Occult London by Merlin Coverley

Lot's of writers are attracted to the idea of London steeped in the occult. It's certainly got the pedigree: there's John Dee living at Mortlake, and the possibly occult Masonic shenanigans of Hawksmoor, but things really got going in the 19^th century. In those years, the city seemed to be at the centre of attempts to reach through the veil, starting with mystical poetry of Blake, and then Swedenborg established the spiritualist church here, Blavatsky settled the HQ of the Theosophical movement here, the Golden Dawn began here.

I wonder why London attracted this sudden flourishing in mystical thought?

Prog Britannia

It's inevitable I guess that the BBB would follow up Heavy Metal Britannia with Prog Britannia covering - you guessed it - prog rock. Once again I was tumbled back in time to a suburban New Zealand adolescence in the eighties. My musical tastes are based on a mix of what Mum and Dad had lying around (show tunes light classics, occasional Beatles LPs) and records passed down to me by my older brothers Matt and Al (classic rock, prog and metal). Formative experiences involve Graham Newport's basement on a rainy afternoon playing D&D or those little board games from Dragon magazine with Al and a bunch of his hairy mates, while in the background Yes, Hawkwind, Sabbath and King Crimson noodled away. Al bought me Jethro Tull's Aqualung for my fourteenth or fifteenth birthday and I taped Steve Vai and Frank Zappa records from Matt's sparkly new CD player in the early eighties.

One thing they touched on during the documentary was the nature of the album art and construction. I owned Thick As A Brick in LP form, complete with newspaper, but it was also the age of high concept Sci Fi album covers by guys like Roger Dean and Hygpgnosis. I was amazed the documentary never looked at the Alan Parsons Project or Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds, which inspired my brainy and bookish little sci fi mind when I was twelve or so. War of the Worlds was the first LP I ever owned, complete with booklet of art and lyrics.

Some of the music managed to live up to this imagery. King Crimson's Twenty-first Century Schizoid Man remains compelling, despite the ugliest cover artwork of the era, and Keith Emerson playing I Like To Be in America is still an enjoyably angry take on a classic song. A lot of it, however, comes over as very flaccid and directionless to me. Even as a kid I wasn't convinced by Yes or Genesis. I liked some of their ideas, but the creamy soft rock sound just rubbed me the wrong way. I liked it to be shrieked or shouted; most of the records just crooned on without ever hitting any emotional high.


In the Court of the Crimson King - hard to look at for long, I find

An important element missing from prog is sex. Metal has a strong libidinal element, testosterone expressed in all it's manly ways, while prog is a more intellectual pleasure. It uses clever words and literary allusions, cunning musical forms and novel changes of tempo and key to engage us, where metal just strives to be old fashioned rock and roll. I think it was Phil Collins who talked about how he noticed (at about the time Peter Gabriel left) that the audience for Genesis was all young guys in great coats and fisherman's hats with stacks of albums under their arms.

I think the backbone of the prog imagery and approach is the kind of placid English intellectualism that first found expression in nonsense verse of the Edwardian era. There's a love of wordplay and imagined worlds, pastoral utopias that inspire an Edenic child-like innocence, but there is no urgency or immediacy. Metal, on the other hand takes directly heroic or dystopian elements of horror and swords and sorcery and aims for high drama. Prog is the music of Wind in the Willows and the Hobbit, while metal is the music of Dennis Wheatley and Conan the Barbarian.

The classic prog bands seem to be mostly public and grammar school boys, some from the Trinity School of Music, they weren't the same as the blues rock influenced metallers. It was rock music for undergrads in the same way, I guess that modern jazz had already become a kind of blues for undergrads, separated from the basic drives of its source material in favour of a more intellectual exploration of form and content.


Typical prog rock fan

In 1983 I was absolutely one of those guys in great coats, although I wasn't much into Genesis (they'd already turned into Phil Colllins, if you know what I mean). It was a useful uniform that was quickly adapted to upcoming goth uniform – same great coat, different accessories – as I discovered Bauhaus, The Birthday Party and alternative rock. Those, of course, are also music for undergrads, and I think there's a connection between those audiences that only comes out over time – Phil Collins wheeled out his old anecdote about Rat Scabies whispering to him that he was a huge fan as evidence of this.

I still like quite a lot of prog, not least the greatest prog band of them all, Pink Floyd. Oddly, the Floyd were only mentioned a couple of times in Prog Britanni in relation to prog's psychedelic precursors. What the Hell is up with that? It was interesting to hear about these other bands, but I thought they should at least mention Pink Floyd. Tubular Bells was big, but if anyone really brought prog to the masses it was Pink Floyd! Come on BBC, why oh why etc...

Short Fiction Wednesday

This week, two stories from publishers that complement a traditional print line up with a vigorous online presence. This seems to be the way ahead for independent publishers, who are able to utilise a free online fiction to help publicise print books and magazines. Apex Online, is a free fiction webzine, from a publisher of print novels and collections, including The Apex Book of World SF, edited by Lavie Tidhar. Wierd Tales is a name that I imagine any of my readers will know, and it's interesting to see it's still going. I bought an issue as recently as the late 80s, which is over twenty years ago, I know, but still relatively recent when considered against the magazine's 1930s hey days. I'm pretty sure it's had its ups and downs (you could check out wikipedia if you were interested) but right now it's edited by Ann Vandemeer, and enjoying something of a resurgence thanks to a revived editorial mission and a great web presence.

From Apex online, Scenting the Dark by Mary Robinette Kowal, is a planetary exploration story with a neat twist. Penn is a blind perfumier, who travels the galaxy with his partner and his guide dog, tracking down alien scents to sell to wealthy clientele. Making the main character blind presents Kowal with a technical challenge that she pursues diligently. It's the sort of thing where you start to really look for fluffs in the point of view, but of course Kowal doesn't put a foot wrong. I read her earlier story "Evil Robot Monkey", and enjoyed it's hauntingly pathetic intelligent chimp a great deal (if enjoyed is the right word... I'm not some sort of monster!) This story is also an animal story, of sorts, dealing with the relationship of a blind person and guide dog. I really liked Penn the intergalactic perfume hunter, and Kowal does a great job of depicting his interactions with Cody the guide dog. The situation is a clever one to get them to work together and show them surviving against the odds.

Weird Tales offers up Ambient Morgue Music by Richard Howard, a nice bit of oblique fantasy that hints at the darker corners of the obsession of the music fan. It's a little like last week's The City of Dreams in this regard, but drier, and played for irony rather than tragedy. In the end, the mysterious music with the ghastly origin doesn't lead to the narrator's destruction, just a kind of madness that is indistinguishable from the manic enthusiasm of the rock journo for a new discovery. It uses the form of mordern rock journalism - part life writing, part non-fiction, part opinion - to build a clever variation on the same theme as Lovecraft's "The Music of Erich Zann".

While we're at Weird Tales, though, checkout sixty seconds worth of "micro fiction" not much more than a poem really, presented with music. Click the link, It'll only take a minute... you know you want to!

Don't Fear the Reaper

I heard this bit of "classic rock" on the radio last night, and it reminded me what an overwhelming disappointment of a band Blue Öyster Cult is. When I was a kid, I was not averse to a bit of nasty, sticky rock goodness, but only knew BÖC from album covers and the occasional reverential whispers of friends. I knew, though, that they had an album called The Black Sword, which was about my emo teen hero Elric. And they had an umlaut, like Mötorhead, and the word "Cult" in their name, like Southern Death Cult. How much darker could this shit get, dude?

Bear in mind that at this stage in my life, I was just discovering Bauhaus and Southern Death Cult and The Birthday Party, and was beginnign to think of even shredding metallers like Iron Maiden as a little bit stodgy and old hat. But I still had faith in BÖC - Elric! The Reaper! You know, the ACTUAL GRIM BLOODY REAPER!!!

Well, sometime in my teens, I actually heard this song. Far from the wild, frightening horror rock circus I imagined it's like a slightly overly serious ELO record, Queen without the knowing wink, like Jeff bloody Wayne's War of the bloody Worlds, for god's sake. The intro sounds like R.E.M!

So, no, Don't Fear the Reaper. Judging by this, the sound of death is the sound of an old man gently farting. Laaaa lalala!



Look at them! Gah!

Short Fiction Wednesday

Welcome to the third short fiction Wednesday here at Pointless Philosophical Asides! Still no sign of my package from amazon, so I think next week's will be a bit of a special edition.

Bad Ideas by Rudy Rucker from Flurb
I really like Rudy Rucker. I've read a lot of his short stories, from the cyber punk era to today, and a number of his novels, notably the 'Ware series (Software, Wetware and Freeware) and his superb Postsingular from a few years back. Despite (or perhaps because of) having a name like Scooby Doo with Tourettes, he can be relied on to deliver and if I'm stuck for something to read I'll check out his site see what he's got (Bruce Sterling is another). His short fiction site Flurb is a constant source of interesting new stories from both new writers and more familiar names, including himself. This is from issue eight (Spetember 2009), but issue nine just came out this week.

One element of Rucker's writing I always enjoy is his distincitvely humane approach to characterisation. He specialises in slackerish types somewhat bamboozled by the odd twists life takes, but smart and kind enough to roll with the punches, by and large. It's always a pleasure spending time in Rucker world, becuase there's no problem so big that it can't be mastered with a bit of thought and a big heart, and in it's own odd way Bad Ideas is no different. He seems really interested in the idea of ideas given reality, or perhaps just the potency to change the world at a physical level. "Surrealism" is a rather devalued word these days, but Rucker's work is the real deal, and here he uses dream-like imagery to a few interesting psychological connotations and a wierd take on the idea of the body snatcher invasion.

The City of Unrequited Dreams by Claude Laumiere from Chizine
ChiZine specialises in dark fantasy, and this is definitely what you get here. The search for pleasure takes on the character of the sublime against a backdrop of fashionable European decadance - casinos and fashion magazines and ambiguous sexuality - that evokes Warhol's Factory scene and the films of Fassbinder and S&M porn. It relies heavily on ornate furnishings and chic lifestyles for its atmosphere, and does a nice job of weaving the narrator's longing for his lost lover and a life of indulgence into a tale of self-destructuve, even self-loathing, obsession. There's a weirdly old fashioned quality to it, a bit like catching The Story of O on late night TV, and there's something studied and remote about this style. The world of credit cards and people in suits sitting at computers seems rather distant from the fantasy of European decadence that is the mysterious city of Venera, but in Laumier's capable hands it still packs in the emotional charge.

While being very different in tone, both these stories use a dream-like, surrealistic atmosphere. Both deal with interior states made real, for surely Verena is just as much an expression of a Bad Idea (the narrator's insatiable desire) as those expelled by Bea & Nils, and both storie are about love. Both Laumiere's narrator and Rucker's married couple refuse to give up on it, but while it destroys the former it staves off anhilation for Bea & Nils.

Heavy Metal Britannia

I watched the BBC documentary Heavy Metal Britannia on Friday night, as the missus was out and I could indulged in a bit of sweaty maleness. It was a good history of the genre, from about 1970 to 1990 or so, just at the period when it's place in the teenage life as complicated by the arrival of grunge and goth.

Metal comes across in the doc as a kind of decadent form of the blues rock sound that had been evolving since the early sixties, a lineage coming via Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix and a few power chord-based rock classics like The Kinks's You've Really Got Me Going and the harder sound coming out of LA via The Doors, Steppenwolf and Iron Burretfly (the documentary does a great jobon the musical forebears and some guitarist (I forget who, might have been Ian Gillan, who's a singer.... but anyway) illustrates the evolution of a standard blues riff (from Brooke Benton's Kiddyo) into Led Zep's A Whole Lotta Love.

The hippy dream showed youth in the ascendent, but metal came along at a time - the early 70s - when the hippy dream was over and things took on a more hopeless tone, singing about apocalypses to come and self-abnegation through hedonism, a lot like glam but without the sexual ambiguity and artsy pretense. In fact, the lack of depth that characterises metal versus glam (and later versus punk and indie and various other flavours of rock) is what makes it so easy to mock. The limited intellectual scope for the genre makes it best when the pratitioners just get on with rocking out. As soon as they introduce elements of fine musicianship or intimations of a message, metal becomes rapidly unstuck.

Goth is pretty much the metal of the punk generation and it's interesting that metal and goth are both heavily associated with the fantasy genres, which also often dwell on past glories of vanished empires. The vampire is to goth what the rampaging Conan-esque barbarian is to metal, with Elric as a kind of intermediate figure. Metal comes at the end of the space race and the huge push that SF got from it, but by the seventies fantasy had so occupied the genre space that a blatant fantasy movie stole all SF's best toys. Goth comes at the end of the initial cyberpunk phase, pushing out the rationalistic fantasies of the burgenoing cyber world with fantasies of parasites and monsters.

Fantasy is a turning away in many ways, a way of saying things that are too hard to say in unadorned terms, a way to place the loss of hope or the death of the old away from us. These decadent forms grow out of the unfulfilled hopefulness of the previous genre - the hope offered by rock in the sixties and punk in the 70s turned sour, the hope of the rocket age and the computer age turned rotten. In these times, people turn to fantasy, but the next wave of hopefulness is never far behind.