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

Sad news. The Knack singer, and writer of song 'My Sharona', Doug Fieger , has died. That 1979 song was the theme of my just-pubescent junior high school years. The song was jarringly adolescent, leeringly (disconcertingly) hypersexual, and utterly catchy - it was, simply, the power pop song of the year - and is arguably, along with 'High School Confidential', one of the raunchiest ever written about the stickiness of love and desire. I loved and feared it then, and still do. It sets me going every time I hear it. While The Knack never amounted to much after that, they allowed power pop a moment in the sun, and caught the new wave cusp as the 80s began.

Two men with an interest in younger women seemingly created the teen dream - the teenage imaginary - in the Eisenhower Era - Nabokov and Salinger . Lolita became the young one as agent and provocative force of energy, and Holden Caulfield became us all. The death of Salinger is an airless chamber; he'd been dead to us since 1965, more or less. Or, perhaps, alive forever since 1951, when his immortal Catcher In The Rye was first published. It had an immense and immediate effect on my youthful sense as writer and reader when my Aunt Bev gave it to me in the late 70s. Many of my early poems are Salingeresque - and I continue to argue for the legitimate expression of the adolescent sublime in mature creative work. It is an irony of fate, or merely a coincidence, that the day of his death I was listening to the new and brilliant Beach House album, Teen Dream . It is Dream Pop via Mazzy Star , true, but Bowie -like, stately, weird, haunting, sexy and nearly as great as Siamese Dream...