Hold on to your fedoras, my friends: Leonard Cohen has spoken from beyond the grave, and the message is: To hell with Kanye West. Yes, just when you think 2018 can’t get any wilder, the lately deceased unofficial poet laureate of the Jewish people pipes up to deliver a warning about false prophets that is…
Booze and Vinyl, by Andre and Tenaya Darlington, is a sleek volume with suggestions for cocktails and music pairings — including recipes for listening to the iconic Songs Of Leonard Cohen album on vinyl. So here it is, some fresh new cocktail recipes courtesy of the Darlington siblings. Time to set the mood and let…
We have arrived at the safest and most secure part of the year: We are exactly 364 days away from the next Grammy Awards. The musical awards ceremony, which showers celebrities with thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of awards, based on unknowable criterion in an interminable televised ceremony, has come and gone in 2018….
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. In the traditional Jewish betrothal ceremony (called tnoyim in Yiddish), the bride and groom barely play a role. The parents of both sides draw up a document detailing all the prenuptial conditions; the parents then sign that document, alongside two “kosher” witnesses. But at the recent engagement…
Leonard Cohen’s original version of “Hallelujah” was 80 verses long. And with respect to Mr. Cohen and Jeff Buckley (zichronam livracha) as well as Rufus Wainwright, k.d. lang, the Pentatonix, Bono, and the many other spectacular interpreters of the song, Kristin Wiig is the only person I would listen to singing 80 verses of it….
A Mona Lisa grin became one of Leonard Cohen’s signature facial expressions. For a poet of self-mocking intimacy, it made a perfect mask. As I walked through “A Crack in Everything,” the new exhibit about Cohen’s life and work at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, I imagined Cohen appraising the show with that half-smile….
Sting rasped an elegant, effortless “Dance Me to the End of Love.” k.d. lang belted a to-the-rafters “Hallelujah.” Courtney Love bellowed a grunge-karaoke “Everybody Knows.” And the great man himself, via a video projected on giant screens, croaked “You Want It Darker” accompanied live by the choir of the Québec synagogue Shaar Hashomayim, which had…
Many American Jews face two yahrzeits in the coming weeks, two memories of existential loss. The first comes November 8, when we’ll mark the first anniversary of the election of President Trump. For many of us, this wasn’t just the loss of a preferred candidate. It was the death of a certain reassuring narrative —…
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