Inna Rogatchi’s new collection of works, Horizon Beyond Horizon: A Celebration of Jewish Talent. Forty Portraits has been published at the legendary site The Leonard Cohen Files.
The Cohen-connection in Inna’s new collection is obvious: one of the works of the series, Heart Talk is her homage to the singer and poet; and also Inna starts the whole series in her musical art video with Cohen’s strophe.
The Leonard Cohen Files site has been created by the Finnish family of Jarkko and Eija Arjatsalo who are known world-wide to fans of Leonard Cohen’s as the pillars of an international club of devoted, understanding, sophisticated and intelligent fans of the maestro of the modern ballade.
Significantly, Jarkko Arjatsalo put his extra-ordinary ‘live archive’ of Leonard Cohen’s art and activities almost three years before the official site of the poet and singer was launched. The Leonard Cohen Files – www.leonardcohenfiles.com – has merited another unique feature during all of its almost 20 years of its existence: the maestro himself publishes his works there, often for the very first time. He said once that ‘the Internet is the best publishing-house’, and additional to that, Mr Cohen seemingly has his own personal and special trust and feelings for this tool – truly enormous in scale, but at the same time, very personal and close to him and to everyone who is visiting the pages of The Leonard Cohen Files, and he is publishing his new works there regularly. Those works are in different genres – there are poems, songs, and Leonard Cohen’s evocative drawings with his personal comments. Some of the works by Cohen published for the first time at The Leonard Cohen Files are his all-time hits, such as Thousand Kisses Deep.
The site is conservatively believed to have been visited by four million people, and in the way in which individual people are visiting the site, the number is getting much higher. The community board of Cohen’s fans worldwide on the site shows as many as ten million visits to those pages; with 25 thousand registered visitors and a much wider audience of those who are visiting the pages frequently without a registration.
The founder of the site – and of the whole institution that very specific site has become, Jarkko Arjatsalo says: “The Leonard Cohen community is very active, not just in the cyber-world but also in real life. In 1998 we started the biennial LC Events around the world, which include the gatherings in Lincoln (UK), Montreal (Quebec), Hydra (a Greek island in the Saronic Gulf made famous in Leonard Cohen’s biography), New York, Berlin, Edmonton (Alberta), Krakow (Poland), and Chicago (Illinois)/Madison (Wisconsin). The next year, 2014, such an event will be organised in Dublin, Ireland. Between the big events we always have a long weekend in June on the Hydra island (this year most recently, and again in 2015).
And there have been numerous meet-ups and gatherings in cities where Leonard has had concerts. Additionally, a new invention of the “Leonard Cohen Walking Weekend” has become very popular. So far, such weekends have been organised in 2009 in UK, in 2011 in Germany, and in 2013 in Ireland. The next one is planned for 2015 to happen in Barcelona, Spain. All these happenings are organised by our local members”- Jarkko Arjatsalo told us.
We will be telling the incredible story of love and devotion in modern cultural history and the significance of The Leonard Cohen Files in more detail in the near future.
The musical art video of Inna Rogatchi’s new collection can be seen here: