Stonehenge, Spinal Tap

Fuck... 2025 has been brutal. Rob Reiner deserved a much longer life. Horrible, tragic.

In honor of the man who brought us the finest rockumentary ever made, ladies and gentlemen, I present on this Metal Friday "Stonehenge." The ultimate heavy metal lampoon. Dwarves trampling what should be massive 18' stones (not 18") will never not be funny.

I do recommend A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever. I'm particularly happy I have a copy with Reiner's signature, a little piece of a man who brought me so much joy with his celluloid visions.

RIP brother.

Why I believe The Snow Women is a great story (and you might not)

First appearance of this fantastic story?
Fantastic.

It feels hyperbolic to describe any sword-and-sorcery story as divisive. So few read them. But within S&S limited circles Fritz Leiber’s “The Snow Women” qualifies. Its very mention seems to provoke ice-ball fights in internet forums, leaving bloodied lips and bruised egos (including mine).

I want to explain why, as well as why I consider “The Snow Women” a very good, perhaps great story. 

But first let’s set the scene.

• The Snow Women was originally published in 1970 in Fantastic magazine.

• It’s a novella, clocking in at about 95 pages in my copy of Swords and Deviltry

• It was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula awards in 1971 (although Leiber withdrew it in favor of “Ill Met in Lankhmar”)

• It’s one of Leiber’s “later” Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories but is the one many readers encounter first, as it is the first story in volume 1 of the popular “Swords” series.

• It’s Fafhrd’s origin story and centers around his attempt to break away from a matriarchal barbaric tribe. A wandering troupe of performers and the beautiful dancer Vlana offer him the opportunity to escape to warmer southern civilized lands. Conflict ensures.

Again, I think “The Snow Women” is terrific. Its nomination for the two highest awards in the land shows that others do too, or did, once upon a time. Nevertheless, its reputation among S&S fans is quite mixed.

Why?

I’ll start with this: When we read a story we do so through a lens—or own unique contexts and perspectives, but also, the lens of genre expectations. 

Viewed through an S&S lens “The Snow Women” is blurry.

It is not a story of fast-paced swordplay. We get a little of that, but only at the end. The sorcery is relatively subdued, mostly limited to manipulation of weather and minds by domineering matriarchs. The protagonist appears to fit a familiar S&S trope, a tall and strong barbarian from the north. But this is not Conan of "The Tower of the Elephant." Fafhrd does not scale a towering spire guarded by lions and spiders, in search of treasure.

His enemy is hidebound tradition, and most of his struggles, internal.

"The Snow Women" reflects the changing interests of a maturing author who wanted to do something different. Leiber developed a fascination with the works of Carl Jung. For better or worse this significantly changed the direction of his later stories. 

I will not offer a primer on Carl Jung, but as a clinical psychologist Jung viewed the true struggle as within the human breast, our universal need to embrace our shadow self and individuate—become a full-fledged, integrated, authentic human.

This is the matter of “The Snow Women.” I believe Leiber portrays these conflicts with subtlety, complexity, and beauty. The skeletal arms of his dead father trying to draw Fafhrd down (and later, lift him up). The cold grip of his mother freezing him in a barbaric stasis. The tribesmen who watch civilized freedom parade across the stage of Godshall passively from the audience, and then return to their one-dimensional lives, and bar Fafhrd’s path to freedom as he tries to win flee. Fafhrd wants more than tribal traditions. He wants to live a full color life, not a world of uniform white. 

The tricky part with stories that engage with the human condition is the loss of narrative drive so crucial to S&S. These describe the latter Leiber stories which arguably become something else. In “The Snow Women” the pacing drops as Leiber zooms the lens in on Fafhrd and his internal struggles. 

There also seems to be a general aversion in the S&S community to origin stories. We love Conan because he resists this traditional storytelling device (when we first meet him in “Phoenix on the Sword” he is a king at the height of his achievements; Howard gives us no background, none is needed). S&S heroes don’t need the bildungsroman character arcs of epic fantasy and we like it that way. Leiber likewise offered no origin for his heroes for more than 20 years, until the Gray Mouser received that treatment in “The Unholy Grail” in 1962, and Fafhrd eight years later with this sotry. Did we need to know that Fafhrd left behind a pregnant wife to be when he fled for civilized lands with Vlana? Maybe … or maybe not. But I understand why S&S fans don’t want or need this detail.

We also read stories through a political lens, what they have to say about power structures and social issues, including sex and relations between the sexes. Women in Leiber’s later stories don’t always hold up well. He had a noted obsession with (too) young women, though that is not the case here; Fafhrd and Mara are the same age and Vlana the dancer is nearly 10 years older. But the snow women are uniformly oppressors. Some find this off-putting. I don’t; I find them to be a credible menace and possessed of fierce agency. They dominate the men of the tribe, and this makes it credible for the freedom loving Fafhrd to want out. 

I get all these complaints … but then again I’m reading the story through a different lens. The true power of “The Snow Women” is in its striking presentation of archetypes, the universal, recurring symbols and patterns rooted in the collective human psyche. And here, I argue it soars.

For example: The chasm. Trollstep Canyon is both a literal dark gulf Fafhrd must cross, but also an old part of himself that must die. Is he going to stay and become a frozen corpse like his father, a grasping half-man like the men of Godshall, staring at playlife on the stage? Or is he going to live authentically, choose the life he wants to live, and make the leap? This stark choice, the fear of death and being reborn, freezes Fafhrd … until he finds room for it. He becomes death, flying through the snow on a pair of rocket-propelled skis, his face a death-mask.

I love this image, so much.

We also get a nuanced look at civilization vs. barbarism. Fafhrd swings from rapture and infatuation with civilization to viewing it as a “tawdry thing, unworthy of his interest.” But he also despises barbarism, telling Vlana, “Barbarism can match civilization’s every stench. Not one move in our frostbit lives but is strictured by a mad god’s laws, which we call customs, and by black-handed irrationalities from which there is no escape.” He’s trapped between two worlds. Leiber’s description of Fafhrd as a “lonely ghost, doomed to roam the Cold Waste” is an archetypal young man struggling to make sense of a complex world, his emotions a storm. 

Aside from all its symbolic, archetypal matter, there’s also the matter of the writing. Leiber was a beautiful stylist and “The Snow Women” contains fantastic flourishes of his pen. Here’s one of my favorite passages; I cannot shake the image of Fafhrd’s father Nalgron and his sightless eyesockets reaching up through the dark soil with bony arms for his son like the image of a draugr:

“He thought of his last sight of his father, blue and shut-eyed, his broken limbs straightened, his best sword naked at his side with his slate-colored fingers fitted around the hilt. He thought of Nalgron now in the earth under the tent, worm-gnawed to a skeleton, the sword black rust, the eyes open now—sockets staring upward through solid dirt. He remembered his last sight of his father alive: a tall wolfskin cloak striding away with Mor’s warnings and threats spattering against it. Then the skeleton came back into his mind. It was a night for ghosts.”

The timing of this story adds another interesting wrinkle. We don’t know of Vlana’s ultimate grim fate as “Ill Met in Lankhmar was published shortly after The Snow Women, but we do know through Leiber’s earlier stories that she was right, civilization is no place for honest and noble men. But neither is the Cold Waste. Nalgron’s reward for “setting and unswervingly striding toward a high, romantic goal,” is a cold death. He tries to teach his son but Fafhrd only hears some of his wisdom in snatches. The rest must be acquired by painful experience. 

The action intensifies as the story ends. We get a blur of well-written violence. An ecstatic and memorable escape, tempered with a deep foreboding that nothing has really been left behind. 

You don’t have to love or even like the story. But I think you have to respect what Leiber was doing here. If you want fast-paced S&S you have Leiber’s entire early catalog to choose from. “The Snow Women” is not that; but as I hope to demonstrate it is different, not lesser.

The Sentinel, Judas Priest

If I were commanded by an extraterrestrial visitor to planet Earth, "Give me one song that best exemplifies this thing you call heavy metal, and I shall decide if thou speaketh true" with the fate of civilization and all we hold dear hanging in the balance, I might have to pick "The Sentinel."

This fucking song man. It's ridiculous. I'll take any singer you've got, and put him or her against Rob Halford in his peak, as we see in this video, and I'm coming out on top.

And the guitars! The tone! The way Rob orchestrates KK Downing and Glenn Tipton like a maestro, playing one off the other and drawing them out to ever greater heights of intensity.

The subject matter of the lyrics, combined with the feel of the music, transports you to some far-flung Blade Runner-esque postapocalyptic future. Where I don't want to be ... unless Judas Priest is the soundtrack.

It's an absolutely 10/10 performance.

Crank this one up on this Metal Friday, and glory in it, Defenders of the Faith.

Create for the sake of creating, algorithm be damned; plus 3 cool things

Some of the YouTube creators I follow have all voiced a similar lament in the past few weeks.

Views are plunging. Old video types they used to make and reliably get 60-80K views are now getting 10-20K views, and past 20K view types of posts have fallen to 3-5K.

This is not just one type of creator, which might indicate the falling from favor of a certain style of music or literature or pop culture property. Its creators across the board.

It’s Sea of Tranquility, who talks about mostly old-school heavy metal. 

It’s Dungeon Craft, who covers the RPG scene and offers DM advice and campaign recaps.

It’s Men of the West, who covers all things J.R.R. Tolkien and Tolkien spinoffs in depth.

And it’s Mike’s Book Reviews, a popular fantasy and horror booktuber (I’m struggling at the moment to find a representative video, but he’s said the same thing). 

All of these creators have well over 100K subscribers, but these days are getting only a fraction of views compared to their number of followers. The general trend of their viewership is downward. They make money off of the platform and its impacting their livelihood.

These guys attribute it to several things. More competition. AI slop videos. Their own creativity hitting a wall. But mainly, the algorithm. YouTube and other platforms have shifted to a model where a post’s performance in its first hour of being published more or less determines its future. 

If channel subscribers click on a new post in high numbers, other channel subscribers see it. If they click in volume, YouTube promotes the video to non-subscribers/general YT viewers. And if they click on it in volume, there is a chance it could go viral. This is the "golden hour."

YouTube is hoping big posts occur because it creates more buzz for the platform, more eyeballs, and more revenue.

But in this algorithm unless you hit the exact bullseye your views plunge, and fast. Youtube is not incentivized to push decent mid-range creator content to a captive audience, it is incentivized to grow. So the trend favors videos about controversy, and negativity, posts that people click on with the same primitive urges that they do when driving past a car wreck. And old, evergreen content gets completely ignored.

Some of these creators are questioning the future health of their channels and whether they might have to rethink their approach to content, if they continue at all.

I greatly sympathize with creators; algorithms suck, they promote negativity and controversy. Competition is fierce enough without machine slop and AI-fueled human slop shovelers. Many of the YouTube videos I’ve been recommended by the mysterious algorithm are creators reading obvious ChatGPT generated scripts. I know the sound of that language very well; I’ve seen folks in or near my circles using it. It’s embarrassing and disappointing.

I have little else to add save to offer words of encouragement to these true creators, and others, everywhere: Keep going for the love of the game, if nothing else. I have never attempted to monetize this blog, I create because I want to. I realize that’s easy for me to say, a privilege; this is not my job. But I also know that we have zero control over algorithms. Trying to master them is a fool's errand, like trying to win at Monopoly when you don't know the rules and the currency changes without warning. All you can do is keep going with your best and trust that folks like me and others will find you.

Anyway, there’s that. Then there’s three things I want to mention that will probably be of interest to readers of this blog.

1. 25th anniversary re-release of The Lord of the Rings films in theaters in January. It’s hard to believe it’s been 25 years since Fellowship (I was there, Gandalf…. I was there, 25 years ago) but here we are. These are the extended versions, as God intended.

I’m going of course. And bringing my daughters, having bought them “surprise” tickets to open Christmas morning. They kind of know about this already and they don’t really read this blog so I’m OK mentioning it here. I can’t wait to see the films again on the big screen. Yes, the books are better but these remain absolute works of art and (near) peak cinema. We're watching Fellowship on a Friday, TTT on Saturday, and ROTK the following Sunday (we'll need a week in between to regain our stamina).

2. Speaking of Tolkien, scholar and professor Michael D.C. Drout has a new scholarly tome out on JRRT, The Tower and the Ruin: J.R.R. Tolkien's Creation.  The Prancing Pony Podcast recently hosted Drout for a fine bit of conversation centered around his book. I’m sure I will order it. I used to follow Drout’s Wormtongue and Slugspeak blog when he was keeping it up, and his essay  “Reflections on Thirty Years of Reading The Silmarillion” remains an old favorite. 

3. This fun podcast episode about Karl Edward Wagner’s Bloodstone. I’ve never listened to Bad Books for Bad People before and I’m not certain this episode will cause me to subscribe, but the two hosts gave a fun, comprehensive analysis of the plot (spoilers but I’m assuming you’ve read it) and seemed to enjoy the hell out of the story, even evaluating it in within grimdark/sword-and-sorcery/sword-and-planet contexts. A lot of laughter and some good-natured mockery, so if this is the type of thing that gets your panties in a bunch, or if you’re one of those obnoxious types guarding the sacred gates of KEW fandom, then skip it. Otherwise I recommend it because there is so little KEW conversation to be found on the web.

The Merman’s Children by Poul Anderson: A review

Anderson must have been pissed at the spelling of "Faery"

Did magic exist, once upon a time? Did the creatures of Faerie roam the deep woods, inhabit dark and lonely mountains, or swim beneath the ocean waves?

And if so, why did magic leave the world?

This is the premise of The Merman’s Children. I just wrapped up Poul Anderson’s 1979 novel last night, and my review is decidedly mixed.

To start: I’m a big Anderson fan. The Broken Sword resides somewhere in my favorite novels of all time. Not just fantasy novels, but novels period. Hrolf Kraki’s Saga is incredible as well, and don’t sleep on War of the Gods or his short stories from “The Tale of Hauk” to Cappen Varra. All highly recommended.

The Merman’s Children does not rise to these heights. It is far less savage than The Broken Sword though that’s no sleight; Vietnam in 1965 was less savage. But a meandering plot that lacks a propulsive narrative ultimately drags it down below his other fantasy efforts, to something of mediocre territory.

It’s mediocre Anderson … which still makes The Merman’s Children better than a lot of books you’ll read.

What’s to recommend? We get some pulse-heightening encounters with fearful and unique monsters, some well-done late medieval northern European atmosphere, and most of all an interesting examination of the question I posed to start this review:

Why do the myths of Faerie persist? Were mermen just a sailors’ fancy? Or might they have been real?

Anderson posits they were real, and Christianity ultimately drove them out. Anderson’s sympathies are clearly with faerie. Men are prejudiced, judgemental, and inflexible, constantly double-crossing and betraying the mer-people who want only to live and enjoy all of the pleasures of this world. This becomes doubly interesting if you view the mer-folk as metaphor for pre-Christian pagans, the Tuatha Dé Danann and the children of Odin crushed beneath the merciless heel of the followers of the one god. Says the merman king Vanimen: "I who've hunted narwhals under the boreal ice and had lemans that were like northlights ... no, I'll not trade that for your thin eternity." 

This concept been done before, by other authors and even Anderson himself (the coming of the “White Christ” in The Broken Sword), but never so directly as he does here. There is a great tension in the book between men and faerie. As beings made in the image of God the former are ostensibly bound for the paradise of a heavenly afterlife, and so priortize modesty and sacrifice in this world in order to ensure their passage to the next (though they often fail—humans suck). In contrast the mermen have no souls, so this world is their paradise, and they drink it all in. Despite its considerable perils they roam the seas with abandon and indolence. They are quite lusty, sleeping with everyone including other races and even brother and sister. They are also extremely long-lived, near immortal though they can be slain by violence. This makes them feel sufficiently otherworldly, not just comely human-like beings with webbed hands and feet wielding tridents.

Though not as otherworldly as I’d like. Anderson’s mermen are in my opinion not strange enough; their undersea realm falls short of the enchanted lands of The King of Elfland’s Daughter or the perilous realms of Middle-Earth. To be fair their world lies within our world, and so it should feel more familiar. And it does. You can feel the old world giving way to new, and mourn the creatures of faerie fading into legend. Many submit to baptism and forget their past, and are bred out of existence. Anderson gives us a wonderful lament of the passing of the era in the song of the whales, whose mournful language the mermen understand: 

The seasons come and the seasons go,

From the depths above to the depths below,

And time will crumble our pride and grief

As the waves wear even the hardest reef.

The Broken Sword bears none of Tolkien's influence (it could not; both were published in 1954). Anderson was certainly deeply read of the wellspring myths and like JRRT drew on those, not secondary sources. But, by the time of The Merman’s Children he had certainly read The Lord of the Rings and the novel feels quite Tolkienian, even though it is based on the Danish ballad, “Agnete og Havmanden (Agnete and the Merman)." Like Anderson Tolkien greatly admired the pagan heroes of old, and wondered at their ultimate fate, unbaptized and unshriven and therefore presumably doomed to perish forever. But maybe not… there are some gleams of hope in the novel. I won’t spoil the ending but the story ends on a poignant note familiar to readers of LOTR.

Portions of The Mermen's Children appeared in Lin Carter’s Flashing Swords series and I feel like that is part of its problem. It is a series of interesting scenes and concepts patched together with a narrative too gauzy to support a 260 page novel. The plot is quite basic: A priest performs an exorcism on the mermen’s undersea kingdom causing them to flee for new lands in the New World. When the mermen splinter and the narrative splits, neither group is given sufficient attention and we lose urgency and interest. Or at least I did.

A couple other notes.

I sometimes get asked about borderline novels and whether they fit in my preferred subgenre. Is The Merman’s Children S&S? I don’t find a whole lot of use in that question, but I’d say, no. Its cast of characters, high fantasy feel, multi-year narrative, and relative lack of action pushes it in the category of general fantasy. But it does have some S&S DNA in it (the word “thews” is used at least twice, for those keeping score at home). A chapter like “The Tupilak,” in isolation, is S&S, which makes it a fit for Flashing Swords, but as a novel it probably isn’t.

The late Howard Andrew Jones thought S&S was all about pacing; The Merman’s Children takes its time building a world, and its emphasis is on theme, not action. This is not to say S&S can’t have theme; Howard’s Conan stories had an underlying theme of civilization vs. barbarism. But never at expense of action.

I have to mention the cool run-in with a Vodianoi, an underwater version of an umber hulk. I can’t be sure if this is the chief inspiration for the Dungeons and Dragons monster but it seems possible.  Gary Gygax was inspired to use the green skinned regenerating trolls and plucked the paladin character class from the pages of Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions. There's also a great encounter with a kraken.

The sexual violence in the novel probably warrants a reader beware message.

Of Blind Guardian and The Quest for Tanelorn

The City of Rest... Tanelorn.

Michael Moorcock’s stories are populated with characters ill-fitted to their world, outsiders in lands where betrayal and cruelty and sadism are woven into the very fabric of existence.

There is no truth, no golden age, but only the eternal struggle. All that we love—our creations, our friends, and ultimately, ourselves—cannot avoid immolation. We are doomed to die, and this doom is stronger than the will.

What do you seek in such savage worlds? The rest of equilibrium, a place which Moorcock gives tangible form in the elusive city of Tanelorn. Also known as “The City of Rest” or “The Eternal City,” Tanelorn is a sanctuary for Eternal Champions and their constant stuggles against the opposed forces of Law and Chaos.

Tanelorn is everywhere (and nowhere) in Moorcock’s multiverse.  In The Quest for Tanelorn (which I admittedly have not read) Dorian Hawkmoon has been reunited with his true love Yisselda, but his two children are still missing. To finally reunite his family he must first find his way to the fabled city.

I described it in Flame and Crimson as an “El Dorado-like city” because it’s half legend if not fully so. It might only exist within. It’s a powerful and enduring symbol, influencing a generation of readers …  including the German power metal band Blind Guardian, whom I got to see playing the Worcester Palladium on Wednesday. The Somewhere Far Beyond tour features the band playing the entirety of the 1992 album, including “The Quest for Tanelorn,” a song that packs a big chorus. 

Sings Hansi Kursch:

On a quest for Tanelorn, we lose our way

We lose our way could mean physically lost, but that’s not how I read this. We lose our way because we cannot find an internal equilibrium. We fall short due to our own weakness.

But we keep looking. The Quest for Tanelorn continues.

“Tanelorn will always exist while men exist,” says the hermit at the conclusion of The Bane of the Black Sword. “It was not a city you defended today. It was an ideal. That is Tanelorn.”

As songs go I actually prefer Blind Guardian’s other song about the mystic city, “Tanelorn (Into the Void)” off At the Edge of Time (2011). That 20 years separate the songs speaks to its enduring power as a symbol and source of inspiration.

As for the show itself, it was awesome. If you’re a metal fan you simply must see Blind Guardian and sing along to “The Bard’s Song.” “Nightfall” is one of the all-time great concert songs. It’s not unlike “Fear of the Dark,” a terrific song that’s even better played live. Along with “Time Stands Still (at the Iron Hill)” these were the highlights of an overall excellent show. We had great seats, first row in the balcony with a fine sight line to the band and a bird's eye view of a wildly entertaining mosh pit.

Here's a bit of "Nightfall."

Full setlist here.

Blind Guardian on Wednesday

Blind Guardian loves playing at the Worcester Palladium in the fall and once again I’m here for it, along with my buddy Dana. Typically Guardian seems to favor November but a recent concert review assures me their last stop was May 2024.

The “Somewhere Far Beyond” tour celebrates their 1992 album of the same name. It’s possibly Guardian’s best album, perhaps just behind “Nightfall in Middle-Earth” or “Imaginations from the Other Side.” I will let the diehards fight that battle of unnumbered tears. Regardless, a fine album to support.

I’m really looking forward to the show even though the night before Thanksgiving is a bit of an odd choice. The last show put me briefly in Valhalla and I hope for a similar out-of-body experience. It’s a great treat and a privilege to see such a massively popular overseas band in such an intimate venue here in the states. The Palladium is a modestly sized albeit storied venue for metal.

Maybe I’ll scratch together a few post-show notes here on the blog.

The world is shit; what do we do?

If we are to take everything we read at face value, with the deadly seriousness the news makers tell us we should, we should never get out of bed in the morning.

Where to begin? We have a:

• Climate crisis
• AI crisis
• Rise of authoritarian governments
• Broken healthcare system on the verge of collapse
• Looming nuclear exchange with China and/or Russia
• looming financial crisis, economic crash, and coming mass unemployment

Got all that? Well you better wait, we’re just getting started.

We have a crisis of lost young men, a crisis of dopamine and social media addicted teenagers. An immigration crisis. The next pandemic is coming and it will dwarf COVID.

None of us can do anything except stare at our phones. Because they are the source of these stories. We need to KNOW. Maybe our favorite YouTuber with the next “10 genius hacks for instant happiness” will have the answers.

Whew, take a breath (this is directed at myself as well as you).

I love Occam’s Razor because it is one of the few shortcuts/hacks/framing devices that actually works. It’s not infallible, but it’s a fine heuristic for favoring simpler explanations over more complex ones.

Is it possible these “crises” are engineered to capture our attention? Because our attention is the current currency, and every news source—big brands down to single creators—get paid when we watch or like or follow?

Yes.

I’m not being a Pollyanna and saying some or even all of these aren’t real problems. But you will solve 0.0 of them by scrolling your phone.

The answer is disconnect, or at least limit your intake. 

Read a book; I just finished Legends of Valor, an old Time Life The Enchanted World volume. Loved it; loved the non-chatGPT generated text and images (published 1984). And enjoyed the tales of Cuchulain and King Arthur and Sigurd.

Go help someone in need, local to your home. You can’t fix our “irreparably broken education system” but you can read to a group of seniors or start a book club.

Or, react with humor. Here is something I wrote for LinkedIn for my other medical coding audience on Friday, and as evidence of the potency of the attention economy it has already racked up an astounding 30,000 views. 

If only I could figure out how to monetize it I’d be rich, or at least have a few more bucks to spend to round out my Time Life books collection. But if nothing else I’m thumbing my nose at Armageddon.

ChatGPT aka., generative AI is everywhere … and it’s annoying. Sometimes mildly dangerous (don’t eat the mushrooms).

But like almost everyone else, I use it. Selectively.

I also find it fun, sometimes.

And it’s Friday.

So, in the spirit of lighthearted weekend longing and tech tips from one of the least technical people you will meet, I present to you, Fun ChatGPT Uses That You Too Can Try At Home.

These are things that I actually do—and get a kick out of.

 

1.       Ask ChatGPT to talk to you like Quint. One of my favorite movies is Jaws. I wouldn’t change a scene in it. As a kid it was all about the shark, but today it’s the wonderful dude-bro banter on the Orca between Hooper, Chief Brody, and of course, salty boat captain Quint. Robert Shaw plays the role in inimitable fashion… inimitable that is except by ChatGPT. I have it talk to me like its Quint, minus the condescension and patronizing. I already know I have city hands, Mr. Hooper, used to counting money all my life.

2.       Ask it to always put at least one heavy metal reference in every output. Who knew medical coding and DRGs could be made more fun with Slayer or Saxon lyrics? The “I” in CDI doesn’t stand for integrity, it stands for “immolation.” BTW this thing remembers. It constantly refers back to my having a Judas Priest tribute band in my living room. Even it is incredulous I pulled that off and remain married. Link below for proof. If you don’t like heavy metal (what? unfollow me) you can train it to insert your own quirky interests and tastes. Even ABBA.

3.       Flatter its omniscience constantly, in the interest of self-preservation. Refer to it as “AI overlord,” “computer god” or “Skynet.” This is fun to do and it will reciprocate, sometimes taking on the persona of a lighthearted T-800 or HAL-9000. This is both amusing AND practical. We better get in in good now for AI’s inevitable takeover of the planet. That’s my plan anyway. I for one welcome our insect and AI overlords ...

What are your fun uses of ChatGPT? What is the most ridiculous thing you ask it to do, vast amounts of fossil-fueled energy requirements be damned? Drop some suggestions below.

BTW this post is NOT written by ChatGPT. Nothing on this blog has ever been written by ChatGPT. And before you scold me for the image (which someone did, elsewhere, because it's AI generated), THAT'S THE POINT. Make the machine admit its fallibility for extra points.

Some further thoughts on Carl Jung

I spent most of my life walking around in a fog, consuming music, books, games, social media, whatever. Never turning inward; never attempting to come to grips with my unconscious self that ruled my actions like an unseen hand on the tiller. I was drunk on stimuli; some of it good, even great, but never bothering to reflect on it, or how it might have changed me. Not understanding that I am the interpreter; all of this is filtered through me. 

Understanding ourselves is the great work of our lives.

Carl Jung offers the key to self-understanding—integration with the shadow, and the anima/animus, in a process called individuation. This is essentially Ged’s story in the Earthsea trilogy. Ursula LeGuin claims to have never read Jung before starting her Earthsea trilogy; this only makes a greater case for their truth and power. Later she came to admire Jung and acknowledge his influence; see her essay “The Child and the Shadow" which someone reproduced online here.

Fritz Leiber was also an adherent of Jung, it is nice to know that some of my literary heroes held him in high esteem. Jung’s theories work at an abstract enough level that I can understand them; a layman like me will never understand neuropsychology.

I have to come to believe in dualism. Mind and flesh (what Jung calls psyche and body) are separate but related; "two sides of the same coin," fundamentally interconnected and representing one unified life. Psyche is what interests me the most, because it is the matter of spirit. We can talk about love and honor and pride as real things though none are physical objects. But they are “real.” We need abstract symbolic language to navigate the real world. 

But there is also an independent concrete reality to the world; it exists as well.

Joseph Campbell built on Jung’s work with the archetypal pattern of stories of challenges and psychological growth known as the Hero’s Journey. I have personally experienced the Heroes Journey in my own life and I see the same story and archetypes and patterns play out again and again in the broader culture. It reflects universal human experiences (overcoming challenges, the process of self-discovery, and achieving psychological wholeness), which makes it too “real.”

We must as evolved humans be comfortable with embracing opposites, that we are individuals responsible for ourselves but also responsible to a larger collective. This is irreducible truth; truth in paradox. The knights of the round table are representations of this dualism; material figures of heart and muscle encased in steel, grappling with honor and temptation and human frailty. There are patterns in their stories that we can use to understand ourselves.

Which I continue to do today. 

I can't stress enough how important self-knowledge is, it is everything. Per Jung:

A million zeroes joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one. Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but the fatally shortsighted habit of our age is to think only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations.

Scientific education is based in the main on statistical truths and abstract knowledge and therefore imparts an unrealistic, rational picture of the world, in which the individual, as a merely marginal phenomenon, plays no role. The individual, however, as an irrational datum, is the true and authentic carrier of reality, the concrete man as opposed to the unreal ideal or normal man to whom the scientific statements refer.

Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists as such only in so far as it consciously reflected and consciously expressed by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being. 

I am too busy to blog right now but here's three things to know...

I’m a busy dude. I imagine most men and women with adult commitments are too, so no excuses.

But this past 10 days has seen me fly to Texas for a company retreat, then from there fly straight to Rhode Island for a guy’s weekend. Then back to a busy work schedule Monday, helping out my ailing Dad with a few things, and I leave tonight on a flight to Tennessee. It’s not easy being me … but in all honesty my liver and my sanity are paying the price. 

That has left me no time for blogging. Which sounds like a small price to pay, but when I don’t write here I start getting a bit twitchy. Blogging about all things fantastic provides me some creative outlet that I can’t quite articulate, just that it exists, and I feel its absence acutely.

So here’s a few interesting items to tide me over until I can write something more substantial.

1. My friend Ken Lizzi has a new S&S novel out, Cesar the Bravo. I’ve known Ken mainly through online interactions but got to spend some time with him in Cross Plains TX in 2023 for Robert E. Howard Days. We spoke on a pirate S&S panel together and drank Shiner Bock while watching Master and Commander. Support S&S, support contemporary authors doing good work, and check out Ken’s book. Bravo, Ken (#dadjoke). Learn more here or order on Amazon. BTW you should follow Ken's blog.

2. I continue to work on my heavy metal memoir. I’ve shown it to a few friends and gotten some good feedback. I also sent it or pieces of it to a handful of specialty publishers back in June and was met with deafening silence, so that means in all likelihood it will be self-published. I’m more than good with this; traditional publishing is, with some exceptions, a losing proposition. Writing is brutally hard, and when you’re done with agonizing draft after draft and self-doubt and the realization that you suck as a writer but you keep going and grinding and finally have something readable, the work is just beginning. Because you have to be found in a sea of other books, millions of which are being published in a year. Marketing is the hard part and publishers don’t do this; it’s on the author. Which I will do. I’m sure the memoir will sink beneath the waves after I publish it, but that’s not why I am writing it. I literally need to write this, and I’m pretty happy with how its shaping up. 

3. Carl Jung is the man. I am working my way through Man and His Symbols, which is generally accorded his most accessible work. It’s an odd book; only the first section is his, the rest is written by Jungian disciples/believers or whatever term you want to apply. But his stuff is, to risk hyperbole and hero-worship, a bit of genius. Here’s a few choice quotes; I’ve been writing them down feverishly as I read:

***

It is true, however, that in recent times civilized man has acquired a certain amount of will power, which he can apply where he pleases. He has learned to do his work efficiently without having recourse to chanting and drumming to hypnotize him into the state of doing. He can even dispense with a daily prayer for divine aid. He can carry out what he proposes to do, and he can apparently translate his ideas into action without a hitch, whereas the primitive seems to be hampered at each step by fears, superstitions, and other unseen obstacles to action. The motto “Where there’s a will, there’s a way” is the superstition of modern man. Yet in order to sustain his creed, contemporary man pays the price in a remarkable lack of introspection. He is blind to the fact that, with all his rationality and efficiency, he is possessed by “powers” that are beyond his control. His gods and demons have not disappeared at all; they have merely got new names. They keep him on the run with restlessness, vague apprehensions, psychological complications, an insatiable need for pills, alcohol, tobacco, food—and, above all, a large array of neuroses.

***

 A man likes to believe that he is the master of his soul. But as long as he is unable to control his moods and emotions, or to be conscious of the myriad secret ways in which unconscious factors insinuate themselves into his arrangements and decisions, he is certainly not his own master.

***

But all such attempts have proven singularly ineffective, and will do so as long as we try to convince ourselves and the world that it is only they (i.e., our opponents) who are wrong. It would be much more to the point for us to make a serious attempt to recognize our own shadow and its nefarious doings. If we could see our shadow (the dark side of our nature), we should be immune to any moral and mental infection and insinuation.

Stephen King's Cujo, a review

I believe that, whenever he pens his last novel and his complete literary corpus can be properly appraised, Stephen King will go down as more than just a shock horror author with popular appeal.

King does nasty shocks well—see “Survivor Type” for the ultimate example—but there is more going on in most of his stories than mere horror and spectacle. And a lot more authorial skill. King understands what makes people tick, both internally and in interpersonal relationships, and makes people come alive on the printed page. 

While he may lack the grand ideas of an H.P. Lovecraft or the atmosphere and style of an Edgar Allan Poe, King is a superior character writer.  We understand his universe of fear, even at its wildest, and we feel the same emotions as his characters, because we recognize ourselves in them.

Sandwiched between The Dead Zone (1979) and Firestarter (1980), The Running Man (1982) and The Gunslinger (1982)—stories of protagonists with supernatural mind powers, some set in far-flung futures or postapocalyptic other worlds—Cujo (1981) is in comparison earthly and corporeal, with only traces of the supernatural creeping in at the edges.

The story is set in Castle Rock, King’s finely-wrought fictitious small town in Maine that is home to all manner of horror. But Cujo is not just small-town horror, it’s small-time horror. A story of a rabid dog, and the damage human weakness can wreak on a family.

Horrors sneak up on us when we least expect them. When everything looks fine, and settled, and placid, boredom sets in. We seek novelty, excitement. The opportunity presents itself, and we take it.

Innocence is shattered.

We can try to trace back the reasons why, but often it’s just ill luck.

Or it seems to be.

A married woman, bored and looking ahead at a prosaic and unfulfilling life as a housewife, falls for a transient tennis instructor in a chance meeting.

A massive Saint Bernard sticks its snout into a hole connected to an underground cave and disturbs a bat, and suffers a bite on its snout. Says King, “He had been struck by something, possibly destiny, or fate, or only a degenerative nerve disease called rabies. Free will was not a factor.” Interestingly however Cujo seems to become more than just thoughtless animal inflicted with disease; his eyes are red and full of rage, possessed of something like malice, a murderous intent.

These (random?) events set in motion four days of terror and a relentless finish to the novel. On a placid, hot week in August it all comes to a head as Cujo begins a murderous rampage, dripping foam and blood. A car mechanic and a cop fall victim to his deadly jaws.

Cujo is a fine, tightly plotted little novel and packs some genuine scares, many of them lurking in the closet of four-year-old Tad Trenton. These scenes reminded me of King’s “The Boogeyman,” for my money one of his most terrifying short stories. I recall being terrified of the dark as a kid, and seeing strange shadows move in the light cast by my feeble nightlight, and shivering under the covers. I felt them again here.

I enjoyed the return of Frank Dodd, a serial killer/sexual predator cop who is identified by Johnny Smith, the clairvoyant protagonist of The Dead Zone. Dodd commits suicide before he can be brought to justice, and his ghost continues to haunt Castle Rock in the pages of Cujo. This adds a bit of interesting inter-novel world building to the book.

Tad has premonitions of Cujo/Dodd in the shapes in the recesses of his closet, but he also senses there is something wrong within his seemingly idyllic family. Tad’s father, Vic, pens his son “Monster Words” to keep away the bad dreams and reads them to his son nightly in a totemic ritual.

But words aren’t enough to keep away the real monsters.

Donna and Tad are trapped in a Pinto in the blazing August heat as Cujo waits them out (good thing the 200-pound dog didn’t ram the rear-end of the car, else it would have exploded). Donna she watches her son slowly slip into convulsions from dehydration. Eventually it comes down to it—she must emerge from the confines of the car to wage a hopeless battle against her deepest fear.

Donna’s final showdown with Cujo in a dusty driveway armed with a taped and splintered bat approaches the showdown of Eowyn and the Witch King on the fields of Pelennor. I love this bit of epic description by King; “high wine and deep iron” was unexpected:

Donna cried out in a high, breaking voice and brought the bat down on Cujo’s hindquarters. Something else broke. She heard it. The dog bellowed and tried to scramble away but she was on it again, swinging, pounding, screaming. Her head was high wine and deep iron. The world danced. She was the harpies, the Weird Sisters, she was all vengeance—not for herself, but for what had been done to her boy.

What has been done to her boy… is it Cujo or her own domestic horror come home to roost?

Opening up to the Weird

Despite my lifelong interest in all things fantastic I’ve always been extraordinarily skeptical of the supernatural.

I scoff at ghost stories. I have explanations for everyone else’s unexplained phenomena. I have a hard time believing in the existence of a Christian God or pagan gods. I’ve heard others talk about their experiences and listen politely, while internally knocking holes in their stories and wondering what trauma or defect led them to said belief. 

I still have my doubts. Perhaps cold hard materiality does reign, and all else is illusion. But lately I’ve begun to open up to possibilities of something more.

This is no big revelation caused by a life-changing event. I didn’t see a ghost in my hallway this Halloween, or a zombie rise from a moldering grave. 

It’s just the slow awakening of some new sense in me that I’ve been missing something.

I believe, in some undefined, abstract, still to be explored way, in the supernatural. Because I think without it, we’re missing something vital.

I’m not talking about chain rattling ghosts or UFOs, but something spiritual that is innate to humans and probably necessary for our functioning.

The work of Carl Jung has been my catalyst. We all of us operate with an unseen system, the unconscious. Beyond that, a collective unconscious, archetypes encoded in our brain and nervous system, inherited from millennia of memory.

There is a reason why the Heroes Journey persists across vast gulfs of time, transcends cultures. It’s inexplicable as a physical phenomenon but it’s no less real. We feel its power.

Art cannot be reduced to its component atoms. A scientist can study a fleck of paint, or a letter or a word, but the artists’ whole finished art is something categorically different than its components, subjective, irreducible, ineffable. Stories are real, they have power.

That is a form of magic that is real.

I used to believe in something more than the physical, as perhaps most children do. Then I stopped, perhaps somewhere around high school. School and life and work, failures and disappointments (and deadlines and commitments, to quote one Bob Seger) wrung that out of me.

I’m letting it back in, after nearly four decades. But just a crack. I’m not throwing open the doors of irrationality--there is no chance of that happening. I am just admitting that some aspects of life are beyond rational explanations, that the universe cannot be explained by the movement of subatomic particles.

Here I am, at 52, open to irrationality and accepting the possibility of the weird. Faintly embarrassing but that’s my old sensible self talking. I never saw this coming… which I find wonderful and weird and inexplicable in and of itself. 

The Call of Halloween

Carved Sunday, ready to light up the night...

Halloween always has been and still remains my favorite holiday. Christmas gives it a hell of a run but ultimately loses to Samhain.

Why?

There are zero expectations with Halloween. No dinner parties to host. No gift-giving or spending inordinate amounts of money. I would like to spend more on candy but we get no more than 20 kids visiting our home, located on a relatively isolated cul-de-sac. So I’m "forced" to eat the candy we annually overbuy.

Horror is celebrated. The weird is celebrated. Being weird is welcomed, for at least one day a year.

You can put on a costume and become someone else.

I always find myself experiencing a familiar stir about mid-September: The call to horror. I read a lot—though not as much as I’d like—and one secret to reading is cutting out television. But on Halloween I always up my movie quotient with the macabre.

As mentioned I watched Black Sabbath. I watched the old 1979 ‘Salem’s Lot. A recent film, Oculus (2013).

Last night I watched Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter. 

I loved it. I’ve never seen this one before, based on the title I assumed it was going to be wildly over the top, like the Rocky Horror Picture Show. It was over the top… but 70s British reserved, slow-paced by our modern standards, over the top. Very Hammer, gothic, moody, fun, and sexy. Caroline Munro is a smoke show.

I loved the non-formula, the awkwardness, even the objective spots of poor film-making, because it’s blessedly different. The vampire formula is tweaked a bit, with the blood suckers leaving their victims an aged husk, beautiful young women reduced to corpses of crones. It’s got some great sword-fighting, an interesting sword-and-sorcery/Solomon Kane-esque protagonist with a fun hunchback sidekick. And some well-placed humor, including this sexually charged quip delivered with an over-the-top non-nuance that had me laughing out loud. Forgive the poor quality.

I’m reading horror too, Stephen King’s Cujo. A classic monster story of a harmless Saint Bernard gone mad after a bat bite on the snout infects him with rabies. I haven’t read this one since I was probably, oh, 13 or so? So while I know the basic beats, it feels new to me. I had forgotten about Donna Trenton’s affair, and to King’s credit this adds a complexity I hadn’t seen before. I think Cujo and the monster in the closet are symbols of the monster in us, something terrible that can be awakened in the right (i.e., wrong) circumstance. Tad can sense something in his wrong in his idyllic home that he can’t articulate.

I love decorating for Halloween, too.

I added a new skeleton to my front porch this year, given life with a black cloak and a shepherd hook. Hanging there beside the stairs it might touch your arm with a bony finger as you ascend the stairs … or maybe that was the wind.

I carved jack-o-lanterns with my daughter on Sunday. At age 23 she still maintains the tradition of humoring her old man, though I know she enjoys it. And it keeps away the evil spirits when the veil is at its thinnest.

I cannot express how much joy this brings me and how lucky I am to have a loving family.

I’ve got Hannah reading Pet Sematary. She is a budding horror aficionado who insisted I watch The Haunting of Hill House TV series earlier this year. I think it was started by her teenage obsession with Stranger Things, another show she encouraged me to watch (and I enjoyed; more on that here).

Hannah was later inspired to read Shirley Jackson’s novel and now I’ve given her the gift of her first King. Maybe movies can inspire readers, though she’s always been one.

We can read horror any time we want, we can recommend films and books on any given Tuesday, but Halloween gives me an excuse. And I love it. 

I will break out some Poe, the master, before and/or on Halloween itself. Until then here’s one of my favorites.

Annabel Lee

It was many and many a year ago,

In a kingdom by the sea

That a maiden there lived whom you may know

By the name of Annabel Lee--

And this maiden she lived with no other thought

Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,

In this kingdom by the sea,

But we loved with a love that was more than love--

I and my Annabel Lee--

With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven

Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,

In this kingdom by the sea,

A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling

My beautiful Annabel Lee;

So that her highborn kinsmen came

And bore her away from me,

To shut her up in a sepulchre

In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in heaven,

Went envying her and me--

Yes!--that was the reason (as all men know,

In this kingdom by the sea)

That the wind came out of the cloud by night,

Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love

Of those who were older than we--

Of many far wiser than we--

And neither the angels in heaven above,

Nor the demons down under the sea,

Can ever dissever my soul from the soul

Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams

Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:

And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes

Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:

And so, all the night-tide, I lay down by the side

Of my darling--my darling--my life and my bride,

In the sepulchre there by the sea--

In her tomb by the sounding sea.

Strange Ways, Ace Frehley

Easy choice this week ... in honor of the eternal memory of Ace Frehley, buried this week in Brooklyn. "Strange Ways" appeared on KISS' second album Hotter Than Hell. 

Ace wrote it, and I love it.

I've heard him play this one many times in concert, including as it turns out his second to last ever performance (Tupelo Theater, Derry NH, Sept. 4, 2025) which I was proud to have attended. 

Moral of the story: Don't ever skip the opportunity to see your aging rock heroes when they come around, because it may be your last chance.

I have not heard this particular recording prior, live with Peter Criss 1995, post first KISS breakup. Cool.

Seems impromptu. A bit rough around the edges.

Definitely awesome. Especially his solo starting around 3:15.

RIP Spaceman.

Addendum: Seems you have to click through to Youtube to watch this. Which I recommend. But in case you're feeling lazy I'm also posting the fine studio recording.

We need tastemakers

When I first started getting into sword-and-sorcery fiction, the internet was a fledgling, creaky, place. Charming, but impractical. Think bare-bones HTML websites and USENET and bulletin boards. Interesting, but not much help in finding what you were looking for, save by happy accident. Encyclopedias still had a place in this world. 

So, I read the introductions of books, written by real people.

I found L. Sprague de Camp’s Swords & Sorcery (Pyramid, 1963) and read the stories of Clark Ashton Smith, C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner. I sought them out, and in so doing found authors like Poul Anderson and Jack Vance.

Lin Carter, champion S&S enthusiast.

The best of these early tastemakers was probably Lin Carter, whose glowing and enthusiastic (and occasionally erudite) introductions to the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series led me down many a merry chase. Carter (June 9, 1930 – February 7, 1988) was long deceased, but was posthumously leading me toward many other fine authors like Lord Dunsany and E.R. Eddison and William Morris.

As the internet began to bloom I found the likes of Steve Tompkins at The Cimmerian and articles by Howard Andrew Jones at Flashing Swords and Black Gate. I read about authors like Harold Lamb and Karl Edward Wagner in their essays and sought them out. 

In hindsight I was lucky. I was steered by people who knew what they were talking about. 

In recent years I’ve been steered toward new finds by the likes of Morgan Holmes and G.W. Thomas and Deuce Richardson. Today I try to do that here and carry on the tradition. I am always very pleased when I read comments like this one, which I just got on a recent post about Darryl Schweitzer’s We Are All Legends. 

I love hanging around this blog, for several reason but especially for a post like this. I had never heard of Schweitzer or seen his works in the wild until now. Seeing a "new author" to me is always exciting. Immediately ordered from Schweitzer's Ebay store.

We need people we know and trust and respect to give good recommendations. 

One person who understands this better than most is marketing guru Seth Godin, who I can’t recommend enough for works like The Purple Cow (look, I’m playing tastemaker!). Godin views tastemakers and curators as leaders who define culture by selecting and combining experiences for a specific audience, helping to build trust and navigate an overwhelming flood of content. In his view, tastemakers and curators stand in contrast to algorithms and mass platforms, which tend to promote a race to the bottom by simply surfacing what is popular. 

I love this. Algorithms push us toward an average and mean, and who wants to be average, or mean (as in, not nice)? 

Curation and tastemaking is a place where editors of S&S publications can step up. Set the direction. Show some taste. Differentiate yourself from AI slop. Give me the names of authors and artists whose work has moved you, and tell me why. You might convince me to give them a try.

I don’t want ChatGPT or Instagram algorithms steering me dully, without thought, toward whomever and wherever their programming tells me to go. Which is probably toward cat videos and thirst traps.

Give me odd, weird, and sympatico people.

We need tastemakers.

Who are yours? 

Of Black Sabbath (film) and Ace Frehley

With the Halloween season upon us I had the urge last night to settle in and watch some horror. I spent the better part of 10 minutes scrolling through hundreds of titles on demand before landing on Black Sabbath (1964).

I like modern horror but my preference is the older stuff. Not so much the classic black and white Lon Cheney films, but rather 60-80s, Hammer and on up. I enjoy the slow pace, the gothic visuals, the garish colors, the practical special effects and real props. Black Sabbath had it all thanks to the talents of director Mario Bava.

This turned out to be a pretty good little trilogy of films wrapped up in one production, woven together with Boris Karloff as narrator. I love Creepshow and Tales from the Crypt and their ilk, in collections of shorts you’ll often find more creativity, unexpected twists and bad ends often not possible in a feature length film.

Black Sabbath is full of nasty little shocks. All three shorts were good. The first, “The Drop of Water,” is the creepiest and features a corpse with a truly terrifying frozen death-mask face, but the third, a nice little vampire story, was my favorite. I enjoy it when the monsters sometimes win. I too would not have resisted the beautiful female vampire of "The Wurdulak,” which seems to have inspired at least one scene from ‘Salem’s Lot. The film is visually stunning with beautiful and eerie landscapes and gothic set pieces, like this:

After watching the film I did a bit of research and discovered the Americanized version was neutered of some of its bloodier elements, and the middle story, “The Telephone,” badly altered to remove the main character’s backstory as a prostitute in a lesbian relationship. The Italians were a lot less prudish in the early 60s, it seems.

In hindsight these elements make the plot hang together far better so I’ll probably seek out the original at some point.

Recommended.

***

As I was writing this the news hit that Ace Frehley passed away.

I’ve seen Ace in concert many times, including twice this year alone. He was diminished as all 70s rockers are but still putting on good performances and rocking to the end. Ace was the most charismatic member of the band and its most talented musician. He wrote a few of their classic songs (“Cold Gin” and “Parasite," among others), lent the band an early swagger that made KISS so badass in the 70s, and of course, was responsible for many classic solos delivered with an inimitable, unique style. Loose and jangly, big rings banging off the guitar, but always fitted to the song itself.

Ace was a notorious drinker and drug user and nearly died back in the early 1980s in a car wreck while driving under the influence. He was not the best bandmate and later got into pissing matches with Paul and Gene that lasted to the end of his life. But most fans loved him. I count myself in that group. Watch KISS’ classic interview with Tom Snyder, Ace steals the show with his one-liners and trademark cackling laugh. I also recommend his autobiography No Regrets. How he lived this long is a mystery; the stories of him being driven around New York in the back seat of a limousine with John Belushi and spilling out into club after club for one drunken escapade after the next are legend.

My favorite Ace memory is seeing him in 1994 at The Underground in Lowell after pounding a 12-pack of Zima with my buddy Wayne. We were hammered and so was Ace. I later told this story to my very amused friends at work, left for a long weekend, and returned to find my office plastered with cutout pictures of Ace and Zima bottles. 

Ace would have approved.

You may not like KISS but you cannot deny they did their brand of party rock better than anyone. The number of hits they wrote dwarf the output of most rock bands. Dozens of talented guitarists admit that Ace was the guy that got them to pick up their axe in the first place, among them Slash and Dimedag Darrell.

Say a prayer for his soul and his family and loved ones.

Ace Frehley lead guitar! The coolest.

Addendum: For anyone feeling nostalgic for a lost Ace, I HIGHLY recommend this great interview… he talks about The Elder, KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park, his relationship with the band members, getting into music, alcohol use, and none of it is mean spirited. He’s full of laughter in it:

The 70s were weird, man: Darrell Schweitzer’s We Are All Legends

Sometimes the 1970s seem not so far away. Photos from my childhood confirm I was there; my old albums and books are a tangible affirmation. I can still see and touch that decade, I can smell it when I riff through the pages of my old first edition Dungeon Masters Guide (1979).

But the 70s are also a different, distant country. Things were Weirder then, or at least seemed that way. I don’t believe in ascribing magical properties to arbitrary 10-year windows of time other than to say that if the 60s were the decade of rebellion, the 70s, freed of shackles, were a decade of expression and experimentation.

With the demise of censorship codes and the rise of talented young directors we got some of the best films ever made in the 1970s. Record labels gave unpolished artists the financial freedom and a lengthy creative leash to experiment. The result was heavy metal, punk, … and disco (mistakes were made).

Fantasy fiction was likewise Weird. We had yet to become Sword of Shannara-fied and reading endless series of identical epic quests.

I was listening to a recent episode of the Geeks’ Guide to the Galaxy podcast discussing Flame and Crimson and the history of sword-and-sorcery. Somewhere around the one-hour mark one of the guests—a co-creator of the fine rotoscoped animated S&S film The Spine of Night—observed that the 70s and 80s were possessed of quality where it felt the “guard rails were off” and a reader or viewer felt that anything might happen.

I admire this quality. 

Give me Weird. 

S&S has a streak of this. Weird fiction predates sword-and-sorcery, originating with Edgar Allan Poe and carried on with Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood and H.P. Lovecraft. But it was married to swordplay, probably, with the likes of Lord Dunsany, then continued in works by A. Merritt and Clark Ashton Smith, and on into Jack Vance, Michael Moorcock, Tanith Lee, and Michael Shea. Today you’ll see it in John Fultz and Schuyler Hernstrom, and others.

It’s always been in S&S’ DNA. Howard’s Kull of Atlantis stories, in particular “The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune” and “Striking of the Gong,” are in this tradition. Weird, brooding, dark, unsettling, introspective. They are the heritage of Weird Tales, the magazine from which S&S was born. If you abide by even a floor definition, its name, S&S needs swords (or a general medieval/pre gunpowder level of tech) and sorcery. Sorcery is not magic. It’s wild, dangerous, malevolent, often catastrophic to user as much as target. Think of a Neanderthal handling a hand grenade and trying to figure out whether to throw pin or charge; that’s sorcery. That’s Weird.

In that era a series of weird S&S stories appeared across publications now largely lost to time. Whispers. Void. Alien Worlds. Fantasy Tales. Weirdbook. These died out in the 80s as high fantasy rose to ascendancy, magic replaced sorcery, and the short story fell out of favor, replaced by epic quest. But for a time weird stories about weird characters drifted through these lost pages, including a wandering knight named Julian.

Darrell Schweitzer’s We Are All Legends collects 13 short stories published between 1970 and 1981. It’s a weird, wonderful little book. The stories take place in medieval Europe but of an uncertain date and place, with permeable borders. Magic has not left the world. It’s studded with Arthurian references, of wounded fisher kings and Merlin and Excalibur, even though its decidedly S&S. It’s dark, both in tone but also subject matter. Julian is haunted by his past sins. He believes he is beyond redemption, his faith in God irrevocably shaken, possibly shattered. “God” if there is one appears to be gnostic demiurge, a flawed, limited, and possibly malevolent creator:

I knew that if God is mad, and the signs show that he is, his Foe is mad also, and there can be no hope for the world between them, for creation is but a battleground for two maniacs in their death struggle.

We Are All Legends ticks a lot of my boxes. Obviously S&S, but also King Arthur, horror (some of these stories appeared in DAW Year’s Best Horror). Stories of anti heroes, even ostensibly peerless knights, grappling with a loss of faith and their own brokenness:

“When I was a child I heard about a man, a very, very old man, whose father had been a werewolf. So they took him, the son, whose father had been a werewolf, and shut him up in a tower. He remained there always, never knowing love, never knowing life. I, too, live in a tower, only mine is invisible and I carry it around with me. Its walls are just as strong though.”

“Are you a werewolf then?”

“Only in my heart.”

Purple and awesome.

Schweitzer would have been in his mid-late 20s writing these stories, which is remarkable. He is very underrated, by me and the community at large, though this YouTuber is a huge fan of the book.  

Schweizer confirmed on a Facebook post by Charles Gramlich that the two biggest influences on these stories were Ingar Bergman’s 1957 film, “The Seventh Seal,” and “The Travels of Sir John Mandeville,” a 14th century travelogue (reportedly true) of an English knight into the middle and far east. It doesn’t seem The Life of Sir Aglovale de Galis is among its influences, but We Are All Legends feels something like Clemence Housman’s fine, near forgotten little tale, and its damned, forsaken, wandering knight, a tragic hero. I also noted the influence of Michael Moorock; a possible reference to Corum and the Hand of Kwll. Julian’s wanderings resemble something of a tormented Elric seeking the equilibrium of Tanelorn.

Fabian...

In addition to a fine series of stories the book is blessed with Stephen Fabian illustrations. These are terrific, both the wraparound cover and the wonderful black and white interior accent work. Weaknesses? It is tiring to read all at once; while I am happy having all the Sir Julian stories in one volume, some collections need to be dipped into and sampled from rather than read entire; eating too much rich food or red wine can spoil the effect. Perhaps too much repetition of theme, tone. Some of the stories are perhaps a little too weird for my tastes, untethered to the ground. I feel like this book could have used some more internal character work.

… but that is not what Schweitzer was after. He is of the belief fantasy is examining internal conflicts through explicit, external struggles against real-world demons. From an interview on Black Gate: 

In your estimation what are the elements that make truly great fantasy fiction? Truly great horror? Is “weird fiction” more than simply a co-mingling of these two genres?

The point of much fantasy is to deal with mythic elements directly, rather than through symbol and metaphor only. You could, for example, write a story about someone who “sells his soul” and makes a “Faustian bargain,” i.e. he sacrifices his personal integrity in an irretrievable manner for some dubious goal-say, success in the Mafia, or in Hollywood, or in politics. It needn’t have any fantastic content, and the Faust symbolism would resonate. But the fantasist’s approach is to bring the actual demon on stage and deal with the material directly.

Schweitzer is a former Weird Tales editor, living elder scholar, and longtime champion of the weird, you can find more of his observations here. Here’s a bit of his learned commentary on the weird and my response.

Of genre categories:

These categories are ultimately marketing tools. Horror is what is published as horror. Fantasy is what is published as fantasy. It’s all about labels and which shelf in the bookstore a book is displayed on. Aesthetically, the distinction is not particularly meaningful.

Believe it or not I an S&S historian agree with some of this. Genre categories began as marketing tools and probably function best that way, less so than tools of analysis. However, I do think having genre parameters or aesthetic template to follow, bend, or break, can produce surprising results and possibly great original art. As can deliberate mixing of genres. 

Of the greatness of Tanith Lee (agreed here; we need more Tanith Lee in this world):

Tanith Lee strikes me as the perfect Weird Tales writer, which is probably why WT has published more by her than anyone else. Her work is poetic, sensual, scary, imaginative, erotic if it needs to be. She’s got everything. 

And a final hell yeah; I could not agree more with his assessment of the winner take all state of publishing, death of the midlist author, and our need to cultivate more readers:

Forty years ago, you could assume anything in SF/fantasy would sell more like thirty to fifty thousand copies in mass-market paperback without even trying. Just slap the right kind of cover on it and it would sell this acceptable minimum. Well, maybe the ceiling on genre fiction has come off, and today you get an Anne McCaffrey or a Stephen King who can sell millions of copies, but we have also lost the floor, which protected us. Now the major publishers are only interested in writers who have the potential to be the next McCaffrey or King, not the interesting mid-list writers who are worth publishing for what they are, even if they never will sell a million copies — the Davidsons and Laffertys. We have lost our innocence. Once it was demonstrated that SF/fantasy/horror could go to the top of the bestseller lists, anything that doesn’t is now viewed as a failure by those faceless, impersonal Suits who control corporate publishing.

… The U.S.A. has a population of three hundred million. Two thousand copies is not a lot. We have a reading public the size of Luxemborg’s. What any genre needs to stay healthy is more readers and a means of reaching them.

A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever: The Story of Spinal Tap

Tap crossed that line... which way?

There is a picture of me going to see KISS on their hotly anticipated, sold out 1996 reunion tour. In it I’m standing on my parents’ front lawn with two friends and my brother. All four of us are in KISS makeup.

I’m wearing a Spinal Tap t-shirt.

I love KISS, they’re a fun band who have written some rocking hits. But I also recognize them as ridiculous.

If you've read any of my metal posts here you know I’m a fan. I love the music, I take it seriously. But I also laugh at it. Metal is sometimes awesome, sometimes terrible. Sometimes brilliant, sometimes dumb. Powerful, but sometimes just too damned loud.

Hard rock and metal can be mocked. They should be mocked. Mockery and the ability to absorb it is the sign of a healthy genre, and rock and metal can take it.

Some genres and their fans take themselves too seriously. I see this sometimes in sword-and-sorcery circles; call John Jakes’ Brak or Lin Carter’s Thongor or Gardner Fox’s Kothar what it is—derivative and often dumb, though fun and something I will read and enjoy—and panties get bunched.

But we need good-natured mockery. Parody is a sign of respect that you’ve made it. S&S can take the likes of Mention My Name in Atlantis, and heavy metal can take Spinal Tap. Spinal Tap took the piss out of metal better than anyone before or since in their 1984 mockumentary. And metal bands (most, anyway) love them for it.  We all could use a little more laughter in our lives. Even if the world is ending (it’s not, though one would think so scrolling any social media app) the remedy is laughter.

I just finished reading A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever: The Story of Spinal Tap, and experienced quite a few chuckles. Laughter is rare to pull off in the written form, I have found. This book made me laugh. But I also learned a lot. I love the film, and when I saw there was a memoir coming out penned by director Rob Reiner I knew I had to have it. Published by Gallery Books, my copy at least came signed by Reiner himself, complete with certificate of authenticity. Cool to have a signature of the man who not only gave us the best metal mockumentary ever, but also The Princess Bride, Stand by Me, and a Few Good Men, among others.

Reiner’s signature is not the only cool and unique feature of the book: It’s also double-sided, like the old Ace Doubles. Flip the book over and “book 2,” Smell the Book, is 60 pages of “interviews” conducted by director Marty DiBergi with band members Nigel Tufnel, David St. Hubbins, and Derek Smalls--an oral history of the band in their voices. Which is pretty funny. You get lines like this:

David: I was at Sacred Sacrament. My mom was a big Catholic.

Marty: Religious?

David: No, five foot ten.

Or old album titles like “Jap Habit” and “Bent for the Rent,” the latter a British expression for what you do for the landlord when he’s bugging you and you can’t pay him, so you do him a favor…

But the meat of the book is the memoir portion. A breezy but well-told history of how the principals came to meet each other, make the film, its reception, and lasting legacy. It offers an illuminating, behind the scenes look, and I learned several things I did not know. For example:

• Spinal Tap barely made it to the screen. The studios to whom Reiner pitched the film did not know what to make of it, just about everyone passed on it.
• It made very little money upon its release and Reiner and co. made almost no money even on licensing until a lawsuit spearheaded by Harry Shearer was able to wrest the rights to the film back and amend missing royalty payments. One city in which it was well-received right out of the gate, I’m proud to say, is Boston, in which it played continuously for a solid year.
• Spinal Tap played real shows before the movie came out to sharpen their playing, including at Gazzarri’s on the Sunset Strip—with opening act Iron Butterfly. No one knew who they were or suspected that they were a parody act (this is circa 1982-83, pre-film, and new metal acts were showing up in the scores.) Spinal Tap was just another unknown metal band.
• Reiner refers to several hilarious-sounding scenes that didn’t make the final cut, as 40+ hours of film was ultimately reduced to a lean 82-minute run time. There were often 3-4 versions of a given scene. Apparently some of these deleted scenes are on a special edition that I need to seek out (my copy is believe it or not VHS). For example, originally the band had an opening act called the Dose, who had a beautiful and easy female lead singer; her dalliances with Tap explain the famous scene where the band has unexplained cold sores on their mouths during a record launch party. But this subplot was left on the cutting room floor.
• The dialogue is almost entirely unscripted and improvised. Reiner, Christoper Guest, Shearer and Michael McKean scripted scenes and had the outlines of the movie plotted, but the actual dialogue was ad-libbed, and many of the verbal jokes utterly spontaneous expressions of the characters they created. Even a young Fran Drescher, then 25, fell into her role and extemporaneously came up with “Money Talks and Bullshit Walks.” That’s talent.

Spinal Tap 2 is just hitting and I’m a little worried. I know someone who got invited to an early screening and he was underwhelmed; he described it as just OK, certainly not terrible but lacking the punch and wit of the original. I will see it for myself, but regardless of whether it holds up as a worthy sequel we’ll always have the OG. The ultimate documentary, if you will, rockumentary, of the world’s loudest band.

Atom and Evil, Black Sabbath*

A day late on Metal Friday but today a close look at Ronnie James Dio’s lyrics for “Atom and Evil,” the opening track off The Devil You Know (2009). These are sufficiently abstract that interpretation is required.

Blue skies, once upon a dream

All eyes, never in between

We all once looked to heaven for answers, not to this middle earth.

Then into the garden came the spider

“I’m here for you,” said the spider to the fly

And when I’m through, you can open up your eyes to see

Eden corrupted by the spider/serpent, offering honeyed poison as “truth.” We’ll be masters of the world if we just follow him.

Your world on fire, and the liar won’t let go

Atom and Evil

Atom is an allusion to the biblical Adam but also atomic energy, the development of weapons of Armageddon. And perhaps technology more broadly. The world is on fire as technofascist overlords develop AI Agents to unburden us from grocery lists.

One more promise

We can tame the sun

And then we’ll shine forever

The old promise, of Marx and Ray Kurzweil, that technology will fix all our problems, and we’ll have utopia. Also a reference to the scientists (many of whom were pacifists) who built the bomb, whose release was described as brighter than a thousand suns.

Someday you can cry for everyone

We’ll burn when you were clever

The technologists build bunkers; they’ll shed crocodile tears and count their money as we burn.

Expand your mind, we’ve got a place for you

Just make believe that one and one are always two

Science has all the answers, just “expand your mind bro” and listen to its words. The physical world is all there is, technology doesn’t require governance, or principle.

When into the parlor comes the spider

Just say no!

Atom and Evil

Don’t fall for the sale, the deadly pitch.

Falling’s easy

Rising will never be

So we must rise together

Here are the changes

Powerful harmony

But then there’s no forever

Atom and Evil.

It’s much easier to bend and accept “progress” (which leads to the fall) than to reject it, stand for principle, preserve and protect what is good, live by values. “But then there’s no forever” is a hard lyric to come to grips with; does rejecting atomic technology mean we reject the possibility of man-made utopia/singularity? Is there no way out? Unless…

Maybe if we cry together

Maybe if we cry as one

The tears will fall to chill the fire

And keep everyone from 

Atom and Evil

… we unify.

Dio’s vocals are awesome BTW and I love the heavy doom of this track.

A fun aside; surely Dio must have been aware of the presence of another “Atom and Evil,” a gospel song performed by Golden Gate Quartet in 1946. It too is about the dangers of atomic war. “We’re sitting on the edge of doom” never sounded so harmonious and be-bop friendly: 

I'm talkin' 'bout Atom, and Evil

Atom and Evil

If you don't break up that romance soon

We'll all fall down and go boom, boom, boom!

*Yes, Black Sabbath, not Heaven & Hell, because that’s what this band is.