Songs, metaphors and brilliance

The browsers ecstasy

I wish that editors would also ask him to write about his musician-heroes and the movies he loves. He follows music ardently and is a devoted cineaste, but not too many people know this. Recently, he was asked to write the liner notes for a new Leonard Cohen CD. He’d be just as happy writing on U2, Sigur Ros, Van Morrison, Jackson Browne, Richard and Linda Thompson. Luckily for us, the good people at Criterion just knew he was the one to turn to for an essay on Monsoon Wedding to be included in their Blu Ray special edition. It’s a gorgeous essay; the perfect Monsoon Wedding essay in many ways.

Not the least bit surprising then that Mira Nair wanted to meet him. When I asked him what meeting her had been like, he replied: “Mira Nair was wonderful--everything I could have hoped for and more: warm, exuberant, fun, and as vibrant as Monsoon Wedding itself. It did strike me--as it did watching The Namesake--that she’s fundamentally a literary soul, and she was appreciably more down-to-earth and book-loving and approachable than most Hollywood directors I know.”

When the Criterion essay happened, he said he had been “delighted to be asked to write at length on the film, while also finding that I admire Nair more and more the deeper I look into her. I quite often feel, to my surprise, that she is the great modern Indian novelist of exile and complicated homes, as so many of those who explore those themes on the page are not.” Most of us, audience and critics alike, missed the playful parallels to Shakespeare’s gossamer play, but Pico so tunefully picked it up, and plays it back for us in his Criterion essay, reliving all the fun again that the Bard (S or Nair?) meant us to have.

“But it took me a while to notice,” he writes, “how the shimmering midsummer night’s dreaming of this film, with its late-night liaisons and narrowly averted tragedies, its many kinds of love, unexpected, doomed and strikingly fresh, might almost be invoking the Shakespearean play that gave us the image of lovers converging on a spellbound evening. Here are the “rude mechanicals,” diligently, sometimes clownishly working to put on a show, while their lords and ladies frolic--and stopping at one moment to watch a beauty through a window, as she watches herself in a mirror, putting on her mistress’s jewels. (The lowest of the laborers is even called “Lottery,” today’s equivalent to Bottom).

Here are a kind of Oberon and Titania surveying all the others as they sleep, in one of the deeply moving and ruminative scenes that reminds us that this is more than just a romp. Here are bawdy jokes, pudgy boys dancing charmingly with beauties and eight different characters, by my count, going through some kind of transformation. Here, finally, is a married man who doesn’t know the meaning of “uxorious”…the whispers and plots on every side all take us to the enchanted minglings of Shakespeare’s gossamer comedy.”

Only a literary-cinematic sensibility as fine and rare as Pico Iyer’s could have zeroed in on something like this. He brings these qualities to bear on his writings on music as well. After decades of dropping out of the music scene, Leonard Cohen was once again on the road, giving concerts. Pico followed him to several — twice in Toronto and again in Los Angeles, and wrote to say just after the tour ended: “I do believe more and more that Leonard Cohen is one of the enduring poets of the age. His verses are bottomless, just as much as Emily Dickinson’s are, and the longer I live in Japan, the more I come to think that nobody can put words to the Zen enigma and challenge so well as he.”

I myself could catch the concert only on DVD — Live in London. I was on the phone and email with friends, trying to describe the experience, but couldn’t. I had been casting about for some way to talk about that thing you see Cohen doing in the concert, kneeling on the floor, hugging his hat to his chest, and could not figure it out -and then there it was, precisely summoned up in Pico’s review of the concert:

“He bounds onto the stage, dressed to kill, and roars into a rendition of one of his classic songs as if he’s been storing up his energy for 15 years to make it new. He’s bent before us, crouching, trying to squeeze out every ounce of blood, and he’s looking into the wings to summon a fury, a devotion, a power most of us would not have words for…the singer is looking at the ground, as if admitting us to his private cell. He has no designs on us at all.

Is this cabaret or prayer-hall, you may wonder as the show goes on? Haunting or celebration? Some of the songs have the dark, chill atmosphere of a graveyard after nightfall; others reveal to us the man before us, hand on his undefended heart.
We’re used to thinking of Leonard Cohen as ladies’ man and monk, master of chansons and koan. But if you’re in the right place, he might be telling us, all of them look the same.”

And as I read and re-read Pico’s little essay, the sentences sound like a Leonard Cohen song, with those cadences. These are verses here, not paragraphs. That’s how deeply Pico has lived in these songs. He’s singing them back here, and his poetry and the poet’s have become one chant. Moving me to say: backing Leonard Cohen on vocals here are Sharon Robinson, the Webb Sisters and Pico Iyer! Here is a tribute offering to this ‘courtly coyote’, ‘this mystic in a gangster’s hat’, by a writer whose deep, mysterious eloquence matches the singer’s own.

Pico is presently steeped in several book projects; the one closest to his heart is a book he has been working on for several years: a life of Graham Greene, a writer’s life.  
While his grateful and devoted readers around the globe wait eagerly for this one of a kind writer-biography, we also hope to see published one day a Pico Iyer anthology on film and music.