It's the end of an old year and the beginning of a new one and this song seems so apt for all kinds of reasons. Think of it as inevitable that it's ended up appearing on this blog:
It's been Leonard Cohen's year in many ways and this performance (from 1993) is stunning. For TV, he had to change "crack and anal sex" to "speed and careless sex" (you can tell he's a poet though - crack/anal, speed/careless - not just any words), but they let him sing everything else.
Great song!
ReplyDelete"Give me Stalin or St Paul .."
"I'm the little Jew who wrote the Bible .."
"You feel the devil's riding crop .."
Happy new year :-)
ABJ
I'm back from a party held by the parents of one of my daughter's schoolfriends. It was good.
ReplyDeleteYup.
"Take the only tree that's left and stuff it up the hole in your culture..."
"And all the lousy poets hanging round trying to sound like Charlie Manson..."
It's a song full to the brim with quotable bits.
Happy new year to you to, Andy. Hope it all works out well.
THOUSANDS
ReplyDeleteOut of the thousands
who are known,
or who want to be known
as poets,
maybe one or two
are genuine
and the rest are fakes,
hanging around the sacred
precincts
trying to look like the real thing.
Needless to say
I am one of the fakes,
and this is my story
[Leonard Cohen, 2001]
ABJ
Yep, what ABJ said & yerself: pretty apt
ReplyDelete