Layer 506 . . . Inheritance Tracks, Wax, Laughs, Hardy and Even More Cohen

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It's often worth listening to Saturday Live at 9.00 on Radio 4, if only for the feature called "Inheritance Tracks". This morning featured Ruby Wax, who gets better as she gets older.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b019q9jx
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b019q9jx

"The piece of music I inherited was the first time I ever heard The Beatles' "Twist & Shout" - and I almost fainted on the floor. John Lennon's voice was the sexiest thing, and I didn't even know what that meant. I grew breasts overnight. Boy do I wish I'd met him. I only came to England to marry one of The Beatles."

This is something that people who don't 'get' the Beatles' fame and music fail to understand. Lennon's voice (and the band) was capable of being raw, raucous and totally compelling - especially back then - when Britain on the whole hadn't discovered rhythm and blues or soul music, and the musical idols of the day were people like Cliff, Adam Faith, Billy Fury and others too bland to mention.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AA9maAERDAs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVlr4g5-r18

"The music that I would hand down is James Taylor's 'You Can Close Your Eyes'. The reason I want my kids to hear it is because I want them to understand how deep and profound our music was - in comparison to the stuff you get on X-Factor."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXxJHk3vWvo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELElnewhHkU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkIiaaXUjlE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpMfdob55W0

Ruby also mentioned 'Frontier Psychiatrist' - "The video is NUTS!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUecUKa_yqo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H86TKkPA3QI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GEXwDJZuBo

To listen to Ruby's bit go straight to minute 49.30 (out of 58.00) if you don't have time to listen to the rest of the programme.

[47.35 - an amusing piece of poetry by Elvis McGonagall ]

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Jeremy Hardy at the Watford Palace Theatre

I don't want to say anything bad about Watford, so I won't say anything at all. Jeremy, on the other hand, was brilliant. Funny, political and passionate. Catch him when you can.

http://uktv.co.uk/dave/quotes/sid/7617
http://jeremyhardy.co.uk/
http://www.redpepper.org.uk/jeremy-hardy-tories/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2001/apr/04/politicalcolumnists.comment

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Here's another mention of Leonard from this week's Guardian:

Leonard Cohen shows there's life in the old dog yet with launch of new album

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/jan/19/leonard-cohen-old-ideas-new-album?newsfeed=true

by Alex Needham
His detractors may sarcastically call him Laughing Len, but Leonard Cohen kept a roomful of journalists entertained on Wednesday night as he launched his first album in eight years.

"Old Ideas" proves that Cohen's long-term preoccupations with sex, death and salvation have endured. The inside cover features a drawing, by Cohen, of a naked woman and a skull.

[Cohen said] songwriting involved "perseverance, perspiration, but also a certain kind of grace and illumination."

[Jarvis Cocker asked] how Cohen felt about being awarded the PEN New England award for literary excellence in song lyrics.

"The thing I liked about this award was that I'm sharing it with Chuck Berry," said Cohen. "'Roll over Beethoven and tell Tchaikovsky the news' – I'd like to write a line like that."

Once questions were opened to the floor, Cohen revealed that he is likely to tour after the album's release. The singer said he had been "invigorated and illuminated" by his last tour, which took in 247 shows over two years to huge audiences and ecstatic reviews.

Before he'd started the tour, Cohen said, "I hadn't done anything for 15 years. I was like Ronald Reagan in his declining years. He remembered he'd had a good role – he's played the president in a movie and I felt somewhat that I had been a singer. Being back on the road really re-established me as being a worker in the world and that was a very satisfactory feeling."

Comments on Len from the Guardian's feedback this week:

alexisd
Lovely article. Laughing Len is truly a living legend. Would have to say that I felt blessed to see him twice on his world tour in 2008. The atmosphere at the 02 was electrifying. He wears his learning lightly but he speaks so much truth, beauty and wisdom, he is impossible not to appreciate.


MoonMoth
For anyone interested in LC, a fascinating and revealing recent speech by him at the Prince of Asturias awards.


http://1heckofaguy.com/2011/10/25/upgraded-video-of-leonard-cohen%E2%80%99s-prince-of-asturias-awards-speech-with-no-overdubbing/


urlaccount
Seeing Mr Cohen in a concert hall in Vienna, where he sang for over 2 and a half hours and even the normally reserved Viennese were literally "dancing in the aisles", will always remain one of the top 3 moments of my concert experiences. When the audience showered him with roses was special too.


Of course, when he played "Take this Waltz" the Viennese audience went "mental" in their own sweet peculiar way.


I want more.


greatpoochini
For someone who can't sing, he is the master of melody, of tune, of song.


And then there's the lyrics.


The widest, most heartfelt, most gregarious tip of the hat to Leonard.


Dravazed
Leonard Cohen is the real thing: a poet in an era--and especially, in a country--that does not value poets. He is not a scribble of mediocre lines, he is not simply self-absorbed, he is not a relentless self-promoter. As noted in the excellent interview described above, he cares but is not didactic.


His poem/song "Democracy" is in many ways the theme of our time, the struggle to bring people back to the integrity of self-rule. He never fails to suffuse his work with a vulnerable tenderness that is only accentuated by his unmusical voice.


Thank you, Leonard Cohen, for your life and your life's work. Some of your songs are among the most important I've ever had the good fortune to hear. Bless you.


2baz
It feels like a privilege, a blessing, to live during the time that Leonard Cohen is recording and performing. Generations to come will tell me how lucky I was. And they will be right.


sammer
Only Dylan, who is more musical, has in my lifetime even attempted to yoke together the concrete and the abstract, the personal and the political, in the same line.


Cohen is a poet who was forced to make recourse to music to create an audience.. Dylan is a musician who was forced to make recourse to poetry to stand up and be heard.


They are the best of our times; but Cohen is the real poet.


Commit suicide listening to Cohen's lyrics? More chance I would have committed suicide because I had never heard his voice.


Thanks for everything you gave.


grembold
Whither thou goest, I will go...


sammer
He reduced the political choice of mankind to 4 lines without mentioning poltics:


I saw a man on a wooden crutch 
He said to me, 'You ask for too much.' 
And a woman in her darkened door 
She said to me: ''Hey, why not ask for more?'


PlanetNat
I too want to add my gratitude for being alive in the same era as the great man.


I love his voice, his words, his humour, his wit, his dryness, his darkness, his generosity as a thinker, poet, song-writer, performer.


DanielFrisbee
The thing I have found most inspiring about leonard cohen is his stoic approach- the balance of ego, incredulity and honesty. It's like he has nailed the scientific formula for how to address and express ideas. I think everyone can benefit from that, it is a gift we are all fortunate that he can share, including him. He strikes me as a fully realised individual - his ascension is a community event.


magicorgan
Leonard is of course your man and (as has been said) is along with Dylan the best songwriter of the last fifty years. i would just like to put in a word for Ten New Songs
one of his most neglected masterpieces, absolutely wonderful. Alexandra Leaving is one of his best songs ever. Not to be missed.


alilea
For me, the best Cohen album is the recording of his concert at the O2 in 2009


GregCallus
I was at that concert - wonderful show, awful arena (like a 10,000 seater cinema) but the performance was magnificent in many respects. Also the most musically-literate audience I've ever seen - they appreciated every minor tweak, every slightly-changed lyric, every phrase of a solo instrument that made delicate reference to a different Cohen song. Probably the best concert I've heard.


inspiring
Consummate performer........The man is perfect in every respect........


marmitetoast
I'm so glad Cohen is still with us and still recording and touring (and hopefully I'll get to see him). Such brilliant writer - I don't know anyone who can tie up love, despair, sex, politics, and theology in quite the same understated way. Some of his lyrics - Love Itself, or If It Be Your Will - are the most astonishing fusion of Jewish, Zen, and Christian thought, with his own wisdom and experience driving them. And he doesn't hit you over the head with how clever he is, either.


Just extraordinary.


Ricooper
Leonard Cohen is the greatest singer-songwriter of them all. When I first heard 'Songs of Love and Hate' as a teenager, I realised: here is someone who feels everything , who suffers everything, who understands everything, and yet it does not destroy him. He's kept me going for nearly forty years, and I treasure his life and work as a blessing.


CatBCN
I am not a "fan" of anyone else, but Cohen is simply incredible. Had the great luck of hearing him at the jazz festival in NIce three and a half years ago...have never, ever seen an audience (for anything or anyone else) that was as profoundly reverential, hanging on every note, waiting for the revelation of the next song, as this one. Left deeply moved, as I think did everyone there.


sunny15
Saw him twice on last tour - he has the most amazing charisma. Brilliant song writer and as sexy as hell.


Snowbirdk
I've been a fan of Leonard Cohen for more years than I care to remember and he has always been my hero. I had the great privilege of hearing him sing at the O2 and it was just amazing how he could make that vast hangar feel intimate, holding the audience in the palm of his hand.


glynluke
I met the man twice long ago. Even then he was charming, droll, gracious, self-deprecating, patient. I would always go and see him on tour in the 60s/70s. He was always impeccable.


whitworthflange
His songs are full of self deprecation and sly wit.
How about: I don't trust my inner feelings; inner feelings come and go.


Missbabs
I've always thought that in interviews Leonard appears as kindly, avuncular, and amused, but above all, detached. He doesn't seem to believe in his own mythology. As the mighty Ian Dury once said, 'Never explain' - it shouldn't be necessary. 


robbo100
When Leonard toured here in 08 and 09 the demand for tickets and the size of the venues he played came as a pretty big shock to me (as well as the price of the tickets!) Never realised there were so many fans. A very big cult audience I suppose combined with the fact that a lot of us had thought that seeing Leonard Cohen live in concert was something we were never going to see - so pretty much everyone who likes LC wanted a ticket. I wasn't really expecting that much to be honest - thinking LC was pretty old and his voice would be gone. Thought I'd just be there for the fact of seeing him. But he surpassed all expectations - really great shows. And as someone said earlier he managed to bring an atmosphere of intimacy to very large venues. Very much enjoy watching the DVD of the O2 performance also 


AshesRising
Being there [at the interview with LC] does mean you have to endure the monotony of waiting for a considered response. I have every sympathy for those who find silence so threatening - unfortunately in this media-driven cacophony it's a rarity. It's the wall to wall din that conceals the vacuousness of content, empty-headed superstars with verbal diarrhoea and not an intelligent thought they can call their own. That's why LC and his like are difficult for some to appreciate - they think before they open their gobs, and what they say is well worth the wait. 


Jamus1
Leonard will assuredly go down as one of the great creators from our time - a Shakespeare or Botticelli. I've been listening since '68 - how great to have Cohen play through my life as a grounding rod. 


Liuzhoukaf
We called him Laughing Lenny because he was funny from the beginning, not the miserable cliché which lazy music writers came up with..


PaxGrass
The New Yorker is streaming the new Leonard Cohen song 'Going Home', the first time they have ever streamed a song. They also publish the lyrics.


'I have been satirised as suicidal and self-indulgent' – a classic Leonard Cohen interview from the vaults

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2011/nov/29/leonard-cohen-interview-rocks-backpages?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487

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Layer 339 . . . Laurie Anderson, Inheritance Tracks, Strange Fruit, Spirituals, The Spirit Level, Spiritual Intelligence, Big Questions and Calls to Action

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Thought for Today

I'd meant to say yesterday that Tom Jones and his new album were even mentioned on Radio 4's Thought for Today last week, as was the track 'What Good Am I?' Zeitgeisty indeed.

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Also on Radio 4 last week was the wonderful Laurie Anderson. She's been around for 30 years now, but is still relatively unknown. So it was good to find her popping up on Saturday Live to talk about her 'inheritance tracks'.

She spoke about listening, as a young person, to the minimalist music of Phillip Glass, especially 'Music in Twelve Parts', and how the act of listening to the music gave her the mental space to ask questions like, what do I want? and what am I doing here?

In fact she used to go to live rehearsals of the music in New York, together with friends who were sculptors, musicians, dancers and actors, and she says 'This was when we learnt to be artists ourselves'. The rehearsals lasted around 10 hours. One of her friends said, "That's when I do my best work - at Phil's rehearsals".

The piece of music she chose to 'pass on' was Billie Holiday singing 'Strange Fruit'. She referred to it as a kind of haiku - simple images of racist hangings.

Can art or music influence behaviour or politics?, she asked. That song certainly did. "Southern trees / Bear a strange fruit . . . "

She said, "It's the story of fascism. How's that made possible? Songs like that motivated people to change the world, to march for civil rights. That song was key. People heard that song, confronted that chilling image, and said, 'Wait a second!' The song is a spiritual, really, and spirituals are often calls to action."

"Cruelty, tenderness, hopefulness and beauty - this song has all these things."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00t5vkr

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00t5vkr/Saturday_Live_31_07_2010/

I notice on Spotify that Tom Waits also chose this song for his 'Jukebox' album.

Other versions worth listening to on Spotify include those by UB40, Jeff Buckley, Nina Simone and Wynton Marsalis.


http://www.legacy.com/ns/fullstory.aspx?storytype=1&storyid=38

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Calls To Action

I often forget to read it myself, so I need to remind myself as much as anyone else to go to Raj Patel's website regularly  - http://rajpatel.org/

There's currently plenty of good stuff on such subjects as G20, South Africa, McDonald's and 'Cheaponomics'.

Also a reminder to buy his book 'The Value of Nothing'.

It's also worth clicking on his RSS feed.

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Patel constantly brings up inconvenient truths, and on good days so does the Guardian:

The Spirit Level: Spooking the right

Even though its great sweep invites all manner of sceptical questions, this book's inconvenient truths must be faced

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/26/the-spirit-level-society-criticism

I reckon the dividing line between left and right in politics is whether or not you want to see greater equality, even if it's for purely utilitarian and pragmatic reasons. For the left, the Spirit Level was a seminal book. A recent Guardian editorial said:

It was briefly fashionable for modernising Conservatives, up to and including David Cameron, to demonstrate their progressive credentials by giving a nod to The Spirit Level, a book by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett which traced a range of social sicknesses back to economic inequality. Suddenly, however, the rightwing thinktanks are circling. Both the Taxpayers' Alliance and Policy Exchange have attempted detailed demolition jobs, egged on from across the Atlantic by the Wall Street Journal and by another attack published under the auspices of the Washington-based Democracy Institute.

To recap: The Spirit Level charted a connection between the income gap and everything from crime to illness and under-education. Its great sweep quite properly invited all manner of sceptical questions. There were, as always in social science, disputes about whether causation and correlation were being confused . . . Thoughtful sceptics like David Runciman accepted the evidence marshalled about the damage done further down the heap as "overwhelming".

The combined forces suddenly being ranged against the book are now, however, of a very different nature. The titles of the anti-egalitarian studies – which refer variously to The Spirit Level's "delusion", "illusion" and its "false prophesy" – reveal the polemical intent, a telling contrast with the meticulous subtitle of the original book: "Why more equal societies almost always do better."

The Spirit Level did not claim to explain every social problem. Rather, it explicitly restricted itself to those societal ills which blight the lives of the lower classes more than they do the rest.

After a budget that made the poor poorer, it should be no surprise that some want to see that insight buried. Yet to emerge from stricken times without breaking Britain, The Spirit Level's inconvenient truths must be faced.

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Also in the paper recently:

Right to Work: In search of a new slogan

In the face of cuts, trade unions are demanding the 'right to work'. Better to rethink work altogether

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/29/right-to-work-recession-women-at-work

by Nina Power

In 1972 Selma James, founder of the International Wages for Housework Campaign  and, more recently, Global Women's Strike, wrote the following: "We demand the right to work less." Her reasoning was clear – when women work for a wage for 40 hours a week and still carry the weight of childcare and housework, what is the moral value in expecting them to toil away at the cost of their health and happiness? Why should anyone, male or female, work more than 20 hours a week?

Should we be clinging on to employment at any cost, or should we instead be reconsidering what it means to work at all?

When James demanded that everyone "work less", it was part of a set of proposals that included a guaranteed income for everyone, equal pay and free, community-run nurseries and childcare.

Making clear the link between housework and paid work, such that unwaged labour must be counted as work and rewarded as such, James's vision is an integrated picture of the relation between (human) reproduction and (industrial) production.

The mass entry of women into the workforce has corresponded with an overall stagnation or diminution of wages. It is as if employers have taken the very worst aspects of women's work in the past – poorly paid, precarious, without benefits – and applied it to almost everyone, except those at the very top, who remain overwhelmingly male and incomprehensibly rich.

This is equality as a race to the bottom. Feminism is not wrong to see the economic autonomy of women as central to their political and social freedom, but we do a disservice to its aims if we believe that it is enough to have a job, regardless of what it is.

The Right to Work campaign, although vital, plays into this attitude that work is the ultimate mark of a man or, in more recent decades, a woman too.

Thinking of a world with less but better work, or even no work at all (as we currently understand it), particularly in the midst of an economic crisis, is impractical, of course. Yet thinking about alternatives to the current system, however unfathomable, may help us to break with much that is wrong about our everyday existence. In Italy in the 1970s, workers under the banner of a "refusal of work" shut down noxious chemical plants and paid only what they felt was appropriate for their utilities bills. This perhaps seems quite mad today, but it is a lot more fulfilling than working even harder for less so that those at the top can keep more.

Nina Power is a senior lecturer in philosophy at Roehampton University and the author of One-Dimensional Woman.

See also an excellent piece she wrote on the study of philosophy:

A blow to philosophy, and minorities

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/apr/29/philosophy-minorities-middleqsex-university-logic

Under the banner of the financial crisis, recent months have seen management threaten departments and jobs  in post-92 and Russell group universities alike. Although no clear national pattern of cuts has emerged, philosophy has been singled out by several institutions. Threats to philosophy at Liverpool and King's College London  were greeted with international outcry and management retreat. Recent news that philosophy recruitment at both undergraduate and postgraduate level at Middlesex University  will be terminated is a particularly terrible blow, both to the standing of philosophy in the UK and to the future of critical thought in our universities as a whole.

Interest in philosophy has in fact grown massively in recent years. This is, in part, due to the increased numbers of students taking A-level philosophy, but is also the result of the widespread desire for critical thought and analysis in the face of an increasingly disorienting world.

Closure at Middlesex would be a step back to the bad old days when philosophy meant a few young, white and almost entirely male students at privileged institutions discussing the finer points of formal logic over sherry. Middlesex University must be prevented from dismantling one of the finest philosophy departments in the country: fight to keep philosophy alive.

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Schumacher Sorry . . .

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/motorsport/formula_one/8878400.stm

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TV Highlights and Lowlife: "Human Life Has No Meaning Here"

Channel 4 ran two major hour long documentaries last night back to back - one on Britain's drugs culture and our hopeless attempts to ban drugs, and the other on the London Hospital's A & E department in Whitechapel and how it deals with the victims of knife crime.

On one level you can say the common denominator in these programmes was drugs, since most knife crime is committed by kids who are pissed or otherwise drugged up, or taking care of their drug businesses.

The excessive use of drugs, and addiction to drugs, however, is clearly just a symptom of people who are spiritually and emotionally sick and incapable of living life in any enlightened way. This type of sickness stems from a failure to develop positive spiritual and emotional intelligence, and what we can call human 'values'. People who are high in spiritual and emotional intelligence are incapable of committing knife crime, and by definition are not habitual users of debilitating drugs. Neither are they capable of inducing others to use drugs, including in some cases their own children.

So the only proper way to rid society of drug addiction and knife crime is to, on the one hand, eliminate poverty and hopelessness, and alongside of that to enable children of all ages to develop high levels of emotional, social and spiritual intelligence.

The problem, however, is that our society is light years away from doing either of these things, especially as virtually no-one understands how to work with children either from regular homes or from at-risk families living in drug-ridden communities in order to ensure they develop these key intelligences.

Virtually no-one understands how those intelligences operate, and hardly anyone has any experience of working in schools in ways that develop those intelligences to high levels, by focusing on them day in and day out. It's doable, but hardly anyone sees the need to do it, and there are far too few teachers who are equipped and trained to do it, or operate to policies in schools that prioritise it. Virtually no schools prioritise the development of emotional, social and spiritual intelligences, since they're too busy 'driving up' academic 'standards' and pass rates.
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And Finally . . .

Rev 'rather good' says Archbishop of Canterbury

Senior church figures flock to praise BBC2 comedy series, which finishes its six-week run tomorrow night

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2010/aug/01/senior-church-figures-rev-bbc

In the beginning was the script. And it was good. So good that it attracted an audience of two million every week to become the highest rating new comedy on BBC2.

A spokesman for the Church of England said it was great to see a church drama on television that did not resort to tired old stereotypes" and instead gave "an edgy insight" into the work of its clergy today.

"Clergy are incredibly gossipy; people don't realise that. It's a radical act to show vicars as human, people expect them to be paragons of patience and virtue. Just like all of us, they are vain, weak and ambitious."

The show, which has attracted more viewers than Big Brother in some weeks, reveals the jealousy, bitterness and rivalry that can exist in clerical circles. One episode is devoted to a "media vicar" who appears on quiz shows, newspaper columns and Thought for the Day.

Last Saturday's Mail magazine even featured the programme on its front page.

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