#Richard Whisker

[woodlnds]

Bigwig / Thlayli

I wanted to try to capture both styles of his 1978 rendition as well as his BBC rendition, while still keeping his design somewhat realistic to that of real european rabbits. The design blended together quite nicely I think! I also gave him a little beard on his chin, because why not? :p

[notnotnightwing]

Um..so hey..my names...Richard...but you can call me Ric if you want....I'm emo now..because Mr Kitty Whiskers Jr didn't want to be my cat...this is me now..

If you don't like it *flips hair* then deal with it posers.

[livvidaloca]

what!? liv made human designs for the watterson family again!? yes, she did, and here’s her train of thought for these under the cut:

so, these are actually for my fic that i’m writing on ao3 in which gumball finds himself transported to another universe in which everyone is a human after the events of the inquisition. this is why there’s very few animal traits on any of them, or magically colored anime hair. i wanted them to look like people who could exist and walk around.

in this, nicole is blasian and richard is a white latino (with frankie being white non-latino and jojo being latina). (also these headcanons were based on a lot of convos with some of my friends back in the day, i don’t remember anyone’s reasonings for these but they’ve been true for so long in my brain) gumball and anais are mixed, and i tried to nod to gumball taking more after nicole and anais taking more after richard without making them carbon copies. and then darwin of course is black thats just canon

as for their designs themselves, i’ll start with nicole. i tried to make her look decently muscular (although the simplistic style i used doesn’t exactly show it off). her blue bandana and shoes are obviously a nod to her canon design, so she doesn’t look like an entirely different character. as for her hairstyle i looked into relatively low-maintenance styles, since she’s a busy woman! and her hair is starting to gray from all that STRESS!

richard’s design is the most straightforward, yet it took me the longest because i was never satisfied with how it was turning out. i’m still not sure if i’m crazy about it. all i know is that i was dead set on making him bald, since there’s literally a whole episode about that. I didn’t commit all the way because the design without any hair was making me lose my mind. i gave him some freckles as a nod to his whiskers because they’re a lot more prominent than nicole’s (which is why she doesn’t have any). this also translated to gumball’s design. also, how could i ignore the obvious choice and not give him pink bunny slippers!? it fits him so well!

gumball was fairly easy for me, because i kinda always have human designs for him in mind. i always give him those blue sneakers because duh, and i always give him dyed-blue hair that he visibly doesn’t maintain. i always had this human-version-only headcanon that gumball BEGGED to dye his hair for the longest time, and nicole finally allowed it on the condition that he’d keep up with it on his own. he didn’t. classic gumball

darwin’s design is also usually an easy one for me. big orange hoodie, green shorts and sneakers. this time i also made the decision to have his hair tied up to resemble his little fin. it’s not really visible with their clothes and stuff blocking the original sketch, but i also tried to make his legs a little bit lankier than gumball’s, just to make them appear longer like they are in the show.

as for anais, i always have trouble nailing the design without it looking like a completely different character. i cant dye her hair pink, because she’s supposed to be four, but i also can’t give her pink shoes, because she’s of course the only one who actually has shoes! then i remembered ribbons and my day was saved. still not sure if i’m completely sold on her design yet, though. i think she looks a little older than four.

anyways, i’m planning on doing other designs like these with other characters! let me know if you’re interested. as for that fic, here’s the link:

[aeide-thea]

Your Catfish Friend

If I were to live my life in catfish forms in scaffolds of skin and whiskers at the bottom of a pond and you were to come by    one evening when the moon was shining down into my dark home and stand there at the edge    of my affection and think, "It's beautiful here by this pond. I wish    somebody loved me," I'd love you and be your catfish friend and drive such lonely thoughts from your mind and suddenly you would be    at peace, and ask yourself, "I wonder if there are any catfish in this pond? It seems like a perfect place for them."

   —Richard Brautigan (1989)

[ice-cream-writes-stuff]

Based on Yandere Nightwing x Yandere Reader Midnight Blurb, [Link Here]

During one of your daily activities, you and a few other passers-bys pared witness to a new vilian attack in the middle of the street. You didn't care if people were evacuating, your time was spent by quietly gushing one the most handsomely hero's you know. Your beloved Song Bird, Nightwing.

But a little pest was aiding him.

Some girl in a magician garb had ruined one of your most treasured times of the day with her unwanted presence.

Two against one, they easily managed to get that vilian away, but...

After a spell gone awry, Nightwing had been turned into...

A BUNNY?!

You wanted squeal at his adorable form, but you still had to deal with little-miss-attention-stealer.

So, while the girl was questioning the vilain. You, playing a good, stupid, sweet little gothamite. Take the helpless bunny to your shop. Saying you'll help him find his owner.

Which the Nightbunny didn't seem to mind.

Instead, he snuggled into your chest area as his furry little chest puffs up with pride. Showcasing the blue bird from his costume that had turned into fur.

When the two of you made it back to your shop, you set him down on the counter as you went into the breakroom area to look for any snacks.

But you find the small bun playfully running after you, jumping over your feet as you walk. You stop and look down at Nightwing. He stomps his feet, kicking his feet as he runs circles around you. It kinda looked like a little dance, you pick him up carefully and press and small tender kiss to his whiskers.

The moment ends as the girl magician runs into your shop. Her face full of fear as she gasps for air, clearly showing she had run here. You glare at her, but she said that she lost her "pet bunny" and was looking for him.

Saying she was SO glad you found him. While he tried to pull Nightwing from your arms. You frown, but let up, giving the magic user the hero that transformed into a rabbit.

"I'm glad I found him, poor thing, he got lost in all of that vilian chaos. As a pet owner, shouldn't you be more reasonable?"

You smile gleefully as her faced warmed up in embarrassment for being scolded while Nightbun held a look of amusement in his button eyes.

"If you need a sitter, stop by any time!" You call out as she and Nightbunny leave.

You ignore the ache in your heart as you wipe down the counter.

"Hey (Y/N)!" Dicks voice greeted you with the click of your shop door accompanying him. You fix your face as you greet him back with your customer service smile.

"Hi Dick," you say forgetting you mostly called him Richard.

"You finally said it!" "What?"

"You said my nickname," he winked at you with a cheeky smile you knew since the first day you saw him.

"Sorry, just a slip of the tongue." You mumble as Dick tries to keep your attention with a new topic.

"So.. How do you feel about animals, more specifically, bunnies?"

[Did you know that male bunnies court female bunnies by chasing them jumping over the other?]

[guttersniper]

LIST 5 SONGS THAT INSPIRE YOU TO WRITE YOUR MUSE.

trouble's braids, tom waits

nature boy, nat king cole

running kind, merle haggard & the strangers

old man, neil young

the city of new orleans, arlo guthrie

bonus songs: the partisan, leonard cohen; hot and dirty in the city by labi siffre; you should've seen the other guy, nathaniel rateliff; hobo's lullaby, pete seeger + playlist

LIST 10 QUOTES THAT INSPIRE YOU TO WRITE YOUR MUSE.

try explaining a life bundled with episodes of this -- swallowing mud, swallowing glass, the smell of blood on the first four knuckles. -- richard siken

those years gaze up at me like a hound. the centuries watch as we walk off the sheer cliff of them. my eyes adjust to the dark, but my heart never. -- hua xi

one of the things i try to do: memorize the smallest, most mundane and ordinary, unprepossessing, and virtually invisible of physical moments: the look and feel of a certain wall at a certain time on a certain day. those walls, those little shacks, those cats in the sun: all that is lacking in self-consciousness i seek to hold in vision, memory. (simple composition, color tints, a wash of light, crumbled brick, cold shadow, stillness, rose-color dirt, a twitching whisker.) -- michelle anderson-binczak

people talk of "social outcasts." the words apparently denote the miserable losers of the world, the vicious ones, but i feel as though i have been a "social outcast" from the moment i was born. if ever i meet someone society has designated as an outcast, i invariably feel affection for him, an emotion which carries me away in melting tenderness. -- osamu dazai

he knew french and german. he knew the periodic table. he knew--as much as he didn't care to--large parts of the bible almost by memory. he knew how to help birth a calf and rewire a lamp and unclog a drain and the most efficient way to harvest a walnut tree and which mushrooms were poisonous and which were not and how to bale hay and how to test a watermelon, an apple, a squash, a muskmelon for freshness by thunking it in the right spot. (and then he knew things he wished he didn't, things he hoped never to have to use again, things that, when he thought of them or dreamed of them at night, made him curl into himself with hatred and shame.) -- hanya yanagihara

the girl fits her body into the space between the bed and the wall. she is a stalk, exhausted. she will do something with this. she will surround these bones with flesh. she will cultivate night vision. she will train her tongue to lie still in her mouth and listen. the girl slips into sleep. her dream is red and raging. she will remember to build something human with it. -- lucille clifton

what voice is this cut in the air as though a wound itself had speech / give her small hands / give her dark hair / give her a wound no word can reach -- christian wiman

what does it feel like to be lonely? it feels like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast. it feels shameful and alarming, and over time these feelings radiate outwards, making the lonely person increasingly isolated, increasingly estranged. it hurts, in the way that feelings do, and it also has physical consequences that take place invisibly, inside the closed compartments of the body. it advances, is what i'm trying to say, cold as ice and clear as glass, enclosing and engulfing. -- olivia liang

maybe it’s better to have the terrible times first. i don’t know. maybe then, you can have, if you live, a better life, a real life, because you had to fight so hard to get it away--you know?--from the mad dog who held it in his teeth. but then your life has all those tooth marks, too, all those tatters and all that blood. -- james baldwin

out there where small things scratched and sometimes touched. where words could be spoken that would close your ears shut. where, if you were alone, feeling could overtake you and stick to you like a shadow. out there where there were places in which things so bad had happened that when you went near them it would happen again. -- toni morrison

bonus quotes: there is nothing in this story that’s not a dagger. (hieu minh nguyen); this may be unpleasant to consider, may even be a bad place to begin, but if there were a nicer way to tell this story it wouldn’t be this story. (catherine lacey); most of it happened without music, the clink of a spoon from the kitchen. / someone talking. silence. / someone sleeping. someone watching somebody sleep. (marie howe); look now: my heart is a fist of barbed wire. (analicia sotelo); now you wear your skin like iron and your breath as hard as kerosene. (townes van zandt); i seize on little things / you can tell a lot about people / by the way they comb their hair / or the way they don't look you in the eye. (nikki giovanni)

[emailsfromanactor]

Happy 60th first-wedding anniversary, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor! Here's some of what Hume Cronyn had to say about the couple:

The entire undertaking was enveloped in the mystique of the Burton-Taylor romance. It was a replay of the hysteria that had existed throughout the world press during the latter half of the filming of Cleopatra in Rome. It was inescapable. Never mind about the film Cleopatra or the play Hamlet: what were the lovers Richard and Elizabeth up to? The play was to rehearse and open in Toronto, and it was there that the news­paper caption “Dickenliz” first appeared. The public interest in the Dickenliz phenomenon seemed unquenchable. Poor old Shakespeare didn’t stand a chance—at least not when it came to publicity. The hullabaloo continued throughout the To­ronto and Boston engagements and on into New York. In each of those three cities, I remember at least one incident that was illustrative of the general madness. With Elizabeth in Toronto to hold Richard’s hand through­out rehearsals, the pressure from press and particularly the photographers (Richard called them the “Canadian papa­razzi”) was enormous. There came a point when Dickenliz would have sold their souls for a couple of days of peace, quiet, and solitude. Since I knew them better than anyone else in the company and, as a Canadian, was on my home turf, I under­took to find them a bolt hole. I couldn’t have done it alone. My niece Katie Grass and her husband, Ruliff, together with their friends Tony and Lou-Ann Cassels, arranged to spirit them away for a weekend at Lake Simcoe. The preparations were all very cloak-and-dagger. Rully was to pick up Elizabeth, Katie was to pick up Richard, and we would all meet at my apartment for what was ostensibly a supper party. After a de­cent interval, Elizabeth would leave with the Cassels, Richard would leave with Katie, and at some trysting point or other the cars would meet, exchange passengers, and Dickenliz would be on their way to the lake. There, in February, they could actually leave their borrowed cottage and take a walk together without photographers popping out of the bushes to harass them. A few weeks later I was to be party to a similar charade. Again there was to be the business of switching cars and indi­rect routes, but this time the destination was the Toronto Air­port. Somehow or other we managed to get the cars, separately, out onto the runway so there was no exposure to the terminal crowds where—short of whiskers, wigs, bandages and smoked glasses—an appearance would have inevitably led to recognition. As it was, the cover was blown when they reached Mont­real. On March 15th, 1964, Elizabeth and Richard were married in their suite at the Ritz Carlton Hotel. The ceremony was performed by a Unitarian minister. Quebec law did not re­quire either blood tests or a license.

[wetwaluigi]

I wonder now, what are your Zeti OCs + Idris's voice headcanon, WetWaluigi? What would they be and Where Did they come from?

OOOOH FUN QUESTION good question i wrote these down somewhere (grim helped me with some of the hard ones)

currently i have- zolus- roger clark as arthur morgan zovvie- richard horvitz as crimson zroxxy- elizabeth maxwell as hollyberry cookie zoray- chuck huber as android 17 zio- john chancer as snufkin zinerva- eartha kitt as yzma aaand my bunny whisker- david tennant as scrooge mcduck

notes: i dont think ill ever find a perfect voice for zovvie, crim is the closest so far but i wish i could something that sounds slightly russian and also a bit shrill then ones like zoray and zio both sound much older than the closest voice counterparts i could find also this could become harshly outdated its just what i have rn anyway ty for the question, i usually take forever for questions because i usually draw something but i dont NEED to draw something here so HA edit: forgot to add i dont have a voice for zixzo yet!! i will update if i find something squeaky and energetic and crackly

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Richard Dawkins

Published: Nov 13, 2023

“I say, Jarvis, cluster round.”

“Sir?”

“Close on me – if that’s the right expression?”

“A military phrase, sir, employed by officers requiring the presence of their subordinates.”

“Right, Jarvis. Lend me your ears.”

“Equally appropriate, sir. Mark Antony . . .”

“Never mind Mark Antony, Jarvis. This is important.”

“Very good sir.”

“As you know, Jarvis, when it comes to regions north of the collar stud, B Woofter is not rated highly in the form book. Nevertheless, I do have one great scholastic triumph to my credit. And I bet you don’t know what that was?”

“You have frequently adverted to it sir. You won the prize for Scripture Knowledge at your preparatory academy.”

“Yes, Jarvis, I did, to the ill-concealed surprise of the Rev Aubrey Upcock, proprietor and chief screw at that infamous hell-hole. And ever since then, although not much of a lad for Matins or Evensong, I’ve always had a soft spot for Holy Writ as we experts call it. And now we come to the nub. Orcrux, Jarvis?”

“Very appropriate sir, or ‘nitty gritty’ is these days often heard.”

“The point is, Jarvis, as an aficionado, I have long been especially fond of the book of Genesis. God made the world in six days, am I right, Jarvis?”

“Well sir . . .”

“Beginning with light, God moved swiftly through the gears, making plants and things that creep, scaly things with fins, our feathered friends tootling through the trees, furry brothers and sisters in the undergrowth and finally, rounding into the straight, he created chaps like us, before taking to his hammock for a well-earned siesta on the seventh day. Am I right, Jarvis?”

“Yes sir, if I may say so, a colourfully mixed summary of one of our great origin myths.”

“But now, Jarvis, mark the sequel. A fellow at the Dregs Christmas party was bending my ear last night over the snort that refreshes. Seems there’s a cove called Darwin who says Genesis is all a lot of rot. God’s been oversold on the campus. He didn’t make everything after all. There’s something called evaluation . . .”

“Evolution sir. The theory advanced by Charles Darwin in his great book of 1859, On the Origin of Species.”

“That’s the baby, Jarvis. Evolution. Would you credit it, this Darwin bozo wants me to believe my great great grandfather was some kind of hirsute banana-stuffer, scratching himself with his toes and swinging through the treetops. Now, Jarvis, answer me this. If we’re descended from chimpanzees, why are there chimpanzees still among those present and correct? I saw one only last month at the zoo. Why haven’t they all turned into members of the Dregs Club (or the Athenaeum according to taste)? Try that on your pianola, Jarvis.”

“If I might take the liberty, sir, you appear to be labouring under a misunderstanding. Mr Darwin does not say that we are descended from chimpanzees. Chimpanzees and we are descended from a shared ancestor. Chimpanzees are modern apes, which have been evolving since the time of the shared ancestor, just as we have.”

“Hm, well I think I get your drift, Jarvis. Just as my pestilential cousin Thomas and I are both descended from the same grandfather. But neither of us looks any more like the old reprobate than the other, and neither of us has his side-whiskers.”

“Precisely sir.”

“But hang on, Jarvis. We old lags of the Scripture Knowledge handicap don’t give up that easily. My old man’s guvnor may have been a hairy old gargoyle, but he wasn’t what you’d call a chimpanzee. I distinctly remember. Far from dragging his knuckles over the ground, he carried himself with an upright, military bearing (at least until his later years, and when the port had gone round a few times). And the family portraits in the old ancestral home, Jarvis. We Woofters did our bit at Agincourt, and there were no apes on the strength during that “God for Harry, England and St George” carry-on.”

“I think, sir, you underestimate the time spans involved. Only a few centuries have passed since Agincourt. Our shared ancestor with chimpanzees lived more than five million years ago. If I might venture upon a flight of fancy sir?”

“Certainly you might, Jarvis. Venture away, with the young master’s blessing”

“Suppose you walk back in time one mile, sir, to reach the Battle of Agincourt . . .”

“Sort of like walking from here to the Dregs, Jarvis?”

“Yes sir. On the same scale, to walk back to the ancestor we share with chimpanzees, you’d have to walk all the way from London to Australia.”

“Goodness, Jarvis, all the way to the land of cobbers with corks dangling from their lids. No wonder there are no apes among the family portraits, no low-browed chest-thumpers to be seen once-more-unto-the-breaching at Agincourt.”

“Indeed sir, and to go back to our shared ancestor with fish . . .”

“Wait a minute, Jarvis, hold it there. Are you now telling me I’m descended from something that would feel at home on a slab?”

“We share ancestors with modern fish, sir, which would certainly have been called fish if we could see them. You could safely say that we are descended from fish, sir.”

“Jarvis, sometimes you go too far. Although, when I think of Gussie Hake-Wortle . . .”

“I would not have ventured to make the comparison myself sir. But if I might pursue my fanciful perambulation back through time, sir?  To reach the ancestor that we share with our piscine cousins . . .”

“Let me guess, Jarvis, you’d have to walk right round the whole bally globe and come back to where you started and surprise yourself from behind?”

“A considerable underestimate sir. You’d have to walk to the moon and back, and then set off and do the whole journey again sir.”

“Jarvis, this is too much to spring on a lad with a morning head. Go and mix me one of those pick-me-ups of yours before I can take any more.”

“I have one in readiness sir, prepared when I perceived the lateness of the hour of your return from your club last night.”

“Attaboy, Jarvis. But wait, here’s another thing. This Darwin bird says it all happened by chance. Like spinning the big wheel at Le Touquet. Or like when Bufty Snodgrass scored a hole in one and stood drinks for the whole club for a week.”

“No sir that is incorrect. Natural selection is not a matter of chance. Mutation is a chance process. Natural selection is not.”

“Take a run-up and bowl that one by me again, Jarvis, if you wouldn’t mind. And this time make it your slower ball, with no spin. What is mutation?”

“I beg your pardon sir, I presumed too much. From the Latin mutatio, feminine, ‘a change’, a mutation is a mistake in the copying of a gene.”

“Like a misprint in a book, Jarvis?”

“Yes sir, and, like a misprint in a book, a mutation is not likely to lead to improvement. Just occasionally, however, it does, and then it is more likely to survive and be passed on in consequence. That would be natural selection. Mutation, sir, is random in that it has no bias towards improvement. Selection, by contrast, is automatically biased towards improvement, where improvement means ability to survive. One could almost coin a phrase, sir, and say ‘Mutation proposes, selection disposes.’

“Rather neat that, Jarvis. Your own?”

“No sir, the pleasantry is an anonymous parody of Thomas à Kempis.”

“So, Jarvis, let me see if I’ve got a firm grip on the trouser seat of this problem. We see something that looks like a piece of natty design, like an eye or a heart, and we wonder how it bally well got here.”

“Yes sir.”

“It can’t have got here by pure chance because that would be like Bufty’s hole in one, when we had drinks all round for a week.”

“In some respects it would be even more improbable than the Honourable Mr Snodgrass’s alcoholically celebrated feat with the driver, sir. For all the parts of a human body to come together by sheer chance would be about as improbable as a hole in one if Mr Snodgrass were blindfolded and spun around, so that he had no idea of the whereabouts of the ball on the tee, nor of the direction of the green. Were he to be permitted a single stroke with a wood, sir, his chance of scoring a hole in one would be about as great as the chance of a human body spontaneously coming together if all its parts were shuffled at random.”

“What if Bufty had had a few drinks beforehand, Jarvis? Which, by the way, is pretty likely.”

“The contingency of a hole in one is sufficiently remote, sir, and the calculation sufficiently approximate, that we may neglect the possible effects of alcoholic stimulants. The angle subtended at the tee by the hole . . .”

“That’ll do, Jarvis, remember I have a headache. What I clearly see through the fog is that random chance is a non-starter, a washout, scratched at the off. So how do we get complex things that work, like human bodies?”

“To answer that question, sir, was Mr Darwin’s great achievement. Evolution happens gradually and over a very long time. Each generation is imperceptibly different from the previous one, and the degree of improbability required in any one generation is not prohibitive. But after a sufficiently large number of millions of generations, the end product can be very improbable indeed, and can look very much as though it was designed.”

“But it only looks like the work of some slide-rule toting whizz with a drawing board and a row of biros in his top pocket?”

“Yes sir, the illusion of design results from the accumulation of a large number of small improvements in the same direction, each one small enough to result from a single mutation, but the whole cumulative sequence is prolonged enough to culminate in an end result that could not have come about in a single chance event. The metaphor has been advanced of a slow climb up the gentle slopes of what has somewhat over-dramatically been called ‘Mount Improbable’, sir.”

“Jarvis, that’s a doozra of an idea, and I think I’m beginning to get my eye in for it. But I wasn’t too far wrong, was I, when I called it ‘evaluation’ instead of evolution?”

“No sir. The process somewhat resembles the breeding of racehorses. The fastest horses are evaluated by breeders and the best ones are chosen as progenitors of future generations. Mr Darwin realised that in nature the same principle works without the need for any breeder to do the evaluating. The individuals that run fastest are automatically less likely to be caught by lions.”

“Or tigers, Jarvis. Tigers are very fast, Inky Brahmapur was telling me at the Dregs only last week.”

“Yes sir, tigers too. I can well imagine that his Highness would have had ample opportunity to observe their speed from the back of his elephant. The nub, or crux, is that the fastest individual horses survive to breed and pass on the genes that made them fast, because they are less likely to be eaten by large predators.

“By Jove, Jarvis, that makes a lot of sense. And I suppose the fastest tigers also get to breed because they are the first ones to grab their medium rare with all the trimmings, and so survive to have little tigers that also grow up to be fast.”

“Yes sir.”

“But this is amazing, Jarvis. This really prangs the triple twenty. And the same thing works not just for horses and tigers but for everything else?”

“Precisely sir.”

“But Jarvis, wait a moment. I can see that this bowls Genesis middle stump. But where does it leave God? It sounds from what this Darwin bimbo says, that there’s not a lot left for God to do. I mean to say, Jarvis, I know what it’s like to be underemployed, and underemployed is what God, if you get my drift, would seem to be.”

“Very true sir.”

“So, well, dash it, I mean to say, Jarvis, in that case why do we even believe in God at all?”

“Why indeed sir?”

“Jarvis, this is astounding. Incredulous.”

“Incredible sir.”

“Yes, incredible, Jarvis. I shall see the world through new eyes, no longer through a glass darkly as we biblical scholars say. Don’t bother with that pick-me-up, Jarvis. I find I no longer need it. I feel sort of liberated. Instead, bring me my hat, my stick, and the binoculars Aunt Daphne gave me last Goodwood. I’m going out into the park to admire the trees, the butterflies, the birds and the squirrels, and marvel at everything you have told me. You don’t mind if I do a spot of marvelling at everything you’ve told me, Jarvis?”

“No indeed sir. Marvelling is very much in the proper vein, and other gentlemen have told me that they experience the same sense of liberation on first comprehending such matters. If I might make a further suggestion sir?”

“Suggest away, Jarvis, suggest away, we are always ready to hear suggestions from you.”

“Well sir, if you would care to follow the matter further, I have a small volume here, which you might care to peruse.”

“Doesn’t look very small to me, Jarvis, but anyway, what is it called?”

“It is called The Greatest Show on Earth, sir, and it is by . . .”

“It doesn’t matter who it’s by, Jarvis, any friend of yours is a friend of mine. Heave it over and I’ll have a look when I return. Now, the binoculars, the stick and the gents’ bespoke headwear if you please. I have some intensive marvelling to do.”

==

Note: "The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution" is by Richard Dawkins. It's a little self-referential, tongue-in-cheek joke.

[grandmaster-anne]

Gyles Brandreth's Exclusive Extract Last Part

The Mail Plus | Published 27 November 2022

Just one example of the Queen’s pithily dry sense of humour, as revealed in GYLES BRANDRETH’s sparkling new biography. Here, in a final extract, he describes why — from pitch-perfect George Formby impressions to laughing at President Trump — she was ‘the best company in the world’

AT a polo match at Windsor, the actor Ian Ogilvy was in the refreshment tent when the Queen wandered in – ‘tweeds, headscarf, muddy wellington boots’.

When he was presented to her, to make conversation, the actor suddenly remembered the name of one of the horses she used to ride on ceremonial occasions.

‘I was wondering, ma’am – whatever happened to Burmese?’

‘Oh, my goodness,’ said the Queen, her face lighting up.  ‘Well, it’s funny you should ask, because I’ve just been to see her. She’s very old, of course, but she lives here at Windsor, in her own field just half a mile away.  

‘So I went into her field, you see, and she came trotting over, as always, because we know each other terribly well, of course – great old friends, in fact and I always take her a carrot or an apple or something – and I was just giving it to her, you see, when I heard this awful snorting and thumping noise and I looked up and there was this huge stallion charging at me! At full gallop!  

‘I had no idea what he was doing in Burmese’s field, but here he was, pounding towards me, and his eyes were all red and his ears were laid back and his enormous teeth were bared – just like this!’  

And here Ian Ogilvy claims to be one of the few of the late Queen’s subject to have seen Her Majesty ‘performing her homicidal horse routine’.  

‘And I knew without a shadow of doubt,’ the Queen continued, ‘that he was going to kill me so I ran, quite literally ran, as fast as I could to the gate and got out just seconds before he attacked me and – well, the fact is – you very nearly lost your sovereign’.

The fun of spending time with the Queen was finding out how much fun she was and discovering unexpected things about her. She really could sing ‘when I’m cleaning winders’ and the other songs George Formby sang to his banjolele when she was growing up during the war – and with Formby’s authentic Lancashire accent, too. (She was the Duke of Lancaster, after all.)   

Her fondness for practical jokes is well known, as when she wore a false ginger beard to greet Prince Philip on his return from a world tour – during which he’d been photographed sporting a full set of whiskers.

Those close to the Queen also speak of the many spot-on impressions she did (including an alarmingly accurate vocal recreation of Concorde coming in to land over Windsor Castle).

But it was her wry, dry, humorous way of looking at things that particularly struck me, and her appreciation of jokes.

Back when I was a Conservative MP, I know she was amused by the hand-written message sent to her daily from the Vice-Chamberlain – a member of the government whips’ office – whenever parliament was sitting.  

This ‘message’, as it’s known, was designed to give the Queen a flavour of the mood of the House of Commons – who was doing well, who wasn’t and how the wind was blowing. And in my day, the Vice-Chamberlain would also send Her Majesty some of my jokes.

It certainly amused her, for instance, when I told her that political correctness required that the Tory MP Sydney Chapman should properly be known these days as Sydney Personperson.

I once made the Queen laugh by telling her a story she claimed she had never heard before – but that both Tony Snowdon and the Lady Olivier (actress Joan Plowright) assured me is true.  

In the story, the Snowdons visit the Oliviers at their house in Brighton, and Lady Olivier and Princess Margaret are comparing notes on the progress of their baby boys. David Linley was born on November 3, 1961; Richard Olivier was born a month later, on December 3, 1961.  

Lady Olivier boasts that Richard has spoken his first word and she says she is ‘so pleased – and so is her husband – because Richard’s first word was “Dada”.’

Princess Margaret responds with the news that by happy coincidence, her little David had just spoken his first word.  

‘And what was it?’ asks Lady Olivier.

‘It was “chandelier”,’ says Princess Margaret proudly.

The Queen thought that very funny and reckoned it was possibly true, given the chandeliers that hang from the ceilings at Kensington Palace.  The nanny could have pointed it out to baby David in his cot, she said, and kept repeating, ‘chandelier!’

Thanks to my friendship with Prince Philip, I was often given privileged access to the Queen, to walk and talk with her as she went about her official duties. I also chatted with her at assorted private events and parties.

Her voice was softer, less artificial and less strangulated in conversation, than the voice we heard when she was opening Parliament or giving her Christmas Day broadcast.  

My conversations and small talk with her would all be recorded, on the day, in the diary I have been keeping since 1959. Over the years, I also talked to some of her friends and many of the people who worked with her. They, too, spoke fondly of her well-developed sense of humour.

Major-General Sir Sebastian Roberts, formerly Commanding Officer of the 1st Battalion of the Irish Guards and Major-General commanding the Household Division, told me his happiest memory of Her Majesty.  

Rehearsing for Trooping the Colour, the Queen’s Birthday Parade, and riding a new horse, a powerful charger of nineteen-and-a-half hands, he said the animal ran away with him, careering down the Mall at 40 miles per hour.  

Eventually, with a cry of ‘pull the effing reins ’til the bridle comes out of his arse’ from a sergeant-major ringing in his ears, the Major-General managed to bring the horse under control.  

Later in the day, Roberts recounted the tale to the Queen. ‘She laughed and laughed and laughed.   I’ve never seen her laugh so much,’ he said.

And while we’re on horsey stories, cast your mind back to the wedding in 1973 of Princess Anne to Mark Phillips, a key member of the British three-day-eventing team that had triumphed in the Olympics the previous year.

‘I shouldn’t wonder if their children are four-legged,’ the Queen is supposed to have remarked.

Like other members of her family, the Queen also enjoyed comic glitches when nothing quite went to plan.

The King’s goddaughter India Hicks recalled one of these as we sheltered under an umbrella on September 14 this year, watching the royal hearse bring the Queen’s body back to Buckingham Palace for the last time.

We were talking about how the Queen was on constant show – even in death – when she told me a hilarious story about the time her mother, Pamela Mountbatten, had been accompanying the Queen on her post-Coronation Commonwealth tour.  

They were in Tonga, in the South Pacific, and it was late at night. Pamela bumped into the Queen when they were both stumbling around the Governor’s house, or whatever it was, looking for the bathroom.  

When they found it, they turned on the light – only to discover that on the other side of the bathroom a second door was wide open and looking out on to the garden, where 400 men were sitting by their campfires staring at them.  

The following morning was a Sunday, and the royal party had been hoping for a lie-in. Instead, the Queen and Prince Philip were woken at dawn by four men at their bedroom door blowing nose flutes in their honour.

Given the weirdness of her life (imprisoned by her fate: destined to be monarch from the age of ten), the Queen seemed to me to be quite remarkably well-balanced, rounded, grounded and at ease with herself, the world and her place in it.

From the moment of her coronation onwards, for more than 70 years, Elizabeth II was the object of adulation. People bowed and curtseyed before her on a daily basis.  When she went on international tours, hundreds and thousands – on occasion, millions – turned out to cheer.  

‘It didn’t affect her at all,’ the Duke of Edinburgh said to me. ‘She never for a moment thought the cheering was for her personally.  It’s for the position she holds – it’s for the role she fulfils, it’s because she’s Queen.   

‘That’s all.  She knows that.  Her head hasn’t been turned by being Queen – not at all.  She’s quite normal.’

Throughout her reign, she took the possibility of being in the firing line in her stride. At Christmas 2021, when the Queen was 95, a masked and hooded intruder wielding a crossbow – a 20-year-old from Southampton, Jaswant Singh Chail – approached a police officer in the grounds of Windsor Castle and announced he had come ‘to kill the Queen’.  

He was arrested and charged under the 1842 Treason Act. When the Queen was told about the incident, she said to one of her team in the Windsor Covid ‘bubble’: ‘Yes, well, that would have put a dampner on Christmas, wouldn’t it?’

This year, just a few days before the Queen died, I went to see her old friend Prue Penn at her home in Scotland. She showed me, because I asked, photographs of Her Majesty and her family at Lady Penn’s ninetieth birthday party.  

To illustrate the Queen’s humility, Prue told me about a dinner she and her husband had given for the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh and a few friends in their house in London.   

‘I had made a carefully thought-out table plan which I forgot to take with me into the dining room,’ she explained.

 ‘Consequently, I got into a serious muddle over the placing of our guests.  Seeing my confusion, Her Majesty took over and in no time at all had made a very good job of it, sat down and said, “Lucky you weren’t giving an important dinner party”.’

Cracking up: The Queen and Prince Philip watching a presentation by recruits of Welsh Brigade in 1963

The Queen added, grinning, ‘We don’t mind who sits where – but I know a few ambassadors who might.’   

Prue said to me quickly: ‘You mustn’t put that last bit in your book,’ but I want to risk it because it illustrates the Queen’s impish sense of humour.  

As does another of Lady Penn’s stories…

‘On one occasion when the Queen was staying with us in Suffolk,’ she said, ‘we went for a walk along the banks of the river Alde. Below the 12th Century St. Botolph Iken Church, we met a woman walking her dog which happened to be a corgi.  

‘Her Majesty was a magnet to dogs, and it made straight for her. She bent down to stroke and talk to it. Seeing the affinity between them, the woman asked if she happened to be a corgi fan, too.

'She said that she was, whereupon the owner said, “Well, you and I are in good company because the Queen has them too”.  

'‘‘’Wasn’t that killing?” the Queen said as we walked away.'

Richard Griffin, a former Royal Protection Officer, tells a lovely story in a similar vein of a time when he was out walking with the Queen near Balmoral.

 ‘Whenever we met people on these walks, the Queen would always stop and say hello.  One day we met a couple of American tourists and it was clear from the moment we first stopped they hadn’t recognised her.  

‘After they had been chatting a while, the American said to Her Majesty, “And where do you live?”  

‘She said, “Well, I live in London, but I’ve got a holiday home just the other side of the hills”.’   

‘The tourist then asked the Queen how long she had been visiting the area, and she replied: ‘For over 80 years, since I was a little girl.’   

‘Well,’ said the American, ‘if you’ve been coming up here for 80 years, you must have met the Queen?’   

According to Griffin, ‘As quick as a flash, she said, “Well, I haven’t, but Dickie here meets her regularly”.   

‘So the American guy said to me, “You’ve met the Queen? What’s she like?”   

‘Because I was with her a long time and I knew I could pull her leg, I said, “She can be very cantankerous at times, but she’s got a lovely sense of humour.”’   

‘The American tourist proceeded to put his arm around the protection officer and gave his camera to the Queen, asking if she’d take a picture of them both.’

Labour PM James Callaghan maintained all his conversations with her were enjoyable.  ‘One of the great things about her,’ he said, ‘is that she always seems able to see the funny side of life.’  

On her Silver Jubilee in 1977, James Callaghan’s Cabinet presented the Queen with a silver coffee pot.

‘Oh!’ the Queen said to Callaghan, apparently delighted, ‘I’m so glad you haven’t repeated Mr Disraeli’s gift to Queen Victoria. He gave her a painting of himself.’

The Queen liked to tease Edward Heath, even after he was no longer prime minister. In 1992, at a gathering of foreign heads of government, she told her former Conservative premier, ‘You’re expendable now.’  

Some commentators interpreted the remark as a deliberate put-down.  She was simply being playful.

 On another occasion, as he came aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia, the Sovereign greeted Heath, mimicking a conductor, with the words, ‘Are you still waving your stick about?’

Not every prime minister relished the traditional Balmoral weekend, which took place every September.   Margaret Thatcher told me it really wasn’t her ‘cup of tea’.  She said she ‘dreaded’ the charades that she was expected to play after dinner at Balmoral.    

Long afterwards, the Queen, at a gathering of six of her prime ministers – including Mrs Thatcher – joked about ‘the party games which some of you have so nobly endured at Balmoral’ – but she nonetheless maintained the tradition.

According to Boris Johnson, the last prime minister the Queen got to know, the weekend there was fun. ‘There was a lot of laughter,’ he said, ‘a lot of laughter.’

In 2018, the Queen had to put up with Donald Trump striding ahead of her when he visited Windsor and inspected the Guard of Honour. Far from being offended, she was amused.

And that night, when the Queen saw herself on television, bobbing about behind him, she laughed out loud.

‘She really loved a good joke,’ recalled Major-General Sir Sebastian Roberts, who was Commander of the Household Division In April 1989 when Russia’s President Mikhail Gorbachev was coming on a state visit.

The communist leader was due to inspect a Guard of Honour at Windsor, and before the event Roberts received a call from Her Majesty.

‘What coats will the Coldstreamers be wearing, Sebastian?’ asked the Queen.  

‘Summer coats, Your Majesty, it’s almost mid-April,’ said Roberts.  

‘Could they wear their winter coats, Sebastian?’  

The Major-General told me: ‘So we scrambled to get the men out of their summer kit into their winter coats.

‘Gorby duly arrived at Windsor and was invited to inspect the Guard of Honour with the Duke of Edinburgh. Inspection done, Gorby said to the Queen – as every visitor always did after any Guard of Honour – “very impressive, marvellous uniforms”.

‘To which the Queen replied, with a twinkle in her eye, “Thank you, Mr President. They’re the Coldstream Guards. They got their bearskins from Napoleon at Waterloo and their greatcoats from you in the Crimea.”’

Once, I told the Queen I’d been to Dubai as a guest of the ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, and that he had shown me around his famous Godolphin stables.

 ‘I envy you,’ she said. She knew the Sheikh well because of their shared love of racing.  

‘I went on my birthday,’ I said.  

‘Did he give you a present?’ she asked.  

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but it wasn’t the white Rolls-Royce he had lent me for the week’.

‘What was it?’ she asked.   

‘It was something he said my wife would treasure.’  

The Queen looked at me wide-eyed: ‘Pearls?  Diamonds?’   

‘No,’ I said, ‘it was a small book of love poetry – poems written by the Sheikh himself and then translated into truly awful English by the retired British brigadier who worked as his ADC.’  

She laughed at that and told me she had received some ‘quite strange’ presents in her time, including all sorts of animals, from antelopes to zebra, and what she described as an ‘Aladdin’s cave’ of gems when she visited the Gulf states in 1979.  

‘Millions of pounds worth of jewellery and gold and silver,’ she said.  ‘I’m not sure what happened to it.  It’s probably locked up in a basement at the Foreign Office.’

Ask the Duke of Kent – now undeniably old and a bit unsteady on his feet – for his happiest, most vivid recollection of the Queen and he doesn’t hesitate.

‘She was just the best company,’ he said, smiling.  ‘So easy, so relaxed, so much fun.  When you were alone with her, when she was just being herself, she was simply the best company in the world.’

The Queen told me she had a soft spot for Rupert Bear. She remembered reading the Rupert annuals when she was a girl, and said Prince Charles loved Rupert, too.  

I told her that Rupert aficionados claim that Rupert isn’t a bear at all: he is a boy with a bear’s head.   

‘That can’t be right,’ she said, ‘Surely not.’  

‘Well,’ I said, ‘if you look at the pictures, you’ll see he’s got fingers on his hands and very human-looking feet.’  

‘I’m sorry you told me that,’ she said.  ‘Some things are best left unknown, don’t you think?’

Read Extract 1 Extract 2

[friendsoftheabaisse]

El-ahrairah 

from Watership Down, by Richard Adams - “The Story of El-ahrairah and the Black Rabbit of  Inlé” (I like his description when he gets his tail replaced with clematis and his whiskers with ragwort, then later dock leaves for his ears.)

Medium: Pen and Ink, Graphite, Marker, and Paint; on Paper

[phantom-trollbooth]

Your Catfish Friend

If I were to live my life in catfish forms in scaffolds of skin and whiskers at the bottom of a pond and you were to come by    one evening when the moon was shining down into my dark home and stand there at the edge    of my affection and think, "It's beautiful here by this pond.  I wish    somebody loved me," I'd love you and be your catfish friend and drive such lonely thoughts from your mind and suddenly you would be    at peace, and ask yourself, "I wonder if there are any catfish in this pond?  It seems like a perfect place for them."

Richard Brautigan

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Anonymous asked: It’s so good to have you back posting. You mentioned seeing Wagner’s Ring Cycle at the Bayreuth Festival no less during your five month hiatus from your blog. How was that? I’m one of the lucky few to make a full time living as a musician in a symphony orchestra. I’m a Wagner fan as you are too and so I hope you could settle a question about Wagner. I’m sure you know how picky he was about the demands he made on his audiences. If Gustav Mahler contributed to the origination of the modern concert hall experience then did Richard Wagner really make the noisy audience shut up and be silent during opera performances on stage?

It’s easy to look at any stern looking portrait of Richard Wagner with his mutton chop whiskers and not think yes, this Teutonic cad is a killjoy (even if you can get past the lurid anti-semitism etc). But I fear for some things we do Wagner an injustice. Many bad things usually attributed to him are in reality unfair and even untrue. Things are so easily believed because it reinforces the nasty bad boy image we have of him.

This past summer I did see Wagner’s Ring Cycle in Bayreuth, the shrine of all things Wagnerian. My French partner grumbled we were better off spending and extra week of vacation in Bali rather than waste a week on Wagner. As a strong Wagnerian, this was all sacrilege to my ears of course. But in hindsight I should have known better. Any opera staged at Bayreuth these days should be approached with fear and trembling. In short, I was better off listening to Wagner on my headphones whilst sipping cocktails on a beach in Bali than live through the dross on display at the Bayreuth festival.

Growing up everyone told me, the best place to see Wagner’s Ring is Bayreuth, in the magnificent Festspielhaus that the composer built for that very purpose and opened in 1876. That’s what they used to say in Wagner’s day but not today. These days if you want a traditional production, as paradoxical as that sounds, you stay away.

Bayreuth has for some time now specialised in clever, sometimes too-clever-by-half, productions that place the master’s operas in a new context. But at least they try for coherence, unlike some other venues which have assigned each of the four operas to a different director. But at least they try for coherence, unlike some other venues which have assigned each of the four operas to a different director. Earlier this year Stuttgart went even further by entrusting each of the three acts of Walküre to three different production teams. Madness - and this new production has plenty of it, whether a good or bad thing depends on your attitude. Minor cheers mixed with extensive booing greeted the first opera Rheingold, and a thunderous boo followed the second, Walküre, immediately the curtain closed. Bayreuth is famous for such disapproval. I admit I was ticked off, annoyed, and then finally seething by the end. I wish I had a flame thrower so I could burn the whole stage down.

This Ring Cycle was being staged byValentin Schwarz, a 30 something Austrian opera director, and under the musical direction of Cornelius Meister. Schwarz was handpicked by Katharina Wagner. She’s the controversial director running the Bayreuth Festival - not because of talent (she has none) but by virtue of being Richard Wagner’s great-granddaughter (as well as Lizst’s great great granddaughter). In fact Schwarz’s production of the Ring Cycle was actually delayed from 2020 because of the Covid lockdown - so he had all these two years or so to fine tune it and get it right. He did neither and it was a like someone taping your eyelids back and strapping you down before forcing you for nights on end to watch a mind numbing TV soap opera on huge plasma screen.

I knew I was in trouble from the moment I opened the programme notes. My heart sank. Schwarz wasn’t looking to make a coherent Ring Cycle with Wagner’s libretto in a traditional sense, and is instead intended to be “constructively disrespectful”. Such a concept, which includes a deliberately “liberal approach to the plot”, and shifting representations of objects and ideas over the four evenings, is justified by alleged inherent inconsistencies within the work itself.

Oh. Dear God. No.

So this chap’s artistic approach was to go for ‘coherent incoherence’ to his overarching message. No, it doesn’t make sense to me either.

I know Wagner traditionalists, and I include myself, are always a hair trigger away from getting our knickers in a twist but when you’re putting on the complete Ring Cycle over four days then we can expect the bare minimum. So there has to be Ring because it’s called the Ring Cycle and preferably gold. And maybe throw in moving funeral march of Siegfried and a heart breaking farewell of Wotan to his daughter Brunnhilde. The bar is quite low. But no, we had none of this. Not even spears or swords and certainly no dragons (as Wagner had intended).

Wagner’s original conception embraces a three-fold division of the world: the Nibelungs beneath the world, the giants on the surface, and the gods in the cloudy heights; all this is made explicit in the third opera Siegfried. But what do we the audience get: a cheap and nasty prime time TV soap opera with studio sets to match. The paddling pool of Rheingold, where the Rhine maidens appear as nannies with children, had become a deep but empty swimming pool. There Hagen kills Siegfried, while his vassals lie half asleep in the fenced-off area above. Brünnhilde, who is supposed to be the tragic but awesome agent of destruction and rebirth, settled herself on the bottom of an empty and dirty swimming pool next to the dead body of her husband Siegfried with the remains of her mutilated horse in a plastic bag.

I tried to look past this travesty and honestly digged deep to make sense of what the production was trying to say. The whole staging and the costumes had a TV family soap opera flavour, that was blindingly obvious. But to what end? If there was an overarching theme then perhaps it was to focus on families and how wealth transforms and poisons future generations such as child abuse. The opening E flat chords of Das Rheingold played to a projection of twin foetuses in the womb. At first, they were intertwined peacefully, before one attacked the other, ripping the umbilical cord from its stomach. Moreover, through his programme notes, if not via actions on stage, Schwarz tells us that these warring foetuses are actually brothers of his own creation – Wotan and Alberich. What this sets up is an attempt to place the majority of the work’s characters into one of two branches of the same family – broadly, the have and have-nots – in order to compare their contrasting, or sometimes similar, fortunes, throughout the four evenings.

If that was the theme then I not convinced that it worked. Wotan at the start appears as a wheeler-dealer with a mobile phone, willing to be utterly ruthless, as when he shoots his own extra-marital son Siegmund in the second opera. This is Wagner’s Ring as dynastic soap opera but who cares? It’s not going anywhere. Schwarz’s idea, in Rheingold, that the cycle’s foundational sin was the seizure of a child, not of the gold from which a ring of power would be created, was not convincing. In Die Walküre, successfully subverting another big moment to the horror of traditionalists, he placed the final focus of the opera on Fricka’s futile triumph over Wotan, not on Wotan’s farewell to his daughter Brünnhilde. cycle ran out of steam in the end because it had no big or unifying idea.

New Ring cycles are springing up as the world’s opera houses get back into their rhythms after the pandemic. It is a competitive market. Among others, there was a well received one in Leipzig in June of this year, a promising one in Zürich, there’s another in Berlin this autumn and two in London in the years to come. Bayreuth remains an extraordinary venue, its ambitious ability to mount a new cycle in a single season is remarkable, and the 150th anniversary Ring, to be mounted there in 2026, will doubtless be a global event. But the festival feels as though it needs a radical rethink if it is to merit the reputation and attention.

My feeling, after mingling and chatting to others present to witness this travesty, is that many of the audience who were there this year may not have the patience to return for the revival of a Ring that went nowhere.

Increasingly I will tell anyone who wants to experience Wagner is to stay away from Bayreuth. Go and see a production anywhere else but Bayreuth that actually honours the spirit of Wagner’s artistic vision and above all respects the operatic lore and the source material.

So let’s move on to more pleasant matters. Your question of Wagner and silence in operatic performances.

In effect you're asking about audiences at performances rather than the performers which I think is an interesting question!

Wagner the composer, not the man, was responsible for many things which I think he doesn’t get enough credit for. In effect he revolutionised the operatic stage. Of course one one of his reforms was to dispense with the term "opera," which he replaced with Music Drama. It was at his iconic Festival Playhouse in Bayreuth that he pioneered innovations which we all now take for granted as traditions. It was Wagner who first hid the orchestra in a sunken pit. It was Wagner who insisted on darkening the theatre. And it Wagner who did away with boxes (except for King Ludwig) and instead built in amphitheatrical seating with no aisles. All these innovations were designed as a way to focus all the attention to the stage. The atmosphere of ‘consecration’ striven for at Bayreuth - Parsifal, Wagner's last stage work, was called something like a "Stage-Consecrating Festival Play" (Bühnenweihfestspiel) - meant that talking, moving, etc. were strongly discouraged. Since all the seats were in long rows that spanned the entire auditorium with no aisles, it was basically impossible to leave your seat during an act without making a scandal.

But did Wagner innovate the idea of silence of the audience before an operatic performance? Back in the day, Mark twain found himself writing a letter back home from Beyrouth where he had seen Tannhauser and suggesting the audience was quiet. He wrote, “I saw the last act of "Tannhäuser." I sat in the gloom and the deep stillness, waiting--one minute, two minutes, I do not know exactly how long - then the soft music of the hidden orchestra began to breathe its rich, long sighs out from under the distant stage, and by and by the drop-curtain parted in the middle and was drawn softly aside, disclosing the twilighted wood and a wayside shrine, with a white-robed girl praying and a man standing near. Presently that noble chorus of men's voices was heard approaching, and from that moment until the closing of the curtain it was music, just music--music to make one drunk with pleasure, music to make one take scrip and staff and beg his way round the globe to hear it.”

An audience at Bayreuth hasn’t always been known to be silent especially when they witness what they see as sacrilege on stage and they vent to make their feelings known with boos and cat calls. The story is similar in Milan at the equally famed La Scala too. In Italy to boo and catcall at the opera is positively a national past time. At La Scala opera singers were (and still are) at the mercy of a small group of Milanese musical purists - known as loggionisti, because of their fondness for the cheap seats (loggione) - if their performance was not up to scratch. It’s perfectly normal to interrupt the performance several times with noisy catcalls, and then round off the evening by booing loudly during the curtain call. How charming.

But did Wagner definitely usher in the silent audience for an operatic performance? It’s hard to say. We need to step back a little.

When the first public opera houses were founded in the mid-17th century, they were designed more as venues for social interaction than as sites of pure and sacrosanct aesthetic experience. Fanning out from the stage in glittering tiers were the boxes. Owned or leased by aristocrats or wealthy bourgeois, these intimate little spaces were perfect for entertaining guests, exchanging gossip or simply being seen. Down below was the parterre. Usually left open and generally without seating, this was the preserve of lower-income groups, including soldiers, students and servants, who used the space to meet friends, share a drink and gamble. Accordingly, the music was treated with noisy indifference, at best, or vocal contempt, at worst. Audiences were more interested in their own conversations than with what was happening on stage. They might perhaps listen to an aria, or watch the ballet (if there was one), but no more; and, if they did not like what they heard, they would make their displeasure known.

By the 18th century – when many theatres installed seats in the parterre and converted the top tiers of boxes into open loggione - the unruliness of performances had already become a commonplace of literature. In Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782), for example, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos indicated that well-bred patrons thought it quite acceptable to chat throughout a performance. In a letter to Sophie Carnay, Laclos’ ‘heroine’ Cécile de Volanges relates that she had been invited to the Marquise de Merteuil’s box at the Paris Opéra so that they could talk about her forthcoming marriage ‘without any fear of being overheard’. Naturally, such sociability all but smothered the music. After a visit to La Scala in 1770, the English music historian, Charles Burney, complained that the ‘abominable noise and inattention’ of his fellow patrons had made it impossible to make out anything but a few bars during some of the better known arias.

We can assume that British opera-goers were more reverent than their Italian counterparts. Samuel Sharp, a Brit visiting Naples in 1765, wrote in horror that at the San Carlo opera house “the crowd laughed and talked through the whole performance, without any restraint; and, it may be imagined, that an assembly of so many hundreds conversing together so loudly, must entirely cover the voices of the singers.” 85 years later, Mary Shelley expressed similar frustrations in Milan: “Unfortunately, as is well known, the theatre of La Scala serves, not only as the universal drawing-room for all the society of Milan, but every sort of trading transaction, from horse-dealing to stock-jobbing, is carried on in the pit; so that brief and far between are the snatches of melody one can catch.” In fact, for a while, La Scala was the only place the Milanese were allowed to gamble.

But this was entirely understandable. Imagine you’re an upper-class citizen in 18th or 19th-century Italy. You go to the opera regardless of what is playing, simply because that is where you will encounter the rest of society. You might attend in hopes of catching the eye of an attractive young lady or gentleman. Or maybe you want to talk politics - you can do that during the performance, too. Disappointed in a singer? Mention it to everyone else in your box. Hungry or thirsty? Flag down a seller of drinks or oranges. Buy and eat them - no need to wait for an intermission.  Mid-eighteenth-century composers intentionally gave a less important singer the first aria in act two. This was known as the “sorbet aria”: it was traditional to serve sorbet at that time, and the clinking of the spoons made the music difficult to hear.) If the opera truly bores you, you can always pay a visit to friends in another box or head to the gambling tables.

Angered by the lack of respect for their music, some composers attempted to fight back – even writing works satirising their audiences’ bad manners. The anonymous Critique des Hamburgischen Schauplatzes (1725), for example, offered a comical defence of opera against the frequent interruptions of German loggionisti. But it was a losing battle. Realising that no audience would listen to an entire work, composers started to produce pieces that took account of their inattention. These often included an aria di sorbetto (‘sherbet aria’), an incidental passage that allowed the audience to buy food or drink without fear of missing anything important.

Such concessions only encouraged further raucousness. By the early 19th century, it was almost out of control. In Paris, the situation was particularly bad. In the 1830s, Honoré de Balzac admitted that no one went to the Opéra for the music; while in Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir (1830) Julien Sorel quickly learns to disregard the performance in favour of his own intrigues. But in Milan, it was even worse. In 1840, Mary Shelley wrote: ‘The theatre of La Scala serves not only as the universal drawing-room for all the society of Milan, but every sort of trading transaction, from horse-dealing to stock-jobbing, is carried on in the pit; so that brief and far between are the snatches of melody that one can hear.’

This kind of control the audience had even influenced what performance happened onstage as well. We still see the occasional encore of a famous aria by a star singer, but in past centuries the audience could and did demand multiple encores of many pieces (little wonder, given how difficult it must have been to hear them the first time around!). In Vienna in 1786, Le nozze di Figaro was received five encores its first night and seven its second (prompting an emperor-imposed ban on encores at future performances, to keep the opera to a reasonable length). Verdi’s Otello had a particularly successful premiere in Milan, with even interludes encored and 20 curtain calls!

Not until the late 19th century did the composers and music directors gain the upper hand and in turn imposed silence as the norm for watching audiences. Even then, it took longer to reach some countries than others. An amusing illustration of the difference between Britain and Italy can be found in E.M. Forster’s novel Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905). Hoping to talk their widowed sister-in-law out of marrying an Italian, the interfering siblings, Philip and Harriet Kingcroft, rush off to the Tuscan town of Monteriano. Soon after arriving, Philip spots a poster announcing a performance of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor and tries to persuade the sceptical Harriet to go with him. ‘However bad the performance is to-night’, he warns, ‘it will be alive. Italians don’t love music silently, like the beastly Germans. The audience takes its share – sometimes more.’ And so it turns out. Though Harriet does not care for music, Forster noted, she knows ‘how to listen to it’, and is outraged by the constant shouting and whistling. Not until the mid-20th century would poor Harriet have been able to find an Italian theatre where silence more or less reigned.

Why did audiences change their minds? Part of the reason is undoubtedly the evolution of opera itself. Although composers had previously been willing to accommodate unruly behaviour, the advent of Romanticism persuaded Germans to adopt a more uncompromising approach in their music. Beginning with Louis Spohr – who abhorred the ‘vile noise’ of Italian opera houses – attempts were made to make opera more like the Singspiele (‘sing-plays’) of folk tradition. This entailed grouping arias into longer and more coherent scenes, which could not be interrupted or missed without the narrative thread being lost. The culmination of this trend was Richard Wagner’s notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk (‘total work of art’).

And now we come to Richard Wagner.

Most people blame Wagner for turning on the sound of silence. Because he was in total control at Bayreuth, he went ahead and eliminated audience boxes, hid the orchestral pit, and plunged the audience into darkness. The message was clear: look at the stage, not each other. Pay attention to the music and the action. Let the artists control your experience.

Wagner though didn’t just control his environment that his art demanded (or enforced) but he made demands on the audience for his music in the name of art. Combining music, poetry and drama in epic form, Wagner greatly expanded the role of the orchestra and relied more on the use of leitmotifs - recurrent musical themes associated with a particular character or idea - much beloved of movie soundtracks today, just listen to any John Williams composed films or Howard Shore’s Lord of the Rings - than on structural divisions to advance the story. So great were the demands placed on audiences, that little scope remained for inattention – or interjection. And, as Wagner’s influence spread, so did the silence.

Of course that silence by the audience during performances was also due to social changes and who went to the opera and it’s important to note that. Between about 1650 and 1850, opera was ‘enjoyed’ by a relatively broad range of people. Though public opera houses tended to be financed by monarchs, nobles or wealthy merchants, performances were attended by high and low alike. In the later 19th century, however, the emergence of music halls changed everything. Offering every kind of entertainment - from music to magic - and a deliberately relaxed atmosphere, these quickly won the favour of the working classes and those who didn’t have spare cash to burn. And so opera houses became the preserve of the upper and middle classes.

And what happens when the bourgeois and the middle classes capture an art form as an exclusive preserve of their class entitlement? They become snobby about it. They had to socially distance themselves from the great hoi polloi and the crude ways of the working poor. And what better way to virtue signal your civilised class refinement that than to socially enforce a reverential code of sacrilegious silence when watching an opera performance on stage?

Indeed it’s ironic that Wagner himself who did much to usher in the silence was a victim himself. At Bayreuth performances audiences do not applaud at the end of the first act. This tradition is the result of a misunderstanding arising from Wagner's desire at the premiere to maintain the serious mood of the opera. After much applause following the first and second acts, Wagner spoke to the audience and said that the cast would take no curtain calls until the end of the performance. This confused the audience, who remained silent at the end of the opera until Wagner addressed them again, saying that he did not mean that they could not applaud.

After the performance Wagner complained, "Now I don't know. Did the audience like it or not?"At subsequent performances some believed that Wagner had wanted no applause until the very end, and there was silence after the first two acts. Eventually it became a Bayreuth tradition that no applause would be heard after the first act, but this was certainly not Wagner's idea. In fact, during the first Bayreuth performances, Wagner himself cried "Bravo!" as the Flower maidens made their exit in the second act. But on this occasion when he did this he was severely hissed by some of the audience watching. Wagner was scolded in his own theatre for being a rabble rousing lout. Charming. 

All this is to say that this has rather uncomfortable implications. In preferring to listen to an opera in silence, are we really just perpetuating a form of Victorian snobbery? I will leave that for you to think further on.

I confess that I grew up in the Wagnerian tradition, like most opera fans, of respecting an operatic performance as it was happening with silence (even if I wanted to scream abuse at someone on stage as if I was at a football match). I’m no different from anyone else if some idiot is coughing loudly and I give him a look of silent despair or if some poor dear starts chatting to her neighbour then I just get mildly annoyed.  I’m there for the opera to lift me out of my body and immerse me into the full drama and music. But even I can understand that such an imposed passivity might make opera inaccessible to everyone (or at least the ones it used to appeal to in the early days). Operas are long - especially Wagner’s operas - and it’s a rare person who can sit through an entire performance hanging on every note with almost religious devotion.

Perhaps the time is long overdue when we need to be so precious with such conventions, if only to broaden the appeal of opera. I’ve been fortunate to have seen operas all across Europe and few exceptional venues overseas too such as the Met in New York. These days if I go to the opera it’s to the Palais Garnier here in Paris. Surprisingly it’s not a stuffy affair as people come dressed as they please and the prices are more affordable, more so than in London. Change in the opera house culture comes at a glacial pace of turning a tanker around, but I feel they are heading in the right direction with their outreach work to appeal to a broader audience.

I’m all for innovation in that regard. Pop up performances in cafés or art galleries or other cool public venues may help people take a second look at opera again…and wrest control away from the stifling hold of the bourgeois. It’s not pure opera but hopefully it helps young people especially to embark on a journey to the opera house.

I hope we can have it both ways. I want to hear the music, and I also want the opera house to be a gathering place for all of society and a true diversity of people. I can’t imagine how one does that. Perhaps longer intermissions for food and drink? A beer tent with premium German beer? Or maybe a quiet gambling den area in the lobby area? And  perhaps a brothel sponsored bonking boxes for…well, I’ll let your imagination run riot. And it would be keeping with tradition too.

The foyer de la danse in an opera house was a backstage room that essentially served as a brothel for opera and ballet patrons and aficionados in the 19th Century. While other international ballets and operas at the time had similar practices, the 19th century Paris Opera Ballet at the Palais Garnier was perhaps the most notorious and most celebrated by Parisians - how else do you suppose Edgar Degas hang out drawing sketches of nubile ballerinas. The opera house managers were positively pimping out the ballerinas and other artistic performers to keep the wealthy patrons sweet. Not that I’m condoning the legitimacy of courtesans flogging their wares during a performance of La Traviata, although Giuseppe Verdi might smile at the irony given that his celebrated opera was essentially about a Parisienne courtesan, Violetta Valery.

I’m sure the surly and serious minded Richard Wagner would get his mutton chop whiskers in a twist.

Thanks for your question.  

[davidpwilson2564]

Bloglet

Sunday, October 15, 2023

Note: I had it all wrong. Yesterday was not my alma mater's Homecoming Weekend game. No. For Homecoming the U of T has to have a sure win. The game is next month, again Connecticut. Assured to be a blowout. (On Saturday they did win over Texas A and M, but it was by a whisker.)

Nice weather. Must walk. Must get out the kinks.

Big sports news: The Jets pull out a win against the Eagles. Their first win over the Eagles.

Monday, October 16, 2023

Jordon really wants that gavel. Is making phone calls, twisting arms. His becoming Speaker of the House, should this happen, would be a real setback.

The news from Israel continues to be bad. Gaza may be reduced to rubble before it's all over.

The plumbler hasn't called me. I am nervous about all of this.

I go see Dr. Seecoomar. My gastroenternologist. Nice man. It is time for me to get a colonoscopy. I am due for it, not having had this procedure for five years. He tells me something interesting, something I'd have not known: this is my last one. No more after this. After the age of eighty it is assumed death will claim you in some other way. Sobering thought, this.

Note: Jim Jordon really wants that gavel. He continues to make phone calls. Twisting arms. To think of him as Speaker is stomach turning. There is going to be a vote tomorrow. (Just a further note: Jordon is tortured by an incident from his past. When he was a wrestling coach in Ohio a number of students reported having been molested. Jordon covered up for his friend, wrestling team physician [musicians will be amused by this] Richard Strauss.)

I find the paperwork on the fridge. It is ten years old. I suppose ten years is a good run for a little fridge. I am ready for a replacement, but first have to deal with the pipes under the kitchen sink. (Old building, faulty pipes. Dammit.)

[dserwer1]

Harris is not risky, the demonstrations are

Tonight’s opening of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago will rightfully bring back memories of the 1968 convention. Then a police riot against anti-Vietnam war demonstrators contributed to wrecking Hubert Humphrey’s prospects for defeating Richard Nixon. Humphrey came within a whisker (42.7% to Nixon’s 43.4%) of winning the popular vote but lost definitively in the Electoral College…

[characterillustrationoliviap]

Character Illustration: Class 3

Today we started by watching a video on good character design, This video talked about two main points; silhouette and colour palette. Silhouette is really important in trying to make your character easily recognisable. A good character silhouette is simple and easily recognisable. A good example would be Sonic the Hedgehog or Mario. Both of these characters are made out of simple base shapes as seen in these photos.

These characters are also both good characters and this is communicated by the shapes used in the base shape. Both Mario and Sonic use a lot of rounded circle shapes which are commonly used to show a happy, good or funny character. These simple shapes also make a good silhouette.

Both characters are easily recognisable by their silhouette. They aren't made up of lots of little shapes so they are memorable.

The second was colour palette. A good character has a distinctive colour palette that we instantly relate to the character when we see them. For example, when we see yellow and blue we relate it to minions, yellow and black are associated with bees, and when we see purple and green we see the joker. This helps us remember a character. Good characters typically have lighter colours while villains have darker colour palette. If we look at Sleeping Beauty (Aurora) and Maleficent, Aurora is frequently seen wearing pinks and blues where as Maleficent wears black and a deep purple. It's also notable that Aurora has more rounded features where was Maleficent has more pointed and defined facial features, especially her cheek bones.

We were then asked to find 9 characters that show good character design; three using circles, three using squares and three using triangles.

Circle:

Jerry from 'Tom and Jerry'

Jerry uses a lot of rounded shapes in his silhouette. This makes him seems funny, cute and approachable. I used the ellipse and rectangle tool to make a rough mock up of the shapes used. As you can see majority of them are circles. He has a very simple silhouette which makes it very recognisable.

The Powerpuff Girls

The Powerpuff Girls is another cartoon television show which uses great character design in its main character. As you can see the three have a very simple silhouette. Each silhouette has a feature which makes it so recognisable. Buttercup has her pointed hair which randomly sticks out, Blossom has her massive red bow which is obvious in the shape and Bubbles has her pigtails. Craig McCracken (the animator of the Powerpuff Girls) used a lot of circles and ovals when making the characters. They have large ovals as a head and massive eyes which are circles. Almost every feature is rounded apart from the dresses, and some of the hair.

Roadrunner from Looney Tunes

Roadrunner has a rather lanky figure but the silhouette still has a lot of curves. It uses a lot of ovals. The silhouette is tall but parts are also very narrow which suggests that the character is fast and light.

Square:

Richard from Amazing World of Gumball

Richard is made up of square shapes. His base body is one large rounded square and this other limbs are similar. This gives him a solid look. He has the sturdiness that a father is portrayed to have but also the cuteness of a rabbit with the rounded corners. His silhouette is so simple, yet very recognisable due to his whiskers and big ears.

Sully from Monster Inc

Sully is a monster who can be either cuddly or very scary. Using the square base shape was a great way to communicate this as he appears reliable because of his structure but his built figure makes him more intimidating. The colour of her fur also helps him appear less scary and more like a soft toy. A lot of his features are based around squares as well. You can see his horns curved in in a boxy way.

Finn from Adventure Time

Finn is made up of a lot of squares and rectangles. This makes him appear more reliable so the viewers will trust him more. But they used a lot of long rectangles with rounded edges which suggests a more soft appearance. He is less intimidating because of this and almost looks slightly clumsy because of how thin they are.

Triangle:

Jafar from Aladdin

Jafar is the Disney villain from Aladdin. He has a lot of pointed features and his outfit is based a lot around triangles. Having sharper edges in a character can make them appear more edgy and untrustworthy so it is a great way to show a villain. You can see him robe is effectively two large triangles with the points intersecting. He is very thin and angular which makes him appear scary or evil.

The Joker

The joker's classic suit has a lot of sharp corners unlike the suits we may see in real life. These sharp angles help make him appear more structured but also more scary. His face especially has a lot of triangles incorporated into its design. His jaw, nose and eyes all resembles triangles. He appears like he is more quick witted and mean than other characters due to this. We can see how pointed his hair is in the silhouette. He has three spikes of hair rather than a flowing hair style. He also has a very simple but pointed silhouette and this suggests he is a bad character (just from his silhouette)