#Philip Corner

[ozkar-krapo]

V/A

"Tellus #24 : Flux Tellus"

(cassette. Tellus. 1990)

[posttheory]

Philip Corner Piano Activities

[hellocanticle]

Agnese Toniutti‘s New Music Vision

Neuma 172 This is the most recent recording by Italian pianist Agnese Toniutti. (her third release by my research). It is also the most recent recording of John Cage’s masterful Sonatas and Interludes (1946-8) for prepared piano, a defining work for that unusual instrument. It has been recorded at least 30 times but is rather rarely heard in live performance. John Cage is perhaps best known for…

[literaryvein-reblogs]

I write almost always in the third person, and I don't think the narrator is male or female anyway. They're both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and sceptical and credulous, and innocent and experienced, all at once. Narrators are not even human - they're sprites. ― Philip Pullman

Writing Prompt: Describe the narrator in your stories/poems.

[calebsrottingcorpse]

King’s Tide if it was good (context under the cut)

[anglerflsh]

duality of man

[literaryvein]

L. V., i found this poem as i swept the confetti away

[starryrock]

What about post-canon Belos’s ghost haunts Luz and neither of them are happy about this outcome? Luz is upset for obvious reasons. Belos is upset because he’s dead, failed, and would rather stay in the In-Between (or whatever afterlife/oblivion there is) than see everyone else happy.

Idk why but I have the thought that he would watch vine compilations. My only reasoning for this is thinking of Belos quoting “Let’s tell each other a secret about ourselves. I’ll go first: I. Hate you.” He wouldn’t understand half the words being said, but he’d watch it like my cousin’s demon cat watches Spanish TV.

[shailion]

A mother making her 3rd eggsac

[ducktr0ducin]

B! Nail! Final answer!

[hippiesolitude]

Two bros, chillin’ in a hot tub… not quite 5 feet apart :o

This was another roomie request, and honestly it was super fun to draw :D

[kaleb-is-definitely-sane]

They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn By fools in old-style hats and coats, Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself.

-This Be The Verse by Philip Larkin

[nothingunrealistic]

asia kate dillon as taylor mason and toney goins as philip charyn in billions 7x01 “tower of london”

(edit: ft. dola rashad as kate sacker)

[littlemuoi]

The Queen of mischief: A wicked talent for impressions, why she calls herself Miss Piggy and how Her Majesty loves it when a titled lady starts swearing by Richard Kay & Geoffrey Levy (March 17th 2016)

ARCHIVE LINK

As the Queen climbed into the open carriage for a birthday drive through the streets of Windsor, there on the seat lay a bouquet of flowers and beside it a birthday card in an envelope.

First, she smelled the flowers. Then, as she settled back on the cushioned seat, she opened the envelope and looked at the card — and burst into peals of laughter.

The card, which was signed by all the staff in the Royal Mews at Buckingham Palace, where the royal carriages and horses are kept, depicted Miss Piggy, the Muppet character.

‘I thought, “Well, she can’t sack us all,” ’ says coachman Alfred Oates, now 76, who was with the Queen for 57 years. ‘But there she was, as the crowds could see, laughing the whole way round.’

It was the Queen’s 60th birthday and the crowds didn’t know of the in-joke that had existed between the Queen and her staff since the wedding of Charles and Diana five years earlier.

It was at an after-wedding party watching video highlights that the Queen, Martini in hand, called to her husband: ‘Oh Philip, do look! I’ve got my Miss Piggy face on.’

It wasn’t long before what had been an intimate — and quite inexplicable — family joke had spread throughout the staff.

Even Princess Diana took to referring affectionately to her mother-in-law as ‘Miss Piggy’.

Almost 30 years after that Miss Piggy carriage drive, and with her 90th birthday approaching next month, laughter is as important as ever to the Queen.

But astonishingly, as she enters her tenth decade, the sober side of her ‘job’ remains as important to her today as it did when she first received those red boxes of government papers 64 years ago.

Indeed, she reads them as studiously as ever, still spending at least an hour a day going through them and noting her observations.

As Sir John Major, the ninth of the 12 prime ministers to serve her during her reign, tells us: ‘Remarkable, yes. But surprising, no. For the Queen is an assiduous guardian of the interests of this nation — and those of the Commonwealth.’

She has been seeing government papers since the final weeks of Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour administration in 1951. Because of her father George VI’s worsening health — a heavy smoker, he died of lung cancer aged 56 in 1952 — she was allowed to see Foreign Office telegrams while he was still alive.

Since then her deep interest and involvement in what her government is doing, and what is happening in the country, has never slackened, even at the weekends. As Sir John observes: ‘It is extremely important to her, personally, that she is kept informed about how policies will affect her people.’

In all these years of hardly putting a foot wrong she has done so just twice, according to her former Private Secretary, Sir William Heseltine.

The first concerned the Aberfan disaster in 1966, when a slag heap in the Welsh mining village near Merthyr Tydfil slid on to a school, killing 116 children and 28 adults. Her initial thoughts were not to go there.

‘Her attitude was highly principled: “If I go down, people who are digging children out of the mud will have to stop and talk to me,” ’ says Sir William. ‘But in the country there was strong feeling that the tragedy needed her healing presence.’

It was eight days before she went and, he says, ‘the fact that she was there healed whatever wound there might have been, but it was late. She shed tears down there. Who wouldn’t have done’.

This delay in visiting the South Wales village has remained, perhaps, the Queen’s greatest regret.

The second time, which Sir William believes the Queen accepts as an error, was failing to have the flag above Buckingham Palace lowered on the death of Princess Diana, which we revealed earlier in this series.

But the two episodes haven’t changed Sir William’s admiration for the Queen’s seven-day work ethic.

As he recalls: ‘On Friday afternoons when Whitehall was clearing its desks there was always a lot of paper that required a decision of some sort by the Queen. She dealt with it on Saturday nights or Sunday. The (red) boxes were always in Whitehall by Monday lunchtime.’

This is a ritual that Philip has had to come to terms with, for even now, if they are together when the government boxes arrive, she gives up whatever they are doing and goes off to deal with them.

‘He found this so hard to handle in the early days, but he looks at her with a certain admiration now,’ says an aide.

One of the Queen’s former ladies-in-waiting, Jean Woodroffe, 93, goes further. ‘I think their relationship has evolved,’ she says. ‘Prince Philip is much kinder than he used to be. I mean, he was never unkind, but he’s more protective of her.’

The Queen often leans on him when surrounded by people who are strangers for, surprisingly, she is ‘shy by nature’, says a former senior courtier. 

Distinguished artist Michael Noakes, who has painted her several times and knows her well, explains: ‘Sometimes she has to rather gather herself together before she can quite face going into a room where everyone will be looking at her.

‘When Prince Philip sees that happening he takes over, in a subtle way, and makes sure everything is OK. He says he can make people laugh within 15 seconds.’

But he can also be ‘cantankerous with people, and occasionally around the Queen’, says a former senior aide, adding: ‘What people don’t realise is that for the past 20 years he has suffered from acute arthritis, which can be very painful.’

Sir Nicholas Soames, former Tory minister and grandson of Sir Winston Churchill, says: ‘Prince Philip is a product of his age, of a wartime generation that doesn’t whine and whinge like today’s generation do about everything.’

The Queen’s reciprocal support for Philip — they celebrate their platinum wedding (70 years) next year — is when he is carriage driving.

Stephen Matthews, 63, former head coachman at the Royal Mews, says the happiest he has seen her is when she is watching Philip controlling a carriage-and-four in a competition.

‘She’ll see him going through one hazard and then race in her Land Rover to get to the next obstacle in time to see him take that,’ he says. ‘She gets very excited when he’s doing well.’

Philip’s admiration for his wife was once based fundamentally on her orderly mind and devotion to her duties. But something has changed in their relationship over the years. ‘Once she always laughed at his humour,’ says a former equerry. ‘He now laughs at hers.’

Indeed, friends have noticed that something of his mischievous humour has rubbed off on to her. Not his salty brand of naval wit and throwaway observations that have caused insult in places as far apart as China (‘slitty eyes’) and Hungary (‘pot bellies’). That’s not the Queen at all.

Irreverent impressions are her forte and she has had the Prince in stitches. There was the time a North Country mayor was introduced to the Queen and insisted on complimenting her by telling her how much prettier she was in the flesh than in her pictures.

‘Later that day the Queen did an impression of the poor man telling her this in a northern accent, which had everyone holding their sides — including Philip,’ says a retired courtier. ‘She wasn’t mocking him, just having fun.’

Michael Noakes was at Buckingham Palace painting the Queen for the City of Manchester in her Order of the Bath robes, and for the best light effect he had her standing near a window in the Yellow Drawing Room.

As he recalls: ‘She was peering out of the window and keeping up a running commentary of people’s reactions to seeing her standing there — “ ‘Gee Maud (in an American accent) it can’t be’ . . . oh no, he’s decided it can’t be, he’s moved on now’ and that sort of thing, and “Ooh, a car has just been hit by a taxi, I think there’s going to be a fight now”. She is very funny.’

Sir Antony Jay, co-author of Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister, who also wrote the script of the ground-breaking 1969 television documentary Royal Family, recalls finding the Queen to be not as he expected when he sat next to her at a lunch.

‘She’d just had her portrait painted and was rather acid about the artist rather than the portrait,’ he says. ‘She was confident and opinionated in a way you would never see in public.’

After the success of Yes Minister, he and the Queen’s former Private Secretary Sir William Heseltine, a close friend, hatched a plot for a Yes Ma’am tv series, but Sir William assures us: ‘It was just a private joke.’

A pity — because the Queen’s wit can be deliciously dry. Coachman Colin Henderson, 69, was with the Queen at the Royal Windsor Horse Show when one of her grandchildren came up to her in the Royal Box. He recalls: ‘The Queen said: “Did you have a good lunch?” and the child replied: “Yes, granny.” To which the Queen said: “I thought so — you’ve got it all down your front.” ’

One running joke involved Audrey Dellow, the organist for 40 years in the Royal Chapel at Windsor who, according to Canon John Ovenden, Chaplain to the Queen at Windsor for 14 years until 2012, competed with Her Majesty every Sunday over who was wearing the best hat.

‘She could see the Queen in her mirror because the organ was almost opposite the royal pew,’ says Canon Ovenden. ‘Everyone was in on the joke — the Queen has an impish sense of humour.’

Going to church remains a key element of her life. The strength of her faith first emerged when her grandfather George V, who doted on his granddaughter Lilibet, was nearing death in 1936 and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang, took her for a walk.

‘Please do not tell me anything more about God,’ the little girl, not yet ten, counselled the Archbishop. ‘I know all about Him already.’

This faith is familiar to Canon Ovenden. He recalls occasions when she has touched down at Heathrow after a foreign tour at 5am on a Sunday morning — ‘but blow me down, there she is in church for matins.’

One thing that makes her laugh out loud is when things go wrong in church. Canon Ovenden recalls a Sunday service when he called out the first hymn and the organist struck up the wrong tune.

‘I had to say “Stop!, start again,” and the Queen loved it.’

She also laughs out loud when one of her great friends, a titled lady who in recent times has sadly suffered from the neurological condition Tourette’s syndrome, uses language more associated with the saloon bar on a Friday night. In the middle of a conversation with the Queen, she is prone to suddenly blurting out: ‘Oh, do **** off, Lilibet.’

When the Queen first told former naval officer Philip about it over supper, he loved it. Surprisingly, they don’t have all that many suppers together. Neither travels as much as they once did, of course, but both continue to carry out many official engagements and don’t meet up very often for meals.

The Queen, like millions of other people, is fond of having supper on a tray in front of the television. (She made a point of watching the Downton Abbey Christmas Special while at Sandringham.)

She will have ordered her supper earlier with a tick from a choice of three main courses — no starters — on a leather-bound menu embossed in gold.

One of her favourites from childhood, always on the menu, is Gaelic steak — a filet steak cut into strips with a whisky and mushroom cream sauce.

She is not much of a pudding eater, and neither is Philip. At lunchtime, the Queen prefers cheese and in the evening fruit to finish. A favourite of them both is savoury souffle. When they do eat together they follow an old palace tradition of the menu on the table being written in French.

Before they dine, they like to have a drink. The Queen’s evening favourite is a ‘very dry’ dry Martini, made from gin straight out of the freezer with the merest dribble of Vermouth. Says an aide: ‘Sometimes people have forgotten to put the Vermouth in and she doesn’t notice.’

For his part, Philip will have a whisky and water or a Bacardi and tomato juice. They rarely drink wine or champagne, except for toasts.

Former Palace chef Darren McGrady, who also worked for Princess Diana, says that one thing the Queen has never made a fuss of is her birthday. ‘She is often alone for tea on the day,’ he says. ‘But in the Palace kitchens, we would never forget it.’ This year, as ever, they will make her the special 12in chocolate ganache birthday cake, using the same recipe (see above) created in the 19th century for Queen Victoria by her Swiss masterchef Gabriel Tschumi, who also worked for Edward VII and George V.

It is always piped simply ‘Happy Birthday’ in white royal icing. Nothing more — and definitely no candles. If the Queen is by herself, a small slice is cut for her.

On every other day of the year she has scones for tea, one day plain, the next fruit, and small, rectangular sandwiches, the bread cut exactly a quarter of an inch thick and the crust removed.

An enduring teatime favourite that goes back to her childhood with Princess Margaret are ‘jam pennies’: seedless raspberry jam sandwiches stamped out about the size of an old penny.

She also likes the cucumber in her sandwiches to be cut lengthwise to avoid the pips in the soft centre. The waste-nothing Queen has the skins sent down to the cellars as garnish for Pimm’s.

Some around the palace insist the Queen’s interest in her food is rather less than her interest in the food she gives her corgis. Nothing is allowed to come between her and their mealtimes.

Even the ancient routine of the Garter ceremony at Windsor has been interrupted for her to feed them, on one occasion removing her blue velvet robe to reveal the long white gown with a blue sash, plumed hat and white gloves, as she put out the food into five bowls on a small side table.

What followed proved what the Marquess of Salisbury says, that the Queen ���is the most remarkable controller of dogs . . . she is a genius for it’.

‘One of the dogs was having fish, another meat, one had this special powder to take, another a pill that she had to crush — she knew precisely what to give each one, and still in her Garter finery,’ recalls a footman.

‘The dogs sat in a semi-circle at her feet and waited with remark-able patience. Finally, she put the bowls — they’re all old silver and porcelain dishes — down on the floor and still they didn’t move, like soldiers waiting for a command. And then she said “Eat, feed” and they did. Only then did she go through for tea with the knights, who were waiting for her.’

So, as we have seen, the Queen can be a completely different person away from Palace formality. Petty Officer William Evans remembers a shooting party at Balmoral where he was assisting Earl Mountbatten when the Queen drove up in her Land Rover with a box of hot baked potatoes wrapped in tin foil in the back.

‘Who wants a hot potato?’ she yelled, opening the boot.

Says Evans: ‘I put up my hand and she tossed one straight at me from at least 20 ft.

‘And suddenly the air was thick with hot potatoes as she threw them around, including one to a grinning Prince Philip. It all seemed so natural. The look he gave her said so much.’

Inevitably, people wonder just how she would cope if she lost Philip, who will be 95 in June.

Says her cousin and lifelong friend Margaret Rhodes: ‘I don’t know how much she would do a Queen Victoria and sit in the background while she was getting over it. She would never consider stepping down.

‘I remember someone once repeating my words, saying that she wasn’t going to abdicate. When I next saw the Queen, she said to me: “You should have said, ‘She would want to go on being Queen unless she had Alzheimer’s or suffered a stroke.’ ” ’

Her 90th birthday may be only weeks away, but this extraordinary woman is as indefatigable — and resolutely dedicated to her duty — as ever.

[smokestarrules]

I want to hear your thoughts on this. So, Luz goes back in time to meet Philip, led him to the Collector and eventually he becomes Belos. But that only happens because Belos created the events that eventually lead to Luz travelling back in time, which sends Philip on the path to Belos. Was there ever an original set of events that make Belos emperor independent of Luz, or is it an infinite loop with no beginning or end?

I definitely think it was an infinite loop, and the reason I believe this is because of the way Elsewhere and Elsewhen ends.

Nothing has changed.

Two main characters have just traveled to the past and talked and aided with someone who is essential to the future, their present, and nothing has changed.

Which means to me that nothing can change. Everything of the past is set in stone, and even if you travel back in time, you will only be turning the path towards what already is. Nothing can change, and so nothing has ever been different. Philip has always met Luz there, because Belos has always set her on that path, because Philip always meets Luz. It's an infinite cycle, and Luz quite literally could not have gotten out of it even if she knew what was coming.