A good friend wisely gave me a copy of Leonard Cohen's Book of Longing last year and I've been on the fringes of curiosity about him for a while now. This is due, in no small part, to the fact that everyone and their mother discovered his haunting Hallelujah on the soundtrack to Shrek. Leonard harnesses the primordial nature of that word in Western society and it somehow transcends religion totally and completely. It was performed by Rufus Wainwright (and therefore not Leonard, himself) but the power is just there.
[Sidebar:] If you have a chance, the Jeff Buckley version is even better. Do yourself a favor and take 6 minutes and 34 seconds out of your day to listen to it if you haven't heard it before. He drowned tragically at the age of 30 and it brings the immensity of that loss into clear focus. Listen. The album version is even better. He even performs Britten's Corpus Christi Carol. How many rock singers do that? [Sidebar over]
All that being said, we're talking about Leonard Cohen here, right? Netflix just sent the DVD celebration of his music, Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man. It's a richly deserved homage with a bunch of different artists (Rufus Wainwright, Nick Cave, U2) and LC interspersed between the concert footage reading poems, telling anecdotes, waxing philosophical, etc. He talks about having his cult hit book, Beautiful Losers, translated into Chinese and how they asked him to write a preface. He reads it out loud and it really struck me as an interesting mini-treatise on the impermanence of art.
"A Note to the Chinese Reader"
By Leonard Cohen
Dear Reader,
Thank you for coming to this book. It is an honor and a surprise to have the frenzied thoughts of my youth expressed in Chinese characters. I sincerely appreciate the efforts of the translator and the publishers in bringing this curious work to your attention. I hope you will find it useful or amusing.
When I was young my friends and I read and admired the old Chinese poets. Our ideas of love and friendship, of wine and distance, of poetry itself were much affected by those ancient songs. So you can understand, dear Reader, how privileged I feel to be able to graze, even for a moment and with such meager credentials, on the outskirts of your tradition.
This is a difficult book even in English if it is taken too seriously. May I suggest that you skip over the parts you don't like. Dip into it here and there. Perhaps there will be a passage or even a page that resonates with your curiosity. After a while, if you are sufficiently bored or unemployed, you may want to read it from cover to cover.
In any case, I thank you for your interest in this odd collection of jazz riffs, pop art jokes, religious kitsch and muffled prayer. An interest which indicates to my thinking a rather reckless, though very touching generosity on your part.
Beautiful Losers was written outside on a table set among the rocks, weeds and daisies behind my house on Idhra, an island in the Aegean Sea. I lived there many years ago. It was a blazing hot summer. I never covered my head. What you have in your hands is more of a sunstroke than a book. Dear Reader, please forgive me if I have wasted your time.
Hell yes, Leonard! Good good good art/music/poetry/drama is created from a monastic sense of humility. If you become a "star" then--at least on some level--you could buy into said adulation and gain a sense of importance. If art is "important" at its birth then it isn't spontaneous. Well, whatever...
Sorry for the thesis. You should really rent this DVD. You might not like all the performers but to hear LC actually read that out loud is really something. He is just one of those people that transfixes you when he speaks.
Picture time! As LC initially became famous as a writer of poetry, here's a photo I took of poet Ryan Newstrom in the Imperial Palace in Rome a few summers ago.
[Sidebar:] If you have a chance, the Jeff Buckley version is even better. Do yourself a favor and take 6 minutes and 34 seconds out of your day to listen to it if you haven't heard it before. He drowned tragically at the age of 30 and it brings the immensity of that loss into clear focus. Listen. The album version is even better. He even performs Britten's Corpus Christi Carol. How many rock singers do that? [Sidebar over]
All that being said, we're talking about Leonard Cohen here, right? Netflix just sent the DVD celebration of his music, Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man. It's a richly deserved homage with a bunch of different artists (Rufus Wainwright, Nick Cave, U2) and LC interspersed between the concert footage reading poems, telling anecdotes, waxing philosophical, etc. He talks about having his cult hit book, Beautiful Losers, translated into Chinese and how they asked him to write a preface. He reads it out loud and it really struck me as an interesting mini-treatise on the impermanence of art.
"A Note to the Chinese Reader"
By Leonard Cohen
Dear Reader,
Thank you for coming to this book. It is an honor and a surprise to have the frenzied thoughts of my youth expressed in Chinese characters. I sincerely appreciate the efforts of the translator and the publishers in bringing this curious work to your attention. I hope you will find it useful or amusing.
When I was young my friends and I read and admired the old Chinese poets. Our ideas of love and friendship, of wine and distance, of poetry itself were much affected by those ancient songs. So you can understand, dear Reader, how privileged I feel to be able to graze, even for a moment and with such meager credentials, on the outskirts of your tradition.
This is a difficult book even in English if it is taken too seriously. May I suggest that you skip over the parts you don't like. Dip into it here and there. Perhaps there will be a passage or even a page that resonates with your curiosity. After a while, if you are sufficiently bored or unemployed, you may want to read it from cover to cover.
In any case, I thank you for your interest in this odd collection of jazz riffs, pop art jokes, religious kitsch and muffled prayer. An interest which indicates to my thinking a rather reckless, though very touching generosity on your part.
Beautiful Losers was written outside on a table set among the rocks, weeds and daisies behind my house on Idhra, an island in the Aegean Sea. I lived there many years ago. It was a blazing hot summer. I never covered my head. What you have in your hands is more of a sunstroke than a book. Dear Reader, please forgive me if I have wasted your time.
Hell yes, Leonard! Good good good art/music/poetry/drama is created from a monastic sense of humility. If you become a "star" then--at least on some level--you could buy into said adulation and gain a sense of importance. If art is "important" at its birth then it isn't spontaneous. Well, whatever...
Sorry for the thesis. You should really rent this DVD. You might not like all the performers but to hear LC actually read that out loud is really something. He is just one of those people that transfixes you when he speaks.
Picture time! As LC initially became famous as a writer of poetry, here's a photo I took of poet Ryan Newstrom in the Imperial Palace in Rome a few summers ago.
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