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

If you were listening this year, you will know that Beyonce, Sabrina Carpenter, Charli xcx, Taylor Swift, Dua Lipa, Halsey, SZA, WILLOW, Olivia Rodrigo, Gigi Perez, RAYE, Mavis Staples, Ariana Grande, Lady Gaga, Kacey Musgraves, Billie Eilish, Miley Cyrus, Tate McRae, Ava Max, Katy Perry, Loreen, Maggie Rogers, Kim Deal , and a few other great women musicians, each had songs that could easily make any Top 50 list of the best tracks of 2024, as could The Cure and Nick Cave, Kendrick Lamar, Benson Boone , Fontaines D.C. ., English Teacher , and The Weekend . I am about to name 15 others, aside from the artists above, that also stood out for me this year. 1. 'Good Luck, Babe!' - Chappell Roan Utterly haunting, strange, beautiful, and anthemic, this was the song that broke Roan to a wider audience, and it already feels like an evergreen classic - as weirdly poppy and uncannily original as Buddy Holly once was. Given the many great women performers doing top work this year, to come...

Everyone can google IMDB and Metacritic, in about a second, or Variety or Den of Geek or Sight and Sound , and find other lists of the best movies of 2024. Here are ten out of 20ish I will post eventually, though the final 10 may only come in a few months, since in the UK many of the releases are due later in the year (or I have yet to see the movies). Of the ten I expect to appear in the second half, some you will have heard of - Anora, The Brutalist, A Real Pain, Sing Sing, Wicked, The Nickel Boys, A Complete Unknown. Still - each of these ten listed below is already on many end of year lists, and is, in their own right, a great movie. At least three of the films listed below have a very good chance of winning the Oscar for Best Picture in a few months (their list is ten films long) - look under C, D and E. BLITZ - a beautifully-filmed revisionist take on the Blitz Spirit by Steve McQueen CHALLENGERS - a witty, erotic highly-stylised play on the tennis as love theme CIVIL WAR ...

I usually write a brief report on the year, from my perspective, at the end of each 12-month cycle - sometimes closer to Christmas, or after. Of late, they've been relatively solemn, and the main message has been gratitude. I have been grateful for the medical care and treatment that has allowed my failing heart to recover somewhat, at least temporarily, and for the chance to live a few more years. I have also been grateful for the love and support of my partner, the hard work and talent of my publishing team, my friends, and those authors and investors that have miraculously helped stave off collapse of BSPG. So it is, this year, that message remains the same. I wish to add a few more things, though - my mother is facing terminal cancer, a rare aggressive kind, and while she is private, her dying impacts those who know and love her most - her sisters, and her children, and her friends; this past year has been very painful, sad, and filled with some brief good moments of shared mem...

Christmas Violence Viewers of the streaming film Mary (2024) starring Anthony Hopkins as Herod may be surprised to discover how sadistic Herod was, or that Mary was once a startlingly beautiful young woman who looks very much like Israeli model Noa Cohen , a fine young actor. But those familiar with the Biblical story of "Christmas" - the birth of Jesus - will know that, along with the myrrh, frankincense and gold, and the bright star, comes the most violent and cruel moment (arguably) of the entire Bible, when Herod orders the slaughter of hundreds, maybe thousands, of young children, to try and destroy the risk of a new king entering the world to topple his earthly dominion. The horrible irony, we know, is that Baby Jesus is not coming to take over in that way, and the murders are not only evil, but not even politically required. They simply typify Herod's monstrous wickedness. The Virgin Mary depicted in Christmas Drama It is therefore a curious thing to reflect on th...

  POEM FOR MY MOTHER   I have not done justice to my mother, The sweep of her life, How when young, she was young, In a country, on a farm, and other children, And I will never know their names, I have forgotten to ask so much, How lazy have I been! Now that she is going, Out of this room, where we can see her, Where she can be talked with, now that she is Leaving the scene of all our disputations, All the tomfoolery of this world, and the music She listened to, her cooking, her reading, Her studies at McGill, those meticulously marked Textbooks, the kisses, the childbirth, the sons, Jordan, the colds, the flying to China, The mourning, lovemaking, waking to make instant Coffee, the long discussions about serial killers, About our ancestors, about Uncle Sandy and Port Daniel, the summers, the winters, the cross-country Skiing, the wedding photos, the modelling career, The rages, the laughing, sometimes, the criticism Of certain TV ...

110 years ago, the Futurists of 1914 began to splinter into factions - but they had already made their biggest impact, and now, 115 years since they basically started in 1909, their vision has won. Forget simply "fascism" to describe what the age of Trump/Musk  is about to look like - it's more complex, radical, dangerous and at times visionary than that - 2025-2030 is going to be New Futurist - or to be blunt, just Futurism Redux. The main interests and aims of Futurism's manifestos were to celebrate a new age of the Machine - an age of speed, violence, money, power, nihilism, war, global travel, and disruption. It was not to be an age of peace, stability, good government or democracy - it was about a radical and total overturning of the values of the world order up to that stage in history. Now, 2025 is set to fulfil this hope and programme - The richest man in the world, a tech visionary businessperson who fetishes rockets and cars, and instant messaging, is ...

Others will say it better - but, here goes my small part in this - I stayed up last night, as the horror dawned on me, literally and otherwise, that VP Harris was losing. I was wrong, thinking she'd win in a landslide possibly, see the other post. Separate from the deep concern for the world, especially with regards to Ukraine, and global warming, and American democracy (which is robust but about to be dismantled) is the deeper wounding realisation that a majority of humans would choose such a person, rather than actually vote for a woman.   It feels like misogyny and racism was on display. Concern for the economy should not mean exemption from moral or ethical concerns.   The digital online world has clearly contributed to a new unreality in America and beyond, where so many millions could not see the truth of the man they elevated, and bestowed such triumph and power onto.   And, what makes it worse, we are all now in this with him, because we have to live in his terri...

A few weeks back this blog predicted Trump was likely to win the US Presidential Election 2024, which is underway today. We now think that was incorrect. In the past few weeks, Trump alienated, needlessly of course, and without apology, of course, Americans with Puerto Rican connections; made unveiled sinister comments about being "nasty" when elected; and hinted he would protect women even if they didn't want him to; he also made "jokes" about journalists that sounded odd to put it politely. The list of reasons is long, but if he loses it will clearly be because more people voted for VP Kamala Harris , which makes sense in a less madhouse world. Trump poses such a danger to America and the world, and has such a history, that it is extraordinarily sad and off-putting that almost half of American voters seem to prefer him to a sane, intelligent, hard-working and successful woman leader, without a criminal record, who, yes, sometimes smiles and laughs. We shall s...

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....

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...

Since it is Easter week, I have been watching Jesus of Nazareth again, that star-studded 1970s spectacle, that brings back wonderful memories of being 11 and watching it with my Uncle Jack. My other favourite TV experience of the 70s is The Poseidon Adventure , when it was broadcast, and the two productions share a similar theme, actually - a holy man trying to lead his flock to safety in a dangerous environment. Both also have Oscar-winning casts (including  Ernest Borgnine ). The Jesus of Nazareth mini-series is now seen as a Sir Lew Grade classic, with Maurice Jarre 's rousing score, and astonishing array of actors, and realistic location-shoots, adding much. Oddly, the screenplay was partly written by Anthony Burgess , whose A Clockwork Orange is probably antithetical; and much of the key moments are directly from the King James Bible New Testament. Whatever else one may think about The Bible, few books have ever had as many great lines of dialogue, so many memorable saying...