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

Fifty years since Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone.  Fifty years since a book depository (had we ever used that term before?) ironically revealed the sword mightier than the pen.  Fifty years since the man with the umbrella, the troops standing down, the epileptic fit, the magic bullet, the three hobos, the manhunt, the swearing in on the plane.  Fifty years to create a new American myth - one never equalled - in terms of complexity, and paranoia. Fifty years since it became possible to imagine the mob, the FBI, and Castro in bed together. Fifty years since a few seconds of gunfire put a Texan in the White House.  Fifty years since JFK became LBJ . In my home town, there are schools and streets named after JFK.  My brother's initials are JFK ( Jordan Fraser Knowlton ) in honour of the fallen Irish Catholic president.  What was his legacy?  Publically, decorum, vigour, culture, a sense of Cold War hope.  In private?  Whoring, and ballot...

JAMES A. GEORGE ON GRAVITY, FILM OF THE YEAR? “Of the Year” is used flippantly as winter approaches, be it books, music or film, and Alfonso Cuaron ’s Gravity has harboured most of the “film” prefix usage. While this is clearly false and smart marketing, one even more surprising statement widely attached to this film has turned out to be true: it has to be seen in 3D! Last year, Ang Lee ’s Life of Pi dabbled with successful 3D projection by composing steady images with careful editing and composed pacing and focusing. In my review of this film for this blog I pointed out that the change in the film’s aspect ratio allowed for startling moments of “pop-out” effects that were genuinely effective in the way that shrill, loud violins in horror movies don’t cause genuine alarm. But on the whole the 3D was just, there. An add-on that worked sometimes but also suffered due to the inherent light loss from stereoscopic projection and wearing clumsy dark sunglasses. Werner Herzog ’s docum...

This is Eyewear 's 3131st post! What a year for pop and indie music 2013 has been.  We have had comebacks from David Bowie and Adam Ant, Travis, Mazzy Star, Prefab Sprout, Pixies, Paul McCartney, Johnny Marr , Alice In Chains ,  Boy George and My Bloody Valentine , just to mention a few of the more unlikely ones. And we have had major pop albums and tracks from Katy Perry , Cher , and Lady Gaga .  And, great Glasgow bands have had a good year, too, with a new Franz Ferdinand , and Chvrches .  And new albums from big hitters The National, Pearl Jam,  and Arctic Monkeys . Meanwhile, Montreal's own, Arcade Fire , returned with a massive classic.  And, not to be outdone, several bands reinvented dance-funk-disco at the same time, including Phoenix and Daft Punk .  Oh, and James Blake won the Mercury.  And mercurial genius Kanye had a new, sonically off-putting release.  And yet, and yet.   Eyewear 's annual round-up of the year's bes...

I have been working with a brilliant group of MLitt creative writing students at the University of Glasgow, one of the world's leading universities.  It became clear to me that their touchstones were not always mine - but sometimes, they very much were: some books are perennial, are loved, despite, or even because of, their canonical status.  Setting aside a few gems like Brideshead Revisited , Fiesta , and The Great Gatsby , which are too well known, arguably too merely literary, to be just Cult classics, here are the 100 (or 101 since there are two Outsiders ) books of the last 100 years that every budding writer will want to read before they turn 21 - and are likely to read anyway, whether we like it or not. To have started earlier, with Against Nature , or Heart of Darkness , would be to miss the point that the cultural phenomenon of the Cult book basically starts with the emergence of the teenager in the 50s and 60s, which is why Catcher in the Rye remains the quintess...

If you want to understand the problem with the world at the present late stage of capitalism, watch The Bling Ring , then listen to the new Lady Gaga album.  Both are obsessed with the surface of material glamour ("bling") as it becomes a fetish object, standing in for what really might drive us - sex, love, safety, faith, freedom - and, in both cases, these American products of excess and  privilege  gesture brilliantly, if rather sadly, at another way. This may be satire or an epiphenomenon.  Gaga's album is not the  master-work  she no doubt hoped it would be, critics say, but several songs are funny collages and cut-ups of sounds and styles and personae that suggest the Lady is as much Shanghai as she is Wilde.  This is certainly the year of the pop diva - with Cher, Katy Perry, Britney Spears and Charli XCX among others coming out with massive tracks and albums of technical delights and quirky gems.  But like a morning after a cocaine bi...

The recent disaster in The Philippines - which may be the result of man made global climate change on some deeper level - is also a nail in the coffin of an interventionist God.  My Catholic theology has wavered, and it now is blown over by yet another assault on my sensibilities.  No God I know would massacre thousands in a windstorm.  But then, I do not know God.  I can only know what he is not, so feeble is my human ken.  At any rate, the universe moves in remote, strange and often cruel ways.  All we can do as mortals is try to pick up the pieces when nature, in its broad brutal swathes of dumb action negates us.  We must gesture towards what a kind presence overbearing all would do.  We must try to be God in the curious absence of one. Those poor people!

Ben Mazer is always an Eyewear favourite and here the Boston poet of flamboyant brilliance offers us a new poem: Orphans The splintered gutter’s cool refreshing pools of mud’s perspective shatter shadowed noon, having rejected all philosophy, its one objective downward to the sea; the poet’s pants in tatters, and a flower in bramble coat of mould, deflect who see in crossing, but the radiant queen bestows her museship on the violent seer; these orphans drink their vodka and they gleam to be descending further than the fold, past every trinket of the common household, where tufts of marigolds gleam in the wind, that signify the sea; quick steps rescind the future and the present, but the past, at last familiar, asserts its precedence where clotted loss builds out of a mixed tense, the secret intimacy orphans clasp to one another, to propagate a myth. There’s no way back from what they carry with. new poem by Ben Mazer; copyright 2013....