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If you are feeling adventurous, I invite you to help me pass the dull days by e-mailing me something you consider exciting. It could be pictures, links, stories or anything else you can think of. In return, I'll e-mail you something of a similar nature that I find exciting. If something interesting comes out of this, I'll consider posting it here.
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In response to this post, Carrie from Montreal sent me this amazing piece:
On Leonard Cohen The American, and the Stillbirth of Instrumental Music
There is hardly any broken glass on St. Laurent Boulevard anymore.
A few years ago, the Main was still a leg, still standing. New buildings tore up either side of it like a pair of pantyhose runs. It was a long, relaxed leg, with its ankle cooling in the river and its quiet hip tilted and lolling in Little Italy, waiting to be fucked by the rent.
We moved out of our 2200 square foot loft just as the diner below cashed it in for a new condo development. We believe it was the last $600 rent in the entire neighbourhood. It had a pile of heavy old elevator guts on the roof from the last century. It had runners in the ceiling from when it was a fur factory. It smelled of parties that dated back to 1940, and grease from seventy-five years of hamburgers that got cooked, flipped, and eaten at three a.m. down below. It was a Jewish place, with the balls of good business rolling around under the floorboards. We messed up its history, dirtied that loft with parties and ideas and rotten potatoes. We turned it into a jam space, recording studio, film set, theatre, and vaudevillian venue during the five years we had it.
Now, for the artists, the Main is a bag of bad luck, cinched tight with United States franchises and mafia eateries and playgrounds. The punks come and go, they keep moving through cars and take rest stops at Berri Square. The bagmen are still flopped out around banks and restaurants, although the banks and restaurants have security guards now.
It is just the same as it ever was.
Now we only see Leonard Cohen in Californian magazines, with bum grey stubble under hats and trench coat collars, dressed always the way icons used to dress –from the Fitzgeralds to the 40’s filmstars, the older beat poets, Bu-Ju The Clown. Cohen’s soft familiar eyes fix on you from Vanity Fair covers, as his backbone slopes further with each issue, as his hair gets thinner, and whiter, as the age spots stake claims on his face. He is beginning to look like the family dog in its winter years. His eyes used to appear differently to us, the drunken armies of beauty and loaf. They were two secrets getting caught in their whisper, if you listened closely to those earlier b/w photographs that were candid and subtle, and taken from 45 degrees. Leonard Cohen looking at a hamburger or a plate of blintzes. Or was he looking just past the blintzes and into a sparkle of Bakelite counter? Was he going to blink and we’d have a new line, a word, a better way to laugh at Jesus, was he finally going to give us a chord change?
Now his eyes are lit with expensive flashes and stare back from a more comfortable place. They stare back and are American, starry, and dancing for the camera, not for us. He makes music videos with choreographers just like Michael Jackson does.
These days we have very little to touch. We have our neighbourhoods. We have our music, which has shorn off all its lyrics and made long, sorry, dissonant tones with the shavings. We have beautiful, simple, communist music that anyone can play, that crams itself into cafes where everyone is white, in school, and is afraid to speak to a crowd.
The slumped shoulders and button-lip is a condition of the good Canadian, who believes that really speaking one’s mind leans toward vulgar.
Let me be vulgar, then, and rush laughter from my hose like the Cubans, like the Spanish, like the Russians. Let us blow each other off course and make each other late – years late, even. Let’s talk when the band is playing because it hit a note that moved us to speak. Let’s talk instead when the band is playing because it can’t move us at all. Or, shall we sit and sip up our wimp ideas in the river, with the two-tone drones washing all around us, alone? Yes, it is a beautiful music! Like Chopin’s salons where the socialites sat and fidgeted and never even discussed the dream they had.