Achtung Baby!

waiting for it to rain

“I don't consider myself a pessimist. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel soaked to the skin.”
― Leonard Cohen

U2: [ Rain (Beatles Cover) ]

Don DeLillo, Mao II /  Maurizio Di Iorio 

well I see Jane's awake

that was New York

 Tavi 

I learned about Cohen from Her

+ 10 Great Leonard Cohen Covers by Female Artists

Someone was missing from that list....

i don't need you

solitude is being tenderly in love

Madeleine Peyroux: [ Bird on the Wire ]

 Charles Bukowski  

You're living for nothing now

+ Tori Amos: Famous Blue Raincoat (Live) - Another one for my funeral playlist. I still recall the first time I heard it on a bootleg (Titled Under The Covers) that was copied one cassette at a time via the Tori mailing list's hey days in 1994. I recall it b/c the tape had Tori singing "American Pie" the night Kurt Cobain died. It also had the first time she did a bunch of other covers like "Boys in the Trees" and "Wrapped Around Your Finger"

Thank God for modernity, who needs to find old cassettes when there's YouTube.

This may be my least favorite cover of it, that fucking saxophone is maddening: Jennifer Warnes - Famous Blue Raincoat

The rise and rise of Leonard Cohen’s once-forgotten classic

+ VIDEO: Hallelujah! The rise and rise of Leonard Cohen’s once-forgotten classic

Over 360 recordings and thousands of performances later, Hallelujah's lyrical mix of the sacred and the secular has graced the repertoires of artists as diverse as Jeff Buckley and Susan Boyle, and continues to appear in movies, television dramas and talent contests around the world.

It's just that I can't speak

he wrote himself a prescription And your name was mentioned in it

 Fairy tale about a girl whose body comes to life every night under his sensitive hands 

this american woman

 LEONARD COHEN 

a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door

+ Katey Sagal - Bird on a Wire

running for the money and the flesh

Anita Lipnicka & John Porter: [ Chelsea Hotel no.2 ]

Democracy

/prelude/to/a/playlist

being a playlist in unknown parts(posts)

a soundtrack to myself.  to feel one way or another about life. a coded soul status. feeling like I'm in the wrong time line, these things keep me alive.

" Sometimes after I have come or just before I fall asleep, my mind seems to go out on a path the width of a thread and of endless length, a thread that is the same color as the night. Out, out along the narrow highway sails my mind, driven by curiosity, luminous with acceptance, far and out, like a feathered hook whipped deep into the light above the stream by a magnificent cast. Somewhere, out of my reach, my control, the hook unbends into a spear, the spear shears itself into a needle, and the needle sews the world together. "

"...my future wife is probably doing her calculus homework right now..."

“Most people live through the day with this or that part of their mind in a happy state of somnolence: a hungry man eating a steak is interested in his food and not, say, in the memory of a dream about angels wearing top-hats which he happened to see seven years ago; but in my case all the shutters and lids and doors of the mind would be open at once at all times of the day. Most brains have their Sundays, mine was even refused a half-holiday.”

— Sebastian Knight in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, by Vladimir Nabokov (via)

I've had a terrible and stressful day. I have to move in a few days and I detest moving. This year's excursion back to Austin was a catastrophic failure. I am ruined. Thank Buddha for my Mistress. She called me and I was able to loose myself in our intellectual conversation of secret origins, missing histories and youthful romances. It added some levity to my agitated state. We are both age-gap inclined so I made her laugh by saying that my future wife is probably 15 at the moment and doing homework, she'll find me in a few years when she's 18. I was trying to emulate the same age difference between my mistress and her very lucky future husband. Making her laugh is the best. Even though all you read is my depressive side here, I think she would attest to how funny I am on the phone. Today I realized just how much truth there is to my principal personal maxim: "I like Smart Girls in Short Skirts", being that two of my closest girlfriends are a doctor in training and a lawyer. I should have been a professor. Teaching and introducing "Lolita" to a new class every semester. Annotating "The Dark Knight Returns" for fun as an extra credit project (I tried to do this in High School and I convinced my English teacher into reading the book and appreciating it). Making fun of Dave Eggers and a long list of elitist literary twats. Elevating the prose issue of Detective Comics by Grant Morrison into the curriculum. Obviously Batman would be my hero with a 1000 faces of choice for discussion. Visiting all the places in Canada portrait in Beautiful Loosers for summer classes on the one book that blew my mind open when I was 18. I would be a peculiar professor no? Affairs with students: optional. This is making me want to watch "Wonder Boys". It's the middle of the night and the silence dictates I put the kind of movie that feels like a safety blanket. Something to make me feel better. "Lost In Translation" it is.  

you know that she's half crazy But that's why you want to be there

Me'Shell Ndegéocello: [Suzanne ]

I can't turn the other cheek

+ Depeche Mode:Coming Back To You (Forest) Remix.Cohen Cover

your heart's hard

 iambiancamarie 

let's not talk of love or chains

Lianne La Havas : [ Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye ]

 the charming innocence   

I got no future, I know my days are few

Sincerely, L. Cohen's App

There's a Leonard Cohen App. so, hmm, yeah

"we're lonely, we're romantic and the cider's laced with acid"

If this blog were to come to a sudden stop because I've croaked or something, this should be the last song posted. "Closing Time" by Leonard Cohen.

I've been saved by a blessed fatigue

persistent perfection

 

c r a c k (s)

 thisismyprophecy 

In the bed the lovers, slowly and deliberately

your relentless absence

When I am at the centre
of my unrequited love
I cannot hold it as an object
It has no sharp edges
to torture anyone
I breathe the fragrance
of the longing
and the longing
has no proprietor
“O my love” embraces
the great wide sky
as the night picks through
the constellations
lifting necklace
after dripping necklace
for the delight
of Leonard’s true beloved
“O my love” cries out
from every pore of snow
and the forest answers
from a great height:
“O my love”
And one heart appears
and one heart dissolves
and they clasp in the place
where I am held up
in the storm
And I walk to you
on the waves of desire
walk across the distance
with something new to tell you
about your beauty
your good legs
and your relentless absence
L.C.

I do what I have to do To get by

Leonard Cohen: In My Secret Life.live

you had the perfect ass

your pen scratches at the heart of life

Dark poet

Dark poet, the breast of a virgin
haunts you,
bitter poet, life boils
and the city burns,
and the sky sucks up its rain,
your pen scratches at the heart of life.

Forest, forest, eyes swarm
over the multiple pine seeds;
hair of the storm, poets
ride off on horses, on dogs.

Eyes rage, tongues curl,
the sky rushes into nostrils
like a nourishing blue milk;
women, hard vinegar hearts,
I am hanging from your mouths.

—Antonin Artaud

let's not talk of love or chains and things we can't untie

Michael Kiwanuka: Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye

 

I was shot by Billy Kidd 

Heart + You

+ Jessica Sula: All Because of You

 reverendcohen 

Jarvis Cocker + Leonard Cohen

+ It starts at 33 mins

Greg Dulli covers Leonard Cohen

Greg Dulli Sings Leonard Cohen's 'Paper Thin Hotel'
Old Ideas with New Friends, a new series of Cohen covers by artists such as Deerhunter's Bradford Cox, Old 97s' Rhett Miller, Cold War Kids and the New Pornographers' A.C. Newman.

 

You who were never the one

Leonard Cohen: Crazy To Love You

+ Leonard Cohen, At 77, Calls His New CD 'Old Ideas.' It's Anything But

 By Alex Dram 

Tori Does Leonard

the background of your entire life

" When I speak of depression," he says carefully, "I speak of a clinical depression that is the background of your entire life, a background of anguish and anxiety, a sense that nothing goes well, that pleasure is unavailable and all your strategies collapse..."

Leonard Cohen: 'All I've got to put in a song is my own experience'  

that nakedness

 Leonard Cohen 

I'm twisted with love I'm burning with boredom

Emilie Simon: Jetaimejetaimejetaime

 Leonard Cohen 

You are not the one I've stopped looking for

You in your generation,
I in mine.
I am not the one
you are looking for.
You are not the one
I've stopped looking for.
How sweetly time
disposes us
L. Cohen

Karmin: Jar of Hearts

Without my sorrow

He wants to write a love song

An anthem of forgiving

A manual for living with defeat

Going Home, Leonard Cohen

my heart is like a thorn

I've been up all night
And all I've got is this
I know that it's not right
but nothing really is

L. Cohen

a list of feelings

My page was too white
My ink was too thin
The day wouldn’t write
What the night penciled in
// L. Cohen

I thought the past would last me but the darkness got that too

Leonard Cohen - Darkness by leonardcohen

[12] To begin everything all over again

 L. Cohen 

everything depends upon how near you sleep to me

Your body like a searchlight
my poverty revealed,
I would like to try your charity
until you cry, "Now you must try my greed."
And everything depends upon
how near you sleep to me
Leonard Cohen

 vichi 

I saved what I could save

I lived alone but I was only Coming back to you

There are many in your life
And many still to be
You are a light
You are a shining light
So there's many that you'll see
I've got to deal with my own envy
When you choose the precious few
Who've left their pride on the other side of
Coming back to you

the room, the bed

You have the lovers,
they are nameless, their histories only for each other,
and you have the room, the bed, and the windows.
Pretend it is a ritual.
Unfurl the bed, bury the lovers, blacken the windows,
let them live in that house for a generation or two.
No one dares disturb them.
Visitors in the corridor tip-toe past the long closed door,
they listen for sounds, for a moan, for a song:
nothing is heard, not even breathing.
You know they are not dead,
you can feel the presence of their intense love.

 Like Crazy  

when I look back I was there for you

Leonard Cohen: [ There For You ]