In continuation of the extraordinary emotional drama of this extraordinary month, we learn that the extraordinary Sharon Jones has succumbed to the Big C.
If you don’t know this miraculous woman, read more here or on my music blog or almost anywhere, a Google-throw away.
Most people close to me know that I avoid Facebook, in part for some private reasons that are certainly peculiar to me and may not imply judgment of FB users in general. Here is a report of a Danish semi-experiment which suggests that happiness can be increased by ditching the venerable ubiquitous social media platform.
Today, Leonard Cohen — on vinyl, this time!– continues: “Old Skin For The New Ceremony” (1974)* and “The Best Of” (1975) …
* TRIVIA FOOTNOTE: Guitar accompaniment on the “Old Skin …” album is provided by Ralph Gibson, one of my early photography mentors; worked with him in New York when I spent part of the summer at the upstate communal photography farm as part of a cross-country adventure (aka “The Great Tunafish Expedition“).
Pigs can be pessimists. Or not. According to this report.
Mostly rain today. Brief respite for late afternoon dog walk and visit to 103. Usual trek through campus and football practice fields. Mount Emily in three variations. Leonard Cohen albums today: “Book of Longing” (2007) and “Songs From The Road” (2010).
There is no visible moon* under rain-clouded skies, Gwen Ifill has died and we are still finding solace in the music of Leonard Cohen.
* Knowing that tonight was to present the closest full moon in many years, I had been preparing with comparative photos each day showing the moon’s progression from the same vantage point. But today the weather changed.
This one feels like losing a family member. Gwen was a highly respected and trusted journalist working for years in print — Washington Post, NY Times, Baltimore and Boston newspapers, etc. — then in television at NBC and PBS. She wrote books and moderated presidential debates and more. For years we saw and heard her almost every night on the PBS Newshour and Washington Week. The image of news media would not be in disarray now if all of its practitioners met Gwen’s standard of truth-seeking and civility. Read on:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/gwen-ifill-meant-us/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/14/business/media/gwen-ifill-dies.html
Gotta add one more … our good friend Jim sends along this link to an astonishing and moving account of one person’s experience of the impact of Leonard Cohen in his life:
http://www.avclub.com/article/dancing-end-leonard-cohen-245785
Thanks, Jim.
My Leonard Cohen obsession continues …
Soon after I moved to Los Angeles in the Sixties (before I had ever heard of Leonard Cohen, and well before his first album in 1967), I found an apartment just off Hollywood Boulevard. I often walked down that street to a small bookstore where I spent hours poring over mostly esoteric or foreign or little-known (to me) prose and poetry. One day, I came upon a small book of poems by one Leonard Cohen, then unknown to me. Thumbing through the book I was struck by these brief lines:
Marita/Please find me/I am almost 30
(I took the book home with me. However, I have searched for some years for that book, but … too many moves over the years, too many friends with good intentions who borrowed both albums and books … I suspect that the poem was included in Cohen’s 1968 “Leonard Cohen: Selected Poems, 1956-1968“, but it is hard to find and/or pretty expensive now.)
Much later I was to find that Cohen was said to have written these lines either on the wall of an alley beside, or in the mens’ room of, a Montreal bar (see photo at top).
He went on to expand the poem, which you can hear now:
And I believe the origin of the poem is discussed in this National Film Board of Canada documentary, made in 1965 but discovered by myself only four or five years ago:
https://www.nfb.ca/film/ladies_and_gentlemen_mr_leonard_cohen/
I also see that copies of this film are showing up on YouTube:
Finally, in the course of my Internet travels, Father John Misty (of “I Love You, Honeybear” fame, one of my favorites from about 2013) has issued this homage:
We are still listening, every day, in this house. This morning the albums that got full play were “Popular Problems”, “Old Ideas” and “You Want It Darker”. All relatively recent. And here is a podcast from The New Yorker Radio Hour:
And here is a little extra on Dylan’s comments on Cohen.