Stone Cupid Real

I made a little movie and wanted you to see it. I asked my friend Hal if I could use his music, called "Sundust", which was on the Frisell record, and he said ok. And other people involved said ok, too.

How did we let this happen? From the imagined voices near ground zero to the flag-draped coffins, what would the dead tell us, if they could speak, about where we're going?

Here's another link.
Now, if you download and save or share this thing, there are some ground rules on this page, meaning you gotta be cool and not do it for money.

In a post on this blog in December, I pasted a story about the U.S. being behind the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, because we needed their 1,500 or so troops in Iraq and a pro-Western government, which was promising under Yuschenko. The media frenzy surrounding THEIR exit polls and THEIR protests and THEIR march to democracy was significant. And where were we? Being blocked by Blackwell, the courts, and Diebold in Ohio.
NEW UPDATES MARCH 12 2005 A-HA!!! WE ADMIT IT NOW that good old American ingenuity was behind the Orange Revolution , BUT YUSCHENKO'S PULLING HIS UKRANIAN TROOPS OUT OF IRAQ ANYWAY. AWWW, NOT WILLING ANYMORE?.....

I've also posted the very funny videos of Maher on Gannon
Maher onGannon Video DSL QuickTime
Maher on Gannon Video 56k QuickTime
To find this and other great video on Windows Media go here
and Please Support Truthout!
Thanks for these go to Truthout.org, whom I visit all day every day, as you should, too. The best, most reliable news source anywhere, in my opinion.
and here's my good old Gannongate link which I try to update when there's news, ....

There are not enough hours in the day to update this blog with the music I'm listening to properly, but as a quick note, ya gotta see Los Lobos in their current acoustic incarnation while they're on a brief tour. I LOVE Connor Oberst from Bright Eyes. An old Iowa gal like me can really relate, but so could anybody. Martha Wainwright: "Bloody Motherfucking A,;sshole"--a wonderful indictment of the patriarchal, and her voice!!! And Antony and the Johnsons is the embodiment of love--"I am a Bird Now" cradles you in his unbelievable instrument of power and grace: a tour de force. If you can experience this live, it's like visiting an androgynous saint with a voice hovering somewhere between a young Billie Holliday and a fried Joe Cocker. Magnificent.

Unspeakable the fall album from Bill Frisell is a staple in my musical diet... like walking through an audio museum of contemporary jazz art. An amazing piece of work by a couple folks with whom I'm proud to be musically acquainted: Mr. Frisell, with whom I sang at a Randy Newman tribute--a real heart and soul man--, and some other folks who worked on it, and produced by my good friend Hal Willner! BRAVO FOR WINNING THE GRAMMY FOR CONTEMPORARY JAZZ ALBUM LAST NIGHT. I KNEW YOU WOULD...

Review of the Show From the Sydney Morning Herald.....
with my boldface in your face! It was such an honor working with everyone again on this great music, and an Australian woman named Lian is making a documentary film on Leonard for which some of the concert, rehearsals and interviews with artists was filmed. Scotty has beamed most of me back, but some is still on Cloud Nine....
Came So Far For Beauty
By Bernard Zuel
January 31, 2005

Page Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House, January 28

In Leonard Cohen's 1973 song A Singer Must Die, presenting himself
before a panel of stern judges he declares: "I'm sorry for smudging the
air with my song." Some smudge. Some song.

That smudge's lasting imprint on several generations of singers and
fellow songwriters is the subtext of what simplistically would be
called a tribute show but in effect was a celebration of song. Spread
across nearly four hours it was as strong on interpretation as it was
light on unnecessary reverence; as steeped in Jacques Brel and country
music as German cabaret and folk; as joyous as it was moving.

You could see that with a cocked-hip Jarvis Cocker wholly inhabiting
Death of a Ladies Man (in duet with Beth Orton) and bringing a
self-mocking playboy touch to I Can't Forget. And certainly it was
there in Nick Cave, who made us re-evaluate one of Cohen's more
contentious songs, Diamonds In The Mine - "a nasty Leonard Cohen song"
he cheerfully declared - by playing up some Vegas sleaze while the
always impressive and flexible backing group briefly turned into Elvis
Presley's TCB band.

Not that the evening's stars were only the best-known faces. The
Handsome Family took and gave great delight by relocating A Heart With
No Companion to the Kentucky hills, while Teddy Thompson (whose mother
Linda Thompson earlier had hushed the room with The Story of Isaac)
found a bruised centre to lines such as "I choose the rooms that I live
in with care/the windows are small and the walls almost bare".

And in the category of "where the hell has he been hiding?" was the
hulking, shambling figure of New York singer Antony, who left open
mouths on and off the stage with his heart-piercing explorations of The
Guests and the prayer-like If It Be Your Will. (He's playing tonight at
the Vanguard and must be seen.)

What was staggering was how each time you thought the night had just had its peak someone else would stroll on stage and give you another one. And then another. For example, Rufus Wainwright's version of Hallelujah, which escaped from the shadow of Jeff Buckley's seemingly definitive interpretation with an elegant but effortlessly transporting take, is the kind of song that would climax any regular show, but here was presented early in the first set. Three songs later a former Cohen backing vocalist, Julie Christiansen, beautifully balanced The Singer Must Die between pathos and humour and upped the ante again.

Martha Wainwright's bared-to-the-bone Tower of Song was matched by her
appearance with her mother and aunt, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, on a
spare but riveting You Know Who I Am. But soon after that came Perla
Batalla, the other of Cohen's long-term backing vocalists, delivering a
rich, passionate exploration of Bird On a Wire.

It was a wondrous night. A long, winding, rich and constantly rewarding
evening brought to us by the musical equivalent of a fantasy football
team whose dedication was to the work and not the ego.

Somewhere in California you imagine the droll Mr Cohen hearing this and
saying to them, "I thank you, I thank you for doing your duty/you
keepers of truth, you guardians of beauty".

He's their man



January 2, 2005

Leonard Cohen, who for the past decade has been a reclusive devotee of Zen Buddhism.
Photo: Supplied

Leonard Cohen inspires an uncommon kind of devotion among his fans, as the all-star line-up at a tribute concert in Sydney proves. Guy Blackman reports.


"I don’t think he plans on performing any more, and now he doesn’t have to because we’re doing it,” American music industry veteran Hal Willner says of Leonard Cohen. “He is really happy, he has been totally supportive in every way.”

Willner — who has worked with everyone from Sting to Sun Ra and whose credits as a movie soundtrack director include Gangs of New York and Robert Altman’s Short Cuts — is the man behind Came So Far For Beauty, an all-star concert tribute to the music of Leonard Cohen.The concert will be performed for three nights only at the Sydney Opera House later this month, as part of the Sydney Festival.

Already in his 30s when he had his first musical success, the Canadian-born Cohen is now 70. For the past decade he has been a reclusive devotee of Zen Buddhism. It seems unlikely he will ever return to live performance.

Cohen was a respected but relatively obscure poet and novelist in 1968 when his first (and still his most famous) song, Suzanne, introduced a literate, decadent and world-weary romantic vision to the world of pop music. His subsequent body of work, consisting of just 11 studio albums recorded over five decades, has become the subject of more serious analysis and feverish discussion than virtually anyone bar Bob Dylan.

“I just adore Leonard Cohen’s music,” says Willner. “I know it backwards and forwards. So the opportunity to do what I call an exploration or a dissection of his music is fantastic. Hey — I get to choose the set list!”

And the line-up. The hand-picked cast is impeccable, comprising Nick Cave, Beth Orton, Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Rufus and Martha Wainwright, Linda and Teddy Thompson, the Handsome Family and Cohen back-up singers Perla Batalla and Julie Christensen.

Each night these 13 performers will present 31 songs from Cohen’s total canon of 101, with the backing of a nine-piece band.

The show has already been staged in New York and Brighton, England, to uniformly rave reviews — no small feat for a night dedicated to a man whose music inspires such fierce devotion. Late last year Nick Cave told The Age’s Patrick Donovan how Came So Far For Beauty managed to come as far as Australia.

“Hal’s events are notoriously ramshackle, with lots of different people singing,” he said. “In Brighton, it somehow clicked together, and after that we got offers from all over to do more stuff. But we didn’t want to spend the next year doing tributes to Leonard Cohen — we all have other things to do. But the Sydney Opera House is too interesting to pass up.”

Cave is a Cohen fanatic and his version of Cohen’s Tower of Song was included on I’m Your Fan, a tribute album compiled by French rock magazine Les Inrockuptibles in the early 1990s. At that time, Cave was asked how he first fell under Cohen’s spell. “I discovered Leonard Cohen with (his third album) Songs of Love And Hate,” he said. “I listened to this record for hours at a friend’s house. I was very young and I believe this was the first record that really had an effect on me. “In the past, I only listened to my brother’s records. Leonard Cohen was the first one I discovered by myself. He is the symbol of my musical independence.

“I remember these other guys that came to my friend’s house who thought Songs of Love And Hate was too depressing. I’ve realised that this depression theory was ridiculous. The sadness of Cohen was inspirational, it gave me a lot of energy. I always remember this when someone says that my records are morbid or depressing.”

Cave first worked with Willner on a 1999 tribute to filmmaker and American folk music anthologist Harry Smith. Since the early ’80s, Willner has made an unusual career for himself by honouring the work of the world’s most intriguing artists, paying homage to such diverse figures as jazz pianist Thelonious Monk, existentialist German composer Kurt Weill, even Edgar Allan Poe and the Marquis de Sade.

Willner believes the grand theatre of American childhood in the 1960s was the inspiration for his career path. He grew up listening to the Beatles, watching the Rolling Stones and the Moscow Circus on the same TV variety show, hearing Ornette Coleman, Jack Benny and Orson Welles side by side on the radio. “It was an era when the Fireside Theatre and Bill Cosby were on the pop charts. You also had movies like Fellini’s Satyricon. That was the era I grew up in, it was my kind of vaudeville.”

This, however, is the first time Willner has paid tribute to an artist still very much alive. To him, the distinction is just an added bonus. “If he’s still alive, that’s great!” he says. “It’s important to me to have the approval of the artist, especially now when we’re seeing something that we’ve never really seen before in the history of music, which is artists making records 30 or 40 years into their career, doing music as good as it ever was. Some of those songs on Ten New Songs, or Tom Waits’ records, Bob Dylan’s records ... These people have been making records for 40 years. It has never happened before. Look at Sinatra — he had, what, five great years?”

Indeed, Cohen has been comparatively prolific in recent times, releasing two albums in the space of three years. Ten New Songs came in 2001, and was his first album since 1992. In November last year he released Dear Heather. Both continue in the style first adopted on 1988’s I’m Your Man. Their sound is so unfashionably slick, so full of dated synthesisers and soulless saxophone solos, as to be almost timeless. Cohen’s words drop deadpan over a bed of tasteful musical mush, more like a catalyst for the listener’s own emotional response than a direct portrayal of emotion itself. It’s a selfeffacing, almost humble style that accords with Cohen’s embrace of Buddhism.

It’s also an approach that strikes a chord with Rennie Sparks, of American country-noir duo the Handsome Family. “Unfortunately, pop music has become a lot about the personality of the singer, or the singer’s nice ass,” she says. “That’s not really what songwriting is about. A good song should be able to be sung by anybody, it shouldn’t only be the property of one person. That’s what I love about Leonard Cohen — his songs are like that. They’re very personal, but anybody can really sing them and feel them. It’s a magical thing.”

Strangely enough, not all of the performers assembled for Came So Far For Beauty are so fervent about Cohen’s music. Montreal-based Kate McGarrigle, who has been releasing folky, odd and always enchanting albums with sister Anna since 1976, grew up in the same city as Cohen, even attended the same university, but didn’t come to appreciate his music until she and Anna were invited to participate in the concert.

“Suzanne kind of showed up at a time when I wasn’t doing any music,” she says. “At that point I was probably much more into Motown. I never really listened a lot to singer-songwriters, other than Bob Dylan. So Suzanne kind of came and went in my life, and didn’t make any impression on me at all.

“When it really came to mean something was when Hal Willner asked us to do this. He gave us all these records to listen to, and we had to choose songs. We ended up choosing the very early ones, the very simple ones on nylon string guitar, because they reminded us of our youth in coffee houses in the early ’60s, of little simple songs with only three chords. So when we started singing songs like Winter Lady, we suddenly realised how good they were.”

McGarrigle’s children are much less off-hand, however. Rufus and Martha Wainwright, whose father is eccentric ’70s songwriter Loudon Wainwright III, are both huge fans. The flamboyant Rufus has described Cohen as the greatest living poet on Earth, while Martha has been performing Cohen’s Tower of Song in concert for many years.

Rennie Sparks, though, loves Cohen so much he has become more myth than man in her mind. She is one of the few cast members who has never met him, and would prefer to keep it that way.

“I don’t want to know about him as a human being,” she says. “Perla Batalla told me once about going to a dollar store with Leonard Cohen. I don’t know if I want to do that! I just want to imagine him alone in a cave with a little lamp, writing in blood.”

*Came So Far For Beauty is at the Sydney Opera House, Jan 28-30.

The third installment of the ROLLING THUNDER of Leonard's considerable oevre, Hal Willner's Came So Far for Beauty, an evening of Leonard Cohen Songs in which I have been honored to take part, will be heading to Sydney, Australia to three sold-out concerts later this month. Click above for more about it....
What's Cohen on

The 2005 Sydney Festival is about collaboration - that is why a brooding Australian rock poet, among others, is performing the songs of a brooding Canadian rock poet. By Clare Morgan.

There can't be too many occasions when Nick Cave fans would snuggle happily beside devotees of the McGarrigle Sisters. Brooding rock poet Cave sharing the same bill as trilling French-Canadian folk singers Kate and Anna? Hardly. And how comfortable would ultra-hip connoisseurs of Rufus Wainwright be cuddling up to followers of the oddball country duo the Handsome Family?

Pretty comfortable, as it turns out, thanks to Leonard Cohen. In a blueprint for the art of crossover, Came So Far For Beauty - An Evening of Leonard Cohen Songs brought together a line-up that showed no respect for musical borders, with folk-pop songbird Beth Orton, Martha Wainwright, Linda and Teddy Thompson, and former Cohen bandmates Perla Batalla and Julie Christensen joining the abovementioned artists for a one-off performance in New York in 2003.

The show was repeated last May in Brighton, England, and in the audience was Brett Sheehy, the hyperactive director of the Sydney Festival, who knew immediately he wanted the show for Sydney. "It was just musical heaven," he said.

Sheehy isn't one to think small, but with only eight months until the festival he was pessimistic about his chances as he dashed backstage.

He even admits to being a bit starstruck: "I was in this room with all this awesome talent, looking at my shoes and a bit nervous, and said 'Gosh, if anyone wants to come to Sydney next January then, you know, it'd be great'. And to a woman and man they said 'Yeah, let's do it' ... I'd like to be able to say it was all down to us, but it was delivered on a platter to us by those artists."

Sheehy was amazed by the mix in the audience. "There were the Cohen dinosaurs like me, the Pulp fans for Jarvis Cocker and the Nick Cave fans, then all the underground and avant-garde types who were there for Rufus Wainwright and all the folk fans for the McGarrigle Sisters. The floor was jumping. To feel in the audience the different patches when people were responding to their favourite artists was amazing."

Crossover is a big theme of this year's festival, with the Cohen event just one of several that feature what might seem unlikely collaborations. Take the festival centrepiece, The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets. The musical fable is based on a book by beat poet William S. Burroughs; Tom Waits wrote the music and lyrics; and it is being staged by ground-breaking director Robert Wilson. John Rockwell, culture critic for The New York Times, described it as a kind of hybrid of Cabaret, The Threepenny Opera and The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Following are some of the agencies accepting contributions
for aid to people affected by the earthquake and tsunami in
Asia.

OXFAM AMERICA
Donor Services Department
26 West Street
Boston, MA
12111-1206
800-77-OXFAM


DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS
P.O. Box 1856
Merrifield, Va.
22116-8056
888-392-0392


INTERNATIONAL FEDERATION OF RED CROSS/RED CRESCENT


INTERNATIONAL MEDICAL CORPS
Earthquake/Tsunami Relief
1919 Santa Monica Boulevard,
Suite 300
Santa Monica, Calif. 90404
800-481-4462

ACTION AGAINST HUNGER
247 West 37th Street, Suite 1201
New York, N.Y. 10018
212-967-7800 x108

AMERICAN FRIENDS SERVICE COMMITTEE
AFSC Crisis Fund
1501 Cherry Street
Philadelphia, Pa. 19102
215-241-7000

ISLAMIC RELIEF USA
Southeast Asia Earthquake Emergency
P.O. Box 6098
Burbank, Calif. 91510
888-479-4968

AMERICAN JEWISH WORLD SERVICE
45 West 36th Street, 10th Floor
New York, N.Y. 10018
800-889-7146

DIRECT RELIEF INTERNATIONAL
27 South La Patera Lane
Santa Barbara, Calif. 93117
805-964-4767

MERCY CORPS
Southeast Asia Earthquake Response
Dept. W
P.O. Box 2669
Portland, Ore. 97208
800-852-2100

INTERNATIONAL ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN
CHARITIES
Asia Disaster Response
P.O. Box 630225
Baltimore, MD 21263-0225
877-803-4622

OPERATION USA
8320 Melrose Avenue, Suite 200
Los Angles,
Calif. 90069
800-678-7255

SAVE THE CHILDREN
Asia Earthquake/Tidal Wave Relief Fund
54 Wilton Road
Westport, Conn. 06880
800-728-3843

( I checked the gushy corporate donor page against "choosetheblue.org"
and it looks to be as much blue as red. Let's hope the corporate
partners give a lot, too...)
I actually went to the web pages of all the charities listed in the New
York Times and left off some that looked too partisan, and American Red
Cross and a couple others that have been in the news as being shady.
If you'd care to see that full list, you can go here:
NEW YORK TIMES

Have a safe and strong new year.