Now he releases a whole collection of new songs in camouflage, as it were, delivered by his companion, and as if to say that it doesn’t really matter who or where they come from. On his last album, Dear Heather, in 2004, he offered a drawing he’d made of a sylph or Muse (who looks very much like Anjani) on the cover-no picture of himself-and on at least two songs let Anjani more or less take over. On Ten New Songs, in 2001, Cohen featured his co-singer, Sharon Robinson, on the album cover with him, and her husky, aromatic back-up often drowned out his aging growl. The ceremonies of farewell have been mounting in recent years on his recordings. The album has stayed with me, almost every evening, because the paradoxes with which Leonard Cohen has always played so mischievously, so meticulously, take on new flesh and blood here, and show us a man-with a woman beside, and inside, him-who has passed through his stress and is not going anywhere except toward a final nowhere. Sweet as much as bitter, with the echo of spring in the dark of early winter. Yet when such songs of parting and old age are delivered by a young, fresh, commanding woman singer, they take on a much more complicated resonance. “Tired” is the word that recurs, and “old,” and the picture that Cohen uses for himself on the back cover (as the album’s “producer”) makes him look out of focus and almost posthumous, fading from our view. The songs on Anjani’s album (as it is officially), Blue Alert, are all about goodbye and “closing time” and passing away from the scene. Crawford’s thrilling analysis of end-time dreaming in the works of influential artists, writers and filmmakers shows how the religious imaginary remains integral to our cultural DNA.” (Margaret Wertheim, author of The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace and Physics on the Fringe.Through the long hot nights of summer and early autumn I have been listening to the ten newest songs from Leonard Cohen, almost unbearably sad in their themes and beautiful in their bareness, yet turned sultry and smoky and rich with a full-bodied looseness thanks to his collaborator in life and in art, Anjani. “ Dark Gnosis takes us into the heart of America’s schizophrenic relationship with the apocalypse, the simultaneous fear and fascination with The End.
Dark Gnosis should take the place of every Gideons bible in every motel on Route 666.” (Mark Dery, author of I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-By Essays on American Dread, American Dreams) Crossing the brio of his fellow Aussie Robert Hughes with an oracular style familiar from Baudrillard’s America, Crawford reveals American Christianity for the mutant thing it is: the dark side of the Enlightenment, haunted by gnostic strains and gothic tendencies. “With just the right balance of postmodern theory and pop intellectualism, Ashley Crawford explores the visions of apocalypse that were always there, in the night terrors of our New Jerusalem. Along the way, Crawford convincingly argues that such epidermal eschatology is not so much a symptom of nihilism as a mutant expression of an American gnostic religion now gone feral and deranged.” (Erik Davis, author of Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica) Casting a scalpel-sharp eye on the enigmas of fleshy abjection in recent American literature, film, and art, Crawford then links this visceral weirdness to the apocalypse cultures of the recent and distant past. “Like the old prophets Ballard and Baudrillard, as well as Mark Dery and Slavoj Žižek (on a good day), Ashley Crawford practices cultural criticism as a high-low art of forensic pathology.