site is at least registered as a Portuguese domain. I have been unable to track down a photographer to credit for this shot. I’ve emailed the source, Sapo.pt, a search engine site in Portugal, but I am not confident about my Google-translated English-to-Portuguese request being decipherable. [↩]