“I worked at Office Depot during the day and I was in the studio really late at night sometimes. Work was getting in the way of my focusing on what I needed to do as an artist. When they fired me, I had no excuse. I had to go all in on my career.”
How to break in a pair of jeans, courtesy of Iggy Pop, as told by Anthony Bozza in the documentary Blue Gold: American Jeans, currently streaming on Netflix:
He said that the best thing about summer, something that he always does is he buys a pair of Levi’s jeans at the beginning of the summer and wears them every single day until the end of the summer and never washes them. And sometime about July he said they start to stink a little but it doesn’t matter because that’s when they start getting good. That’s when they start fitting. And he said by August, they are sticking to your ass so perfectly that he doesn’t care if no one is going to come near him, it doesn’t matter. He finally has the perfect pair of jeans.
Whether you’d do such a thing or not, the whole doc is worth checking out if you’re a denim head or simply interested in cultural history.
Previously: Repair Your Own Jeans.
One of the many amazing tidbits from David Remnick’s New Yorker profile of Leonard Cohen:
In the early eighties, Cohen went to see Dylan perform in Paris, and the next morning in a café they talked about their latest work. Dylan was especially interested in “Hallelujah.” Even before three hundred other performers made “Hallelujah” famous with their cover versions, long before the song was included on the soundtrack for “Shrek” and as a staple on “American Idol,” Dylan recognized the beauty of its marriage of the sacred and the profane. He asked Cohen how long it took him to write.
“Two years,” Cohen lied.
Actually, “Hallelujah” had taken him five years. He drafted dozens of verses and then it was years more before he settled on a final version. In several writing sessions, he found himself in his underwear, banging his head against a hotel-room floor.
Cohen told Dylan, “I really like ‘I and I,’ ” a song that appeared on Dylan’s album “Infidels.” “How long did it take you to write that?”
“About fifteen minutes,” Dylan said.
This resonates with me because I too am a slow worker, often, like Cohen, laboring on and fussing with little things for years, though nothing quite at the level of “Hallelujah,” it’s true. It’s more like some people are Cohens, some people are Dylans. Speed-wise, I wanted to be more like Dylan for years, but now I’m more okay with my Cohen-like process, though the Dylan style has its advantages.
Here’s another great tidbit from the piece:
Cohen lived in a tiny cabin that he outfitted with a coffeemaker, a menorah, a keyboard, and a laptop. Like the other adepts, he cleaned toilets. He had the honor of cooking for Roshi and eventually lived in a cabin that was linked to his teacher’s by a covered walkway. For many hours a day, he sat in half lotus, meditating. If he, or anyone else, nodded off during meditation or lost the proper position, one of the monks would come by and rap him smartly on the shoulder with a wooden stick.
And here’s Cohen’s latest single:
May we all be as cool at 82.
UPDATE: There’s an episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast that covers fast vs. slow creativity and Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” Whatever you think of Malcolm Gladwell or podcasts, I think it’s worth listening to.
(Hat tip: @GenerationMeh.)
I’m a big fan of the movie and I listen to the soundtrack with this song on it all the time but somehow I had never seen this video until Ian Petrie tweeted it to me last night. I’m glad he did.
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Tagged Los Angeles, To Live and Die in L.A., Wang Chung
Dan Wang on composer Philip Glass, who came out with a memoir earlier this year:
Glass didn’t work just as a taxi driver and as a (self-taught) plumber. He also worked in a steel factory, as a gallery assistant, and as a furniture mover. He continued doing these jobs until the age of 41, when a commission from the Netherlands Opera decisively freed him from having to drive taxis.… He seemed uninterested in stabilizing his position with more regular income. He never took up an honorary conductor position. He never ensconced himself in a plush conservatory professorship. And he didn’t even apply for grants because he didn’t like that they imposed terms.… Other music students may spend their Juilliard prize monies to practice and compose, but he bought a motorcycle so that he can ride around the country. When people made fun of him for appearing in a whiskey ad, he retorted: “It seemed to me that people who didn’t have to sell out… must have had rich parents.”
Related post: “Key to the Whole Thing.”
(Via Kottke.)
“I’d be biased to think that the community of Geminis is the most consistently in tune with what their spirit is telling them to do or why they have breath in their lungs. But I do think that creative Geminis – Tupac, Biggie, Prince, Miles Davis, all being Geminis – have, throughout history, been really in tune with those things.”
—Kanye West flattering my sense of self in Interview magazine
(Via @austinkleon.)
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