Sunday, lazy Sunday "I needed so much To have nothing to touch I've always been greedy that way" Leonard Cohen: The Night Comes On

Lousy weather most of the day, rain and a little sun and more rain made me stay in-house today. Additionally I have caught a cold and my nose has been running all day long. Therefore I spent most of today reading Various Positions. A Biography of Leonard Cohen from 1996 by Ira B. Nadel. I know a little more about Cohen's life now but somehow I feel cheated as I hardly got to know anything new about his character and his thoughts. The two most important lovers of Cohen Marianne Ihlen and Suzanne Elrod apparently did not collaborate to this book. Suzanne is the mother of Cohen's two children, she is not the Suzanne of the song. Marianne on the other hand is the Marianne of So Long Marianne which was his farewell song to her. Cohen left both as so many other women.It would have been nice to hear her stories about him which would probably be much less positive than the overall tenor of the book. Cohen's perseverance and obsession with poetry and writing is something I really adore in him. The almost thirty years of Zen meditation practice underline his self-discipline. Besides I learnt that Cohen was a good friend of Joni Mitchell (who btw composed Both Sides Now and not Judy Collins as stated in the book). And apparently he fell deeply in love with Nico who told him to back off as she would only sleep with men younger than herself as for example the 18 year old Jackson Browne. Cohen was much more successful in Europe than in America. He said the reason could be that they do not understand him there(very funny). I found his behaviour at concerts in Germany a little irritating. His first concert in Germany he starts with the Hitlergruß "Heil Hitler". In the Berlin Sportpalast he salutes the crowd with Goebbels famous words "Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg?". Provocation or bad taste? Cohen is a Jew which makes this even more embarrassing. The key scene for me are the recordings of his first album. In the studio he needed a mirror to see how his appearance was when he played guitar. Vain as a peacock was my first thought when I read that. Maybe I am wrong. Nevertheless I have put his last album Ten New Songs in my top ten of last year. The music is purely electronic but arranged in such a subtle way that his voice (and Sharon Robinson's in the duets) stays the angular point of the songs and the music floats calmly around Cohen's extremely low and masculine voice. The lyrics I have still to discover. They sound rather calm but also darkly philosophical as always with Cohen.