rusrep.ru/article/2010/10/12/cohen/
Julia Idlis
Leonard Cohen as a spirit of time
After the first, and, most probably, the last concert of 76 year old Leonard Cohen in Moscow, stepping out on the street among a thick crowd of people with eyes so clear that happens only if their owner cried shortly beforehand, even for a couple of minutes, in the dark, singing along with English songs and mistaking the words, because Cohen sings them a little differently every single time, my friends and I discussed the history of the XX century. A friend told me that two foreigners behind him were having a conversation.
-Yeah, one said, - the last time I’ve heard Lenny Cohen in the 60s.
- No, the other replied, - my last was in the 80s.
People, who listened to him in the 60s and 80s, lived with him their whole life. Many of them followed him around the world, especially during his 2008- 2010 tour – his first in 15 years, and may be the last. Now they can with condescendence compare light and sound during the London concert and light and sound during a concert in Paris, and also compare Cohen of today with Cohen two years younger. And bitterly note how much older he got.
But what is left for me? I have discovered Leonard Cohen very late, - not even with the release of Natural Born Killers, but already in the mid-2000s, when he decided not to tour any more, and would keep his promise, if not for his manager leaving him without money. What is left for me?
Who can say, that in my life, of which according to statistics, I haven’t live even a half, will appear another artist of the same scale? Is it even possible to have such an artist?
- Oh, please, - my friends are telling me, - there are people, for whom Bono is a comparable phenomenon. Although for those people Cohen is not such a great person.
There are people who consider the death of Michael Jackson an end of an era. And they won’t have another era like this, because alive Cohen (as, actually alive Bono) do not represent their era and their universe, but something parallel. We all live in our own eras and universes, and they die before we do and leave us with the solitude of memories.
Human life is longer than all good things that happen in it. Leonard Cohen himself is the best proof. He started writing poetry and prose in the 50s and singing in the 60s. He wrote the songs that are known and performed in the whole world, - from Dance Me to the End of Love to Hallelujah. He loved Janis Joplin and Nico and survived them as he did many other women. He seems slight and fragile on the stage of the Kremlin Congress Palace, especially when he kneels to sing I Am Your Man.
We don’t believe in the future much. That is why we want to stay in the present, knowing full well that we outlive it – meaning lose it. That is why, when Leonard Cohen sings in Waiting for the Miracle – I haven’t been so happy since the end of World War II, - I am crying. Because in some time in MY world won’t be left a single intelligent person, who can say that and whom I will trust.