E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG BY TODD SWIFT

In what is either a True Detective style creepy sign, or very lo-fi viral marketing, someone has scrawled the name Lana on the pavement today outside my flat in chalk, amid some occult symbols. Meanwhile, the second album from Ms Lana Del Rey, titled Ultraviolence, in a bald reference to A Clockwork Orange (she had already exhausted that other hip transgressing novel Lolita) is upon us. This is not a review - I am still taking in the deadly nightshade that is this aural intoxication - but more of a nod of assent.

Del Rey is a persona - so what? so was Oscar Wilde - and she gives good dark mood.  Her interview in today's Guardian is perhaps more nihilistic than even Detective Rust, though - she claims not to want to be alive, and not to enjoy her enormous success or performing live.  With ennui like that, who needs fiends?  A common criticism is that her soporific melodies are attached to lyrics that are obsessively one-note: that basically they are torch songs about doomed love, an…

Sylvia Plath is a deserved icon of 20th century poetry, so why is it so surprising that a wannabe 21st century icon, albeit of popdom, Lana del Rey, would pose as her for the October Australian Vogue?  Well, it is a little tasteless, it seems to us at Eyewear - and oddly counterproductive for a singer-songwriter who claims to have tatooed the names of Nabokov and Whitman on her body (two men, notice, with reps as pervs - as well as genius).  How much of the del Rey mythos is false was debated - but the doom-mongering seems a courtship with death too far, once she crosses Sylvia's path.  Should we call Ms. del Rey rather Slyvia?  No honour is done to the memory of the poems, nor is a reckless homage requested or required.  This is sheer usury.  Will Lana next pose as Ezry Pound?  For now, she is a dross-dresser.

Lana Del Rey, now a meme of sorts, is this year's Lady Gaga - a heretofore unknown young woman rising from obscurity to instant world fame, thanks to Turner Prize-style art hijinks, and Madonnaesque reinvention; we are living in an era when Walter Pater and Walter Mitty have married and given birth to girls with the nous of Orson Welles and Oscar Wilde yoked together with virulence - call them Odette Weldes.

What is amazing is how the media gets so excited about a transformation whose blueprint is now at least 120 years old; after all, we now know how to burn with a gemlike flame; and all about personae and making strange.  Anyway, here comes Lana.  Her name refers to an O'Hara poem in my mind as well as a star.  She was born in New York State, so she is a New York School character, in a sense, though she prefers to position herself somewhere between High School Confidential and Blue Velvet.  Much has been made of the Lynchian in her work, but by that we really mean the rotten…