"free of the war life"

Colin Wilson, one of my favourite authors, once wrote of "outsiders". Recently, Outsider Music became a kind of quasi-genre, roping together socially marginal figures who make mavericks seem like the elite.

Now I have come across the oddest outsider of them all (odd in a good way?). The title of this post is from one his songs.

Have you heard (of) Y. Bhekhirst? The link below will take you to a site that has MP3s of all the ten songs on his under-the-underground classic Hot In The Airport tape, recorded and then re-released in New York.

The sound is as disconcerting and discordant and disturbed as a private language. This is Private Music.

Is there such poetry, as well? Is this a hoax?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y.Bhekhirst

Mahfouz Is Dead, Times Are Hard

Mahfouz, the great Arab novelist, pictured here, has died, but not before seeing a different kind of result from that of the Arab-Israel war of 1967, which plunged him into relative silence for five years.

Meanwhile, cluster bombs continue to kill innocent people in Beirut - even as Iran defies the West over its desire to possess nuclear power.

But, Chavez's new friendship with Syria may be a step too far.

A fraught week, indeed, in the Middle East.




http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1988/mahfouz-bio.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/syria/story/0,,1861607,00.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/syria/story/0,,1861571,00.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,,1861804,00.html

Does Climate Change Require You To Change Too?

A friend of Eyewear's recently wrote this article for The Guardian.

UK readers may wish to attend the Camp for Climate Action, running until September 4.

http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,1855816,00.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/north_yorkshire/5300560.stm

Review: Modern Times

Every artist (infinite in potential) limits their range and delineates their limit. In this way the tradition is revised, enhanced and made bountiful in conserved seriousness which establishes new norms and points to farther reaches.

Modern Times by Bob Dylan, released yesterday, is a supremely modest, mature and controlled offering of ten songs whose generous appeal and broad, open manner present the most crafted, popular sound of his late career. Those who come to this album hoping for explicit expressions of critique or contempt for these modern, fraught, American times will be turned away not empty-handed, but handed signs and symbols wrapped in tuneful enigmas, swaddled in traditional folk, blues, swing and country sounds and tropes.

Of Dylan's three great albums of the decade begun in 1997, this is the second strongest, the least cryptic, and the most romantic: deeper, socio-political losses figured as absenteed women on the road of a lonesome cowboy band.

However, critics who have tried to lessen the impact of this album are foolish and have stale ears. The Guardian suggested this was no masterpiece. A bit like splitting the difference and suggesting Hamlet ain't Lear. Bob Dylan, friends, is that rare and true thing - a universal genius - he may be America's Shakespeare, and surely exceeds (after equalling) the uncanny gifts of Whitman, maybe even Emily D. Little journalists needn't jockey to blow this house down - this work will be listened to so long as recording technology exists. Dylan's timeless as Aeschylus.

Since this album has been five years in the making, and comes after September 11, 2001 (when his major work, "Love and Theft" was uncannily released), some may have expected it to be political, to take the measure of these days. And it does, in the private, measured, and strange manner that is Dylan's - as fans know, he long ago left the protest stage for a deeper, higher platform, after strange gods and fostering elusive commitments.

The word that crops up most often in this work is "brain" - half the songs have a character with something on the brain - often the heart. In "Nettie Moore" the singer wants to escape the "demagogues" and complains about "too much paperwork".

The last, and strongest, song, track 10, "Ain't Talkin'" is an Oedipal drama set on a plain, where the singer's character takes up his "walking cane" in search of his father's killer, unaware that, in his quest for revenge and slaughter, he seeks himself. The second most common word on the album, is "hill" - where lovers are to meet. This signals the city on a hill from John Winthrop's famous New England sermon, a warning to America that all eyes were upon it, and it should be true to God's covenant.

In the penultimate, prophetic song "The Levee's Gonna Break" the rain is falling (the hard rain) and some people just "take". Katrina is thus invoked, but never named (we know Dylan loves, and derives much from, New Orleans). In mysterious yet clear fashion, Dylan extends his concerns with America, nature and with faith, while never letting the album cease to be simultaneously simply a beautifully-rendered album of moving, attractive tunes, often very upbeat in style.

The three best songs here are all as good as any but perhaps the ten best of Dylan's early period: "Workingman's Blues #2"; "Nettie Moore" and Ain't Talkin" and are startlingly robust and fresh in their big sound. There is nothing flawed or hesitant or old here - just ten timeless, supremely-crafted songs. I am now hungry for the next album, in 2011.

Eyewear's rating: 5 specs out of 5.

The album cover image is copyright Ted Croner's Estate. It is likely no coincidence the title is "Taxi, New York At Night" as this album looms, opaque, out of the dark night of New York's post-9/11 experience.

Eye On New Gold Dream

Q, the music bible with which Eyewear likes to quibble, recently suggested that Simple Minds was a guilty pleasure.

They are not. Their album, New Gold Dream, is a shimmering masterpiece of new wave iconography from about a quarter century ago: from signal cover to its deeply-crafted songs that hint at Christology by way of Bonhoeffer, and still calls for attentive recovery. It is now time to establish it as a recognized classic.

It is a wonder, all of a piece, this transcendent album, full of Kerr's whispers and new, resonant sounds. Each song builds on a crashing wave of revealed theology and subtle synth-sound - from the alliterative call-and-response of "someone somewhere in summertime" to the promised miracles, to the dark-night-of-the-soul doubt of "Big Sleep" to the redemptive, eschatoligical fervour that is the bold title track's luscious line: "she is your friend" (that wondrous promise still makes me swoon - oh to hold her hand).

Each song relates to the soul's journey toward faith - sometimes pulling back, sometimes entering in - and does so, in true metaphysical fashion, and in the English tradition, by marrying the secular and the divine in the body of one beloved. So it is that track 2 has the love-struck Catherine figured as a fireworks display as "Catherine wheels" in her fear of falling "in love / out of the sky" - fusing pagan and Christian imagery with Eros. The titles are themselves wonderful. "Glittering Prize" for instance.

Blending allegories from Auerbach, of sun-struck summer wheatfields, to burning youths, souls and hearts ablaze, Christ figured as the ideal teen girlfriend, the redemption songs on this album stay ever-golden, luminous and sublime, gently reminscent of the Gawain-Poet's search for Pearl. Images of friendship, light, and heraldry interpenetrate each song. Consider the song "Hunter and the Hunted" which is strongly reflective of Wyatt.

Throughout this brilliant god-haunted, love-shaped album, the well-written and considered lyrics refer, back to traditions of religious poetry and other writings (including of course the Bible), and forward, to a millenial possibility flaring on the edge of perception. A tense, compassionate struggle is endorsed in these songs, between earthly and heavenly love - in other words, the original pop tropes are cleverly, seriously, redeemed.

Critics - of music and poetry - often mock the adolescent sublime, when works of art and wonder are first encountered, and the soul shouts out to what it hopes is best ahead in the summer heat of foolhardy but heroic decision - but doubters should heed youth's aesthetic call; not all encountered when young is silly or sentimental only.

Much in the green fires of youth still burns within us years later, and can lead one home at the end of our days. I first heard NGD in the spring of my fifteenth year, as the winter ice cracked under the bright blue winter sky, and it remains a constant counterpoint to this less romantic era. We need to listen with more heart, and Hart (Crane), somewhere, sometimes ("speeding through the eye of love").

Volver

The actress Penelope Cruz (pictured here) is the best thing about Volver, Eyewear believes. Pedro Almodovar's latest Cannes-winning vanity project (each of his films is a homage to his own sensibility sustained by self-reflecting lenses) may be his best, in that the mise-en-scene, while ravishing (especially the hot reds and cool blues) is never entirely overwhelmed by camp.

Instead, a humane, and sober, web of intrigue, spun from the themes of incest, murder, hauntings and mother-love, creates a moving and thrilling picture, which plays on the style of TV sit-coms and soaps, while never entirely descending into laff-riot comedy or bathos.

Almodovar has never been my favourite director; he is my least favourite, of a generation of major auteurs that includes Lynch, Ozon and Wong Kar-wai. I am not merely aping Sight & Sound (whose recent issue asks whether PA is over-rated): indeed, I have avoided reading the article until after this post is done, so as not be influenced unduly.

What has always been his major failing is his strength - a visual sense drenched in a certain regard for older cinema. His signature has always been colour, style, passion and melodrama - usually associated with "great roles for women" (so long as women want to portray mothers and whores). PA flatters and idealizes women (and in the world of film this is sadly often called love), much as Hitchcock demonized and idealized them - driven by tired sexual tropes and desires that nonetheless achieve force when rendered as film.

Another way of saying this is that PA's movies yearn for a sentimental golden-age of film (and life) and do so by use of shallow homage and scene-quotation that is about as deep as pastiche always is.

Volver is more mature than this. The homage is still there (to Psycho, especially, although the colour is more North by Northwest - and Visconti) but the story - a touching ensemble-piece that explores the return of the repressed, as a literal figure, or figures - reveals moments of genuine pathos, psychological insight. It opens with wind, dust and gravestones in a tour-de-force shot worthy of Welles, and terminates with a sombre final act that (in a world without men) credibly restores the possibility of redemption, of heaven, on earth, as simply respectful agape among one gender.

I sometimes felt, while watching Volver, that PA is trying to fuse the colour of late Hitchcock and the existential shadows of Bergman; it is a measure of his stylish mastery that he has come close.

Four specs out of five.

Poem by Togara Muzanenhamo

Togara Muzanenhamo (pictured here) was born to Zimbabwean parents in Lusaka, Zambia in 1975. He was brought up in Zimbabwe, and then went on to study in The Hague and Paris.

He became a journalist in Harare and worked for a film script production company. His work has appeared in magazines in Europe, South Africa and Zimbabwe, and was included in Carcanet's anthology New Poetries in 2002.

The poem below is taken from his debut collection, recently out from Carcanet, The Spirit Brides. Eyewear is very glad to welcome him to these pages this Friday.


The Laughing Wood

A rock and a river,
And on the rock a blade of sunlight intensifying the colour of moss.
The sound of water
Flowing down into the valley where they found the bags.

I have never seen a fairy,
But she professed to seeing fields of them, at play, in flight.
And to talk of them in the sparkle
Of sunlight amid the dreamy sound of water; that was a great pleasure.

The moss was warm and soft,
She lay with her head in her palm and knee up,
Exposing her inner thigh
As the river flowed down into the valley where they found the buried bags.

poem by Togara Muzanenhamo