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Cargando... Leonard Cohen (1996)por Ira Bruce Nadel
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Known as the "Prince of Bummers," Leonard Cohen is a multi-talented poet, singer-songwriter, novelist, and Zen Buddhist whose career has spanned more than forty years and inspired countless other artists. In this critically acclaimed biography originally published in 1996 by Pantheon Books, Ira Nadel draws on extensive interviews with Cohen, as well as excerpts from his unpublished letters, journals, notebooks, songs, and other writings, to offer a full portrait of this enigmatic man and his artistic career. A new concluding chapter brings Cohen's story up-to-date, including the release of the albums Dear Heather,Ten New Songs,The Essential Leonard Cohen, andBlue Alert, as well as the publication ofBook of Longingand the screening of the documentary filmLeonard Cohen, I'm Your Man. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Nadel's excellent biography, for its part, is filled with many insightful and diverting anecdotes, although less actual poetic criticism than I'd prefer, and if I'm not rating it a flawless success, then it maybe has more to do with the limits of the biographical form, which is hard to do except by the numbers--its nearest fictional equivalent, the bildungsroman, allows delights and departures the likes of which poor plodding biography, with its "and then this happened, and then this, and then this", has difficulty aspiring to. Various Positions also plays up the tensions and tradeoffs between the authorized and unauthorized biography--the stories, the access, and the general envelope of approval that make this function as an insider work also mean that Cohen is treated to lightly in a world that has treated him too lightly, because he was a priest and a prophet and not a rock 'n' roll ego. But even that voice that climbs the stairs and calls us by our name again and again has faltered, even the intensity that we honour in this man and causes us to forgive what in, you know, Jimmy Page was just douchery, doesn't disguise the fact that he failed a whole host of people in his life who needed him to be just a reliable man, when what he needed was to be free. That's the tradeoff.
It also doesn't disguise the fact that the sixties in general treated women, not like chattels, but like bodies first and humans only if they made that extra effort to shine--and that the route to humanity was often through the body and its efforts. It was a necessary stage, I guess, but it doesn't do to treat it with the indulgent and often prurient eye (liberal, professor, ex-cocktail party guy, wears Armani and turtlenecks?) that Nadel brings. I'm going to put this into italics, as a dictum: Except where unavoidable, use blonde and brunette as adjectives. It would have done a lot, even for sweaty-palmed scenes like the "six-foot-two blonde clad in tinfoil" outside Cohen's hotel room.
But you know, there is a new edition coming out to reflect Cohen's strange last act, the loss of his fortune and so forth, and maybe some of that language will change. I understand that Nadel was trying to sell books, and maybe in 2010 we at last don't need the girl to sell the car. And this is (lest it be forgot) an excellent survey of a life in art, and who knows which particular bit of trivia will been something to the particular reader (I always think on the bit about the women taking over and letting men go and fuck around like we do, which is pertinent and perhaps ironic in light of this review); and Nadel is especially good on the interplay between Cohen's Zen and Judaism. I enjoyed this reread. ( )