Long live Leonard Cohen




It is now after midnight in Montréal. Leonard Cohen has been dead for one year. Is it ever November 7.


Tomorrow, I am off to Calgary for an evening bicycle ride with friends I haven't yet met to mark the first anniversary of the poet's death This may seem a strange thing to do. 


But I remember driving alone in the rain through the Rockies. It was night. I was on my way to Vancouver to start a new job. Taillights ahead comforted me. And Jennifer Warnes sang Joan of Arc from the cassette player. Into the smear of red and black I sang so loud. 

I remember running down Clinton Street with Shelagh on the way to see a play and I remember how we stayed in a restaurant afterward and ate fried chicken and drank and listened to music. 

There should be a plaque at the Hotel Macdonald in Edmonton. Something to the effect of: From this bar Leonard Cohen was kicked out one winter night after making too much noise and without this expulsion he never would have met the University of Alberta students and written Sisters of Mercy. The management, on behalf of fans everywhere, stands by its decision.

I remember sitting in Santa Lucia park in Mérida during Noche Blanca and listening while musicians offered a tribute to Cohen. 

As a rule, I go back and forth. I am careful not to ask for too much.  I also wonder why not ask for more?

In Montréal earlier this year we walked up The Main. It was cold. Our waiter at Schwartz's showed us a picture of a Leonard Cohen fedora tilted he keeps on his phone. We walked to the gazebo at Parc du Portugal. On the planks underfoot ice, like resin, had encased orange peels and flower petals and cigarette butts. Across the park stood his house, curtains drawn, cars parked. 

In 2014, Leonard Cohen put out the Popular Problems album. It contains a song called Did I Ever Love You. The song sounds like a series of questions. Did I ever love you? Did I ever need you?  Did I ever fight you? Did I ever want to? But in written form, the sentences are punctuated with periods, not question marks. What a thrill. What is he saying? Is he saying how much he loved her or wondering if he ever did? Ever allows both both readings. It is also an adverb that means at all times. When the singer sings are we still leaning across the old table, is he asking a fake question or teaching that all times is present and that in some real way they are still leaning across the old table? Is he moving and bringing us along at a speed greater than light?

It makes you think about memory. Am I still driving to Vancouver listening to Famous Blue Raincoat? Am I ever driving. Are we still sitting happy in a little basement restaurant in the Lower East Side in Manhattan? Are we ever sitting happy. Are we still listening in Mérida? Are we ever listening. Still walking up the Boulevard St-Laurent? Are we ever walking. 




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

:)

Image
One of the joys and dangers of studying in the MACT program is that you start to feel scared enough to feel confident enough to fool around and try simple new things with technology. The danger is that you're not good enough not to spend most of your time fiddling around doing those things. And, so, this morning I am proud to announce that, taken by the hand, I have managed to embed html vimeo code into my blog. Please, no applause. This is not much, I know. Your basic 8 year old can do more. Asleep. But it is a minor accomplishment for me, because of me. And how I get in the way with my pre-wired reaction that new things won't work. The effect of that kind of thinking (or that lack of thinking) is that I transform the machine in front of me into an antagonistic force working to undo me. But it does remind me of me when I attribute malevolence to the skies when they conspire to bring rain on a morning of golf! Either way, that's bad storytelling. On another leve...
Read more

Hello!

Image
The potential socialness of a bicycle is built right into its roofless and windshieldless and doorless frame. It is easy to say hello on a bicycle. Like this morning. These sidewalkers nodded to me in unison at the exact instant I nodded to them. I said hello to the jogger, and he waved back. Hi, I said, to the dog walkers and the dog, and they nodded a greeting back. Both joggers smiled and said hello as our lives passed. I said hello to the squirrel. I said hello to the woman walking with poles and she returned the hello. The jogger looked over and I said hello as she said hello. I said hello to this fellow egg picker upper and we talked for a couple of minutes. Her bicycle comes out April 1. She is excited. Hello, I said. Hi, she said. I said hello to the  man on the other end of this leash and he said he and his dog were enjoying the beautiful morning. I said hello to this woman and she said hello, and we laughe...
Read more

Some Late Thoughts Listening To Wheat Kings

Image
Wheat Kings in Edmonton, July , 2016 I asked a friend at work what The Tragically Hip song Wheat Kings was about, and he paused for a beat longer than he would have had he not considered the same question many times. And then said: "I don't know." I took this as a good sign both of his humility and the song's profundity. It was an honest question. I don't know much about The Hip. They were cool for the first time when I was watching my wife raise our children, and trying to help the mission where I could. Those were busy days. The 1990s are my mediated decade, preserved by photographs of my younger self. Among the art that didn't get in was The Tragically Hip's. And it was a dishonest question. I knew the song was about David Milgaard's wrongful conviction and wrongful jail time served for the murder of Saskatoon nurse Gail Miller. And it was an honest question, because song's visual shards—that weathervane, a killer's face lit ...
Read more