To complement the empty Chelsea Hotel bed posted yesterday as part of The Recumbency Of Leonard Cohen - Beds, Dominique BOILE offers this excellent photo, taken by Jarkko Arjatsalo and originally posted at LeonardCohenFiles, of Leonard Cohen's bed in his home in Hydra.

MARIANNE: I never felt that I looked like much at all. I didn't believe it when Leonard said ”you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen”. And he has continued saying that. But what I mean is that... I think I had too round a face. So I have gone round looking down all my life. But after all I did have… you know the sun bleached my hair, and after all you were … in Greece you were so blonde, so blonde, so blonde, because there they were mostly dark. Skinny. Almost no boobs. laughs To my great regret. 

NARRATOR: Leonard then, what did he look like?

MARIANNE: Oh, he was beautiful! Haven't you seen pictures of Leonard when he was young? Oh yes, you have. He was marvellous. Neither did he think that he looked like much. We both had problems. You have no idea. We often stood in front of the mirror before going out and wondered who we were today and stuff like that. Oh god, how strange we human beings are, you know...

Marianne Ihlen, from an interview with  Kari Hesthamar, Norway, 2005. Transcript found at LeonardCohenFiles. 

Credit Due Department: Top photo is from "So Long Marianne" by Kari Hesthamar. Second photo is from Life magazine archives.

The spontaneity and beauty of Marianne are apparent despite the low quality of these images (all screen captures from Harry Rasky's Song Of Leonard Cohen).

Adam Cohen has released a video promoting his new album, "Like A Man." In it, he talks about finding his place as part of his father's heritage rather than rebelling against that notion.  Consequently, Leonard Cohen appears often in this brief video.  These photos are all screen captures from "Adam Cohen - Like A Man"  

The first  shot is Leonard Cohen with his grandson (Adam's son). The second image shows Leonard and Adam Cohen embracing. The third is composed of two screenshots, one showing Adam Cohen walking past a mirror and one showing a young Leonard Cohen also walking  past  a mirror (a scene originally from "Ladies and Gentlemen - Mr. Leonard Cohen"). Fourth  is Leonard Cohen in the audience watching his son perform. Fifth is Leonard Cohen talking about about his son's performance; the full caption (including the previous frames) follows:

He's the real thing. Even if he weren't my son, I'd be deeply moved. The fact that he is my son makes me so very happy.

There are many more allusions to Leonard Cohen, including scenes from Hydra. Rufus Wainwright also makes a couple of appearances.

 

Excerpt from Living Off The Grid by Linda Immediato (LA Weekly, Jan 28, 2010). Photo by Orly Olivier.

In the '60s, the young avant-garde dancer had been the darling of Montreal's flourishing beatnik scene. It was there she first met Leonard Cohen, who would later write the poem about her that became his hit song "Suzanne." But being immortalized by Cohen is only one story in the scrapbooks. Along with the photos of Verdal are homages to her written by poets; letters of recommendation about her talent from the CBC; awards for costume design in Minnesota. One especially proud correspondence declares that she had been made an official Romany Gypsy. But her greatest accomplishment, she says, was getting her green card to the U.S., based on her artistic achievements in Montreal.

By 1996, Verdal had decided to seek her fortune in L.A. as a choreographer. Wanting to arrive in style — on a budget — she designed and built the wooden vardo camper, her "ultimate fantasy vehicle," out of recycled cedar siding and downed trees found on a friend's land. Arriving with $100 in her pocket, she says it was hard to be "the new kid on the block." Eventually she found her way, got a few gigs — choreographer on a couple of music videos, teaching dance to actors, doing French voice-over for films. But there were less glamorous jobs, too, such as selling ads for the Culver City News and cleaning houses. Meanwhile, Verdal began to build a clientele for her massage practice. "I started getting my foot in the door. It's a double life, trying to make ends meet as an artist."

... Her then-boyfriend had repaired the ladder on her camper, but she didn't know he had used small picture-frame nails until it broke loose when she was on it, and she fell backward from a height of six feet onto concrete. "Instinctively, I put my wrists out to break my fall. If I hadn't, the doctors said, I'd be paralyzed. Concrete has no bounce, no mercy; it's completely unforgiving."

Verdal shattered both wrists (one still has a metal bar) and a vertebra in her lower back. "I couldn't dance anymore. I couldn't feed myself or go to the bathroom. I was incapacitated," she recalls, clutching her wrists. "The turmoil of knowing that I had lost something I'd worked for all my life was the most devastating experience; there were moments when I didn't want to live."

... With no other means to express herself, Verdal says, she made homelessness her performance art. "I had to have the camper clean, neat, the bedding fresh. I got very creative with cooking. I always kept my clothes fresh and looking good. No one would believe I was homeless. My hair was always neat. I didn't want to buy into that stigma of being downtrodden, part of the great unwashed, as it were, in the eyes of the world."

... Verdal flips through her scrapbooks and pulls out a couple sheets of paper, her poems written to her street sisters and brothers. She chokes up a bit as she reads them. "It's something very visceral that you feel out there," she says when she's finished. "It's so empowering because you're able to survive another day, pretty gracefully, and not get hooked on anything — when you know you could, very easily, through despair, take an extra drink or get hooked on something that's not legal. I'm telling you, had I not had the dancer's discipline, I might have."

 

Leonard Cohen, along with Moses Znaimer and David Solway, gave eulogies at the memorial services for poet Irving Layton, who died January 4, 2006.

On hearing of the passing of his friend and mentor Cohen issued this elegant acknowledgment:

There was Irving Layton, and then there was the rest of us. He is our greatest poet, our greatest champion of poetry. Alzheimer's could not silence him, and neither will death.

More pithily, Leonard Cohen once said of Layton,

I taught him how to dress, he taught me how to live forever.

Credit Due Department: Both quotations are from Irving And Leonard by Rich Baines, 2006. Photos are by Ian Barrett/CP and were found at Globe and Mail.

Suzanne Elrod: Atop this post is a photo of Suzanne Elrod, the companion of Leonard Cohen in the 1970s  and the mother of his children, Lorca and Adam Cohen. Elrod shot the cover photograph ofCohen's Live Songs album and is pictured on the cover of the Death of a Ladies' Man album. More information about the relationship between Leonard Cohen and Suzanne Elrod, including her role in "My Gypsy Wife" and a 2008 photo of her living in the home she and Cohen once shared in Hydra can be found at  Leonard Cohen Unfolds, Sings "My Gypsy Wife." Suzanne Elrod, however, is not the subject of Leonard Cohen's song, "Suzanne."

Suzanne Verdal McCallister:  Leonard Cohen wrote "Suzanne" about Suzanne Verdal McCallister, the wife of Cohen's friend, sculptor Armand Vaillancourt. The transcript of an enlightening June 1998 interview with Suzanne Verdal McCallister by Kate Saunders for BBC Radio 4 can be found at Suzanne  - You Probably Think This Song Is about You. The photo below of Suzanne Verdal McCallister is by Peter Martin for the Montreal Gazette. 

[After the depression ended in 1999 ...] There was just a certain sweetness to daily life that began asserting itself. I remember sitting in the corner of my kitchen, which has a window overlooking the street. I saw the sunlight that shines on the chrome fenders of the cars, and thought, “Gee, that’s pretty.” 

I said to myself, “Wow, this must be like everybody feels.” Life became not easier but simpler. The backdrop of self-analysis I had lived with disappeared. It’s like that joke: “When you’re hitting your head against a brick wall, it feels good when it stops”. 

... When you stop thinking about yourself all the time, a certain sense of repose overtakes you. It happened to me by imperceptible degrees and I could not really believe it; I could not really claim it for some time. I thought there must be something wrong. It’s like taking a drink of cold water when you are thirsty. Every tastebud on your tongue, every molecule in your body says thank you.

This quote, from "I Never Discuss My Mistresses Or My Tailors" by Nick Paton Walsh (The Observer, October 14, 2001), is part of a  post dealing with Leonard Cohen's depression, treatment, and recovery: Leonard Cohen's List Of Pharmaceuticals Joke & His Not At All Funny Depression.

As these photos from the Sun Breaks Out for Palisades Community Expo post  by Linda Rubin (Pacific Palisades Patch, May 16, 2011) demonstrate, Leonard Cohen - who appears to be sporting two jackets, a tie, and a nascent pencil moustache - was a visitor at the Pacific Palisades Community Expo held  from 10am-2pm on May 15, 2011 at Via de la Paz, Antioch and Swarthmore between Sunset and Antioch.

The Expo itself is described in the post:

Folk music and vintage pop provided the soundtrack for Sunday’s Community Expo. The annual bustling block party and vintage car show was thrown again by the Pacific Palisades Chamber of Commerce.

Booths representing local businesses and non-profits lined both sides of Antioch Street. Strollers could meet and greet neighborhood vendors and come away with a bag of swag. Music stages capped each end of the street with Michael Cladis and Kenny Batch on one end and Patrick Hildebrand of Amazing Music on the other, with his daughter Kalani selling cupcakes and lemonade out of a little red wagon. Nearly 50 vintage and exotic cars were on display for half a block down Via de la Paz.

The caption for the first photo reads: 

Rabbi Zushe from Chabad with the amazing Leonard Cohen. Credit Rabbi Shloime

The caption for the second photo reads: 

Celebrity Sighting, Credit Linda Rubin

 

I find the simple life voluptuous. I like ... a good chair and a good table.

Leonard Cohen, from 2006 NRK iinterview (the video of this outstanding interview is available at Leonard Cohen On His Poems, Zen, Hallelujah, His 6 Good Songs, Money, America, And The Squirrel)