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

David Lynch has died. Perhaps the last time an American death of a cultural icon was so massive was the loss of Warhol . This blog is of the opinion that David Lynch was probably the most significant global artist of the past 45 years; perhaps only David Bowie  approaches his immense contribution to multiple senses of art forms and identity in this period, and had such ubiquitous impact. But Lynch, more even than Warhol or Bowie, or any other film-maker of the period, was consistently and openly also an artist, musician, painter, and writer/visionary. To call him a "surrealist" barely does him justice, and is in many ways misleading. Lynch's transgressive visions were sometimes dreamlike, but controlled evacuations from the underbelly of the conscious/unconscious divide in the psyche/soul - demonic expulsions, like solar flares, or toxins released in the bloodstream; his dreams are never entirely merely random or absurd (like Dylan Thomas serving string in tea cups). Wh...

Sad news. Perhaps the most significant choreographer of her European generation - and surely the most visually strange and imaginative - Pina Bausch has died. I recall seeing her works on several occasions, in London, at Sadler Wells, and was always struck by the visceral and surreal brilliance of her ideas about dance and movement, and staging (often the stages were littered with flowers, or muck, or bricks, or other shattered remains). Bausch saw the world, at least partially, as things to be moved around, often with transgressive force - desire and rage and natural disaster all colliding in the human body. I am not sure dance had ever been so existentially challenged before, so hurt - or so healed. I found her work bracing and laugh-out-loud funny - she gave me some of the abrasive pleasure that some of David Lynch's work does - she very much saw and showed the world in a new light. In her work about the after-shocks of an earthquake in Palermo, for instance, a young woma...

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 ...

Eyewear has long enjoyed the cinematic worlds of David Lynch . Even Dune . Good to see poetry trying to explore them with pleasure, intelligence, oddity. See the call for poems below: http://zoo.f2s.com/privatepress/callforpoems.html