satire

The Wall Around Heaven (for Larry Williams)

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Let me start out by saying I think that today’s poem is a fine piece of writing capable of making its listener think anew. “The Wall Around Heaven”  is satire. Satire has two dangers: that one will take its audaciousness as a literal program or doctrine, or that one will laugh simply at the outrageousness without thought. Satire often believes laughter can be the germ of thought even if you laugh before you know what that thought could be.

This project’s usual thing is to present poetry old enough to be freely reused, and then performing it with original music. If one was to note that the poetry wasn’t meant to be performed with music, or that there is a danger that our understanding of the poet’s intent is incomplete, I reply that’s part the point. We want to think anew about the works, some of which are revered poems, some of which are poems that are lesser-known or rated.

In this case we have the poet themselves performing the piece, longtime Parlando contributor Dave Moore. When I asked Dave if he wanted to add some background on “The Wall Around Heaven’s”  intent, here’s what he wrote:

At this point I don’t even remember when Larry died. As you know he lived right around the corner from you, drove a cab, and identified as a folk poet. Not to mention, tho I’m sure you will, sharing a name with a musician. He also vocally retired from poetry, tho a lot I heard from him seemed spontaneous (I’m missing a word here). When I wrote this of course I was thinking about Trump’s cruel & ridiculous buzzpoint (missing another word, must be too early in the day for me).

Anyway I was thinking in Larry’s voice when I drafted the piece.”

Who’s that Larry Williams that Dave speaks of? Nope, not that guy. Our Larry was also someone who attended the Lake Street Writer’s Group along with Dave and myself, and the two poets who died this winter that we’ve been introducing you to: Ethna McKiernan and Kevin FitzPatrick. So, in that way, Dave’s poem inspired by our Larry Williams is of a piece with those matters, even if it uses different tactics than the poems by Ethna or Kevin.

I don’t want to say a lot about Dave’s “The Wall Around Heaven.”   I think it’s best encountered as one listens to its satiric fable, its parable, without my commentary. I’ll add only this: this month I went the long way around to see the roadshow production of the folk opera Hadestown.  Hadestown’s  first act closes with what may be the most heard song from this opera, a rousing act-closer “Why We Build the Wall.”   I think that song was written nearly 10 years ago, but by the time Hadestown  evolved into its current staged version, the song was seen — as Dave also recalls about the genesis of his own piece — as commentary on a certain U.S. presidential campaign’s idée fixe: an impenetrable border-long wall on the country’s southern border.

Hadestown set

The set for the production of the folk-opera Hadestown I saw last week.

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To this listener “The Wall Around Heaven”  is something much more than that. In some part it’s a satire on a long-time Christian theological question. But what if you’re not a Christian? Well, one doesn’t need to be an acolyte of classic Greek polytheism to enjoy Hadestown.*   The Larry Williams I knew would often speak, poetically or otherwise, about social injustice and elite indifference. I suspect that the muses were whispering those shades into Dave’s ear as he wrote this — but the concept of a wall around paradise and the capricious human understanding of the rules to gain entry is broader and richer than even that.

This one is a bit longer than many pieces here, but it’s well worth a listen. The player gadget is below for many of you. Can’t gain entry to that? This highlighted link is the other way to hear it.

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*Here’s my summary review of Hadestown:  I enjoyed, appreciated, and was moved by it. Having heard a few of the songs by the original Broadway cast, and having a modest grasp of some of the mythological tales, I was still glad that I encountered it as a discrete story-telling experience whole for the first time. I discovered, as with Dave’s parable, Hadestown  adds an undercurrent of social inequality to its mythopoetic story. External to Hadestown  itself, the story’s impact was amplified by sitting next to someone just out of hospitalization for suicidal ideation during this performance. Orpheus in Hadestown  makes a point that he entered the underworld of the dead “the long way.”

That’s the way I wish for you to get to heaven or hell — the long way.

God Made Mud

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Let’s complete our series honoring American writer Kurt Vonnegut on the 99th anniversary of his birth with another piece taken from his novel Cat’s Cradle.  In the world of this novel there’s an imaginary religion created called Bokononism whose elusive founder writes psalms and prayers that reference Caribbean musical styles. Even though Vonnegut never set music to them, he seemed happy that others did during his lifetime.*

Cat’s Cradle is still in print, so why not buy or read it? Also for the curious, here’s a nice “behind the making of the book” listicle

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The LYL Band, the loose organization of herded cats that Dave Moore and I have played under for about 40 years, performed several pieces using Bokonon’s psalms and other short passages we’d read in Vonnegut’s novels three days after his death was announced back in 2007. I wrote the music for these in that interim and did the vocals when they were performed “live in the studio” within two one-hour sets. As I mentioned in other episodes of this series, the performances aren’t perfect. For one thing, Dave is creating his keyboard parts on the fly after maybe hearing a quick run down and with nothing more than a chord chart. Given that I’m not a very good chord/rhythm player that’s a testament to him and what decades of playing together will do for a band. Another problem was that I was suffering from cold/allergies that day and my vocals had issues with congestion and phlegm.

I recorded those two sets, though I thought it a shame that my phlegm issues reduced the quality of the performances. Over the years since 2007 I’ve listened to those performances, and I found that I either had become inured to their sound or that the emotional moment of us honoring Vonnegut overcomes that.

“God Made Mud”  was the next to last song we did that day.** It’s probably the best of our Vonnegut Memorial stuff in terms of my vocals. “God Made Mud”  appears in Vonnegut’s novel as the text of “The Last Rites of the Bokononist Faith.”   The Bokononism that Vonnegut invented is used in the novel in various ways to satirize human nature and our search for meaning. For some readers — oddly enough, atheists and secure believers both — those insights into belief are the emotional core of the book. For those in non-Abrahamic religions, there are echoes of Buddhist teachings, intentional or otherwise, mixed in there too.

But by the time Vonnegut gets to “God Made Mud”  the sincerity of the final human situation, the miracle and the limits of our lives, completely overcomes the satire, and removed from the novel’s plot it moves me. It moved me then as we were performing it in the week of its author’s death, moved me later in consideration of other deaths and thoughts of gratitude for lives, and moves me again this autumn as I consider death and the approach of death by folks in my circle.

Click this highlighted hyperlink to hear the LYL Band’s performance of “God Made Mud”  —  or some of you may see a horizontal player gadget below this paragraph to play it. One last thing before I go: if you appreciate what this Project does and you think you know someone or some audience who might also appreciate these varied combinations of words and original music, help it continue by sharing links to the audio pieces or posts on social media or elsewhere. I almost never have the time to do that, and I’m bad at it anyway, so a good deal of this effort’s audience comes to it this way. Thanks!

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* Oddly, most of those settings that I’ve heard make no reference to Caribbean musical styles implied in Vonnegut’s imaginary Bokonon texts. One of those styles, calypso, has lost most of its currency in North America, but in today’s piece I used a reggae feel as a reasonable substitute.

**The last song back in 2007? Dave Moore’s own meditation on last things “The Final Minute,”  which we presented here this summer.

Bokonon’s 53rd Calypso (Nice, Nice, Very Nice)

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

On to Kurt Vonnegut novels I have read and admired, as we continue this week’s Vonnegut series. In 1963’s Cat’s Cradle Vonnegut created one of the most elaborate satires I have ever read or heard of. What’s the target of the satire? I’d start to list them, but how much time do you have? What’s that you say?

“Busy, busy, busy…”

Well, let me talk a bit about Bokononism, a fictional religion created by Vonnegut as a Dadaist philosophical framework for this novel. I thought it a clever satire as a young man, but now as an old man I admire the richness of its contradictions and insights. Bokononism (named for its living, but elusive founder, Bokonon) is rich in meaningful/absurd contrasts. It’s said to have been invented by the West Indian sidekick of an accidental American imperialist* as an opiate of the masses for an impoverished Caribbean island nation. But not far under the cover of its optimistic and panegyric lies are sharp observations of life and how we think we make sense of it.

Instead of the Psalms of David, Bokonon wrote calypso songs. To many readers now calypso is but an obscure genre of Caribbean Afro-American music, but in the years immediately prior to Cat’s Cradle  it had had a fairly significant US commercial visibility. Here’s a complexity in this calypso moment: to the typical US listener at the end of the 50s the music was “read” as carefree and only moderately exotic and absurdist.** But to calypso’s originators on their colonial islands, it was a sly comment on oppressions and troubles.

Creating such a song-writing character was an excuse for Vonnegut to do what many novelists stuck on silent pages would love to do: dress up and pretend to be pop music performers, even if only in a novelist’s imagination. Cut Kurt some slack: that pretending allows us to use Vonnegut’s sensibilities in the short formats the Parlando Project prefers.

Over a decade later, this lyric escaped from the novel, and what was presented as the trickster guru Bokonon’s scriptural “53rd Calypso”  in the book had a  second life as a song lyric under the title “Nice, Nice, Very Nice.”  It made the American hit parade charts with this song by Ambrosia in 1975. Taken that way, it either can seem a simple, pleasing song; or a good reason in 1975 to form a punk band, without delay.


These guys wrote additional lyrics, sing better than I do, and were more concise in explaining Bokonon’s motivation for his religion “I wanted all things to make sense/So we’d be happy instead of tense” Still, I formed a punk band.

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Simple isn’t without complexities. All we have is one quatrain and a short refrain — “Be Bop A Lula”  is epic poetry compared to this. That one verse is a diverse catalog of the lowly and the high, the brave and the mundane, and the refrain wishes to claim they are part of the same “device” which rhymes with a repeated judgement that this is “nice.”

On one level this is a statement of shared humanity, and our connection. As complicated as the character of Bokonon is, I don’t think his creator Vonnegut would doubt the truth of that sharedness — but the “nice” and then too, the “device” part? There is the complex part of Vonnegut’s world-view.

Vonnegut portrays a world where kindness, love, and altruism are possibilities – no, necessities. Everything that is not those things exists too. We are all in a net of “butterfly effects” — even then in the novel’s 1963, even more so now in 2021. Is the world “nice?” In moments and pin-points it is. Let’s acknowledge that. In totality? “Busy, busy, busy” is said to be what a Bokononist says whenever they try to consider the complexity, the world’s intended and unintended awe of incomprehensibility. The implication: too complex to understand, to control.

At this point, in an earlier draft of this post I then tried to synthesize these things in my conclusion, but I don’t believe the book ever does, and certainly this little song that I present today doesn’t.  So, let’s move on. Busy, busy, busy.

This song, performed in the same live set, back in the week of Vonnegut’s death in 2007 by the LYL Band, is unusual among the several musical settings I’ve since heard for it — I actually aimed for a calypso feel for the melody and groove, while others don’t. These 2007 performances I’ll use this week are each imperfect in some way, but as we approach the 99th anniversary of Vonnegut’s birth, it’s my hope that they still express some of his spirit.

There’s a player gadget for some to hear “Bokonon’s 53rd Calypso”,  but if you don’t see it, tap this highlighted hyperlink.

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*The very idea of accidental or coincidental imperialism is rich in itself. Even the minor threads in Cat’s Cradle  are often like that.

**Just as I’m not much of an expert on the novel and its expressions, I can’t allow anyone to think of me as some expert on West Indian musical genres and political movements. But I am old enough to recall a bit about how the music was used and understood by white-Eurocentric-American culture circa 1960 — roughly, a darker-skinned Jimmy Buffett kind of thing. Some may recall a signal use in the goth-comedy Beetlejuice  where the uptight urban sophisticates in a New England farmhouse were possessed and cursed to sing “Day-O (the Banana Boat Song),”  which had been a big US hit in the late 50s. It’s an extraordinarily silly scene. I laugh at it. Vonnegut could (should) draw laughs too, but he is using a deeper, darker, slyer take on calypso.

Calypso’s use first by the American pop music industry, and then by white US filmmakers, as well as Vonnegut’s use of it in Cats Cradle  could be viewed as cultural appropriation — I’d guess because it is. How would actual people of Trinidad/Tobago view Vonnegut’s reflection of their adaptation of African songcraft in a new colonialist world? I’d expect the opinions would vary, but I haven’t found anything on a simple web search.

I’ll let them judge Vonnegut in that regard. I’m an American musician, so I will not throw the first Rolling Stone from a country whose music is unique significantly because of kidnapped Afro-Americans. I feel that restricting art and tactics that oppose oppression only to each group who could claim ownership and a first, best understanding of them reduces the powers of resistance.

Genius by Mark Twain

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Last time, American satirist Mark Twain took aim at the pretensions of half-hearted sentimental memorial verse. Today’s barbs for bards are from a younger Twain. The text is taken from what was apparently a journal entry written on shipboard in 1866, before Twain was established in his literary career. Elsewhere on the web “Genius”  is identified as a poem, and perhaps in manuscript that intent is clear—but when I first read it, I suspected it could be notes for something not yet finished, or even cue-phrases for a humorous lecture.

150 years and the mystery of what it is hardly obscure the points Twain makes. The alienated, self-pitying, and intoxicated artist, damaged by a feeble market that is itself a claim to their originality, is a type we can still recognize—even for some of us, in the mirror. In my performance I chose to bring forward what I think is some ambiguity in the piece. Twain never quite shows the work itself is a worthless affectation, while indicting the affectations around the artist specifically and wholeheartedly. Yes, the poet’s rhymes are said to be “sickly” and “incomprehensible,” heavy charges laid on them by those “with sense” who are not hip enough to appreciate the “genius.” Every single poète maudit* since would take those charges as badges of honor. I sense some mixed admiration for this stubborn guy who sensibly should take available steady work as a sawyer, but instead sticks to writing.

Mark Twain 1863

The pen name was still fairly new, and the ‘stache hadn’t yet leapt to his upper lip, but here’s the twenty-something Twain.

 

After all, Twain himself was not far from that state. He was not yet a successful writer. He hung out with a group of self-described Bohemians in San Francisco. He lived in his Twenties a fairly reckless and feckless life, fleeing to the west from Missouri to escape the Civil War and the draft, fleeing Virginia City for San Francisco to escape a duel occasioned by a slanderous article he had published, and this particular journal entry had him on a ship heading to Hawaii, leaving San Francisco. “No direction home, like a complete unknown…”

And all his life, Twain was two, a man who clearly wanted success and recognition, but whose writing and outlook was distrustful of established norms, propriety, and shibboleths.

If “Genius”  is notes for a talk and not an intended page-piece, it points out that Twain’s eventual career included substantial work as a speaker who told humorous stories. We have a name for that sort of work today: stand-up comedian. During his time out west Twain met and befriended Artemus Ward, a man who has since been called the first stand-up comedian. They met in the mining boomtown of Virginia City, and the story goes that after Ward’s performance, Twain took Ward on a drunken tour of the rooftops of the town. Given their state, the risk to American culture of such an intoxicated lark was in retrospect considerable, so perhaps we should thank the town constable who along with a shotgun filled with rock-salt, ended that escapade.

So, Twain lived to write his books and to skewer poetry. The player gadget to hear my performance of Mark Twain’s “Genius”  (whatever it is, or was intended to be) is below. Here’s the full text of “Genius” as is appears elsewhere on the web.

 

 

 

*Was Twain skewering a particular poet, or a type? Edgar Allen Poe, the American poet of his time who lived and sang the “songs of a poet who died in an alley” would be one candidate. And it could be in some part a reflection of persons in the West Coast bohemian scene he was sailing from.

President Declares Poetry an Essential Service

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

In a sharp turn-about that shocked many in our nation’s capitol, the President today declared that poetry is an essential service that must remain open during the current pandemic emergency.

“People tell me, that may surprise you, but they do, they say, you know Mr. President your speech is very poetic. I’m told I’ve been compared to the great French poet Ubu Roi, and you know that’ll surprise a lot of the so-called elites who look down on the way I talk straight in several directions. And I hear that Andre Breton had some very good things to say about my campaign. That Andre Breton is a smart guy, and I hear he’s a doctor too, so it’s especially good to hear that he supports me these days.

Ubu Roi Performance

The President also demonstrated there are plenty of ventilators, tests kits, and protective masks and gowns available.

Now this is odd, because I’ve been involved in other things, but I think I could have been a poet if I’d wanted to. A great one. Maybe I didn’t because I don’t have a big ego like a lot of those poets do. Someone showed me some poetry today, and it didn’t seem to get to the most important things. It seemed to be mostly about the poet themselves. I don’t know if I could do that. But poetry seems to be like that, so maybe I could. I dunno—poets look to what I do, and do the opposite maybe.

Oh, some folks are telling me that I need to get back to the declaration. All right. As you know, our country is going through some tough times. Sometimes they are in little rooms, not fine rooms like this one here, or the ones that you could write in at my hotels or resorts by the way. Great rooms. Big ones, you could put a lot of poetry in there. Stuck at home, and I hear that some of them write and read poetry in those rooms. So, it’s an essential service to social distancing. Even in the earliest days of social distancing I’m told poets across the country were happy to comply with the earlier, looser crowd size regulations of 50 people—some of them even asked if the authorities could go further and require 50 people to attend their readings.

The declaration. It says here that:

Read poetry out loud, at full voice, often, until this emergency is over. It’s good for your lung function. Sad poems will tell you your sorrow is not all the sorrow in the world. Love poems will tell you there is an invisible web of desire as important as gravity. Poems of joy will make you leap like Carl Sandburg’s goats in pastures of plenty. Poems will turn your eyes inside out so you can see with another heart, and hear its strange burbling music.’

That’s the stuff here they want me to say, but I suggest you wait until after I’m done talking to start with the poetry. Oh, and this guy tells me it’s National Poetry Month. Yes, I think so. I hereby declare poetry an essential service today, and every April 1st.”

Reached for comment, Andre Breton suggested that he could not comment at this time, being dead and all. But he referred us to this section of his Surrealist Manifesto  as performed in English by the Parlando Project. He further added “Vous pouvez cliquer sur le gadget du lecteur ci-dessous pour l’entendre.”

Emerson’s Requiem

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

In the last hour of 2019 I was sitting on the couch with my son as we exchanged video clips we thought each other should see. I mentioned that Neil Innes had just died, that he was part of the Monty Python circle, and that before Python he had founded a musical group that helped inspire the Pythons called the Bonzo Dog Do-Dah Band.

“I think I’ve heard of the Bonzo Dog Do-Dah Band.”

“Search for ‘Canyons of Your Mind’”  I suggested. Sure enough, the magic of Internet searching brought up a video. “This is the most Sixties song ever” I promised.

Here’s the clip we watched.

Farcical fascicles found  “In the wardrobe of my soul, in the section labeled shirts.”

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I wasn’t sure if I needed to provide context for it. As the performance shows they’re sending up every bit of performative anguish over absent love as well as the worship of musicians offering it. And the lyrics? They should have mortally wounded a certain kind of Sixties metaphor that was supposed to transcend our mundane world. In the middle of it Neil Innes plays a guitar solo that was likewise a pig cupid’s dart to the heart of every guitar hero moment. Anyone got the tab for that?

Son was not impressed. He had just shown me a Franz Ferdinand video chock-full of early 20th century Dada and Constructivist art moves: Max Ernst, Kurt Schwitters, Alexander Rodchenko visual riffs. In contrast, the Bonzo’s Dada lacked the same danceable drive and sleek black stage dress of the smart and sharp 21st century Glaswegian rock band.

Oh well. I hadn’t seen the Franz Ferdinand videos he showed me and I was glad I saw them. They made me think how we are still working out the Modernist revolution as we enter another decade that will be called “The Twenties.”

Early in the last week, I watched an episode of Apple TV+ Dickinson with my wife. In it Emily was crushing on Benjamin Newton over their mutual admiration for Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem “Dirge,”  “The one where he’s on a plain with all those ghosts” as TV’s Emily has it.

That made we want to go back and check out Emerson’s “Dirge.”  What might Dickinson have seen in it?

It is 19th century Goth, right full of death and lonely love for the dead. Emerson had suffered at least as much as his early 19th century peers in terms of early deaths in his circle, and his poem is quite similar to a poem Abraham Lincoln wrote around the same time that we’ve featured here. One of Emerson’s charms as an essayist was that his mind might take him anywhere while writing one, and the reader is afterward taken along for the ride. This one-thing-after-another move can also work in poetry, but when Emerson the poet does it, it generally doesn’t work for me. “Dirge”  suffers for that.

Here’s the text of “Dirge”  as Emerson published it. The TV show’s Dickinson latched right onto that arresting image, a rural plain full of ghosts, but Emerson buries the lede, putting another stanza before it. That stanza isn’t entirely bad, indeed its abandoned field with scanty corn could have conceivably informed Dickinson’s “Summer’s empty room” in her later poem we featured this December. I tried performing the poem in its entirety, but it was running nearly 8 minutes (longer than I like to use here) and so I then decided to cut to length by removing those stanzas that were Emersonian digressions. I’m not sure that’s the right way to go, though I think the listener might prefer my more single-threaded version. In some of the excised stanzas, Emerson made the poem’s setting distinctly his Concord hometown; and the mourned, missing folks: his siblings who died young. Specificity also works in poetry, but I’m not sure it strengthens this  poem.

One more thing before I offer you a chance to hear my resulting performance. An 1850s Emily Dickinson would have been reading this kind of gothic romanticism in its moment. The element, performative or not, of contemporary personal emotion in poems was part of the change of 19th century Romanticism. Her models: Emerson, Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and others used that mode. Even Whitman made common use of it. Here’s something I find striking: Dickinson generally didn’t. Her poems make little use of sentimentality. She will use emotional words in her poems rather than images meant to invoke feelings in the 20th century Imagist manner, but those emotional terms often seem examined, observed, set to the side.

I asked my son if what put him off the Bonzos was that they were desecrating his musical religion. *

“No, you could have just picked a better one.”

Acoustic guitar and a mix of synthesizer sounds for today’s musical performance of Emerson’s “Dirge.”  The player gadget to hear it is below. Don’t see it? Then this highlighted hyperlink will also play it.

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*Pedantically one could draw a fairly direct line from the Bonzos to early Roxy Music to “Anarchy in the UK.”  But no more footnotes today! If I’m going to excise Emerson’s digressions, why should I give myself license?

Sincerely, M. Cohen

~ Frank Hudson ~ 4 Comments

As long-time readers here will know, the Parlando Project likes to vary what it does. Loud, immediate and approximate rock’n’roll, string quartets, folkie and electronica tinges combine with words that I look around for—different stories each time, most of them not mine.

Are we now going to vary from Bronze Age Chinese poetry collected to instruct politicians? Or from the W.H. Auden-who-can-bring-the-funk remarks of Jimi Hendrix’s ET visiting the Third Stone from the Sun and marveling at the chickens?

Well, maybe a little.

And so, we’re going to descend into parody today. Mad  magazine imprinted me on parody while young, and Weird Al Yankovic never did a thing to cure me, and here I am an old man who still can’t help making up travesty-lyrics to songs he hears, which distresses my son who likes to sing Billy Joel’s “For the Longest Time”  with his sincerely growing voice, while my questionable tenor tries to make that into a dissertation on salad vs. main-course silverware: “Fork with the Longest Tine.”

To the possible detriment of today’s piece, I didn’t choose anything as well known as one of Joel’s hits. In tryouts, just one of the folks I’ve sung today’s piece to even recalls the original song it references: Leonard Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat.*”  That may say something of the fragmentary fame of Leonard Cohen in the United States. Back in the Sixties, a couple of his songs “Suzanne”  and “Bird on a Wire”  were fairly well known from cover versions, and his 21st Century song “Hallelujah”  has become even more well-known after being sung by John Cale, Jeff Buckley and Rufus Wainwright—but “Famous Blue Raincoat”  despite dozens of covers, just hasn’t penetrated the U.S. mind.**  There may be reasons for that. It doesn’t have a hooky chorus, even Leonard Cohen himself thought the lyrics were confusing, and to the degree it has an accessible plot it’s about a complicated love relationship far from the common I love her/him, or her/him has left me and I’m so sad or angry about that.***  My favorite part of the song was its uncommon ending, where it’s revealed to be a letter of sorts, signed with solemn irony “Sincerely, L. Cohen.”

M Cohen and L Cohen

A famous orange retainer and a famous blue raincoat.

 

And that was the hook for today’s parody. I thought of another Cohen living in New York City, who is a principal in another messy romantic entanglement, whose feelings about it are multivalent, and whose sincerity is a changing thing. You can hear “Sincerely, M. Cohen”  using the player below.

 

 

 

* If you want to hear Leonard Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat”  first, you can see a lyrics video here.

** Am I depending on the Parlando reader/listeners outside the US this time, and yet assuming you have any interest in juicy U.S. scandals?

*** Ever wanted a coherent reading of the Cohen song? Here’s one of the best I’ve read.