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

Psy , the world's second most-famous, second oddest Korean, created the greatest music meme of 2012, and now has leaked his Justin Bieber entourage-created follow-up wannabe-meme, 'Gentleman'.  The only similarity, aside from the plodding-galloping beat, is that both songs share a G in their title, and also, I suppose, the Orientalising yelps of half-imprecise English declamations, which add poignancy and eccentricity, to Psy's work. I like the new song fine, but, bereft of its still-secret video, without the new dance, it is impossible to gauge how this virus will spread.  The new song is not as silly, joyous, or wildly unexpected, as 'Gang nam' .  B ut neither is it utter crap.  It has an intriguing claim in "I'm a mother father gentleman" which has a bit of Lennon wisdom in it.  He is trying to be a universal dance-pop artist, and be fun about it, across cultures and languages.  He deserves some credit for this. I wish him well, and hope hi...

EYEWEAR 'S FILM CRITIC JAMES A. GEORGE ON THE NEW DANNY BOYLE Cool Poster, Not So Cool Film The London Olympic ceremony was good, wasn’t it? Danny Boyle, kinetic director and recent national treasure, in my mind is the Hollywood underdog, so it’s with no pleasure that I feel I need to slap him – to inform that Trance is a blip in an otherwise remarkable career. Perhaps the greatest contribution this film will make is to film students as the ultimate example of style over substance. The editing is a little misjudged and hastily disorientating, the camera constantly canters and thus saturates, and while the music sometimes weaves in effortlessly, it occasionally jars – telling you exactly what to think during the film's wafting climax. Trance is an off-rail locomotive zooming along so stylishly that by the time my interest in the characters had spiralled away, and the story became so painfully vague (yet predictable concerning plot twists), all that was left...

LYDIA BOWDEN , EYEWEAR MUSIC CRITIC ON THE NEW JAMES BLAKE James Blake has fallen in love. It’s true. I found this out after I had my first listen to his second album Overgrown . Blake has recently admitted that he knew nothing about music before he met his new love, who is in fact, Theresa Wayman , singer and guitarist in American band Warpaint . In comparison to his self titled first album, which hints his earlier work with dub-step, has a haunting vocal at the forefront, all with a mixture of bleeps and hums, this second album is somewhat more soothing, with less of a kick. And it’s obvious that something in his music has changed. I guess love can have that affect.   Mr Blake in love People have been very excited about this album. After his big entrance to the DJ music scene, his music was soon playing on all popular radio stations and loved by every pop music lover out there. People loved what they heard, it was fresh and spooky, a sound that made you feel dr...

Ian Pople reviews Pat Boran The Next Life Dedalus Press, £10.00 There is an interesting tension in this book between its overall opulence ( it’s 100 pages in length and its approaches and techniques just as varied) and the often beguiling simplicity of its best poems.  In part that tension is controlled by Boran’s seeming effortlessness - Boran is a very fine technician - and it is also controlled by Boran’s clear-sighted perspective on the world.  To my mind, the best poems in this book are where Boran responds with dextrous and beguiling simplicity to the things he has seen. As in ‘Skipping’, in which a girl is portrayed skipping outside his house for most of the morning.  In the course of the morning, the girl is ‘now with a friend, now with a whole gang of friends,/now on her own.’ The poem then moves into a single sentence which last the remaining twelve lines of the poem.  In the trajectory of the syntax, Boran mov...

POET-CRITIC SNEHAL VADHER WEIGHS IN ON The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry   edited by Sudeep Sen This anthology is a welcome addition to a line of anthologies that have been challenging and expanding ideas about Indian English Writing. This trend begins with A. K. Mehrotra ’s illustrious The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets , published in 1992, a book that served as a textbook for a generation of poets and helped establish Nizzim Ezekiel, Dom Moraes, Adil Jussawala and A. K. Ramanujan as the first truly modern Indian poets in their engagement with present realities in and through the medium of English.   Then in 1994 came Ramanujan’s and Dharwadker’s The Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry , opening inner borders and familiarising English readers with poetry written in several of India’s regional languages. More recently, The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets , edited by Jeet Thayil and published in 2006, is n...