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

It has been months since I wrote anything here and anything written before has been superseded by such strange, heretofore unimaginable, and extreme, world events, that reality itself has seemed at times bent out of shape. Of course, as commentators have long said, the near-occult power of Donald Trump to warp reality by constant fabrication, deception, and illusion, is a form of magic, augmented by the chaos he seemingly intentionally unleashes daily, with wars, taxes, threats, insults, and weird claims; as well as demonstrable affection for right-wing and tyrannical leaders and systems. In the past few months, for example, Trump has turned Canada, once a paragon of reliable loyalty and decent stability, into almost a foe, and has antagonised a whole nation, with his wild lies and threats. The damage is huge. Bryan Adams has even released an enraged single titled "51st State". Elbows Up Canada Strong! This Donroe power grab menacing Canada is economically illiterate, cruel ...

A Hollywood film poster that shows the best and worst of America in one product Nothing made by humans is all good. Of all the verities that have been agreed on since the dawn of thought, and hence, civilisation and history, the imperfectability of humanity is high on the list. The USA is therefore, like every other nation in history, a flawed, imperfect country, devised by humans, caught like us all in the flood of history. Since it is 250 years old (more or less today), we must also agree that it was conceived and born relatively recently, compared to many other civilisations (India and China and England, for example). Human recorded history is at least 5,500 years old, after all. So, let us admit that the USA is deeply flawed: it was greatly enriched by human slavery, an extraordinarily callous evil; another mass evil, part of its founding myth and extension Westward was the near or total genocide of the indigenous peoples who first lived and belonged on the land now called the USA ...

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...

what happens when the leader is a charismatic charlatan? I have been watching the dawning, infuriatingly slow wake-up call Covid-19 has been for many Americans these past few weeks... as the Washington Post editorial goes, this pandemic will strip the United States of any pretence to normalcy or capability. Trump is one man, but he represents something the land of the free has indulged for decades now - a willingness to ignore science, fact, and reality, for pure partisan ideology and bias. This emotive, irrational and blind behaviour, aided and abetted by the right-wing, often religious TV and radio media and latterly, the amoral nihilistic Silicon valley companies, literally recreated a biblical-level-event Babel. Since America is ludicrously rich and powerful, it has had much capital to spend, even waste. But it has been too intellectually and morally profligate, and now has a gutted and aberrant leadership, unable to form coherent, rational plans, and project determi...

much has changed... 18 YEARS AGO, like most everyone else, I watched the planes hit the twin towers on this day, on television, and was stunned. I felt instantly this was a different level of historic event I was witnessing - the world had changed. That gets said a lot, but 9/11 was a major shift - the start of the 21st century that has led, one way or another, to where we are today. IRONICALLY, the rise of the digital social media world, and the collapse of the banking system a decade ago, coul d not be foreseen then, nor Trump, Brexit, or the resurgence of Russia and China, and the relative decline of America, in the world. Nor that a Black President would be twice elected in a once slavery-owning nation. IN SOME WAYS, 9/11 feels like a much-more-distant event, now - like Pearl Harbour, or the Charge of the Light Brigade - because the 2003 illegal war in Iraq, and then the tragic destruction in Syria, as well as the enduring Palestinian-Israeli conflict, not to mentio...

It is perhaps no surprise that most ( not all, thankfully ) film critics have praised Tarantino's latest (9th) film Once Upon A Time In Hollywood... as a masterwork - I have seen it even called Shakespearean - a term that comes from a scene in the movie; but he is more a Jacobean Middleton. Tarantino's late career has been focused on revenge - one of the primary staples of drama and melodrama in all English literature; it is also, of course, the staple of Nicholas Cage's late career, so it is not an inherently perfect one. Violence is to Saint Quentin what bars are to San Quentin - the raison d'etre. I cannot think of another director - not even Peckinpah or de Palma, Hitchcock or Scorsese - so cocked and aimed in one direction - that of setting up and paying off scenes and situations so that 'all hell breaks loose' and terrible violence ensues. Tarantino has argued - often publicly and coarsely - for an art for art's sake separation between reel violen...

 HER IMAGE WAS BOUGHT AND USED BY HEFFNER TO CAPITALISE ON HER FAME FOR HIS OWN GAIN I do not come to mourn Heffner. He lived to 91, and had what he wanted from life. What he wanted was desperately limited, although hedonistically exciting - he had the devil's bargain, as it were - all the sex, money, fame, and influence he asked for. Why mourn the villain who makes crime pay? His impact on Post-war Western society was akin to that of the atomic bomb, and just as destructive. His "lifestyle" - never harmless boys will be boys fun - for all its purported social-justice elements and literary collus ions (with sex-creeps like Sartre ), was about radically free access to a certain kind of sexual pleasure - mostly white male middle-class heterosexual freedom (though he did advocate for gay rights at some stage, likely as a cover for his own need for total access to sex objects). What brand is better known, or more sinister, than the bunny ears, other than the ...

DARKNESS VISIBLE: THE RISING TIDE OF HATE IN MY TIME BY SARAH BURK, AMERICAN EDITOR AT EYEWEAR PUBLISHING   This past Saturday, a week ago (it seems longer) the quiet college town of Charlottesville, VA became the site of violence and vitriol as white supremacists and neo-Nazis rallied to “Unite the Right” against the removal of a statue of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee , clashing with counter-demonstrators. This scene turned tragic when a man drove a car into a crowd of counter-demonstrators, killing one and injuring 19. He had earlier been seen marching with the symbols of far-right extremist group Vanguard America, though according to the group, he was not an official member. As physical confrontations erupted between protesters, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe declared a state of emergency and law enforcement officers attempted to stop the rally under orders that it was an unlawful assembly. However, the damage had already been done. ...

NOT ONE OF THESE BESPECTACLED MEN WOULD APPROVE OF TRUMP August was once (still is?) called the Silly Season, because less news happened then. Indeed, Malcolm Bradbury's classic novel of the 70s, The History Man , opens with a page on the subject. Ironic, because more than one war has started in August - no month is ahistorical, apolitical. Even the name August refers to an imperial figure. Our editor went away for a fortnight to relax, and like the rest of the world, has witnessed one of the least pleasant August's in living memory, in terms at any rate, of the news. No point in rehearsing the obvious: Donald Trump and his administration are the worst since Nixon' s, and may well be worse. Nixon himself toyed with using nukes in Asia, and harboured hard-hatted rednecks as allies. But the refusal over the weekend to properly condemn extreme-right actions is breathtakingly un-American and unsettling. America has not been as unwelcoming to non-whites since Reagan - p...

HE VOTED TRUMP, ALAS Sorry for having been away. The world's tumult continues. Notably, and for the better, Macron beat Le Pen in France; the tide of hate was briefly halted. In America, Trump edged closer to Full Nixon , with this throttling of the very tall FBI director, and odd references to taped conversations. Nixon, as an aside, had a drink problem, mental health issues, BUT - and this is a big but - for all his errors and personality problems, and troubling ambition, and disrespect for the law of the land - was an educated legal mind, with a strong sense of right and wrong, a keen intellect, and a very clear economic and foreign policy objective - to defeat Communism. That Nixon fell well below his ideals and values is his personal and political tragedy and legacy. Disastrously for America now, and the world, Trump appears to have no moral compass, no worldview worth speaking of, no intellectual capacity - just the ambition, personality disorder, and lack of respe...

WE'D ALL BE BETTER OFF IF SHE WAS IN CHARGE A few days ago a person who was very angry at the state of the world, and who had determined to do something violent in the name of extreme views, went on a rampage outside of the British houses of parliament. A terror incident, and awfully, innocent people were injured, and killed, including an officer guarding the home of democracy in these isles. Images of an heroic MP bloodied and unbowed, and talk of the Blitz spirit, boomed across the globe.... Britain is strong, and unbeaten. Family members of the killer have apologised. Debates rage about his religious identity, and how someone "home grown" could end up so hate-filled - as if this was not also the country that gave us Cromwell and Jack The Ripper . Hate is often grown at home. The new PM, Mrs May , spoke eloquently, and in rather rhetorical fashion, about the greatness of democracy and Westminster. True, but painfully ironic. For, while the terrorist in Londo...

DANGER - SPOILERS AHEAD!!! Logan , the new film by James Mangold , and the tenth outing for the Wolverine character from the Marvel Universe, as played by Hugh Jackman , is receiving a lot of critical praise. Released March 1, the film has been called "the Citizen Kane " of comic book films, and compared favourably to the previous benchmark for quality in this sub-genre, The Dark Knight trilogy, by Christopher Nolan . It shares with that trilogy a gritty realism, a downbeat tone, and serious actors at the top of their game. It is however not an urban picture, but, as every critic has noted, a road movie/Western in its DNA. The cliché is to cite Shane , which the picture does itself, as the blueprint, but this is a red herring, since the actual Western it most resembles is The Searchers - let alone In Cold Blood or T2 . Mangold has co-written the film, at a time of Western darkness (Brexit, the rise of Trump ) and the film opens on a landscape torn from Beckett by ...

THE SHIT GOT REAL The Cavalry   As the early results curdle, I text my father three words - This Is Bad. Like thousands of others, I’ve spent the last year volunteering and working to elect Hillary Clinton. The long fight. The good fight. The first fight I’ve truly thrown myself into, again and again. Election Night finds me in southern Virginia, a ramshackle campaign office held together by duct tape, off-white cracked paint, and five other community organizers. Growing up, the evening news was my family’s sacred time. Six years old, I watch a Palestinian child dive behind wreckage as gunfire crackles. Peter Jennings’ lullaby voice informs us that the child is unaccounted for. My father responds to my text with two words - I know.             Hour ago a packed office, trusty volunteers using an auto-dialer to rapid fire call as many inconsistent voters as we can. After polls close in Virginia, volunteers shu...

Inaugural Occasional Poem: The White House Casting Couch Is Visited By Zeus as Golden Rain BY THE AMERICAN POET AND SATIRIST ERIC SIGLER   I   I thought I saw a smoke screen or a cloud descend through spears that rallied at the sky, and railed against the theme - four years beneath a shroud- until I woke to see that, in my eye, I could not emancipate the dream  from shackles chained to starlight - a strident stalker wading through the night, an endless specter searching for a theme....   II   But then I saw sun's gilded feet retreat -  high-heeled hopes broken by the darkness, love that lies alone on mirrored splinters, shattered by the monuments of defeat, that thrust into the eyes the vile success  of tyrants who elect to be successors - their statutory statutes on the plaques - marble mountains moved on others' backs - destroyers in the mantles of the victors......