It is your turn, beloved.
Leonard Cohen is dead. What a soul. Sounds like a good death, at a good time. But a magnificent spirit has left the earth.
I remember haunting a scrubby second-hand vinyl store in about 1990, when I wore black from head to toe and a magical jumper I found at Camberwell Market that had rents and gapes in it, when I strode in my DMs and scowled at everyone (I was doing literature and archaeology and reading Jean Rhys and Barthes and queer theory and feeling incredibly smarter than everyone I passed in the street; also a hundred times more unhappy too, most of the time). I'd go there on my miserable way home from uni, and riffle through the milk crates of old records. The Cure, Patty Smith, Sisters of Mercy, Shelleyan Orphan, The Sundays... and Leonard Cohen. 'Greatest Hits', with him in sepia looking in a mirror. And there I was, beguiled forever. To this day my favourite song in the entire world is 'Avalanche'.
No one will ever again inhabit the world he made with his music. The bones, the sorcery, the lovers, the rain, the blizzards, the blades and the jokes. We just get to hear the singing from inside it.
George -- he's so handy in a bad momentI Just so happens that George also does a lovely Buckleyesque 'Hallelujah'. Sing for beautiful Leonard, young man.
I remember haunting a scrubby second-hand vinyl store in about 1990, when I wore black from head to toe and a magical jumper I found at Camberwell Market that had rents and gapes in it, when I strode in my DMs and scowled at everyone (I was doing literature and archaeology and reading Jean Rhys and Barthes and queer theory and feeling incredibly smarter than everyone I passed in the street; also a hundred times more unhappy too, most of the time). I'd go there on my miserable way home from uni, and riffle through the milk crates of old records. The Cure, Patty Smith, Sisters of Mercy, Shelleyan Orphan, The Sundays... and Leonard Cohen. 'Greatest Hits', with him in sepia looking in a mirror. And there I was, beguiled forever. To this day my favourite song in the entire world is 'Avalanche'.
No one will ever again inhabit the world he made with his music. The bones, the sorcery, the lovers, the rain, the blizzards, the blades and the jokes. We just get to hear the singing from inside it.
George -- he's so handy in a bad momentI Just so happens that George also does a lovely Buckleyesque 'Hallelujah'. Sing for beautiful Leonard, young man.
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