Lots of swords, lots of sorcery going on.
My friend Ken Lizzi, one of the dudes with whom I split a house rental at 2023 Robert E. Howard Days, is having his Cesar the Bravo fiction collected and kickstarted by Cirsova. Cesar, a sometimes-condottiero and a bravo by trade, has earned a reputation as one of the best swords for hire in the city of Plenum. If you need a foe humiliated before a cheering crowd, he’s your man!
This collection includes 5 previously published adventures plus an all-new full-length novel! Ken is a good dude and a good writer. Get in on that today.
I'm giving Old Moon Quarterly a shot. I bought one of their issues recently and now am kickstarting issues #9-10. One of these is Arthurian themed which ticks a lot of my boxes. I'm liking the aesthetic of this publication. As I write this entry I can see they've met their funding minimum and now we'll see what else they might unlock. Maybe Excalibur from the stone?
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| Digging the Celtitude. |
I'm also kickstarting David C. Smith's Sometime Lofty Towers. You should too, as its one of the best modern sword-and-sorcery stories I've read. You can read my prior review of this fine title here. This one is just about to fund, you can be the one to put it over the top!
In summary, no shortage of excellent stuff going on these days in S&S. I love the old stuff too but try to support new authors and projects.
Note: This roundup is far from comprehensive, just a few things that have crossed my transom recently.
The result I was anticipating has occurred. A Federal California Judge today ruled in favor of AI giant Anthropic, stating that the company’s training of its large language models on the works of authors without permission constitutes fair use. He did rule that its use of pirated material is theft, but this latter win is quite minor in comparison to the win handed to tech giants.
It's the precedent for which all the major AI firms were waiting. They can now ingest all your work freely and then sell it back to you for a monthly licensing fee.
The rich get richer and the rest get ever smaller scraps.
All while gleefully continuing to destroy your jobs and your family’s future. Because, China?
Just a few weeks ago Anthropic’s CEO predicted that their product and its AI ilk will lead to the elimination of 50% of all entry level jobs, and 10-20% unemployment more broadly.
This is not me playing Boy Who Cried Wolf. The wolf is at your door, and its hungry.
Job losses are already happening. In my work outside of the blogosphere I serve a slice of healthcare. Providence Health Care recently laid off 600 employees amid restructuring and is now heavily investing in AI.
That’s 600 jobs replaced by machines. This trend will grow exponentially.
EVEN IF the end result is something like universal basic income it will be a net loss for humanity. We’re meant to do hard things, not play with ourselves on our fucking computers and lap up the output of machines that have strip-mined humanity’s riches and spoon feed it back to you as slop.
A few other wonderful AI news briefs worth mentioning.
Sometimes progress isn’t.
I suppose I could just stick my head in the sand and go back to blogging about old books and pulp authors and heavy metal. I’m sure a few of my half-dozen readers would prefer this. No fear, I will blog about these subjects.
But none of this exists without people. I love looking at works made by people, for other people, not the output of machines. I can’t and won’t stop writing about this issue.
I continue to maintain that for creative work and deep learning, and possibly our future as a species, gen AI is a cancer.
One of those pieces made its way back home to Massachusetts where I call home. God's Blade: A Sketchbook by Michael Rollins. Editor Jason Hardy put together this modest but terrific little handmade book and asked me to write a short introductory essay. Which I was proud to do, for a gratis copy. See "Solomon Kane Against Injustice."
The book features some fine poetry by Hardy, Charles Gramlich, Michael Rollins, and Chris L. Adams. At first glance I'm struck by the outstanding artwork by Rollins. Very unique style, dark, lonely, Puritanical in feel. Kane's visage is cast into shadow, suitable for this somewhat complex figure. In the preface to the book Rollins says his art was inspired by the stark trees native to his hometown of Cumbria, England. He notes that when composing these pieces he "rarely began with Solomon, rather placing him in the landscape, which I think accentuated the feeling of his almost hopeless fight against the darkness around him."
Well done.
Iron Maiden is so damned good and has so many damned good songs that I can't listen to them neutrally. I've lost track of the number of times I've found myself sitting next to a friend with a cold beer, and had to stop our conversation mid-sentence.
"So man I've always wanted to tell you something. And never had the courage. It's just that..."
"Wait, hold that thought--you need to hear this. Wait for it..."
And then I launch into how awesome this bit of Maiden-ness is.
The guitar solo in "Powerslave" is one of those moments. Stops me cold every time. Easily in my top 5 Maiden solos, and that's saying something. I'm proud of the work I did capturing the fantastic work of Nikki Stringfield of the Iron Maidens absolutely killing it at Wallys on Hampton Beach.
I mean, just beautiful. So is the guitar solo.
"Powerslave" brings dry and dessicated ancient Egypt to vivid visceral life through the power of heavy metal. When Bruce Dickinson dons his owl Horus mask (as I saw him do in 2008) the effect is complete. We're hearing the words of an ancient Pharoah, believing he is a god but finding out he is all too mortal, subject to the eternal law of death.
Tell me why I had to be a Powerslave
I don't wanna die, I'm a God, why can't I live on?
When the Life Giver dies, all around is laid waste
And in my last hour, I'm a slave to the Power of Death.
Have a very metal weekend.
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| Pumped for this delivery. |
Until now.
You may recall my prior posts about it here on the blog. Here's the first, A scare from the deep mists of time: Monster Tales, from July 2009. At the time I could not even remember the name of the book, only a few vivid details. A happy Google search struck paydirt. I wrote at the time:
Were you ever seized by the intoxicating memory of reading a much-loved book as a child, only to despair that you'd never remember the title? This happened to me today. From some subterranean depths in my brain came the tale of a boy who exacts revenge on his family's killers by voluntarily taking on the form of a werewolf. I remembered it being a short story contained in a red hardcover book, filled with startling black-and-white illustrations. I remember reading it over and over again in my elementary school library in the 1970s. But that was the extent of my recollection.
I plugged in "werewolf stories for children" and "horror anthologies for children and 1970s" into Google to see what would come up... and eventually came across this marvelous link, courtesy of The Haunted Closet: http://the-haunted-closet.blogspot.com/2008/10/monster-tales-vampires-werewolves.html.
Twelve years later I revisited Monster Tales in a post for the blog of Goodman Games/Tales from the Magician's Skull, Brian Murphy's Gateways to Sword-and-Sorcery. Monster Tales was one of my gateway drugs to S&S, and a potent one. As I wrote in that 2021 blog post:
In hindsight I can see how I was being inevitably steered toward sword-and-sorcery by consuming its various components; historical elements, grit and danger, monsters, tough and resourceful heroes, horror, and the weird. I am grateful to have had access to books that moved me, exposed me to grim struggle, even disturbed me. Here’s a PSA for parents of young children: A few bad dreams are OK if the reward is making a lifelong reader.
Within a year or so of consuming the titles in this list I would discover Robert E. Howard in the pages of The Savage of Sword of Conan, and my path was fixed. But I have these gateway books to thank for getting me started down that savage trail.
Sixteen years later, I now have a copy of my own.
I haven't been looking with any regularity. No ebay or Google alerts. Just the occasional search... and blanching at the typical $80-100 asking price (I've seen it listed for as much as $120. WTF). But a couple weeks ago I popped it into ebay and saw a copy listed by Thrift Books for $33. Immediately bought it. Today it arrived in the mail, in surprisingly excellent shape.
With patience, you can still get a decent deal. BTW I also tracked down a copy of Fire-Hunter.
Looking forward to a re-read for the first time in a VERY long time.
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| Tell me these aren't some creepy images for a kid... |
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| Lady Gaga would appreciate this romance.... |
Robert E. Howard Days is here again. The annual gathering to celebrate one of the twin towers of modern fantasy at his home in Cross Plains, TX. And I won't be going. I'm definitely feeling a few pangs of regret and a fair bit of FOMO.
I suppose I'll be there tangentially; David Hardy is bringing a Solomon Kane fanzine in which he asked me to contribute a short essay.
Two years ago I attended the mecca for Howard-heads, staying in a rented home with Deuce Richardson and Ken Lizzi. You can read the sordid tale of our exploits here. If you want more there's an oral history of it here on this episode of the Rogues in the House podcast, where I was joined by fellow guests Jason Waltz and Jason Ray Carney.
I came back loaded up with more loot than a Viking raid of the Irish coast circa 780 AD.
I do absolutely plan to get back one day, and hopefully soon. One Howard Days is not enough. I'd like to see Howard's home and Higginbothom's again and take in the panels, but also the fantastic human companionship. Shake Will Oliver's hand for example for his herculean task of researching and writing Robert E. Howard: The Life and Times of a Texas Author. Have a great trip Will! And the Shiner Bock is not drinking itself.
In 2023 I was asked to present a paper at an academic panel. I thought I'd share that here, since I only recited it orally and it has never seen print elsewhere.
Here is Far Countries of the Mind: The Frontier Fantasy of Robert E. Howard.
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| 2023 Glenn Lord Symposium panel... left to right Dierk Gunther, me, Will Oliver, Jason Ray Carney. |
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Far countries of the mind: The frontier fantasy of Robert E. Howard
When Jason asked me to present a paper at the Glenn Lord Symposium, I wanted to do something that would both be on point with the man of the hour, but also spoke to why we need to seek out new experiences and new landscapes.
This is my first trip to Cross Plains, a far country at least to this son of Massachusetts.
Any Jack London fans here?
Howard certainly was; he referred to London as “this Texan’s favorite writer,” and boasted that London “stands head and shoulders above all other American writers.”
London is today best known for his novels The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and The Sea-Wolf, and short stories like “To Build a Fire.”
London actually did write some notable fantasy, including a book which held Howard in a particular possession: The Star-Rover.
But compared to Howard, London’s literary corpus was principally set here, in a recognizable historical framework contemporary times. The Klondike, and the South China Sea.
Why?
Born in 1876, three decades before Howard, London was able to experience life in a way Howard could not.
London had a literal frontier to set his stories: The Klondike, Yukon territory up in northwest Canada. London experienced North America’s last frontier first-hand. In 1897, a 21-year-old London took part in the gold rush in search of fame and fortune. His adventures in this vast, unforgiving, awe-inspiring expanse of wilderness informed the remainder of his writing career. It was something akin to magic.
In the last chapter of The Call of the Wild, “The Sounding of the Call,” John Thornton, Buck and their companions embark on a long overland voyage in search of a lost mine, pushing the boundaries of the gold rush into uncharted lands. Here it’s as though the characters have left reality and entered the land of myth. A hunt for treasure in a dangerous, unknown, and fantastic world, not so far from the likes of Conan as you might think.
London’s language here is heightened, rarefied, almost otherworldly. Indulge me this reading:
“When Buck earned sixteen hundred dollars in five minutes for John Thornton, he made it possible for his master to pay off certain debts and to journey with his partners into the East after a fabled lost mine, the history of which was as old as the history of the country. Many men had sought it; few had found it; and more than a few there were who had never returned from the quest. This lost mine was steeped in tragedy and shrouded in mystery. No one knew of the first man. The oldest tradition stopped before it got back to him. From the beginning there had been an ancient and ramshackle cabin. Dying men had sworn to it, and to the mine the site of which it marked, clinching their testimony with nuggets that were unlike any known grade of gold in the Northland.
But no living man had looted this treasure house, and the dead were dead; wherefore John Thornton and Pete and Hans, with Buck and half a dozen other dogs, faced into the East on an unknown trail to achieve where men and dogs as good as themselves had failed. They sledded seventy miles up the Yukon, swung to the left into the Stewart River, passed the Mayo and the McQuestion, and held on until the Stewart itself became a streamlet, threading the upstanding peaks which marked the backbone of the continent.
… on this great journey into the East, straight meat was the bill of fare, ammunition and tools principally made up the load on the sled, and the time-card was drawn upon the limitless future.”
We’re in Holy Grail territory here, or perhaps the land of the Jewels of Gwahlur. Possibly.
Born 30 years after London, Howard lived in a world in which the frontier, at least in the continental U.S., had closed. In 1906, the west was only recently settled but was settled nonetheless. After Wounded Knee the days of Indian raids were largely over.
In Howard’s time the “gold rush” was not individuals seeking wealth, but oil companies setting up shop in Texas and pumping the land of black gold, leaving broken bodies and despoiled land in their wake.
Faced with this unsatisfying reality Howard turned his typewriter to stories set in the world of fantasy, where a frontier of the mind could still be found.
The Hyborian Age is Howard’s impossibly ancient re-creation of the western, when the entire world was still a frontier to be explored, great plains and vistas of wild lands to be traveled and settled, forgotten cities and their riches waiting to be discovered and plundered, and decadent cities and civilizations ripe for treading under the sandaled feet of barbaric races.
It was also a place where life had meaning, because it was put to the test.
Back to London, in his story “In a Far Country” two civilized slackers serving as part of an expedition in the Klondike opt to leave their party and hole up for the worst of the winter in a cabin. They succumb to their own sloth and the dark isolation of the terrible cold north. It’s dark and terrible (and wonderful).
From "In a Far Country":
“When a man journeys into a far country, he must be prepared to forget many of the things he has learned, and to acquire such customs as are inherent with existence in the new land; he must abandon the old ideals and the old gods, and oftentimes he must reverse the very codes by which his conduct has hitherto been shaped. To those who have the protean faculty of adaptability, the novelty of such change may even be a source of pleasure; but to those who happen to be hardened to the ruts in which they were created, the pressure of the altered environment is unbearable, and they chafe in body and in spirit under the new restrictions which they do not understand. This chafing is bound to act and react, producing divers evils and leading to various misfortunes. It were better for the man who cannot fit himself to the new groove to return to his own country; if he delay too long, he will surely die.”
This was Howard’s model; these lands were hard, and broke many, but they were a testing ground, where life was vivid and real, and you could emerge from it transformed if it did not destroy you.
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| Artist credit: Alex Kerr. |
Karl Edward Wagner in Echoes of Valor described Howard’s work a “fusion of Old World Myth and Old West Legend.” Mark Finn has made mighty inroads with Blood and Thunder.
But mostly he’s known as the Conan guy.
Another Howard scholar who sought to rectify this narrow view was the late great Steve Tompkins. In “How the West Was Wondered” in the April 2005 The Cimmerian journal, Tompkins quipped, “Robert E. Howard’s sense of humor could be plenty dark, and we can but hope that he would have been amused by his status as a perennial absentee, a Nowhere Man of Texas Literature. He has become a figure of world-historical significance in modern fantasy without ever figuring in the literary annals of his home state.”
Tompkins essay includes a William Carlos Williams citation. Williams described America as being the perhaps the only nation capable of flooding the civilized world with “rich regenerative violence” because of its frontier legacy.
And when we see the Picts flooding over the walls of Valenso’s stockade at the end of “The Black Stranger,” we understand.
Howard had no contemporary frontier in which to tell his stories, like London had. But Howard’s violent fantasy frontiers regenerated reader’s minds that were no longer offered the possibility of somewhere else.
The Hyborian Age became Howard’s Far Country, a place where he could hurl off the shackles of modern courtesies, conformity, and expectation, through larger-than-life figures like Kull and Conan.
We need a frontier. I sometimes wonder if our lack of unclaimed land is at the root of our current national and international unrest. At least here in the U.S. we don’t do well with restrictions and imposed scarcity.
We feel the need for frontiers without, and we feel them within. Howard needed them, something beyond the close walls of his Cross Plains bedroom, crying out for individual liberty, the only thing worth a damn.
The Hyborian Age is Howard’s impossibly ancient re-creation of the western, when the entire world was still a frontier to be explored, great plains and vistas of wild lands to be traveled and settled, forgotten cities and their riches waiting to be discovered and plundered, and decadent cities and civilizations ripe for treading under the sandaled feet of the barbaric races. In “Beyond the Black River” a small group of settlers struggle to make a living on the edge of a vast, dark Pictish wilderness, and is essentially a western masquerading as a weird tale. Consciously or unconsciously the west crept into his fantasy, which lent them much of their unique character.
As has been well documented, Howard began to turn away from fantasy, and toward stories of the old west, specifically the history of Texas. Howard often waxed poetically of these bygone times. In a December 1934 letter to Lovecraft he relayed a road trip he and good friend Truett Vinson took to the wild and isolated frontier village of Lincoln, home to the infamous and bloody Lincoln County War. Howard described his arrival as stepping into an elder age where old ghosts stalked its dusty, haunted streets, and of catching a glimpse of the once limitless frontier in the open desert plains west of the Pecos River.
In this old town of ghosts he saw the frontier.
Had he lived longer he would have written these stories; while this assertion involves some degree of speculation his own words layer that assertion with more than a veneer of Truth. I offer this passage from one of his letters:
Well they have gone into the night, a vast and silent caravan, with their buckskins and their boots, their spurs and their long rifles, their wagons and their mustangs, their wars and their loves, their brutalities and their chivalries, they have gone to join their old rivals, the wolf, the panther and the Indian, and only a crumbling ‘dobe wall, a fading trail, the breath of an old song, remain to mark the roads they travelled. But sometimes when the night wind whispers forgotten tales through the mesquite and the chaparral, it is easy to imagine that once again the tall grass bends to the tread of a ghostly caravan, that the breeze bears the jingle of stirrup and bridle-chain, and that spectral camp-fires are winking far out on the plains.
We would have had some amazing western literature from Howard’s typewriter, blending poetic flourishes with realism. Possibly tales about Billy the Kid or John Wesley Hardin, of whose tales he regaled Lovecraft at length. Maybe something as poignant as Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove (McMurtry was a Howard fan, by the way), blending virtue and violence and an unflinching look at what a cattle drive might actually look like, when aid was far away and Indians and cattle-rustlers stood in for Picts and Zamorian thieves.
Howard’s mind was in a far country; maybe he tarried there too long.
Sadly we don’t have his great tale of Texas. But what we do have are his stories of impossibly distant frontier life, in a far country, Beyond the Black River.
I revere Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day. But June 6 stands out, perhaps because it’s tied to a specific event and time. A single day.
The longest day.
June 6, 1944 was a long one.
Years ago I met a gentlemen on the deck of the decommissioned aircraft carrier U.S.S. Midway, a floating museum in the San Diego bay. Here’s the pic, of he and I. His name was Bob Watson, and he was in one of the first waves to hit the beach on that fateful day.
Bob had with him a photo collage that included handshakes with Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, taken on the eve of the debut of Saving Private Ryan. The two legends interviewed Bob as part of their research for the film.
Spielberg later asked Watson what he liked and disliked about Ryan. "The landing scene was accurate, though not quite as bloody as what really happened that day,” he said.
Yikes.
In general Bob thought it was an excellent film and a compelling portrayal of the war. His sole criticism? "I told Spielberg: 'Who were these guys (actors)? They're too old. All the guys I knew were almost all 18, 19 years old.'"
The logistics of June 6, 1944 defy belief. I struggle with creating an email campaign for a webinar; can you imagine planning a seaborne invasion of Europe against an entrenched Nazi war machine? It makes my problems feel … ridiculous.
My struggles are real but I’m glad I have this struggle, and not the one that confronted the allies that day, long ago. Your troubles are real, and worth solving. But when you look back at June 6 you also realize they’re not really that big, and some of them are not really problems at all.
Walking into withering MG-42 machine gun fire without cover, waist deep in water that is quickly turning to blood? Major problem. The best way to visualize this is to watch the opening 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan and the landings on Omaha Beach.
I also recommend “Band of Brothers” which tells the story of Easy Company, the paratroopers who landed behind the lines shortly after midnight on June 6. Over 18,000 men of the US 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions and the British 6th Airborne Division were dropped into Normandy, landing about 12:15 a.m.
That was just the beginning of a very long day.
Bob passed away in January 2024. If you know anyone left alive from that day, or WWII more broadly, give them your thanks.
Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. Let teachers and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I play pinball, and am content.”
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| Walk with me... |
I just finished re-reading The Long Walk after a long walk of my own, years and years of life since my last reading decades ago. Some thoughts.
We get no details on why the Walk came to be, just a couple scant suggestions. Like this: “In the old days, before the Change and the Squads, when there were still millionaires, they used to set up foundations and build libraries and all that good shit.” There is a reference to a war fought against a nuclear-armed Germany in 1953. So it’s not set in an apocalyptic future but some alternate history, perhaps one in which Germany develops an atomic weapon before 1945 and greatly extended the second world war. The result is a terrible totalitarian 20th century where the country is so lost and the future so bereft of hope that it turns to horrible death-fueled game shows to forget.
We don’t know, and I like it this way. Given the many chapter epigraph references to the Price is Right, prize fighting, and the Ten-Thousand Dollar Pyramid, I’m sure King was inspired by the game show craze sweeping the nation in the 1970s.
Things haven’t changed all that much. We all seem to be walking around in a fog, distracted just enough by digital spectacle to ignore the real horrors going on around us, as well as our own impending deaths. Just scroll an Instagram feed.
The Long Walk is an extended metaphor on dying. We’re all on the same Walk, two minutes from a ticket out (Walkers who slow their pace get three warnings before they are shot dead). That brief space tracks somewhat closely to what happens when you stop breathing. We’re separated from the other side by a thin margin. So we walk, and everyone around us drops off, one by one, until its our turn.
I know the literal, physical territory of this Walk, I was just on it, yesterday, when my wife and I had a nice dinner in Portsmouth, NH. The Walk starts in Maine, crosses into New Hampshire, and a skeletal handful make it all the way to my home state of Massachusetts. Weird, wild. Between King and H.P. Lovecraft New England takes a back seat to no other region of the United States when it comes to horror.
I really do enjoy King, in particular his old stuff. Say what you want about his long-windedness, his occasional closure whiffs and bad endings, and his lack of philosophical depth (King himself describes his work as the literary equivalent of a cheeseburger). I’d be hard-pressed to think of another writer who can so sweep you up into a story and hold you spellbound until the end. That’s true talent.
Thing 2
I’ve seen a few places—messageboards, articles, reddit threads—refer to the sword-and-sorcery definition I offered in Flame and Crimson as “seven points,” which makes it seem like a cumbersome checklist that must be met.
This is not correct, because it’s not what I wrote.
What I wrote was, sword-and-sorcery often contains these handful of elements; it does not need all of them nor any precise proportion. But shorn of any it’s hard to picture anyone calling said story S&S.
I kind of like this, it seems to me flexible and elegant, forgiving but not without boundaries. A precise definition of S&S is not really possible, IMO. When you look at how the subgenre evolved it coalesced over three decades and in conversations with authors and a fan community. It has changed and will continue to evolve. So instead of a precise definition I offered up a constellation of tropes. With the caveat that I am just a guy and YMMV.
See some of my other musings here.
But for some reason this seems to be a continued source of confusion and occasionally complaint. Some feel the need to simplify the definition, boil and boil down like maple syrup in some type of purity contest, until the definition of S&S might fit on the head of a pin.
If you must insist…I can’t boil it down to one word but I’ll give you two: Pulp Fantasy.
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| I am this target audience. |
I mentioned Instagram further up; yesterday that platform triangulated me with precision, locked in with unerring heat detecting radar, launched its missile, and hit me with a dead-on bullseye.
The missile: A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever: The Story of Spinal Tap. Signed by director Rob Reiner.
How did I not know this existed? The ad hit my feed. I preordered.
The takeaway: Algorithms work, and I too can be reeled in like a fish on a line.
“Then Arthur learned, as all leaders are astonished to learn, that peace, not war, is the destroyer of men; tranquility rather than danger the mother of cowardice, and not need but plenty brings apprehension and unease. Finally he found that the longed-for peace, so bitterly achieved, created more bitterness than ever did the anguish of achieving it.”
“In the combat between wisdom and feeling, wisdom never wins. I have told you your certain future, my lord, but knowing will not change it by a hair. When the time comes, your feeling will conduct you to your fate.”
A black rage shook Sir Launcelot, drew his lips snarling from his teeth. His right hand struck like a snake at his sword hilt and half the silver blade slipped from the scabbard. Lyonel felt the wind of his death blow on his cheek.Then, in one man he saw a combat more savage than ever he had seen between two, saw wounds given and received and a heart riven to bursting. And he saw victory, too, the death of rage and the sick triumph of Sir Launcelot, the sweat-ringed, fevered eyes hooked like a hawk’s, the right arm leashed and muzzled while the blade crept back to its kennel.
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| Lancelot and Guinevere. |
Sir Lyonel knew that this sleeping knight would charge to his known defeat with neither hesitation nor despair and finally would accept his death with courtesy and grace as though it were a prize. And suddenly Sir Lyonel knew why Lancelot would gallop down the centuries, spear in rest, gathering men’s hearts on his lance head like tilting rings. He chose his side and it was Lancelot’s.
“Granite so hard that it will smash a hammer can be worn away by little grains of moving sand. And a heart that will not break under the great blows of fate can be eroded by the nibbling of numbers, the creeping of days, the numbing treachery of littleness, of important littleness. I could fight men but I was defeated by marching numbers on a page.”
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| A perilous quest... |
And it can be shown and it will be shown that the myth of Arthur continues even into the present day and is an inherent part of the so-called “Western” with which television is filled at the present time—same characters, same methods, same stories, only slightly different weapons and certainly a different topography. But if you change Indians or outlaws for Saxons and Picts and Danes, you have exactly the same story. You have the cult of the horse, the cult of the knight.
The world is getting increasingly artificial. And by world, I mean the online spaces most of us inhabit for many/most of our waking hours.
I'm starting to wonder if knowledge and expertise as we know it isn't being rewritten and entirely outsourced to machines. I plan to post about some increasingly disturbing trends I'm seeing.
I'm glad I wrote Flame and Crimson before generative AI, lest I be accused of having a machine do the work. I'm not using AI at all in my WIP metal memoir, either.
I'm not anti-AI. I think this tech has massive positive potential for humanity. In my own professional niche I've seen how it can for example allow physicians to offload burdensome documentation requirements and restore sanity to a burned out, overworked profession.
But I think in the creative realms gen AI something close to a cancer. It's definitely slop.
You will never see ChatGPT generated text on this blog. Or generative AI images.
I value human beings and authentic creativity, the product of human minds and souls. It's why I revere live performances and continue to attend them. I believe in human beings, as fucked up and flawed as we often are.
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| Take a ride on the Wildside. |
I decided on the spur of the moment to see an 80s hair band tribute. They were playing at a place called The Boat in Dracut, where I’d never been. I felt the call. On Thursday I texted my buddy Wayne, whom I’ve known since grade school and has been my wingman at countless metal shows. Yesterday he let me know—he was in. The night was on.
I never go to Dracut. I have never had a need to go to this odd town far off any major interstate, accessible only by driving through 20 minutes of woods and farmland. Which feels like undiscovered Lovecraft country in a state this small. I navigated past rusted grain silos and empty fields and then battered mill buildings and then I was there.
The Boat as it turns out is located on the shore of Mascuppic Lake. To be frank it looks a little rough on the outside, a windowless concrete bunker with a weathered deck off to one side. You have to pass through a steel door to enter.
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| Meat Raffle ... and Wildside |
Inside it was the place to be, if you like blonde women in tight leather pants swaying on the dance floor. Or overweight dudes, one wearing a Kix t-shirt and another a sleeveless denim vest with “The Warriors” emblazoned on the back. That Warriors, of the 1979 film. Very dark, biker-ish, but clean and well maintained, with a great center stage where the action unfolded. Kudos to the owners of this establishment and any club owner who hosts local rock and metal.
Wildside was great. The lead singer is Ron Finn, who also sings for a Judas Priest tribute band I twice hosted at my home. I am very familiar with his work. The guy can sing, with a wonderful stylistic range and high top-end register that works for everything from “Still of the Night” to “Lick It Up” to “Screaming in the Night” (Krokus). And everything in between. AC/DC and Guns-and-Roses, Van Halen, and some fantastic Def Leppard covers.
We heard it all, listening after midnight. Here's an upload from my phone, an excerpt of "Bringing on the Heartache."
Women and some men swayed on the dance floor, thrust fists to the heavens, air guitared along to the break in “Running With the Devil.” I did too.
A thought crossed my mind: Should I be home? No. Not for a $10 cover charge. Budweisers are $4.50. Tripoli’s beach pizza cooked hot, topped with a slice of melted provolone cheese for $5. That’s fucking living right there. I need nothing else.
Looking around, I know it’s all ridiculous. But life is ridiculous. I am ridiculous. And I love it. I love it all.
I’m going to wring every fucking last drop out of life. Why else are we living?
I am never so alive than when I’m at a metal show. I feel electric.
It’s worth the 1 a.m. bedtime next-day fatigue and the dry mouth hangover.
Don’t pass it up. Go to the show. Live.
