Leonard Cohen: the determinator, Details Magazine, July 1993

Leonard Cohen, the maestro of melancholy, answers questions on love, obsession, and despair

What’s the one thing men ought to know about women? A.B. (Berkeley, CA)
    They are deeply involved in a pattern of thought centered around the notion of commitment.

What’s the one thing women ought to know about men? T.M. (Worcester, MA)
    A man steadfastly refuses to eavesdrop on his conversation with himself.

Is there a difference between love and obsession? F.S. (Phoenix, AZ)
    It is the same difference between the Sermon on the Mount and the Crucifixion.

What do men really want? B.B. (Houston, TX)
    A square deal.

What would be the most appropriate thing for a guy to say to a girl after sex? J.H. (New York, NY)
    Thank you.

I am twenty-eight; I work and attend college. I have been single for three years and love women but have developed a strong attraction for Italian men only. I have repeated dreams about them. What should I do? J.G. (Los Angeles, CA)
    This habitual drift toward the trivial will continue to make you suffer.

Is it possible to be madly in love with more than one person at a time? M.B. (San Jose, Costa Rica)
    It is possible to be in love with more than one person at a time but not “madly in love.”

Is honesty always the best policy? G.W. (Hartford, CT)
    In my case, yes. In your case, rarely.

How can you tell if you’re in love? C.H. (Fort Lauderdale, FL)
    You dissolve your strategy for the other.

Why is having an orgasm so exhilarating? N.P. (Portland, OR)
    You stop thinking about yourself.

How can I remain friends with my former lover? R.A. (Chicago, IL)
    Move to another country.

Is it possible to achieve love without desire? S.O. (Washington, DC)
    Yes.

Are there any examples of good or healthy sexual relationships in the Bible? P.R. (Cleveland, OH)
    The patriarchs and their wives stand as shining examples of possible human marriages. The love of Jesus for Mary Magdalene continues to inspire me.

Is loneliness necessarily a sad thing? M.C. (Atlanta, GA)
    Yes, it is designed to be that way.

How long does it take to recover from a bad relationship? S.T. (Baltimore, MD)
    You never recover from a bad relationship.

I feel humiliated and exposed by my needs and my desires, even when they’re reciprocated. How can I deal with this? T.D. (London, England)
    You feel humiliated and confused anyway. Do not confuse the issue with your needs and desires.

Does there have to be democracy in sexual fantasies? I love tying up my lover, but I don’t want him to tie me up. C.H. (Middlebury, VT)
    You are already tied up.

Why do people marry? M.D. (Hudson, OH)
    I don’t know. Ask the man who owns one.

My Sky Blue Trades, Sven Birkerts

And then, one afternoon, kneeling down in a new section, I pulled out a book called The Tower Treasure, one of the very first in the Hardy Boys series. And with that began a reading obsession that lasted right into the early sixth grade. I read and reread the books — there were forty-some, I think. I borrowed them from the library, requested them as gifts, used allowance money to buy them; I even asked my mother to drop me off at the Birmingham bookshop whenever she went into town to do errands. There I would stand in place and read, knocking off forty or fifty pages at a stretch, dreading the shoulder tap that would mean it was time to go.

The Hardy Boys series gave me a complete and ongoing world — a world of danger and intrigue offset by what I now see as the cliches of cheery home life, but which then seemed the essence of what I wanted. Their town, Bayport, managed to condense the whole voluptuous larger universe, complete with gangsters, police, shady establishments, boathouses, deserted farmsteads, warehouses, train stations, wilds of all descriptions — everything, in short, required for every imaginable adventure. I entered in a state of joyous trepidation. To have one of the books under way, safely secreted on the shelf by my bed, was to have a validated ticket to immunity. Then it did not matter in the least if I was passed over for some playground team or whether my father came roaring up the driveway in one of his moods. It did not even matter that, catching sight of me propped on a pillow in my bed, he sent me out into the yard with a rake or clippers or some other instrument of manual repetition. I had only to think of my book, the marker like a signpost showing me the road back in, and I would feel safe.

My absorption into the world of Frank and Joe Hardy bled into my daily life as no reading experience has since, not quite. When I now read of others growing up with loftier excitements — those mythic schoolboys devouring their Dickens or Scott or Kipling — I feel slightly chagrined. But the fact is that I don't know if I could have hurled myself into those other imagined worlds in the same way. Part of my Hardy Boys obsession had to do with my susceptibility to renderings of American boyhoods (I also loved Penrod, Tom Sawyer, A Separate Peace). I was drawn by the mysteries, of course. But I was no less deeply compelled by the settings, the images I derived of an ideal boy-world. I loved the idea of these brothers with their lightly ribbing loyalty, their constant interactions with their buddies — “chums” — the extraordinary freedom with which they went about their complicated and endlessly exciting business. Nothing could have been more different from how I lived.

My Sky Blue Trades: Growing Up Counter In A Contrary Time, 
Sven Birkerts

A Positively Final Appearance, Alec Guinness

A refurbished Star Wars is on somewhere or everywhere. I have no intention of revisiting any galaxy. I shrivel inside each time it is mentioned. Twenty years ago, when the film was first shown, it had a freshness, also a sense of moral good and fun. Then I began to be uneasy at the influence it might be having. The bad penny first dropped in San Francisco when a sweet-faced boy of twelve told me proudly that he had seen Star Wars over a hundred times. His elegant mother nodded with approval. Looking into the boy's eyes I thought I detected little star-shells of madness beginning to form and I guessed that one day they would explode.

“I would love you to do something for me,” I said.

“Anything! Anything!” the boy said rapturously.

“You won't like what I'm going to ask you to do,” I said.

“Anything, sir, anything!”

“Well,” I said, “do you think you could promise never to see Star Wars again?”

He burst into tears. His mother drew herself up to an immense height. “What a dreadful thing to say to a child!” she barked, and dragged the poor kid away. Maybe she was right but I just hope the lad, now in his thirties, is not living in a fantasy world of secondhand, childish banalities.

A couple of weeks ago, in a Chinese restaurant, the dapper little Chinese maître D bowed low as I left and, full of Chinese smiles, said, “Sir Guin, now that Star Wars is being shown again you will be famous once more.” Oh, to be Ernest Thesiger.

The mornings, during the past few weeks, have started quite sharply and yet gently blurred in hazy sunshine. There is a very rounded cherry tree in the middle of the paddock, now in flower, but the haze softly obliterates the trunk of the tree, leaving the blossom looking as if it might be a small pinkish-white cloud that has settled with us. It spreads a feeling of calm like a blessing. I stand out of doors in my dressing-gown, gazing at it with gratitude, but know that all too soon there will be a thud of letters falling through the letter-box, including glossy photographs which no ordinary pen can sign. As often as not they have already been signed in a sprawling gilded signature by “Darth Vader” from Star Wars —“so-and-so IS Darth Vader.” Maybe — but it wasn't so-and-so's voice or face (when it was finally revealed) to the best of my remembrance. The “IS”, I suppose, is for reassurance, like clutching at something when waking from a bad dream.

Last Sunday, as Mass was finishing, a young man leaned over my shoulder and said, “My pop is a great fan of Star Wars. Will you say hello to him as you leave the church?”

I asked where his father was.

“At the back in a wheelchair,” he said.

The priest gave his blessing and the ritual words, “The Mass is over, go in peace.”

“Thanks be to God,” we chorused back, the young man adding, “And can I have your autograph?”

“Not here,” I replied rather crossly.

At the back of the church, sitting in a wheelchair, was a large, middle-aged, genial-looking man. I went up to him all smiles, like a baby-kissing politician, and exuding the sweet benevolence of a hospital-visiting princess. I took him warmly by the hand and made one or two fatuous inquiries. He suddenly said the dreaded words — “Star Wars!”

“Ugh —hugh –uh –ha –hm,” I said, but I kept up my smile.

“Obi-Wan Kenobi,” he nodded at me and, for good measure, “May the Force be with you.”

“And also with you,” I replied, to ecclesiastical merriment.

“The Man In The White Suit; that was you, wasn't it?”

“Yes, about forty-five years ago,” I replied, with a sense of relief that we might have reached saner ground; anyway terra firma. Then his face became grave and he said, “Darth Vader.” 

I backed away as quickly as possible, sketched him a valedictory wave of the hand and stumbled down the church steps into fresh air and morning sunlight. The young man pursued me. “The autograph,” he said, quite politely. But that was suddenly too much for me. “Not in front of the parishioners,” I said. Then I disappeared.

A second later I was deeply ashamed but the damage had been done. No excuse. Just sudden bloody-mindedness and panic. It's no good saying to myself, “Watch out in these declining years, things could turn nasty.” Donkey's years ago I remember seeing an elderly man in Harrods screaming and screaming at a shop assistant because she was buffing her nails. I felt sad contempt for him and it never occurred to me to mutter, “There, but for the Grace of God, go I some day in the future.”

The evening news announced that dust bowls have formed on the dry farmlands of Cornwall. Cornwall, of all places, where there used to be so many hedges.

We all need hedges, I thought. They don't have to be prickly though, like mine.

“I was world-weary, and I always complained a lot.”

Do you miss Walter when you’re writing lyrics on your own?

Yeah, for sure.

Do you two exchange ideas, and can we assume that there will be more Steely Dan?

We’ve been talking about it for a couple of years. But he’s been spending a lot of time with his family and that’s what he’s into now.

When people say they’re spending a lot of time with their family, I always think there’s some other covert reason they’re not saying.

Walter always tells me that what he likes best to do is nothing. He likes to hang.

And what do you like best?

Work.

Donald Fagen interview, 2012

Unassigned Territory, Kem Nunn

Harlan stood for several minutes at [the room's] center, in the darkness. He was trying to figure it but found he hadn't enough to go on. An affair of the heart, perhaps. Harlan had given in to an affair of the heart once. He had been eighteen years old at the time. He had run away with a neighbor's wife and they had gone to Kansas City. His father and the woman's husband had come looking for them. It was an absurd story. At least it seemed absurd to Harlan. The woman's husband wound up pulling a gun on him in their apartment. He wasn't very good with it and Harlan had taken it away from him. Then his father, who had been looking in another room downstairs, had come up and Harlan had fought his father. He could have taken his father but he hadn't.

In the end -- not the night of the fight, but in the end -- Harlan had done what his father wanted -- he had gone home. What he had found at the time was that living with the woman was doing something to him. When he had left with her he understood he was breaking a rule. But he thought it was only one rule; he had thought that he could violate one principle and yet still live by the others, and what he found was that it didn't work that way. Later he believed he had learned the truth of Paul's words when he said that God's Word was like a mirror in which a man might see not only the man he was but the man he might be, and he came to understand that the proper business of life was trying to do something about the difference. It was the revelation which had pointed him down the road he still followed. It was about keeping honest and as near as Harlan could tell, obedience to the Word was the only thing that worked.

Harlan went to an open window. The night air was cool against his face. He could see a bit of the road and above that the ridge which led to the interstate. Above the ridge the sky was filled with stars. He tried for a moment to imagine what the girl the Wheeler boy had run off with might be like. Neil Davis had described her as a common whore. The curious thing about that was, it was more or less the way Harlan's father had once described the woman Harlan had run away with. There were times when it suited him to imagine he no longer remembered the woman's name, but he did. He continued to stand at the window, to examine the huge black shape the ridge had cut from the starlit sky. The woman's name was Virginia. At one point during the summer of his eighteenth birthday she had given him a record as a present -- the Paul Whiteman recording of "I'm Coming, Virginia." It was supposed to be a joke, something she had picked up in a secondhand store. The thing turned out to be something of a collector's item, however, as it contained a cornet solo by Bix Beiderbecke and there were times now, when Harlan thought of her, when he imagined he could still hear the pure tone of Bix's horn as it filled a cheap two-room flat complete with bamboo shades and colored lights, windows open upon hot summer nights.

The woman had died some ten years later, or so Harlan had been told, in a Memphis hospital of cirrhosis of the liver -- an ugly death and what he supposed was the point of the story, what one ought to remember about the pursuit of empty pleasures. That he remembered more, that the cheap trappings of a romantic sentimentality still clung to the episode like the scent of a dime store perfume, was a nagging source of irritation. That the trappings were capable, on occasion, of generating actual tears, was worse than irritating. But then he supposed there was a point in all of that too. It had something to do with the stuff choices were made of. Though not a subject he ordinarily talked about, it was, he thought, under the circumstances, something he might take up with a certain Obadiah Wheeler, should the opportunity present itself.

True Believers, Kurt Andersen

Back in 1963 people thought they were seeing the future when Gordon Cooper spent a day in outer space circling the earth. But when I look back now at the long weekend after John Kennedy's assassination, I realize that was the big time-warped glimpse into the twenty-first century. In 1963 it was unprecedented and bizarre to have nothing but news and discussions of news events airing on all three TV channels around the clock for days on end, and to have that clip of Ruby shooting Oswald played again and again. I sit with a plastic pint of sugar-free green-tea gelato and a purring Clarence Darrow on my lap, flipping between MSNBC and CNN and FOX, driven from one to the other and back by ads for pharmaceuticals and gold. On every channel, people are talking about the latest breakdown of talks with Iran. In the last forty-five minutes, I've listened to a dozen different anchors and experts and commentators and have learned absolutely nothing I didn't know from reading the story in the newspaper this morning. For a few months last year, when I stopped watching cable news altogether, I think I felt slightly mellower and happier, like when I gave up cigarettes and Diet Coke, or when mosquito season ends. And as with cigarettes, I've come to believe cable news is slowly killing us, giving us intellectual emphysema, cancer of the mind. After all, people smoked for the better part of a century before they really knew it could be fatal.

True Believers, Kurt Andersen

Power Chord: One Man's Ear-Splitting Quest To Find His Guitar Heroes, by Thomas Scott McKenzie

"She's my shovel," Brad Gillis said when I asked about the battered Stratocaster his guitar tech had shown me on the side of the stage. It's a 1962 model that he obtained in 1979 when a friend abandoned a project to paint the guitar. It wasn't a huge acquisition at the time because the guitar player had a black Les Paul Custom that he adored. But he started customizing the Strat on a bit of a lark.

"I had a Datsun 240Z that was custom painted with red-orange paint," he said. "I had an extra can left over for touch up. I sold the car, but still had the paint. I thought, 'Shit, I'll paint this guitar in car red.' I took it to a body shop."

He then had the neck and headstock painted black, which was an unusual treatment back then. He added a Floyd Rose tremolo, changed the pickups, and made numerous other alterations.

"Whatever the hell I wanted," he said. "An extra fret, locking nuts, tuners, I changed everything. Then I started playing and I thought, 'This is a fucking great guitar.'" The instrument has never been far from his side for the last thirty years.

The interesting thing about workhorse guitars is how they are treated with both reverence and abandon by their owners. These instruments contain decades of memories, successes, and failures. They carry the scars of tens of thousands of miles on the road. They often have the dried blood of musicians caked in cracks and crevices. On his website, Steve Vai writes movingly about one of his instruments that he calls Evo:

Although Evo is just made out of wire and wood, I'm afraid of how much emotional investment I have in her. I think when you play an instrument long enough it becomes an extension of yourself in ways that run deeper than anyone may understand but you . . . For me, Evo has been the voice of my heart and seen the depth of my most depressed emotional frames of mind to my most euphoric moments of joy and divine love, and she usually gets the brunt of it all. I have cried, screamed, prayed, and bled through that instrument, and like I said, although she is only wire and wood, there is an emotional investment in her. I'm afraid at how much I love her

Musicians aren't the only ones to cherish their guitars. As fans, we invest tremendous sentimental value (and therefore, a cold hard cash value) in the instruments that produced our favorite songs -- enough value that celebrity-owned guitars fetch huge amounts at auction. Eric Clapton's Fender Stratocaster, nicknamed Blackie, brought an astounding $959,500 at a Christie's auction in 2004. Slowhand sold the instrument, along with many others from his collection, to raise money for his drug rehab program in the Caribbean. The idea of parting ways with the guitar didn't seem to bother him, at least not when compared with the good work the money would make possible. But I went out and purchased a lottery ticket, hoping to win enough to buy the guitar. My plan was to win the auction and then loan the guitar back to Clapton. It just didn't seem right -- in my mind -- that he should be without the guitar. After his passing, maybe it would come back to me or to a museum.

But in spite of the fervor with which the instruments are honored, the musicians still manage to thrash them around every night. I've seen Vai play his cherished Evo with such abandon and fury that I thought he would rip it apart onstage. It felt like watching a cheetah tear into a gazelle on Wild Kingdom.

Brad Gillis was no different with his beloved '62 Strat.

"I still beat the shit out of that guitar," he said. "I'm still playing it hard."

Mr. Gillis, with shovel.