Poem by Tony Lewis-Jones

Eyewear is very pleased to welcome Tony Lewis-Jones (pictured) this Friday.

Lewis-Jones was born in Wales, and educated at Clifton and Oxford. While still at school, he won the T.E. Brown Prize for Poetry (1975). His poetry has appeared in magazines and anthologies all over the world. He has held a number of poetry-related posts, including Co-ordinator, Poems On The Bus and Poetry In The Parks, Poet-In-Residence at BBC Radio Bristol and Poet-In-Residence at The Bristol Evening Post. He is one of the 100 Poets Against The War (Salt Publications). His most recent collection Anytime was nominated for the Welsh Book of the Year 2007.

I've known of his work since just before I first published him in my anthology Short Fuse, launched in New York and Paris, where Lewis-Jones read. This poem is, as with much of his work, all-too-relevant in this troubled age.

Ruling Class

You weren’t so handsome then.
More human maybe.
We beat rebellion
Into your tender intellect
Till there was nothing else.

In retrospect
We wouldn’t have done otherwise.
It’s us you have to thank:
Our pupil, monster, the garrulous destroyer
Of nations. We taught you how to hate
Which is, by now you know,
A valuable gift.

poem by Tony Lewis-Jones

West End?

Iraq seems to be coming to the streets of London.

Is this the way the West will end?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6255960.stm

Goodbye to all that

Tony Blair, the second-longest serving British PM of the 20th and 21st centuries, has left Number 10, for his new job as Middle East Peace Envoy for the Quartet.

Eyewear is glad to see him go. Blair was a mostly negative influence on British politics, and society, more generally. He ushered in an age of spin - glib media-manipulation and poll-driven decision-making - and then, paradoxically - made an isolated, almost Lear-like stand, in pushing through UK support for the Bush-led illegal war on Iraq - never admitting the failed vision of that action. Both of these impulses - to manufacture events, and often deny the reality of others - has led to a widespread cynicism in British life, where often the worst are filled with intensity, and the majority lack conviction.

The latest example of this is Tory leader Mr. Cameron, a lightweight Blairesque figure, who may not be a match for the lead balloon gravitas of dour Mr. Brown, now Prime Minister. Cool Britannia seems a long way back, now. It'd be nice to think a new age of seriousness may arrive - one able to cope, with honesty and integrity - with real-world issues, such as climate change.

If Mr. Brown wants to start well, he will distance himself from Iraq - and America; become more open to Europe - especially France or Germany; tax the super-rich; monitor the military-industrial complex; curb the cigarette and pharmaceutical interests; and attend to the problems that face schools across the nation. He will also try to provide more affordable housing for families who work hard, and deserve a step onto the property ladder.

Time will tell whether his clunking fist will wear a velvet or an iron glove.

As for Mr. Blair, history may yet swerve his way. Should he be a truly balanced interlocutor in the Middle East, he might - against the odds - work a miracle, and win his Nobel Peace prize. Meanwhile, he will rake in millions, speaking in America. He is, as his farewell speech in the House of Commons reminded, a witty, clever man. Imagine what he might have achieved, if he had been a true Labour leader.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6245682.stm

Review: Keren Ann

Keren Ann (pictured) is a French singer with a new self-titled English album recently out.

Keren Ann is nine moody songs, and might have been subtitled I'm Your Mazzy - since it's a faithful homage to a few styles that are best filed under, or between, those separated-at-birth troubadours of drowsy underground glamour Leonard Cohen and Hope Sandoval - in short, breathy slow narcotic chansons that swirl about the room, lazy opium for the masses, concealing a razor blade under their mirror smiles.

One can almost imagine handsome-lost Chet Baker in the Parisian background, nodding along (or off) to these tunes to drop out by.

"Lay Your Head Down" is the stand out track. A few others are good. None are ultimately exceptional, though some of these dream pop songs flirt harmlessly with greatness, but the whole is greater than the parts and permits a certain slack jouissance to play as aural wallpaper for that certain sort of night in.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keren_Ann

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazzy_Star

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_pop

Review: Prison Break, Season 1

America is a giant prison, and the bars are made of television screens. Maybe not, but fortress America has an incarceration problem - large numbers of its young populations are in prison.

The rest just watch those that are. Prison Break (which appeared in the USA on politically-conservative Fox) is one of the best contemporary television programs, and, at times, achieves a pop culture giddiness that one only gets when in the presence of entertainment genius. Eyewear gives it four out of five specs.

Fusing various elements (and cliches) from the original Mission: Impossible series, with The Great Escape, The Green Mile, The Shawshank Redemption, The Birdman of Alcatraz, X-Files, and even Robin Hood, its series arc follows the semi-mythic TV paths of the mysterious, resourceful stranger who comes into a community (Shane) to redeem a lost world.

No world could be more lost (other than Lost's) or self-contained than a prison's - and no stranger-hero could be more thrilling than Wentworth Miller (pictured) - the small screen version of Barak Obama (photogenic, racially complex, and hyper intelligent). Miller's character - in a skin-trope doubled from the great Memento - enters a maximum security prison to rescue his death row brother with the entire blueprints for the prison house tattooed (and allegorically disguised with visual and verbal codes) on his body (he was the man who retro-fitted the enclosed structure).

Maximum security meets maximum planning - as Miller's beautiful, glib, masterful man, Michael Scofield, manages to slowly, surely, unravel his complex - preposterously complex and artful for that reason - escape plan. As a structural engineer, he's good with a system, and has visualised this one down to its last screw. What he hasn't counted on are the polymorphously perverse needs of, and dangers posed by, the other inmates he must also collaborate with.

Prison Break is - among other things - a hymn to the greatness of the American can-do capitalist system and rugged individualism, with a Depression-era FDR slant (sometimes we have to sacrifice a little elbow grease for our brothers). It's also a not-so veiled commentary on Guantanamo Bay, 9/11 and the surveillance society Bush has built (and later episodes even feature Iraq-based US-led torture as a surprise character backstory element).

After all, the main villain is the Vice President, and the shadowy forces of evil are CIA-style men in suits. More importantly, the key struggle in the series (between all the characters) is how to ethically deploy force and use power. The haunted, decent Warden (slowly building a miniature Taj Mahal for his wife, symbol of a love embedded in a built environment) is mirrored by the thoroughly sadistic, corrupt, freedom fries-chomping two-faced Captain Bellick, who plans his overthrow.

Michael must learn to work with thieves, mafia killers, and, most disturbingly, a cornpone child-killer. Meanwhile the Governor and his do-good medico daughter represent two ways of thinking about the justice system - throw-away the key, or rehabilitation. There are also strong Christian overtones (the two brothers who face death to save each other, versus, for instance, the two government killers who abandon their fallen "brother" in a deserted well).

Stacy Keach as Warden Pope is wonderful, although the two stand-out, bravura performances belong to character actors given the roles of their lives - Peter Stormare (originally of Fargo fame) as organized crime boss (with a tortured soul) John Abruzzi, and Robbert Knepper as T-Bag. Knepper inhabits the Southern sex killer in the white T-shirt, with two pockets for two prison-friends to clutch amorously, with the filthy lilting panache of Hopkins in Lambs, swaggering towards Babylon to be damned. The strength of the series, in general, is that it manages to generate a great deal of interest in, and sympathy for, characters who would normally be merely baddies, mainly by the gothic grandiosity of the writing.

There are a few problems with the series - the main one being the "outside" conspiracy theory plotline is much more far-fetched and less rigorously plotted than the gripping "inside" story. There's also the little matter of the Internet connection in the isolated deep-forest cabin without any phone lines. Also, two late-season twists, the amputation of T-bag's hand (too-reminiscent of Lecter's similar experience in Scott's Hannibal), and the intentional overdose of a beloved character, seem cliffhangers too far.

The last words of Season 1: "we run" - turning a closed-system exercise in nail-biting claustrophobia into a wide-open The Fugitive homage (with "big W" elements of It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World) - do not augur all that well. Still, I aim to view the sophomore season soon. And, Season 1 of the original The Fugitive series is out on DVD this August 14...

The War Against God

Richard Harries, in today's Guardian Review, admirably and cleverly takes on Christopher Hitchens, whose new book is a direct frontal assault on religion and a belief in God. The main theme of all the recent anti-God tracts published in England and abroad is that man hands on misery to man, and that this deepening coastal shelf of pain was made by true believers - entirely ignoring the truth that the fact of man's wickedness is the best reason for the need for religion, not the best reason to assume it is yet another human evil. Religion - at its height - symbolizes the horizon at which the human finds possible perfection - hardly an aim worthy of such hack indignation...

This at a time when Hypocrite-in-Chief Tony Blair has met the Pope in Rome, on his way to becoming a Catholic - an admirable road to take, but one which will be paved with the need for a great deal of soul-searching, or at least, forgiveness. Lying to the nation and helping to instigate an illegal war are hardly the highlights of the Sermon On The Mount. Blair and Bush as poster boys for Jesus would have the saviour turning in His grave, were he not already above them.

Meanwhile, P. Pullman's Northern Lights has been selected as the best book for children of the last 70 years (since 1937, then) - a curiously arbitrary period that is no doubt designed, among other things, to avoid the possibility that otherwise the award would have gone to J.R.R. Tolkien. It seems possible to argue that books for children like The Hobbit, Wind In The Willows, or Charlotte's Web, are superior to Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy - and surely The Chronicles of Narnia are better by far - and the clear Aunt Sally with which Pullman shadow boxes.

Pullman's writing is fluent, inventive, sometimes utterly delightful and frequently very exciting - and his idea of shape-shifting daemons is most clever. But his attempts to work philosophy, poetry, and theology into his novels are hardly as innovative as many critics claim - indeed, almost all serious fiction refers, on any number of levels, to myth, belief and the poetic canon. And, of course, Tolkien and C.S. Lewis had done so, before.

What is to be regretted is that Pullman has allied his fictional gifts and interest in childhood and its various discontents, to a deeply atheistic vision of the world, one which, among other things, is profoundly anti-Catholic. In some ways, Northern Lights is A Child's Garden of Satanic Verses - except, this time, it is Christians who are getting the ungracious salute. Naturally, Jonathan Swift crafted imaginative works whose anti-humanism and satiric rages are great, despite or because of, their dark perspective and materials, and Pullman is to be excused his intolerance and Blakean zeal.

Who doesn't want to see the film version of The Golden Compass (the American title of NL), especially as Nicole Kidman (above) plays the villainess?


http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2109068,00.html

http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2108818,00.html

Poem by Linda Black

Eyewear is very glad to welcome Linda Black (pictured) this Friday.

I met her recently at an Oxfam poetry reading which she was attending, and she gave me her wonderful pamphlet, the beating of wings, from Hearing Eye (2006) which was a PBS recommendation, and which impressed me greatly.

Black studied Fine Art at Leeds Art College and etching at the Slade School. She ran Apollo Etching Studio in London and has exhibited widely. Her poems have appeared in various magazines including Magma, Shearsman, The Wolf and Poetry Salzburg Review and in the Poetry School anthologies Entering the Tapestry (Enitharmon, 2006), This little stretch of Life (Hearing Eye/ Poetry School, 2006) and the recently published I am Twenty People! (Enitharmon, 2007).

Black was recipient of the 2004/5 Poetry School Scholarship. She is the winner of the 2006 New Writing Ventures Poetry Award. The poem below appeared originally, as you might expect, in This little stretch of Life.


This little stretch of life

(from the letters of Elizabeth Bishop)


There are sanctuaries, small melting snowdrifts
here and there; an atmosphere

easy to crawl into. In one of those intervals
where all thought has ceased, I am tempted

by waves, the transparent sea. I think my heart
beats twice a day – a very slight

ailment. I’ve tried all approaches; aerial
and subterranean – I am mixed about

like a drop of oil on water. This place!
This pile of masonry! Accumulated

stray objects – you can get right under,
clutching like a gasping mermaid,

no view to be seen. Have you ever
gone through caves? Things

just seep through the walls.
I don’t imagine anyone could hear me

howling. I am one
of ten thousand or whatever it is

who are lost each year. In a minute or two
I know I shall forget. Excuse

my disconnectedness – I must go see
what everything is doing

– these things on my shoulders
are not wings.


poem by Linda Black