Before the next tsunami (physically and psychologically) hits, which could upset my world again, I mull over one word: iconoclast. The word iconoclast does not get much play these days. I find it curious given the fact that so many of our most sacred institutions, ideas and traditions currently totter under the weight of so much flux and attack. The word is defined as 1: one who destroys sacred images, and 2: one who attacks and seeks to overthrow traditional or popular ideas or institutions. Depending on your dictionary source (I looked at Answers.com and Merriam-Webster’s) either one could be the first definition.
The height of iconoclasm occurred in the eighth and ninth centuries at the height of the Byzantine Empire. Big happenings over idol worship between Christian viewpoints with statues and paintings destroyed ended up being the result. This behavior surfaced about eight hundred years later during the reformation when Protestants had their way in dismantling idolatrous art from the Catholic Church for a brief period in the 16th and 17th Centuries. In both instances heads rolled.
In the latter part of the 19th Century, anarchists embodied iconoclasm by demanding that all governments and government institutions should be toppled and done away with. Disenchanted iconoclastic people targeted the ruling class and assassinated a fair number of influential people, including two American Presidents, Garfield and McKinley. The institutions did not topple by their actions, but in a perverse way the 20th Century wars-to-end-all-wars ultimately leveled many of the stratified class barriers that had caused the anarchists’ outrage. It has taken only sixty years to use up that window of grace in the western world. We now seem gripped in some epileptic fit of destructiveness that has all institutions on the verge of toppling from their monolithic weight.
I bring this all up because I find it fascinating that old core struggles never seem to die. They are like those ash covered hot spots in the aftermath of a forest fire. Changes we prefer to think as revolutionary, become illusory when put to the fire. There will be new growth in the forest. The forest may thrive and be different for many years, but it is inevitable that the cycle of flames will reappear to reduce it in time.
Art mirrors life in the same respect, with accepted formulae crushed and rebuilt around some new perspectives that will die and pass into something else again. Through all these passages art remains intrinsically art, the creative expression of life.
There a very few iconoclasts in the world of artistic endeavors today. In the world of film the last great iconoclasts are all memory with the passing of Robert Altman. He and Sam Peckinpah were the last true movie directors to obliterate all those quaint film notions regarding bogus film-western values of virtue, cleanliness, chivalry and death where the good guys always won. The Wild Bunch remains the finest western ever made and it broke every story telling rule in the process. Above all, there were no good guys, only choices and actions. Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller ranks right under Peckinpah’s masterpiece as a tremendous film achievement recording much the same struggle. Through Altman’s eyes the old west is reduced to a rainy dark dreary mining camp where the players are drawn to a small brothel and bar as the object of conquest. The brooding themes in Altman’s classic are expanded with the brilliant soundtrack composed by Leonard Cohen, one of the few living iconoclasts of popular music.
The first three Leonard Cohen albums were reissued on compact disc back in April 2007 by Sony/BMG. These are Songs of Leonard Cohen, Songs From A Room and Songs of Love and Hate. These three album reissues marked the fortieth anniversary of Leonard Cohen’s remarkable musical career. If you had to pick just one get the Songs of Leonard Cohen. This album contains most of the material from McCabe and Mrs. Miller, as well the wistful tune Suzanne. The ubiquitous producer John Hammond produced this first Leonard Cohen album. I was googling and discovered Suzanne has been covered more than 1,200 times to date.
Two other records from the Leonard Cohen vault that I've grown old with and love are I’m Your Man and The Future, which whisper brutal truths of life in sinuous baritone. Songs like Waiting For The Miracle, Closing Time and Democracy from The Future all are epic tomes on the human condition whose themes are unlike any other in the annals of pop music. Anthem is another beautiful and tragic expression of life where the chorus intones, “Ring the bells that still can ring…. There is a crack in everything. That is how the light gets in.”
Atom Egoyan crafted an excellent film, Exotica, around the strange bonds between an exotic dancer and an obsessive club client who are locked in time to Cohen’s Everybody Knows. The song is on the album, I’m Your Man. Don Henley did a tremendous cover of this song that appears on his greatest hits album, Actual Miles.
In the world of music there was a gifted young man, Jeff Buckley, the son of another gifted young man, Tim Buckley. Both the father and son died tragically at very young ages. On the Jeff Buckley album, Grace, there is the most beautiful cover of a Leonard Cohen song my hears have inhaled. The song is Hallelujah. If I had to pick a top 100 song list this one would definitely be included.
If you're a fan, Leonard Cohen has a tour in full swing coming to a region near you. I've enclosed a link below that has all the concert information, and other cool Cohen confidences. If you cannot make a concert this time around, there is also an amazing documentary tribute DVD that was done a few years back entitled Leonard Cohen I’m Your Man. This DVD features performances by U2, Rufus Wainwright, Nick Cave and others. It recounts very effectively this poet and songwriter’s Canadian roots and travels of time, thought and life. Really a great view if you have not seen it. I hadn’t realized how closely Al Pacino resembles Leonard Cohen until I viewed this recently. Check out www.leonardcohenfiles.com if life needs a fresh look. Comments always welcome, spin one of your own.
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