Skip to main content

Another Way To Die

Eyewear readers know the profane calendar can be divided into years, months, and days, that do, or do not, feature a James Bond film. In one of the great pop culture moments of all time, the cult singer-songwriter Warren Zevon, dying of cancer, said it would be "a drag" if he died before the next Bond film came out. Paul Muldoon, as we know, worked with Zevon - what the world needs now is a Muldoon long poem on Bond. In the meantime, we have the new theme song (well, we did until it was removed from Youtube for copyright reasons) from Jack White (and Alicia Keys) for the Qauntum of Solace film; the song's title is not the title of the film, which seems needlessly busy (but Bond movies do that sometimes, think of the classic Louis Armstrong ditty), but is instead, Another Way To Die. Well, okay, it isn't Duffy, or Amy Winehouse - they would have been elegantly, or at least retro-great, with the Ronson treatment. But, in the same cluttered offbeat tradition of Paul McCartney's Live and Let Die, White's song captures some of the uneven, even stilted violence and suspense at the core of the Bond mythos, with moments of stuttered grandiosity and sampled trumpets. It'll do.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

CLIVE WILMER'S THOM GUNN SELECTED POEMS IS A MUST-READ

THAT HANDSOME MAN  A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought.  Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart?  A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional.  Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were.  For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ?  Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets.  But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ?  How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular.  John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se.  What do I mean by smart?

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and  Silence of the Lambs .  I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".