Cohen "I’m Your Man," my Parisian album. Hi Greg, even if you're not a DeBaserian and I've lost track of you, you'll always be in my heart forever. I asked you where the metro stop was, and I ended up at your place for two weeks. You were crazy; we had fun like crazy people, even with your girl Arianne, kissing each other in threes at the Tuileries, talking about Trotsky and communism (I didn’t understand much, to be honest). Ah, and we even went to the Moz concert. "Beethoven was deaf," huh, really, I brought you there by force and then honestly, I lost a huge joint, and after 10 minutes, a semi-stranger came up to me and said, "I saw you were there with your friends, now I see you looking, look what I found, I think this is yours." And naturally, since I was high, I invited her, and she joined the group. Things I can only remember; who knows if I’ll relive the train departures, the first one even from Gare de l'Est. You ran to me, and you were shouting "Je t'aime." I was happy... it was 1992. And when you came to my house, we emptied the cellar of that bad cynical jerk of my brother; the wine was good, of course, he specifically went to Valais to get it, and we drank it all. I even gave you two bottles for the trip (P.S. I’m not an alcoholic, let’s clarify). Every now and then, not too often, but that wine was divine. WHERE ARE YOU? I mean, more than 20 years have passed. PARIS, the most beautiful city in the world once, now Notre-Dame is on fire, and many neighborhoods, especially the most touristy, have conformed to other metropolises, practically all the same, except for a few neighborhoods (the Marais and the arrondissement of the Hôtel de Ville). Logically, with the uniformity of human beings, there’s also a uniformity in the cities that are standardizing, as if seeing cities that are completely different from each other sets a mood and then EUROPE, and Europe is no longer made of states that decide how to build or maintain their cities... unfortunately; I’m against a united Europe. But that's a long discussion. Human beings and therefore change their homes, taking as an example not certainly Le Corbusier, who made a "Le Havre" in blue-gray concrete and pink, where sometimes you can’t even recognize the sea from the city, as if it entered and exited with the tide... but that was another era; now it’s all Chinese and the same... humans?? They transform cities even with details but are the same; I can’t explain it well, but they’re the same, all of them, apart from a few pieces (IT SEEMS TO ME a step back in history, not forward), also changing the places where they live, thinking that it's beautiful; instead, beauty is something else, not palaces and LED lights that don’t allow you to see the sky and the stars.
Leonard Cohen - Everybody Knows (Audio)