altariel | Grooving with dinosaurs

This week, to get me through the insufficiently remunerated cat-herding that constitutes my so-called career, I have been besotted with Fairport Convention’s cover of a song by Lal Waterson called Rubber Band. It’s about a band that “keeps on bouncing back” and whose fame keeps spreading, “just like margarine”. Flipping through my Big Book of Fairport Nolij (yes, such a thing exists, and it’s on a shelf but two feet away from me), they seem to have released it as a swansong single when they split in 1979 (i.e. shortly before entering the period of steady productivity and comfortably sufficient success that has lasted until... ooh, now).

Anyway, Rubber Band. It’s extremely funny, and from the sound of it I’m fairly certain it’s a pisstake of the Beatles in their most vacuous “I’ve got a song about an octopus” mode. It jogs along to an ‘um-CHICK um-CHICK um-CHICK um-CHICK’ beat and it makes me cry with laughter. Also, the harmonies are fucking brilliant. There simply isn’t enough accomplished novelty folk-rock in this world. I may revisit that statement.

With this song I descend god-like into the modern age: I am using it to christen my spanking brand new iPod nano-thingy. I wasn’t convinced that iTunes would allow me to put Fairport Convention onto an iPod. “Dear wannabe acolyte of the Church of Apple: Unfortunately, your taste in music is far too crusty for our spanking brand new products. In the unlikely event that you somehow become fashionable, you may try again.” But I seem to have got away with it. Also, I knew the thing would do music and so on (obviously), but I didn’t know it would be fairly stuffed with gadgets and widgets and things to play on the bus. It appears to have all the benefits of a mobile phone without any concomitant and hideous risk of someone trying to talk to me.

Right, down to business. Podfic. What is there out there? Is it all SGA or is there anything for the crusties amongst us who think SGA is a new-fangled invention for the glittering kind of people smoothly at ease with spanking brand new techno-widgetry and NOT QUITE PROPER? Am I going to have to read out stuff to myself? Or can I make people do it for me? Ursula Le Guin has.

What else has been going on? I’ve accidently got to the end of January without reading any books written by men. Ha! That's one in the eye for patriarchy. I’ve booked for Eastercon. I’ve been having Thorts about the telly I’ve been watching (The Wire, The Kingdom, Torchwood), but the lure of the tiny shiny metal music maker is too strong and they will have to remain in my head a while longer. Aah! Here comes the chorus round again...

“I’m the leader of the rubber band
(we’re the members of the rubber band)
And it’s the finest band in all the land
(the best band in the land)
And isn’t it grand being the only band in the land
To play rubber bands...?”

um-CHICK um-CHICK um-CHICK um-CHICK...