First we take Manhattan

21 09 2016

That was my first Leonard Cohen song, although I didn’t quite know it.

I’d gotten the Jennifer Warnes’s album, Jenny Sings Lenny, and First We Take Manhattan was the first cut on the first side. It’s a great song—probably why I bought the album—but I had no idea who Leonard Cohen was.

Oh, I got that he was a singer—he did his thing in a duet with Warnes—. . .

. . . but I didn’t really know him.

I don’t know when I thought he might be worth knowing—at some point in grad school, I think, relatively late, I think—and I can’t say that I know all there is to know about him. But oh, yes, I think he is worth knowing.

(An aside: of the singers who can’t sing, I’ll take Cohen and Reed over Dylan and Waits every time. They’re all killer songwriters, though, so I’d want ’em all for that.)

Anyway, a coupla’ more, of just him, singing songs I mention often on this blog:

and, for that one beautiful, heartbreaking line:

Happy 82nd birthday, Old Man. May you live to be Ancient.

 

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You’re the top!

30 10 2014

So it was the Statue of Liberty’s birthday the other day—and I missed it.

Sorry, big copper statue that lacks a central nervous system and thus cannot feel bad that I neglected to wish it a happy birthday!

It may or may not (see the photo heading up this blog) surprise you that I fuckin’ love the Statue of Liberty. I have no idea why.

I did fall, hard, for New York City when I was a theatre-mad teenager, but my ardor was focused on Broadway, not the harbor. And yeah, my bitter little heart swells a bit at The New Colossus, but the poem wasn’t added to the site until 1903.

Maybe it was print of the magnificent work of the Pail and Shovel Party, submerging the Lady in Lake Mendota:

Photographer unknown/(surroundedbyreality.com)

I’ve got a color print of the original incarnation (it’s since been recreated) that I’ve been meaning to frame and hang.

For all of my troubles in Madison, I loved the town and the university; maybe it was the merging of the two places (Montréal was yet to be for me) where I felt This is where I’m supposed to be that fixt the Statue in that bitter little heart.

Or maybe it’s just watching it get taken out in all of those disaster movies that made the impression.

Anyway, I’ve probably mentioned once or thrice before that I think the Statue is the bee’s knees, but why not use the occasion of missed birthday to once again send my regards to the Old Broad.


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Happy birthday. . .

18 07 2013

. . . to one of the best human beings of the 20th and 21st centuries:

A long walk home to freedom, indeed.


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Get it while you can

19 01 2013

Happy Seventieth Birthday, Janis!

I don’t know if there’s anything after life, but if there is, I do hope you’re singing.

~~~~

[Reposted from January 26. 2012]

I missed her birthday.

Not that she’d know, given that she’s been dead for over forty years, but I used to know and celebrate the day Janis Joplin squalled her way into the world.

I think I’ve written this before, but what the hell: My friend K. and I taught this to a half-busful of Forensic [speech, not mortuary] Society high schoolers on our way back from some tournament or another. It was dark, the bus was old, the trip long. And if our high-volumed rasping pissed off the faculty adviser, all the better.

Janis was like that: the big personality you could hide behind.

I fell for Janis in high school, aping her in drink (Southern Comfort, when I could afford it) if in nothing else: I couldn’t sing like her, had no appetite for heroin, and was never as outrageous as I would have liked to have been.

Janis was too much, in every way. She was too loud, too drunk, too high, and way too sexy for someone who in no way fitted any conventional notions of sexiness.

You could see that, too, in those old photos and reels of her performing. She knows she’s performing when she sticks out her tongue or her chest or when she struts across the stage. She’s covering.

She never thought she was enough, but man, when she snugged that mic up beneath her lip, her voice spilled out and over her and everyone who heard her and then all her too-muchness was just as it should be. No cover, then.

[The video I had posted was taken down, but it showed Janis singing “Get It While You Can” on the Dick Cavett show. If you can track it down, by all means, watch it. Devastating.]

There she is, in all her feathers, a few months before her death.

Of course, that she died was part of the fascination for my teenaged self—she suffered for her art!—but it was the fight in her, even more so, even if back then I could only valorize the suffering-unto-death, not that she suffered in the fight to stay alive.

I was listening to her recently, and came across a line I used to write on notebooks and bathroom stalls: Tomorrow never happens, man, it’s all the same fucking day, man.

Janis Joplin, absurdist. She would have been 69.


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Let it be

4 08 2011

I always call on birthdays. And this was a big one.

No, not the president’s (tho’, since we’re here, happy birthday Mr. President); my mom’s.

She’s seventy.

That could be old, I guess, but it’s tough for me to think of her (or my dad, 73 in December) as old. They golf and take vacations and go swimming and take walks and work out and play cards and watch movies and, I dunno, do all the stuff they’ve done for the past thirty or forty years.

Maybe more slowly, but, hell, a couple of years ago they went to Costa Rica and whipped down a zip line.

Anyway, my pop got my mom a Nook for her birthday. I told her about The Unexpected Neighbor.

Which was unexpected.

I didn’t think I’d tell ’em because I thought, well, they’re not going to read this thing on their computers. Plus, there’s the link to my profile, which includes a link to this blog.

My family doesn’t know about this blog.

Now, it’s not a problem if my mom follows the link and finds this blog. When I started the blog it was VERY IMPORTANT to me that I retain my pseudonymity, but over the years I’ve loosened up a lot. (And, obviously, in posting the link to The Unexpected Neighbor I made it very easy for anyone to find out who I am.) Since I had decided that I wouldn’t say anything behind my big red cube that I wouldn’t in front of my name, traversing the distance between my given name and my absurd one isn’t that great.

Still, I like that distance.

Anyone runs a search on me, this wouldn’t be the first thing to pop up. (Although I don’t know that I’d be the first thing to pop up if I ran a search on my name: it’s not uncommon. Anyway, I don’t know, because it’s been, mmm, five years? ten? since I ran a search on my name. Some shit I don’t need to worry about.) And, to extend this, I like having that space between my teaching self and my musing/ranting self. Finally, however much I’ve given myself over to the cyber-machine, I still don’t care to make it easy for the Googleplex to connect my absurd self to the rest of my life.

So, what if my mom or pop or anyone else in my family reads my blog? Eh, I don’t know. They’d be bored by the politics and likely put off by the swearing and they might wonder about my wonderings.

I don’t know that I want them wondering about my wonderings but, really, isn’t it long past time for me to stop policing what others may think of me?

I mean, let’s be real: I’m always going to try to police what people think of me, but I’m way past knowing that others will think what they think, regardless.

That’s how it’s always been, hasn’t it? You do what you do and everyone else will do what they do and sometimes it matters more than anything and sometimes it doesn’t matter at all.

So I’ll walk the beat and then let it be.

Absurdly, of course.

______

h/t  Susan Wise Bauer, for this aptly-timed post


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