This is an old blog I wrote when I blogged on MySpace ( I have since bought the video and have watched it over and over and over!):
I initially wrote this blog on Sunday after seeing this film for the first time. I have watched it four more times since then and have added more thoughts and revised my initial blog on it…
I just finished watching the documentary on Leonard Cohen "I'm Your Man". The documentary includes interviews with Leonard Cohen, interviews with other artists about Leonard, performances of his songs and so forth. Be sure as usual to watch the "Special Features" section at the end of the film!
I have never heard of Leonard or even heard his songs before. Funny that I am 37 years old and never have heard of him. I don't think I would appreciate him as much as I do now if I had come across him earlier.
My favorite performances of his songs in order are : "Tonight Will Be Fine" -Teddy Thompson, "Tower of Song" -Leonard Cohen and U2, "The Traitor" - Martha Wainwright, "Anthem" -Julie Christensen and Perla Batalla, "If It Be Your Will" by Antony and "Suzanne" by Nick Cave".
I cannot even begin to cover ALL of the emotions, thoughts and feelings this amazing film has brought to me at such an appropriate time. I would like to mention a few things that really spoke to me though.
I am just kind of throwing it all together for me to reflect on later.
Things that speak to me of how I am changing in the way I feel about life, the universe, others, earth, current goings on in the world, my place here, lessons I am learning, my path, ways I am learning to become myself truly, what comes to me as guidance in the form of movies that come into my hands at certain times or songs that crack my heart open (to let the light in as Leonard says, funny how my good friend Zed told me that too a good time ago), who I really am and all that is.
Needless to say this movie and this man has inspired me to learn more about him. I have a feeling I will be reading his books of fiction, essays and poetry.
He represents imperfection in such a way that it is perfection just as it should be. Everything in life, the suffering, the joy, the dark, the light...is just as it should be. Leonard, he has shown me how beauty is in it all, not just in the good stuff.
His life and who he is illustrates that nothing good ever comes easy. That knowledge and truth cannot be simply attained by some New Age workshop or religion that takes your responsibility and free will away by allowing you to just follow the "cliff notes" instead of striking out the hard way to find real truth. Not some half-assed way of doing things. That it takes work, patience and that it comes within. The only thing you need is yourself. The "New Age" movements and organized religions are for wimps. Jesus did it the hard way and so should you if you want it to count.
I have this mixture of feelings that includes awe, rawness, inspiration, creativity, clarity, distraughtness, joy, love, sadness, etc… this doesn't even cover it. It is so visceral and inexplicable, it numbs me.
Leonard on his birth into this world and early childhood:
"I was born in chains but I was taken out of them. It was windy dried leaves crashed against the walls of the homeopathic hospital. I was alive. I was alive in the horror. The givers huddled over me like a football team. They started to give me things and then to take them away. Things that didn't fit they chucked back into the funnel of the void. The gifts were many and many were the warnings that went with them. We are giving you a great heart but if you drink wine you will begin to hate the world. The moon is your sister but if you take sleeping pills you will find yourself in the company of unhappy women. Every time you grab at love, you will lose a snowflake of your memory."
Leonard on how his father's death when he was a child, how it inspired his first writing. Illustrates what an old soul he was at such an early age:
"I had no other way of connecting with the event which was so mysterious and curiously not devastating. Seemed to be alright that my father died. It seemed to me that he died...it was in the realm of things that couldn't be disputed or rejected or even judged and so my writing, I don't remember what it was, perhaps some kind of prayer to speed him along with whatever realms he was traveling."
Across the screen with a picture that he drew "I never found the girl. I never got rich. Follow me" is written as Leonard begins to speak of the process of writing and his life:
"You have to write down what you are going to abandon. You've gotta see how it works in the whole thing and then throw it away. If it is your destiny to be this laborer called a writer you know that you've got to go to work everyday but you also know that you're not going to get it everyday. You have to be prepared but you really don't command the enterprise. When you no longer see yourself as the hero of your own drama, you know expecting victory after victory and you understand deeply that this is not paradise. Somehow where… especially the privileged ones that we are, we somehow embrace the notion that this veil of tears, that its perfectible. That you got to get it all straightened out… I found that things became a lot easier when I no longer expected to win. You know where you understand your masterpiece in you and you sink into the real masterpiece"
Leonard Cohen on the song he wrote "The Traitor":
"The song is about the feeling we have about betrayal. Some mission mandated to fulfill and being unable to fulfill, then coming to understand that the real mandate was not to fulfill it. The deeper courage was to stand guiltless in the predicament in which you found yourself".
Leonard Cohen on his friend. Roshi, that he studied under at the Zen Center:
"I felt that there was something that Roshi had to show me and since I was there and looking after him as my job in the monastery, it was appropriate that I become ordained because that was just the procedure. So I became a monk but just formally so the protocol could be observed. Roshi happens to be a Zen Master and a Zen Monk. As he said to me in on of our first personal encounters, formal encounters...'I not Japanese and you not Jewish. Roshi not Zen Master and Leonard not Zen student' other versions of ourselves might arise that are more interesting. So be became a part of my life and a deep friend and real sense of friendship. One who really cared or didn't care, I'm not quite sure which it is, who deeply didn't care who I was therefore who I was began to wither. The less I was who I was, the better I felt."
Leonard on his life:
"I hate everyone but acted generously and no one found me out."
Bono from U2 on Leonard Cohen and the two songs "Democracy" and "Future":
"As dark as he gets like in 'Democracy' and 'Future' you still sense that beauty is truth and so he makes something beautiful out of this blackness. He finds shades in the blackness that feel like color".
The Edge from U2 on how Leonard inspires him:
"Reminded me of the very early days of Christianity where pretty early on they figured to hear God's voice you have to kind of go somewhere very quiet. That was the beginning of monasticism where people would isolate themselves, go off into the wilderness, starve themselves...I don't think Leonard has ever had to go quite to that extent but he is the man for me who is like...comes down from the mountain top with the tablets of stone having been up there talking to the angels".
The Edge from U2 on Leonard:
"This is an important man to celebrate now because I think those days are gone. I don't think there is going to be another Leonard Cohen".
Bono on how Leonard first affected him:
"Here was a man inside of a pop song you know there was some big ideas, big dreams. It reminded me of Keats or you know or Shelly. They were poets I was reading as a kid you know I said this is our Shelly, this is our Byron. There was an otherness to the language, it was just the sensory overload of the language that first got to me".
Bono on Leonard Cohen and how he writes his songs:
"You get the sense with Leonard that he doesn't mind waiting, that he will wait for God to walk through the room, waiting for that right phrase, that right rhyme, that right rigorous through. There is a humility to that too 'cause he doesn't seem to think that everything he does is great and the rest of us would be very humbled by the stuff he throws away."
Bono:
"I didn't get a religious feeling from him. It was much more tactile or sensual the world was just really brightly colored."
Poem written by a friend of Leonard's to his friend's wife"
"I am a dreamer living in the past of silver nights that came and swiftly went. Your lovely ghost still owns the power."
Leonard on his friend and the poem:
"He was not insensitive to the honor that he had received from her."
Leonard Cohen on how songs that he hears or other events that touch him ( in response to a comment by Liam Leeson the director, stating that she loved the song "The Traitor" but did not know what it meant when she first heard it. She said to the effect that in spite of this she sensed the song had an important deep truth to it in meaning and just drew her in) :
"Things like that, its just how they resonate with the truth that is hard to locate but which is operating with some force in your life".
The performance towards the end of the film of "Tower of Song" by Leonard and U2...wow surreal. You can really see how it affects him still, how he loses himself during the guitar solos. You can see all of the memories of his life flood into him. It was poignant, gave me chills and made my cry. It's amazing and touching how open he is with himself in front of others. Allowing others in and being humble and non-egotistical about it, just an open sharing.
Leonard's song "Tonight Will be Fine" performed by Teddy Thompson takes my breath away. It is simply magical.. The resonance of Teddy's voice just kills me, his vibrato. He looks like a modern folk angel to me or a Greek statue of a cherub come to life. I cannot stop watching this song! I want to eat the words, eat his voice. I want to consume the song. It calls that deep hole in my heart to the surface to be filled and made whole again with remembrance. It kills me to watch the video when it pans to Leonard looking over old photos of his past life when that line "we swore to each other our love would last". If you have ever been in a relationship that is no more with someone you loved deeply, Leonard has you on this one.
He performs this song in a truly even more raw and simple way at the end of the film in the "Special Features" section and you can see how much it affects one of Leonard's long time female back-up singer, Julie Christensen.
I initially wrote this blog on Sunday after seeing this film for the first time. I have watched it four more times since then and have added more thoughts and revised my initial blog on it…
I just finished watching the documentary on Leonard Cohen "I'm Your Man". The documentary includes interviews with Leonard Cohen, interviews with other artists about Leonard, performances of his songs and so forth. Be sure as usual to watch the "Special Features" section at the end of the film!
I have never heard of Leonard or even heard his songs before. Funny that I am 37 years old and never have heard of him. I don't think I would appreciate him as much as I do now if I had come across him earlier.
My favorite performances of his songs in order are : "Tonight Will Be Fine" -Teddy Thompson, "Tower of Song" -Leonard Cohen and U2, "The Traitor" - Martha Wainwright, "Anthem" -Julie Christensen and Perla Batalla, "If It Be Your Will" by Antony and "Suzanne" by Nick Cave".
I cannot even begin to cover ALL of the emotions, thoughts and feelings this amazing film has brought to me at such an appropriate time. I would like to mention a few things that really spoke to me though.
I am just kind of throwing it all together for me to reflect on later.
Things that speak to me of how I am changing in the way I feel about life, the universe, others, earth, current goings on in the world, my place here, lessons I am learning, my path, ways I am learning to become myself truly, what comes to me as guidance in the form of movies that come into my hands at certain times or songs that crack my heart open (to let the light in as Leonard says, funny how my good friend Zed told me that too a good time ago), who I really am and all that is.
Needless to say this movie and this man has inspired me to learn more about him. I have a feeling I will be reading his books of fiction, essays and poetry.
He represents imperfection in such a way that it is perfection just as it should be. Everything in life, the suffering, the joy, the dark, the light...is just as it should be. Leonard, he has shown me how beauty is in it all, not just in the good stuff.
His life and who he is illustrates that nothing good ever comes easy. That knowledge and truth cannot be simply attained by some New Age workshop or religion that takes your responsibility and free will away by allowing you to just follow the "cliff notes" instead of striking out the hard way to find real truth. Not some half-assed way of doing things. That it takes work, patience and that it comes within. The only thing you need is yourself. The "New Age" movements and organized religions are for wimps. Jesus did it the hard way and so should you if you want it to count.
I have this mixture of feelings that includes awe, rawness, inspiration, creativity, clarity, distraughtness, joy, love, sadness, etc… this doesn't even cover it. It is so visceral and inexplicable, it numbs me.
Leonard on his birth into this world and early childhood:
"I was born in chains but I was taken out of them. It was windy dried leaves crashed against the walls of the homeopathic hospital. I was alive. I was alive in the horror. The givers huddled over me like a football team. They started to give me things and then to take them away. Things that didn't fit they chucked back into the funnel of the void. The gifts were many and many were the warnings that went with them. We are giving you a great heart but if you drink wine you will begin to hate the world. The moon is your sister but if you take sleeping pills you will find yourself in the company of unhappy women. Every time you grab at love, you will lose a snowflake of your memory."
Leonard on how his father's death when he was a child, how it inspired his first writing. Illustrates what an old soul he was at such an early age:
"I had no other way of connecting with the event which was so mysterious and curiously not devastating. Seemed to be alright that my father died. It seemed to me that he died...it was in the realm of things that couldn't be disputed or rejected or even judged and so my writing, I don't remember what it was, perhaps some kind of prayer to speed him along with whatever realms he was traveling."
Across the screen with a picture that he drew "I never found the girl. I never got rich. Follow me" is written as Leonard begins to speak of the process of writing and his life:
"You have to write down what you are going to abandon. You've gotta see how it works in the whole thing and then throw it away. If it is your destiny to be this laborer called a writer you know that you've got to go to work everyday but you also know that you're not going to get it everyday. You have to be prepared but you really don't command the enterprise. When you no longer see yourself as the hero of your own drama, you know expecting victory after victory and you understand deeply that this is not paradise. Somehow where… especially the privileged ones that we are, we somehow embrace the notion that this veil of tears, that its perfectible. That you got to get it all straightened out… I found that things became a lot easier when I no longer expected to win. You know where you understand your masterpiece in you and you sink into the real masterpiece"
Leonard Cohen on the song he wrote "The Traitor":
"The song is about the feeling we have about betrayal. Some mission mandated to fulfill and being unable to fulfill, then coming to understand that the real mandate was not to fulfill it. The deeper courage was to stand guiltless in the predicament in which you found yourself".
Leonard Cohen on his friend. Roshi, that he studied under at the Zen Center:
"I felt that there was something that Roshi had to show me and since I was there and looking after him as my job in the monastery, it was appropriate that I become ordained because that was just the procedure. So I became a monk but just formally so the protocol could be observed. Roshi happens to be a Zen Master and a Zen Monk. As he said to me in on of our first personal encounters, formal encounters...'I not Japanese and you not Jewish. Roshi not Zen Master and Leonard not Zen student' other versions of ourselves might arise that are more interesting. So be became a part of my life and a deep friend and real sense of friendship. One who really cared or didn't care, I'm not quite sure which it is, who deeply didn't care who I was therefore who I was began to wither. The less I was who I was, the better I felt."
Leonard on his life:
"I hate everyone but acted generously and no one found me out."
Bono from U2 on Leonard Cohen and the two songs "Democracy" and "Future":
"As dark as he gets like in 'Democracy' and 'Future' you still sense that beauty is truth and so he makes something beautiful out of this blackness. He finds shades in the blackness that feel like color".
The Edge from U2 on how Leonard inspires him:
"Reminded me of the very early days of Christianity where pretty early on they figured to hear God's voice you have to kind of go somewhere very quiet. That was the beginning of monasticism where people would isolate themselves, go off into the wilderness, starve themselves...I don't think Leonard has ever had to go quite to that extent but he is the man for me who is like...comes down from the mountain top with the tablets of stone having been up there talking to the angels".
The Edge from U2 on Leonard:
"This is an important man to celebrate now because I think those days are gone. I don't think there is going to be another Leonard Cohen".
Bono on how Leonard first affected him:
"Here was a man inside of a pop song you know there was some big ideas, big dreams. It reminded me of Keats or you know or Shelly. They were poets I was reading as a kid you know I said this is our Shelly, this is our Byron. There was an otherness to the language, it was just the sensory overload of the language that first got to me".
Bono on Leonard Cohen and how he writes his songs:
"You get the sense with Leonard that he doesn't mind waiting, that he will wait for God to walk through the room, waiting for that right phrase, that right rhyme, that right rigorous through. There is a humility to that too 'cause he doesn't seem to think that everything he does is great and the rest of us would be very humbled by the stuff he throws away."
Bono:
"I didn't get a religious feeling from him. It was much more tactile or sensual the world was just really brightly colored."
Poem written by a friend of Leonard's to his friend's wife"
"I am a dreamer living in the past of silver nights that came and swiftly went. Your lovely ghost still owns the power."
Leonard on his friend and the poem:
"He was not insensitive to the honor that he had received from her."
Leonard Cohen on how songs that he hears or other events that touch him ( in response to a comment by Liam Leeson the director, stating that she loved the song "The Traitor" but did not know what it meant when she first heard it. She said to the effect that in spite of this she sensed the song had an important deep truth to it in meaning and just drew her in) :
"Things like that, its just how they resonate with the truth that is hard to locate but which is operating with some force in your life".
The performance towards the end of the film of "Tower of Song" by Leonard and U2...wow surreal. You can really see how it affects him still, how he loses himself during the guitar solos. You can see all of the memories of his life flood into him. It was poignant, gave me chills and made my cry. It's amazing and touching how open he is with himself in front of others. Allowing others in and being humble and non-egotistical about it, just an open sharing.
Leonard's song "Tonight Will be Fine" performed by Teddy Thompson takes my breath away. It is simply magical.. The resonance of Teddy's voice just kills me, his vibrato. He looks like a modern folk angel to me or a Greek statue of a cherub come to life. I cannot stop watching this song! I want to eat the words, eat his voice. I want to consume the song. It calls that deep hole in my heart to the surface to be filled and made whole again with remembrance. It kills me to watch the video when it pans to Leonard looking over old photos of his past life when that line "we swore to each other our love would last". If you have ever been in a relationship that is no more with someone you loved deeply, Leonard has you on this one.
He performs this song in a truly even more raw and simple way at the end of the film in the "Special Features" section and you can see how much it affects one of Leonard's long time female back-up singer, Julie Christensen.
When I viewed the film for the first dozen or so times, I focused mainly on Leonard. Transcribing all of the jewels that flowed from his mouth and listening to the resonance of his wise voice. After swimming in the pool of his deep thoughts and knowledge I was able to turn my attention to focusing more on the performances. I began to appreciate the performances on a much deeper level.
This film has introduced me to a whole realm of musical artists that I did not even know existed. Real musician's musicians. They remind me of all of the toys on the "Island of Misfit Toys" from "Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer" that have gathered for what appears to be a "misfit" concert.
In actuality these are superbly, non-commercial, world class, renowned musicians and producers. I love all of them : Martha Wainwright, Rufus Wainwright, Joan Wasser, Nick Cave, Perla Batalla, Julie Christensen, Antony, Teddy Thompson and Linda Thompson (Teddy's mom).
It led me to explore even more great artists of the past like Richard Thompson (father of Teddy Thompson) and Loudon Wainwright (Rufus and Martha Wainwright's father). It just keeps on unfolding, these discoveries of these truly talented artists and profound writers is mind blowing. I had no idea! Where have I been?! I am 37 and had no idea of the history and connections!
I have watched this film every which way. The main feature dozens of times, the special features, the extras, etc and you just get more and more out of it each time! Even watching the main feature with the director's commentary running from Liam Leeson brought more jewels! It just never stops!
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