E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Probably the most dull thing to do is to discuss a movie that critics have already consigned to the dustheap of critical disapproval, where all the ladders start. Here goes nothing... The whole Francis Ford Coppola story of Megalopolis has been done to dust by now - we know he spent his own oodles of vineyard cash, to make a movie that all on set felt was lunatics running the asylum level batshit bad, and that the 40-year-gestating rough beast slithered out like a viscous grotesque from The Substance , to near-total disappointment, that worst of all responses, as if a Gladiator's codpiece slipped to reveal a tiny rubber duck. This man, we were reminded, was a Genius with the same capital G as for Godfather (1 and 2), and he also made The Conversation , and Apocalypse Now ; then loads of mediocre films, except some were zany and brilliant, like his Dracula . It is hard to think of any other filmmakers from America, other than say Spielberg, Scorsese, Kubrick, Ford, Welles, Wilder

I am going to save the hand wringing and doom-mongering for another day - the dire predictions, the gloomy sense of the end of the West as a credible, semi-reasonable force for good, and so on, and nor am I going to predict the demise of American democracy; nor will I belabour the obvious pulchritude of a mass of 74 or so million voters who seem hellbent on electing an alleged (if not more so) monster of depravity, hypocrisy, and so forth... those editorials will come, alas, and they almost write themselves, as if with AI... Simply put, the polls, the way the mood and the momentum is going, the way the media is swinging, how the key battleground states are shaping up, how the billionaires are swinging, and shaping, things... it all seems it will go Trump's way, as it did in 2016, when this blog predicted he would win. Then he was apparently far behind in the polls, so imagine where he really is now, when even the polls make him close, or tied, or the leader. We cannot blame VP Harr

As the summer comes to an end, more questions than answers remain, about the fate of humanity, perhaps than ever before. That's likely an exaggeration, but let me put it this way: on the one hand, the best of humans was on display in Paris for the Olympics - youth, energy, discipline, peaceful competition, superb skills, goodwill - and again last night with the Obamas' speeches - or again, with the Taylor Swift tour - humans being talented, smart, and generous; and enjoying music, and the best we can offer. On the other, war may escalate in the Middle East, Europe or Asia; and an anti-democratic force may take over America's government soon. Not to mention other sad, terrible things that happen daily or weekly, and reveal the depths of human cruelty and short-term thinking. You might be forgiven for thinking these are end times. Or, almost a golden age, of new discoveries. Since the poet Pope's Essay on Man , at least, we have had the half-angel half-beast trope, and it

P oem for my mother, who read me Frost first The whole thing is the fact we’re not okay, The thing and the rest of it are the same corollary It has the name of all and several sectors, sprayed, Like lavender oil or some arcane graffiti, in display – We’re meshed up with the disappearing decay, gone   Like Spengler into the madhouse there, a fairground Array that would make Ian Curtis moan this is the way Not to go – we’re AWOL on a precipice for Cruise To cycle off, in cyclone, in perpetuity, as if to say, The ground is up above, the twister is also there,   And I don’t care who knows the plans of the Chief Who holds the cards intact, the hand betrays The eye that bulges from battle affray, from fearsome Blown debris, it’s not a good time to be staying out late, Or even indoors, mate, stay somewhere else, sick bay?   The tree that hid us from the storm has been struck twice First by light’s finger, then by the malefactor known as ice. As Elvis C.

The debate last night between Trump and Biden was one of the worst moments in American political history. Far from being just a pitiful spectacle, that can be mocked, it was (and remains) a terrible, shocking and even terrifying look into an abyss. The main take-away was that the two main candidates are unworthy to be President, and that a once-great nation of hundreds of millions of people, that can only locate these two for the most important job in the land, and world, is in peril. But it gets worse. Trump is more than unworthy - he is a clear and present danger to the world. Not everything he says is a lie, or monstrous, or threatening, but a lot is. He openly refuses to accept democracy, and is likely to side against NATO in the Ukraine conflict, undermine efforts to control global heating, as well as implement radically extreme positions at home. His re-election to a second term would signal a low from which American democracy might not recover. Biden, on the other hand, did his

  IN MEMORIAM HELEN VENDLER, APRIL 2024   Critics who die are never loved; Love itself is a paradox their ambiguous work Cannot solve; theirs are the rocks The penmanship of prose is   driven onto – Theirs the grove the poet is not laurelled in – Canyons divide what labours they prove To themselves have value, from The impression made by them on authors   Stranded to one side of their prodigious wake – They take more than they give, some say – While others bask in their praise, as if Their gift was new, more luminous solar rays – But even when their own texts approach, Penumbral, art itself, the beauty or truth They claim remains incongruously peripheral, Like the third lover in any complicated bed –   Used, then merely tolerated, perhaps despised, For envy is bred by savage intimacy entangled by Parasitical limbs – or what passes lyrically for such, In the books they tore to shreds, or adumbrated, As the worthiest of desire’s deceitful a