Stone Cupid Real

...He's the sweetest dog I know. Please adopt your animals and love them (but be responsible with and for them). "I'm trying to be the person my dog thinks I am."

Here's a picture of Rothko just after we adopted him at 8-9 weeks old.

 And another pic of him with our friend Vonder recently.

And here's a nice link to pet psychic Laura Stinchfield's interview with another smart, sweet pit bull named Daisy Mae. 

Here is the flashpoint for the resurgence of an anti-war movement. Thank you, Cindy. You are very brave.
Camp Casey updates and videos 24/7 on Truthout.org
"I have a broken heart. And I shouldn't have a broken heart."--Cindy Sheehan to George W. Bush
TODAY (August 17th) IN THE NEW YORK TIMES... Doesn't it seem with all of W's neighbor's complaining, he could just do the neighborly thing and TALK TO CINDY??? No, because he will never be able to look her in the eye.
Here is her letter from California, TODAY, Saturday, August 20th. She's with her mom, who's had a stroke.

This image is not Cindy Sheehan, This is another protester at Camp Casey in Crawford, picking up the pieces from Monday night's attack on Arlington West... And here's a letter up on Truthout TODAY, Saturday, August 20, from a retired Sergeant who lost two soldiers in Iraq to the Texan who mowed those crosses down...
You Mowed Down His Cross
By Perry Jefferies, First Sergeant, USA (retired)
t r u t h o u t | Letter

Thursday 18 August 2005

Mr. Northern:

I am a Veteran of the Iraq war, having served with the 4th Infantry Division on the initial invasion with Force Package One.

While I was in Iraq, a very good friend of mine, Christopher Cutchall, was killed in an un-armored HMMWV outside of Baghdad. He was a cavalry scout serving with the 3d ID. Once he had declined the award of a medal because Soldiers assigned to him did not receive similar awards that he had recommended. He left two sons and a wonderful wife. On Monday night, August 16, you ran down the memorial cross erected for him by Arlington West.

One of my Soldiers in Iraq was Roger Turner. We gave him a hard time because he always wore all of his protective equipment, including three pairs of glasses or goggles. He did this because he wanted to make sure that he returned home to his family. He rode a bicycle to work every day to make sure that he was able to save enough money on his Army salary to send his son to college. At Camp Anaconda, where the squadron briefly stayed, a rocket landed inside a tent, sending a piece of debris or fragment into him and killed him. On Monday night, August 16, you ran down the memorial cross erected for him by Arlington West.

One of my Soldiers was Henry Bacon. He was one of the finest men I ever met. He was in perfect shape for a man over forty, working hard at night. He told me that he did that because he didn't have much money to buy nice things for his wife, who he loved so much, so he had to be in good shape for her. He was like a father to many young men in his section of maintenance mechanics. They fixed our vehicles with almost no support and fabricated parts and made repairs that kept our squadron rolling on the longest, fastest armor advance ever made under fire. He was so very proud of his son-in-law that married the beautiful daughter so well raised by Henry. His son-in-law was a helicopter pilot with the 1st Cavalry Division, who died last year. Henry stopped to rescue a vehicle belonging to another unit on what was to be his last day in Iraq. He could have kept rolling - he was headed to Kuwait after a year's tour. But he stopped. He could have sent others to do the work, but he was on the ground, leading by example, when he was killed. On Monday night, August 16, you took it upon yourself to go out in the country, where a peaceful group was exercising their constitutional rights, and harming no one, and you ran down the memorial cross erected for Henry and for his son-in-law by Arlington West.

Mr. Northern - I know little about Cindy Sheehan except that she is a grieving mother, a gentle soul, and wants to bring harm to no one. I know little about you except that you found your way to Crawford on Monday night in August with chains and a pipe attached to your truck for the sole purpose of dishonoring a memorial erected for my friends and lost Soldiers and hundreds of others that served this nation when they were called. I find it disheartening that good men like these have died so that people like you can threaten a mother who lost a child with your actions. I hope that you are ashamed of yourself.

Perry Jefferies, First Sergeant, USA (retired)

See also another entry about Cindy and her son on this blog, thanks to Will Pitt,
here:
The subject of PTSD is very compelling to me in this war, and in these times. That day in March I had searched PTSD and gotten a few hits. I did another search today on truthout google for PTSD, and got 55 hits.
By the way, the title of that entry was "These Boys Are in Pain". And I wrote a song for my new album called "Boy in Pain", and it began because a friend of my son was struggling. March 20th, I found just now, held
THIS ARTICLE in the Chicago Tribune, reprinted in Truthout, about FEMALE SOLDIERS coming home with TWICE the levels of PTSD. Girls in Pain, too. And it's hard to get sympathy (and treatment) when you wear your pain on the inside...

I found all this great stuff at my daily digest here at truthout.org


Making the Most of Mother's Day
This great piece by Rebecca Ephraim from Alternet includes great reminders about a stellar daughter, Marla Ruzicka, and why Mother's Day (for Peace) was created by Julia Ward Howe in the 1870's after our own Civil War:

Making the Most of Mother's Day
By Rebecca Ephraim AlterNet Saturday 07 May 2005.

This Mother's Day, why not follow in the tradition that Julia Ward Howe set and Marla Ruzicka exemplified.
I grudgingly admit that the big things I wanted when I was a young adult were fame and fortune.
Yes, I can rationalize that I wasn't alone in my youthful lust for more, more, more for me, me, me.
But then there's the audacious northern Californian, Marla Ruzicka, whose stirring death in Iraq last month,
at age 28, was an elegant reminder of how stuck we can be in our boundless self-interests.

It's as if her bigger-than-life role as a long-time advocate for the victims of war was a giant finger poking
at the tightly woven cocoon many of us have spun (consciously or not) that insulates us from acknowledging the ravages of armed struggle on the lives of ordinary people in other lands. Yes, she did the heavy lifting for a lot of us.

Ruzicka, by dint of personality and pluck, sought out politicians (for aid money), U.S. soldiers (for clearing
landmines) and the media (to cover the plight of civilian Iraqis) so she could assist displaced families and orphaned children who were either bombed by mistake or simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ironically, this woman who had made helping victims of war her life's work was "collateral damage" herself when a car bomb meant for another target, killed her and two others on April 16. She was on her way to help an Iraqi child. I recall I was on my way to the mall.

It was a stunning realization that this smart and pretty blonde -- 20 years my junior -- had done more at her age, as Vermont's U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy put it, "than most people do in a lifetime."

Yes, Marla Ruzicka was a daughter any mom could be proud of. "She cared about people and gave people her love and help," her own mother, Nancy, was quoted as saying following her daughter's death. "I'll remember the love she spread around the world and the good ambassador that she was for her country."

In one sense -- and not as tacky as it sounds -- Marla Ruzicka's death comes just in time for Mother's Day. Her acts of compassion in war-torn countries renew the importance that Julia Ward Howe gave to the act of honoring mothers in the late 1800's. You could say Mother's Day was her brainchild; but flowers and chocolates didn't figure in.

Julia Ward Howe is probably best known for writing the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Yet, like Marla Ruzicka, Howe witnessed first-hand the carnage and suffering of war -- for her, the Civil War, taking place on our own shores. She was shocked by the staggering deaths, injuries and disease among the soldiers, the devastating toll it took upon the widows and orphans she worked with and the ensuing economic crises that followed the war.

It was from this seminal experience that in 1870, Howe composed a Mother's Day Proclamation calling on women to
rise up and "solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace. Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God."

This Mother's Day, why not follow in the tradition that Julia Ward Howe set and Marla Ruzicka exemplified. Both embraced the great human family, drawing no distinctions between "them" and "us." Let's honor the valued women in our lives by making peace a priority, whether it's making peace at home or a half a world away. Even better, as you sit with your family this Mother's Day, read Howe's original Proclamation aloud knowing that we all can't soar with eagles -- but we can carve the turkey and aspire to doing a little more to make the world a better place.

Did you get what you wanted on Mother's Day?
Wow. These women are up to something: www.wand.org
This one came into view after Mother's Day, but it sure fits the bill...

A Mothers' War

By Cynthia Gorney

The New York Times

Sunday 29 May 2005

    Go to Original

They were talking about military burial benefits as the waitress took the salad plates away, and one of them had come up with something perversely humorous even on this subject, so they had been laughing. Now there was a brief, comfortable silence. They had one of the back rooms at Boone Tavern in downtown Columbia, Mo., where they usually go. It was a Friday night in February, and because one woman had other plans, there were only five of them, which made the big, round table seem too large. Instead of spacing themselves around it, they had taken seats along one side, closer to one another.
    Patricia said, "I had a doorbell moment this week."  Tracy Della Vecchia looked up quickly and watched Patricia's face. Tracy's son had gone to high school with Patricia's son, so Tracy and Patricia knew of each other during the years when all the teenagers would hole up drinking beer in the barn on Tracy's property. But now their sons were 22 and in the same Marine unit in Iraq, and Tracy knows things about Patricia that she has never known about another person before. Tracy knows that clipped to Patricia's refrigerator is a list of things to remember in case the telephone rings in the middle of the night and it's Patricia's son calling from a camp somewhere just to talk. Tracy knows that the grandfather clock in Patricia's house chimes nine times when the other clocks say it's noon because the grandfather clock is set to Baghdad time. Tracy knows that Patricia has figured out how to tell if someone is in her driveway by squinting at the reflection off a certain glass-covered picture in the dining room, so that if it should ever be two men in uniform, Patricia will know they have arrived before they start ringing the bell and before she is obliged to look directly at them and hear what they have come to say.  "It was last night," said Patricia, who asked that her last name not be used. "Around 8 p.m. I was home by myself. I was not expecting the doorbell." Patricia said she finally saw that it was an older gentleman, alone. "Probably canvassing for leukemia or something," she said. She said she never did open the door for him, and the other women said, no, of course not, and Tracy told the story about the blue car at dawn. She was telling it for my benefit; the others nodded as she spoke, like church women hearing a familiar passage of
Scripture. "This was Derrick's first deployment, 2003, right after the war
started," Tracy said. "I was a basket case. Five-thirty in the morning, I'm not sleeping anyway, I go downstairs and make coffee. You've seen my house -- nobody ever comes down my driveway. But a car comes down my driveway. A Lincoln Town Car." "Crown Victoria," Sharon Curry said. "Sorry," Tracy said. "A dark blue Crown Vic. Thank you, Sharon. And it's got these little antennas. And I'm sure someone's coming to tell me my son has died. I'm sure of it. And I literally fall down on my knees. I'm saying to myself, You've got to answer the door, you've got to answer the door. I'm yelling for my husband, but nothing's coming out of my mouth. I'm crawling toward the door. The car turns around the driveway circle. It stops for a minute. I think: O.K.
He's going to get out. He's going to come tell me now. And -- he drives away. I come busting out the door. 'Wait! Wait!' But he didn't. So I call 911: 'There's somebody at my door! My son's in Iraq!' Turns out it's the fire district. There was smoke coming from someplace. They were going up and down driveways trying to find out where it was from."

Tracy has a wide, beautiful face, with pale skin and thick black hair that curls down her back, and her expression was complicated, at once anguished and amused, in a way I was beginning to recognize. She lives and works on 15 acres outside town in a two-story house, where she runs a Web site called marineparents.com, which she built after she understood that her 19-year-old son, who enlisted two years earlier in the Marines, was going to be sent to war. The Web site has sprouted message boards, chat rooms and multiple layers of explanatory information, turning it into a national gathering place for adults whose sole connection is their role as parents of marines. Tracy tries to devote part of each day to her Web-design business, but most of her waking hours are now spent attending to marineparents.com, hunched in a silent office before a computer in which pride and grief and bewilderment and rage seem to be crashing around all the time, so that sometimes Tracy just pushes back from the desk and walks outside to smoke a cigarette and look at her pond. She signs her e-mail messages "semper fi." She is 43 and once thought she would become a hippie. When her son was small and received toy guns as presents, she threw them into the trash.
    That son, Derrick Jensen, has spent three birthdays in a row deployed in Iraq. There are about 140,000 American troops stationed in Iraq; 23,000 of them are marines. As this article appears, Corporal Jensen should be somewhere near Falluja. He is an infantry radio operator, which sounded to Tracy like a good, safe job until she found out that radio operators carry big antennas, which make them easier targets. She let me stay at her house for a while this winter partly because I am a reporter and happen to have a 22-year-old son who is not in the military. Tracy thought people like me might want to know something about what it's like to live all the time with that kind of information about your child, to go to sleep knowing it and wake up knowing it and drive around town knowing it, which makes it possible to be standing in the Wal-Mart dog-food aisle on
an ordinary afternoon and without reason or warning be knocked breathless again by the sudden imagining of sniper fire or an explosion beneath a Humvee. Still. Derrick has been shipped home twice since President Bush delivered his May 2003 speech in front of the "Mission Accomplished" banner on the deck of an aircraft carrier, and shipped back twice. He has had one occasion of near death that Tracy knows about in some detail; there are others, she assumes, that Derrick has so far kept to himself. "During the first deployment," Tracy said to me
once as we were sitting in her car, a lipstick-red PT Cruiser with a yellow "Keep My Son Safe" ribbon magnet on the back, "the only emotion I could imagine him having was fear." Tracy's closest friends in the world right now are other parents whose sons and daughters have served in Iraq or are serving there now.
Some of these parents think the war is righteous, some think it was wrongheaded from the outset and some, like Tracy, have made fierce internal bargains with themselves about what they will and will not think about as long as their children and their children's comrades remain in uniform and in harm's way.

The women Tracy meets every week for dinner, each of whom has a son in the Marines or the Army, have a "no politics" rule around their table; this was one of two things I remember Tracy telling me the first time she took me to a gathering of the mothers. The other thing was that draped over a banister in Tracy's house was an unwashed T-shirt Derrick had dropped during his last visit home. I thought Tracy was apologizing for her housekeeping, which I had already seen was much better than mine, but she cleared her throat and said that what I needed to understand was that she hadn't washed the T-shirt because if the Marine Corps has to send you your deceased child's personal effects, it launders the clothing first. "That means there's no smell," Tracy said. She let this hover between us for a minute. "I've heard from so many parents who were crushed when they opened that bag, because they had thought they'd be able to smell their son," Tracy said.
    
One morning in February, Tracy got up at 4:30, made coffee, filled a commuter mug and climbed into her car with a suitcase to drive east to St. Louis. The highway was nearly deserted, an occasional McDonald's or Super 8 Motel sign looming in the darkness. Tracy hadn't slept well; she had been brooding for days about what she was on her way to do. "Luigi keeps telling me, 'Breathe,"' she said. Luigi is Tracy's husband. He is Italian and moved to Missouri from Naples four years ago, after he and Tracy met while teamed up on a Web-design project. Tracy divorced Derrick's father a couple of years before that and had been raising Derrick and his younger sister by herself, on the Columbia property, when Derrick marked his 17th birthday by signing up for the Marines.
    He left for boot camp in the summer of 2001, two months after his high-school graduation....Read the rest HERE

Link to Code Pink's Mother's Day
Proclamation for Peace

codepink.org

And finally,
a magnificent treatise on HOW TO BE AN ACTIVIST MOM and why it is so important NOW,
by Dolores Huerta, co-founder with Cesar Chavez of the United Farm Workers. She is the mother of 11 children.

www.CourageToResist.org

Call for a National Day of Action for GI Resisters on May 10, 2005

May 2, 2005

We urge you to join us in a "National Day of Action for GI Resisters" on Tuesday May 10, 2005. This is the day before the US military is planning to bring sailor Pablo Paredes and soldier Kevin Benderman before military court martial tribunals for their opposition to the Iraq War. They face forfeiture of pay and benefits, and military jail time.

On December 6, 2004, Navy Petty Officer Pablo Paredes refused to board his ship as it left the San Diego Naval Station in support of the Iraq War and occupation. At the time of his refusal, Pablo said he hoped his protest might inspire other GI's to refuse to take part in the war.

On January 5, 2005, Army Sgt Kevin Benderman refused to deploy for a second tour of duty in Iraq with the Army's Third Infantry Division. At the same time seventeen other soldiers from his unit went AWOL, two tried to kill themselves and one had a relative shoot him in the leg to avoid deploying.

Both men applied for discharge from the US military as conscientious objectors. The military has wrongly rejected both claims.

It's time for us to escalate public pressure and action in support of Pablo, Kevin and the thousands of other courageous men and women who have followed their conscience to uphold international law and to take a principled stand against the unjust, illegal war and occupation of Iraq. It's time we had their backs.

Objection and resistance by military servicepersons is a healthy and important assertion of Democracy in a country where the decisions to invade Iraq, to maintain an occupation, and engage in widespread human right violations and torture were made undemocratically in violation of international law and based on continuing lies and disinformation.

Please join us by organizing a public demonstration, vigil or rally of support on May 10. Every action, no matter how large or small is important.

Also,

• Send letters of support and donations to cover legal fees to Pablo and Kevin via their websites listed below.

• Come to San Diego, California (Pablo) or Fort Stewart, Georgia (Kevin) to show your support during their trials.

• Write letters to the editor, and help educate your organization, church, union, school, co-workers and community.

Resisting illegal occupation and war is not a crime! The right to conscientious objection is being systematically violated by the military. Those objectors who are publicly asserting their rights are being singled out for punishment. We demand that military personnel retain their right to follow their conscience, publicly dissent and that their basic democratic rights be respected.

A better world is possible.

More info about Pablo Paredes:
www.SwiftSmartVeterans.com
More info about Kevin Benderman:
www.BendermanDefense.org

Left: Pablo Paredes refuses to ship out in support of the Iraq War at the San Deigo Naval Station pier. Right: Monica and Kevin Benderman outside of Fort Stewart, Georgia.

Initial signatures

Monica Benderman - spouse of Kevin Benderman

Victor Paredes - brother of Pablo Paredes

Aimee Allison - Gulf War CO; Oakland City Council Candidate

Medea Benjamin - CodePink, Co-Founder; Global Exchange, Founding Director

Andrea Buffa - CodePink; Global Exchange, Peace Campaign Coordinator

Leslie Cagan - United for Peace and Justice, Nat'l Coordinator

Todd Chretien - Int'l Socialist Organization

Gerry Condon - Right To Resist / Project Safe Haven (Canada), Director

Stephen Funk - former Marine and first public Iraq War resister

Susan Galleymore - MotherSpeak; military mother; Courage to Resist

Stan Goff - Bring Them Home Now!, Coor Cmte; retired Special Forces Master Sgt; military father

Lynn Gonzalez - San Diego Military Counseling Project

Jack Heyman - Int'l Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 10, Exec Board

George Johnson - Veterans for Peace, Nat'l Exec Board

Ragina Johnson - College Not Combat

Naomi Klein - activist; writer

National Youth Student Peace Coaltion

Sharon Lee Kufeldt - Veterans for Peace, Nat'l Exec Board VP

Barbara Lubin - Middle East Children's Alliance, Director; ANSWER, Nat'l Steering Cmte

Efia Nwangaza - Afrikan Am Institute for Policy Studies; Not in Our Name Nat'l Steering Cmte

Siri Margerin - United for Peace and Justice, Bay Area Steering Cmte; Iraq Peace Panel Project

Steve Morse - GI Rights Program Coor, Central Cmte for Conscientious Objectors

Jeff Paterson - Not in Our Name; former Marine and 1991 Gulf War resister

David Solnit - People Powered Strategy Project; Courage to Resist

Vida Shahamat and Brain Barry - South Bay Mobilization Against the War

Aryeh Shell - Courage to Resist; Popular Education and Action CollectivE

Samina Faheem Sundas - American Muslim Voice

School of the Americas Watch, staff members

Fernando Suarez del Solar - Gold Star Families for Peace, father of Marine Jesus Suarez killed in Iraq

Fr. Louie Vitale, O.F.M., St Boniface Church; Korea War veteran

Liat Weingart - Jewish Voice for Peace, Co-Director

Bob Wing - War Times; United for Peace and Justice, Nat'l Steering Cmte

Howard Zinn - historian; author

(organizations listed for identification purposes only)

Organizational endorsers include

Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors

College Not Combat

Courage to Resist

MotherSpeak

National Youth Student Peace Coaltion

Not in Our Name

Jewish Voice for Peace

National Leaflet (PDF)

San Diego, California
BETTER LINKS FOR ALL THESE EVENTS WILL BE ON THE COURAGE TO RESIST.COM SITE. CLICK THE BIG BLUE LINK AT THE BOTTOM OF TODAY'S ENTRY! or download the pdf and write in the info for your hood and post. Tuesday, May 10 ~ 7 PM
"Vocies of Resistance" featuring Pablo Paredes, Adian Delgado, and Camilo Mejia at the Bayview Babtist Church, 6134 Benson Ave (at 61st St, between Imperial Ave and Skyline Dr)
Contact: solidaritywithpablo@yahoo.com
Event info: graphic

New York City, New York
Tuesday, May 10 ~ Evening
Details coming soon.

Orlando, Florida
Tuesday, May 10 ~ 11 AM-1 PM
Military Recruiting Center, Herndon Shopping Plaza at Colonial and Maguire Streets
Contact: orlando@notinourname.net

San Francisco, California
Tuesday, May 10 ~ 12 Noon
War Memorial Veterans Building
401 Van Ness (across from City Hall, near Civic Center BART)
Contact: courage@riseup.net
Event info: leaflet (PDF)
Also, a car caravan is being organized to leave from the protest to travel directly to San Diego for Pablo's court martial May 11-13. Contact the email above for more info.

Ventura, California
Tuesday, May 10 ~ 12 Noon
Ventura Government Center, corner of Victoria and Telephone
Contact: nionvtc@riseup.net

Please send us a note letting us know of what you have planned: courage@riseup.net

 

COURAGE TO RESIST is a new group of concerned community members, veterans and military families organizing support for military objectors to illegal war and occupation and the underlying policies of empire. We have adopted a people power strategy to weaken the pillars that support the Iraq war and occupation by supporting GI resistance, which together with counter-recruitment and draft resistance work can remove the supply of obedient troops.

www.CourageToResist.org

I awoke today depressed. Jesus didn't die and rise for MY sins. I haven't believed that since I left Iowa 30 years ago. I study zen, and I practice compassion and service, but living in a beautiful valley full of smug SUV-driving homeowners who, despite recent cuts in arts education, are finding it in their pocketbooks to fund it anyway, often gets me feeling guilty... Like, "don't get too complacent, because there's always some issue to distract us from the fact that the world's a mess because WE'VE BEEN TAKEN OVER A CULT." Click on this site: Mission NOT Accomplished and you may feel more relaxed, too.

Save the Arctic Wildlife Refuge!

Save the Arctic Wildlife Refuge!

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...

Dahr Jamail writing about positive steps toward healing loss in Iraq. A journey of a thousand miles.....

You can check in almost daily with what this amazing man writes from Iraq...

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.