Friday, June 3, 2011
Do You Know What The Problem With Leonard Cohen Is?
Monday, May 30, 2011
Karma Wangchuk Rinpoche On The Buddhist Ethics And Wrong Action Associated With Revenge Lawsuits - Such As Leonard Cohen's
“In my opinion, if someone sues another person only for revenge or to realize some financial gain, then this is wrong action according to Buddhist ethics or any ethics that I am familiar with,” Wangchuk said. “By contrast, if it will prevent some harm, then it is proper to defend oneself. And in a civilized society, the way to defend oneself is through legal channels.”
http://www.karmapa-issue.org/politics/lawsuit_terhune.htm
Sunday, May 29, 2011
Sent Mikal Gilmore Harvey Kubernik's Article - What Happened When Phil Spector Met Leonard Cohen?
- One last point, Mikal. I have studied Cohen's ever changing comments about Phillip and ultimately he relents and admits that Phil Spector's body guards were armed. I have no idea if that's the case. My friend, John Barry, said he never saw Phillip armed with a gun in a studio and very quickly realized Phillip was set up. Harvey Kubernik wrote an article at the time that I believe really captures the Cohen-Spector sessions and he is now writing a fascinating series for Goldmine on Phil Spector (Part 4 is the latest piece) which are phenomenal. Take it easy. Kelley http://www.rocksbackpages.com/article.html?ArticleID=8402
My Facebook Message To Mikal Gilmore
Mikal,
I thought I would do a brief time-line for you that generally encompasses Cohen’s time on Mt. Baldy. Please keep in mind that Roshi would also frequently visit his center in Los Angeles. At those times, Cohen would stay at his house in Los Angeles. I would like you to take a look at this in black and white. Cohen has now stolen from me; Steven and Marty Machat; Phil Spector; and probably record producer Bob Johnston. He has lied about me. I was not served his retaliatory lawsuit and, after filing it, he confirmed his “massive tax hit” for the news media and stated that he wasn’t accusing me of theft. I suppose not since in 2004-2005 he was attempting to offer me 50% community property (and other things – including paying me my share of all intellectual property dating back to 1967 and my commissions that he withheld). And, if Mick Brown/UK Telegraph was accurate (he said he was looking at the grand jury transcripts) then Cohen testified against Phil Spector in the grand jury. Now, you think this man is a stage. He performs and he is calculated. Imagine how a grand jury felt but these types of statements were obviously withheld from that grand jury and did not show up in the prosecution’s motion in limine. Phil Spector is an innocent man and these “de riguer” gun stories (many that were told in court were never reported to the police or anyone else and some of these women were paid handsomely for their embellished stories). I was present for one incident raised in court. The Carlyle Hotel incident. Phillip didn’t have a gun. The woman was in his room – hiding in the bathroom shower from what I can tell. Phillip and I went down to talk to the front desk about this. I worked for Phillip in 1988 and 1989 when Diane Ogden (a witness who has since died of a drug overdose) said she did. There are so many lies in the Phil Spector set up it is inconceivable. That’s why his ex-wife (a friend of mine), Janice Zavala Spector, and I realized – after review the motion in limine (prior bad acts) realized the DA was absolutely and completely lying about Phil Spector. Janice has known Phillip for approximately 40 years and has never once seen him with a gun. Everyone that really knows Phil Spector understands that this woman shot herself. That’s what the forensic experts testified to but the prosecutors understood this – just slander them. Lie. Jurors are more interested in Lifetime movie drama than science. Also, there are serious allegations of judicial, prosecutorial, and juror misconduct. So, with that in mind, keep in mind that Leonard Cohen told LAPD detectives that his stories about Phillip over the years were good rock ‘n roll stories. I had my attorney present for that interview because I know how vindictive Cohen is and how jealous he was of Phil Spector. I think Cohen stole his line about “I love you Leonard” (Phillip apparently said this) from John Lennon and that rather amusing gun anecdote that Yoko Ono has publicly said was exaggerated. Cohen’s first interview with Stephen Holden re. Phil Spector has been embellished fantastically over the years. I sat in on many, many interviews and Cohen was furious when journalists would ask him what it was like to work with Phil Spector. I know what it was like for Phil Spector. He found it depressing. Cohen was humiliated when he was forced to telegraph Phillip to ask him to finish the album. Marty Machat told me Leonard Cohen never held a gun on Phil Spector but Mr. Machat had to disarm Cohen (evidently on meth, etc.) at the time in NYC. This man has stolen from me; destroyed my life; permitted me to end up homeless; had his lawyer file a declaration in my son’s custody matter (he doesn’t know him – Ray witnessed a conversation about criminal tax fraud; the millions Cohen owes me; the missing state tax returns; and their threats); and recently had his unconscionable thug lawyers threaten to have me arrested when I requested information I require for a complete forensic accounting in order to amend my federal tax returns and determine the amount of the theft. I can assure you that this is not an enlightened man. He is evil; vicious; and inconceivably cruel. He even had the audacity to target my elderly parents – after I refused to go into his lawyer’s office to sign a settlement agreement. The fraudulent TROs are meant to prevent me from requesting information from him in order to communicate fully with the IRS on my tax returns. He stole “Bird On A Wire” (the film) from Steven and Marty Machat and then had the audacity to tell Steven that he was keeping it from Avril Giacobbi who was Marty Machat’s companion. That’s absurd: he signed the warranties and representations for Pinewood Studios so they would release the film to him. He is indeed, as His Holiness Kusum Lingpa said, an “asshole who is going to hell.”
I trust you’re well.
All the best,
Kelley Lynch
P.S. While I put together the “Tower of Song” tribute album for this fraud, he personally kicked Daniel Lanois off the project. These deals he insisted upon were being done from 1994-2001. He was micro-managing things from behind the scenes. He seems to forget that we met with his advisers (including Greg McBowman who advised him, as did I, NOT to sell these assets), Arthur Indursky, and others. He cannot stop lying. He once told me that I am the only person he does not resent when he is meditating. Does that sound enlightened? FYI – Hal Blaine told the detectives he never once saw Phillip in the studio with a gun. He was on the Cohen sessions.
Don't Go Home With Your Hard-On]
Leonard Cohen
That happened at a very curious time in my life because I was at a very low point, my family was breaking up, I was living in Los Angeles which was a foreign city to me, and I'd lost control, as I say, of my family, of my work, and my life, and it was a very very dark period. ..I was flipped out at the time and he certainly was flipped out, … the atmosphere was one of guns, I mean that's really what was going on, was guns. The music was subsidiary an enterprise, you know people were armed to the teeth, all his friends, his bodyguards, and everybody was drunk, or intoxicated on other items, so you were slipping over bullets, and you were biting into revolvers in your hamburger. There were guns everywhere …
http://www.webheights.net/speakingcohen/bbctrans.htm
Very Brief Timeline: Just some of the things Cohen and I were working on. It was a retreat that served as a backdrop for journalists and gave Cohen the opportunity to work on new material since Sony wanted him to deliver a new studio album. He was, after all, contractually obligated to do so but contracts – including all those involving me and his psychotic entities and deals (many of which are notarized).
1993: The Future Tour
Elton John – Duets Album
1994: Stranger Music book is released; book tour; August – attends Oliver Stone’s opening of
Natural Born Killers in Los Angeles
1995: Tower of Song released.
James Adams reports in ‘The Globe and Mail’, Toronto, in 1995:
"To signal new beginnings, Cohen thought earlier this year that perhaps it was time to do a recording, say, 14 short songs, each of them under three minutes. In fact, he did record a rather concise tune called ‘I Was Never Any Good at Loving You’, with some "hot session players" in Los Angeles. While it likely will find its way on to his next CD, right now he’s wondering if he really has the knack for cranking out book-filled ditties. ‘I have this ponderous mind’, he chuckles, ‘that seems to need eight on 10 stanzas to uncover the idea of the song.’"
James Adams continues: "Cohen hasn’t entirely forsaken the purely written word that first brought him attention. He is currently about 100 pages into a new volume of prose and verse titled ‘The Book of Longing’, which, ‘if it stands up’, should be published late next year."
http://www.leonardcohenfiles.com/news0.html
Robert Hillburn interviewed Leonard Cohen for Los Angeles Times in September 1995 at the Zen Center on the edge of the tiny resort village of Mount Baldy. The interview was published on Sunday, September 24.
The 61-year-old songwriter and poet hasn't turned his back on the world. He frequently heads down the mountain to Los Angeles in his four-wheel-drive vehicle, either to visit an affiliated Zen center, to visit his daughter in the Mid-Wilshire area or meet with Kelley Lynch, his manager.
Cohen has plenty of time here to devote to his writing. At present, he's working on an illustrated book of poems and songs for a future album. His workroom contains a primitive Macintosh computer and a synthesizer, tools for his music and his graphic art. There is also a radio in the room but no CD or cassette player. He has to go out to his vehicle to play a CD.
http://www.leonardcohenfiles.com/news0.html
1996: Cohen participates in Armelle Brusq’s 1996 documentary; gives interviews on Mt. Baldy –
1997: More Best Of (see liner notes and Cohen’s work on the LP)
1998: Billboard 30th Anniversary Tribute
Cohen is emailing songs to the Leonard Cohen Files – see blackening pages: Advises
Them that he is working on “A Thousand Kisses Deep,” new poems and drawings for
“Book of Longing”
1999: Cohen is recording “Villanelle For Our Times”
Jack McClelland On Leonard Cohen
Leonard Cohen re-invented himself as a singer-songwriter at the age of thirty-two because he couldn't make a living as a poet and novelist in Canada without either (a) turning into a hip Adrienne Clarkson impersonator at the CBC or (b) finding himself a niche somewhere in the academic hierarchy and becoming an Ur-Ondaatje. Instead, he borrowed money and headed off to Nashville with his guitar. He got as far as New York's Chelsea Hotel. In retrospect, the make over of Leonard Cohen the writer into Leonard Cohen the singer seems inevitable. At the time, it was anything but a sure bet. He had a singing voice even Bob Dylan fans disliked, he was an indifferent guitar player with a five chord repertoire, he was a decade older than anyone else who was hip and too bourgeois to be beatnik, he'd never played with professional musicians and was so heavily into tranquillizers that he'd picked up the nickname Captain Mandrax. In 1969, Songs of Leonard Cohen sounded so wasted and wounded, so used-up, nobody I knew could listen to the album straight through.
…
In April 1959, when he was twenty-four, Leonard Cohen was awarded a Canada Council grant of $2000. He used the money to live cheaply in London and even more cheaply on Hydra while drafting the novel he called Beauty At Close Quarters. He returned to Canada in November 1960 and secured another Canada Council grant and a rejection slip from McClelland & Stewart. Jack McClelland objected to Cohen writing prose in the first place, found his novel tedious, egotistical, disgusting and morbid in its sex, worried about its autobiographical content and suggested radical revisions without guaranteeing publication.
…
Cohen's gloom had more than one cause. Jack McClelland did take his next poetry book but gave the poet a lot of grief. McClelland insisted on changing the title from Opium and Hitler to Flowers for Hitler, dropping its dedication to "The Dachau Generation", proposing a cover which featured a drawing of a nude female with Cohen's face for tits before grudgingly accepting a compromise cover featuring elements from six different ones Cohen had designed. Then McClelland published it with a back cover blurb (taken from a letter) that was used against Cohen's express wish. When Cohen remonstrated that "It was very important that a Jew's book about Hitler be free from arrogant personal promotion...",