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

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...

 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 ...

CULTURE IS NOT ALL ABOUT WHAT WHITE PEOPLE SAY OR DO Last week saw the deaths of TS Eliot and John Lennon ... now imagine that media fuss. Well, what did happen? In fact, Derek Walcott and Chuck Berry died. Now consider what actually happened... There was a lot of fuss; obituaries... AND THEN... sort of not all that much. Certainly not the wailing lamentation when Bowie died... or even Ted Hughes ... I am not saying the media and Western cultural machines are organisationally racist, but there is something wrong with the omelettes in Denmark, when arguably the greatest poet of color of the 20th century dies followed by ONLY THE GOLDARN INVENTOR OF ROCK AND ROLL - and there is no world-shaking sorrow and recognition that SOME OF THE GREATEST ART AND CULTURE is made by non-white folks. Just saying... Because Walcott and Berry, for all their human weaknesses, were universal geniuses in their fields. Their deaths were not just sad or notable - they were SEISMIC. Now ima...

Aside from our personal losses, 2016 was the year when everyone apparently began to socially mediate the death of beloved others - famous people known universally, or to many. No other year - not even 2001 - since the new century began, has been so reviled by those living in it. Fuck you 2016 was a common refrain.  The year almost became a running joke, coming to symbolise all that was mean, unfair, cruel and random about existence - it was the most existential year in decades. certainly, the death of so many talented, brilliant and creative persons underlined the compelling fact that WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE, SOONER OR LATER, no matter what. So we better get right with ourselves, the world, and decide how best to deal with the fate we have been thrown - stoicism advised. Claims that no more well-known people died than usual this year are basically besides the point (THOUGH the BBC now reports 50% more celebrities died this year than in any other on record) - in the se...

The media is anniversary mad, as we know.  This is the 5th anniversary of Eyewear .  2010 is also the 50th anniversary of 1960 - so get ready for a half-century reappraisal, this decade, of everything Sixties related. In terms of literature, here are some classics (well, they are now if we are still talking about them and reading them) whose 50th anniversary 2010 is: Green Eggs and Ham; The Violent Bear It Away; The Country Girls; To Kill A Mockingbird; A Canticle for Leibowitz ; and my favourite children's book, after The Wind in the Willows , The Weirdstone of Brisingamen , a work of genius.  It is also the 50th anniversary of the death of Camus . In terms of poetry, it is now 50 years since some of these major publications: Curnow 's The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse ; AJM Smith 's Oxford Book of Canadian Verse ; The New American Poetry 1945-1960 edited by Donald M Allen (perhaps the most influential anthology of the last half-century); Shapiro 's In Defen...

One of the greater Western cultural impresarios of the last 40 years died on my 44th birthday the other day: Malcolm McLaren .  He will be missed.  I met him once in a Moroccan restaurant in Paris.  Certain of his provocations, bands (not least Bow Wow Wow ) and songs ('Madame Butterfly') are an indelible part of my earlier life, and his work in some ways influenced Tom Walsh and I when we worked on the Swifty Lazarus project a decade ago.

There has been a recent hullabaloo in Canada as big-name mostly Toronto-based authors like Margaret Atwood protest the idea of Amazon - the world's leading Internet provider of books etc. - into the Canadian market. Canadian cultural protectionism (CanCon) has done some good, and some harm, over the years. Before it existed, my father's records went up against The Beatles and Elvis in the battle of the bands, and lost. With such protection, third-raters like Caucasian Chalk Circle had their moment in the sun. The Canadian Government admirably subsidises many small Canadian publishers. This means many Canadian poets and writers get published in their homeland. I realise that the lack of many international book-selling chains in Canada means the country has an enviable number of small local independent book-sellers. However, from my perspective as a small press writer, Amazon has done far more good than harm for me, and my peers. After all, most poets sell most of their...

Oddly, the head judge of the forthcoming Orange Prize, Daisy Goodwin , has claimed that too many books by women involve sexual abuse, rape, and Asian twins. Instead, she would like more humour. Her complaint is that books seem dark, and focus on depressing issues. Where is the light stuff? The dumbing down of British culture continues apace. Where novels, such as Hard Times , or Middlemarch (to name one by a woman), once dealt with the struggle and hardship of human existence, now it appears, contemporary novelists who actually explore themes and concerns that are of relevance to actual women (alas, these include incest, abuse, rape, as well as twins) are in danger of boring readers like Goodwin. Perhaps the problem is such prizes themselves. Asking anyone to read 120 or more novels over a limited period is a marathon a day sort of madness. Instead of savouring, one begins to look for ways out of the tedium. So - a good laff. Ironically, whereas British novels are apparently ever-less...

The Sunday Times Culture section ran an intriguing list of the best of the 00s in film, pop, books, last weekend. It was a persuasive list. Best film: In The Mood For Love – which would have been my choice. Best book: Austerity Britain , by David Kynaston – a wonderful choice, and one that makes me particularly pleased because David is a colleague of mine at Kingston University, and also because my doctoral research is in the austerity years of the 40s and British poetry of the period. Best album: Kid A – not a bad choice either. Eyewear’s Top Films of the Decade would include The Lives of Others, The Bourne trilogy, Mulholland Drive , Elephant, The New World , Lost In Translation, Match Point (Woody Allen’s misunderstood film), Before Sunset , Let The Right One In , Casino Royale and The House of Mirth . The Lord of the Rings trilogy is also a noteworthy achievement of the time. In terms of albums, Bob Dylan’s Love and Theft remains the masterwork of the decade. Other acts tha...

The dumbing down of Britain and America continues, with ITV's broadcast, over the last two nights, of a new version of Wuthering Heights , destined to be aired in America, too, and then let loose on the world in the form of a DVD. That this latest heap of rubbish was masterminded by the creator of Desperate Romantics - a bodice-ripping series that lays waste to the Pre-Raphealites - should surprise no one. The media has discovered - again - that high culture and emotionality and poetry can sell - if commodified and repackaged to be all about sex and violence - which, as Frankie said a while back, were "the new gods". Though Tom Hardy is rather good at being handsome and menacing as Heathcliff, everything else about this adaptation is beyond poor. I don't want to flog a dead horse, but le me briefly explain. The novel, on which this TV two-parter was based, is, as we know, one of the greatest books in the English language. Its passionate exploration of the psycholog...

Sad news. The great psychobilly performer, Lux Interior , who, with partner-in-music Poison Ivy made up the bruised core of The Cramps , has died. American "trash culture" has lost one of its major iconoclastic icons. I saw them perform once in Montreal, in the late 1980s, and it was weird and inspiring. No one who was anyone then had not danced to "Human Fly". The Cramps' style (they never cramped mine) was very influential, I think, on Canadian poetry of the 90s, in the sense that they were at the vanguard of a movement to reintroduce, or reinretroduce perhaps, a B-movie subculture to greater prominence, in the way that Vampirella did. This led to the rediscovery of Ed Wood , Bettie Page , and other lost figures on the sordid margins of the Eisenhower Era. This love of creepily backstreet Americana was also part of what drove David Lynch and Tarantino . This was very much in my mind when I began my cabarets, and it was a part of the zeitgeist, then, for poe...

If U2 are to be believed, New Year's Day is a little like poetry making nothing happen (why not begin 2009 with a cliche?) - and yet, of course, the ambiguity in that line of theirs: "nothing changes on New Year's Day" is a clever one: the lover's love remains, just as the world (underway) is ongoing in its beauty and its terror. So, both love and evil do not change, so much as calibrate their relationship, even as the years go by. Eyewear wants to wish you, dear reader(s), the best possible of years ahead, in the full knowledge that war, credit crisis, environmental degradation, mass unemployment, and general despair are in pretty full swing just about now (as in Gaza currently). As poets and readers, we have an especially challenging task - to maintain some form of literate communion with the past, while innovating responsibly for the future (and the present). I was recently in a bookshop that had no poetry books for sale (well, one). That's not a good sign...