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

This is Eyewear's 3131st post! What a year for pop and indie music 2013 has been.  We have had comebacks from David Bowie and Adam Ant, Travis, Mazzy Star, Prefab Sprout, Pixies, Paul McCartney, Johnny Marr, Alice In Chains, Boy George and My Bloody Valentine, just to mention a few of the more unlikely ones. And we have had major pop albums and tracks from Katy Perry, Cher, and Lady Gaga.  And, great Glasgow bands have had a good year, too, with a new Franz Ferdinand, and Chvrches.  And new albums from big hitters The National, Pearl Jam, and Arctic Monkeys. Meanwhile, Montreal's own, Arcade Fire, returned with a massive classic.  And, not to be outdone, several bands reinvented dance-funk-disco at the same time, including Phoenix and Daft Punk.  Oh, and James Blake won the Mercury.  And mercurial genius Kanye had a new, sonically off-putting release.  And yet, and yet.  Eyewear's annual round-up of the year's best tracks is never based on critical plaudits or any legi…

I have been working with a brilliant group of MLitt creative writing students at the University of Glasgow, one of the world's leading universities.  It became clear to me that their touchstones were not always mine - but sometimes, they very much were: some books are perennial, are loved, despite, or even because of, their canonical status.  Setting aside a few gems like Brideshead Revisited, Fiesta, and The Great Gatsby, which are too well known, arguably too merely literary, to be just Cult classics, here are the 100 (or 101 since there are two Outsiders) books of the last 100 years that every budding writer will want to read before they turn 21 - and are likely to read anyway, whether we like it or not.

To have started earlier, with Against Nature, or Heart of Darkness, would be to miss the point that the cultural phenomenon of the Cult book basically starts with the emergence of the teenager in the 50s and 60s, which is why Catcher in the Rye remains the quintessential Cult bo…

If you want to understand the problem with the world at the present late stage of capitalism, watch The Bling Ring, then listen to the new Lady Gaga album.  Both are obsessed with the surface of material glamour ("bling") as it becomes a fetish object, standing in for what really might drive us - sex, love, safety, faith, freedom - and, in both cases, these American products of excess and privilege gesture brilliantly, if rather sadly, at another way.

This may be satire or an epiphenomenon.  Gaga's album is not the master-work she no doubt hoped it would be, critics say, but several songs are funny collages and cut-ups of sounds and styles and personae that suggest the Lady is as much Shanghai as she is Wilde.  This is certainly the year of the pop diva - with Cher, Katy Perry, Britney Spears and Charli XCX among others coming out with massive tracks and albums of technical delights and quirky gems.  But like a morning after a cocaine binge, there is a great wasteland of …

The recent disaster in The Philippines - which may be the result of man made global climate change on some deeper level - is also a nail in the coffin of an interventionist God.  My Catholic theology has wavered, and it now is blown over by yet another assault on my sensibilities.  No God I know would massacre thousands in a windstorm.  But then, I do not know God.  I can only know what he is not, so feeble is my human ken.  At any rate, the universe moves in remote, strange and often cruel ways.  All we can do as mortals is try to pick up the pieces when nature, in its broad brutal swathes of dumb action negates us.  We must gesture towards what a kind presence overbearing all would do.  We must try to be God in the curious absence of one. Those poor people!

Ben Mazer is always an Eyewear favourite and here the Boston poet of flamboyant brilliance offers us a new poem:


Orphans
The splintered gutter’s cool refreshing pools of mud’s perspective shatter shadowed noon, having rejected all philosophy, its one objective downward to the sea; the poet’s pants in tatters, and a flower in bramble coat of mould, deflect who see in crossing, but the radiant queen bestows her museship on the violent seer; these orphans drink their vodka and they gleam to be descending further than the fold, past every trinket of the common household, where tufts of marigolds gleam in the wind, that signify the sea; quick steps rescind the future and the present, but the past, at last familiar, asserts its precedence where clotted loss builds out of a mixed tense, the secret intimacy orphans clasp to one another, to propagate a myth.
There’s no way back from what they carry with.

new poem by Ben Mazer; copyright 2013.  First published at Eyewear today.

Readers in Britain may be forgiven for thinking that portly John Candy has been resurrected and, with a script from Mike Myers, invaded the mayor's office in Toronto.  Mayor Rob Ford - obese, slobby and unrepentant - is a figure of Rabelesian relish.  His recent news conference, globally spread, is a comic gem.  In it, he claims he only smoked crack cocaine because he was in a drunken stupor, but refused to resign.  This seems a good defence.  Almost any evil can be performed in a drunken stupor, and once a politician admits to being a drunken drug user, there isn't much mud left to sling.  This is a new level of brazen confession.  I only inhaled a class A drug because I was pished.

I particularly loved him asking to see the revealing video, as he wanted to see how drunk he actually was.  Oddly, the mayor is likely to be re-elected - the Toronto voters are amused in sufficient numbers.  Eyewear hopes not.  Drunken drug users may make good artists, witty friends, and have an an…