Ladies, this is not a political comment. I actually have nothing against Hilary Clinton. Truly. It is just that she has been making the press rounds saying all kinds of really silly things about her personal income (just FYI her speaking fee is 200K per talk). Her daughter (whose spectacular multi million apartment in NYC was featured in some design mag) made things worse by professing 'not to care about money'. Enter Newt Gingrich, himself a rather insane US political figure - who, it has to be mentioned, has quite the history with the Clintons - and utters the following gem:
Wait, what?! Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich compared former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Kim Kardashian on CNN’s Crossfire on Tuesday, June 24.
“You have to understand the problem Bill has,” Gingrich started while discussing how former President Bill Clinton came out defending his wife, Clinton, who recently revealed they were “dead broke” when they left the White House. “Bill is to politics what Fred Astaire is to dancing, he is just automatically amazing and he wants to have Ginger Rogers out there dancing,” the former House Speaker went on.
“Instead [with Hillary Clinton] it’s a little bit like watching Kim Kardashian get kicked off the stage by Prince because she couldn’t dance,” he concluded in reference to when the reality star was booted off stage by the iconic singer in 2011 at a concert at Madison Square Garden in New York City. (In case you missed it, Mrs. West was invited on stage by Prince, until she started dancing and he yelled, “Get off the stage!”)
Gingrich didn’t stop there. When it came to politics and the former First Lady, the 71-year-old continued his dance metaphor.
“I think there’s a big problem, because I don’t think, as acandidate, that [she] dances very well,” Gingrich said.
In the depths of the Russian State Library, Marina Chestnykh takes the creaking elevator up to the ninth floor. She walks past stack after stack of books behind metal cages, the shelves barely visible in the dim light from the frosted-glass windows. This is the spetskhran, or old special storage collection — the restricted-access cemetery for material deemed “ideologically harmful” by the Soviet state.
She arrives at a cage in the floor’s back corner. When she inserts a key in the padlock, the door swings open to reveal thousands of books, paintings, engravings, photographs and films — all, in one way or another, connected to sex.
It was the kinkiest secret in the Soviet Union: Across from the Kremlin, the country’s main library held a pornographic treasure trove. Founded by the Bolsheviks as a repository for aristocrats’ erotica, the collection eventually grew to house 12,000 items from around the world, ranging from 18th-century Japanese engravings to Nixon-era romance novels.
Off limits to the general public, the collection was always open to top party brass, some of whom are said to have enjoyed visiting. Today, the spetskhran is no more, but the collection is still something of a secret: There is no complete compendium of its contents, and many of them are still unlisted in the catalogue.
“We chose to preserve it intact, as a relic of the era when it was created,” Chestnykh said.
Chestnykh, who traverses the drafty stacks in a purple knit poncho, is the collection’s main overseer. After joining the library in the 1980s, she only learned of its existence in the 1990s, when she was asked to help reassign its holdings to a different department.
Did its contents come as a surprise?
“Yes and no,” she said. “There was a special collection, so I knew something pretty special had to be kept there.”
The collection’s story begins in the 1920s, when the Bolsheviks turned what was once the Rumyantsev arts museum into the country’s national library. As the newly anointed Lenin Library began amassing new literature, it also opened a rare book department to house compromising materials, acquired primarily from confiscated noble libraries.
One of the most stunning items seized from an unknown owner is “The Seven Deadly Sins,” an oversized book of engravings self-published in 1918 by Vasily Masyutin, who also illustrated classics by Pushkin and Chekhov. Among its depictions of gluttony is a large woman masturbating with a ghoulish smile.
Before the revolution, it was fashionable among the upper classes to assemble so-called knigi dlya dam, or “Ladies’ Books,” a kind of bawdy scrapbook. Anostentatious leather-bound album with “Kniga Dlya Dam” embossed in gold on the cover opens to reveal a Chinese silk drawing of an entwined couple. Farther on, dozens of engravings show aristocratic duos fornicating in sumptuously upholstered settings.
Erotica was also consumed by Russia’s masses, as evidenced by a set of pamphlets from the 1910s. A pamphlet labeled “Pikantnaya Biblioteka,” or “Naughty Library” containing a tale from the 14th century Italian classic “Decameron” and a story titled “A Consultation,” retailed for 50 kopeks. On the cover, a satanic figure grips a silky-tressed damsel in distress.
In the 1930s, increasing control over books led to hundreds of new additions. Items deemed inappropriate now extended to Soviet writings on sexuality from the previous decade, when abortion was legalized and Alexandra Kollontai, the most famous woman in the Bolshevik government, called for the destruction of the traditional family — a movement reversed under Stalin.
One 1927 publication provided a round up of scientific research into birth control methods. Another title from the same year looked at “Delinquency in the Sphere of Sexual Relations,” with charts on subjects such as “The Social Composition of Sex Criminals.”
The collection got its biggest boost from Nikolai Skorodumov, who began collecting books while at school, and eventually became the deputy director of the Moscow State University library. The librarian led a quiet personal life, taking on his maid as a common-law wife, but his appetite for books was voracious. Interested in rare Russian material as well as foreign acquisitions from France, Germany, the U.S. and beyond, Skorodumov kept collecting until his death in 1947.
Among Skorodumov’s treasures was a portfolio of drawings and watercolors by the avant-garde titan Mikhail Larionov. Made in the 1910s, they are no less scandalous in today’s Russia. One pencil sketch features a happily panting dog standing in front of a human, who is engaged in much more than petting. A watercolor depicts two soldiers having an intimate encounter on a bench.
How did Skorodumov amass such a collection when owning a foreign title could result in a Gulag sentence?
First, he was careful to frame it within the discourse of communist ideology, receiving documents from a variety of organizations attesting to its scientific value. Ivan Yermakov, the director of the soon-to-be-disbanded State Psychoanalytic Institute, provided one such letter in 1926:
“Sexuality demands serious and rigorous scientific examination, particularly as it has played such an extensive role in the evolution of culture and daily life,” wrote Yermakov, who published many of Freud’s works in Russian for the first time. “It is highly important to preserve the collection in unadulterated form as a socially valuable work.”
There is also a second theory. Stalin’s secret police chief Genrikh Yagoda — a pornography aficionado whose apartment reportedly held a dildo collection — is said to have enjoyed viewing Skorodumov’s holdings. Librarians believe that he personally ensured the latter’s safety.
After Skorodumov’s death, the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB, raided his collection. According to a letter sent by library director Vasily Olishev to the Council of Ministers, a post-mortem search of his apartment revealed a staggering 40,000 items, 1,763 of which were “books of an erotic nature” while 5,000 were “pornographic or vulgar” brochures and magazines.
The Soviet state snapped up the collection from Skorodumov’s widow for 14,000 rubles, then a considerable sum. However, Olishev was careful to note that the money did not extend to the erotica.
“The library did not deem it appropriate to pay citizen Burovaya [Skorodumov widow] for the erotic literature, broadsheets and magazines, as this literature presents neither scientific nor historical value to the library’s readers, and is an especially harmful vestige of bourgeois ideology,” he wrote.
For just this reason, however, it was necessary to hang on to it: “The Lenin Library did not deem it appropriate to return literature of such a harmful nature to citizen Burovaya, as its possession in the home of a private citizen presents considerable danger.”
Safely ensconced in the spetskhran, the erotica collection became available for viewing by top Stalinist henchmen. According to legend, they included the mustachioed cavalry officer and civil war hero Semyon Budyonny and grandfatherly Mikhail Kalinin, the longtime figurehead of the Soviet state.
“They were supposedly interested in the visual stuff — postcards, photos,” Chestnykh said. A Politburo member did not need a pass: “No one could refuse them.”
The collection’s most recent additions date from the 1960s to the 1980s, when racy-looking materials — often in English — were confiscated at customs.
“There was no system to it,” Chestnykh said. “They just took whatever seemed inappropriate.”
They bear a variety of purple stamps from the state censor, the meaning of whose numbers — 170, 230 — is puzzling even for librarians.
What resulted is a truly random assemblage: an album of Beatles photographs, an anti-homosexuality screed called “Gay is Not Good,” multiple English-language Kama Sutras, popular 1970s memoir “The Happy Hooker,” a set of bawdy limericks, a coffee table book of Picasso paintings and Gore Vidal’s “The City and the Pillar.”
Years after its existence was revealed, the collection is still awaiting comprehensive study. While some books are now available for viewing in the reading rooms — the Marquis de Sade’s writings, Chestnykh said, are the most popular among them — rarer and more delicate artifacts, such as the Larionov drawings, linger in obscurity on the shelves.
The problem is not just a lack of resources, Chestnykh said. “The management have differing opinions. Some think this material is worthy of examination and display, and others do not.”
Since the collection has never been truly open to visitors, most items remain incredibly well-preserved, “like fine wine,” Chestnykh said. However, she suspects a few things may have vanished over the years — ferried away by unscrupulous librarians, or even heads of state.
“Innocent before proven guilty,” she said with a smile, locking the metal cage’s door behind her.
This was, by far, the most fantastically silly, hilariousy and ironic dress ever worn to a silly ceremony that by-and-large rewards mediocrity. Think of how deftly it packed a myriad of cultural associations and hierarchies of value into one sartorial (ok, sartorial only by virtue of actually being worn, otherwise it was a costume, pure and simple) statement. It questioned vanity, beauty, and the plumage of fame.
Perfect, no?
The reason I thought of this is the woman who wore it, the pixie Bjork whose song, Aeroplane, has been swirling through my head as I prepare to board one along with kiddies en route to TLV.
Return to sender, ladies.
Here is the song, for your Nostalgia Friday enjoyment - it first came out around 1994... how time flies:
I always wonder if art and design schools suffer from the same herd mentality that infects other disciplines. Based on the scouting of graduating collections at the Antwerp School of Design as undertaken by StyleBubble that certainly appears to be the case.
No, the bloggress herself, Susie Bubble (aka Susanna Lau) doesn't make this comment - it is all mine. I'm basing it, however, on the images she so wodnerfully provides (and I repost).
The images on Lau's blog range in terms of the quality of designs - some (like those of Emmanuel Beguinot and Madeleine Coisne) are better, some (like that of an Israeli grad and former Bat Sheva dancer Eran Shanny) are worse. But what unites them all is an attempt to translate the simuloutaneity of the street into clothing. By and large this attempt can be boiled down to a replication of graffiti - either as pattern or as cut or both. Speaking of cuts - they are mostly uninteresting.
Graffiti is the one visual element that a spectator immediately perceives. It is everywhere, in the cacophany of graphic forms, clashing primary clolors.
I'm not sure what this means for the future of these students - graduation collections do not necessarily reflect future paths - but it speaks to a kind of shared Zeitgeist that permeates the school..
Here, take a look for yourselves ladies - each image is from a different collection - (and for a more detailed look go to StyleBubble):
And by that I do not mean structured activities for your kids (although aren't they great?). What I mean, quite simply is this: while summertime clothes tend towards the loose and unfitted for reasons of ventilation there is something to be said about deploying structure when it is hot outside.
Why, ye may ask?
Well, for one, structure tends to mask bits better. Despite the natural inclination upon seeing your 'bits' to run for the sackiest thing in your closet, I would strenuously recommend reaching for structured items instead. They corral bits in while not adding bulk. So there, reason number one.
Reason two has to do with the fact, already stated above, that summer clothes tend to be loose. Most summer pants, for example, while delightful, can look like baggy, limp, and - god forbid! - hippy things due to their preferred fabric (linen is often featured), if paired with a slouchy top. Structure can come to the rescue.
Vests, or waistcoats, or as they are known in Europe gillets, are the best structure summer has to offer.
There are two options for vests:
1) Short, fitted, and worn closed - those are best when paired with looser cut pants or longer length
pencil skirts.
2) Longer, looser, and worn open - those are best when paired with mini skirts or skinny pants.
The basic principle here is to avoid repeating the same silhouette on top and bottom - if bottom is loose top should be fitted and vice versa.
With that in mind, ladies, here is a selection, in our usual categories:
I do not watch Game of Thrones (I saw the first episode, hated the gore factor and the rather predictable storytelling - yes, predictable, despite the show's willingness to kill off its stars) but as a popular culture consumer I know enough about the show to have an idea about its characters and their looks.
And I have to say that the look below is inspired, conveying the military and the feminine that the Khaleesi embodies in one well-made dress:
And, after several trips through evening-wear sections of a number of department stores I can say with full authority that said dress makes for more interesting fashion - that is at the same time perfectly wearable and NOT costumey - than anything retail available at the moment.
Fashion people write a great deal about Janie Bryant, the costume designer for Mad Men, and with good reason - the looks she has created for the show have had a tremendous trickly down effect into high street retial, even launching her own Banana Republic collection. Perhaps Michele Clapton, the designer for Game of Thrones, is another, if less likely candidate for ready to wear translation. Sure, her fantasy show is medeival-like , but I stand firm - that dress above is perfectly on trend and yet innovative.
My idea of a CA wannabe skank who lunches is epitomized by a large-ish female behind ensconsed in velour and emblazoned with the sparkling gothic script JUICY. Today, to my glee, comes the news that the company that absconded with a word that should connote natural bounty to transfer its properties onto lazy and be-dimpled behinds is no more. The bane of airports everywhere is dead. YEI!
Take back the juice ladies, and rejoice.
Here is the no less gleefull recap from NYMag. If there is one who deserved all your schadenfreude, ladies, this is it:
RIP, Juicy Tracksuits, Famewhore Uniform of the 2000s
Last week, Juicy Couture announced its plans to close all of its U.S. stores, causing a faint tremor of nostalgia to ripple through anyone who recalls the popular T-shirt from middle school "Juicy Is Forever."
In the early 2000s, comfort was cool. Celebrities went about their glossy lifestyle of international bottle service in velvet hoodies and fleece-lined Uggs, and one brand seemed to encapsulate that ethos perfectly. The rise of the Juicy tracksuit coincided with the emergence of a particular kind of tabloid coverage; Us went from monthly to weekly in 2000, InToucharrived in 2002, and Life & Style came out in 2004. With the help of blogs like Perez Hilton(2001), the invention of YouTube (2005), and the birth of TMZ (2005), fans could easily see the rich and famous looking their absolute laziest.
Immortalizing this high point in American leisurewear, celebutantesand "It" girls starred in a number of reality TV shows that involved a lot of lounging, such as The Simple Life, Newlyweds, The Gastineau Girls, the Real Housewives franchise, Laguna Beach, and The Hills. From the start, life (in sweats) imitated art. Eva Longoria’s character on Desperate Housewives wore Juicy sweats, but so did real Eva Longoria at the grocery store. Paris Hilton wore the cotton-candy look pretty much everywhere. They signified bitchy-cool-girl status, with Summer Roberts on The O.C. (2004), Mean Girls(2004), and every female in middle school (2001–2004) all sporting that tiny little J on their zippers.
Sporting a tracksuit meant you were too good to do actual work. Paris and Nicole’s The Simple Life marked a limp attempt at pursing employment, as the duo traveled around the U.S. taking on a number of internships. The running gag was basically: We’re so rich we’ll never really have to do this stuff. Oddly, it was Kim Kardashianand the whole Kollective who shepherded us away from the celeb-as-pampered-princess and into the era of super-hardworking — but famous — people. Kim Kardashian, a childhood friend of the Hilton sisters, got her start as Paris’s personal assistant and closet organizer, eventually working as LiLo’s stylist before finding major fame after her sex tape was leaked.
The first season of Keeping Up With the Kardashians aired in October 2007, the same month that the stock market peaked. Post-recession celebrities now work really hard to demonstrate how hard they work. While the show — and its many spin-offs — has revolved around the Kardashians' crazy antics and well-funded adventures, their businesses have always played a major part. They’ve got theirDASH stores, the clothing lines (QVC and Sears), beauty collaborations, Kardashian Glamour Tan, theKardashian Konfidential book series, ad infinitum. Instead of aggressively relaxing, many post-recession reality shows of the famous detail the often-grueling lifestyle of maintaining celebrity, which brings into sharper focus why Juicy sweats are so appealing in the first place.
By 2008, even Gossip Girl's Blair Waldorf was too hip for Juicy sweats, though she did wear a Juicy bracelet in one episode and some of the show's other stars attended the opening of the New York flagship. These days, the only people on reality TV wearing much Juicy are a few members of the Real Housewives franchise, but no one would ever mistake them for cool. Besides, many of them are moving beyond the traditional-housewife role to start their own fashion lines, gyms, and beauty brands, and they’re often doing it in form-fitting yoga pants.
The Kardashians, Kim in particular, have banished their terry-cloth tracksuits for Lululemons (being famous is a real workout!) andembraced the more polished look of actual couture. But, just like Paris Hilton, Juicy Couture isn't really going away. Though a search for “sweatpants” on the JC website yields bold text that reads “sorry, we couldn’t find any items that matched your search," they’veinked a deal with Kohl’s. The discount store will begin selling Juicy-branded products this fall. Just in time for the early 2000s trend revival that's right around the corner.
I had a wedding to go to. A cousin of the husband's. Outdoors, in Boston. Weather here never cooperates as much as you want, and so while it didn't rain, the nighttime was cooler than usual and the presence of my orange shantung coat was much desired. But - the only evening dress I own is purple, no friend to my little coat. So I set out to hunt for a dress that in color and spirit would work under a 50s style orange dress coat. I visited Neiman's and Nordstrom's - and the dreary boredom in both was overwhelming. I was willing to spend, and yet there was not a single dress I wanted. Marching to the car I was lured into Zara by the SALE sign, and saw the dress above.
The material is cottony yet rich but what makes the dress is the cut - the square arm holes, the shift, and the pockets(!) - it fits perfectly. I accessorized it with a ring, earrings, and a gunmetal bracelet
:
End result was pretty darn pleasing, even if I say so myself.
And so Zara's reign of glory continues. The sale is still on, by the by.
I liked Leonard Cohen before meeting the super talented Anna Hacco, the designer responsible for the look of this blog, in a little Jerusalem boutique where she worked while we were both university students. But after meeting her, Cohen's music became a kind of shared obsession, something to analyze and over-analyze in the university cafeteria over coffee, or be angsty to back in our rooms. Fastforward a few years and one of Cohen's songs - yes, "Dance me to the end of love - was the 'first song' at my wedding.
The funny thing about Leonard Cohen is that I don't feel any different about his music now than I did back then - the love and the flavor kept their sweetness.
So much so that in the crashing mess of my last year in P, when everything I thought my life was about was turning out to be terrible, the one incident that possibly made me unhappiest was forgetting that I pre-bought tickets to his show in Boston. And remembering only when it was too late. Given how old the man is it was likely my last chance, and I blew it. AH saw him in Berlin. And loved it.
As I think now what song of his to post I have a hard time choosing - so many are beloved, so many seem special.
How about this one, just because I'm still unsure what it means:
And here is an interview with Leonard Cohen's new biographer (AH, thinking of you, and can't wait to see you in a week!)
Our scene opens on the teenage Leonard Cohen attempting to hypnotize the family maid. Here’s Cohen, growing tall and lanky, losing the puppy fat, smiling, precocious, inquisitive, intense, with a zest for life.
Cohen has bought and studied 25 Lessons in Hypnotism How to Become an Expert Operator, a book that promises much—mind reading, animal magnetism and clairvoyant hypnosis—which the youngster hopes will deliver. As Sylvie Simmons explains in her biography on the singer I’m Your Man, the enthusiastic and earnest Cohen worked hard to master these powerful arts, and soon discovered he was a natural mesmerist.
Finding instant success with domestic animals, he moved on to the domestic staff, recruiting as his first human subject the family maid. At his direction, the young woman sat on the chesterfield sofa. Leonard drew a chair alongside and, as the book instructed, told her in a slow gentle voice to relax her muscles and look into his eyes. Picking up a pencil, he moved it slowly back and forth, and succeeded in putting her into a trance. Disregarding (or depending on one’s interpretation, following) the author’s directive that his teachings [on hypnotism] should be used only for educational purposes, Leonard instructed the maid to undress.
Simmons goes on to describe how Cohen must have felt at this “successful fusion of arcane wisdom and sexual longing.”
To sit beside a naked woman, in his own home, convinced that hemade this happen, simply by talent, study, mastery of an art and imposition of his will. When he found it difficult to awaken her, Leonard started to panic.
Let’s freeze the frame on this “young man’s fantasy,” as there’s something not quite right, as neither Simmons or the young Cohen, appear to have considered the possibility that the maid was only feigning her trance, and had willingly taken off her clothes. This would turn everything on its head.
Cohen will later fictionalize the incident in his novel The Favorite Game, where the maid is also a ukulele player (the instrument Cohen first taught himself to play before the guitar), which his alter ego mistakes for a lute, and the maid for an angel. As Simmons puts it “naked angels possess portals to the divine.”
Simmons suggests this slim book on hypnotism had a greater affect on Leonard Cohen than just convincing the maid to take-off her clothes. The book was possibly a primer for Cohen:
Chapter 2 of the hypnotism manual might have been written as career advice to the singer and performer Leonard would become. It cautioned against any appearance of levity and instructed, ‘Your features should be set, firm and stern. Be quiet in all your actions. Let your voice grow lower, lower, till just above a whisper. Pause a moment or two. You will if you try to hurry.’
Scientific research has pointed out that some women are attracted to men with deep, low voices. While a touch of “breathiness” suggests a “lower level of aggression.”
Cohen’s voice is instantly recognizable. He is aware of its power to mesmerize an audience: when he played at Napa State mental hospital in 1970, he jumped down from the stage and sang amongst the inmates, where anyone who could move “followed him around the room and back and forward and over the stage.” At the Isle of Wight concert, he was the only act not to have bottles thrown at him. Kris Kristofferson was booed off during his set, while a flare was thrown onto the stage during Jimi Hendrix’s performance, setting it on fire. Cohen was unfazed by such antics, he was mellowed out on Mandrax, and before he began:
...Leonard sang to the hundreds of thousands of people he could not see as if they were sitting together in a small, dark room. He told them—slowly, calmly—a story that sounded like a parable, worked like hypnotism, and at the same time tested the temperature of the crowd. He described how his father would take him to the circus as a child. Leonard didn’t like circuses much, but he enjoyed it when a man stood up and asked everyone to light a match so they could locate each other. “Can I ask each of you to light a match,” said Cohen, “so I can see where you all are?” There were a few at the beginning, but as the show went on he could see flames flickering through the misty rain.
As Simmons recounts the episode, Cohen “mesmerized” the audience, with just the power of his voice. Or, as Cohen described his talent himself in “Tower Of Song”:
I was born like this
I had no choice
I was born with the gift
of a golden voice.
Sylvie Simmons was a little girl who loved The Beatles, when she first heard Leonard Cohen sing. He was one of several artists, along with Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, Moby Grape and Spiirt, included on the compilation album, The Rock Machine Turns You On.
Sylvie Simmons: I heard him sing “Sisters of Mercy” and it just picked me up and throttled me. I loved his music and I bought all of his albums, until I became a Rock journalist in 1977, when I started getting them for free.
I interviewed him over time and found him fascinating and mysterious, and he was never quite captured in the books I read on him, so, I just thought I’d give it a go.
Simmons has produced an excellent, near-definitive biography on the singer, which reads like a page-turner, in-as-much as Cohen’s life has been filled with incident, adventure and romance, and like all heroes in such tales he comes across as likable and ever-charming.
Sylvie Simmons: Leonard is very charming. Every journalist who’s interviewed him in person, male and female, comes out with a little blush in their cheeks, smoking an imaginary cigarette. He is a total charmer. He is the kind of man who stands-up when you come into a room. He gives you a chair to sit down on, he makes sure you’re comfortable. All of these things
He’s not a Rock Star celebrity person. He has that kind of old world manners. He is a real gentleman. But mostly he has this very clever way of focussing on whoever is in the room, so in a way takes the pressure off of him—you’re so charmed you forget to ask any leading sort of questions or realize you’ve had the wool pulled over your eyes when he’s answered something. But I also think it’s just innate to him.
When Sylvie Simmons was given the blessing to write Cohen’s biography, the singer only had two stipulations: the book must not be hagiography, and the biographer must not starve to death. Everything else was fair game.
Sylvie Simmons: He just trusted me to do a diligent job. I wanted to write a biography on him with diligence and heart, that had some of his voice going through it, as I felt I hadn’t found that in other books.
Simmons spent three years immersed in Cohen’s life, working on the biography right-up to its publication. It took over her life to such an extent that Simmons was able to second guess how Cohen would respond to the various events in he encountered.
Sylvie Simmons: It was more a sense of understanding, like almost imagining as I was writing the book I was thinking: “Of course this would happen. Of course this would go on.” It was almost like I would anticipate what was going to happen next and it happened. Everything started making sense in that way it only can if you’re almost on the inside of the story rather than on the outside.”
Simmons tells Cohen’s life from birth (21st September 1934, in Montreal, Quebec); through his privileged upbringing in a respected and well-to-do family (his father owned a successful clothing store); to his father’s early death (which left Cohen to be raised in a household of women); to the people, events and influences that have made Cohen one of the greatest singer-songwriter poets of the last half-century.
Simmons approach to such a mammoth undertaking was part detective, and part complete immersion in Cohen’s life.
Sylvie Simmons: It seemed to me when I started the book I better start my research in Montreal because that’s where he started his life. I thought I better go in winter because I want to feel exactly how hideous and ghastly it is to be in Montreal-winter, because that’s what he had for most of his life.
[Cohen] breezed through the early years of childhood, doing all that was required—clean hands, good manners, getting dressed for dinner, good school reports, making the hockey team, keeping his shoes polished and lined up tidily under his bed at night—without showing any worrying signs of sainthood or genius. Nor of melancholy.
Sylvie Simmons: Everywhere I went, something else would come up, “Oh no, I’ve got to the Chelsea Hotel,” or “I’ve got to go here,” or “I’ve got to go there.” It was a wonderful part of it, and I think it was very essential. It gave the people I was speaking to a kind of element of trust that I was willing to go to them and track them down, and speak to them that way, rather than just do it on the phone.
On the phone is how I interviewed Simmons. Her voice is young, infectious, bright, London, with no California. The problem with phone interviews—with no face to respond to—they lose out on the look, the gesture, the smile or shrug, that can often give meaning and color to what is being said.
Reading your biography, it struck me that Cohen has always been on the move, going off in search of something, is all this movement part of his creative process?
Sylvie Simmons: I think what it’s more about is that he came out of the egg as a very restless man, it was one of the things that he was cursed with rather than blessed with, and he certainly was blessed with a lot of things. He was blessed with a huge talent, and a supportive family, and coming from a very good background and everything. There were so many things he had going, but he had this restlessness and that related to so many things. He was always leaving somewhere, the first songs on the first album, like “The Stranger’s Song”—he was always the stranger running-off: when he got the grant to go to England, he moved to Greece, when he was in Greece he moved to Montreal, it went on-and-on.
He has this restlessness, and I think that goes right through his life. He changes geography a lot, he changes his spiritual path a lot, although he is consistently Jewish through the whole thing, and he insists on being called a Jew. And he has also been restless around women. I think he needs to live in this state of (almost) longing and yearning and emptiness. It is not much an excitement as this feeling of having to fill himself with something that goes deep in him. He is a very deep man.
Is this restlessness expressed in his songs?
Sylvie Simmons: I managed to get hold of the Artist’s Cards from Columbia Studios. There was a song that was on there called “Come On Marianne,” and it kept being called “Come On Marianne,” and about half-way through the recording process it became “So Long Marianne.” I thought it could have been a spelling mistake, so I called up Mary-Anne Ilhen, who is the Mary-Anne of the song, with whom Leonard had lived on-and-off for seven years, mostly on the island Hydra. I asked her and she said, with a kind of sob in her voice, “I always thought it was ‘Come On Marianne, Let’s keep this ship afloat,’ but I guess in the end we couldn’t.”
Leonard said that some writers had a kind of valedictory way about them, and I think that’s it. His things is, “Hey, that’s not a good way to say goodbye,” it was a goodbye put in the position of emptiness, which he was always looking for, so he could long for something to fill it.
If you could give three examples, what would you say were the three key moments of Leonard’s life?
Sylvie Simmons: This is so journalistic, why should it only be three?
I’m duly chastened, but I persist.
Sylvie Simmons: I should say that with a caveat because he’s had a very long life and he’s probably got at least nine of those moments. He’s had various different religious epiphanies and he’s also had careers as a writer and a musician. But I would saysome of the key moments are:
The day that his father died, Leonard was nine years old and he buried his first piece of creative writing, he folded it into a minute, little knot, and put it inside one of his Dad’s bow-tie’s, and buried it in the garden, making a rite of his writing. He really does have this kind of ritual feeling towards his work.
Simmons adds in her book:
Leonard has since described this [piece of writing] as the first thing he ever wrote. He has also said he has no recollection of what it was and that he had been “digging in the garden for years, looking for it. Maybe that’s all I’m doing, looking for the note.”
Sylvie Simmons: That also led to the fact he was brought-up in a house of women, by his doting mother and sisters, so he was given much more freedom. The death of his father was a very, very key moment, even though Leonard himself as said it didn’t really have much impact on him, but I believe it did.
Leonard did not cry at the death of his father; he wept more when his dog Tinkie died a few years later.
The ‘Big Bang’ moment for Cohen (‘the moment when poetry, music, sex and spiritual longing collided and fused together in him for the first time’) came when he fifteen years old, when he chanced upon a book of poetry by the Spanish Civil War poet, Frederico Garcia Lorca, in a bookshop in Montreal.
Sylvie Simmons: As Leonard read it, he said that the hairs stood-up on his arm like hearing the music from the synagogue. There was almost this kind of synesthesia reaction to reading poetry that moved him in that way. Lorca was a musicologist, a collector of Folk Music, and he loved Spanish guitar, so, that got Leonard into buying a Spanish guitar and learning to play it. So, these two are very key moments
Another one, but quite a long way down-the-line in the 1990s, would be when he had been studying Buddhism and living at the Buddhist Monastery on Mount Baldy for five years, where he was ordained a priest. I had no idea how awful the Mount Baldy Monastery was until I went and stayed there. I actually emailed Leonard and said, “I’ve been here two days and I’m stealing a spoon and digging an escape tunnel. How did you last five years? You’re a greater man than I.”
A fourth, would be the betrayal by his former manager [Kelley Lynch], who to some degree or another managed to wipe out all of his money, and he had to go back on the road, where he learned to love touring.
The tour not only restored Leonard’s funds, it improved on them considerably. But it also brought Leonard something more important: vindication as an artist….
All the heavy labor, the crawling across carpets, the highs, the depths he had plummeted, and all the women and deities, loving and wrathful, he had examined and worshipped, loved and abandoned, but never really lost, had been in the service of his. And here he was, seventy-six years old, still ship-shape, still sharp at the edges, a working man, ladies’ man, wise old monk, showman and trouper, once again offering up himself and his songs:
Here I stand, I’m your man.
What have you learned from writing the biography?
Sylvie Simmons: Persistence, probably, was the main thing, because obviously in the beginning some people, especially the women, were a bit reluctant to speak, because this is so personal. But they came to realize I was not after them for details of what went on behind the bedroom door—though a few of them actually offered to tell me. I wanted to speak to them because nobody had bothered to speak to these women and women are so important to his life, and they had an awful lot of insights to give me. So, persistence is one thing I learned.
Also, I think what I learned was that so many Rock biographies they are like in the beginning they have this huge rush and this brilliant life, and it all goes downhill, then they die, in the kind of way the best Rock stories are tragedies. But this one was almost like a story of redemption, keep the faith and it will come true. He got the kind of attention he wasn’t getting in the U.S. and Canada, at the end of his life, he got this amazing tsunami of love coming at him, and it continues, and he loves it, he’s learned to love the road. .
Otherwise, the usual things a biographer who gets into something deeply will learn, everything from the sublime to the ridiculous. Things like, finding out he was a ukulele-player before he was a guitar-player delighted me, because I’m a ukulele-player, an obsessive uke-player. There is something strange about uke-players, as they say, “One is too many and one-hundred is not enough.”
I got Leonard to out himself as a ukulele-player, and he was very keenly talking about meeting Roy Smeck, The Wizard of the Strings, when he was 10 years old and getting his instructions from a manual and teaching himself to play the uke, much as he taught himself to hypnotize and getting the maid to take her kit off. He is a very good student is our Leonard.
Ladies,
I apologize. I have a yet another cold, and it is bad. On top of that I am in the midst of moving my office from P to MA - movers that I hired are screwing up in a major way. It is giving me anxiety.
