Let’s Face It There Isn’t Much On Except Songs Of Praise
Jason Pegg out of Clearlake to perform at This Machine Kills Wasps, plus a bit of Dickens because why not
Sometimes you just have to ask.
I want to keep This Machine Kills Wasps special, occasional. For it to reappear when you least expect it, like a particularly zany comet.
Based on the feedback from February’s show, people seemed to like the cabaret style, and also the jarring shift in tone from comedy chaos to sad songs afforded by what we in the entertainment business like to call “the interval”.
So it makes sense to keep the headliner a songwriter, and I racked what remains of my brains for a suitable candidate.
Then I remembered Jason Pegg.
I first saw him some time at the end of the last century, shuffling onto a stage with a harmonica to sing a song about Jumble Sailing.
I was immediately transfixed. Who were this group with their songs about endless Sundays, quiet despair and imaginary seaside towns?
It turned out they were Brighton’s Clearlake, and they wrote songs about almost-Brighton. Their first album, Lido,1 was one I listened to far too much as a student.
But how could I not? From the profoundly bathetic lovelorn anthem I Hang On Everything You Say to the organ-suffused space rock poetry of Winterlight, they had everything I needed.
Clearlake followed up Lido with an even better album, Cedars, which received an unintentionally hilarious (and extremely positive) review from Pitchfork’s Chief Britain-Understander.
It’s a claustrophobic, occasionally unsettling listen, only coming up for air during album closer Trees In The City - and even this is undercut by the paranoid anti-punchline “do you ever get the feeling that you’re being watched?”
I lost touch with the band before their third album, belatedly enjoying “It’s Getting Light Outside” as the perfect Clearlake single, before they vanished into the fog to the slowed-down organ sound of an unravelling fairground ride.
Jason did a couple of solo albums, and then quietly disappeared from public view.
Life carried on. Occasionally, a dog barked.
The band’s online presence gradually faded.
I reached out via a long-dormant Tumblr blog, and he got back to me immediately, saying he’d have to think about it, as he wanted to do the songs justice.
On Sunday, he said he was in.
This will be the first time he’ll be singing Clearlake songs for at least a decade.
He’s asked me what I’d especially like to hear, which feels like a real privilege.2
I am choosing wisely.
Tickets to the show are on sale now, but quietly. I want people I know to have the first chance at buying tickets, as I expect this to be another sell-out show and exceedingly special occasion.
The pieman and the hot-potato man
Charles Dickens is probably best known for his appearance in The Unquiet Dead, where, alongside Billie Piper and Christopher Ecclestone, he battles gas creatures from another dimension.3
Before that, he wrote a number of books, many of which I have not read, to the shock and disgust of my librarian ex-mother-in-law.
I’m trying to rectify this. This week I read a selection of his essays, the most riveting being his description of insomniac night-walks around Dickensian4 London.
Like Dickens, I am also fond of a nighttime wander, today as in his time a much easier pursuit if you are a generic, middle class white man.
But London is much quieter today. It may have a Night Tzar but it doesn’t have much of a nightlife, as rising rents and changing working habits condemn life increasingly to the margins of this old city.
Here are some of the people he encountered on his nocturnal journey; people I would most definitely like to meet…
The potmen5 throwing “the last brawling drunkards into the street” from the late public houses.
The Waterloo Bridge toll-keeper6, with his fire, great-coat and woollen neck-shawl. “A man who defied the night, with all its sorrowful thoughts, and didn’t care for the coming of dawn”.
The woman in Bethlehem Hospital - or Bedlam - who claims “Queen Victoria frequently comes to dine with me, and her Majesty and I dine off peaches and maccaroni in our night gowns.”
The feral children in Covent Garden market who sleep in baskets and fight over the offal.
The guy in a cafe near Bow Street with a snuff-coloured coat and a cold meat pudding in his hat.
The seller of peppered horsemeat sausages called “Small Germans” with an establishment near St Paul’s.7
The Algorithm: How AI Can Hijack Your Career And Steal Your Future
Hilke Schellmann
I wrote a book review for the Morning Star. Unedited version below…
A friend of mine once wrote a sketch about a management training guru, who claimed to have invented a tool that can tell “whether you’re a blue, a green, a red or… a dickhead.”
Compared to the products and procedures documented in Hilke Schellmann’s The Algorithm: How AI can Hijack Your Career and Steal Your Future, the dickhead test is positively scientific.
One can usually tell a scam by its acolytes; Rishi Sunak, Elon Musk and Wes Streeting count among “Artificial Intelligence”’s cheerleaders. It will, apparently, automise many jobs, turbocharge the economy, and save the NHS.
To paraphrase Blackadder, there is just one problem with this narrative: it is bollocks.
AI isn’t revolutionary. We are not on the cusp of robots with feelings or computers capable of independent thought.
Instead, it’s theft: large language models trained on material by writers and artists who never consented for their material to be used in this way, with the cheap-trick ability to regurgitate uncanny-valley approximations of human creativity.
AI is also an environmental catastrophe: machine learning uses an extraordinary amount of computer power, with data centres around the world burning through more fossil fuel than the world can sustain.
Schellmann’s book focuses on one specific aspect of the AI con: its implementation into the world of work, the promises made, the grim reality, and the consequences for the future.
She has interviewed scores of true believers and whistle blowers, alongside ordinary people whose working lives have been “disrupted” by anonymous, unaccountable algorithms.
As ever, these latest tools for oppression were first used on the working classes: delivery drivers sacked by automated message; warehouse workers disciplined by algorithmic surveillance; and even bus drivers in China wearing brainwave-monitoring hats that use AI to detect “emotional spikes such as depression, anxiety or rage”.
Even white collar workers are no longer safe, when millions are already being filleted by keywords with profound discriminatory implications, or working in jobs where you have to wiggle the mouse every thirty seconds to convince the machine that you’re “working”.
Ken Willner, an employment attorney, found many troubling things when given access to the black box of data that these AI tools rely on.
“The algorithm could look for shoe size, and people with a larger shoe size may be associated with doing well… that’s not related logically to job performance, it just happens to be a correlation that may exist.
“This may happen to have an adverse impact on women, who have smaller shoe sizes on average.”
Willner found “Afric*” was being used as a keyword to score job applicants. Another example of non-job-related demographics being used by the algorithm is zip codes: in a country with such a history of segregation as the United States, this is “in practice, a proxy and could have a disparate impact on racial minorities,” according to Ifeoma Ajunwa, an expert in AI and hiring.
A lot of what is documented here is management consultant phrenology.
“We’re worried about the snake oil or the bad science in our industry,” says the CEO of a company that makes bullshit “good employee” games, with no apparent irony.
And in the case of techniques like facial expression recognition to figure out if someone is “confident” or “happy” - owners of resting bitch face need not apply - we’re seeing a technology with few non-dystopian uses trying desperately to find a purpose.
The only criticism of this by turns enjoyable and disturbing read is the author can be a little too forgiving of the shysters and frauds she gently exposes by their own words.
And her conclusions are a trifle milquetoast, given the depths of what she diligently reports upon.
Without regulation - and fast - all of this is going to get a lot worse.
But the solution isn’t to make AI “more fair”; it’s to challenge the outsourced, surveilled, and corporate model of employment on its very existence.
That’s it for this week. I’m trying to write more regularly, so deepest apologies for the hiatus. Enjoy the newsletter? Recommend it to your friends!
As reviewed by my nemesis, Mark Beaumont. He’s pretty much correct here, though I don’t really get the Morrissey comparisons.
And thanks to MJ Hibbett for asking me the same last time! Chips and Cheese, Pint of Wine sounded immense…
Ah ok fine I’m talking about Doctor Who. But it was a very sensitive and moving portrait of an author, towards the end of his life, recounting old triumphs to declining audiences and wondering if there’s anything left to learn or love.
Be funny if they called it this at the time.
Do any pubs still call glass collectors potmen? Answers on a postcard please.
The toll was abolished in 1878.
Actually this is from when Dickens got lost as a child during the daytime, so I can’t confirm this guy’s opening hours. Also I suspect his business has been replaced by a kebab shop.