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

after dropping out of the Tory leadership campaign, he joined the Dublin Murder Squad... 2019 is no one's idea of a good year, and enough nonsense, high crimes, and yes, conduct unbecoming, has washed under the bridge so far to make it a low-water mark of the new century, so far. But, as often happens, when the times are darkest, the popular culture is best (see the 1940s and American film). Television has been having a golden age for so long now, it is almost trite to mention it, and Netflix is offering so many great movies on TV (including the latest Breaking Bad semi-squib), it is hard to keep up. In a year of absurdly-superb televised plenty (and then there's that odd guilty pleasure, Evil ...) a few shows stood out, even so, from the pack (though others came close, morally or aesthetically and could and will make many end of year lists). The three that struck me most were: 1. Chernobyl The sense of dread, horror, realism, and scientific and political accuracy...

 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 ...

TRUMP IS PART OF A HISTORY OF WHITE MALE RAGE Like a crazed killer clown, whether we are thrilled, horrified, shocked, or angered (or all of these) by Donald Trump , we cannot claim to be rid of him just yet. He bestrides the world stage like a silverback gorilla (according to one British thug), or a bad analogy, but he is there, a figure, no longer of fun, but grave concern. There has long been a history of misogynistic behaviour in American gangster culture - one thinks of the grapefruit in the face in The Public Enemy , or Sinatra throwing a woman out of his hotel room and later commenting he didn't realise there was a pool below to break her fall, or the polluted womb in Pacino's Scarface ... and of course, some gangsta rap is also sexist.  American culture has a difficult way with handling the combined aspects of male power, and male privilege, that, especially in heteronormative capitalist enclaves, where money/pussy both become grabbable, reified objects and obj...

Fans of sexy, smart, chic LA-based pop star and music producer Kennedy (aka Jack Kennedy ) - he of the Silversun Pickups and other cool stuff - will be pleased to hear that he has teamed up with none other than bespectacled poet and vocalist Todd Swift, he of Boyband-champagne-attack fame, to create a single, called The Boyband Incident ; now available at iTunes, that just may become one of the weirdest leftfield novelty dance tracks to generate worldwide buzz.  There are now plans afoot for a video.  But in the meantime, and in the absence of radio airplay on BBC 1 etc, the way to poetic justice is gonna have to be achieved one click at a time. https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/the-boy-band-incident-single/id821185894

Sad news.  Larry Hagman has died, but for most of the world that has ever watched a TV set, he isn't the hapless husband dreaming of a genie (though he was that), or the troubled alcoholic who suffered various medical ailments (that too) but the ultimately iconic figure of J.R. Ewing - arguably the most popular anti-hero (okay, villain) of all time on American television, and by extension, globally.  It is hard now to comprehend, but once Dallas was an event of the first order, in terms of popular culture; and its recent enjoyable second coming is now in doubt.  Let's hope the show runners were as devious as their best character, and plotted a way to keep things going without their eminence gris.  Hagman, you'll be missed.  You put Texas on the map for a billion people.

Any reader in Britain, of serious literature, might be disheartened to learn that sales of the recently short-listed Booker novels are, for the most part, in the low thousands (one of them has sold around two thousand copies); meanwhile, most poetry collections sell less than a thousand copies.  However - and this is the funny part - memoirs by comedians sell tens of thousands, making millions of pounds.  Apparently, this year's Christmas season, which began in publishing on September 29, features a number of comedy books, which sellers hope will hit the jackpot.  This may be fun on Christmas Day.  It is not good for culture, however popular.  The truth is, poetry has a particularly hard-sell in a culture, like Britain's, where the default setting is a guffaw, or chortle.  Poetry can never compete with stand-up, for even when it is light and witty, it is not Comedy; nor is poetry sex, drugs or rock and roll - the other obsessions of the marketers who peddle...

Want to feel old?  It is the 10th anniversary of Wikipedia - which, among other things, is proof of a poet's existence in the 21st century (don't believe me? - Google and see how many poets are listed there - know any to request the pages be taken down?).  Meanwhile, The Simpsons first aired on this day in 1990 - 21 years ago.  If proof was ever needed that zany, post-modern, and cutting edge American culture has long since gone so mainstream as to render the very idea of post-modern pop culture toothless, well, look no further than this show.  I turn 45 this year (in April), and am now on the verge of (if not already tumbled over into) what is surely "middle age".  I was 20 (that sublime age) 25 years ago - in other words, a quarter of a century ago, and no matter if I wear jeans, runners, and baseball caps, I cannot hold back time.  We are no longer young - even those of us so embedded in, penetrated by, dazzled with, and intermediated via, new media an...