Tag: Leonard Cohen

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Kicking the Crack

Once in a while I just want to rant about some long-standing irritant.

A few years ago, Leonard Cohen– whom I deeply admire– issued an album with a song on it (called “Anthem”) with the lyric:  “There is a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in”.  Many people I know have quoted this line to me– nodding their head as if in deep contemplation– as if it is profound or beautiful or deep.

Here’s the whole context:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

It’s not a great line.  It’s not even good.  It’s lame.  It’s a Hallmark Card of pseudo-profundity, and emblematic of Cohen’s exhausted talents at this stage of his career.  Nothing on any of his recent albums is as remotely interesting as his splendid earlier songs like “Suzanne”, “The Bell”, “Chelsea Hotel”, or “Famous Blue Raincoat”,  or “The Future”, or “If it be Your Will”.

I thought of it today as I was listening to the Bare Naked Ladies cover of “Lovers in a Dangerous Time” by Bruce Cockburn, and these lyrics arrived:

Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight
Gotta kick at the darkness ’til it bleeds daylight.

I thought, aha: that’s the same idea as Cohen’s crack about crack, but far more beautifully expressed.  The word “bleeds” gives it a more visceral punch.  The word “kick” alludes to desperation.

Cockburn never rose to the level of Cohen at his best, but he has written some exquisite songs and his musical skills are far more impressive.

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The Thought Police Strike Again

Once again the thought police have sprung into action.   The Canadian Broadcasts Standards Council has banned the original version of Dire Straits “Money for Nothing”.

The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council is a “self-governing regulatory body for Canada’s private broadcasters”.  What does that mean?  That means it can’t arrest you.  It is reminiscent of the Hays code, Hollywood’s attempt to clean itself up before Congress did it legislatively.  It is the CRTC, thank god, that has the real power, but I assume that the CBSC has some sway.

And how do you get the CBSC to ban a song you don’t like?  Hey, it’s a free-for-all!  Just contact them and announce that humble little you, just one out of 30 million citizens, has decided that you must step in and decide which songs should be played on the radio no matter how many people like it.

I am curious now: what if I filed a complaint.  What if I alleged that the censorship of “Money for Nothing” is deeply offensive to my delicate little sensibilities about truth and integrity and honesty and historical accuracy?  I am veritably traumatized by the idea that my precious memories of dramatic depictions of real personalities and social values are being erased by repressed puritanical little zealots with a political agenda.  Does my objection count?

Yes, I am enraged.  I feel threatened by a world that is sliding towards banality and antiseptic homogeneity.  Hey, can I file a complaint about vocalists using Autotune?  If ever there was a legitimate complaint to be made to a “broadcast standards” council that would be it.

Not only do they want to correct your current misshapen and erroneous ideas and feelings; they want to go back in time and correct your past iniquities.  Do you remember “Money for Nothing”?  It was a snippet of a certain attitude at a certain time and place.

Let’s get one thing absolutely clear and straight right off the bat:  “Money for Nothing” is not a dramatization of Mark Knopfler’s thoughts and feelings about MTV or gay people or microwave ovens.  It is a clever, insightful, reasonably accurate depiction of the attitudes of a working class schlub working at an appliance store watching MTV and thinking, geez, I could do that.   Are we clear?  Do you understand the difference between and artist and the subject?  Do you understand what drama is?  Do you get that when a writer tells you that a character committed a murder that the artist himself is not committing murder?

Here are the “offensive” lyrics:

See the little faggot with the earring and the makeup?
Yeah buddy, that’s his own hair
That little faggot got his own jet airplane
That little faggot, he’s a millionaire

I knew people who thought like that.  I don’t need any one to tell me to not remember him or his attitudes.   I don’t need anyone to try to erase the record of that person from public discourse.

Is the next step to go through Shakespeare and Dante and Dostoevsky and remove all the violence and murders and even the insults from their works?  Why not?  We no longer think people should be murdered.  It distresses people to see murder depicted in a play or movie.  Let’s remove it.  Let’s remove the rape scene from “Streetcar Named Desire”.  We don’t approve of rape any more.

And how does “Walk on the Wild Side” (Lou Reed) and “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” get away with it?   How about this, from the innocuous Elton John and Bernie Taupin (“All the Girls Love Alice”):

And who could you call your friends down in Soho?
One or two middle-aged dykes in a Go-Go
And what do you expect from a sixteen year old yo-yo
And hey, hey, hey (hey, hey, hey) oh don’t you know?

And please, please, please:  “All the Girls Love Alice” is not “by” Elton John.  The salient component here is the lyrics which are by Bernie Taupin.  Would the internet please grow up and get this straight?  Most of the songs it says are “by” an artist are actually merely recorded by that artist.  They do not deserve the holiest credit of all, the act of creation, which most of them don’t deserve even in respect of their vocals.

You think, well, we can’t gut one of America’s greatest works of drama, can we?  “Streetcar Named Desire” is a classic.  It is untouchable.  But how does that make a difference when public morals are at stake?  And what is the difference between the character saying “faggot” in “Money for Nothing” and the character raping Blanche in “A Streetcar Named Desire”?  They are both dramas of believable human behavior.  They both tell us, this is something someone would do (and has done, in real life), in the setting and circumstance depicted.  What is the problem?

There is no real problem.  What there is is a bunch of pious, self-righteous individuals trying to assert their own virtue by punishing a perceived miscreant.  Burn the witch.

If I was a gay man of any prominence I would have issued a statement– like the self-righteous guardians of public morality do– and insisted that Dire Straits keep the fucking lyrics exactly the way they are, just as “Huckleberry Finn” should retain the word “nigger” used in reference Jim, the escaped slave, just as Stanley should continue to rape Blanche in stage productions of “Streetcar Named Desire”, just as Ophelia should continue to commit suicide in any staging of “Hamlet” (spoiler alert).

And Leonard Cohen should never have excised “give me crack and anal sex” from his searing original version of “The Future”.    (Here, in a supreme act of gutlessness, Cohen jumps the shark and changes it to “careless sex”; am I harsh?  Yes, I admit it.  When you were influenced by an artist to embrace the authentic, the true, the audacious, and then he starts embracing compromise– yes, I’m harsh.  The odd thing is that as I am getting older, unlike Cohen, I feel less and less inclined to cater to the more delicate sensibilities around me.  Maybe it’s just a phase.  And here, expanding his audience for the sanitized version, he appears on– god help us– Letterman (!), changing  “crack” to “speed” and interjecting the awful “careless sex”.)  He didn’t have to castrate anything here:  he’s on the Ralph Benmurgui show.  And if you’re curious, here’s the original lyrics attached to inane video effects.  Finally, thank you, thank you, thank you Erlend Ropstad & the Salmon Smokers for this!

Finally, let me note the hypocrisy.  Here are the lines no one seems to object to:

It’s lonely here
There’s no one left to torture….

There’ll be fires there’ll be phantoms on the road
And the white man dancing…

Destroy another fetus now

Lie beside me baby, that’s an order

“Nigger” is what white people called black people at that time in history.    If I was teaching a college class on racism, I would discuss how the word “nigger” was used in America for years as a label of contempt and expression of white superiority.  “Faggot” is what straight working class white men called gay men at the time Mark Knopfler wrote that song.  “Dyke” is what they called women who were either gay or had turned down their advances.

We have reached a new pinnacle of stupid when a writer has to explain to the audience that this song or story is about someone who really existed and really thought that way.  Listen.  Consider it.  Be glad that we have made some progress (never enough, but some).  Tell your children that that’s the way working class white men used to talk about gay people.  Tell your children we now know better.

Tell your children is wrong to try to rewrite history into something false in order to avoid offending the delicate sensibilities of the weakest among us.

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Kicked Out of Ballet School

If you are a male hockey player and you invest a huge chunk of your life in the pursuit of a career as a professional hockey player and you reach a fairly high level– say, Junior A– and then one year you don’t make the team, how would you describe what happened? I think you probably say you had been cut. You couldn’t make the team. You couldn’t keep up.

I just heard the author of “Various Positions”, Martha Schabas, describe how the same thing happened to her when she was around 15, and a student at the National Ballet School of Canada. I thought it was interesting that she didn’t use the word “cut”. She said she was “kicked out”.

Call me sexist if you like: I don’t think a male would use that term to describe what has happened when you are no longer good enough to make the team. That’s the phrase you might use if you wanted to indicate that you had broken a rule, or had a fight with an assistant coach, or failed a drug test or something: you got kicked out. If you were removed from the team because you weren’t good enough, however, you were just “cut”.

For the record, I don’t believe all girls would use that phrase either.

“Kicked out” implies that you were part of a group, the in-crowd, an association of like-minded individuals with a mutual self-interest. And then, outrageously, you were “kicked out”. Excluded. Unjustly deprived of membership.

Incidentally, Martha Schabas’ book, “Various Positions”, is about “Georgia”, a 14-year-old ballet dancer who lusts for and seeks sexual relationships with adult men. Without, apparently, the disapproval of the writer/narrator.

A number of reviewers on Goodreads complained about that. But I suppose she could argue she is just describing reality, and the reviewers are being politically correct.

The title, by the way, obviously alludes to a Leonard Cohen album by the same title.

The coach of Canada’s national women’s hockey team, Shannon Miller, once cancelled the team Christmas Party because she didn’t like their attitude during or after a loss to the Americans.

I will never understand why the players didn’t simply announce that they would have the party without Shannon Miller. What would she do? Call the police?

Kick them off the team?

Well, maybe. Shannon Miller would have cut the ring-leaders from the team. If you would have asked her if that was fair, I don’t think she would have been troubled by the issue at all: they were disloyal. Membership on the team is a favor bestowed by me. That’s enough.

I frankly don’t believe it’s likely that a very good player would make the team if she did not at least pretend to hold the coach in high regard.

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The 2010 Grammys

I watched the Grammy Awards for a while. It was striking how much of the presentation consisted of spectacular lights and explosions and special effects. This is an acknowledgement of what the music industry really is about– making everything bigger and louder– rather than any kind of nod to actual musical qualities. If you want to impress the audience even more than the previous performer, God forbid you would do something more artistic. Hell no– just turn up the volume, get bigger amps, bigger lasers, bigger breasts, use a trapeze, strip.

The problem, of course, is diminishing returns. Like the previews at the Cineplex– eventually the amp is at 10 and then what do you do to impress? Tell a story? Develop a character? Couldn’t we just go to 11?

In the middle of all this— an award for Leonard Cohen– “lifetime achievement”. They couldn’t even spare a moment to actually perform one of the legend’s songs. Besides– how do you do a laser show to:

Suzanne takes you down
to her place near the river
you can hear the boats go by
you can spend the night beside her

At what point in the song do you set up the fireworks?

Well… you could. Why not?

Who was lip-synching? And does anyone care? Apparently Pink was not, even while drenched, hanging upside down from her silks. Beyonce looked to me like she synched. It’s pretty safe to assume that most pop/rock artists do. But I wish they would tell you before and during the performance. If you’re not ashamed of it, why hide it?

The Who did not appear to lip-synch their Superbowl appearance. They sounded awful all by their lonesome selves. Did Pete Townsend, 40 years ago, ever dream he would be doing a medley of his hits in front of 100 million people? A medley! I’m guessing that this appearance isn’t going to do much for their careers.

No longer hoping to die before he gets old.

 

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Nick Cave’s Towering Tower of Song

Unfortunately, I can’t trace the origin of this story, but here it is: Nick Cave was asked to do a cut for the 1991 Cohen Tribute album “I’m Your Fan”. But he didn’t want to. But he loved Leonard Cohen, so he had to.

This is not the same as the more mainstream tribute 1995 album “Tower of Song”, which featured some regrettable and embarrassing choices (Don Henley singing “Everybody Knows”, Elton John butchering “I’m Your Man”, Billy Joel singing “Light as a Breeze”. Now that I mention it– how can any album with a Don Henley cut on it be a tribute to anything?)

Where was I? Oh yes– Nick Cave did not like tribute albums. He thought they were tacky and tasteless and, you know, Don Henleyesque. But he loved Leonard Cohen. So he showed up at the studio and then took his band to a bar across the street and got everybody totally smashed and then came back into the studio and worked up “Tower of Song”. Apparently, he did several versions and the engineers later patched them altogether.

I was not impressed, the first time I heard it. Or the second or third. It was there in the middle of an album that I enjoyed very much, otherwise. And then a funny thing happened. The first I remember of it was this: I began listening for the belch. Yes, about 2/3’s of the way through Nick Cave’s cover of “Tower Song”, he lets go one very loud, ornery, rude belch. Then I began to listen more carefully to this whacked out pastiche of bizarre interpretations– one minute he’s Elvis, the next he’s Hank Williams, then Heavy Metal, then Lou Reed…

It’s really quite charming. It’s simultaneously off-putting and embracing, passionate and excoriating. It’s a throw-back to Cohen himself, in his old “Dress Rehearsal Rag” days. It’s a paean to pure unbridled passion and spirit and despair, and a great party song.

“I’m Your Fan” also features the definitive cover of “Hallelujah”, for my money, but if you liked Rufus Wainwright’s or K.D. Lang’s versions, you might not like this one.

It’s a quiet, humble little performance by John Cale accompanying himself on the piano. Why oh why oh why do so many so-called artists approach this song with the attitude of, “well, let’s see how many people I can blow away with my soaring rendition of this esteemed song!”

It’s not that kind of song. It’s a song that is demeaned and embarrassed by a soaring, virtuoso performance. “It’s not a cry you can hear at night/ it’s not somebody who’s seen the light/ it’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah”.

Please, have some respect for the integrity of the song and stuff your fucking ego into the toilet.

Nick Cave and his band “The Bad Seeds” appeared in “Wings of Desire”, an exquisitely beautiful German film by Wim Wenders.

Nick Cave also created and performed one of the most revved up and demented– and hilarious– criminal mind songs ever called “The Curse of Millhaven”, about a young girl that goes on a murder spree, which features these fabulous lines:

Now I got shrinks that will not rest
with their endless Rorschach tests
I keep telling them
I think they’re out to get me
They ask me if I feel remorse
and I answer, “Why of course!
There is so much more
I could have done
if they’d let me!”
So it’s Rorschach and Prozac
and everything is groovy

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Leonard Cohen Live in Kitchener

I remember fondly an era in which I was the only person I knew who was a fan of Leonard Cohen. When I was in college, I personally introduced many of my friends to the dark, brooding pleasures of “Suzanne”, “The Stranger Song”, “Famous Blue Raincoat”, and “Take This Longing”.

Most, quite sensibly, rejected him: “music to slit your wrists by”.

On June 2, 2008, I joined more than 2000 people paying over $100 a seat in Centre in the Square in Kitchener to see “the grocer of despair” on his latest (and last, perhaps) tour. With the exception of “Suzanne”, he didn’t do any of my six or seven favorite songs, which are, without exception, products of his early career, before he became the bard of rueful despair, rather than the bard of exquisite, flaming rage and desire… and despair.

Nothing in this concert suggested the searing heat and mystical vulgarity of his brilliant novel “Beautiful Losers” or the searing heat and mystical vulgarity of “Songs of Love and Hate”.

I have a couple of favorites from his later albums– “First We Take Manhattan” and “Hallelujah” of course. His backup singers, the Webb Sisters, performed a marvelous version of “If it be Your Will”. The band was smoking on “Who By Fire”, the best performance of the night. “I’m Your Man” was fine. But I longed to hear the Cohen I first came to love, and his explorations of the dark links between sensuality and mysticism and despair and grace.

Well, what kind of a sick person “enjoys” listening to this:

There is no comfort in the covens of the witch
Some very clever doctor went and sterilized the bitch
And the only man of energy, yes the revolution’s pride
He trained a hundred women just to kill an unborn child

(Leonard Cohen, “Diamonds in the Mine” from “Songs of Love and Hate”)

Or

And when we fell together all our flesh was like a veil
that I had to draw aside to see
the serpent eat its tail.

And the answer is:  me.

(Leonard Cohen, “Last Year’s Man” from “Songs of Love and Hate”)

Would Mr. Cohen be embarrassed to sing those lines today?

He now sings “give crack and careless sex” instead of “give me crack and anal sex”, so, yes, I think he is.  And to sing them with passion?

It is more embarrassing to hear him wail, unconvincingly, “there is a crack in everything/ that’s how the light gets in”.

Songs I wish he had skipped:

  • Democracy
  • I Tried to Leave You (the joke, of performing this as an encore, is worn out)
  • Anthem (Cohen’s Hallmark Card song; yes, there is a crack in everything, but sometimes there is a light in everything and a crack gets in.)
  • A Thousand Kisses Deep
  • Bird on the Wire (I know this is a fan favorite but even Joe Cocker can’t make it interesting musically).

Songs I wish he had performed

Famous Blue Raincoat
Take This Longing
Chelsea Hotel
Last Year’s Man
Stranger Song
Memories

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Beautiful Losers

A Lost Rant

Before I was out of high school I read the brilliant, obscene, and intoxicating novel Beautiful Losers, a gush of orgasmic narrative that forever demolished every remaining preconception I had of love as a delicate waltz of chivalric gestures and sentimental aphorisms.

From Beautiful Losers I learned that love was desperation and cunning, flagellation and mysticism, grunting and grasping and kissing and licking and scratching for the tiniest fragment of grace in a world of obscene emotional brutality.

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Leonard Cohen Farts at the WTC

Leonard Cohen is over 70 and he’s been living in Los Angeles for too long.

As soon as I realized that he had a song about 9/11 on his new album (Dear Heather), I knew what it would be about, and I knew what it would sound like. That is depressing.

I knew it would express this coy expectation that the old radical left would somehow approve of the attacks on the World Trade Centre, or think America deserved them in some way, and that Cohen himself was just too smart to be taken in by that. At the same time, he would modulate the stridency of the right– so he couldn’t be accused of being too conventional or, heaven forbid, reactionary. He would feign disinterest, and neutrality, coyly, to try to imbue what is fundamentally an utterly conventional response to the event with some kind of mystique:

Some people say
They hate us of old
Our women unveiled
Our slaves and our gold
I wouldn’t know
I’m just holding the fort

I’m just holding the fort, as if I am above partisan politics and hold only reasonable views on the matter. Or worse– what is “reasonable” is what I am now about. I have forgotten what is so unreasonable about the reasonable.

“I wouldn’t know”, as if, unlike everyone else, his judgment is grounded in thoughtful reflection, not knee-jerk platitudes.   This, from a man who doesn’t seem to be aware of the history of American involvement in the Middle East, the interventions, the coups sponsored by the CIA, the extraction of oil, the tolerance of authoritarian regimes in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and, before 1979, Iran.

So he thinks, why on earth are they mad at us?  We haven’t done anything.

And then he stops short of giving an actual opinion. He wants you to project your own feelings about the subject onto his ambiguous lines:

Did you go crazy
Or did you report
On that day

But if you knew it was coming, the mystique is gone. It’s gone. Cohen is too smart to wrap himself in the flag, but he’s got a pin on his lapel. He is too smart to resort to slogans, but comes down safely on the side of those educated but insular suburban minds of middle America like the editorial board of the New York Times or the reporters at “60 Minutes”.

I’m really quite progressive on many issues, but, after all, America really does have enemies.  Am I still hip?

Added March 2005:

I don’t mind that he plays his politics close to the vest. What I mind is that it is a weak song. “Some people say” takes you nowhere. What people? Who?  Why do they say that? And, Leonard, do you think people should go crazy, or should they report for duty? You don’t seem to care. If you don’t care, you have nothing to say. If you have nothing to say, don’t say waste the space on your album.

Neither option, of course, provides you with the option of yawning. Neither does Cohen seem even dimly aware of the fact that America is not the center of the universe, and just because 9/11 was tragedy does not mean that yawning is not an option.

He did far better on “There is a War” from New Skin for the Old Ceremony (1976):

There is a war between the left and right
A war between the black and white
A war between the odd and the even…
Why don’t you come on back to the war,
That’s right, get in it.
Why don’t you come on back to the war,
It’s just beginning.

That was a provocative song. You might or might not agree with him, but at least he came at with creative energy and inspiration.

Or how about “The Future”:

Give me crack and anal sex
Take the only tree that’s left
And stuff it up the hole in your culture

You see, it’s not his politics that have gone soft.  It’s his aesthetic.  “The Future” implies as conservative an outlook as “I’d Love to Change the World“, with, perhaps more subtlety.

By the way, like Neil Young and Bob Dylan, Cohen’s talent does not translate into film: the “official video” is terrible.   Cohen obviously had no clue of what to do in front of a camera.  I just watched it.  My God– they bleeped out “crack” and “anal sex”.  What kind of fucking regime is managing Cohen’s videos now?  (Cohen himself changed “anal sex” to “careless sex” in live performances:     Here’s the live version with the self-bastardization.)

That is unspeakably disappointing: the grocer of despair has become the checkout cashier of minor annoyance.  The background singers, by the way, in this live version don’t cut it: where’s Julie Christensen?

[2011-03] I don’t think I gave enough credit to those lyrics from “There is a War”. Is the natural state of humanity war? War with each other, because every soul seeks to possess reality, to extend the ego to every conquerable continent, emotional or otherwise? Yeah… “I wouldn’t know”.

I’m not sure where Cohen comes down on The Patriot Act, but I know lame lyrics when I hear them: “some people say” and that very tired and boring “I’m just holding the fort”. Rolling Stone Magazine seems to think he’s attained a kind of zen-like simplicity that is deeply profound. I think that if anybody else had written those lyrics, Rolling Stone would not be bending over backwards to explain why those lyrics are not merely sophomoric.

Leonard, it’s time to retire. No, wait– I can see that you already have.

An interesting cover of “There is a War”.

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Conrad Black

So it’s now Lord Black.

I personally find it completely offensive that there still exists, within the British Empire, an institution whose very foundation rests upon assumptions about class and lineage that should be utterly repellent to any democrat. The House of Lords is a bastion of exclusive White Rich Male Privilege (no matter how many token women and blacks are added) and British Upper Class Twittledom. And now, Mr. Twittledom himself, Conrad Black, who started a newspaper (and did a good job of it) just so he could show bad pictures of Jean Chretien and declare the Alliance winners before the election was held, is a Brit and a Lord and gets to wear hysterically funny costumes that remind me of the arch stereo-type of British Lords as, well, er, gay. Shall we say, fops. Precious. Delicate and righteous.

It’s Barbara Amiel who really annoys me, though. She once wrote an interesting article on Leonard Cohen, and I believe admitted that she agreed to strip for him in exchange for the interview. Correct me if my memory fails me, Barbara. She also wrote an article for Chatelaine once– my memory is clearer about this– in which she provided a vigorous defense of the art of gold-digging, which is, of course, the art of offering sex in exchange for position, power, and vast amounts of capital. Other than the prostitution angle, I suppose, not much to quibble with there, but it should suggest to us that perhaps Lord Black wasn’t himself so passionate about the cause of privilege as his wife, who now gets to be known as Lady Golddigger. Perhaps Mr. Cohen, recently descended from Mount Baldy (I kid you not) would consent to strip for the aristocracy.

The only thing that disturbs me is that she was a fan of Leonard Cohen. She should have been a fan of Frank Sinatra instead. Maybe she was. That would have been perfect. Frank was exactly the type of man who could see the value in an expensive Lordship. Perhaps she admired both. That’s possible nowadays. There was a time when any person acquainted with the work of Leonard Cohen could be counted on to be a dissident in some way, and remarkable for independence of thought, and, perhaps, a passionate spirit. Nowadays, it is obligatory to honor Mr. Cohen, which is precisely what is beginning to make Mr. Cohen boring. I say it makes Mr. Cohen boring not because his earlier work has become boring, but because Mr. Cohen has begun to believe in it himself.

Which leads me to the question of how one becomes a Lord. Well, it’s quite simple, really. If you have any doubts about my insinuations above just ask yourself a really easy question: is there any way that you or anyone you know could become a Lord? Yes, there is, of course. You simply have to have enough money.

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The London Defibrillation Choir

The New York Times, which never lies, has an article today about a movement to train everyone on how to use defibrillators. Apparently about 90% of the people who have cardiac arrest– which is not the same as a heart attack or a heart with no companion– die in the first 10 minutes. But if you have a defibrillator handy (in your purse or your camera bag or something, I assume), about 53% of the victims survive. That is amazing. Now the heart can have a companion.

They were even able to demonstrate that the average grade six student, who doesn’t know the state capital of Alaska where the oil is, can nevertheless be trained to operate a defibrillator in just a few hours. They tell them it’s just like a Sony Playstation.

Still, I find it somewhat alarming. New York State has passed a law that released from liability anyone who uses a defibrillator to try to save someone. You see, if you use a defibrillator on someone who is not having a heart attack, you can actually kill them. So I think the first thing we need to do, after making defibrillators available to everyone in order to save lots of lives, is to restrict their availability in order to save lots of lives.

Another thing I find alarming about defibrillators is that you have supposed to shave the person’s chest before applying the two little paddles and shouting “all clear”, so everyone knows you watch ER. I mean, some guy is dying (most likely in a Casino where there is a disproportionate number of cardiac arrests as well as tacky double-knit pantsuits), and you rush over to help and everyone’s standing around watching and you have to say, “anyone got a razor– while he’s down, I might as well shave his chest.” What if it was Burt Reynolds or someone? “Oh my god, this is going to take hours. Anyone got a Philishave?” What if it was Dolly Parton? “Bigger paddles, quick! We need— yes, those satellite dishes will do quite nicely….”

Another thing is — which is why Cohen’s explicit poetry is actually good for our society– what if it is a woman undergoing cardiac arrest and you’re kind of a shy young man and all these people are watching…. Can New York State also make an exception for sexual harassment lawsuits? But then, if they did, you’d have all these guys walking around the beach with defibrillators on their shoulders instead of boom boxes, and they’d be targeting good looking girls who fall asleep while tanning. “All clear. Leon! I said ALL CLEAR! Now. I mean it. All right, see if I care. ZZZZZZAAAAAPPPPP. Oh my God! Leon’s down! Someone get a razor, quick!”

I’m only bringing this up because if Leonard attends Hydra 2002… well, he is getting on in years, and I hope they have a defibrillator handy just in case. You know how women react around him. If Fiona or Judith or Ania actually met Leonard, you’d have to be ready to use those paddles, I think, though I would be very nervous about it myself. And, instead of shouting out “all clear”, I think, apropos of the occasion, I would shout “did you ever go clear?” ZZAAAAPPPP. “Bill, Bill, stop! She’s only taking a nap!” “Not any more. We better do it again. It’s like the reset button on a computer, isn’t it?”

And before I go to bed, I want to note that they have an actual video of a 77 year old man having cardiac arrest in a Las Vegas Casino. He falls over. The security guards rush to his aid. They look like they are in grade 6. They rip off his shirt and shave his chest. They apply the goo, the little sensor pads, and then — “Go Clear!”– the paddles. ZAAAAPPPP. He’s up. An old man who had fainted was revived. And everyone agreed twould be a miracle indeed…. except that the video also shows all the other people in the Casino basically ignoring him. I’m not kidding. They took one look at the guy and went back to their slots and blackjacks.

I think hell is… you’re in a Casino. Wayne Newton is singing “Dunkeshein”. Fat ladies in pastel-plaid double-knit pantsuits are working the slot machines. The décor resembles Andy Warhol repackaged by Walmart. You have a heart attack. Your soul starts to rise from your body and you look down and notice that not a single person gives a damn. What depresses you even more is that these are not the kind of people you wish would give a damn about you, but Ania and Fiona and Judith and Corisa and Tim and both Mikes and Mark and Jarkko and Nancy and Barbara …. are all in Hydra jamming to an aud and eating roast sheep. They don’t give a damn, and the guards stand helpless by: no one remembered a shaver. They try the paddles on your butt instead. With every zap you return to your body and the whole experience starts over again.

Did you ever go clear? No. ZZZZZAAAAAPPPPP Ow! Now I am.