Various venues. July 23-28.
Info: www.cohenites.blogspot.com.

Leonard Cohen is an inescapable axiom of Canadian culture—he’s Buddha, Hank Williams, Bryan Ferry, and Barry White all wrapped up into one stylishly dressed, Quebec-born package. The various musicians, dancers, authors, and filmmakers assembling in Edmonton for the biannual Leonard Cohen International Festival will be spending six days in the man’s thrall and wrestling with his apparent contradictions. 

How, for instance, can someone with a four-note singing range win a Juno Award for Best Male Vocalist? How can one person have one of his songs performed on American Idol without losing one shred of his credibility as a hipster icon? How can one man be spiritually enlightened enough to spend five years in a Buddhist monastery, yet still be willing to do a guest appearance on an episode of Miami Vice, playing the head of Interpol? He’s a Zen koan... and a Zen Cohen.

So... Leonard Cohen. Is he one of the greatest songwriters of our time, or an aging cheeseball who can’t keep his hands off women young enough to be his daughter? Maybe we can get closer to an answer by running Cohen through SEE’s Artistic Icon Balance Sheet...

PRO

Well, “Suzanne” is a pretty indestructible song, especially when you hear it interpreted by someone like Nina Simone, who opened her 1969 album To Love Somebody with a memorably soulful cover that shakes itself loose from Cohen’s more dirgelike version. 

CON

That line, “I touched your perfect body with my mind,” is stomach-turningly awful, no matter who sings it. (And don’t get us started on the lyrics to “Jazz Police” either.)

PRO

Robert Altman’s use of “Stranger Song,” “Sisters of Mercy,” and “Winter Lady” in his 1971 revisionist Western McCabe & Mrs. Miller remains one of the most inspired uses of pop music in cinema history. “He was just some Joseph looking for a manger,” “I’m just a station on your way, I know I’m not your lover”: that’s Warren Beatty and his relationship with Julie Christie summed up in two sentences. And any viewer who doesn’t gasp at Altman’s use of “Sisters of Mercy” as the theme for the sad, pathetic whores who service the town before Christie arrives has a heart colder than the snowbank where McCabe meets his death.

CON

According to Altman’s audio commentary on the McCabe DVD, Cohen (who had generously given Altman permission to use his songs) hated the movie when he first saw it and only came around to admiring Altman’s achievement many years later.

PRO

The “Red Needle,” the cocktail that Cohen invented while living in Needles, California in 1975? The one made of tequila, cranberry juice, and lemon? It’s actually pretty tasty!

CON

"I Am a Hotel", a 24-minute 1983 extended music video starring Cohen as a resident in a hotel haunted by the memories of its former guests, is one of the more unbearably pretentious artifacts of the early days of the music-video era. (That ballet between the bellboy and the maid? Yikes.) Still, it’s length made it a handy hole-plugger in the weekend and late-night broadcast schedules of CBC and City-TV, who co-produced it. 

PRO

In the recent concert film Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man, Rufus Wainwright tells a great story about meeting Cohen for the first time—he was in his underwear, nursing an injured bird back to health by chewing up bits of sausage and feeding them into its beak. 

CON

The omnipresence of Cohen’s “Hallelujah” (or at least the emotionally simplistic cover version by Jeff Buckley) as a shorthand signifier of teen depression on Scrubs, The O.C., House, The West Wing, and Joan of Arcadia, to the point where even Fall Out Boy recorded a song called “Hum Hallelujah.”

PRO

Mia Kirshner undressing to “Everybody Knows” in Atom Egoyan’s Exotica: only in a Canadian art movie would a stripper choreograph a routine to a Leonard Cohen song.

CON

This wretched passage from Beautiful Losers, which The Globe and Mail called “the worst sex scene in Canadian literature”: “Oh what a greasy tower he there massaged! His right hand beneath the steering wheel, urging, urging, he seemed to be pulling himself into the far black harbour like a reflexive stevedore.... I feared for the organ, feared and coveted it, so hard it gleamed, streamlined as a Brancusi, the swelled head red and hot as a radioactive fireman’s helmet.... Thus we existed in some eye for a second: two men in a hurtling steel shell aimed at Ottawa, blinded by a mechanical mounting ecstasy, the old Indian land sunk in soot behind us, two swelling pricks pointing at eternity, two naked capsules filled with lonely tear gas to stop the riot in our brains.”

PRO

“The heart goes on cooking... sizzling like shishkebab.” Cohen’s defence of his continuing interest in younger women—his current partner, Anjani Thomas, is 25 years his junior—is such a great turn of phrase we can’t help but forgive him all his faults... even that howler about the radioactive fireman’s helmet. Vive Cohen!