The turning point for Leonard Cohen seems to have been his time spent on Mount Baldy. No, that's not a metaphor for man's struggle against hair-loss, writes Frank McNally.
It's the name of an actual mountain in California, home to the Buddhist retreat where Cohen spent time as a monk in the late 1990s. It was there that he learned to forget himself and to overcome the depression with which he and his music had been long synonymous.
In a later interview, he attributed his changed mood to the strict discipline of Mount Baldy; although, in his late 60s by then, he also credited age. "I read somewhere that as you get older the brain cells associated with anxiety begin to die. So I might have saved myself the rigours of monastic life if I had just waited for it to happen." The mature, post-Baldy Cohen features in a new documentary film, Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man, a project that grew out of a concert in Sydney last year to mark his 70th birthday. Apparently it shows the old doom merchant to be a warm, witty, and engaging human being. According to the Daily Telegraph, the film is spoiled only by some "squirm-inducing tributes" from U2, in which the Edge compares Cohen to Moses, "coming down from the mountaintop with tablets of stone".
The good news is that Cohen came down from the mountaintop without tablets, whether of stone, Prozac, LSD, or any of the other substances he relied on in the past. A singer who once agreed with critics that his distributors should give away razor blades with his records suddenly felt at peace with the world. "There was just a certain sweetness to daily life that began asserting itself," he said in 2001. Looking out his kitchen window one day, for example, he was struck by the beauty of sunlight on chrome car fenders. "Wow," he thought, "this must be like everybody feels."
The population of Germany appears to be coming to same conclusion as Cohen, at least according to an article in the Wall Street Journal. It didn't start with the World Cup, the WSJ says. But the German football team has caught a new carefree mood in the country and fanned it. The result is a collective euphoria not seen since the 1950s.
Producing documentary evidence for the zeitgeist, the newspaper reports that a recent book, The New Germany Feeling, posed the question: "Is it possible to be both German and happy?" The answer, shockingly, was yes. Other writers have taken up the theme, reversing a decade-long trend for angst-ridden volumes with titles such as: Can Germany Still be Saved? The change did not happen by accident. Because gloomy introspection had only added to the problem, a group of "new patriots" deliberately set themselves to produce self-affirming literature and journalism "that read like Walt Whitman romping through Germany on a high-speed ICE train".
There was an ad campaign too, and the movement suffered a setback when it emerged that one of its slogan had also been used by the Nazis. But undeterred by the scorn of "turtle-neck wearing negativists", the campaigners pressed on, listing what they liked about their country, viz: "idyllic villages, the humour of Heinrich Heine, noisy Berlin clubs, tasty sausages, supermodel Heidi Klum, sweet white wines".
Watching the Germans' exhilarating performances in the World Cup, it's easy to get caught up in their euphoria: especially if you backed Miroslav Klose at 20-1 to be the tournament's top scorer. The WSJ notes, however, that one of the most worrying features of Germany's stagnation has been a low birth-rate. The acid test of how attractive the new Germans find each other, post-World Cup, will be whether they start procreating again.
Last time I heard from France, that country was still in the grips of "miserabilisme" and addicted to reading books with titles like: Can France Still Be Saved? I sense the mood is turning there too, although my analysis may be confused by romantic feelings toward the country's foxy new presidential hopeful, Ségolène Royal. At any rate, if there is a carefree spirit abroad in France, the revival of the national football team - and of Zinedine Zidane in particular - should boost it.
Zidane, one senses, is a man who has spent time on Mount Baldy. Thanks to premature hair loss, he always looked older than his age. Now at 34 (which, for a footballer, is about 70 in ordinary years), he is delivering some of the finest performances of his career. After a period in which he and his team appeared mired in negativity, he seems at peace with himself, smiling like a Buddhist monk when not busy achieving oneness with the ball.
The contrast with David Beckham - a man defined more by his ever-changing hairstyle than his talent - could not be more striking. The only thing these players have in common is that both have now thrown up on a football pitch. In his declining years, my advice to the former England captain is this: go to Mount Baldy, literally or metaphorically or both, and stay there until further notice. Take your wife and your own-label perfume-for-men with you. Don't bring any photographers.