LIGHTEN UP LEONARD

The poet stands in the middle of stage. He is tall and thin and dressed in a dark suit and a fedora; he is the epitome of an antiquated word: Dapper. The word suits him as more than just a physical description. For he is an old man, clothed in history, most of it public. He is, after all, a poet, and it his vocation to make the personal public, to let what is inside of him out and he has been doing it for a very long time.

The poet is very still, one hand raised closed to his face, his feet close together, head slightly bowed so that his face is shaded by his fedora. He begins to speak in a voice that voice, a voice more famous than the suit, than the face, than the name of the man; a raspy voice a learned voice a raw voice a cultured voice a passionate voice a measured voice .. the poet's voice.

Music comes to the poet's voice, other voices join in the, the voices of women, women singing, orange lights sweep across the stage, the poet sways to the music and we are taken we are taken away, we are taken to some place, to some other place.

We are taken to the world of Leonard Cohen.

The poet on the stage.

Leonard Cohen is 78 years old. Last night in Toronto he performed a three hour show with a 20 minute intermission. He literally danced off the stage. He made a joke that he has not toured in 15 years but hopes to be turning for two more years; when he turns 80 he wants to take up smoking.

I have been a Cohen fan since I first heard the album The Songs of Leonard Cohen sometime in the early 1970's. I had never read his printed poetry at that time but the lyrics of that album had a powerful influence on me; along with Margaret Atwood, Cohen was probably the poet who shaped my own early attempts at poetry.

We saw Cohen perform once before, in 1992, supporting the album The Future. I remembered it as one of the best live shows I'd ever seen. Last night I experienced deja vu; this old man gave me the best show I've seen in a couple of years.

The band was superb, including two virtuosos: Alexandru Bublitchi on violin and Javier Mas, who's flamenco guitar and mandolin playing was as fine as I've ever heard.

I've often said that if you are a female singer, you want to sing with Cohen. He doesn't have backup singers, he has co singers. Some of them, like Jennifer Warren, have used their association with Leonard to launch their own careers.

Last night Cohen was accompanied by three women: Sharon Robson is a singer and songwriter in her own right and collaborated with Cohen on his album 10 New Songs. She gave us a moment of pure transcentendel bliss as she soloed the song Alexandra Leaving, a perfectly beautiful song based upon some ancient poetry.

Cohen at one point referred to his singers as "these angels" and that certainly applied to the Webb Sisters, who not only have spine tingling voices, but are adept instrumentalists.

Cohen's work is rich and complex and often thought of as "dark". And while he never shies away from those deeper areas of the human heart, I've always appreciated his sense of humour. In one of several asides, Leonard talked about "what's with all this melancholy and darkness, I get up in the morning and stumble down the stairs and look at myself in the mirror and say, Leonard, lighten up"

Not only did Leonard lighten himself up, he lifted us up, giving us one of those experiences you can only receive from a live performance. Through his poetry and his artistry and his overwhelming desire to please the audience, Leonard lifted us, he transported us, he brought us into his world, the world of the poet.

STONES OF OTHERS IN THE POOLS OF INSPIRATION

I thought I would start off the new year by returning to a topic that I've examined several times before: Inspiration. Perhaps returning to the same topic over and over is indicative of a lack of inspiration or it could be that inspiration is an ongoing theme in my life or perhaps I just enjoy thinking in circles because once you start thinking in a straight line you actually have to have a destination ...

Ahem

What inspired this topic, this time around, was one of the gifts Collette got me for Christmas. The Exegesis of Phillip K Dick is a non fiction book by .. well .. Phillip K Dick.

Phillip K Dick was a writer, when I was a fan of his through the 70's and early 80's, he was known as a science fiction writer. Since his death in the mid 80's he has become known as something more; he's become famous for the number of movies based (and I would say very loosely based) on his work, such as Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, The Adjustment Bureau and others. He's also become well known for some of the themes that run through his novels, such as questioning reality and logic, that have brought him recognition outside of the science fiction world

The Exegesis is not a novel, it is a collection of Dick's writings concerning a revelation, an ephiphany you could say, that he experienced in the 70's and caused him to reconsider his fiction in a whole new light. Did I mention he was a serial drug abuser and probably suffered from mental illness?

Anyway, this is not a review of the Exegesis, I have yet to crack the spine. As I stated, it's a post about inspiration. Phillip Dick was an inspiration to me. I devoured most of his novels when I was a teenager. Like all of his fans, I was attracted to his themes of reality or unreality or the sense that there is always something behind whatever we see. I also appreciated his humour and his spare efficiant writing style.

Having this new book and digging out some of those old novels as reference material got to me thinking about the sources of art that were inspirations to me when I was younger, that shaped me as a writing and video creator for better or worse.

Here's a few of them, far from a complete list, but probably some of the most significant works of art in my life, perhaps they will get you thinking about inspired you, what gave you that spark that "aha" moment, that opened your mind and inspired you to do whatever you do, better

A WRINKLE IN TIME by Madeline L'Engle. This was the first novel I ever read.

I think I was in Grade Five at the time. My teachers considered me literate because I had a vocabulary that was a little more advanced than my classmates but that came from comic books. All I read at that time was comic books. I never had an interest in anything else, fiction wise, they gave me to read in school.

I remember that the school librarian came into the class and it immediately got my attention: A scientist father who goes missing, mysterious beings who may be witches or ETs, the tesseract, which was basically a wormhole before anyone ever used the term wormhole ... I was intrigued and probably for the first time actually put up my hand. I got the book and devoured it. It started me on a science fiction journey that last a few decades and an interest in other worlds, other realities, other experiences that not only led me to Phillip Dick but that led me to the real life stories of adventuerers and explorers that I follow to this day.

And yes, it had an influence on my writing. I don't think I wrote much before I read this novel. While the greatest influences and motivations on my writing always came from people, like my family members and certain teachers, this was probably the source that ignited my  imagination and made me say "I want to so that"

THE CIRCLE GAME by Margaret Atwood. If A Wrinkle In Time got me interested in writing prose, this was the book that got me interested in poetry.

I discovered this book in my first year of high school and up to that point I had never been much exposed to poetry that was structured and lyrical. None of that worked for me. While I would later grow to appreciate Tennyson and such, it was this book that really inspired me to write poetry of my own. It wasn't just the contemporary structure of the poetry it was the subject matter: Atwood didn't write about ancient kings or dead civillizations, she wrote about people trapped in their apartments or lost in a relationship. I related to everything about this poetry

In terms of influences on my poetry or perhaps impetus to write it, I would be remiss if I didn't mention Canadian poet bill bissett. bissett was a radical poet for his time, he took the non rhyming paradigm to a whole new level, using lines and words on the page to create a kind of visual structure for his poems. This was probably my first experience with the concept of negative space. bissett's influence on me continues to this day: He never capitalized his name and when I sign creative works, neither do I.

THE SONGS OF LEONARD COHEN by Leonard Cohen (duh) I don't write music but of course I gravitated towards this album written and sang by a poet

I have a confession to make: I've never been overly fond of Cohen's written poetry but his lyrics are among my favourite poetic compositions. I always had an appreciation for lyrics from the Beetles to Paul Simon but this album, with its fluent language and exotic realities, opened me up to a whole new form of expression. I think this works better for me than Cohen's written words because his somber world-weary voice shades the language here with tones I never gleaned from the page

THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION by Samuel Delany. Another science fiction novel but like Dick, Delany is an author whose concepts and vision exceeds that of most SF fiction while having to rely upon that form in which to be expressed.

This was a novel that pretty much blew me away when I read it as a teenager. I had a read a ton of science fiction at this point and had read a great deal of mythology, mostly Greek and Norse (thank you Thor, Mighty God of Thunder by Stan Lee). But I had never read anything like this. On the surface, this novel (original title A Fabulous Formless Darkness) is like a post apocalyptic retelling of the Orpheus myth but there is much more to it than that. Delany heads each chapter with a lot of quotes, many taken from his journals as he travelled and lived in Turkey and Asia in the early 60's. Through these passages and characters such as the red headed, gilled Kid Death, Delany weaves a more contemporary (to the writing of the story not its futuristic setting) mythology that includes film and literary references into the story

More than Dick, I can point to Delany as a major influence on my own writing. His entire sf/fantasy collection taught me a lot about depth of character, about permitting your characters to have flaws, to not to be afraid to introduce elements of chaos into your plots and how to use themes like colour or repeated language to express ideals. This book in particular opened me up to introducing elements of my own life into fiction

THE SEVEN SAMURAI by Akira Kurosawa. This movie has influenced a great deal of my story telling.

If I was ever to make a full length, full fledged movie, it would likely NOT be an historical samurai movie. Nor do I ever envision writing such a novel. But this movie showed me a lot of things that I had never really understood before: That an adventure story can be a vehicle for examining interpersonal relationships, that action elements can be used as catalyst for character growth, that indeed if your characters don't evolve or change or progress or fail, no matter how great your plot, your story will fail.

Kurosawa was also a master of pacing, a master of building characters and situations so that they naturally built to a climax. One of my favorite themes, as either author or reader, is that of redemption and that is one of the major themes in this story. It is romantic, heroic, tragic, funny, inevitable, surprising. I can't really think of a more satisfying work of art.


These are just a few examples of works of art that influenced me, that inspired me. There is of course a long list that includes Poe, Bradbury, Burroughs, John Ford, Martin Scorsese, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen ... it goes on.

But still, as much as I have always been inspired by artists, it's been the people in my life who have had the greatest influences on whatever creative endeavours I've indugled. But I'll leave that for some future post

A BIG STEAMING BOWL OF ART

In Lily Tomlin's one woman show Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe aliens come to Earth searching for .. well .. signs of intelligence. Judy the bag lady argues to the aliens that humanity's ability to create art designates us as having true intelligence. "What is this art?" they ask her. She reaches into her shopping cart and pulls out a can of Campbell's tomato soup "This is soup" she says. Then she pulls out a copy of Andy Warhol's print of a can of Campbell's tomato soup and says "This is art" She pushes her two hands back and forth "Soup, art, soup, art .."

Collette and I recently sojourned through the streets of Toronto in search of art; it was Nuit Blanche, which I posted about earlier. This "festival of art" was one of those events that stretched the definition thereof. We are not talking just paintings and sculpture here. We are talking huge "installations" some of which invited interactivity. One of these installations was a lighted drop ceiling draped over an existing alley way

So what they ended up with was ... a really bright alley way. The artists had staged garbage around but our nephew Jeff told us he wandered into this work of art and didn't realize that it was art till he came out the other side and saw the sign.

Was it art? I suppose some sort of aesthetic was involved, things had been staged but from a purely visual sense, it really did little for me. I found myself on my usual high ground and stood up there with my camcorder, taking in the scence. I liked the reactions it envoked, I liked watching people walk through it and discuss the experience ... is shared experience art? Is it art when a bunch of people gather, take in the experience and say "This is art"?

Several years ago the Ontario College of Art exhibited the work of one of their graduates. A young woman had purchased a 40 pound cube of chocolate and a 40 pound cube of lard, took a bite out of each, and placed them in a gallery space. Was it art? The young woman contended that the pieces themselves were not art but the fact that she literally "put herself into them" made it art. So, the chocolate and lard was not the art, the teeth marks were not the art, but the biting was the art, or was it the woman's need to make art .. made it art.

Another Nuit Blanche "installation" was called Sketching Beauty, also hosted by the Ontario College of Art.

This was a project where anybody who wandered in was given drawing materials then all the artwork was assembled both inside and outside of the college; art created out of art. So you had all these individual works of art, all created entirely independently, to the taste of the individual artist then assembled by seperate artists in a seperate space ... was the art created by all those folks sketching? By the assemblers? Or by the people who came up with the concept in the first place. Was the art the final product, or the act of creation itself.

I once saw a piece of "video art" where a guy stood in front of the camera and bounced a tennis ball off the palm of his hand ... for an hour. One long unbroken, unedited shot. Where is the art in this project? The skill of the guy to bounce a tennis ball for that long, the fact he thought to record it, the fact that it was presented in a gallery ...

One of my favorite Nuit Blanche installations was the Cocoon Garden erected in this tiny little public square behind a market off of Queen St West.

The artist created their cocoons by wrapping sheets of plastic around chicken wire forms. They hung lights inside, some flickering, some static. So the cocoons themselves were art, pieces of sculpture fairly easily related to. The cocoons were mostly hung in the trees but there was also one mostly hidden under a park bench.

The cocoons were obviously carefully placed in the trees, I'm sure that it was not random. So there was art in that, grouping and placing all those individual cocoons so that they became one piece. Inside every cocoon were little boom boxes, and at certain intervals, they would activate and play snippets of jingles and radio commercials. I will straight up admit I didn't really get the message here ... what was the point of the commercials coming out of the cocoons? I liked the way the jingles were cut together but I wasn't able to grasp the big picture (now that is an unintentional pun when discussing art ... "the big picture") But I wondered about it .. and perhaps that is the art.

Out on College Street an artist had created this enormous installation called Waterfall, created entirely out of recycled plastic water bottles.

There was an obvious environmental message here, using man made materials to approximate a natural situation. For me, the message, so obvious, did not make it art. The enigmatic message of the cocoons seems more artful to me; perhaps that is my own ego saying "If I can't figure it out, it must be really really creative" But then, I couldn't figure out the message of the partially eaten lard and honestly, that didn't seem artful to me at all. There was something there, in the cocoons; the rest of the installation had a kind of integrity so I just made the assumption that the inclusion of the sound bites had integrity as well.

I have seen lots of things called "art" that I didn't understand and just thought it was bullshit. I have also seen art I "didn't get" but felt there was something there. I think that word "integrity" has something to do with it, another word would be conviction. I don't have to get it, I just need to feel that there is something to get ... how that comes about I don't know if I can totally explain.

I can pull out two examples from the film world: Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers and Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.

The Oliver Stone movie is certainly "arty" Different frame rates, back projections, colour schemes, flashback, flash forwards, radical camera angles and camera movement, off kilter art direction .... and I just think it's a piece of crap. Why? Because it was just arty for the sake of art. Like many Oliver Stone movies he had a point to make .. in fact, he had about 500 points to make and he wanted to shoe horn them all into this movie. There are so many techniques used here I really sense a lack of conviction. John Ford or Akira Kurosawa didn't need back projections and cartoons to make their points, they used the beautiful, simple, powerful langague of a perfectly framed shot, a good actor and an understated score. All of Stone's furious activity was not art; it was more like camoflauge, disguising the fact that he really had very little to talk about at all.

The Life Aquatic is one of those movies that I really like but find it difficult to reccomend to people; it's weird. On the surface it is a parady of Jaques Cousteau but there is more going on here; what that is I am not exactly sure. There is family stuff, relationship stuff, stuff about knowing your role, stuff about the importance of art over science, a lot of stuff about the artifice ... I don't get all of it. But I accept that something is there. Why? Because there is an integrity to the movie, the creators had a plan and they followed it even if it left behind.

In the Leonard Cohen song Take this Waltz he has a line that says "take this with the clamp on its jaws" I have no idea what the hell that means but I know it means something. Largely because it's from Leonard Cohen and I can't think of better example of artistic integrity.

Nuit Blanche had an installation at Dundas Square that, at first blush, did very little for me at all.

The artist was up in this watchtower with a big search light that he would focus on people in the square below. The installation had the title of Fifteen Seconds, a reference to Any Warhol's concept that in our modern age, everyone would have their fifteen seconds of fame (interesting how many Warhol references there are in this post) I scoffed at this at first, but as I think about it now, I am wondering about the concept of art being what people make of it. Was the guy in the tower art or were the people upon whom he shone his light?

You can watch Natural Born Killers and think it is the greatest piece of cinematic art ever, you could listen to that Leonard Cohen song and think it is dreck. Art is interpretive. Art has no existance without us, the audience. We experience the art, we access it with our minds, our hearts, our emotions, we make some kind of value judgement, we in that moment just for ourselves, decide whether or not it is art.

At the end of Lily Tomlin's play, Judy the bag lady comes back out on stage. She takes out the can of soup, she take out the Warhol print, looks at them for a moment, then puts them back in her cart. Then she looks straight out at the audience. She puts her hand to her breast "Soup" she says, then points out to the audience "Art"