http://www.thejakartapost.com/yesterday ... 060924.O02
Thanks to the author Cynthia Webb for the link & article!!
Cohen at 72: Still walking 'Boogie Street'
Features - September 24, 2006
So come, my friends, be not afraid. We are so lightly here. It is in love that we are made; In love we disappear. Tho' all the maps of blood and flesh Are posted on the door, There's no one who has told us yet What Boogie Street is for.
-- Boogie Street, Ten New Songs (Sony, 2001)
Cynthia Webb, Contributor, Gold Coast, Australia
The melancholy maestro, Canadian poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen, marked on Thursday 72 years of his life, which he has called "Boogie Street".
Cohen has been our musical companion since he released his first album in 1968, The Songs of Leonard Cohen, from which Suzanne was a huge hit. The music from this album was used on the soundtrack of the 1971 film Mr. and Mrs. Miller directed by a fan of his, Robert Altman.
For the youth of the Hippy era, his lyrics had a "trippy" feeling and suited the times during which so much was being questioned. And as one grew older and experienced more of life, the lyrics seemed to come into sharp focus in quite a painful way, because Cohen had an acute sense of the existential doubts that often plague us.
His words contained anguish, irony, sarcasm, despair, piercing truth and also recognition of beauty. Such is the nature of a poet.
Cohen is a Canadian Jew born in Montreal in 1934, and he began his career as a poet in the "beat" venues so typical during the 1950s of his youth. It is still hard to decide whether to call him a poet or a singer. Apparently, Cohen is grateful when people call him a singer, and feels he hardly qualifies for that description. He is just grateful that he has "been born with the gift of a golden voice", as he sings in Tower of Song.
Cohen credits his lifelong friend Judy Collins for encouraging him to become a singer -- she had recorded two of his songs on her 1966 album.
He had visited her with his guitar to sing for her and to ask her opinion about whether he could perform his own songs. Collins was impressed and later managed to get the nervous Cohen on stage at an anti-Vietnam War concert in 1967.
So he went ahead and recorded his first album, Suzanne (1968), and has been performing ever since. Blessed with a rich, resonant voice that sounds musical even if he wasn't actually singing.
Later, he realized that his mournful tone is complemented well by female voices singing harmony, and has consistently used this to beautiful effect.
Although he has written several novels and poetry volumes, he is best known around the world as a musician and songwriter, with 17 albums and compilations under his belt.
His most recent release was Dear Heather in 2004, which contains two tracks in response to the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and meditations about its causes and directions for the future.
"Some people said it's what we deserved, for sins against God, for crimes in the world. I wouldn't know, I'm just holding the fort, since that day they wounded New York," he sings. And "from bitter searching of the heart, we rise, to play a greater part".
In 1968 Cohen sang, "I told you when I came, I was a stranger," and he was so different it seemed true -- yet he was also the voice deep within us all.
In Stranger Song he sings of life: "You hate to watch another tired man lay down his cards, like he was giving up the holy game of poker. It's hard to hold the hand of anyone who's reaching for the sky just to surrender."
In several songs, he calls God, "The Dealer", as if this life experience might be nothing more than a game -- and us the gamblers with our hands full of randomly dealt cards that will decide our destiny.
Cohen has also sung about the "too hard stuff": the meaning of life, death, suicide, genocide, politics, hypocrisy, betrayal, sex, loss, self-doubt and the mystery of all this, coexisting with beauty, love, sweetness, hope and dreams.
Despair can be clearly heard in the song Dress Rehearsal Rag, in which a man is reminiscing, evaluating his life and considering suicide as he looks in the mirror while shaving.
Veering to the other extreme in a moment of epiphany, he sings: "I am not the one who loves, it's Love that chooses me. When Hatred with his package comes, you forbid delivery. So come my friend, be not afraid, we are so lightly here. It is in love that we are made, in love we disappear.
And then finding a middle road to cope with the great mystery, he continues: "The odds are there to beat. You win a while and then it's done, your little winning streak. And summoned now, to deal with your invincible defeat, you live your life, as if it's real, a thousand kisses deep."
Unforgettable words like this leave a mark on our heart, and over 40 years on, Leonard Cohen still has legions of devoted fans who have bought every one of his albums. Cohen has said out loud, with an often ironic or cynical voice, the things from which we have desperately tried to hide.
If It be Your Will, is a poignant prayer in memory of the Jews in Hitler's death camps. These lyrics could break your heart, like another song on this theme, Dance Me to the End of Love, which he considers one of his best works.
It refers to the doomed Jewish violinists who, knowing their own deaths were imminent, played beautiful music as other prisoners entered the death ovens: "Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin, dance me through the panic, `til I'm gathered safely in. Let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone. Show me slowly what I only know the limits of, and dance me to the end of love."
Sometimes, Cohen appears to have lost hope for a better world, and this is heard in the lyrics of Everybody Knows: Everybody knows the boat is leaking/Everybody knows the Captain lied.
His songs have turned up regularly in various film and television show soundtracks, including Oliver Stone's anarchic 1994 film Natural Born Killers, for which The Future was like a black despairing anthem for a disintegrating world.
In Hallelujah, he reveals what comes close to being his credo: There is a crack in everything/that's how The Light gets in.
He has been quoted as saying, "It is the notion that there is no perfection -- that this is a broken world and we live with broken hearts and broken lives, but still, that is no alibi for anything. On the contrary you have to stand up and say 'hallelujah!' under those circumstances."
The final track on the same album, The Future, is his one and only instrumental offering, Tacoma Trailer. This is a work of incomparable beauty, an aural poem that restores our balance after all the despair in some of the other songs on the album.
A lifelong manic depressive, the evidence can be heard in his collected lyrics and poems as he explores every aspect of life between light and darkness.
From 1996 to 1999, Cohen lived at a Zen Buddhist center at Mount Baldy in California, where he is known by his Dharma name, Jikan, which means "the silent one".
Cohen first became interested in Zen in the 70s, yet he does not want to change his religion from Judaism.
At Mt. Baldy, he studied the most rigorous branch of Zen Buddhism, called Rinzai. He rose at 3 a.m. to cook for and take care of the old Zen Master, Joshu Sasak Roshi, at the time aged around 90. Special allowances were made for Cohen to be able to continue his work.
Cohen received The Order of Canada in 2003, the nation's highest civilian honor, and this year was inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Like the work of Bob Dylan, whose career and world view parallel Cohen's in many ways, his songs have become classics during his lifetime. The legendary voice is deeper than ever and there is deep wisdom in his words.
In The Tower of Song he sings, " You'll be hearing from me baby, long after I'm gone." And while this is surely true, millions of Cohen fans are hoping that he won't be gone for a long time yet.
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. I was wondering where 'her' comment had been and was already thinking that, perhaps, it had occurred elsewhere on the Forum and that you'd seen it there. My feeling [since first hearing the 'rumour' has been the same as yours on "Dance Me to the End of Love"] and suits me just fine to leave it that way... however, that has never precluded it as a love song of incredible depth, either, and so I view it that way, as well.
... not to mention that what they might considerable most omittable might be what you consider least.
!]" Needless to say, I haven't written one... and can really appreciate how much you had to struggle to stick to a word limit, no less 
