This week’s issue is a grab-bag of oddness. Hopefully you find something interesting in it. Which reminds me, I should probably say something about the purpose and direction of this newsletter (if it has one).

I’d probably be better off sticking to one thing. Cultivating an audience and giving them lots what they want. I’m sure I dragged my Flame and Crimson audience over and they landed here expecting more of the same.

I offer some sword-and-sorcery, but I’m not interested in only that.

I am interested in life and its magic pockets and spotlighting whatever wonder there is to be found. Wherever that takes me.

Arcane Arts is about my interests, and what I care about.

What does that mean on a week-to-week basis in the newsletter? I can’t say for sure. I’m following my muse. I hope you come along for the ride. If you don’t like the journey, that’s fine. We have an unsubscribe button.

I can’t give you a content calendar. The only thing I can promise is it won’t be boring (to me. And hopefully, not you).

TL;DR, keeping it arcane.

In that spirit, here’s a Warlock van.

Neil Peart documentary on Youtube

Rush fans received an early Christmas gift with the release of “No One’s Disciple,” a thorough and wonderful 1:47:53 documentary of the life of the late, incomparable drummer of Rush.

I’d heard rumors of this but was not expecting to see it available in full on YouTube.​

You’re welcome in advance. It is fantastic in every way. A fair bit of interesting/geeky technical drum, stuff but also plenty of deep emotional appreciation for Peart, who passed away far too early at age 67 from an aggressive form of brain cancer in early 2020. His loss hit me and the Rush community quite hard.

The documentary is built around a series of visits from rock drummers who join Alex and Geddy in the studio to play Neil’s parts. Stuart Copeland playing “New World Man” was a favorite. Interestingly The Police once perceived RUSH as an “establishment band” and took pride in their anti-RUSH stance. Copeland later recognized that attitude as childish and became fast friends with Peart, part of his inner drumming circle that met in Peart’s “cave” for heart-to-heart bro talks.

I loved seeing the dude from Tool struggle with “Overture” from 2112, wrestling with Neil’s complex rhythms and off-cadence drum strikes. Neil wrote his drum work for Geddy’s vocals, making space for his trademark fills rather than fitting them around the singing.

He could do this of course because he wrote all band’s lyrics.

Watching other drummers if not nail then very closely mirror Peart’s playing made me realize it was not his technical skill that made him extraordinary. Peart’s magic was his writing, the lyrics that have us singing and the drum fills that 50 years later have us air drumming at concerts and pounding our steering wheels at red lights.

The Tool dude eventually locks in and kills it BTW. As does the documentary.

Why OpenAI sucks (and AI in the arts sucks, too), part 368

​An article by the Authors Guild serves as another reminder why you shouldn’t use LLMs in the arts.

Actual emails from OpenAI executives reveal:

· They trained their stochastic parrot machine using pirated works to avoid paying royalties

· They look forward (with some measure of delight, it seems) to the day when we can all summon images and text at the press of a button and human authorship becomes irrelevant.

You, the writer, can’t print a song lyric in a book or share music on YouTube without obtaining permission while big companies trample these laws into the mire.

That’s not capitalism, it’s digital oligarchy.

These companies flaunt laws, good taste, and morality.

These companies don’t like you, they deliberately stole from you and me, and they treat artists like medieval peasants. Indentured servants, grist for their relentless mill.

Oh yeah and their products also have a +/- 10% of destroying humanity.

Don’t use AI in the arts. Use your own thought and creativity.

Why would you want to cede that to a machine?

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Early Growing Up Metal feedback rocks

I’ve been very pleased with the early feedback from readers of Growing Up Metal, and most of all the reactions of non-metalheads. As I’ve noted on the blog and here and elsewhere, the book is not a heavy metal history, it’s a memoir of my life, with heavy metal as the backdrop and soundtrack. You don’t have to love metal to read it and can even skip the “Amplifier” sidebars (though I do like these myself).

Here’s a few quotes:

A couple folks took me up on my offer for a free signed copy in exchange for a review in a location of their choice (blog, social media page, Amazon, etc.). I look forward to those.

If you enjoy my writings here and have bought a copy of Growing Up Metal, please consider a short review or a star rating on Amazon or Goodreads or wherever else. It helps the book get found among the thousands of books published daily. Recommend it to a friend.

Perhaps the best bit of feedback I’ve received is this pic, sent to me by a dude who appears in the book: Bryan Shepard aka., “Glenn Tipton” of the Judas Priest tribute band The Priest. Bryan loved Growing Up Metal, came to the metal party for a beer and a signature, and while here revealed he’s not only a fan of the pinball machine Gorgar but has one in his house.

A grab bag of horror, S&S, metal

• It’s the witching season and my annual dark detour into horror has begun. On the blog I review Gary Brandner’s The Howling, a little gothic werewolf shocker that is better than I remembered. With a few warnings attached.
• From a blog I follow, Wormwoodiana, a reminder that we’re in the Centenary of E.R. Eddison’s viking novel Styrbiorn the Strong (published 1926). Here’s one all fans of hard, martial heroic fantasy and historical fiction should read. Criminally underread, a title not nearly as well-known as The Worm Ourbororos. Here’s a review of mine from the archives of the blog.​
• I just finished reading Matt John’s To Walk on Worlds, which proved to be quite good, a cut above (pun intended) much modern sword-and-sorcery. A more complete review/impressions will be forthcoming. For now I simply say, I definitely recommend this.
• It’s the 40^th anniversary of Somewhere in Time, my favorite Iron Maiden album. Here’s a pretty good video of what makes it such a special album, from the technical perspective of a guitarist.

Do you think Somewhere in Time is a perfect album (except for the chorus of "Heaven Can Wait")? Let me know, or if you cast your vote with Powerslave.