Any Other Business: Part LXXXVII

As the title suggests, so forth.

Artwork by AI

We’re now four months into 2024, and this blog’s grand experiment with AI art. It has already fooled one regular theatre cohort of the blog into thinking an AI image was an official stylised poster. Success! But on a serious note it has been nice to have bespoke imagery about the place. Nobody else will get the exact same results from the AI behind Night Cafe even if they used the exact same prompts. And nobody else will use the exact same prompts derived from idiosyncratic interests. It gives a vague New Yorker or Wall Street Journal feel to a mere blog to have charcoal sketches hovering over pieces. And it has been interesting watching the development of the technology. Originally just goofing around it with it for such important artistic endeavours as Keanu Reeves v Cocaine Bear, taking it seriously allows for checking in on the progression of the AI’s skills. This image was a Cezanne pastiche last year.

It was a reasonable attempt for a supercomputer. The colours were in the right places. The subject was as requested. And the style was primitively correct. To paraphrase from Brideshead Revisited, it was as if an Aztec had attempted a Cezanne painting. And now the exact same prompt produces the image beneath. Which is clearly a Cezanne pastiche of a much higher order. Yes, asking it to do pictures that could be considered characteristic subjects in the style of the various painters I request (Hodler, Van Gogh, Hopper, Klimt, Van Gogh, Lichtenstein, Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, Schiele, Botticelli, Hockney, Michaelangelo, Whistler, Warhol) is helping to train it, which means effectively working for free for a corporation.

But in the age of surveillance capitalism a good chunk of all our lives seems to be spent doing that anyway. At least this way some beauty gets brought into the world, in the most curious way imaginable. ChatGPT! What is beauty? (Don’t you dare quote or reference Keats in your reply)

And like that, it’s gone

I wondered why it was so late opening on a Sunday the other week, then thought I might have got muddled about its hours. But when I saw another branch clearly closed for business I got suspicious. And yes, it really has abruptly closed. The entirety of Mao and Dante’s Pizza has been shuttered. It makes very little sense that a chain which was doing well enough to have a tie-in with Leinster rugby, and didn’t seem to be lacking in customers, couldn’t find someone to take over the lease. But that’s how it is. It will leave quite a hole in the takeaway options, and explode some rituals. No more will Bank Holidays be marked with the treat of a Nasi Goreng in the specially elongated box to accommodate the chicken skewer underneath the fried egg, with a pack of prawn crackers to round out the dish. No more will the Inaugural speech of the latest POTUS be listened to while wolfing down Ho Chi’s chicken wings, chips, and egg fried rice. No more will I idly pop in while returning home from the NCH to get an egg fried rice just before they close. And there will be no more idle flitting between Mongolian beef and Singapore noodles as options for an impulsive treat. I remember the oddity of the first Mao restaurant appearing, complete with its massive Warhol portrait of the Chairman, right across from the College of Music in Chatham Row. And after being followed, as it felt, around all my haunts for decades, suddenly it’s gone. Goodbye Mao, thanks for the food and the memories.

What Does Elon Musk Do All Day?

Work? Where? This is a deadly serious question. The other week I saw Andrew Ross Sorkin getting annoyed two days in a row on CNBC when his guests seemed to question whether Elon Musk should be paid 56 billion dollars by Tesla. The man is listed as CEO of Tesla, CEO of SpaceX, and CTO of Twitter; yet he has criticised people working from home for not really working because they are less productive than in the office. In his case, which office? Elon Musk is, as so many thin-skinned billionaires are, a raging hypocrite. But how on earth can he expect a 56 billion dollar package from Tesla to keep him interested in doing his job? As they have said is the purpose of such renumeration. Fire him. That, not paying them 56 billion dollars is the usual response to a worker checking out of their job. 56. Billion. Dollars. That amount of money is obscene.

I, Daniel Blake

Ken Loach returns from his Sinatraesque retirement with a film that leads you to question not Tory policy but the line between art and propaganda.

Geordie carpenter Daniel Blake (Dave Johns) is unwell. He had a heart attack, nearly fell off a scaffold, and is waiting for doctors to clear him for work. The Kafkaesque welfare system deems him fit for work, however, so his benefits are stopped. Trying to appeal is impossible until a phone call from the ‘Decision Maker’, which should though have preceded the letter cutting off his benefits. Dan is forced onto the dole, where he must prove to a veritable Eichmann of the Welfare Office, Sheila (Sharon Percy), that he is indeed actively looking for work he is physically unable to perform. Humiliated Dan befriends another victim, Londoner Katie (Hayley Squires), who has been moved up North with her children Daisy (Briana Shann) and Dylan (Dylan McKiernan), by Tory plans to gentrify London by cleansing it of such benefits scroungers.

Watching I, Daniel Blake is like being trapped in an empty carriage with Jeremy Corbyn on a slow train from London to Newcastle, it’s like being bludgeoned on the head repeatedly with Michael Foot’s 1983 election manifesto, it’s like having John McDonnell endlessly throw Mao’s little red book in your face from an infinite supply. Screenwriter Paul Laverty artistically stacks the deck, loads the dice, and magnetises the roulette wheel, so comprehensively does he put his agit-prop puppets (poorly disguised as characters) thru the wringer in a plot so unrelentingly grim and ploddingly signposted that its ‘moving’ finale becomes unintentionally funny. My mind wandered so much I wondered whether Laverty and Loach tackling Free-born John Lilburne might have forced them to make actual art, rather than blatant propaganda, by dint of having to use allegory for their contemporary political points.

Daniel is told some employers want video CVs recorded on schmartphones. Loach might have been better served uploading a short screed decrying the Tories, because futility hangs over this. WH Auden said his verse didn’t save a single Jew from the Nazis, but Loach did force change once – with Cathy Come Home, in 1966; before the fragmentation of Britain’s TV audience. But who is he talking to now? I, Daniel Blake is absent from Savoy, Dundrum, IMC Tallaght, and has but 2 shows tomorrow in Cineworld where Jack Reacher has 8, on considerably larger screens. Loach is making clarion calls for the working-class, which will be viewed as art-house fare by some of the middle-class; champagne socialists perhaps. Watching this clumsy tub-thumping film, complete with Hollywood’s clichéd ‘precocious young girl’, is like having a screw slowly hammered into your head…

The only rational response to I, Daniel Blake is to fall asleep in the cinema or undo Loach’s work with the liberal application of screwdrivers at the nearest bar.

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