I just received a very important email from Mr. Todd Rohal alerting me to this potentially shocking revelation. Is it just coincidence? Or was it a bit of subliminal marketing from the This Is It team, who were hoping to ride Mr. Holland’s coattails all the way to the bank? You tell me:
I was just about bursting with excitement for Friday night’s Leonard Cohen show at Madison Square Garden. Aside from Neil Young, who I still haven’t seen, Cohen was the one favorite artist of mine who I felt would be able to deliver the goods this late into his career. I figured that, in Cohen’s case, age might even add a measure of stature to his music, which had the power to transcend the inherent cheesiness in this risky set-up: playing songs forty years later to aging fans in a gaudy arena. I felt strongly that he would still make it seem classy and first-rate. As the rain fittingly began to fall, my girlfriend and I made our way through the Chelsea streets, up to MSG, where we made it to our seats by 8pm—two sections up but directly in line with the floor’s tenth row—and prepared to take in three glorious hours of majestic music.
Things started well enough, as he played a newer song, coated in the glaze that has always teetered on the edge of becoming too Weather Channel/smooth jazzy for my tastes. But this was the new Cohen, and when he sang the chorus on “The Future,” I was on board. I assumed that when he journeyed into the past, he would make the necessary changes to the musical presentation.
And then came another slightly jazzy groove, which I didn’t recognize until he started singing, “Like a bird, on the wire,” and I had a crushing realization. Nobody else seemed to mind the cheesy new glaze on this classic song—especially those holding lighters in the air—but in that opening line, my balloon of excitement started deflating. Without saying anything, I looked at Holly, who looked back at me with similarly disappointed eyes. She knew it too. We stayed for an hour, then left to catch up with friends back in Brooklyn.
Let it be known: I am not here to say that Leonard Cohen, his band, and basically everyone except us was wrong. Time changes things. But when you have an idea in your head and that idea reveals itself to be the thing you desperately didn’t want, it’s impossible not to feel crushed. In recent years, I’ve sworn off going to see the “old greats” for I understand that the environment, as well as the ticking of the annual clock, will always turn the event into a disappointment. This show was the final nail in that coffin. The next morning, we woke up, laid in bed, and listened to Songs of Leonard Cohen as the overcast sky cast a gray light over our bedroom. This was what I’d wished for all along.
(ADDITIONAL NOTE: I now no longer feel as critical of the documentary Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man. At the time when I saw it, I was outright offended by the overriding cheesiness of the musical presentations, the session players and “noteworthy” singers doing covers of Cohen songs in that Weather Channel style. But after seeing Cohen’s current approach to his own music, replete with a “master” guitarist and “soulful” saxophonist, I realize that the documentary was more accurate than I would allow myself to acknowledge.)
I’ve been meaning to turn this site back into a daily diary/column type of deal but life has been getting in the way. Not to mention the fact that having exposed myself in that manner for the past many years seems like a rather pointless endeavor. But let’s see if I can get those juices flowing once again.
CMJ has invaded NYC this week, and I am going to have slight dabbles with it. When I first moved here in ‘98 and lived on the Lower East Side, there was a palpable buzz in the air that made me want to dive in headfirst, soaking up as much music (and alcohol) as I could. But I was younger then. Now, I’d rather have a quiet night at home in Ditmas Park. That said, I still love music, and am still committed to supporting friends, which I did last night at Local 269 Bar as Louis Schefano’s Regia showed the kids how songs should be written and sung.
Unfortunately, I will be missing tonight’s Polyvinyl Records showcase at the Bell House and won’t be able to see good buddy James Husband deliver his own melodic goodness unto the kiddies. James Husband is Jamey Huggins, multi-instrumentalist and longtime member of Of Montreal. I’ve been waiting ten years for Jamey to step into the spotlight, and now the time has finally come. Luckily, I’ll be able to attend today’s day show at Bruar Falls in Williamsburg so I won’t be missing out entirely. Jamey goes on at 2pm, so if you’re in the neighborhood, be sure to check-a-check it out.
Why am I missing tonight’s showcase, you ask? Why, I have another musical performance to attend. Another CMJ showcase, you ask? Not quite. I have a more lofty engagement. The place: Madison Square Garden. The musician: Mr. Leonard Cohen. This will be my first live encounter with one of my all-time favorite musicians. If it’s even a fraction as good as this clip, it will be money very well spent and a Friday night that I won’t soon forget:
(The Last Blunder is a humorous weekly serial detailing the making of a true independent filmmaking catastrophe. I hope all of you who read along find it entertaining and can relate to it to some degree. The names of the participants have been changed. Any comments, suggestions, compliments, or criticisms can be sent to damianATkaverasfilmDOTcom. Enjoy!)
The Last Blunder: Chapter 11 by Damian K. Lahey
Our final production meeting went well and I was pleased with that. I couldn’t believe we had pulled it all together. Our first day of shooting was going to be the following Monday. I decided to throw a dinner party for the department heads that Friday at my house. It was something I liked to do. It was a calm before the storm sort of thing and if it reeked of me sucking up – it was because I was indeed sucking up.
I was going to cook chicken and shrimp with penne pasta. I bought a couple bottles of booze, but aside from that, it was BYOB. Biff wasn’t going to attend. Neither was Karen Hall. She was going to a “real party” for a “real show” with her big shot art department lackey boyfriend. Spanky, Shifto, Studs, and Billy Bold would be absent as well. This is because they weren’t invited.
At this point, I need to introduce you, my gentle readers, to Randall Dillon. Randall was our key electric. He had worked sporadically on a prominent TV series in town and had been fired for being an out of control drunk. He day-played on various other gigs in town to pay the bills. He constantly worked because his girlfriend was a big makeup artist in town and pulled all the strings she could for him. No one understood it. This shit kicker had missed four out of six production meetings. This was because he would get slobbering drunk at this honky tonk across the street from his girlfriend’s house. Don’t get me wrong. He was an all right guy, but he couldn’t hold his liquor. After a couple drinks, he would start whoopin’ and hollerin’, screaming ‘the south will rise again’ at the top of his lungs.
He’d missed our final production meeting because he’d flat out disappeared. His girlfriend had shown up looking for him. It turns out he’d passed out in a ravine outside of his 24-7 watering hole. Some morning joggers had come across his body Law & Order style around eight in the morning and called 911. The fire engines arrived and a paramedic revived Randall with some smelling salts. They offered him a ride back to his house, but he begged them off. He walked across the street to his girlfriend’s house and raided her liquor cabinet with a vengeance. A fifth of vodka, a shower, and an hour of internet porn later, Randall was back at the honky tonk. When confronted with his tab from the previous evening, Randall responded by grabbing a beer from the guy at the stool next to him and chugging it ferociously. The police were called and Randall was thrown into the drunk tank. On the ride home, he promised his girlfriend he’d stop drinking and go to AA meetings. That lasted till he climbed back into his girlfriend’s refrigerator and sucked down beers till he passed out on the floor.
The next day he woke up feeling like crap. A note from his girlfriend let him know he’d missed our last production meeting and that he should call me. He did and was all apologies. There was really nothing I could do to the guy. We weren’t paying him enough and we were shooting in three days. He was excited about the party, though. He said he was going to bring a twelve pack and his world famous potato salad. He was going to use a recipe that had been passed down to generations of Dillons, beginning with his great-great grandfather, Confederate Col. Jeremiah Dillon. Jeremiah used to make his potato salad to boost the morale of his troops during the civil war, or ‘the war that got away’, as Randall liked to refer to it.
I spent the day sipping whiskey sours and getting ready for the party with Morrison and Phil Lately. I persuaded Lately not to invite any of his homeless buddies. I also put him to work since he was incapable of paying rent for the third month in a row. I was using the party as an excuse to not go to the office and listen to Biff Frank complain about us being broke. We only had enough money to shoot for three weeks. I had scheduled the shoot for five, but knew realistically we’d need to shoot for six or seven. It was just dawning on him that we were shooting in three days. He was getting the jitters and to be honest, so was I. Everyone was, except maybe Randall, who was getting ready for what he thought was going to be a five week party. He’d have to settle for three. That was another reason I was throwing this shindig. Guilt. Biff and I weren’t telling anyone they were out of a job till the end of the third week. I didn’t feel good about it. Especially considering what we were paying them.
Everyone showed up and had a good time. I was glad. It’s always good to lift people’s spirits before a no holds barred independent film production. The Savantis were huge Stones fans and brought over Goat’s Head Soup, Bridges to Babylon and It’s Only Rock N’ Roll. The drinks flowed and everyone enjoyed the food. The only person who didn’t bring anything was Salami and she ate and drank twice as much as everyone else, while boasting about how she didn’t spend any money on us because she wasn’t getting paid enough. Biff made a point of calling when things started hopping to tell me about a mistake I’d made on the first day’s call sheet. Biff didn’t like it when people were having a good time and he wasn’t there. But I understood his stress and frustration. He had made some promises to the vendors he knew he couldn’t keep. There was only one ace up our sleeve. Investors were going to be visiting the set weekly. Biff had spent some production money on a gamble. He wanted everything to look as professional as possible to impress the money men so they would give us more cash.
Just as things were winding down for the night, I thought I heard some noises outside. I grabbed a cigarette and walked outside to check it out. We lived in a fringe neighborhood and sometimes when we had social gatherings the dregs of society would come knocking for money. I opened the door and lying on his back in our front yard was Randall Dillon. He was wearing most of his world famous potato salad and the bowl he’d brought it in was shattered on the sidewalk next to him. There was no sign of the twelve pack. Morrison and I carried him into the house so he could sleep it off. After that we called it a night, told everyone to have a safe ride home, and to be on time Monday morning for our first day of shooting.
(I want to thank everybody for reading and hope you continue to read as the misadventures of The Last Blunder continue next week…)
(The Last Blunder is a humorous weekly serial detailing the making of a true independent filmmaking catastrophe. I hope all of you who read along find it entertaining and can relate to it to some degree. The names of the participants have been changed. Any comments, suggestions, compliments, or criticisms can be sent to damianATkaverasfilmDOTcom. Enjoy!)
The Last Blunder: Chapter 10 by Damian K. Lahey
We haven’t discussed Karen Hall, the art director of The Last Blunder, very much and there’s a good reason for that. She loathed Balthazar Spankenstein and just about every other aspect of the production as well. She stayed away from the office as much as possible but was very intelligent and hard working. She’d assembled a cool group of guys to help her in the art department that I liked drinking with.
That afternoon I had lunch at Pizza Palace, my favorite spot in Wilmington. I had a slice of pizza and a shot of bourbon before heading back to the office. As I was pulling up, Karen stormed out of the office. I saw that both Shifto Jeans and Spanky’s cars were in the driveway. That explained things right away. I got out of my car and asked Karen what was going on. She told me she could now confirm what she knew all along about Shifto and Spanky. They were raving pedophiles. She told me she went to the office to pick up a petty cash envelope and Shifto and Spanky were watching audition tapes of ten to twelve year old girls in bikinis. They were watching with the sound off and rating the girls from one to ten. She told me it was disgusting and unprofessional and was thinking about quitting. She said she was going to talk to her husband about it. But she was appalled by their behavior. She got in her car and drove off.
I walked into the office and there they were - sitting cross legged in front of the TV, giggling and pointing at an eleven year old girl in a bikini sitting on a stool and reading what I assumed were sides from The Last Blunder. You couldn’t tell, though, because just as Karen had said – the sound was turned off. I watched as Shifto and Spanky decided that she was an eight and then high fived. My production assistant, Emily Loft was sitting at her desk reading a magazine. I motioned for her to follow me into the kitchen. I asked her what the hell was going on. She told me that Spanky had called while I was at lunch wondering if there had been a FedEx delivery from a talent agency. There had been. An excited Spanky and Shifto had showed up within five minutes, torn the package open, and had popped it into the VCR, salivating at the mouth. They’d been having themselves a ball for the past thirty minutes. I told her to stay in the kitchen.
I walked back into the office area and asked Spanky and Shifto to turn off the VCR and speak to me for a second. They asked me if I thought the twelve year old on the screen was hot. I turned off the TV and asked Shifto what his wife and kids would think if they knew what he was doing. He said he’d tell them he was on official casting director business and exchanged a smirk with Spanky. I told them that whatever sick, twisted shit they were into - they needed to cut it out. We were two weeks away from shooting and there were still a couple roles that needed to be cast. Shifto told me not to forget who was paying my bills and Spanky agreed. I told them to keep that stuff out of the production office and back at the bunker. Spanky told me that was out of the question because Midriff was there. I told him it was out of the question to do that shit at the office as Karen, who they both knew was already sensitive to things of that nature, was now thinking of quitting because they were a couple of pigs. Spanky made a comment about that being her problem. I told them it was our problem and a big one and we needed Karen and she couldn’t be replaced and to do so would be at too great an expense. I shoved the VHS tape into David’s fumbling hands and told them to leave.
As soon as the door was closed, I called Biff Frank. I knew Biff was gonna ask if Spanky had raised any more money. I was going to have to disappoint him. Biff was getting stressed out. He was making promises to the vendors based on money we hadn’t raised yet and we were two weeks out. We were about 25,000 off, but going forward anyway. This was really driving Biff up the wall. He had suggested a week earlier that I cold call for Spanky to raise more money. I suggested he do it himself. I called Biff and told him about Karen Hall and Emily Loft and the audition tape. He laughed and told me Karen and Emily were probably making it up because they didn’t like Spanky or Shifto. I told him I saw it myself and that he needed to call Karen and talk her into staying on board. He stopped laughing and said he would make a couple phone calls.
Molly Wire walked in five minutes later. I hadn’t seen our glorified “accountant” in quite some time. She plopped a large manila folder on my desk and told me she was quitting. I’d been paying her weekly salary for about seven weeks and had never even seen her. Spanky would pick up her check. I asked her why she was leaving us and she told me it was because Spanky was an ass-hole. She said I could keep her last pay check and left. I opened up the manila envelope and looked inside. It was filled with production accounting sheets. And all of them were blank.
(I want to thank everybody for reading and hope you continue to read as the misadventures of The Last Blunder continue next week…)
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