Summer Poetry At Oxfam One Week From Now

Life Lines: Eight Poets For Oxfam

Oxfam Summer Poetry Reading 2006

Thursday, 27 July, 7-10 pm

Oxfam Books & Music

91 Marylebone High Street, W1

Julia Casterton
Jan Conn
Alfred Corn
Annie Freud
John Redmond
Michael Schmidt
Henry Shukman
Roisin Tierney

Hosted by Todd Swift & James Byrne

Admission free, suggested donation £8

Please contact Martin Penny to reserve seats

Telephone: 020 7487 3570

email: oxfammarylebone@hotmail.com

Black Holes and Revelations

Q recently gave the new album from Muse - that hyperbolic sci-fi-inspired band from the UK - titled Black Holes and Revelations - five stars.

Recently Sight & Sound suggested the star ranking system should be rendered null and void, as so much stuff and nonsense to sell papers (S&S merely sells magazines), which is why Eyewear uses the five spectacles system instead.

BH&R is an album that calls for weird yet precise synergistic blurbs: consider the following formula: Pink Floyd + Ultravox + Queen + New Order + Radiohead = Muse.

In otherwords, this is not a subtle sound, but one prone to grandiose utterance. But it is thrilling, and oddly fresh, despite the "Mr. Roboto" vocoder effects in places and the endless invention; indeed, what was once postmodern art's best tactic, endless playful and eclectic invention, has now become a vaguely tedious nervous tic that infects every new 21st century product.

The opening track is stupendous ("Take A Bow"); the fourth, "Map of the Problematique" would not be out of place on Achtung Baby, if that had been produced by G. Moroder.

Have fun; inject a diode; zip to Japan on a jet-pack; listen to this space-age outfit.

4 specs.

Hotter Than Heck

It's official!

Today is the hottest ever July day in the United Kingdom. Roads have melted.

What we have here is a heatwave.

Meanwhile, Mickey Spillane, world's best-selling writer of the 20th century, has died.

What's a feller to do?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5193486.stm

New American Writing 24

The image above is taken from a photograph by Sally Ritts, from the Bill Viola installation The Messenger, 1996. It is the cover image on the 2006 issue of New American Writing 24, edited by Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover.

NAW 24, just out, features a section on Nathaniel Mackey, the poetry of Nguyen Trai, and translations by, among others, Neruda, Holan and Asse Berg.

It also has three poems by yours truly, as well as writing by Max Winter, Rosmarie Waldrop, Pierre Joris, Clayton Eshleman and many more.

To order or subscribe, please see www.newamericanwriting.com - you will find NAW one of the best places to locate the pulse of innovative work from North America.

Q and '80s

Eyewear has a weakness for alternative music from the decade known as the '80s, as loyal readers of this blog will know, no doubt to their chagrin. Blame it on the facts of my birth, which allowed me to immerse myself in a full-body baptism of new wave as the 80s swelled its banks lo 20 years or so ago.

Eyewear also misreads Q (The Essential Music Guide) as a sort of bible manque. Long has Q snubbed the 80s scene as naff. No more. It was milk and honey to see the August 2006 issue appear, with Madonna on the cover. They also long-listed the top 80 records of the 80s.

Eyewear saw much that was good about these lists (40 Best Tracks, and 40 Best Albums) and won't quibble too much. One aspect of the selection was its catholicism, which was welcome - rather than staying to the narrow path of indie sounds, mainstream classics like Van Halen's "Jump" and Dylan's staggering "Blind Willie McTell" were noted.

Of the 40 Best Tracks, many are iPod friendly, and among my all-time faves, such as:

The Whole of the Moon, Golden Brown, Everyday Is Like Sunday, Personal Jesus, There She Goes, Tainted Love, How Soon Is Now, Love Will Tear Us Apart, Relax, West End Girls, Kiss, and Blue Monday. Missing were beloved classics from INXS, Eurythmics, Simple Minds, XTC, Iggy Pop, Joe Jackson, OMD, Bow Wow Wow, ABC, Orange Juice, Eyeless in Gaza, The Passage, and many more, however.

The 40 Best Albums list is also mostly worthy, and includes masterpieces such as:

Graceland, Ocean Rain, Psychocandy, Dare, Spirit of Eden, Disintegration, Like A Prayer, Nebraska, Doolittle, Closer, Murmur, The Queen Is Dead, Hounds of Love and The Joshua Tree. Missing were seminal albums such as New Gold Dream and Rio, rendering the list faintly ludicrous, but mostly, it was faithful to the spirit of the age and not entirely revisionist.

He Was The Model for Rear Window

How could Eyewear, of all blogs, not note the passing of one of America's greatest (as in above) photographer's, Slim Aaron (see obituary link below), especially as he was the model for James Stewart's immobilized shutterbug-cum-murder-witness in Hitchcock voyeurism classic Rear Window.

Slim's main theme, after war, was nothing less than the playgrounds of the jet set he helped to snap in time - the rich who float above the fracas of life in which others do the fighting; although immune to ideology, his images yawn wide with Marxist meaning. Slim did history by other means. The history of the impermeable membrane on the pool - the flashing surface of things. The cream on top.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1821979,00.html

Welcome to the multipolar world

The G8 has done precious little this past week-end to halt, condemn or resolve the current unedifying slaughter of innocents (and, indeed, the guilty) in the Middle East. Nor is the Quartet about to.

Meanwhile, China, Russia, and the USA begin to divide the world's remaining petroleum resources among them, in order to sustain technology and lifestyles which are dismayingly unsustainable.

The French wanted a non-unipolar world to offset the hegemony of the Americans; they may be getting what they ordered, and what once seemed a plausible alternative to the hard-to-construct utopias of the far-flung Left. But it doesn't seem to be the French calling the shots.

The rockets, by the way, being fired at civilians and infrastructure on both sides of the border of this current dispute, are manufactured and sold; who profits from this mayhem?

There will come a time, surely, when stock options are not an option, for those left in the ruined world of the 22nd century.

All these reflections verge on the unsayably trite. But if so trite, why are they still resisted by so many? It seems the women and men of most "democratic nations" prefer their giant screens to the smallest insights - and will not budge to alter the way we live and "do business" in a highly-competitive world - where competition so often masks an utterly degraded view of what the person and the community are meant for and could achieve, in a post-market economy.