December 21, 2009 | music

In the latter half of the 20th century, three Montrealers – Leonard Cohen, Pierre Trudeau and Mordecai Richler – redefined the spheres of popular music, politics and writing within Canada.

With Trudeau, the day of the Canadian politician who looked like the miserable principal of a monochromatic highschool was gone in favor of a man so flashy and cool that John Lennon sought him out for a meeting, while Mick Jagger bedded his wife (not usually a marker of cool if not for the fact that Trudeau was busy bedding ladies who were not his wife in kind). Likewise, Mordecai Richler gave young Canadian writers hope – false though it may have been – that there existed within the Canadian literary scene possibilities beyond the interminable stories about the incest, dementia, and abominable weather conditions faced by frontier families and the godforsaken generations after them also raised alongside a hellacious mosquito-infested bogwater. He brought Canadian literature into the city, wrote brilliant satire and did so with none of the pastoral pretense of a novelist writing as if he’s practicing his Giller acceptance speech or grovelling for a grant.

Leonard Cohen is the sole survivor of these three Montreal maestros, a Canadian singer-songwriter with an air of European cool, who luckily does not croon in Danish. In Leonard Cohen: Hallelujah: A New Biography, honorary Shark Guy and blogger, Tim Footman nimbly dissects the complicated appeal of the “Bard of the Bedsit”. This is not a book meant solely to solely be a one-sided celebration of a man who could be bronzed and put in a park at any moment. What separates Hallelujah from much of what else has been written about Cohen is that it is not afraid to wipe off some of the gloss on the Cohen image. How a man who gives off such an air of assured self-confidence can spend years anxiously fretting over getting a song just right. How the man who apparently has an all-seasons pass to the bedrooms of every woman with a pulse once was left broken-hearted and spurned by the Velvet Underground’s Nico, who may have had Neo-Nazi sentiments to boot.

While most biographers are Cohen fans to the point of blinding themselves to any tears in his “famous blue raincoat”, Footman approaches his subject squarely — celebrating the achievements, while noting the utter failures. (The Cohen song “Fingerprints“, he writes, is “…possibly one of the most horrid and pointless things Cohen has ever recorded, as if he’d resurrected the Buckskin Boys [Cohen's high school band, a country outfit] to sing about divorce at a square dance.”) And unlike some of the Cohen hagiographies that have preceded it, and much in the spirit the great man has shown himself on his recent tour, the book approaches its subject with a welcome sense of humor. Cohen, one presumes, would have wanted it that way. How could he write about being “blessed with a golden voice” if he wasn’t a comedian at heart?

In that spirit, we pick up on a theme in Tim’s book, the consistently terrible cover art that has  accompanied Leonard Cohen’s albums for almost his entire career. The 10 albums pictured below account for a sizable chunk of his oeuvre, and Cohen was not printing these in his basement — much of the work you see done here (with the exception, as noted, of No. 1) was done by top industry professionals.

Here, accompanied by excerpts in italics from Leonard Cohen: Hallelujah are the 10 Ugliest Leonard Cohen Album Covers!

10. More Best Of Leonard Cohen

This is certainly the best looking of the album covers on this list. The main complaint here from a visual standpoint is the use of the Cohen symbols at the bottom, which also litter the sleeves of other Cohen albums and books and here have the effect of someone compounding the youthful folly of getting one ugly tattoo by getting five more to distract from the first. The photo is fine and the font choice makes a valid, though failed attempt to downplay the utterly terrible name of the album — “More Best Of”. It is, as Tim notes, “a stylistic and grammatical abomination of a title if ever there was one.”

9. Songs from a Room

The front image is an improvement on its predecessor [see The Songs of Leonard Cohen, below] , but still no classic: a monochrome shot of the artist looking decidedly stern, on a white background.

8. Various Positions

“… The cover photograph – a stubbly, suddenly old-looking Cohen scowling into the lens of a Polaroid camera – was the depiction of a man who just wanted to get it all over and done with.”

7. Songs of Leonard Cohen.

The album cover for Leonard Cohen’s debut album, an auspicious occasion marred by an image of him conjuring up the image of Michael Corleone, “I don’t feel I have to wipe everybody out, Just my enemies”… Well, whoever green-lighted this font would be high on the hit list.

“The cover design appears to have received little thought: a sepia head shot of the performer, taken in a photo booth in Montreal, with the album’s title in lettering that may have appeared cutting-edge at the time, but now looks dated to the point of self-parody… Half-assed as it was, this would by no means turn out to be the worst packaging to adorn Cohen’s work.”

6. Death of a Ladies’ Man

Not a fine moment in album photography and with a font and use of bars that date it more than Cohen’s youthful looks. Also unappealing, the look on Cohen’s ex-wife’s Suzanne Elrod’s face, one more commonly seen as weekend visitation rights for the family dog are worked out in divorce court.

5. Songs of Love and Hate

“Much of the album is pretty bleak, comprising the sort of songs that Cohen-haters and Cohen-mockers point to when they suggest that he just makes music to accompany whimpering and wrist-slashing. … The cover isn’t so great, either: white lettering on black, with an inexpertly cut head shot of an unshaven Cohen, grinning like a beatific hobo.”

4. The Future

“The cover is rather mediocre as well, resembling the sort of tattoo an accountant might get to celebrate a divorce.”

3. Recent Songs

The cover (an amateurish portrait of Cohen, based on a photograph taken by Hazel Field) was pretty ropey, but diehard fans had by now become used to that sort of thing.

2. Cohen Live (1994)

“What do you think of when you think Leonard Cohen?” “Uggh, the moon… castles…” “Perfect, put that on there, and add some other crap on the side. Limit yourself to the colors available on a 1984 Commodore 64 computer.”

1. Dear Heather

Dear Heather: “… The album sleeve is an absolute shocker, resembling nothing so much as the packaging for a range of feminine hygiene products from about 1986, decorated with the Chinese symbol for his monastic name, ‘Jikan’. Cohen has nobody to blame for this, as it’s based on one of his own drawings.”

—-

Of course, we kid Leonard and these covers do not reflect the content of the albums… mostly.  Tim Footman closes out his book with a list of his 10 favorite Leonard Cohen songs, and Noel, the more die-hard Leonard Cohen fan of the two SharkGuys, thought he’d do the same so here is:

Noel’s Top 10 Favorite Leonard Songs:
1) Sisters of Mercy
2) Ballad Of The Absent Mare
3) Everybody Knows
4) Hey That’s No Way To Say Goodbye
5) Famous Blue Raincoat
6) Bird on The Wire
7) Closing Time
8) Waiting for The Miracle
9) Chelsea Hotel # 2
10) I Can’t Forget

December 18, 2009 | Pics,Sports

As our faithful readers no doubt have guessed, we’re not the most dedicated sports fans in the world. We happen to think that greater feats of athleticism can be found when a gag reflex isn’t triggered on the competitive eating circuit.

One of us was in a bar when this flame happened by, and camera was in tow to document a different special occasion. The fact that thousands of people were lining the streets wasn’t an immediate tip off as it was just initially chalked up to the subway grinding to a halt again.

What was captured was a shill fest worthy of the Sham Wow guy except without the ‘wow’ as a convoy of corporate trucks rolled down Yonge Street generating something called Olympic spirit. This is when sports that are routinely ignored the intervening four years are suddenly given the lion’s share of a newscast’s sports segment and a scant bit of attention.

That most countries on the planet don’t luge, have snow or give two shits about this, the second banana to the real Olympics is not really a surprise.

Besides, other than hockey and the soon-to-be moribund on account of global warming, skiing/snowboarding, the Winter Olympics features nothing that anyone would really call much of a sport. And whatever that thing is where you cross-country ski and shoot something intermittently, is not a sport but really training for Russian Spetsnaz.

December 18, 2009 | lists

Christmas season is here and with it the 200 fires that, according to the US Fire Administration are caused every year by Christmas trees going up in flames. NIST’s Building and Fire Research Lab found that well watered trees are the safest, giving gift recipients a few precious moments to grab the largest and most expensive looking present before running out of the room as the curtains catch fire.

Most Christmas tree fires are due to electrical shorts and this is not surprising given that some people’s Christmas displays rival the opening ceremonies of the Olympics in terms of sheer wattage. The rest are caused by open flames, say from a candle knocked over by someone’s drunken uncle or a lit cigarette flicked at the base of a tree by a teenager who doesn’t want his parents to know he smokes, but who now has bigger concerns.

This is not a PSA for Christmas tree safety, however, but rather a rundown of ghastly seasonal ornaments that would be well suited to a raging inferno.

Last year, we featured some pretty crappy ornaments but it appears that during the intervening year, lead-based paint supplies have run dangerously low as more Chinese factories have come online, flooding the market with with even more ugly retina-singing doo-dads which should be kept away from small children and ideally everyone else as well.

So, in the spirit of giving (and then making completely unrelated trips to the nearest pawn shop), we present our Top 10 Ugly Christmas Ornaments.

10. Glass Hot-dog

Nothing invokes the spirit of Christmas quite like meat slurry, intestinal casings and sodium nitrite rendered in glass. The only thing that could possibly make this worse is if were shatterproof, though we’d be willing to put it to this to the test.

According to the product description, this magical ‘old world’ gift (we imagine Medieval craft guilds offering this up this in jest for an particularly despised lord) is “glittered for you to enjoy and cherish as a holiday heirloom”. If by “cherish as a holiday heirloom”, the people who wrote this mean “sell at a yard sale for 5 cents come spring”, then, yes, it could be used in that manner.

How someone thought to devise a crystalline poop, Mexican flag dashboard key-chain and pass it off as a Christmas tree ornament will be forever left a mystery.

9. Rusty Wallace and Pit Crew NASCAR Ornament

Several questions spring to mind when you cast your eyes to the right:

1. Why are members of Mr Wallace’s pit crew, dwarfs? This would significantly increase pit stop times given the relative size of the wheels, not to mention the ease with which someone so small could be backed over.

2. If your tree did catch fire, wouldn’t it be nice if the pit crew could put it out?

3. If your name is Rusty is it really as career-limiting as one would think? Consider which is more plausible:

a) Adjunct professor in the Department of Applied and Computational Mathematics, Rusty Johnson, PhD or

b) Rusty Williamson is wanted on charges of drug paraphernalia with intent to manufacture and resisting arrest.

8. Grease Light Up Holograph

According to the description, the ornament “lights up and plays part of ‘Hopelessly Devoted to You’. Has holographic pictures that change scenes, a very unique ornament for the Grease fan.”

It is our experience that anything that lights up while playing a song should immediately be hurled down a long flight of stairs or dropped from a balcony.

Two words: ‘Grease fire’.

7. Sex & the City High-Heel

In an episode of Family Guy, when Brian is first exposed to SATC he asks “Let me get this straight, so it’s a show about 3 hookers and their mom?”

The show’s major contribution to popular culture was showing how women were capable, much like their male counterparts, of continuing to have anonymous sex and trolling bars at an age a good decade beyond what most people find socially acceptable. If your holiday is this secular, perhaps it’s time to reconsider the notion of a tree and decorate a bonsai.

6. Kane and Stone Cold Steve Austin

In one of the more grisly WWE wrestling gimmicks, Kane was billed as the lunatic asylum-raised half brother of The Undertaker, who burned down the family home, killing their parents and rendering Kane’s face permanently disfigured, necessitating a mask (that is, until the genesis of the gimmick was completely forgotten in true crappy wrestling style and the mask came off years later to reveal a completely normal visage).

Stone Cold Steve Austin meanwhile, was a bald-domed southern roughneck who’d flip the bird to the crowd while getting drunk on cheap beer. Merry Christmas everyone!

5. Campbell’s Collector’s Edition (our italics) Ornament

If you bought a hundred identical ones and had them strewn around the mantle, Andy Warhol’s ghost would be proud. A product that contains more salt than the Trans Canada highway in February, and one which, if served on Christmas would mean a reduction by half the number of dinner guests the following year, this ‘collector’s edition’ (we haven’t seen whether the split-pea soup version is equally collectible) retails for $8 US.

As the product description states, it’s ‘Never been displayed’ and we hope this holiday tradition continues.

4. Dunkin’ Donuts / Coffee Themed Ornaments

So far, we’ve come upon Starbucks and Tim Hortons ornaments, the latter an inexplicably popular java shop north of the border named after a dead hockey player, but neither comes close to this, which will soon occupy landfill real estate along with its sugarcoated Styrofoam cousins.

Weigh down the branches of your ‘Tanenbaum’ with this, a franchise that has been sinking neighboring property values wherever a new outlet has opened for more than 5 decades.

3. Deer with its Own Hunting Rifle

Teach kids another life lesson after their dreams of a real Kris Kringle have been dashed, by preparing them for the inevitable discussion as to how that plate of venison arrived at the dining room table with a murderous, self-loathing deer ornament.

Hunters are often torn between whether to blend in with their surroundings and go with camouflage and risk “if a hunter is felled in a forest, does it make a sound?” or whether to go with the stand-out bright orange, which means you’re less likely to be in the crosshairs of a drunken companion but  more likely to be spotted by whatever ruminant you are hoping to mow down in the woods and tie to the grill of your car.

2. Sharon Osbourne Plush Beanie

“Has no pulls, rips, tears, holes, stains or odors. Smoke free.” This is more than can be said for her famous rocker hubby.

One of the weirder Christmas ornaments we’ve come across, and this is quite an achievement as we detailed a Geisha girl, lady pharmacist and Jon Bon Jovi last year, but there is no denying both the craftsmanship and utter misguidedness of this frightening chatchka.

1. Taylor Lautner

Wrong on more levels than advanced Gran Turismo, you can show off your love for the star of the anemic novel and movie on which it’s based, Twilight. With more copies circulating than asses around the Xerox machine and translated into 37 languages, this shopping mall version of True Blood will remain among the living, perhaps not as far as brainpower is concerned, for the foreseeable future.

With a filmography consisting of The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3D, What’s New Scoobie Doo and My Own Worst Enemy there is no telling how much further his agent will have to drive to land him another role.

Merry Christmas everyone!