"We've only got one monk, but he can overdub" - tales from Black Sabbath

My local library isn't terribly well-stocked for books - though it's great if you need to use the internet - so I've been reduced to picking pretty much anything off the shelves to serve my reading needs. Hence Tony Iommi's autobiography Iron Man.

I'm inclined to judge it lightly - the Sabbath story is an interesting one even if it's reduced to the picaresque adventures of four Brummies travelling the world and setting fire to their drummer. Which is one thing I learnt from the book they did. A lot.

"Bill, can I set fire to you again?"
"Not just now, I'm busy."
"Oh okay."

[time passes]

"Look, I'm going back to the hotel, so do you still want to set fire to me or what?"

As the bandleader and musician-in-chief Tony Iommi's presumably the most coherent Sab but probably the least engaging to read about. Bassist Geezer Butler wrote most of the lyrics for the songs on which their reputation rests - I don't have much time for Dio - while Ozzy brought the wierd, shamanic presence and disturbed holler before his slide into light entertainment.

Reading about how Tony invented the downturned guitar sound that birthed (no, Tim, spawned) metal is somehow less interesting. And a blow-by-blow account of the production of every Sabbath album into the 90's and beyond even more so.

Whereas what really interests me about Black Sabbath is how four blokes from Aston could tap into the deep vein of blues and folk singing about death, doom 'n' Armageddon and jump-start it for the modern age. Ozzy's voice - so high, so out of place in modern metal - suddenly sounds a lot more right placed in this old-time company.

With Led Zeppelin, musically a much more 'progressive' band than Sabbath, lyrically speaking, you get the refusal of the present ("Womannnn! I want to make looooove to you! In Rivendell!!"). With Deep Purple, you get rock'n'roll tropes underpinned by a mighty slab of The Funk.

But with Sabbath, when they weren't dabbling in pyromania or singing about Fairies in Boots, you get a band - perhaps more by accident than design, certainly much more on-record than off - that stared down the barrel of the modern age.

Literally, in the case of War Pigs.

Which is what I would argue makes Sabbath more culturally - if not musically - more interesting than their one-time peers.

Brand new you're retro - Clock company takes my home town's name in vain

I'd like to say I wasn't taken in by it, but I was taken in by it. On the second picture below of the clock I scored at a charity shop in Cannock, you can see the name 'Towcester Clock Works' on the dial. Now, I'd never heard of a clock manufacturer in Towcester, but given that my knowledge of its history extended to the Romans and Prince Rupert, I was prepared to give it the benefit of the doubt and check my history online later.

Only to find that TCW is a brand name for a retro-style clock brand based in Newport Pagnell invoking Towcester as some token of early-to-mid twentieth century authenticity.

Now, I might make a cheap shot here about my childhood home being the Town That Time Forgot, but I'm not sure about how I feel about it being appropriated in this way. By printing the lie, are we opening up a vein of alternate history which sees Towcester as a clock-making centre, the town of a thousand ticks? Or are we just cheapening what really was?

Cut-up poem experiment – Forty Thousand In Gehenna

(original book by C J Cherryh)

Additional non-citizen personnel
Stocked in dock at Cyteen station
Stepwise, we inch up-ramp
Joyless, we are gathered
To build a world
The Governor
(soon we shall call him Governor)
He knows who lives
In the down-spaces of the ship
Experienced and eerie
He tells us that the world is
To be landed and loved
Newport, Year One
Green forest of saplings
On a hazy shore
But we earth-movers will build there
Locate our assignments
Start our work
And how we fare
You have no true idea.

Method

- Use percentile dice to randomly select pages from among first 100 of book
- Use dice to randomly select sentences
- Select key phrases in sentences
- Arrange phrases to reassemble narrative and create poem
- Tweak phrases until content.

Bibliography

Forty Thousand in Gehenna is an SF novel by C J Cherryh about the colonisation of a new world. Its most striking feature is the 'Azi', non-citizen clones transported with the colonists to be labourers and serfs, programmed to serve and taken through space in scenes reminiscent of Brave New World spliced with the Long Passage of slave ships from Africa.

I picked the book for this experiment mainly because it had the word 'Gehenna' in the title – Cherryh's written much better, more interesting books than this – and I was looking for a poem I could try out my Wolves In The Throne Room-inspired black metal voice on. :-)

Scott Pilgrim vs Female Agency

Or: what do Bryan Lee O'Malley and a thirteenth century Languedoc troubadour have in common?

I finally watched Scott Pilgrim vs The World this month. While it has lots of nice touches - the chiptune intro, the Bollywood dance-fight breakdown, the snarky drummer - it felt like cramming all the books into a single film was over-ambitious.

Also - casting the inert element that is Michael Cera in such a dynamic, kinetic film was a stroke of counter-intuition which didn't work for me.

My real concern with SPVTW though, is it's central device of Scott having to defeat his lady love Ramona's evil exes before being 'allowed' to date her. While it's a cute video-game reference, can you imagine a gender-reversal of this scenario?

Granted, Ramona is as bad-ass a fighter as Scott and clearly much more together than he is. But it's not her who is having to fight her own past lovers, never mind Scott's exes. The film speaks to a discourse of (heterosexual) love as a game which men play and win, where women either have no choice, or their choice is contested by the men in their lives.

The combination of rock and denial of female agency in SPVTW ultimately reminded me of courtly love. A load of guys bashing seven shades out of each other to win the love of a fair maiden, backed by guitars lutes? Is it Scott Pilgrim or the Late Middle Ages?

Either way, I'll sign off with this previously unseen drawing of an early (thirteenth century) Sexbobbomb line-up. I'm loving the intensity of the triangle player.

Rest in peace, Eastside Cafe

Digbeth lost one of the jewels in its tarnished tiara earlier this month, when the Eastside Cafe shut its doors after six years of trading.

Fantastic locally-sourced food, friendly staff, proper coffee, it was a great place to meet, write and plot world domination. It was part of what made Digbeth a treasure-trove of independent life in Birmingham.

At a time when residents and others with a stake in the area are asking, how can we keep Digbeth different, the loss of the Eastside Cafe is keenly felt.

Strange fascination with David Eddings continues

Yes, reader, I did what I said I wouldn't, and read volume two of the Belgariad, Queen of Sorcery. I felt furtive and slightly ashamed, but still, I checked it out of the library.

Other than admiring Eddings' chutzpah in using the same 'plot to overthrow the king' plot three times in two books, QoS reminded me of another one of the key ingredients of his success - introducing new stock characters to the party in each book. So we meet the archer, the knight champion, all sketched out with customary Eddingsian aplomb.

The book does depart from the cosy template pretty disastrously towards the end in (ahem) Sthiss Tor, city of the serpent people: a race of decadent, drug-happy slavers with pretty much no redeeming features, led by an eternal queen moonlighting from L Rider Haggard.

In Eddingsworld, it does sometimes seem that the less Northern European you are, the less moral you are - which is a deeply troubling thought. And the overall effect on QoS of the Snake People episode is equivalent to Conan farting in a lift.

I love the way Finny is looking at QoS as if she's thinking "What is this?!? Bring me some Ursula Le Guin forthwith!'

It's cat-dead-rat syndrome in reverse. :-)

 I

February blogging intermission ends

Zounds! I managed to get almost to the end of February without blogging at all. This can be laid at the door of two factors.

1. Escape The Cheese taking up a lot of time and head-space up till the 14th.

2. House-share imploding into a screw-up of white dwarfish density - as a result of which I'm now looking for a new place to live.

Things are beginning to settle down again and [fingers crossed] I'll have sorted out a new place to live by Monday. All of which means I've got time to type up a few things that I have been working on.

So, brace yourself for a bumper packet of blogging this morning. Or not.