Miles Goes The Extra Spacey

Last night Eyewear attended the Old Vic's new production (directed by Trevor Nunn) of Richard II, with Kevin Spacey as Richard, and Ben Miles as the usurper. It was extraordinary. The modern-dress setting was perhaps too busy with the usual tropes of cameras and cell phones as imagos of a post-modern world, but the stark crisis between godly tradition and naked power was well presented even in contemporary fashion (the play partly being about fashion of course). Kevin Spacey has never been better, and lent Richard a few extra layers of pathos and eloquence, as well as suavity and cattiness, beyond the usual ones of self-pity and preening vanity stripped bare like a winter tree.

Ben Miles was a revelation - a bold modernizer out to capture his country like some former-day Cameron or Fox (or Blair). The play itself, delivered with such passion and seriousness, is newly-minted as one of Shakespeare's greatest and most profound essays on being and identity itself - the soul being appeased by "being eased to being nothing" - and Spacey's soliloquies with the mirror and in the cell were arresting and ravishing.

At the bleak end, when the brilliant, poetic king is grossly murdered, one is struck by the play's underpinning subtext: that the poet in society is disposable, no match for a determined forceful march forward - for all of Richard's speeches, which fuse his sense of self with tradition and language, ultimately link him to the royal fabric of spoken thought itself, which is, finally (and finely) poetry.

Causing A Scene

The always irrepresible and informative Canadian literary site, Bookninja, has an article out on the pros and cons of being in or out of a "writing scene". See link below. Warning, may contain traces of TS. ...


http://www.bookninja.com/magazine/oct_2005/scene.htm

Review: Playing The Angel

Depeche Mode have a new album out (meaning they now have a 24-year-old career). Bands once mocked now have a quarter of a century under their belts, and serious discographies and histories worth considering.

The new Depeche Mode album, Playing The Angel, is not as good as Violator or Music for the Masses, which arguably have the key songs, and are in fact from the golden middle period (after the early candy-synth and before the portentous slow decline into irrelevance) - but it is a work that coldly, and strongly, references the whole back catalogue with sinister wit.

Depeche Mode are loved by some, and regarded as faintly silly by most others, and for the same reasons: their merger of S&M, biblical allusion, electronic music and ultra-louche posturing (where all behaviour is deontologically challenged) is a brew not all may consume lightly.

I have always considered them natural heirs to the Byronic tradition: there is nothing Byron (or the idea of Byron) didn't do they have done, which includes the opiates and the orgies - with a curious C.S. Lewis Screwtape Letters diabolism. In fact, it is surprising they have never titled an album Screwtape - it would be be the summation of their summa psychopathologica - that is, they take the path of Judas, and celebrate it. They combine Poe and the Pope.

The best song on the new album is undoubtedly "John The Revelator" - a clear homage to their own "Personal Jesus" - which is about as joyous a misuse of American Gospel Born Again rhetoric and music as can be imagined - it is as if a Mormon choir joined Nine Inch Nails on tour and really got into it. This is what Depeche Mode do better than anyone else - desecrate the transcendental like some sort of coy William Empson about to be sent down for having a condom in his digs. That is, if they are of the devil's party, it isn't for want of trying to get into Magdalene first.

The rest of the album sags under the weight of too many dreamy ballads and less than impressive forays into their slow stuff. But it has three other highlights: "I Want It All"; "Lilian" and "Suffer Well" - which basically sum all their tropes up, lyrically and musically, but with valedictory panache, at least. Of these, "Lilian" is the most refreshing - it is rare for a Depeche Mode song to actually celebrate an actual person as subject (if even a fictional one) - too often their love objects are simply objects, and love isn't the right word to use either.

One final note: the James Bond franchise has overlooked DM for their theme song as often as the Tories have Ken Clarke - and this should stop. No other contemporary British band combines European sophistication, real menace, and kitsch as well as they.

Otherwheres In Islington This Wednesday

Otherwheres - "the new anthology from the University of East Anglia’s renowned Creative Writing MA course. It showcases the fresh talent of the Class of 2005 across the genres of prose, scriptwriting, poetry and lifewriting. UEA’s course is famous for selecting and nurturing a wide variety of writers and launching the careers of many well-known names in the world of literature, including Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Toby Litt and Trezza Azzopardi. UEA Creative Writing Anthology 2005: Otherwheres is a fabulous collection that ranges from the military courts of Pakistan to a marshland in France, on to the teeming streets of Osaka via a New Jersey airport, stopping at Tuscany and Siberia on the way and serving up burnt porridge to the Brontë sisters." - as the blurb goes.

What makes it meaningful, to me, despite the to-be-expected-hoo-ha is that my poetry colleagues and fellow classmates on the same year are in it; and we have wonderful, insightful and witty introductions from our marvellous tutors, Drs. Denise Riley and George Szirtes (two of the best poets now writing in the UK and beyond, if I may say so).

It'll be interesting to see how you compare this to the Hallam collection reviewed here a few weeks back.

The London launch is on Wednesday 19 October at 7.30 pm in The Mini Bar @ The Garage, 20-22 HighburyCorner, Islington, N5 1RD, which I shall be hosting.

Hope to see you there.

BBC Notices Poetry

The T.S. Review is happy to note that the BBC reviewed the recent Citizen 32 reading in Manchester, earlier posted here.

They kindly state:

"2004’s Oxfam Poet in Residence Todd Swift was entertaining as he was controversial".

See the link below.

This photo of me is by the Welsh writer Jo Hughes, and was taken in London in 2003.

One of the poems I read was:

The Shape of Things to Come

Resembles a triumphant trump of doom;
Is like a hollow room; a horn of plenty;
A ballerina’s shoe; a house in Hooville,
Like a devil’s mouse; a bang-
Drum, a pirate drunk on deadman’s

Rum; like a broken broom used to brush
Away the webs from day-dreaming boys
In a math exam; like a rack of lamb;
A donut convention; a depleted pension;
Like the sort of position churchmen don’t

Like to mention; is shaped like a poem,
Mute and dumb; like a big bronze bell
Held by a handlebar-moustachioed strongman
Working for Barnum; like a circus tent;
Like the hole rent in just such an umbrella;

Like a sausage and some French mustard;
Seems to be hoist on its own petard; looks
Like rain; is infinite, so will and won’t come again.
Is shaped like love; is shaped like a question
Mark and also an exclamation mark and also

A period. The shape of the terrible future
Is a sonnet and a no, looks like a Chinese box and
A door without locks, a hairless fox,
A vortex, a matrix, a nexus, a government rope.
Dystopia up around that there bend

Appears to be green soap abandoned
Under an infernal never-ending tap. The future,
According to the latest discovery, is a bit
Like a U-boat captain, or a tortoise neck.
The bad things ahead look like a two-mile wreck.

poem by Todd Swift

http://www.bbc.co.uk/manchester/content/articles/2005/10/05/041005_citizen_32_poetry_feature.shtml

Craig As Bond Is An Owen Goal

The badly-cropped image to your right is a picture of the Man Who Should Have Been Bond: Clive Owen.

Instead, the Friday 14 annoucnement, in London (a day after the far merrier Pinter Nobel) is bad news for those who want their Bond dark-haired, and good with a croupier.

Owen, by far the better actor, seemed a shoe-in - after all, he actually looks the part, and has played several Bond-like characters. Perhaps Owen did not want the part, now that he is an Oscar-nominated act-tor.

What we have instead is Dalton Mark Two. Warning bells are already ringing, and the volcano HQ is about to self-destruct, along with the franchise. As soon as I read that Craig wishes to "take the part to darker, more serious places, with more emotion" and that the writer of the screenplay wishes to create a sombre character study without Q or gadgets, I realized that the reality principle was about to burst the greatest fantasy bubble in cinema history. Bond is not Hamlet, nor was meant to be. When Dalton tried to go dark and thespian, it went all pear-shaped.

I hope I am wrong about this. However, rather than getting Masterpiece Theatre on Bond's ass, they should have hired Tarantino or some other edgy, cool director to make a retro classic, updated to reflect the current cinematic trends from Asia and beyond. Retreating to Casino Royale seems like a fallback position. I am shaken, not stirred, today, to reuse the most tired trope in the biz.

Harold Pinter Deservedly Wins Nobel Prize In Literature

The T.S. Review is very happy, indeed, to report that Harold Pinter has today been awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize In Literature.

Pinter - like Kafka or Beckett - defines the age he finds himself in, through the anxieties of language, and the unease of its uses, misuses and the emptiness (silence is not sufficient) between what is said and unsaid - the dialectic of human speech, and thus, society. In fact, the politics of how we say things and do things to others, surely the core concern of writing.

As a playwright, screenwriter, and antiwar poet, he has fully earned this honour, which is a refreshing surprise, and a bloody nose to both Blair and Thatcher. Coming on her 80th birthday it is a double irony - and a welcome one, given this is also HP's 75th birthday year. There were complaints in the British media not enough was being done at home to fete the great man - now there will be.