Available Light

What is it with this sudden Cohen revival going on in our household? I went to bed last night and Clemency was sitting up under the covers with 40 year old sheet music scattered all around her, going over the tablature for Suzanne and The Stranger . I only have to play a few bars of Hallelujah ( any version will do, but Jeff Buckley works best ) and she's speechless - drifting around the room with a dreamy look on her face. It's very handy, but also puzzling in a woman whose usual taste runs to Teleman Beethoven and Rachmaninov. Why is it that I woke this morning with a burning desire to listen to Rufus Wainwright singing Chelsea Hotel ? Why is it that since about 5 I have been awake with the song - well, actually, not the song, but one line from the song - running through my brain? It happens doesn't it? A catchy phrase or a haunting bit of melody gets stuck in the gray matter like a piece of gristle between the teeth and no amount of mental licking and pushing can dislo...

A couple of people have questioned me privately about the Leonard Cohen song The Traitor , and about Cohen's comments on the song, "[The Traitor is about] the feeling we have of betraying some mission we were mandated to fulfill and being unable to fulfill it; then coming to understand that the real mandate was not to fulfill it; and the real courage is to stand guiltless in the predicament in which you find yourself". What on earth does he mean, and why am I so excited about it? For the latter, check with my psychiatrist. For the former, my take on the song is this: The Traitor is another of those instances, as in The Partisan , where Leonard Cohen uses a military metaphor to speak of life in general and human love in particular. Many of us hold high ideals: some great quest or other that we pursue. These are often laudable things: finding true love, finding the absolute love of God, becoming enlightened, spreading the Gospel, writing the great novel or some such ...

AAhhh.. the early seventies. Bell bottomed cords and paisley. Going to the Victoria Coffee lounge where they served Nescafe in earthenware cups and lit the place with candles jammed into the necks of old wine bottles. Sitting around til dawn having D&Ms. And the soundtrack to it all was Leonard Cohen . His dark eyes glowered soulfully out from the cover of Songs Of Leonard Cohen propped against the side of the sofa as the needle cracked and popped its way across the LP: Suzanne takes you down to her place by the river, you can hear the boats go by you can spend the night beside her ... I wish. I haven't listened to him in years. He caught absolutely the angst and self absorption of early adulthood; he gave it all meaning and set it in a bigger context. The last album I bought was Death Of A Ladies' Man , and then I sort of lost track of him. I'd found another even bigger context. But a couple of weeks ago I was given a DVD called I'm Your Man , a film ce...