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

It is possible to disagree with, or even recoil from, VP Pence 's right-wing conservative political and social and religious beliefs, and still recognise that his recent conference speech was a remarkably powerful rhetorical exercise in firing up the new Republican pro-Trump base (down to its nasty transition pun); AND as clear a delineation between choices in any American election they've had since Reconstruction. 'Freedom vs. Control' may be an extreme version, capitalism vs. socialism also a slight exaggeration, but this is the final battle (for now) of the so-called 'Culture Wars' that have been brewing in the US since Nixon in 1968. It's the ultimate American struggle, between the angels of our better selves with a progressive liberal agenda, versus traditional, evangelical, broadly Constitutional literalists, who think America has always been great, needs little correction, and is exceptional in the eyes of God - basically FDR versus Bush Jr . slash C...

Imploding The Mirage , as critics and reviewers will quickly inform you, is a title that refers to the famous Las Vegas casino's demolition, which made way for something arguably even snazzier, or more empty. Born in Vegas, that most artificial and symbolic of American places (famous for gambling, glitz, misadventure, criminal origins, and mass murders), The Killers - named after a Hemingway-based film noir, but following in the footsteps of numerous rock acts that have signalled their outlaw claims with similar names ( Jerry Lee Lewis was called The Killer) - are a very American rock band. That their lead singer, Brandon Flowers , is famously a Mormon and allegedly a straight arrow, albeit flamboyant on stage, only adds to the resonant enigma - they are part of the myth of the American Dream, while in classic post-modern mode, nod to the artifice, albeit a non-nihilistic one with a God. Their inoffensive, hummable songs, mainly about broken hearts, yearning, broken lives, and ho...

The trouble with getting older, aside from fear, boredom, and the only end of age, is, of course, you keep hitting milestones and anniversaries like unwanted speed bumps on the road of encroaching senility.   Eyewear, the blog likes to note some of these as well as the next media outlet (see the recent post on Pulp Fiction ). It comes as a shock to read in NME that it has been 25 years since The Cure released Disintegration , even still.  From a North American perspective, certain bands from the UK created a certain moody indie romantic feel, that spoke to the suburbs and made those lost places feel enchanted with an outsider's chance of escape. It was poetry for the adolescent, in all but name - music yes, but far more impactful even, still - it was a bible, it was poetry, it was our wine and our dregs - and that group of 7 must include Depeche Mode, Echo & The Bunnymen, The Smiths, Simple Minds, Tears For Fears , Joy Division/New Order , and The Cure among its ke...

It came as something of a rude shock to learn that this week marks the 30 year anniversary of the release and banning by the BBC of 1984 hit single 'Relax' by Frankie Goes To Hollywood .  Songs age and track and trace and mark us, of course, and I have around 66 songs that I cannot do without, but this one is special.  Firstly, it appeared when I was 17 and exploring my queerness (my bisexuality).  At the time I had a boyfriend, and this song, which has since been seen as the first openly gay number one hit, really moved and thrilled me.  It shaped my apprehension of a wilder, more flamboyant, aesthetic, a camp style best exemplified by my beloved gay Uncle Jack, and Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote , - somewhat dated figures - suddenly updated into the midst of 80s culture, which was generally quite camp anyway (one thinks of singles of Tina Turner's 'Beyond Thunderdome', or 'Tainted Love' by Soft Cell). Anyway, as the NMe noted this week, Madonna w...

OMD was always one of my favourite '80s bands - their machine-tooled fusion of sweet pop, and austere synths, made them different from Depeche Mode , who were darker, less elegant, less literary.  OMD seemed to refer back to an earlier 20th century Golden Age that Auden might have recognised - modernity in solemn collision with war, technology, love, and loss.  Famously, their best songs were about factories, Hiroshima, and dead female saints; and soundtracked Hughes movies.  But they were very English for all their international style. Now comes their first truly great work for 30 years - English Electric - an album peppered with unrequired samples from robot voices and modish public announcements - that nonetheless has the sound, scope and mood of their masterpiece, Architecture and Morality . The best track is the second, 'Metroland', a peppy yet sad reflection on "elegance in decline".  OMD always located lyricism in some austere ironic modernist hinterl...

It will soon be time to dust off those golden oldies from 1983, via Spotify - and what a year it was, 30 years ago.  Just 20 classics from then to consider, each of which remains with me as one of my favourites still, and raises the question, wasn't the singles chart better then?  I mean, how to compete with Gaye, Jackson, Bowie, etc...: Safety Dance - Men Without Hats I'm Still Standing - Elton John Hungry Like The Wolf - Duran Duran Our House - Madness Goody Two Shoes - Adam & The Ants Sweet Dreams (Are Made of These) - Eurythmics Down Under - Men At Work Rock The Casbah - The Clash She Blinded Me With Science - Thomas Dolby Little Red Corvette - Prince Billie Jean - Michael Jackson Every Breath You Take - The Police Electric Avenue - Eddy Grant Come On Eileen - Dexy's Midnight Runners Let's Dance - David Bowie Mickey - Toni Basil Steppin Out - Joe Jackson Maneater - Hall & Oates Do You Really Want To Hurt Me? - Culture Club Sexual Heali...

Bear In Heaven are yet another one of these "Brooklyn Indie Bands" that are essentially synth-rock outfits, all reverb and as Pitchfork notes , digitization.  Well, I love their new album, just out, I Love You, It's Cool . Fresh as new paint from Tom Sawyer's brush, the songs answer the question, what would happen if Animal Collective went back in time and fused with Depeche Mode and Tears for Fears .  You'd get loping, emotive, ultra-cool synth songs with just a bit more dreampop shiver-shimmer, sung in an American key of boyish yearning.  'Sinful Nature' and 'The Reflection of You' are two of the best indie pop songs you'll hear in 2012, or 1982.

Patrick Chapman , Irish poet, has brought this to my attention: a very good online discussion and interview surrounding the 30th anniversary of one of the greatest of the 80s albums - synth-pop/avant-garde hybrid, Architecture & Morality , by OMD .  OMD have fascinated me since, well, at least 1980 or so, when I was 14.  I'd never heard music like this - it had the pop nous of The Beatles , but was cerebral, solemn, eerie, and profoundly serious, as well as being emotive.  Perhaps my PhD research into British poetic styles of the 1940s started here - for OMD certainly manage to fuse melodrama and the rational, in a romantic-classical mix that would have pleased a young Nicholas Moore .  The album's opening track, 'The New Stone Age' remains one of my all-time favourite songs - Misha Glouberman first played it for me in Westmount on a snowy Sunday morning, after waking up in his home after a party.  It felt like a revelation.  "Oh my God, what have I d...

Drive , the new Ryan Gosling film, whose director won at Cannes this year, is one of the most purely satisfying big screen experiences of this century - a movie so stylishly aware of its intertextual tire tracks, each shot, each scene, is writerly bliss.  From the neon pink, garish titles, and robo- Moroder soundtrack, to the 80s-noir "erotic thriller" blue lighting and slat-shadows, this LA-set Car Opera is just Shane updated, by way of American Gigolo , Scarface , and To Live and Die In L.A. - in short, it is a Western updated via several layers of homage and pastiche. Indeed, the major scenes are pure Shane - the monosyllabic outsider entering the endangered family of father, mother, and son, and, despite the love of the wife and son, heroically using his latent, concealed dark abilities (gun play, car play) to defeat the bad guys, sloping off mortally (?) wounded into the sunset, slouched on his horse/in his car.  Even the toothpick is pure cowboy. There is al...

Want to feel old?   Generation X the book is 20 years old - reading it yesterday on the tube it might have been from the Great Depression.  Hard to remember a young adulthood without the social networking of now.  MTV is now a dinosaur, of course, turning 30 yesterday.  Music Videos are on YouTube.  Not the Telly.  But When I was 15, at the dawn of MTV, it was great to be alive, and to see songs acted out so wildly and imaginatively.  My favourite - the quintessential MTV video - with all the silly excess that entails is Animotion 's 'Obsession'. 'Flesh For Fantasy', 'Relax', 'Like A Virgin', 'Everybody Wants To Rule The World', 'Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), 'Addicted To Love', 'Do You Really Want To Hurt Me', 'Maneater', 'With or Without You', 'I Get Weak', 'Electric Avenue', 'C'est La Vie', and 'Take My Breath Away' are some of the other greats. How to celebrat...

Great love songs are also, often, great heart-broken songs - and my favourite, from the 80s, is the Simple Minds classic, 'Don't You Forget About Me'.

The debut from British band Chapel Club  - Palace - seems designed for Eyewear 's aural pleasure.  Ricocheting from the dream-pop sounds of early Nick Heyward/Haircut 100 , to the lighter side of Echo & The Bunnymen , with a bit of shoegazing thrown in for good measure, this is a moody, new romantic jangly-guitar indie circa 1981 album that makes a nonsense of the passing of three decades.  The style holds up, and while this will either sound (to come-again ears such as mine) like immaculate retro, or simply good pop for first-timers too young to care about forebears, it won't win any prizes for moving music ahead one iota.  Still, it joins Hurts , and the recent White Lies albums, as keeping the 80s sounds alive and kicking.

Sad news.  The tragic diminutive child actor, Gary Coleman , beloved by millions of viewers in the 1980s as one of the classic sitcom characters, has died.

I was born on Good Friday, 44 years ago - and just barely survived, being exceptionally tiny, three months premature, the smallest baby on the ward, and one of the youngest at my size to ever survive in Canada - a "miracle baby" as they were called then - perhaps still are.  It was a fraught time for my parents, and of course, for me - and I am grateful to have struggled through.  Today, at a celebration of the Lord's Passion, I could not help but reflect on my good fortune, to have lived, at all. Eyewear will be back on April 12. In the meantime, fellow eyewearers, enjoy the various religious holidays with your families, the returning light, and the sense of renewal in the land. May you achieve physical and spiritual health. Or, if that is too much, enjoy some chocolate bunnies. Nothing like a good egg hunt. What's to look forward to in April at this blog? A few superb new poet features; reviews by Christopher Horton , Ian Brinton , Abigail Curtis , and others...

Eyewear saw a little-heralded "stoner" indie movie that came and went last summer (2009) after a Sundance debut - Adventureland . Starring Kristen Stewart of Twilight infamy, and Jessie Eisenberg , of cult classic The Squid and The Whale , the film (on DVD) is actually a very sweet (and hilarious) coming of age story (with discussions of theology), set at the fag end of the Reagan 80s, in the dead-end summer job Purgatorio that is Adventureland: a sagging lo-fi amusement park that employs kids too broke to go to Europe, and divides them into a Games and a Rides cohort. Playing on the Schindler List trope that saw Schindler's quick rise through the fascist ranks due to his copious baskets of champagne, the main character is gifted with a magic stash of weed at the start of the film, and manages to ingratiate himself quickly with the theme park wastrels. Of these, the most touching is the loser Russian lit student, a beanpole four-eyes with alternative hair and a stunne...

Last night I was happy for the first time in four months; for a few hours I forgot I have to take six pills a day and am often in pain or discomfort. Friends took me to Cadogan Hall to see Nick Heyward reunite with Haircut 100 . This band had only one album, Pelican West , which went to 2 in the UK charts in March 1982 before Heyward quit the next year to make his masterpiece, North of a Miracle , the great upbeat pop album of the early 80s. The show was only slightly marred by Heyward's Mike Myersesque eccentric tween-song ramblings. Actually the band was tight and hearing Love Plus One again and Fantastic Day - as well as A Blue Hat for a Blue Day - was a pure retreat to when we were all teenagers. This was my Buddy Holly - sweet clever love songs and fun clean tunes. The audience was almost all late 40s and facebook fans. After the show which was too brief Heyward mingled in the bar with several hundred fans, smiling and genuinely bemused by the adoration. I hope for a Pelican ...

The 80s seems to have produced an endless supply of clever and often pleasingly eccentric pop, much of which has been revisiting us this year, twenty years after that decade ended. There's a new Moyet Best Of just out for instance. And since the year began new albums from Simple Minds , Depeche Mode and Echo and the Bunnymen , to simply name three of the major bands of the time - each of which made it equally big in America as at home. Now comes the reunion album from Spandau Ballet after almost Smiths-size acrimony. SB were not as big as Duran Duran or Tears for Fears stateside, but bigger than OMD. They were part of the New Romantic wave at its height. Their unlikely name and likely look were of the moment, and song 'True' is one of the, yes, true classics of the period. While the new Frankie compilation is mainly a rehash of the hits, SB have rerecorded their greatest songs for this album. The results are both disarming and sometimes disappointing. 'True' is g...

La Roux's been getting too much press. It's really just a synth band duo that's been thrown from a wormhole in a back to the future sort of nostalgia trip, giving us the sort of Speak and Spell sounds that I love, but probably make most people reach for their phasers. However, if you liked Vince Clark era Depeche , then this is your moment. For my money, the two best tracks are the infinitely catchy "Colourless Colour" and "I'm Not Your Toy" (which sounds as if it was written by Prince for Ms. Easton ). Eighties pastiche and homage is well and good, but how long can it be mined, like Whitby Jet, before the cliffs are bare?

Sad news. As everyone in the world must now know, Michael Jackson has died. In a spontaneous act as moving as the lights dimming on Broadway, the web slowed worldwide at the news. I don't have much to say. I woke up, got out of bed, turned on the radio, and was met by the news, which stunned me. This is the greatest loss to pop culture since the death of Elvis . As many commentators have been saying, Jackson was a sort of Elvis and Beatles in one - a triple-threat singer, songwriter and liver performer of extraordinary ability. He was the Mozart of the age - and the major figure of the 1980s, surely, in terms of cultural impact and influence. I don't happen to like the song "Thriller" but the album is a masterwork of its kind. Jackson was stranger than fiction - and curiously disliked in later years, when many other less brilliant, and less strange, entertainers were less sinned against. It is, for example, unlikely his excesses match those of The Stones . He was ...

For those who want to feel old, consider this: today marks the 20th anniversary of Madonna 's Number One Hit, " Like A Prayer " - in the sense that it stayed at #1 until Easter, on 26th March. The album, of the same title, is considered by many to be one of the greatest pop albums of all time, and the song itself - despite or because of its wedding of religiosity and carnality - is sometimes considered Madonna's finest. Personally, I prefer "Dress You Up". Her claim that "life is a mystery / everyone must stand alone" is at once religious and nihilistic. The cover of the album is, itself, a striking example of this. Madonna is famous for her anti/Christian puns and dress sense - and in some ways matches Donne or Leonard Cohen , in that department. She also favours simile. "Like A Virgin", surely, forms the basis for this later song. Her "down on my knees/ I want to take you there" it should be said was substantially borrowed fro...