Letters to the Editor
AJCalhoun
Published Letters: 964 Editor's Choice: 127
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Did Anybody Actually Read the Damn Article??
[Read the article: Remembrance of things past]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Maybe Mary E. did. Maybe one or two others. It seems to have totally blown past everyone else. Sweet Jesus! The man is having a nostalgia fit! Those are never true to life! They are a joy because we can remember doing stupid things but we don't remember DYING from doing them! Come on awready! He reeled it in at the end lest any of you Big Mother boosters out there be pushed into A-fib or perhaps an anxiety attack. It was just a mind - a brilliant mind - wandering back, and not unreasonably, since where I spent the majority of my life (up til now, anyway) is so fucking liberal (ie: "Welcome to Maryland. Please Drive Gently" - gag me with a fondue fork!) that there are signs at pedestrian crossings with instructions on how to cross the goddam streets! Now I'm stranded out here in Oz, I mean Orange County, where the last of the careening fools have gathered in hopes of keeping California a livid purple. Even here it's almost impossible to find a place to smoke (I don't, so I don't care, but I do feel there needs to be a limit on this interfering with people's own private self-destructive urges). I never allowed my kids to wear bike helmets when they were little, and they not only lived, they prospered. I also survived that unnatural behavior. Not even a scar to show for it. And my bypass surgery was due to a dissected coronary artery due to inherited mixed connective tissue disease - autoimmune shit. Not heart disease. How do you protect yourself from your own genes? Well I'm sure Maryland has some ideas on the table. Probably Walking Helmets are on the short list. One could trip...
So yeah, like GK, I occasionally think I was happier during the Cold War when actually I was convinced that Tom Leher was right and "We Will All Go Together When We Go" and I lived in a state of part-time terror. That was balanced by an insane bravado that resulted from the terror: if we're gonna go, let's make it a damn party, by god! And I lived through that too. More of us did than didn't, actually. Even the polio kids I knew survived. Not pretty, but there was my heart thing, so maybe that's what I get for not wearing a...oh, never mind.
In 1955 one of my cousins came home from school early one day because a kid who had been reamed out by their teacher in front of the class had gone home during lunch, picked up his father's rifle, walked back into class and shot their teacher dead. So I have no illusions about then - or NOW. Life is dangerous, I like it a lot, and I intend to make it last as long as I can enjoy it. Someone mentioned moderation and I would only take that one step farther, and offer the advice of James Hilton's "Chang" in "Lost Horizon": "...moderation in all things - including moderation."
The death of Common Sense seems to have brought about the Big Mother state. The Big Mother state breeds rebelliousness in adults, which is generally inappropriate. So we imagine things were better when WE made our own decisions as to whether or not to light the fuse, holler "Watch this!" and run like hell. Can we just get off each other's backs for a while? And for God's sake, enjoy the great mind of GK before he goes off the deep end and starts playing with the .357! Come on, people! Open the goddam window and just let the universe come in. There.... isnt that better?
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If It Leaves You Wanting More...
[Read the article: "Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...at least, thank god, there is more. Not only has Cohen left an abundance of material to be perused and listened to over and over again, but he's still at it. Depressive? Hell, people seem to love to label people like Cohen (are there actually people like Cohen? It's just a figure of speech) as "dark" and "depressing" (see Nick Drake or Richard Thompson for probably as close as anyone comes to this sort of beatiful "darkness" which is really just the shade creeping across stories about life lived). If ever anything would be "depressive" it would have to have come from "Songs From A Room", and then only because I was in a similar room at the Henry Hudson Hotel myself, four years prior to Cohen's "dark" revelation there, and by god, there is no more depressing place on earth, so much so that I was unable to put into words the horrors I was feeling. Later he came along and did it for me, with amazing grace and beauty. He survived that and filed the report. Since then it's just gotten better and better, shadow and light. To whine about "Beautiful Losers" against the backdrop of this magestic body of work is what's really depressing. R.C., a huge Thank you! Hallelujia!