The Hundredth Royal-Thomian

 

The Thomian First XI of 1979

The 1979 Royal-Thomian cricket match may not actually have been the hundredth in the series, as it was proclaimed to be, but was certainly regarded, at the time, as the most important Royal-Thomian ever played. Richard Simon’s forthcoming book, STC: The Unauthorised History, captures not only the game itself but also much of the behind-the-scenes competition, lobbying, manoeuvring and occasional skulduggery that accompanied the selection of coaches, team members and other important participants. Below is part of Simon’s description of the match.

✥

Royal College, who had enjoyed a good 1979 season, were favoured to win – though the fisherfolk and market-workers of Mount Lavinia, who often ran informal books on the performance of the College First XI and First XV, loyally bet on St Thomas’s. The Royal captain, Ranjan Madugalle, was an outstanding cricketer: a star batsman with over a thousand runs already to his credit and a future Sri Lanka captain who would later serve as chief of the ICC’s panel of international match referees. Many of his teammates would also play for their country in the near future. The Thomian cohort, too, was talented, but not to the same degree; Royal, after all, was in the enviable position of being able to take its pick of gifted young players from any school within the state system. The advantage became painfully obvious when STC’s batting order suffered an embarrassing collapse with only 154 runs on the board, and by teatime on the second day Royal were able to close their innings sportingly, with two wickets still in hand, having scored 321. 

St Thomas’s batted grimly all through the last day, but before teatime they were down to their tail-enders, Mahinda Halangoda and C.P. Richards, with thirty runs yet to make. Little was expected of either player. Richards was a bowler, not a batsman; Halangoda, an able bat from a cricketing family (his grandfather had coached St Thomas’s in the Thirties), was young and fairly green. Anticipation of an imminent Royal victory brought the President and half his cabinet back to the pavilion; the Royal tents were in an uproar. Richards, joining Halangoda in the middle after Umesh Iddipily was dismissed for 29, walked out to no poetic ‘breathless hush’ but to an ear-splitting din that already had in it the audible timbre of Royalist triumph. The Royal team, Halangoda noticed, had all put on their caps…

©2023 by Richard Simon. All rights reserved.

Beginnings of the Battle of the Blues

Spectators at an early Royal-Thomian
(though most probably not the first)

Adapted from STC: The Unauthorised History 

by Richard Simon (forthcoming)

The origins of Lanka’s oldest public sporting fixture are surprisingly obscure. The Colombo Academy had, in fact, met St Thomas’s College at cricket several times during the late 1870s, but these were irregular matches in which the respective teams were captained by masters rather than boys. Thomas Keble, the great official historian of STC, preferred to call the 1880 match, the earliest to be played by all-schoolboy teams, the ‘first Royal-Thomian’.

His opinion was eventually overruled; today, ‘the first Royal-Thomian’ is generally held to have been played in 1879. The convention is justified by a contemporary Ceylon Observer article, in which it was reported that the match ‘was instituted as an annual fixture on 15 July’ that year. By preferring the earlier date, historians of Royal may claim that the series began with a hat-trick of victories by their side. 

But the teams at the 1879 game, too, were captained by masters: Ashley Walker led the Academy while the Thomian First XI was skippered by its founder, Sub-Warden Rev. Thomas Felton Falkner. It was an important fixture for the Academy, for of the two schools, St Thomas’s had, it seems, much the more formidable cricketing reputation. Academy pupils were given three half-holidays to watch the game, which their side won by a margin of 56 runs. Thomians, sadly, did not get even one afternoon off; Warden Miller, struggling to keep the College from bankruptcy in the wake of the coffee crash, had more important things on his mind than cricket.

Rev. T.F. Falkner, DSO,
captained St Thomas’s in 1879

The 1880 fixture, in which the teams comprised boys only, was played, like the previous year’s, on Galle Face Green, although the precise site is disputed. It is known that the teams arrived from their respective schools by boat across the Beira Lake – then a common mode of transport in Colombo and its suburbs, which were still clustered mainly about the lake. First in to bat for the Academy, which won the toss, was Benjamin ‘Benny’ Bawa, who would later become an eminent lawyer and father of the renowned architect Geoffrey Bawa. Young Benny was given out for three runs, but despite such an inauspicious beginning, the Academy again won the game, this time with 62 runs in hand.

Much to Thomian chagrin, the boys from San Sebastian went on to repeat their winning play the following year as well. Happily, this embarrassing hat-trick was immediately matched by their Mutwal rivals, who promptly won the next three matches in a row. Then, in 1885, came the infamous Nine Runs Match, over which Royalists and Thomians have argued ever since...

©2023 by Richard Simon. All rights reserved.

Road to Nowhere

Utopia Avenue
by David Mitchell

I’ve been an avid David Mitchell reader ever since Ghostwritten. I loved the supernatural elements in his work as long as they were presented as mysteries that obviously contained a secret logic and backstory of their own, albeit one the reader was never privy to. That reticence on the part of the author added depth and power to his stories and the characters who appeared in them. And as Mitchell’s work matured through Cloud Atlas, Black Swan Green and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, each book more fully realised than its predecessor, I thought I had found another lifelong favourite contemporary novelist like Iain Banks, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan or Gene Wolfe. 

The came the speed bumps. The Bone Clocks was a brilliant page-turner but its revelations caused that ghostly, essential backstory to lose its mystery and power, to the detriment not of the book itself but, alas, all of Mitchell’s previous writing instead. This was followed by the genuinely frightening Slade House, which in spite of its success within the limited parameters set by genre-fiction icons like Clive Barker and Stephen King, hammered the last coffin-nails into the backstory and, moreover, utterly failed to satisfy as a David Mitchell novel.

And then this. It’s been out for almost three years now, so I shan’t bother to tell you much about it. It’s set in the Sixties. London. Pop music business. The story follows a band that almost makes it, but fails to crack America. There are lots of fictitious cameos from famous real stars, but – as someone said on goodreads.com – they’re no more lifelike than their waxworks at Madame Tussauds. One exception is the infamous Don Arden, who appears here as some kind of brutal Mephistopheles, an agent of pure evil, with Steve Marriott in his thrall; good call there. Mitchell’s own invented characters are, to be fair, more rounded: but what a dull lot they are, and how tedious they are as a band. The lead guitarist provides the supernatural link with Mitchell’s earlier works, but frankly that’s all a bit tedious, too.

As a rock fan who grew up in the Seventies and who is himself a musician, Utopia Avenue should have been right up my street. And at first, I did quite like it; but that should have been a warning, since one of my favourite authors writing about my favourite subject should have been thoroughly enjoyable to read, not just likeable.

Still, it took some time for the scales to fall. The book is very easy going, written in a rather simplified and deformalized version of Mitchell’s characteristic style that seems to take aim at the young adult market. It moves along at quite a clip. It’s a pleasant enough read, almost too action-packed in places, but when it was all done with, I really had to ask myself why I’d bothered. It is only now, two years after I read it, that I have finally admitted to myself how bad a novel Utopia Avenue really is. Hence this belated review.

My Favourite Guitarists, Part II

Here is the second part of a ramble about my favourite guitarists, inspired by a jazz-vs-rock argument with a friend. Part I is here; all the necessary preamble is in that post, so I’ll just dispense with formalities and dive right in.

Pete Townshend

This list isn’t in any real order. If it had been, Pete would have been a lot higher on it. He was the first guitar player who really inspired me, my first ‘favourite guitarist’. His music can be imaginative and exploratory, tender and confessional, yet never loses its open-handed, life-affirming impact. It slaps sense into you. As a guitarist, he was one of the electric innovators: he showed people how you could torture a guitar into making sounds it hadn’t been designed to, and thereby greatly expanded the sonic palette of rock guitar.

Jim Morrison used to talk a big game about the Dionysian spirit of rock, but The Who could show him a thing or two about that. For all that they comprised four very different and idiosyncratic personalities, the band on stage were always a collective manifestation of Pete Townshend: Roger brought the rock ’n’ roll posturing, Keith the vandal spirit, John the musical elegance; Pete himself supplied the artistry, and the brains. He wrote the songs, though John would contribute a couple now and then. Their records displayed their musical craft and his songwriting talent, but live was where The Who excelled. For all the crashing and falling about, the music never faltered. They were broke for years when they started because they had to keep replacing the instruments they smashed on stage. Fun fact: Pete had kicked Abbie Hoffman – a man who incorporated in his person all that is irritating about hippiedom – offstage minutes before they gave the performance captured below.

B.B. King

Muddy Waters was the electric blues pioneer. The other two Kings, Albert and Freddie, was each great in his own way. Buddy Guy, a bit younger than they, was a worthy contender. B.B., though, was the finished article. He was at his absolute best just before he was discovered by White listeners (check out Live at the Regal), but this 1972 clip, live at Cook County jail on his home turf of Chicago, beats any other filmed performance of his that I have ever seen and heard. Although he, too, is an improvising guitarist, his playing is the polar opposite of the Joe Pass/Howard Roberts school – it’s all in the tone, those rich and varied timbres, with every note given its own expression. There is a very real sense in which electric guitar never got any better than this. Certainly nothing B.B. himself recorded or filmed after this was much good. He’d made it by then, after a long hard career on the chitlin’ circuit, and he was milking it as he had every right to do. Fun fact: how blue can you get? Exactly this blue, and no more. Scientists have proven it.

Robert Johnson

Po’ Bobby, as I like to call him, probably never held – probably never saw – an electric guitar. He made just two recordings in his life, one in 1936 and another in 1937. Each contained the same songs as the other. A year after he made the second he was dead, killed in a fight over a woman at the rock ’n’ roll-approved age of 27.

His short, hard life distilled all the poverty, racial oppression and violence of the American South. His father abandoned his mother, fleeing Johnson’s birthplace, Hazelhurst, Mississippi, ahead of a lynch mob. Bobby himself grew up hungry and often in trouble with the law; he used at least eight surnames during his short life. Known today as the ancestral begetter of rock guitar, he was a mediocre player in his early years; he then suddenly disappeared (something he was wont to do) and reappeared a year later playing as you hear him on the recording below. Word got about that he’d sold his soul to the Devil at a crossroads outside Clarksdale, Miss., for the ability to play like the Delta blues hero Son House. House, doubtless feeling the young hellhound on his trail, wasn’t shy about putting that story about himself. Johnson was the kind of man of whom you would believe it.

If you’ve don’t often listen to old, pre-WW2 recordings, you’re going to have trouble with this. Persevere, however, and the music will eventually possess you. Playing in the style of Johnson remains a challenge even for capable guitarists today; just ask Eric Clapton about that. Fun fact: when Brian Jones first played Robert Johnson’s album to Keith Richards, Keith’s first question was, ‘Who’s the other guitarist?’

Richard Thompson
In Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity, the rock-snob narrator reserves for Richard Thompson the ultimate rock-snob accolade. I don’t know if I would go that far, but the man’s a master. Emerging from the seminal folk-rock band Fairport Convention, he carved out a career (and a life) that was very un-rock, becoming a strict practising Muslim and divorcing his wife and musical partner, Linda Pettifer, for not being religious enough or something. His austere onstage presence does evoke the mullah, and seems wholly at odds with the wrenching, often bitter emotional storm he whips up on his guitar. His searing music is a product of deep feeling and long study; in the clip below, you’ll hear the use of drones as in mediaeval European folk music, exotic scale snippets, atonal passages and a tremolo effect like the voice of Malak Jibreel, but the result sounds anything but schooled.  He’s as good, or better, on acoustic, correctly treating it as a completely different instrument from electric – but I’d have to post another video for that, wouldn’t I? Here it is. Not-so-fun fact: he walked out on Linda just after they’d had their third child; Shoot Out the Lights was written during roughly the same period.

Reeves Gabrels

Tin Machine, the hard-rock band David Bowie unaccountably decided to form at the end of the Eighties when the mainstream career he’d begun to enjoy with Let’s Dance began to pall on him, were never a very attractive proposition. The rhythm section were two born-to-privilege louts who were best known for working with Iggy Pop. Bowie himself sang and played saxophone and wore shiny pea-green suits on stage. The music, played mostly on ugly headless Steinberger guitars, was mostly terrible. The saving grace, if you can call it that, was Reeves Gabrels.

The metal boys can play microdemisemiquavers at 300bpm and use the sludgiest of distorted tones but they’re a carnival house of horrors compared with the authentically intimidating Gabrels. This now-elderly man (he wasn’t young even in the Tin Machine days) is an expert at negotiating the interface between beauty and terror. What are those notes he’s playing? What scale is that? Hell, are those even notes? It all goes by so fast the questions become moot before they’re fully formed in your head. He’s also great at layering sheets of deliciously tormented chordal sound, rich with harmonies that shimmer like the blade of a kris, over rhythm tracks. His brilliance couldn’t save Tin Machine, a concept that should have been drowned at birth, but Bowie, who knew a great guitar player when he saw one, kept him on after the band folded, relying on him as a key member of his live backing group and also to help produce and play on those terrifying albums the Dame made in the Nineties: 1.Outside, Earthling, ...hours.

I think this live performance of a classic older Bowie tune captures everything I like about this guy. Yes, of course it’s schooled brilliance. And yes, it’s exhibitionistic and over the top – it’s meant to be. But if you ever heard Bowie’s original single (with Robert Fripp on guitar) and thought its razor riffage couldn’t be improved upon – c’mon, check this out. Fun fact: the song features a guest performance by Black Francis, aka Frank Black.

Andy Summers

Reeves Gabrels is not someone you can listen to every day. This guy, on the other hand, I could listen to all day. He’s a real veteran – his career goes back to the Sixties – and he began as a jazz musician, a form he returned to in later life after his world-buggering success with The Police left him able to indulge a taste for music that makes no money.  

His work with The Police owed a lot to jazz; he stole from bebop players the trick of omitting thirds from his chord voicings to create major-minor ambiguity, often filling the resulting harmonic space with suspended seconds, suspended fourths and their dominant extensions. Sting was left to insert the thirds...where he could. The two ex-jazzmen each had harmonic gifts that complemented the other’s perfectly; Sting only found his mojo as a songwriter after meeting Summers. The whole-tone bass line on Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic: Sting could never have got away with that if he didn’t have Andy to help extend those notes harmonically.

Not content with rewriting the parameters of pop-song harmony, Summers is also important in musical history for adding an entire new palette of sounds to the electric guitar. He is the master of electronic tonal effects. People like The Edge and Ed O’Brien of Radiohead are just followers in his footsteps; only Fripp and Adrian Belew, who sprang from very different roots, can really compete. The Police arrived on the scene just as digital recording and tone shaping became possible, and he made the field his own. He also invented (or at least popularised) a new rock guitar sound, relatively clean and chorus-based, which became an Eighties cliché – Prince used it on Purple Rain – and which you can still hear at any Colombo nightspot where live music is played. 

I was going to post my favourite guitar solo of all time – on Driven To Tears – but decided not to because it’s in the same musical jurisdiction as Gabrels on Scary Monsters. So here, instead, is the song on which I think his sonic experimentation with The Police is most clearly and expressively heard. Remember, as you listen, that drums and bass apart, there’s just on guy on stage making all those sounds. Fun fact: at home or abroad, I have never seen any cover guitarist play the guitar parts of Message In A Bottle or Every Breath You Take correctly. The five-fret stretch required for those suspended chords (or the string-skipping skills you need to avoid the stretch) are very difficult to do fluently in a live setting – unless, of course, you happen to be Andy Summers.

Warren Haynes

The Frog King comes on like an out-of-shape redneck with a face that even a mother might have trouble loving. Then he opens his mouth. Luminous honey pours out. After that he starts playing his guitar, and that honey just keeps on drippin’.

Emotive, tasteful and steeped in tradition, Haynes is not really a songwriter, although his on-and-off jam band, Gov’t Mule, do have a few original numbers. He’s really a cover artist, at his best reinterpreting classic songs from the past. He’s been in the Allman Brothers for years, playing co-lead guitar with Derek Trucks. His net is cast wide: I’ve seen him sing and play Into The Mystic, Wish You Were Here, Son House’s Death Letter Blues and even Elvis Costello’s Alison. He’s also a promiscuous collaborator, playing with everyone from John Schofield (this one’s for you, David) to, er, the Grateful Dead. Here is one of my favourite performances of him on video: Haynes covering Neil Young’s Cortez the Killer with the Dave Matthews Band. 

More to come in Part III

My Favourite Guitarists. Have Away!

I’ve been having an email argument about guitar players with my friend David. He, like me, plays the guitar, and has done so, I think, for rather more than fifty years. He also plays stand-up bass, organ, piano and heaven knows what else, and has received the Order of Australia for his work in choral church music. As a musician, he functions on a far higher level than the amateurish one on which I operate.

Though he is only a few years older than me, David’s musical taste and mine are a generation apart. I love all kinds of music but am basically a rock fan, and though I play a lot of different styles of guitar, rock was my departure point. His taste, I suspect, ranges as widely as my own, but his preference set barely intersects with mine. He’s a jazz lover, and the kind of jazz he loves best is the kind that was popular when his parents were courting. He’s old-fashioned in that way – and in many others too, more power to him.

David is a temperate, courtly gent of becoming humility. It is very hard to argue with him because he won’t argue back. His sweetness and tolerance are thoroughly aggravating, so one is naturally driven to provoke him ever more outrageously. Mainly the effort is futile, but not long ago I found a tiny chink in the shining armour. I told him that no jazz guitarist ever knew how to get a decent sound out of an electric guitar till rock guitarists came along and showed them how.

That fetched him. In reply, I was frostily informed (this is the only portion of our exchange that I plan to quote directly) that he was ‘happy to leave the screams, the bent strings, the fuzz, the waa-waa and the burn-out to others,’ before proceeding to explain to me what jazz guitar was all about. He illustrated his exegesis with the names of famous jazz guitarists, each exemplifying one of the particular virtues he listed.

My riposte was not pacific. I was especially scathing about two offenders, Joe Pass and Howard Roberts, whose crimes against art and the guitar I regard as particularly black. He was, as he always is, gentle and forgiving in reply. Ah, David, if you but knew how those coals of fire burn...

I hadn’t the heart to trouble him further, but I thought it a bit of a shame that, after I’d roughed up his darlings, I gave him no opportunity to belabour mine. I thought at first to do it in an email, listing my favourite guitar players for him to have a go at, but then I thought: why not write a blog post and give everyone a chance to rough them up, and me too in the process if they felt so inclined?

So here it is, folks, Notes from Ceylon’s Top Twenty guitarists, plus a few extras thrown in because, like a certain big-selling brand of artificial snack, once you pop it’s hard to stop. I compiled the list by writing names down as they occurred to me, figuring that the ones I thought of first would be the ones I liked best, or at least the ones that have influenced me most as a guitarist. That didn’t quite work out, but I’ve kept the order, more or less as it came to me. Your opinions, etc, welcome.

😎

Los Lobos

Two for the price of one. These guys, to me, exemplify really good guitar music. David Hidalgo is the virtuoso and sometimes shows off a bit, but he and his southpaw buddy César Rojas are all about playing what suits the song best. There’s rarely a superfluous note; everything fits perfectly together to manifest the music and encourage the listener to embrace it. In addition to guitars both acoustic and electric, they are also capable players on a variety of guitar-like Latin American instruments like the bajo sexto and the charangua, which add an ethnic flavour to Los Lobos’s music that has grown more pronounced over the years. Their other flavours are R&B, country and rock. Fun fact: they once complained that Paul Simon had ripped them off on songwriting credits.

Cliff Gallup

Once upon a time there was Western swing, a forgotten musical form rooted in the blues and now hopelessly confused with country-and-western, which it helped engender. But Western swing also gave rise to another form – rockabilly, whose earliest big stars were Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and, er, Johnny Cash. Gene Vincent and his Blue Caps came along right after those pioneers.

Vincent’s guitar player, Cliff Gallup, was by far the best of the old rockabilly guitarists. His playing was influenced by Western swing as well as the more urbane sounds of jazz, but he could play in just about any style of the day. Rockabilly, though, was the art that he truly made his own. Unusually, he played with all five fingers of his right hand: thumb and index to hold a flatpick, middle and ring fitted with fingerpicks and the little finger reserved for the vibrato bar. Fun fact: When Cliff died in 1988, his widow begged the press not to mention his rocking days with the Blue Caps in the obituaries, but rather that he’d been director of transport and maintenance for the Chesapeake, VA school system.

Neil Young

Maybe it’s just sour grapes, but gratuitous exhibitions of virtuosity often leave me cold. Neil, whose playing on both electric and acoustic often attains the sublime, is as far from being a virtuoso as you can get; just listen to what George Harrison had to say about his lead playing. However, it was precisely Young’s ramshackle but compelling style that encouraged me to pick up the electric guitar; if he could get away with that, I reasoned, anyone could get away with anything. On acoustic, he’s a wholly different creature: his playing is fluent, economical and evocative, carrying a haunting quality that fits his music perfectly. I love his work on both instruments.

Something the people on my list have in common is that, unlike jazz musicians most of the time, they tend to perform music that they wrote themselves. This often makes it impossible to consider their playing as an entity apart from the music as a whole. Neil Young is one of two people whose music helped get me through the worst period of my life (the other is David Bowie) and his music means a great deal to me. He would have been higher on this list if I’d deliberately set out to order it by preference. Fun fact: Neil Young is so analog he used to fit his amps with pedal-operated servos to turn the knobs.

(The particular version of Powderfinger

 I want to share with you

isn’t on YouTube, so please click here.)

Albert Lee

My introduction to Albert Lee was watching him play behind Eric Clapton at Guildford Civic Hall in 1980. I don’t think I’d really heard a chicken-pickin’ guitarist before and when he got to do his party piece at the time, Country Boy, about halfway through the set, I was blown away. Later, after I’d become familiar with the likes of James Burton and had a basis for comparison, I was still hugely impressed. He’s actually an all-rounder and a veteran of the music scene, but that high-energy style of country-rock is his bag. For a guitarist, at least, it’s exciting music to listen to. I said I don’t care much for virtuosity for the sake of virtuosity, but there are exceptions. Fun fact: he can sing too, and this more or less impromptu version of Jimmy Webb’s The Highwayman is ace. Listen from 1:56:00; there’s a slight preamble which is, I think, worth hearing, before he starts.

And then there’s this.

Paco de Lucia

I don’t listen to him as often as I do some other guitarists on this list, but he stands here not just for himself but for an entire musical form, flamenco. My friend and former bandmate Pascal, who plays keyboards and whose missus is Spanish, says flamenco and rockabilly are physically the hardest styles to play, and I agree; I can’t play flamenco at all. De Lucia remains, by general acclaim, Top Flamenco Guitarist; Martin Carthy of Steeleye Span once told me that he’d watched the Guitar Trio – John McLaughlin, Al di Meola and Paco de Lucia – playing live and ‘there was only one guitarist in it.’ I don’t go in much for exhibition matches, but who am I to disagree? Have a look for yourselves and see. Fun fact: it’s a wicked lie that you can’t be a proper flamenco guitarist unless you need to shave three times a day.

Tom Verlaine

If you had those initials, what else would you call your band? Television came out of the New York punk scene that grew up around a club, CBGB's – legendary today though it was a just filthy boîte not much bigger than a coffin. The Ramones, Patti Smith, Talking Heads and Blondie all came out of there. So did Television, which was a punk band who could (i) play and (ii) didn’t care who knew it. I think they only ever made two albums; their first, Marquee Moon, is the classic. The second guitarist, Richard Lloyd, is Verlaine’s ideal foil. Verlaine plays lead guitar, sings (punkily but Romantically) and, of course, wrote all the songs. His is a unique voice on guitar; no-one before or since has sounded quite like him. Fun fact: one of Television’s best songs is about falling into the arms of Venus de Milo.

Joni Mitchell

You never knew Joni Mitchell was a great guitar player? Well, listen to this: she milked the muse by tuning her guitar in strange ways (e.g. CGCEGC, or C#D#G#F#G#C#) and catching the melodies and harmonies that fell out of the instrument as she noodled about on it. She would turn them into songs, record them and play them live. In the early days, this meant this meant long pauses between songs while she retuned; later, it meant a guitar shop behind her on stage, every instrument tuned differently. Heaven knows how she kept track of them.

When you use an alternate tuning, you have to learn the fingerboard all over again. It would be, if you were playing a piano, as if some of the black and white notes suddenly had different values: the one that used to be C is now C#, the one that used to be F is now G. It’s not that hard to do if you stick to a few popular open or alternative tunings – open G or DADGAD, for instance – but imagine doing it for every tuning under the sun. Well, that was Joni. She got a lot of respect from jazz musicians (the Pat Metheny Group once served as her backing band, Jaco and all) but she transcends all musical forms. She is her very own unique amalgam of folk, jazz and Laurel Canyon Sixties hippiedom. Fun fact: she also paints, and her method is the same – slap on some paint, see what it suggests, then slap on some more to enhance the suggestion.

Continued in Part II>>

A Big Let-Down

Home Truths

by David Lodge

There’s a blurb on the back of my Penguin paperback, allegedly from the New Republic: ‘Lodge is pure dazzling style, book after book, in his fusion of form and content.’

Well, that may be true of David Lodge’s other books but it certainly isn’t true of this one, which is pretty transparently adapted from a playscript. Lodge admits this in a foreword, but you don’t need to read that to figure it out. All the action, plot and character in this novella emerge through dialogue. We never get a direct look inside the characters’ minds and the non-dialogue sentences in the text read like stage directions. If that’s a stylistic fusion of form and content, I’m Italo Calvino.

For all that, the book is readable enough, even gripping – stylishly (yes) written, tightly plotted, its four very believable (if rather stock) characters life-changingly affecting one another by their interactions. The excitement and tension rise as one reads on. And then, right at the end, comes the big, big letdown, a huge deus ex machina that dissipates all the carefully cultivated excitement, rendering everything that went before irrelevant and pointless. I really had developed an interest in Lodge’s characters and situation by that point, and the realisation that everyone was going tamely back to Square One without properly working out the consequences of the plot left me disappointed and annoyed.

The big DEM does bear a thematic relation to the action that has gone before, but affects it not a whit except to invalidate it. Chin-stroking readers and reviewers might find something to praise in the symbolic congruence, but not I. This is too much a case of an author painting himself into a corner plot-wise and calling in the cavalry because he doesn’t know what else to do.

Working on the Blockchain Gang

Théâtre D’opéra Spatial: AI-generated artwork by Jason Allen

Some people imagine you can do anything with money. They are, obviously, people with very limited imaginations, but there are so many of them that they manage somehow to keep this absurd idea afloat on the ocean of popular culture.

In the last couple of years, these people have been getting very excited about NFTs – and if you don’t know that stands for ‘non-fungible tokens’, sir or madam, I envy you. A NFT is an image, sound or video file, created either by digitally photographing, recording or filming actual objects or sounds, or else by using one of the many computer programs available to create artificial ones. Whichever the method used, the ultimate product, in ultimate terms, is the same: a string of ones and zeros parked on a server somewhere in cyberspace, or encoded on a passive device like a CD-ROM.

NFTs are putative works of art. In reality, of course, they’re just data, some arrangement of bits and bytes that anyone can copy easily enough, even modify to their taste if they wish. But the original version, though humanly indistinguishable from any copy made of it, is uniquely identified by the data trail it has left behind in cyberspace since its ‘creator’ brought it into being. This purely theoretical uniqueness makes possible the existence of what you might call a digital-art market, which a lot of otherwise intelligent folk are getting awfully excited about.

NFTs appeal to two kinds of people. The first are those who collect art for its investment value, or for the bragging rights that come with ownership of a ‘masterwork’. They may or may not love the work itself; that is secondary. The most important thing about a work of art, for such people, is that they own it. These are the customers who will drive the NFT art market if and when it ever gets going.

The other people to whom NFTs appeal are commercial artists operating at a certain level. They may well be as capable of making ‘fine art’ as the poor fools who toil in hardship and obscurity, driven by their muse to create a thing nobody wants to buy. Their technical prowess may be as great or even greater. But these are bread-and-butter pragmatists who have learnt or come to believe that they do not possess the extraordinary ability (and luck) it takes to impress ordinary people who have never before seen anything like the picture, poem, concerto, movie or whatever it is that they have just produced: that they lack, I mean to say, the genius of a Greco, a Milton, a Rachmaninov or a Kubrick. Still, they know they have more than enough talent to produce something that, while not compellingly original, is still attractive enough to find a buyer. The customer might be someone who likes decoration for its own sake, perhaps, or wants something to hang in their offices or dental surgeries to soothe their clients, or to help sell their brand of vegan sausages or life insurance. Such buyers, too, form a market, even if it isn’t what we snobs normally call the ‘art market’.

Artists operating at this level – known as illustrators, graphic designers, visualizers, copywriters, music suppliers and a plethora of other names, depending on the media they work in – spend most of their time creating art that will pay the rent, put food on the table and so on, rather than the art that they would rather make. Some of them, if they grow prosperous enough to have spare time, will spend that time in self-expression, making art for art’s sake. Most of the time, the works so produced will exhibit no more aesthetic merit than the stuff they churn out during the rest of the week. This, then, is the type of artist – the type that nurses aspirations above his or her creative station – who is most attracted to the concept of NFT art and (in my experience) the first to try to ‘break into the market’ themselves. 

And this leads to a most intriguing paradox, because the type of artist to whom the idea of NFTs most appeals is exactly the kind of artist whose work does not command the kind of interest and reputation that (along with, of course, antiquity) make a work of art valuable. They – we, I suppose, and our name is Legion – are expert fabricators of kitsch, authors of pretty, briefly diverting trifles. Anyone who buys our NFTs is paying good money for something that nobody else is ever going to covet. NFT buyers, remember, aren’t interested in acquiring art for its artistic merit but only for the pecuniary and status value into which that merit can be converted. But if the work – the NFT – has no artistic merit, it has no pecuniary or status value either.

We seem to be in a Catch-22 situation here, folks.

§

To be honest, NFTs and their moneymaking potential fail to enthral me. Like ‘the cloud’, cyberspace, cryptocurrencies and the metaverse, they’re just another vaporous scam set up by crooks to part fools from their money by convincing them that something imaginary exists. Pull the other one, pal, is my usual reaction.

But it seems to me that the NFT delusion, peddled and bought into by the blockchain gang, is closely related to something else that’s been exercising the minds of those who make their living out of producing things that aren’t quite ‘art’ but share the same creative processes and aesthetic conventions. They’ve been palpitating about it a lot on social media lately. A few days ago one of my friends (a photographer) posted about some new ‘photographs’ – art images really – that had been created by an artificial intelligence (AI) program. OMG OMG, went the thread of his remarks, we photographers will soon be out of a job. Another photographer weighed in, pointing out that somebody had to take the original photos, so there would still be a human input. He didn’t explain why, in a world of spy satellites, automated webcams, sea turtles fitted with GoPros and robot telescopes photographing the early-morning light of Creation itself, the photos used by the AI still had to be ones taken by a human being. Another person (an architect) then came on the thread to warn, Jonah-like, that architecture and painting would be next to go. 

At this point I butted in to say that both these redoubts of human uniqueness had already fallen, only to be informed that I was wrong: AutoCAD and Adobe Illustrator and suchlike still require human input. It didn’t seem to occur to these guys that once you have AutoCAD and Illustrator and stuff like that, you’ve already transferred the creative process out of the real world and are working in an analogical space, manipulating ones and zeros rather than pens, brushes and paper. You’re not painting or taking photos, you’re doing mathematics. And how – you being a mathematical ignoramus – are you able to do that? It is always the machine that processes your ones and zeros into an image, or sound, or text. How long did you expect it to be before the human factor in that operation was eliminated altogether?

Well, now it has. But what is it, really, that the AI is producing in the form of these images, words, sounds et cetera? Is it art? And if it is, what makes it so? And then, of course, the Big Question: is it any good?

For the artists who make art for a living rather than under compulsion from their muse, these are haunting, terrifying questions. The obsession and terror come from the thought that – if AI productions can be art, and are good enough to pass for the ‘real’, i.e. human-made, thing – then we’re all going to be out of a job. And that, I think, is why this is the kind of artist who falls for the lure of NFTs. It sounds like a way to infuse value into work that may soon, otherwise, be worthless. Who is going to pay them for their art if an AI can create something equally acceptable for nothing, or next to nothing? All over the world, people who rely on their creative abilities to make a living are wondering how long they can keep on doing so. NFTs sound like one possible solution, and the concept has the art-market snob value of exclusivity built in, so it’s hardly a surprise that the idea tempts many commercial artists. But – as I pointed out earlier – they’d be foolish to fall for the scheme, because they don’t, by definition, have the talent to swing it.

§

On, then, to those terrifying questions about AI-produced ‘art’. 

Let us try to answer them.

The first two are pretty easy. Unless your definition of art is either proprietorial or snobbish – the kind of definition that excludes children’s drawings or images originally produced for commercial purposes – then yes, AI art is art. What makes it art? Well, what makes anything art? Here’s my working rule: any non-natural object designed to engage the emotions through the senses is art. This includes things like cars, shoes, even that hideous gold toilet-paper dispenser on Putin’s yacht. A thing doesn’t have to be good, nor be useless for any practical purpose, nor command fourteen times its reserve price at Sotheby’s, to make it art; if it just makes you want to look at it, or listen to it, or touch it, or whatever, that will do. It’s art.

This, then, brings up the valid but dicey question of intention. The human artist aims to convey some thought or feeling. The AI, as far as we can tell, is just following instructions. Does that make a difference? But then, the effect of an artwork on its audience is rarely exactly the one its maker intended. Does that make a difference?

Stalemate.

So let’s leave it and move on to the big question. Is art produced by AIs any good?

In my opinion, it varies. Recently, I was sent a New Yorker article about an AI that can write poetry in the style of any famous poet. All you have to do is feed the beast a few examples of the poet’s oeuvre and it will produce reams and reams of the Good Stuff. The writer of the article seemed to think it was pretty good. He included a couple of examples of poetry the AI had written in the style of Philip Larkin. Here’s one.

The Invention

Money is a thing you earn by the sweat of your brow

And that’s how it should be.

Or you can steal it, and go to jail;

Or inherit it, and be set for life;

Or win it on the pools, which is luck;

Or marry it, which is what I did.

And that is how it should be, too.

But now this idea’s come up

Of inventing money, just like that.

I ask you, is nothing sacred?

Now, this isn’t gibberish; far from it. And it contains words that you can imagine Philip Larkin using, and captures some of the oddities of his syntax and punctuation, so good work on that. But the idea it expresses is mundane and trivial. The lines evoke no feeling and certainly none of that throat-catching emotion that grips you when you read a line of verse that the poet has got exactly right. And – fucking hell, as Larkin himself might have said – it doesn’t even rhyme. Larkin only wrote about seven or eight poems, out of the hundreds he published, in free verse; and he was a rhymer with a particular style, too. But even if we give the industrious AI a pass on that, The Invention could never be mistaken for anything by Philip Larkin. It can’t even be mistaken for a poem.

I thought I would demonstrate the difference by reproducing an actual Larkin poem (that doesn’t rhyme). I reckon a good choice is Days: far from his best, but about the same length as the impostor. Hope no-one sues me...

Days

What are days for?

Days are where we live.

They come, they wake us

Time and time over.

They are to be happy in:

Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question

Brings the priest and the doctor

In their long coats

Running over the fields.

If you can’t see any real difference between that and The Invention, gentle reader, maybe NFTs really are for you after all.

But there are other AI-produced works that are a lot more like art in that they evoke, through the senses, real ideas and emotions. Some time ago there appeared, in my Facebook feed, an album of ‘photos’ of what looked like a Gothic horror-fantasy-science-fiction story come to life. Many of the people commenting on the photos weren’t sure whether the images were real or created by some kind of photo-manipulation; quite a few of the commenters seemed convinced of the former. And the images are, indeed, shockingly ‘realistic’, though they depict things that certainly do not exist on Earth. 

The album, which you can view in its original form as an imgur.com portfolio, is called The Curious Journeys of A.I. Midleton and it was produced (as the title hints) by a AI program, called Dall-E-2. It works rather like the poetry AI does: you feed it with words; it uses them to search the internet for image files, which it then combines and manipulates to create ‘art’.

Here, though, there was a difference. The person interacting with the AI didn’t just settle for the first images they got; they modified the words, picked out related images, modified again and selected again, and when they’d got something they were reasonably happy with, they worked on it in PhotoShop (or something like that) to make them even more convincing. So this was, if you like, a human-AI collaboration. If it’s art, it’s art that a human being was closely involved in making.

But then, just a few days ago, I learnt from CNN that in faraway Vail, Colorado, an AI-produced work has won first prize at a state art fair. Sadly, the work was not entered by the AI that created it (real world, you see; difficult) but by a computer-game designer named Jason Allen. He used another open-source AI, Midjourney, to ‘commission’ it from. Apparently he spent eighty hours in consultation with the AI over it, but I don’t think he used any image-manipulation software like Adobe Illustrator or PhotoShop. I’ve fooled about with Midjourney myself, just to see what the fuss was about; it seems to be a bit more ‘realistic’ than Dall-E-2 and to require less post-processing. Anyway, the result is a pretty convincing ‘artwork’ that you, if you didn’t know better, would certainly believe was created by a human being.

The controversy over this little affair is already pretty hot. Some people say Allen cheated, or that the picture isn’t art. I don’t know about that; it looks like a picture to me, and the sight of it certainly evokes some kind of feeling, though – for me, at least – no very strong one. But it seems the whole argument is a bit cockeyed, because, once again, the human involved in the creation of the piece was picking and choosing, and combining, what Midjourney offered him until he got the result he wanted. 

So whether it was AI-generated or not, and whether it was art or not, it was finally a human being who decided how the picture should look. Shouldn’t that be enough to quash the controversy? The AI might have created and presented the original images, but the final result was completely dependent on human judgement.

Let’s take that argument one step further. A work of art is never the sole creation of the artist; it is those who experience it through their senses who ultimately dictate whether it is, or is not, to be regarded as art. So even if a one hundred per cent AI-created work does go on exhibition and win first prize at an American country fair, or even fetches a million pounds at Christie’s, there is still an enormous human input involved: that of the viewers, the listeners, the audience. As long as they accept the thing as art, it is art. 

§

Which brings us back to the very understandable anxiety of those of us who produce ‘creative work’ for a living. If these pesky machines get any smarter, we’ll starve.

Well, you know what. The market for work by commercial artists, writers, composers, filmmakers et al has been shrinking in monetary terms for a long time now. The average value of work (measured by what the creator can charge for it) has crashed. The internet certainly has had a lot to do with this; by removing barriers to entry, it has greatly increased the number of people competing for work in the commercial arts, while at the same time generating business-model changes and economies of scale that have put traditional middlemen and gatekeepers – agents, publishers, A&R departments in the music industry – out of work, too. I see no possibility, for a decade or so at least, of this situation changing. The internet, after all, is here to stay, and with it e-commerce and a legion of other inhuman, soul-destroying innovations. Tough.

I think what we are really seeing is the death of the mass market for human-made art. Art-for-a-purpose – advertising, interior decoration, popular entertainment – will henceforth be produced by machines and the human race, as a whole, may well be none the worse for it. But what about the artists? What will happen to them? 

Perhaps they will find themselves in a situation much like that experienced by practitioners of the arts in the ages before mass media and consumerism came to stay. They will, once again, look to individual rather than corporate patronage or the big money of advertising to sustain them. Their egos and the dignity they stand upon will undergo a salutary deflation as they find themselves reduced, once again, to the status of street performers, courtiers or servants. The vast sums a few big names now command will no longer be paid. The absurd, starvation-level fees upon which many commercial artists and writers subsist will cease to be paid at all. Anyone who is not an artist or author by compulsion will stop trying and go and get a boring office or service-industry job instead. In sum, the population of those who think of themselves as artists will fall to maybe a thousandth of what it is now; the market for human-made fine art will shrink to perhaps a hundredth of its present size; and the average income of those who are still in the game will rise, perhaps, tenfold from what it was before the rise of Amazon and its fellow cyberslavedrivers. A lot of us, artists and non-artists alike, may finally come to look upon this as a good thing. The arts, which are in a state of creative prostration for the most part, may even experience a renaissance.

Or maybe not. Predicting the future is a risky business (something the NFT advocates would do well to remember). As for the rights and wrongs of the case, I abhor making ethical judgements about aesthetic matters. I have my tastes and prejudices, but I don’t really feel the need to explain or justify them to anyone. But then, I am lucky enough to be, for the most part, retired from the world of creative commerce; I have less skin in the game than most of the poor guys and gals who are worrying about the ‘AI takeover’ on social media. My advice to them would be to make up their minds: either follow your own muse and prepare to starve for it as van Gogh did, or give up being ‘creative’ and get whatever job you can – and that you can stand. But whatever you do, don’t fall for the NFT scam, because it combines the worst of both worlds: no money (once the pecuniary worthlessness of NFTs becomes common knowledge) and no artistic satisfaction or fame for you, either.