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Notes from An Evening with Leonard CohenBy Cole Louison LEONARD COHEN MAY 16 AND 17 SOLD OUT! is in lighted letters thatcurve around the bottom of the Radio City Music Hall sign and go down50
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street. A few blocks down, David Hyde Pierce is introducing hishusband at a gay pride rally with a really loud PA. A guy in a tuxedowears a sign that says enter down the block. Across 50
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, scalpers withcell phones face police, selling back row tickets for $100. The line ismoving briskly between the barricade and wall, past a nice big goateedguy in a doorman’s coat who asks how we are while he looks at ourtickets and points us towards the curtained doors. Pretty soon we’re allunder the sign and its light bulb ceiling and moving through the walllike an hourglass.This is my first time here. Walking in it’s perhaps easy understand whymy seat cost what it did and why they sold every single one, twice.The walls are goldish paper and have the same pigment in the windowcurtains. The carpet is thick and reddish and there’s a little ticketbooth with an iced glass sign lit from somewhere by a tiny green light.The air feels rich and the people look famous. This is about six feetinside of Radio City.People take the subject of Leonard Cohen so personally that it’s doomto try any kind of review of his work or even life. But if you don’t knowmuch about him or see why he’s a big deal, you might listen to hisrecords or ask your Dad, or Mom. He was a recognized poet before hewas a famous singer slash songwriter and has made as many books ashe has records and at 74 continues to write, perform, explore, andlive. He’s a devout Jew and a Zen Buddhist. When Allen Ginsburgasked him how he mixed the two and he said “no conflict.” He’s livedin Montreal, Nashville, New York, Hydra, and Los Angeles. Five of hisyears in LA were spent in a mountaintop monastery, where he wore amonk’s robe and a shaved head (but still smoked) and during whichhis manager Kelley Lynch stole all of his money, one reason—headmits—he’s back on tour for the first time in 15 years.
 
Just before his tour started a month ago, Cohen sat down with theNew York Times. The guy nasally asked him about his Zen practice andbeing on the road. Here’s part of his response, in a sanded baritoneyou just want to keep hearing:
There’s a similarity in the quality of the daily life. There’s a sense of purpose. I don’tmean purpose with a capital P. I mean just . . . focus. It’s very hard to focus,generally speaking, in one’s life. So there’s a very specific focus. Because of thatfocus a lot of extraneous material is discarded without any effort. So you tend tosleep carefully, because you need to sleep. You need to eat carefully, because youneed your body in a certain kind of shape. You tend to exercise with a certain kind of modest regularity because you’ve just got to be able to do that three-hour show.
The lobby of Radio City is a huge high oval with balconies and heavycurtains that hang 60 feet from the ceiling and stop an inch over thecarpet. The left wall is mostly a mirror that reflects everything in agolden tint and the right is bright old paneled wood with 10 footspaces left open for the second and third mezzanine people to lookdown. Every window has leaners. The top row of windows touch aceiling that’s covered with gold paper. The walls seem to bend towardsthe other side of the room, with the curved red stairway and oneheavenly golden mural that deserves its own story. People are sittingall the way up the stairs. No one’s telling them not to.My ticket’s for the first mezzanine, seat 412. The seating people wearvests and bow ties and have tiny scuba flashlights with soft greenbulbs. There’s a tiny outlined black plaque at the front center with 412in gold, held to the wood with two tiny tacks. The wall in front of us islike two feet high with a wood rail edged in leather that feels good torest your chin on. The second and third mezzanine are each fartherback so from here you don’t know they’re there. Seat 412 is the centerseat in the front row on the foremost crest above the house.It’s hard to look at any one thing but it’s also hard not to just keeplooking at the curtain. It looks like stone and whirling sand and waterin the wind. It spans the whole stage and disappears maybe 100 feetup at the top of the house’s last arch wall. It’s like we’re at the back of a giant shell. There are piles where the curtain’s fabric touches thestage. It breaches liquidly, fluidly out across the floor. It pours andbillows and rises and falls, like how a canyon looks from anairplane. The gap in the curtain is maybe a third of its whole size, andwhere the stage is set in black.
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