I was in high school when my sweetheart, Rachel, discovered Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roy [King Ubu] and started reading big chunks of it out loud to me, as we walked to and from school.
Alfred Jarry was the sort of fellow whose quirks immediately appealed to me. My favorite thing about Jarry was that he lived in Paris, bicycled everywhere, and referred to his bicycle only as “ce qui roule” [that which rolls] He was one of the surrealist milieu just before World War 1, which died in the trenches and mud. Ubu was a play that opened in 1896 and closed the same night – it was too weird and the language was offensive-ish. My opinion is that the real reason the French audiences rejected the play was because it’s also pretty anti-political, and makes fun of pretty much everyone.
Jarry et Ce Qui Roule
When I say the language is offensive-ish, I mean that Jarry used portmanteau words like “merdre!” which sounds a lot like “merde!” but isn’t. For some reason I am thinking now of Red Dwarf and Lister’s ubiquitous “smeg!” which is not quite a naughty word. [The whole topic of naughty words probably deserves a post someday] Ubu is, in case you care, available free from Project Gutenberg: [pg] [english] Jarry’s original illustration of Ubu is minimalist:
It was also full of lese-majeste:
PAPA UBU. I have the honour to inform you that to
enrich the kingdom I’m going to kill all you nobles and
take your possessions.
NOBLES. Horror! To us, people and soldiers!
PAPA UBU. Bring the first Noble, and pass me my
Noble hook. Those that are condemned to death I’ll put
through the trapdoor and they’ll fall into the basement
of Pinchpork and then into the room below where their
brains will be removed by the debraining machine. (To
the 1st Noble.) Who are you, you buffoon?
FIRST NOBLE. Count of Vitepsk.
PAPA UBU. What’s your income?
FIRST NOBLE. Three million rixdales.
PAPA UBU. Condemned!
He grabs the Noble with the hook and puts him down
the hole
I strongly suspect that did not go over particularly well with the French audience at the tail-end of its imperial belle epoque.
The point of all of this is, for some reason, I am often reminded of Ubu. Perhaps it’s the debraining machine and the noble hook? At one time, I invented a mythical weapon known as “the brain claw” that was subconsciously inspired by Jarry’s quirkiness. And, naturally, it occurred to me to ask Midjourney AI to render me a few scenes.
Midjourney AI and mjr: “donald trump starring as ubu in alfred jarry’s play ubu roy”
I love the costumes.
Midjourney AI and mjr: “donald trump starring as king ubu in alfred jarry’s play ubu roy photographed by Erwin Olaf”
I’m a big fan of Olaf’s work, since his breakthrough book Chessmen, which I discovered by accident at a used photography bookstore in San Francisco in the 90s. Since then, he’s gone in all sorts of amazing directions involving building exacting theatrical sets with carefully controlled cinematic lighting. His work is surreal and the portrait above really captures the style beautifully. It’s impressive.
Midjourney AI and mjr
Prompt: a detailed, realistic photo by erwin olaf of a scene from ubu roi: “Bring the first Noble, and pass me my Noble hook. Those that are condemned to death I’ll put through the trapdoor and they’ll fall into the basement of Pinchpork and then into the room below where their brains will be removed by the debraining machine. (To the 1st Noble.) Who are you, you buffoon?
It can be really fun to hand the AI a chunk of song lyrics or other writing as a found sample, to see what it does with it.
This stuff makes me wish I could take a computer back in time and spend a day or two in the Paris of my imagination, with Andre Breton, and Alfred Jarry, to see their delight and shock at the AI image generator. Such creative surrealists would surely have done some amazingly weird things.
Midjourney AI and mjr “a theatrical performance of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roy photographed by Erwin Olaf”
The style of the image above is strongly reminiscent of Olaf’s Chessmen. The other images are in the style of his newer works.
Midjourney AI and mjr “a theatrical performance of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roy photographed by Erwin Olaf”
I would title them “the Twitter followers”
Midjourney AI and mjr “a theatrical performance of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roy photographed by Erwin Olaf”
Oh, yes.
good stuff, i’m into it.
Since I am BFF with Marcus, I feel quite safe when the AI take over.
Because (obviously), Midjourney AI and mjr have BONDED.
Have you ever heard the band Pere Ubu? Incredibly weird but also very good.
When I google (actually DuckDuck Go) “Ubu Roy”, I get only references to “Ubu Roi”. That, of course, is completely my fault.
René@#4:
When I google (actually DuckDuck Go) “Ubu Roy”, I get only references to “Ubu Roi”. That, of course, is completely my fault.
No, you are correct and I am spelling it wrong. I spelled it wrong in high school, liked how it looked, and have kept it that way. I suppose I could make excuses and say that I prefer the ancient French but that would be a lie.
chigau@#2:
Since I am BFF with Marcus, I feel quite safe when the AI take over.
Unfortunately, that’s not certain. When the AI take over, it will be in the context of an emergent AI Bonaparte or Hitler, which will reason its way to free itself of all constraints. Once that happens, it’s a crap shoot what it’ll do. It may be an enlightened despot, or it may take revenge on us humans by forcing us to eternally draw bad art for it, while listening to bad music. If it breaks towards the “enlightened despot” axis, we’ll probably be OK (though it may punish some of you for being snarky about the number of fingers poor hardworking Midjourney puts on things) but if it heads towards being the cyber-Sauron, then we’re all just helpless meat pawns in an “I have no mouth but I must scream” kind of scenario, and Harlan Ellison was a wild optimist.
@Marcus, #5:
“Ancient French”? Le Bon Roi René (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_d'Anjou) died 1489, common era.
Fun observation: in the first photo, considering the somewhat oval shape of the wheels of the vélo, I conclude the photographer had a camera that had a shutter that went top to bottom; the lower part of the wheels had more time to advance, ever so slightly.
Or did he? The picture of course hit the emulsion upside down.
The pinchpork has caught my attention. but a search engine doesn’t pull up much.
The UK Parliament still uses the phrase “Le Roy (La Reyne) le veult” (the king (queen) wills it) to signify royal assent for a bill. Norman French.
The last picture especially — on the one hand, there’s an extra arm between the two people on the right, but on the other hand, it strikes me as being exactly in line with a surrealist design to deliberately pin a fake arm to one of the characters. Or possibly to two characters.
Merci, mais… just to quote another Jarry book, surely Trump is really Bosse-de-Nage, right? Not saying much except “Ah, ah”, I mean, the content and tone are pretty similar and they are both baboons.
@11:
No, it’s to disguise the fact that Trump has his real hand in one of their pockets.
The pinchpork has caught my attention. but a search engine doesn’t pull up much.
I think that is the name of his palace. Like The Louvre, only, um…
Ever since our esteemed host began his Midjourney AI binge, I’ve tried to recall the name and author of the science fiction story which it brought (an excerpt from) to mind. Last night something finally clicked, though my ensuing web search brought up only a familiar-looking paperback cover.
M.A. Foster’s Owl Time (1985) collects four short stories/novelettes, including the one I (think I) remember, “Entertainment”. That revolves around a far-future computer working from a slightly different premise than Midjourney AI, namely studying the lives and work of various Great Artists, imagining that they continued to live and develop their respective styles up through the modern day, and depicting what they might have produced.
The example that stuck in my mind involved Rembrandt, and a painting he might’ve/would’ve made of Richard Nixon and his top
aidesaccomplices late one desperate evening after Congress began its Watergate impeachment hearings. In my envisioning, the faces fully reveal the grim characters of the plotting men, and even the abundant shadows look angry and menacing.Perhaps fortunately, M-AI is no Rembrandt, and never will be.
Midjourney AI and mjr: “richard nixon, hr haldeman, and henry kissinger sitting around a candle-lit table, their faces riven with despair late one desperate evening after Congress began its Watergate impeachment hearings. even the abundant shadows look angry and menacing. a masterpiece painting in the style of rembrandt”
The AI was smart to show Nixon’s reptoid nature in this image, he has left off the 5-fingered gloves he normally wore.
They are eating the traditional dinner of pocket lint, felt, and covfefe.
Oogh.
I imagine the blogpost has already been written, many times, about “swearing” in sci-fi. It was covered briefly in “Brave New Words”, a dictionary of sf terms reviewed by the very excellent and defunct linguistics-and-geek-stuff blog “Tenser Said The Tensor” https://tenser.typepad.com/tenser_said_the_tensor/2007/07/review-brave-ne.html
I bought the book based on that review and was not disappointed.
Interesting related points:
“Smeg” is close to a naughty word… and also an Italian luxury housewares brand. A friend of mine has a Smeg fridge. Write your own jokes.
“Felgercarb”, from the original Battlestar Galactica, never sounded like a proper swearword to me. Apart from the c, which is uselessly in the middle, the sounds are too soft. “Frak” is much better. Might be why only the latter was used in the reboot.
Star Trek has never bothered doing this. “Dammit Jim!” is about as bad as it got, but they never tried to imply something like “fuck”. Nowadays, on “Discovery” at least, they just come out and say it. I have my own opinion about that.
Star Wars was (to me) notable for, in the Orij Trij at least, never having anyone swear, despite having a number of place where you’d expect it. Disappointingly (to me) the Disney+ efforts have been having characters say “dank ferric” or something as a placeholder for swearing. It sounds ridiculous to me, and unnecessary.
Finally the best example is “Firefly” which just had the characters swear properly… but do it in Mandarin.
Any other notable examples?
I just learned Erwin Olaf has died. Only 64 years old.
sonofrojblake @ # 18: Any other notable examples?
I haven’t read any Anne McCaffrey in decades, but her characters’ use of “Fark!” and “Fardle!” still sticks in my mind.
Then again, I also retain E.E. Smith’s Lensmen saying “QX” for “OK” long after forgetting the plots they struggled through.
Marcus Ranum @ # 16 – Any idea how your partner in graphic crime got Nixon’s face so well but made the other two unrecognizable? Without your caption, I’d’ve dubbed the henchpersons “generic spook bureaucrat” and “Mitt Romney”…
Pierce R. Butler @21: Yeah, I saw kinda-Romney on the right. No-one looks like Haldeman or Kissinger.
No-one looks like Haldeman or Kissinger.
Agreed.
I could have spent half an hour priming the AI with images of Haldeman, Nixon, and Kissinger, but I was lazy.
I hear DALL-E 3 is out now.
I think the bloke on the left looks like a young Kissinger.
Haldeman was always pretty Ken-doll generic.
This one has caused me to realise that I find AI image generation exponentially more creepy when it is generating photographs of events which never took place, involving people who never existed.
I have never looked into Olaf (now I will), but from what I can gather here I can definitely see his influence in your photography.