When Cohen wrote “The Future” he was still battling severe depression off and on. (Later it seems he outgrew or broke through depression.)
In a 1993 interview Cohen explained the song refrain:
________________________________________________
There’s a line in “The Future”: “When they said repent, I wonder what they meant.”
I understand that they forgot how to build the arch for several hundred years. Masons forgot how to do certain kinds of arches, it was lost. So it is in our time that certain spiritual mechanisms that were very useful have been abandoned and forgotten. Redemption, repentance, resurrection. All those ideas are thrown out with the bathwater.
People became suspicious of religion plus all these redemptive mechanisms that are very useful.
________________________________________________
Cohen may be on to something. There are problems with religion but it does offer means to deal with the human condition that agnosticism, atheism and psychotherapy don’t quite get at.
Not my favorite LC song or favorite LC album. Though the song “Closing Time,” a sprightly meditation on the end of love or the end of life, is one of his best. The B&W YouTube likewise:
_________________________________________
Ah we’re drinking and we’re dancing
And the band is really happening
And the Johnny Walker wisdom running high
And my very sweet companion
She’s the Angel of Compassion
She’s rubbing half the world against her thigh
And every drinker every dancer
Lifts a happy face to thank her
The fiddler fiddles something so sublime
All the women tear their blouses off
And the men they dance on the polka-dots
And it’s partner found, it’s partner lost
And it’s hell to pay when the fiddler stops:
It’s Closing Time
Only 36 STRONGLY approve while 41 STRONGLY disapprove so the overall number is “minus 5”.
Still. After a week of vicious propaganda that’s a stunning result.
An old movie that is elevated to greatness by Leonard Cohen’s music, in some viewers eyes, is McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971). It only got one Oscar nom., but did make it to the National Film Registry and got onto the Criterion Collection of BluRay discs.
I thought it was movie magic when I first saw it (and I was young). I’ve seen it a couple times in the last 15 years and it holds up OK, but not quite the way I remembered it. It’s possible that it needs a movie theater or a very large HD TV (not mine). Here’s a little about the movie and music.
During post-production on this film, Robert Altman was having a difficult time finding a proper musical score, until he attended a party where the album “Songs of Leonard Cohen” was playing and noticed that several songs from the album seemed to fit in with the overall mood and themes of the movie. Cohen, who had been a fan of Altman’s previous film, Brewster McCloud (1970), allowed him to use three songs from the album – “The Stranger Song”, “Sisters of Mercy” and “Winter Lady” – although Altman was dismayed when Cohen later admitted that he didn’t like the movie. A year later, Altman received a phone call from Cohen, who told him that he changed his mind after re-watching the movie with an audience and now loved it.
_____
Robert Altman called the film an “anti-western”.
Whenever I go to my grave,
I shall do so unrepentent,
a refusal to bend the knee,
a badge of honor…
JimNorCal:
I’m reminded of the Pew polls of Iraqis after the Iraq War. Each year Pew would ask Iraqis if the coalition’s 2003 invasion of Iraq was worth it to oust Saddam Hussein. Each year 55-65% of the Iraqis said it was worth it.
Think of that!
Hussein was so bad that the majority of Iraqis felt having their country invaded with shock and awe by foreigners was worth it. The majority didn’t say they liked America. But Hussein was that bad.
As I recall Pew stopped asking that question. It didn’t seem they were getting the answer they wanted. Then Barack Hussein Obama became our president and scuttled the entire effort to be sure nothing good came of it.
Nowadays it’s a creed that both Democrats and most Republicans swear to:
The Iraq War was wrong.
I say, it wasn’t entirely wrong and it might have turned out right … until Obama was elected. No one knows.
But rest assured, no one who opposed the war ever mentions those Pew polls.
TommyJay:
The story I heard about Altman, Cohen and the soundtrack to “McCabe and Mrs Miller” involved a deeper link. This Rolling Stone story captures it:
________________________________________
…[Robert Altman] certainly knew the songwriter – the iconoclastic auteur loved “Songs of Leonard Cohen” when it came out.
“[W]e’d put that record on so often we wore out two copies!” he once professed to film scholar David Thompson. “We’d just get stoned and play that stuff. Then I forgot all about it.”
When Altman started dreaming up McCabe, he drew inspiration from Cohen’s music — without realizing he had. After shooting the film and moving to the editing stage, he happened to hear some Cohen for the first time in a while and had a revelation: “‘Shit, that’s my movie!’ …
[B]ack in the cutting room we put those songs on the picture and they fitted like a glove. I think the reason they worked was because those lyrics were etched in my subconscious, so when I shot the scenes I fitted them to the songs, as if they were written for them.”
As someone who listened to Cohen’s first album obsessively while stoned, I can relate. It’s one moody, stoner of a record.
While we are watching the last mints for Pres. Trump, let remembered Presdent Ronald Reagan along with First Lady Nancy Reagan an emotional farewell to White House staff and members of his administration on 1/18/89
I think “Anthem” is my favorite from that album, for the wonderful lines:
“There’s a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in”
I heard somebody or other sang “Hallelujah” at some pre-inaugural thing. It’s a great song but it’s been sort of spoiled for me by bombastic renditions, often linked to a vaguely leftish Imagine-ish sort of feeling. The chorus is sort of an invitation to singers to go over the top.
Thanks for that huxley. It’s interesting that RS mag. put that article out in 2016. Also, that Altman had incorporated 10 Cohen songs in one edit before paring it back to 3 songs. I wonder if money was a consideration in that choice.
Dick Illyes:
Yes “disturbing” that Quora is pushing leftist propaganda (not surprised). Color me not surprised about it from them. An actual coup without a military involvement, after Nancy Pelosi had gone to the Joint Chiefs of Staff to undermine the CIC. Oh well, Winston Smith will be very busy correcting history and current events under Creepy Joe and the Ho.
Will the fences and concertina wire around the Capitol come down? Probably not, as the threat from the white supremacist domestic terrorists has not yet been eradicated, only one has been dealt with (Ashli Babbit RIP).
om, it was coup by fire extinguisher.
Regarding the future (and with a big dollop of the past that brought us here), here’s the latest from Angelo Codevilla:
Still reading it. Clarity: well, yes, we’ve got that.
FOAF:
Heard about a fire extinguisher but AFAIK no video of a fire extinguisher and Officer Sicknick (RIP) has been seen. A virtual fire extinguisher? But Ashli Babbit’s execution was taped (GoPro’ed?) otherwise that would be memory-holed.
“I say, it wasn’t entirely wrong and it might have turned out right … until Obama was elected.”
Stop. Just stop. The Iraq War was sold to the American people, and to you, on largely false premises. The post-invasion management of the country was a debacle. It was literally one of the worst disasters in the history of American foreign policy.
Mike
The “worst’ actually means something, stop just stop, current events matter more that fighting your demons.
Repent, the time nears.
No one knows the time, you could look that up Yammer, that source is reliable, unlike you.
Keep Leonard Cohen’s name out of your mouth, neo. He wouldn’t approve of your politics and the innate cruelty of them at all.
“the innate cruelty of them”
So neo is supposed to support the party of Al Sharpton instead? In any case she isn’t going to be silenced by a nit like you mchar.
mchar is triggered and needs a safe space because he/she/xi/we/fee/they/them/the has pee in its’ shorts.
Innate cruelty? Life’s a bitch then you die, in your world, mchar. Sad.
She can support whoever she likes–but invoking Leonard Cohen when he’d be disgusted by her and her Great Man is just classless. And she knows about the innate cruelty–she just hopes she can spin things so that she’s not implicated.
But she can’t.
Also: “silenced”–this is the problem with y’all and ‘cancel culture’–you draw a broad swath from criticism to deplatforming to, well, ignoring Kaepernick, and call it all “cancel culture.” It’s a lot of crying “wolf.”
“y’all”
I see that a lot with you phonies, what a down to earth regular guy you are mchar lol
*That’s* what u got? y’all are the ones who need a safe space, foaf. Just keep Leonard Cohen’s name out of your mouth.
mchar:
A new troll and thought policeman (?)
Leonard Cohen is often written about by Neo, doesn’t that just enrage you? What can you do or say to change that? Sad little thing you seem to be. Impotent rage?
Well, bless your heart, child.
mchar:
“Kaepernick” LOL, LOL, LOL. maroon char
Keep the laugh lines coming. Oh to be the guardian of Leonard Cohen.
Oh noes, to be “implicated” by mchar. LOL again.
Bless you soul, little child.
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Always with the negativity.
Surely these folks deserve the last laugh:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dcaSCYnvtY
BLEAK
This is why LC checked out when he did.
Everybody Knows.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IfmiKnZi3E
When Cohen wrote “The Future” he was still battling severe depression off and on. (Later it seems he outgrew or broke through depression.)
In a 1993 interview Cohen explained the song refrain:
________________________________________________
There’s a line in “The Future”: “When they said repent, I wonder what they meant.”
I understand that they forgot how to build the arch for several hundred years. Masons forgot how to do certain kinds of arches, it was lost. So it is in our time that certain spiritual mechanisms that were very useful have been abandoned and forgotten. Redemption, repentance, resurrection. All those ideas are thrown out with the bathwater.
People became suspicious of religion plus all these redemptive mechanisms that are very useful.
________________________________________________
Cohen may be on to something. There are problems with religion but it does offer means to deal with the human condition that agnosticism, atheism and psychotherapy don’t quite get at.
Not my favorite LC song or favorite LC album. Though the song “Closing Time,” a sprightly meditation on the end of love or the end of life, is one of his best. The B&W YouTube likewise:
_________________________________________
Ah we’re drinking and we’re dancing
And the band is really happening
And the Johnny Walker wisdom running high
And my very sweet companion
She’s the Angel of Compassion
She’s rubbing half the world against her thigh
And every drinker every dancer
Lifts a happy face to thank her
The fiddler fiddles something so sublime
All the women tear their blouses off
And the men they dance on the polka-dots
And it’s partner found, it’s partner lost
And it’s hell to pay when the fiddler stops:
It’s Closing Time
–Leonard Cohen, “Closing Time”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-0lV5qs1Qw
huxley:
As songs, I’m also much more fond of “Closing Time” than of “The Future.” I guess it’s obvious, though, why I put the latter up.
I guess it’s obvious, though, why I put the latter up.
neo: Yep.
I’m reminded of a Russian woman I met through NLP. She was one of the fortunate few who made it out of the USSR breakup to San Francisco. She said:
You Americans, you always think things will get better.
Unrelated but check out the last(?) Rasmussen Trump Approval poll.
https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/trump_administration/prez_track_jan19
” … 51% of Likely U.S. Voters approve of President Trump’s job performance. Forty-eight percent (48%) disapprove.”
Only 36 STRONGLY approve while 41 STRONGLY disapprove so the overall number is “minus 5”.
Still. After a week of vicious propaganda that’s a stunning result.
An old movie that is elevated to greatness by Leonard Cohen’s music, in some viewers eyes, is McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971). It only got one Oscar nom., but did make it to the National Film Registry and got onto the Criterion Collection of BluRay discs.
I thought it was movie magic when I first saw it (and I was young). I’ve seen it a couple times in the last 15 years and it holds up OK, but not quite the way I remembered it. It’s possible that it needs a movie theater or a very large HD TV (not mine). Here’s a little about the movie and music.
Whenever I go to my grave,
I shall do so unrepentent,
a refusal to bend the knee,
a badge of honor…
JimNorCal:
I’m reminded of the Pew polls of Iraqis after the Iraq War. Each year Pew would ask Iraqis if the coalition’s 2003 invasion of Iraq was worth it to oust Saddam Hussein. Each year 55-65% of the Iraqis said it was worth it.
Think of that!
Hussein was so bad that the majority of Iraqis felt having their country invaded with shock and awe by foreigners was worth it. The majority didn’t say they liked America. But Hussein was that bad.
As I recall Pew stopped asking that question. It didn’t seem they were getting the answer they wanted. Then Barack Hussein Obama became our president and scuttled the entire effort to be sure nothing good came of it.
Nowadays it’s a creed that both Democrats and most Republicans swear to:
The Iraq War was wrong.
I say, it wasn’t entirely wrong and it might have turned out right … until Obama was elected. No one knows.
But rest assured, no one who opposed the war ever mentions those Pew polls.
TommyJay:
The story I heard about Altman, Cohen and the soundtrack to “McCabe and Mrs Miller” involved a deeper link. This Rolling Stone story captures it:
________________________________________
…[Robert Altman] certainly knew the songwriter – the iconoclastic auteur loved “Songs of Leonard Cohen” when it came out.
“[W]e’d put that record on so often we wore out two copies!” he once professed to film scholar David Thompson. “We’d just get stoned and play that stuff. Then I forgot all about it.”
When Altman started dreaming up McCabe, he drew inspiration from Cohen’s music — without realizing he had. After shooting the film and moving to the editing stage, he happened to hear some Cohen for the first time in a while and had a revelation: “‘Shit, that’s my movie!’ …
[B]ack in the cutting room we put those songs on the picture and they fitted like a glove. I think the reason they worked was because those lyrics were etched in my subconscious, so when I shot the scenes I fitted them to the songs, as if they were written for them.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-news/how-leonard-cohens-music-turned-mccabe-mrs-miller-into-a-masterpiece-107637/
________________________________________
As someone who listened to Cohen’s first album obsessively while stoned, I can relate. It’s one moody, stoner of a record.
While we are watching the last mints for Pres. Trump, let remembered Presdent Ronald Reagan along with First Lady Nancy Reagan an emotional farewell to White House staff and members of his administration on 1/18/89
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUTjmK_ZqEw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nI3QnC3NohQ
I knew there were no nuclear weapons in Iraq?
https://twitter.com/IraqOverRedLine/status/1351665230380748800?s=20
I think “Anthem” is my favorite from that album, for the wonderful lines:
“There’s a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in”
I heard somebody or other sang “Hallelujah” at some pre-inaugural thing. It’s a great song but it’s been sort of spoiled for me by bombastic renditions, often linked to a vaguely leftish Imagine-ish sort of feeling. The chorus is sort of an invitation to singers to go over the top.
This piece is disturbing: https://www.quora.com/q/makingsense/New-information-indicates-that-Capitol-raid-was-an-actual-coup
Thanks for that huxley. It’s interesting that RS mag. put that article out in 2016. Also, that Altman had incorporated 10 Cohen songs in one edit before paring it back to 3 songs. I wonder if money was a consideration in that choice.
Dick Illyes:
Yes “disturbing” that Quora is pushing leftist propaganda (not surprised). Color me not surprised about it from them. An actual coup without a military involvement, after Nancy Pelosi had gone to the Joint Chiefs of Staff to undermine the CIC. Oh well, Winston Smith will be very busy correcting history and current events under Creepy Joe and the Ho.
Will the fences and concertina wire around the Capitol come down? Probably not, as the threat from the white supremacist domestic terrorists has not yet been eradicated, only one has been dealt with (Ashli Babbit RIP).
om, it was coup by fire extinguisher.
Regarding the future (and with a big dollop of the past that brought us here), here’s the latest from Angelo Codevilla:
https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/19/clarity-in-trumps-wake/
Still reading it. Clarity: well, yes, we’ve got that.
FOAF:
Heard about a fire extinguisher but AFAIK no video of a fire extinguisher and Officer Sicknick (RIP) has been seen. A virtual fire extinguisher? But Ashli Babbit’s execution was taped (GoPro’ed?) otherwise that would be memory-holed.
“I say, it wasn’t entirely wrong and it might have turned out right … until Obama was elected.”
Stop. Just stop. The Iraq War was sold to the American people, and to you, on largely false premises. The post-invasion management of the country was a debacle. It was literally one of the worst disasters in the history of American foreign policy.
Mike
The “worst’ actually means something, stop just stop, current events matter more that fighting your demons.
Repent, the time nears.
No one knows the time, you could look that up Yammer, that source is reliable, unlike you.
Keep Leonard Cohen’s name out of your mouth, neo. He wouldn’t approve of your politics and the innate cruelty of them at all.
“the innate cruelty of them”
So neo is supposed to support the party of Al Sharpton instead? In any case she isn’t going to be silenced by a nit like you mchar.
mchar is triggered and needs a safe space because he/she/xi/we/fee/they/them/the has pee in its’ shorts.
Innate cruelty? Life’s a bitch then you die, in your world, mchar. Sad.
She can support whoever she likes–but invoking Leonard Cohen when he’d be disgusted by her and her Great Man is just classless. And she knows about the innate cruelty–she just hopes she can spin things so that she’s not implicated.
But she can’t.
Also: “silenced”–this is the problem with y’all and ‘cancel culture’–you draw a broad swath from criticism to deplatforming to, well, ignoring Kaepernick, and call it all “cancel culture.” It’s a lot of crying “wolf.”
“y’all”
I see that a lot with you phonies, what a down to earth regular guy you are mchar lol
*That’s* what u got? y’all are the ones who need a safe space, foaf. Just keep Leonard Cohen’s name out of your mouth.
mchar:
A new troll and thought policeman (?)
Leonard Cohen is often written about by Neo, doesn’t that just enrage you? What can you do or say to change that? Sad little thing you seem to be. Impotent rage?
Well, bless your heart, child.
mchar:
“Kaepernick” LOL, LOL, LOL. maroon char
Keep the laugh lines coming. Oh to be the guardian of Leonard Cohen.
Oh noes, to be “implicated” by mchar. LOL again.
Bless you soul, little child.