Wild Ducks Flying Backward (8 page)

Leonard Cohen

H
e was rowed down from the north in a leather skiff manned by a crew of trolls. His fur cape was caked with candle wax, his frown stained blue by wine—though the latter was seldom noticed due to the fox mask he wore at all times. A quill in his teeth, a solitary teardrop a-squirm in his palm, he was the young poet prince of Montreal, handsome, immaculate, searching for sturdier doors to nail his poignant verses on.

In Manhattan, grit drifted into his ink bottle. In Vienna, his spice box exploded. On the Greek isle of Hydra, Orpheus came to him at dawn astride a transparent donkey and restrung his cheap guitar. From that moment on, he shamelessly and willingly exposed himself to the contagion of music. To the furtive religio-sexual inquisitiveness of the solemn seeker was added the openly foolhardy passion of the romantic troubadour. By the time he returned to America, songs were working in him like bees in an attic and connoisseurs were developing cravings for his nocturnal honey, despite the fact that hearts were occasionally stung.

Now, thirty years later, as society staggers toward the millennium, flailing and screeching all the while, like an orangutan with a steak knife in its side, Leonard Cohen—his vision, his gift, his perseverance—is finally getting his due. It may be because he speaks to this wounded zeitgeist with particular eloquence and accuracy, it may be merely cultural time-lag, yet another example of the slow-to-catch-on many opening their ears belatedly to what the few have been hearing all along. In any case, the glitter curtain has shredded, the boogie-woogie gate has rocked loose from its hinges, and here sits L. Cohen at an altar in the garden, staidly enjoying newfound popularity and expanded respect.

From the beginning, his musical peers have recognized Cohen’s ability to establish succinct analogies among life’s realities, his talent for creating intimate relationships between the interior world of longing and language and the exterior world of trains and violins. Even those performers who have neither “covered” his compositions nor been overtly influenced by them have professed to admire their artfulness: the darkly delicious melodies—aural bouquets of gardenia and thistle—that bring to mind an electrified, de-Germanized Kurt Weill; the playfully (and therefore dangerously) mournful lyrics that can peel the apple of love and the peach of lust with a knife that cuts all the way to the mystery, a layer Cole Porter just couldn’t expose.

It is their desire to honor L. Cohen, songwriter, that has prompted a delegation of our brightest artists to climb, one by one, joss sticks smoldering, the steep and salty staircase in the Tower of Song.

There is evidence that the honoree might be privy to the secret of the universe, which, in case you’re wondering, is simply this: everything is connected.
Everything.
Many, if not most, of the links are difficult to determine. The instrument, the apparatus, the focused ray that can uncover and illuminate those connections is language. And just as a sudden infatuation often will light up a person’s biochemical sky more pyrotechnically than any deep, abiding attachment, so an unlikely, unexpected burst of linguistic imagination will usually reveal greater truths than the most exacting scholarship. In fact, the poetic image may be the only device remotely capable of dissecting romantic desire, let alone disclosing the hidden mystical essence of the material world.

Cohen is a master of the quasi-surrealistic phrase, of the “illogical” line that speaks so directly to the unconscious that surface ambiguity is transformed into ultimate, if fleeting, comprehension: comprehension of the bewitching nuances of sex and the bewildering assaults of culture. Undoubtedly, it is to his lyrical mastery that his prestigious colleagues now pay tribute. Yet, there may be something else. As various, as distinct, as rewarding as each of their expressions are, there can still be heard in their individual interpretations the distant echo of Cohen’s own voice, for it is his singing voice as well as his writing pen that has breathed life into these songs.

It is a voice raked by the claws of Cupid, a voice rubbed raw by the philosopher’s stone. A voice marinated in kirschwasser, sulfur, deer musk, and snow; bandaged with sackcloth from a ruined monastery; warmed by the embers left down near the river after the gypsies have gone.

It is a penitent’s voice, a rabbinical voice, a crust of unleavened vocal toast—spread with smoke and subversive wit. He has a voice like a carpet in an old hotel, like a bad itch on the hunchback of love. It is a voice meant for pronouncing the names of women—and cataloging their sometimes hazardous charms. Nobody can say the word “naked” as nakedly as Cohen. He makes us see the markings where the pantyhose have been.

Finally, the actual everyday persona of their creator may be said to haunt these songs, although details of his private lifestyle can be only surmised. A decade ago, a teacher who called himself Shree Bhagwan Rajneesh came up with the name “Zorba the Buddha” to describe the ideal modern man: a contemplative man who maintains a strict devotional bond with cosmic energies, yet is completely at home in the physical realm. Such a man knows the value of the dharma and the value of the deutsche mark, knows how much to tip a waiter in a Paris nightclub and how many times to bow in a Kyoto shrine; a man who can do business when business is necessary, yet allow his mind to enter a pine cone or his feet to dance in wild abandon if moved by the tune. Refusing to turn his back on beauty, this Zorba the Buddha character finds in sensual pleasures not a contradiction but an affirmation of the spiritual self. Doesn’t he sound a lot like Leonard Cohen?

We have been led to picture Cohen spending his mornings meditating in Armani suits, his afternoons wrestling the muse, his evenings sitting in cafés where he eats, drinks, and speaks soulfully but seductively with the pretty larks of the street. Quite possibly this is a distorted portrait. The apocryphal, however, has a special kind of truth.

It doesn’t really matter. What matters here is that after thirty years, L. Cohen is holding court in the lobby of the whirlwind, and that giants have gathered to pay him homage. To him—and to us—they bring the offerings they have hammered from his iron, his lead, his kryptonite, his sexual nitrogen, his gold.

Tower of Song,
30-year tribute album, liner notes, 1995

Slipper Sipping

W
ith the exception of chocolate dentures, there’s probably nothing in this world more impractical than glass shoes: their life expectancy must be as short as their discomfort level is horrific. So, was Cinderella a naïve ditz, a dingbat with masochistic tendencies? Did her fairy godmother, who presumably possessed the power to conjure up the finest Milanese leathers, have a twisted sense of humor? Or was there some hidden logic behind sending the humble little hearth honey to the royal ball shod in brittle silica?

Surely, the last. Fairy Godmother’s intention obviously was to try to entice Prince Charming (alas, not the sharpest knife in the drawer) to sip champagne from one of Cinderella’s slippers.

Why? Because no gesture in the annals of romantic behavior is quite as auspicious as drinking a toast from a woman’s footwear. Any dull swain can buy a girl flowers, candy, or even a ring, treat her to a movie or a weekend at a spa, but a man who’ll quaff from a shoe-in-use is a man who, in the name of love, will stop at almost nothing. The woman so honored may be absolutely confident that this date-night daredevil is not among the faint of heart. If only at floor level, he is committed. Better yet, the dude is fun!

Walking as it does a thin line between exhibitionism and intimacy, between chivalry and perversity, the very act of the shoe-sip allows debonair zeal to vibrate ever so slightly with the distant thrill of kinkiness. Symbolism aside (see Freud on shoes), it flirts with danger, even should the risk involved be nothing greater than a stained insole. (A real sport will later blot the lining dry with a clean handkerchief or the tail of his shirt.)

Flavored, if only in the imagination, with the sweet pink of toe meat; barnacled with tar, bubblegum, or something much worse; a friend of the earth, survivor of tack and shard; tasseled tramp, buckle-bedecked blistermeister, grunt soldier bearing the muddied flag of fashion, sailor of the woven and grouted seas; streetwise, dance-dizzy, blind as an ol’ blues cat, the lowly shoe—no matter how elegant or expensive, a slipper can never conceal its utilitarian roots or its kinship to beasts—the shoe must be shocked to suddenly find itself a vessel ferrying luxurious bubbles to a lover’s lips. And its astonishment only mirrors the surprise of its owner, for no female, not even a Gabor or Lola Montez, is ever so jaded as to be prepared for, or unimpressed by, the man who impetuously and ceremoniously sates his thirst from her pump.

For all of its spontaneity, however, the impromptu shoe-swig does possess a certain protocol. While there may be something verbally poetic about slurping a Singapore sling from a slingback or chugging cappuccino from a Capezio, those variations, in practice, will never do. The chosen shoe may be any color or style—so long, of course, as it isn’t open-toed or pathetically orthopedic—but the beverage consumed from it can be only champagne. No beer, no gin, milk, tea, Diet Coke, or bathwater; not even a fine cognac or vintage bordeaux. Champagne, and champagne alone, with its fizz of stardust, its gilded sparks, its secret singing and tiny bursts of light, only champagne has the magic to transform a shoe into a holy chalice, and the shoe-sup (on the surface of it, a rather silly piece of business) into a kind of wild kinetic sonnet, a pantomime of reckless adoration.

Because of the manner in which it combines playfulness with passion, the way that it both galvanizes the moment and anticipates the future, imbibing champagne from a suitable slipper may constitute the perfect salute to the new millennium.

When the little cobbled skiff of womanhood is swamped with Mumm’s Extra Dry, when that pedestrian article that cushions the heel and supports the arch is invaded by the tongue, when devotion is enlivened by audacity, and longing refuses to limit itself to conventional expression, well, anything can happen. Anything.

What wiser way, then, to face the Big Tomorrow than with an open mind, an adventurous spirit, and a romantic heart; ready, even eager, for come-what-may? Fairy Godmother knew this. That’s why she conjured up the wearable goblet. And why it got results.

So, pass those high heels, baby, and don’t spare the stiletto. Here’s looking at you—from the ground up. And Happy 21st Century!

Bergdorf Goodman,
1999

Redheads

R
ed hair is a woman’s game.

The harsh truth is, most red-haired men look like blondes who’ve spoiled from lack of refrigeration. They look like brown-haired men who’ve been composted out behind the barn. Yet that same pigmentation that on a man can resemble leaf mold or junkyard rust, a woman wears like a tiara of rubies.

Not only are female redheads frequently lovely but theirs is a loveliness that suggests both lust and danger, pleasure and violence, and is, therefore, to the male of the species virtually irresistible. Red—Code Red—were the tresses of the original femme fatale.

Of course, much of the “fatale” associated with redheads is illusory, a stereotypical projection on the part of sexually neurotic men. Plenty of redheads are as demure as rosebuds and as sweet as strawberry pie. However, the mere fact that they are
perceived
to be stormy, if not malicious, grants them a certain license and a certain power. It’s as if bitchiness is their birthright. By virtue of their coloration, they possess a congenital permit to be terrible and lascivious, which, even if never exercised, sets them apart from the remainder of womankind, who have traditionally been expected to be mild and pure.

Now that women are demolishing those old misogynistic expectations, will redheads lose their special magic, will Pippi Longstocking come to be regarded as just one of the girls: Heidi with a fever, Snow White at the beach? Hardly. To believe that blondes and brunettes are simply redheads in repressive drag is to believe that UFOs are kiddie balloons. All redheads, you see, are mutants.

Whether they spring from genes disarranged by earthly forces or are “planted” here by overlords from outer space is a matter for scholarly debate. It’s enough for us to recognize that redheads are abnormal beings, bioelectrically connected to realms of strange power, rage, risk, and ecstasy.

What is your mission among us, you daughters of ancient Henna, you agents of the harvest moon? Are those star maps that your freckles replicate? How do you explain the fact that you live longer than the average human? Where did you get such sensitive skin? And why are your curls the same shade as heartache?

Alas, inquiry is futile: either they don’t know or they won’t say—and who has the nerve to pressure a redhead? We may never learn their origin or meaning, but it probably doesn’t matter. We will go on leaping out of our frying pans into their fire, grateful for the opportunity to be titillated by their vengeful fury, real or imagined, and to occasionally test our erotic mettle in the legendary inferno of their passion.

Redheaded women! Those blood oranges! Those cherry bombs! Those celestial shrews and queens of copper! May they never cease to stain our white-bread lives with supernatural catsup.

GQ,
1988

Alan Rudolph

I
n the smart and lively movies of Alan Rudolph, nuances are at work like bees in a hive. A busy swarm of subtleties generates a nucleus of narrative honeycomb that has more layers than an archeologist’s wedding cake, and the energized reticulum is all the more amazing because its intricacies seem at first ambiguous and offhand.

Horizontal layers of lust and angst crisscross with vertical layers of wit and beauty (despite modest budgets, every Rudolph film is delicious to the eye and ear), but the layer that most delights me (and drives the dullards daft) is the oblique stratum of goofiness that angles through his cinematic matrix like a butter knife that forgot to take its lithium and turned into a corkscrew.

For many people, “goofy” might suggest a kind of good-natured stupidity. With humorous overtones. Practiced observation, however, has led me to define goofiness as “user-friendly weirdness.” With humorous overtones. And that is the definition intended here.

In case anybody has failed to notice, our little planet is
très
bizarre. Some of our weirdness is violent and horrific, ranging from fully flowered genocidal warfare to the secret buds of personal evil that David Lynch likes to press in his small-town scrapbooks. Far more prevalent—yet decidedly more difficult for a serious artist to capture—is the non-threatening variety of weirdness; the weirdness of the quirk, the tic, the discrepancy, the idiosyncrasy half-concealed, the passionate impulse that when indulged puts a strange new spin on the heart.

All of our lives are at least a trifle haywire, particularly in the area of romantic relationships. It is Rudolph’s special genius to illuminate those haywire tendencies and reveal how they—and not convention or rationality—channel the undermost currents of our being. It is precisely Rudolph’s attention to our so-called “off-the-wall” behavior that gives pictures such as
Choose Me, The Moderns,
and
Trouble in Mind
their comic and erotic freshness, their psychological veracity, their ovoid contours.

“Ovoid” is the correct description, although “elliptical” will do. Football-shaped at any rate. Most films or novels or plays bounce like basketballs, which is to say, up and down, up and down, traveling in a forward direction in a generally straight line. Rudolph’s movies, on the other hand, bounce like footballs: end over end, elusively, changing direction, even reversing direction; wobbly, unpredictable, and wild. Goofy, in other words, like so much of life itself. Most of his films produce the aesthetic, emotional, and intellectual equivalents of gridiron kickoffs, followed by bone-cracking tackles or exhilarating returns.

When considering Alan Rudolph, it is crucial not to overlook those jarring hits. As charming and tinged with fantasy as his work can be, it is not fueled by froth. Even a walleyed strut such as
Songwriter
has its dark, serrated edges; and when they cut, they cut deep. The director possesses an urban sensibility, which he focuses sardonically on the sorrows as well as the pleasures of metropolitan romance. Who could sit through
Afterglow,
for example, without feeling that they’d been both whipsawed and lovingly massaged.

The miracle of Rudolph is how he manages to be gritty and dreamy at the same time, even somber and funny at the same time. Not funny in one scene, somber in the next, but funny and somber
simultaneously
. This is a form of profundity that only the nimble-minded can totally appreciate, which eliminates… well, you know who it eliminates. I suspect it is the virtuoso manner with which he orchestrates nuances that allows him to ply the tragicomic paradox so successfully.

In any case, those almost surreal interpenetrations of melancholia and gaiety amplify the sense of mystery that haunts Rudolph’s every movie if not his every scene (many of which unfold in smoky, neon-lit clubs and bars). What is present here is neither the prosaic mystery of whodunit nor the sentimental mystery of will-boy-get-girl—each a formulaic device calculated to manipulate an audience by means of manufactured suspense—but rather that transcendental mystery that swirls around our innermost longings and that can liberate an audience by connecting it viscerally to the greater mystery of existence.

In the marvelous
Love at Large,
Rudolph (who usually writes his own scripts) has Anne Archer ask Tom Berenger if they will be “glad and dizzy all the time.” Ultimately, no matter how moody or bittersweet a Rudolph movie might be, when I walk out of the theater I feel somehow glad and dizzy. If you are aware of a better way to feel, please phone me right now. Collect.

Writers on Directors,
Watson-Guptill, 1999