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Topic: Existential Angst Moodpiece (Cut and paste) (Read 1835 times) |
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Hermit
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Re:Existential Angst Moodpiece (Cut and paste)
« Reply #1 on: 2006-08-25 09:10:47 » |
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Sunsets always freaked me out because they looked to me as if they belonged more on chocolate boxes rather than in nature. Particularly sunsets in Africa which, to my eye, have a peculiarly unique quality of light - more Whistler than Whistler if you follow. Especially noticeable in the Karroo and in East Africa. Perhaps it is something in the Scottish heritage I share with Ruskin that results in my just-above-the-subliminal response to sunsets along with Ruskin's reaction to Whistler, "I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face."*
Leonard Cohen, ought to be every-one's favorite manic depressive, if not "depressional inspiration". Mind you, ever since I first listened to the insanely brilliant "Diamonds in the Mine" he has been mine**.
Diamonds in the Mine
The woman in blue, she's asking for revenge,
man in white -- that's you -- says he has no friends.
The river is swollen up with rusty cans
and the trees are burning in your promised land.
And there are no letters in the mailbox,
and there are no grapes upon the vine,
and there are no chocolates in the boxes anymore,
and there are no diamonds in the mine.
Well, you tell me that your lover has a broken limb,
you say you're kind of restless now and it's on account of him.
Well, I saw the man in question, it was just the other night,
he was eating up a lady where the lions and Christians fight.
And there are no letters in the mailbox
and there are no grapes upon the vine,
and there are no chocolates in the boxes anymore,
and there are no diamonds in the mine.
(You tell them now)
Ah, there is no comfort in the covens of the witch,
some very clever doctor went and sterilized the bitch,
and the only man of energy, yes the revolution's pride,
he trained a hundred women just to kill an unborn child.
And there are no letters in the mailbox,
oh no, there are no, no grapes upon your vine,
and there are, there are no chocolates in your boxes anymore,
and there are no diamonds in your mine,
and there are no letters in the mailbox,
and there are no grapes upon the vine,
and there are no chocolates in your boxes anymore,
and there are no diamonds in your mine.
*I'm not sure if I advocated it, or if you responded, but I suspect that you will be delighted by Whistler's "The Gentle Art of Making Enemies" which I tried to find as an eText as I'm sure it is out of copyright - and was astounded not to be able to track it down. Sad. But the library ought to have it or be able to request it.
**intentional abuse of homonym and homophone here I'm afraid.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Blunderov
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"We think in generalities, we live in details"
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Re:Existential Angst Moodpiece (Cut and paste)
« Reply #2 on: 2006-08-26 05:05:19 » |
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Quote from: Hermit on 2006-08-25 09:10:47
...Leonard Cohen, ought to be every-one's favorite manic depressive, if not "depressional inspiration". Mind you, ever since I first listened to the insanely brilliant "Diamonds in the Mine" he has been mine...
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[Bl.] Along with TS Eliot, mine too. (Both deeply influenced by Catholicism. Perhaps religiosity can sometimes be philosophy that has collased under the gravitas of it's own metaphor?)
"Cohen's music has become very influential on other singer-songwriters, and more than a thousand cover versions of his work have been recorded. He is iconic in his native land, having been inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame and the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame. He is a Companion of the Order of Canada, the nation's highest civilian honour."(Wikipedia)
I was looking for a quote from Cohen's movie "Beautiful Losers" in which he said something about "becoming reconciled to the fact of one's own catastrophe" but I couldn't find it. I did find some others though:
"I don't consider myself a pessimist. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel soaked to the skin.”
“I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. That's what sitting on your ass does to your face.”
“The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world.”
“What is the appropriate behavior for a man or a woman in the midst of this world, where each person is clinging to his piece of debris? What's the proper salutation between people as they pass each other in this flood?”
[Bl.] I liked this review of his book "Beautiful Losers". (The movie is completely different to the book.)
http://www.necessaryprose.com/acohen.html
BEAUTIFUL LOSERS
August 19, 1998
Taipei
Dear H.:
Do you know of Leonard Cohen, the Canadian singer-songwriter and poet? I've just finished a novel Cohen published in 1966, the year of my birth. Entitled Beautiful Losers, the novel is haunting and lyrical in the highest of North American modes. I'm amazed I'd never heard of this book before. Cohen is a major writer. Here, almost at random, I copy out a paragraph on Spring's arrival in Montreal:
Spring comes into Quebec from the west. It is the warm Japan Current that brings the change of season to the east coast of Canada, and then the West Wind picks it up. It comes across the prairies in the breath of the Chinook, waking up the grain and caves of bears. It flows over Ontario like a dream of legislation, and it sneaks into Quebec, into our villages, between our birch trees. In Montreal the cafes, like a bed of tulip bulbs, sprout from their cellars in a display of awnings and chairs. In Montreal spring is like an autopsy. Everyone wants to see the inside of the frozen mammoth. Girls rip off their sleeves and the flesh is sweet and white, like wood under green bark. From the streets a sexual manifesto rises like an inflating tire, "The winter has not killed us again!" Spring comes into Quebec from Japan, and like a prewar Crackerjack prize it breaks the first day because we play too hard with it. Spring comes into Montreal like an American movie of Riviera Romance, and everyone has to sleep with a foreigner, and suddenly the house lights flare and it's summer, but we don't mind because spring is really a little flashy for our taste, a little effeminate, like the furs of Hollywood lavatories. Spring is an exotic import, like rubber love equipment from Hong Kong, we only want it for a special afternoon, and vote tariffs tomorrow if necessary.
One blurb on the back of my copy of Beautiful Losers hails Cohen in the following words: "James Joyce is not dead.... He lives in Montreal under the name of Cohen...writing from the point of view of Henry Miller." What can one do with this kind of review? These guys always see it as their job to label new writers with the names of the recently famous. A sorry practice. And what of James Joyce himself? Did the reviewers give us things like: "Flaubert is not dead.... He lives in Trieste under the name of Joyce...writing from the point of view of Andre Breton." Probably they did write such things. And what about Flaubert? "Balzac is not dead.... He lives in Rouen under the name of Flaubert...writing from a point of view that leaves us clueless." One could go on and on like this. And of course it’s much easier to play such reviewer's games than it is to define what is singular about a writer's work.
What is singular about Cohen's novel? One main characteristic stands out. Cohen's writing is charged with a biblical rhetoric: his sense of the meaning and pain of experience is biblical. In Beautiful Losers he forces this rhetoric into intercourse with the things of our everyday world: the slogans, spaces, politics and detritus of capitalist North America. The hard symphony Cohen wrings from these elements is authentic: they are raised into a lyric cry whose reality is grounded in what I sense as the writer's real spiritual need: his need for light, for revolution, for the real matrix from which miracles may arise. This is rare indeed in our writers.
Beautiful Losers carries two major burdens. One of them is the spiritual legacy of the first native American saint, the Iroquois Catherine Tekakwitha. One might say that Cohen is a Montreal Jew deeply infected with the Catholic visions of his neighbors. Though his implicit distance from the Catholic hierarchy and official tradition may be obvious, his tendency to find imagery and metaphors in the Catholic culture of Quebec is evident on nearly every page of his work.
The other burden is that pan-Occidental question of how secular history, how the history that Enlightenment has taught us to see, relates to the divine realities we still know. It would be interesting to try to extract one historical philosophy from Cohen's many little hints. (It would be a labor not unlike the scholarly one of defining the prophet Isaiah's notion of history through the study of his poetic texts.) It is clear that Cohen places, or at one time placed, some hope in a kind of leftist Messianism. But in Beautiful Losers there are glimpses of his cynicism and despair, his suspicion that, in terms of the presence of the divine in the world, it will never get better than it is now. History is always a dreary constant: the Messiah will never come. Cohen's political-psychological realism can be seen in passages like the following:
What is most original in a man's nature is often that which is most desperate. Thus new systems are forced on the world by men who simply cannot bear the pain of living with what is. Creators care nothing for their systems except that they be unique. If Hitler had been born in Nazi Germany he wouldn't have been content to enjoy the atmosphere. If an unpublished poet discovers one of his own images in the work of another writer it gives him no comfort, for his allegiance is not to the image or its progress in the public domain, his allegiance is to the notion that he is not bound to the world as given, that he can escape from the arrangement of things as they are.
Cohen's lyricism struggles with the weight of an intellectual maturity uncharacteristic of the Beat writers. Although much in this book may place him with Ginsberg and friends, Beautiful Losers is a novel on another level. It is literature of a stronger breed. It is true the book is excessive in places--one might happily excise twenty or thirty pages, marking big black X's here and there--but such excess doesn’t impinge on the power of the rest. Is it merely a minor problem of editing that has kept this novel from gaining greater recognition?
This letter has ended up being a sort of book review in its own right, H. I initially intended just to mention Cohen, and praise his novel in a few lines. But I felt it deserved more.
[Bl.] Best regards.
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David Lucifer
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Enlighten me.
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Re:Existential Angst Moodpiece (Cut and paste)
« Reply #5 on: 2006-09-07 11:18:25 » |
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Quote from: Blunderov on 2006-09-03 13:12:40
Thanks for the link. Did you go?
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Yes, saw it with DJ_dANROID the other day. Very enjoyable, I think it succeeds as a tribute film. I would have picked a different set of artists for the live concert. I think the best song was left til last with the man himself and a somewhat surprising backup band 
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