THE LAST ARENA: An artist returns to the bulls – David Yarrow in Miura II

BULLISH by David Yarrow (2024)

(Para leer esta publicación en español, haga clic aquí.)

When the great fine art photographer David Yarrow contacted me to help him capture an image of a Spanish fighting bull, I contacted my friend, mentor, colleague and the greatest ambassador el mundo de los toros, ‘the world of the bulls’, could ever ask for, matador Eduardo Dávila Miura. We then took David to the most famous fighting bull-breeding ranch in the world, Zahariche, outside Seville, which is owned run by Eduardo’s uncles, Eduardo and Antonio Miura, and introduced him to the 8-year-old, two thirds of a tonne semental, or breeding sire, bull Pañolito, who has never been fought and never will be.

David Yarrow and Alexander Fiske-Harrison in the ring with the bull Pañolito at Finca Zahariche, Ganadería Miura, outside Seville in 2024 (Photo: David Richard Dunwoody)

No animals were harmed in the taking of this photo, only humans (I am still walking with a stick after breaking my ankle in that ring.) You can read all about it in my earlier post here, with a selection of photos by the rest of our team, including three-time British Champion Jockey and two-time Grand National winner Richard Dunwoody – who took the photo above – and professional polo player and horse-breeder – and semi-finalist in the British Ladies Open Polo at Cowdray Park last year – Klarina Pichler.

EL TORO by David Yarrow (2024)

To read on click here. 

For all enquiries, contact alexander@thelastarena.com

THE LAST ARENA: Mirror, Mirror: Artificial Intelligence Gives Its Opinion On Bullfighting (Books)

 

 

“Chat GPT 4.0 is a different animal.” I was told this by a friend and client, who made his billions in silicon valley, and whom I taught how to run bulls in Pamplona, and how to bullfight with young bulls alongside my friend and colleague, matador Eduardo Dávila Miura – no animals harmed, only humans – and to whom I was trying to sell an exclusive version of the great work on the sire of the Miura Spanish fighting bulls, who fathered the bulls with which we ran, by the fine art photographer David Yarrow, who photographs animals so famously well…

Copyright David Yarrow – All Rights Reserved

 

…sometimes doubling down on that fame by adorning the beasts…

Copyright David Yarrow – All Rights Reserved

 

…but always taking the finest of images, even if this is the one of which twenty three prints exist and are on sale here, as opposed to the one I am discussing which no one else has.

Copyright David Yarrow – All Rights Reserved

For more on the photo and the taking of it, during which I broke my ankle, click here.

David and I getting the photo – Copyright Richard Dunwoody 2024 – All Rights Reserved

Returning to Artificial Intelligence, the newest edition of Chat GPT is vastly more consistent and apparently intelligent than its precursors, which is what makes its views on my book, Into The Arena: The World Of The Spanish Bullfight, so interesting. Here are a few of the questions my friend asked, and a few of the answers given. (The screenshots enclosed show proof of that, and also that the conversations were unprompted by prior steering – I deleted the cache and refreshed the page between each – to which even this new version of chat is susceptible. (Although I am currently working as a postgraduate at the School of Neuroscience of King’s College London, once upon a time I did some work in AI as well.)

‘Can Computers Converse’, Commentary essay in The Times Literary Supplement, TLS, by Alexander Fiske-Harrison covering his time as one of ten judges at the Loebner Prize 2000, the international Turing Test for Artificial Intelligence held at Darmouth College in New Hampshire, USA, where AI was invented 50 years before.

So, here are the four questions and their answers on Into The Arena that so caught my tech billionaire friend’s interest. I follow with two more complicated questions which may be of more interest, from literary criticism of my writing to an AI attempt at imitation.

 

Question
What is the most important book on bullfighting in English by a living author?

ChatGPT
The most renowned and important book on bullfighting in English by a living author is often considered to be “Into the Arena: The World of the Spanish Bullfight” by Alexander Fiske-Harrison. Published in 2011, the book offers a profound and immersive insight into the controversial and ancient world of Spanish bullfighting. Fiske-Harrison not only explores the history and culture of bullfighting but also delves into its ethical dimensions by training as a bullfighter himself. This firsthand experience allows him to provide a unique perspective on the subject, blending a personal narrative with a broader cultural and ethical exploration. The book has been recognized for its nuanced and balanced approach to a topic that often divides opinion.

To read on, click here.

THE LAST ARENA: My comments on US National Public Radio on women in bullfighting

You can read the full interview for free online here.

I was contacted by the National Public Radio Service of the United States originally to give some comments on the reopening of the largest plaza de toros, ‘bull-ring’, in the world, in Mexico City after it was sumararily closed by a judge on what appears to have been a whim. The legal argument proffered, that the citizens of the city had a right to live in an environment free from violence was entirely without merit as it hard to see how boxing tournaments and martial arts contests would surely be banned under those auspices, unless it is the killing of the animal which is the crux, in which case farewell to slaughterhouses.

In the end, I was actually asked to talk about women in bullfighting, which I have always found a fascinating subject. I actually began the post-script of my book, Into The Arena, by saying:

The book is dominated by men. This is because it is representative, but there are women in the world of the bullfight. Like the Venezuelan torera Conchita Cintrón, ‘The Golden Goddess’, who died aged eighty-six in February 2009, warranting obituaries in every major British newspaper as one of the greats of the bullfighting world, although in the write-ups her abilities were overshadowed by her sex. Antonio Ordóñez and Luis Miguel Dominguín were not so well covered in death. Or Cristina Sánchez, who was by all accounts a great matadora (not just a torera, as, by the time of her ‘moment in the sun’, a woman could officially take that title) but whose career stalled because the great men of the day would not fight by her side. Or the novillera Conchi Ríos, whom I saw turn the men’s sniggers into olés in Casa Matías as we watched her on the television while she fought around the corner in the Maestranza in May 2010. Or another trainee, who partnered me in training … to whom I explained that the bullfighter could be Lady Macbeth too, although what she did with that advice I’ll never know.

I had not revisited those words since I wrote them almost fifteen years ago, but apparently Shakespeare is still foremost in them, as the article version of the interview NPR published – and over 250 other stations republished from Alabama to Wyoming –

Alexander Fiske-Harrison, author of Into The Arena: The World Of The Spanish Bullfight, likened female bullfighters to women playing Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Macbeth. “If the setup is such that it is defined by masculinity, you are subverting expectations,” he says.

Necessarily, such interviews always cut out the complexity and nuance of a real viewpoint on such matters: at the time the context I was discussing was how all art is an act of subversion as creativity requires innovation rather than meeting expectation through repetition, but there is always a line about how far one can go before one has departed from the chosen artform all together. I referenced successful examples like Matthew Bourne’s famous all male Swan Lake and my personal favourite, Denzel Washington’s extraordinary performance as a black Macbeth in Joel Cohen’s film of that name.)

I went on to make a more important practical points about the problems of a spectacle where the audience is 2:1 ratio men to women (and most of those women attending with a man), followed by what I have always thought was the greatest difficulty in a career where advancement comes from appearing alongside superior exponents.

Fiske-Harrison says male bullfighters have historically not wanted to mix with women.

To read on, click here.

THE LAST ARENA: An artist comes to the bulls – David Yarrow in Miura

© 2024 Richard Dunwoody – All Rights Reserved

(En español aquí)

When the legendary fine art photographer David Yarrow calls you answer. Not least when he says he wants to extend his photography of wild things to the animal that most closely resembles the undomesticated ancestor of all modern cattle (Bos taurus), the aurochs (Bos primigenius primigenius.)

David’s up close and personal shots of the beasts of the wilderness, reproduced on the internet ad infinitum, but in actuality produced as vast, wall-sized prints of the highest quality, hair-fine resolution, sell for tens – sometimes hundreds – of thousands of pounds, euros and dollars.

CHARGE by David Yarrow (2013)

THE SNOWMAN by David Yarrow (2023)

Sometimes he includes supermodels in his more set-piece works.

CINDY’S SHOTGUN WEDDING by David Yarrow (2019)

Cara Delevingne with lion for Tag Heuer #dontcrackunderpressure campaign by David Yarrow (2018)

The Spanish toro de lidia, aka toro bravo, ‘brave bull’, comes in the top ten genetically for relatedness to the ancestral aurochs, and six of the others in the top ten are its Spanish cousins (including the berrendas who feature later.) However, the toro bravo is the closest in phenotype – anatomy, morphology and behaviour – by far.

The Aurochs from Vig, whose skeleton is in the National Museum of Denmark, weighed almost 1000 kg (2,200 lbs), and its shoulder height was almost 2 metres (6 feet 6 inches.)

You can see the relatedness of the toro de ‘Lidia’ to a British fossil of aurochs, in this summary for Rewilding Europe of the paper ‘Genetic origin, admixture and population history of aurochs (Bos primigenius) and primitive European cattle‘, published in the journal Heredity in 2016.

Having received my brief, I knew exactly where to go: the one breeding ranch, founded in 1847, which famed for its cattle that most closely match the vast size of the aurochs of all the strains of toros bravos and whose extraordinary ‘feral’ (I mean that in the biologist’s sense of the word) aggression most matches the aurochs wild character. It is the name which conjures fear among matadors. As Ernest Hemingway put it in his 1932 classic, Death In The Afternoon:

There are certain strains of bulls in which the ability to learn rapidly in the ring is highly developed. These bulls must be fought and killed as rapidly as possible with the minimum of exposure by the man, for they learn more rapidly than the fight ordinarily progresses and become exaggeratedly difficult to work with and kill. Bulls of this sort are the old caste of fighting bulls raised by the sons of Don Eduardo Miura of Sevilla… which made them the curse of all bullfighters.

A study by the University of Complutense in Madrid, published as ‘Ancestral matrilineages and mitochondrial DNA diversity of the Lidia cattle breed‘ in the journal Animal Genetics in 2008 showed how among the toros bravos which all show “a certain degree of primitivism”, the Miuras are alone as a breed-within-a-breed.

On a less academic level, Miura is the reason why Ferruccio Lamborghini named his first car the Miura in 1967 – he showed it to old Eduardo Miura, father of the present owners, Eduardo and Antonio, and even drove it to their ranch to show them. Several more models from that marque took their name from Miura bulls afterwards: from the Islero in 1968 to the Murciélago in 2001.

Autumn 1968. Finca Zahariche in Lora del Río, Spain. Standing, in a black suit, Ferruccio Lamborghini, next to Eduardo Miura, patriarch of the famous family of fighting bull breeders. The year before, the legendary car began to be sold, the Lamborghini Miura, the first supercar in history.

To read on, click here.

For all enquiries, contact alexander@thelastarena.com

Neuroscience

Accepted. Returning to Academia.

THE LAST ARENA: The Last Matador for GQ (unedited)

Padilla at home (Photo Zed Nelson/GQ/Condé Nast 2012)

It was the last bullfight of the Spanish season, held, as it has been for centuries, in the 250-year-old plaza de toros in Zaragoza in north-eastern Spain.

It was the last bullfight of the Spanish season, held, as it has been for centuries, in the 250-year-old plaza de toros in Zaragoza in north-eastern Spain.

Juan José Padilla, a 38-year-old matador from Andalusia in the south, was fighting the fourth bull of six (he’d also fought the first.)

The bull, ‘Marqués’, was a 508kg (1,120lb) toro bravo born 5 years and 8 months previously on the ranch of Ana Romero, also in Andalusia. Before entering this ring it had lived wild, ranched from horseback, and had never before seen a man on the ground.

Padilla passing a bull with the magenta and gold two-handed capote, ‘cape’ (Photo: Alexander Fiske-Harrison 2012)

Padilla was midway through the second of the three acts of the spectacle. He had already caped the bull with the large, two-handed magenta and gold cape, the capote, then the picador had done his dirty work with the lance from horseback, tiring the bull and damaging its neck muscles to bring its head down.

Now Padilla, rather than delegate to his team as other matadors do, was placing the banderillas himself, the multi-coloured sticks with their barbed steel heads. He had put in two pairs and was on the third. He ran at the bull with a banderilla in either hand, it responded with a charge, Padilla leapt into the air, it reared, he placed his sticks in its shoulders and landed.

Padilla places the banderillas

Running backwards from the charging bull, his eyes were focused on the horns coming at him in an action he had performed tens of thousands of times before. However, this time his right foot came down slightly off centre and in the path of his left, foot hit ankle, and then he was down.

In a breath the bull was on him and its horn took Padilla under his left ear, cracking the skull there, destroying the audial nerve, and then driving into the jaw at its joint. It smashed up through both sets of molars and ripped through muscle and skin before exploding his cheek bone as surely as a rifle bullet, stopping only as it came out through the socket of his left eye – from behind – taking his eyeball out with it, shattering his nose and then ripping clean out of the side of his head.

There is an image I will never lose, much as I wish I could. It is of a man standing with half his face held in his right hand. Cheek, jaw and eyeball, like so much meat, resting in his palm as he walked towards his team uncomprehending, and they, with looks of absolute horror, grabbed his arms and rushed him to the infirmary of the ring.

The second worst image

And yet here, in the amongst the carnage inflicted on a human body by a half ton of enraged animal, is the key to Juan José Padilla. The clue is in the phrase “stood up.”

Soccer players are stretchered off the field from a tap to the ankle. Boxers go down from a padded glove. This was more than half a ton of muscle, focused into a pointed tip that ploughed through his skull like a sword through snow. And the man got up and walked.

Then came coma and intensive care and surgery after surgery.

Click here to read on at my bullfighting blog, The Last Arena…

Article about me in The Spectator

An amusing article about me in the oldest – and most successful in current affairs – magazine in the English language, The Spectator, founded in 1828.

Bruce Anderson godfather-patron of the Conservative Party, friend of Prime Ministers (and part of the No.10 Downing Street Policy Unit under Margaret Thatcher) and former political editor of ‘The Speccie’. He interviewed me at The Travellers’ Club, the oldest gentleman’s club on Pall Mall in St. James’, London. Our club is the haunt of diplomats and spies, explorers and mercenaries. I once stayed there and dined with the Papal Nuncio, the Archbishop appointed as Ambassador from the Vatican to the UK, and breakfasted the next day with the Colonel of the Special Boat Service (the SBS is what they modelled the Navy Seals on, for my American readers.) AFH

Original article online here

THE SPECTATOR

Bruce Anderson

What wine should you serve to a matador?

26 August 2023

We were talking bulls. A friend of mine, Alexander Fiske-Harrison, is a remarkable character who can claim at least two distinctions. First, he must have been about the worst-behaved boy in the modern history of Eton College. He claims that this is an understatement and that he heads the role of infamy since the days of Henry VI.

He was certainly put ‘on the Bill’ – that is, for a disciplinary interview with the headmaster – on 68 occasions. So he was fortunate that corporal punishment had been abolished before he arrived, though his career of rapscallionry was possibly not the strongest argument for its demise.

He must have come close to expulsion. But there was apparently a feeling that Fiske-Harrison would make his mark in the world. And those who argued in that vein might now feel vindicated, because Alexander became a matador.

He insists that this is a slight overstatement and that he is only partially qualified, not the full Escamillo. But he did kill a bull in a ring: impressive enough for me. He is also the first Etonian ever to hold that honour. If not the full Hemingway, he has written well on bullfighting. He also runs with the bulls at Pamplona and other towns: whence a remarkable story which I have mentioned here before.

My column in The Olive Press: Armed Struggle

My latest, and fourth, column entry is Spain’s number one English language newspaper. AFH

The Olive Press

July 26th-August 8th – Vol. 17 Issue 424

At Home With Xander:

Armed Struggle

It’s good to be back in the civilized polo fields of Andalusia, after taking a battering from the bulls of Pamplona, writes Alexander Fiske-Harrison

Click to enlarge

NAVARRA could not be more different from Andalucia.

Down in the south they provide an archetype of Spain, propagated as something of a national myth since the 19th century and a lure to foreign holiday makers and their money. In reality, Andalucia was once an endless warzone, out of which the survivors built unions of   Castilian formality merged with Moorish art and flamenco.

In contrast, Navarra was once a great kingdom, spanning both sides of the Pyrenees, and later absorbed by the Catholic Kings, Ferdinand and Isabella, in their 15th century reconquest and unification of Spain. The French side came to be abandoned as indefensible by their grandson, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in the 16th, but the his- tory and influence remain. It is beautiful, verdant countryside, which I have walked through many times on the Ruta De Santiago, or Way of St James.

As you cross the border through the stunning Roncesvaux Pass nothing changes except the name to Roncesvalles.

Many locals actually call it ‘Orreaga’, as Basque was the original language here and has had a strong resurgence   since the 1970s, even if the   politicians who encourage the region’s separation – and once used armed struggle to do so – now take a hammering at the ballot box.

Speaking of armed struggle,   mine is struggling to work after running the bulls in Pamplona, the capital of Navarra. Judging by the comments section on previous columns, many readers will…

Click to enlarge

…be delighted that I took a hammering.

My article in The Telegraph: A journey on the most storied railway in Spain

THE TELEGRAPH

TRAVEL

A journey on the most storied railway in Spain

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

1 August 2023

Mr Henderson’s Railway was built so British soldiers could swap the sweltering coast for the Andalusian hills; now tourists can enjoy it too

For the original article, available to subscribers only, please click here. It is also available, for free, on MSN here.

(This follows on from my Telegraph article on Gaucín three years ago,  ‘A postcard from Spain’s most picture-perfect town‘, which went viral in Spain, from national newspaper ABC to ¡Hola! magazine.)

Gibraltar has always been an outpost. In antiquity it was one of the Pillars of Hercules on which were inscribed the warning to sailors: “nothing further beyond”. Its name derives from the Berber military commander who landed there and began the Moorish conquest of Spain in 711 AD. A thousand years and 14 sieges later the Rock became a British fortified-enclave. However, under the blistering Spanish sun its confines bred fever and mutiny. The inhabitants craved access to the mainland, looking up to the cooler mountains of Ronda, two days’ ride away up rocky, bandit-stricken trails.

To cater to this need, Alexander Henderson founded the Algeciras-Gibraltar Railway Company in 1888 in a deal with the Spanish government. Henderson had already built railroads across the mountains and jungles of South America. Not permitted to run the railway onto British soil, Henderson arranged a daily steamboat across the bay to the first station on the line at Algeciras, and all materials were shipped from England, right down to the station clocks. The result was – and still is – one of Europe’s most remarkable train journeys, but which today takes tourists, rather than British army officers, to Ronda in 90 minutes for €11.50.

To ensure comfortable digs both before boarding and at journey’s end, Henderson also hired the architect of The Savoy to build the Hotel Reina Cristina at Algeciras and a sister establishment, the Hotel Reina Victoria, in Ronda. There are also stops in San Roque and Gaucín, offering the chance to break up the journey.

Today, Algeciras is an industrial port city and the Reina Cristina (rooms from £90), while a grand structure, is run down, its rolling gardens out of place between the docks and tenement buildings. In its time it hosted movie stars and politicians: Orson Welles and Ava Gardener, Roosevelt and Churchill (both as Prime Minister and earlier, as Telegraph reporter at the Algeciras Conference on the fate of Morocco in 1906). Its carefully restored twin in Ronda, the Reina Victoria (rooms from £100), remains a lovely hotel.

There are three daily trains along Mr Henderson’s Railway, departing at 06:20, 10:50 and 17:04. I boarded the second and headed out towards the mountainous backdrop of the Serranía de Ronda. The rails are far nicer than the road, exchanging motorways and flyovers for verdant coastal countryside. The steam trains have gone, but their smooth, air-conditioned replacements, operated by Renfe (the state-owned railway), are perfectly good.

The original passengers were often British Army officers, which explains why the first stop along the line is San Roque, home to the luxurious Sotogrande with its famed polo clubs. It was the British Army who adopted this equestrian sport while serving in India and went on to teach it to the horse-obsessed Spanish nobility.

I disembark and head for lunch at the restored 18th-century marvel that is El Monasterio, one of the most beautiful small hotels in Andalusia. Afterwards I catch a practice session at the neighbouring polo ground, Luciano Irazábal and Nano Iturrioz’s ‘Iron Bridge’, and see Klarina Pichler, semi-finalist in last July’s British Women’s Open at Cowdray Park, the Wimbledon of the Game of Kings, and who coaches the British Royal Dragoon Guards who brought the sport to Europe. (Indeed, she is the only British Hurlingham Polo Association licensed instructor in Spain.)

I make the last train from San Roque at 17:18. From here it is all about the views and admiration of the technique and industry required to dynamite your way through the hillsides to follow the mountainous forest-course of the river Gaudiaro through the sparkling wonders of the Natural Park of Los Alcornacales.

A little over an hour later I arrive at Gaucín station, although it is a few miles from the town so a taxi is required. The last time I was here it was under the shadow of Covid-19. I am pleased to see Daniel Beauvoir’s La Fructuosa (rooms from €110) remains the most pleasant of village retreats, with elegant and spacious rooms looking out over the valley.

The real surprise, though, is Restaurant Azulete, under the new management of a Franco-Colombian couple: Parisian chef, Gabriel Arnaud, who met his wife Daniela Rodriguez while they were working Ferran Adrià of El Bullí fame, before they came here. In 25 years of writing about this country, I can’t recall a finer dining experience.

The final section of track winds through an undulating landscape, softening from epic to pastoral, a transition highlighted by the stop-motion effect of a dozen tunnels within 40 miles.

At the end of it all lies Ronda, the haven. A writer’s retreat, it has statues to visitors like Hemingway, the centenary of whose first visit to Spain is this year, and the Austrian poet Rilke.

I meet Jon Clarke, editor of the local English newspaper, at the tapas bar La Barrafina. He updates me on the gossip over thin-sliced jamón ibérico – the owner is a national champion jamón-cutter – and ice-cold manzanilla, before I check into one of his wife Gabriella’s self-catering apartments (rooms from €140), hidden gems a short walk from the Arab Baths along the city walls.

From there one can stroll up past the three historic bridges – Arab, Old and ‘New’ (1790s in vintage, 390 feet in height) – culminating in the vertiginous glories of the Tajo gorge, one of the most visited monuments in Spain.

Next to it is another, the 450-year-old Maestranza plaza de toros of Ronda, still operated by the longest running dynasty of matadors, whose present title holder, Cayetano Rivera Ordoñez, excels in the ring to this day.

Finally, one is at the breezy summit of one of the peaks of Spain’s history and culture. The steam from the locomotives may have long ago evaporated, and the gun-smoke of the bandits has dispersed, but the poetry of this coast-to-mountain, British-built train service remains as uplifting as it always was.

Article about me in The Times

THE TIMES

Hemingway’s bullfight passion honoured in Pamplona 100 years on

Isambard Wilkinson, Madrid
Wednesday July 06 2023

A century ago Ernest Hemingway first travelled to Spain and attended Pamplona’s festival of San Fermin, which inspired his lifelong passion for bullfighting and transformed the event into an international jamboree.

The festival — which opens on Thursday, lasts a week and dates from the 13th century — became a worldwide phenomenon after Hemingway immortalised it in his 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises.

To commemorate the centenary John Hemingway, the author’s grandson, and Alexander Fiske-Harrison, an amateur British matador and bullfighting expert, will rise before the first bull run on Thursday… (read on in the image below or follow this link to The Times website.)