Readings: A Portrait of the Poet as an Old Man

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Considering that I have absolutely revered the man since he came onto the scene back when I was in college, I have written very little about Leonard Cohen on this blog. He ranks near, or at the top, of my personal patheon of  'sixties-era singer-songwriters. His only competition would come from Dylan, Paul Simon, and Joni Mitchell. Honorable mention goes to Neil Young and Van Morrison. But, no--Cohen is king. There have been several pop stars who have published books of poetry. But I think that Leonard Cohen may be the only one who was a published poet (and novelist) prior to becoming famous in show biz.

For my recent birthday, my daughters gave me a gift certificate to the bookstore that one of them works in. And my father gave me a bit of money. I used some of the money to buy Leonard Cohen's new CD. I used part of the gift certificate to buy his 2006 book of poetry and drawings, Book of Longing. I have been reading in that book this evening.

The birthday was my 65th. Some kind of milestone, I guess. The birthday following which one can no longer deny being old. That being the case, the poem from Cohen's book that I will be sharing below definitely resonates with me tonight. As usual, he says it perfectly. He speaks for "Sixties Survivors" everywhere, I think, in the poem,

TOO OLD

I am too old
to learn the names
of the new killers
This one here
looks tired and attractive
devoted, professorial
He looks a lot like me
when I was teaching
a radical form of Buddhism
to the hopelessly insane
In the name of the old
high magic
he commands
families to be burned alive
and children mutilated
He probably knows
a song or two that I wrote
All of them
all the bloody hand bathers
and the chewers of entrails
and the scalp peelers
they all danced
to the music of the Beatles
they worshipped Bob Dylan
Dear friends
there are very few of us left
silenced
trembling all the time
hidden among the blood -
stunned fanatics
as we witness to each other
the old atrocity
the old obsolete atrocity
that has driven out
the heart's warm appetite
and humbled evolution
and made a puke of prayer

Xxxxxxx
xxxxx***xxx
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In case you were wondering, that's exactly how some of us feel when we observe those who are left in power as we Boomers drop off the tree, over ripe; an invitation to bugs, scavaging birds and little furry rodents.
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Quote du Jour: Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

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In her memoir And a Voice to Sing With, Joan Baez succinctily sums up the residuals of her affair with Bob Dylan and of that period known as "the 'Sixties:

Even now, in the the 1980s, "Farewell, Angelina," a beautiful little love song laced with cockeyed imagery, is enough to transport a festival audience of forty thousand people in France back to the meaningful days of the sixties, and to give them a sense of empowerment, because for a few minutes they can become a part of a dream from the years when "everything was happening," life seemed to have a purpose, and everyone made a difference. And that, dear Bob, is not fuckin' bad.

We thought we could sit forever and fun, but our chances really was a million to one.
xxxxx~ "Bob Dylan's Dream"
___________________
Update: check out how beautiful Joan is here, in a live clip that unfortunately truncates the song.
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Riffs: A Sixties Footnote

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The New York Times reports the death of William Zantzinger, the villain of Bob Dylan’s editorial ballad, “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” from the album The Times They Are A-Changin’.

Click here to see and hear Dylan performing this song live, when it was current, in one of his rare early network television appearances. Fellow sixties survivors, and TV history buffs, will recognize emcee Steve Allen at the beginning of the clip. We could use more personalities with the brains and class of Steve Allen on television today. Unfortunately, our world is more likely to harbor a remnant the W. D. Zantzingers.

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Reflections: From Boom to Tomb...

…or WHAT I DID IN THE WAR

The following shall serve as counterpoint to, and reality check of, my previous paean for my generation.

There’s room at the top they are telling you still
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill
~ John Lennon, Working Class Hero

I’m nearing the end of Cathy Wilkerson’ s autobiography, Flying Close to the Sun. That means that I’m nearing the climax of the story of her life as a revolutionary. It means that I’m nearing the part where Weatherman blows up the Greenwich Village townhouse of Wilkerson’s father, attempting to construct bombs to be used in the insurgency against the power structure; the explosion that kills three members of Weatherman and sends Wilkerson underground.

The lesson to be learned from Wilkerson’s confession is that the essence of every collective is coercion and conformity. In resisting the violence of Vietnam; in opposing the violence of racism; idealistic youth, in frustration, finally turned to violence as a means. The outside is the inside. The microcosm of SDS/Weatherman came to mirror the macrocosm of the military industrial complex against which it aspired to revolt.

In the end there was only coercion and conformity in society-at-large, and coercion and conformity in SDS/Weatherman. In the end, Wilkerson found that while a woman faced male chauvinism in society-at-large, a woman faced similar sexism in SDS/Weatherman. If she had to use her sexuality to ascend the ladders of the work world, she was also defined by her gender in the revolution. If pedagogy, Madison Avenue, and State Department briefings were thought-control, there was thought-control in the ideological posturing and in the self-criticism sessions of SDS/Weatherman. In the end it is coercion and conformity in school; coercion and conformity in the family; coercion and conformity at work; coercion and conformity in middle-class propriety; coercion and conformity even in church. The same pressure that impels one to join the revolution, forcefully reconfigures one to fit in: a round hole for every square peg in the collective.

All worldly relationships are power relationships:

The only truly free man is the man who finds himself totally emptied out by affliction and alone in a hole in the earth, or locked in his room, flat on his face, begging God to come fill the void where his ego formerly raged like a holocaust, fed by the inexhaustible fat of his gluttonous appetite for sin.

One could say that the Boomers’ collective dream of an activist solution began its slow death under the rubble of that townhouse, just as the morbidity of the ‘Sixties began to spread like a sepsis through the crowd at Altamont, while Mick Jagger wandered about helplessly on the stage, at a loss for a tune to fit the occasion:

We had met the Pig, and he was us.

Reflections: Who's Boomin' Who?

Boomers tend to hear a lot of vapid shit laid down against them by those who came after. They call us selfish and self-absorbed; we know that that's not where it’s at. We know that we put our actual, physical butts on the line--and we did it for others. If we talked, we also walked, and we marched, and we sat-in, and we got gassed, and jailed, and beaten, and harassed, and busted, and verbally abused by morons wearing Nixon buttons. Some of us got killed.

Today, there’s 24/7 blogging and incessant talking. Walking? Not so much.

We were brave and we were creative. We transformed pop music into an art form. We made movies that were worth watching. Many of us were spiritual seekers. We bequeathed to subsequent lame ass generations their sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. Say 'Thank you.' You know you love it.

Today everybody runs. Everybody’s a hard-body. They all got the six-pack. But inside (where it counts) they’re soft, self-pampered pussies and impotent whiners. Mom-my! The liberals stole my lunch money! Wah! Wah!

Two of the books I’m currently reading, Black Glass, by Karen Joy Fowler and Flying Close to the Sun, by Cathy Wilkerson, both fellow Boomers, are bringing back to me the danger and excitement of just being on the streets in the ‘Sixties as a young person engaged in the movements for civil rights and against the war in Vietnam.

Here is an excerpt from Flying Close to the Sun which is a graphic and typical example of why I remain so fond of cops to this day:

On January 17 [1969], John Huggins and Hunchy Carter, leaders of the LA Panthers, were gunned down at a meeting of UCLA students, called to establish a black studies department. The Panthers had been invited by some students to provide a counterbalance to members of another black organization, Ron Karenga’s US (United Slaves), because some students had felt intimidated by the armed men from US that had recently insisted on speaking on their behalf to the administration. Several people at the time saw who had done the shooting, but those identified were not arrested. Instead, police jailed seventy-five members of the Panthers that night. One was the widow of slain John Huggins, even though she was the nursing mother of a three-week-old baby. John Huggins was a Vietnam vet who had left Lincoln University in Pennsylvania to work with the Panthers. Many suspected at the time that US had been infiltrated and as being used by the LAPD to get rid of the Panthers.
When news of the shooting reached us (SDS members), I was stunned. The police response, to do a sweep of Panthers and not arrest anyone from US, seemed strong evidence that informants or agents were somehow involved. [Flying Close to the Sun, pp.246-247]

And here is an episode that explains in part the genesis of my great love and respect for Cowboy Ronnie:

Militant demonstrations erupted on several campuses that April [1969]. In Berkeley, black students and white supporters went on strike, demanding an autonomous black studies department. Governor Ronald Reagan called in the National Guard. [Flying Close to the Sun, p.248]

Wilkerson writes of the aftermath of the disclosure of the secret and illegal bombing of Cambodia. Check out the amazing words of the governor of the great State of Ohio, anticipating the kind of hyperbole that today is used to characterize al-Qaeda, spoken to vilify the sons and daughters of ordinary Ohioans who were demonstrating against the escalation of the war:

…Nixon announced the US bombing of Cambodia. … The response by hundreds of thousands of students on hundreds of campuses around the country is now legendary.
The government reaction to these uprisings is also legendary. Ohio Governor James Rhodes derided Kent State student activists, already in the midst of antiwar demonstrations, saying, "They’re worse than the brownshirts and the communist element and also the nightriders and the vigilantes. They’re the worst type of people we harbor in America. I think we are up against the strongest, well-trained, militant, revolutionary group in America.” Days later, the nervous young National Guard troops under his leadership shot and killed four young students, shocking the country. [Flying Close to the Sun, p.356]

In her story “Letters From Home” in Black Glass , in which she imagines writing to a boyfriend who has disappeared in Vietnam, Karen Joy Fowler, who was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley from 1968 to 1972, recalls what it was like to be a college student on an activist campus in those days. (More reason to love cops. More reason to love Ronald Reagan):

By the spring of 1970… I had gone out to protest the Cambodian invasion and come home in a cast. The police had removed their badges, donned their gas masks, and chased us down, catching me just outside Computer Sciences. They had broken my ankle. Owlie [one roommate’s boyfriend] was gone. His birthday had been drawn seventeenth in the lottery, and he’d relocated to a small town in Oregon rumored to have a lenient draft board. Gretchen had acquire a boyfriend whose back had been injured in a high school wrestling match, rendering him 4-F with no tricks. …We heard that the National Guard was killing people on the campus of Kent State. I heard nothing from you. [Black Glass, p.111]

Long before Iran-Contra, more reason to love the memory of Ronald Reagan:

They didn’t want me at any more demonstrations. “When you could run,” Lauren pointed out, “look what happened to you.” But I was there with them when the police cordoned off Sproul Plaza, trapping us inside, and gassed us from the air. …Governor Ronald Reagan and all the major networks assured you that we had been asked to disperse but had refused. Only Poncho [PBS reporter] told the truth. We had not been allowed to leave. Anyone who tried to leave was clubbed. A helicopter flew over the area and dropped tear gas on us. The gas went into the hospital and into the neighboring residential areas. [Black Glass, p. 116]

So, go ahead—mock the Boomers. We can take it. We’ve heard worse than you’ve got. To steal a line from SNL, “We got chunks of guys like you in our stool.”

Heroes - Interlude: 1963

1963

In the late 1950’s, a collegiately-styled group consisting of two acoustic guitars and a stand-up bass, calling themselves The Kingston Trio, introduced “folk music” to Top 50 AM radio with their #1 SMASH HIT, Tom Dooley. Their success, which continued through several more Top 50 hits, as well as three or four successful albums, gave rise to a rash of imitators, and kicked off the folk music craze.

Scroll down to 1963. Another trio, calling itself Peter, Paul and Mary, and significantly more authentic than the Kingston Trio--Greenwich Village-wise--recorded the classic anti-war ballad, Blowin’ in the Wind. Of course, in 1963 there was not yet any war going on that anybody knew about, so Blowin’ in the Wind didn’t really become an anti-war anthem until several years later. But in 1963 it did reach #17 on the pop charts. And it was different. Lyrically, it was almost poetry. (My more alert readers will have picked up on the Dylan Thomas segue here.) It caught my attention. I bought the 45 rpm single and noted that the composer’s name was B. Dylan.

The number one tune that year was the Beach Boys’ Surfin’ USA. Little Stevie Wonder was kicking off his career with a two-sided hit (45s had two sides, children) Fingertips, Pts. I & II, which came in at #8. The Motown Sound was majestically represented that year by Martha and the Vandellas’ hit, Heat Wave (#32). Yeah, 1963 was smokin’. Roy Orbison put out Mean Woman Blues (#45) that year. And one of my favorite tunes (as it was so clearly about me) was He’s So Fine (#7) by the Chiffons, a black girl group. 1963 was at the height of the surf music craze. The Surfaris scored with the tom-tom and guitar-driven instrumental, Wipe Out (#18). The Chantays were blasting their own instrumental offering, Pipeline (#27), and Jan & Dean came in at #28, harmonizing on Surf City. Some 1950’s hold-outs, such as Dion (Ruby Baby #40), Bobby Darin, Andy Williams, and even Eydie Gorme (#30, Blame It on the Bossa Nova), were still hanging around the Top 50. And the folkies were represented by Trini Lopez, with his Tex-Mex rendition of If I Had a Hammer, a tune that Peter, Paul and Mary had previously scored with; and by The Rooftop Singers, with Walk Right In.

That gives you the general picture. Next time around, the story of the late night radio, virtual Damascus Road revelation, that was my introduction to the transformational, mind-bending, phenomenon that was Bob Dylan.