Friday Ephemera
Subway scenes. || Putty want ball. || Adventures in Magnetism with Professor Julius Sumner Miller. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || What if the Moon spiralled inwards towards the Earth? || He doesn’t respect you, alas. || Gusto detected. || Now wiggle yours. || Printed GIFs. || The thrill of teapot-making. || AI-generated 1970s sci-fi pulp covers. (h/t, Things) || The progressive retail experience, parts 414, 415, and 416. || “The universe will expand by 527,250 kilometres” in the blink of an eye. || Between bites and sips. || Beverage of note. || Cable guy. || The thrill of mental illness. || You shall not escape. || Headline of note. || I hadn’t considered this. || Old-school alternative. || And finally, a service is offered.
Opens Stephanie’s file, adds known troublemaker.
She surely won’t be missed.
And while we’re on the topic of thee-ah-tuh, I received an…amusing survey from the now thoroughly insufferably woke Stratford Festival (nee the Stratford Shakespeare Festival).
It seems that in their zeal to diversify not just their productions but their audiences, they’ve been trucking in large numbers of vibrant urban youth to fill the seats actual theatregoers will no longer pay for. Said youth are then behaving at the live theatre the same way they behave in movie theatres, and Walmarts when the EBT card reload glitches.
The survey contained a number of circumlocuitously worded questions about “theatre etiquette”, and whether I as a prospective Stratford attendee might have some expectations about “theatre etiquette”, and specifically whether the failure of other patrons to abide by such expectations might affect my enjoyment of the production[1]. The survey was bookended with a bunch of boilerplate questions about DEI but it’s pretty clear that having gone woke the festival is in the process of going very, very broke.
[1] And my likelihood to pay for any future ones
Wouldn’t have thought of Mr Muldoon as a communist, but there you go.
free the world from this cloacal scourge
Don’t hold back Mr Muldoon, tell what you really think!
As an aside, when I read that quote I had a disturbing vision of chocolate easter eggs.
Looks up from a snack plate of soft-boiled egg, pickled okra, smoked Gouda, and buttered rye toast.
“What’s all this commotion?”
the ABOMINATION known as Fruity HP.
Indeed. I rather liked HP’s foray into curry flavouring though. Typically that is the one they discontinued, whilst the HORROR that is fruity continues to be excreted from their factories.
IN FUCKING HOLLAND.
Wouldn’t have thought of Mr Muldoon as a communist…
A communist because I want to free my fellow
manhumanx from the brainwashing of Big Egg that Beelzebub’s Butt Bubbles are the primary source of breakfast food? We won’t even get into that French abomination, quiche.…pickled okra…
Pickled okra; great googly moogly, the only way to eat okra is either fried, or in gumbo. I am among savages.
The only way to eat okra is to let someone else eat it.
Indeed. I rather liked HP’s foray into curry flavouring though.
I weep for never having tasted this very ambrosia of the gods.
Why, why have you forsaken my taste buds Herr Heinz ?
Bloomin’ bosch.
And while we’re on the topic of thee-ah-tuh, I received an…amusing survey from the now thoroughly insufferably woke Stratford Festival…
From their official statement:
“Conclusion: We compel every individual who is part of the Festival community to continue to learn and take action to ensure the Festival is not only free from racism and cultural harassment, but is, in fact, anti-racist…Working toward anti-racism cannot be undertaken solely by the racialized individuals in our community; it takes allies and accomplices…”
Mandatory participation in Maoist struggle sessions and “reeducation” thuggery.
Arrgh. Did it again.
[ Sees all, judges accordingly. ]
[ Hangs head in shame. ]
The only way to eat okra is to let someone else eat it.
Pretty rich from someone who thinks fried unfertilized chicken ova is haute cuisine. As I said, I am among savages.
I am among savages.
Should you look around and find yourself among savages there’s a good chance that you’re a savage too.
Should you look around and find yourself among savages there’s a good chance that you’re a savage too.
Around here, probably, but it would be an interesting debate between Custer and Sitting Bull on that point.
Some of us prefer the term barbarian. Savages are beneath us.
I take back what I said about Farnsworth being a ‘communist’, anyone who can quote Zappa with such aplomb can’t be all bad.
The only Zappa much worth quoting is “Shut up and play your guitar”.
I did very recently see comments by Zappa in reply to complaints that he was a “tyrant” (or something like that): In brief, he said that he held the band members to high standards because the concert goers deserved a good performance for the money they paid, and that he risked a large amount of money up front for every road tour.
Paul Anka held band members to high standards.
Mandatory participation in Maoist struggle sessions and “reeducation” thuggery
This is the theatre which had to cancel performances in 2020 and 2021 and had to beg for $12M from the government to stay afloat, while simultaneously refunding me $1200 for season tickets and telling me the festival “wasn’t for [me]” if I disagreed with their woke agenda. They’ve staked out their ideological territory.
…and telling me the festival “wasn’t for [me]” if I disagreed with their woke agenda.
Do you still have a copy of that survey that you mentioned earlier in this thread? If so, how about posting choice excerpts?
Those remarks by Frank Zappa that I mentioned up-thread.
Every band, if it is going to stay successful, must be run in a strictly businesslike way. This presumably dismays snowflakes and slackers.
had to beg for $12M from the government to stay afloat, while simultaneously refunding me $1200 for season tickets and telling me the festival “wasn’t for [me]” if I disagreed with their woke agenda.
Vanity is a powerful drug. Also, taxpayer subsidy.
how about posting choice excerpts?
Let me know if this stays up.
Slides 5, 6 and 9 are the what they’re really concerned about. The rest is boilerplate. Note that Slide 9 – “how do you feel about welcoming vibrant urban youth to the Festival” comes after the etiquette questions so you won’t make the connection until after you’ve already answered 5 and 6 and can’t go back.
Judging by the questions, and the questions those questions beg, it does seem to be a DIVERSITY INITIATIVE with a theatre attached.
The John Lewis department store did something similar with a recent customer satisfaction survey. “Diversity” seemed to occupy rather more space than one might think possible, and was invariably framed in heavily loaded terms. As if when buying a washing machine or a pair of trousers, these things should obviously be foremost in one’s mind.
It was around the time of their Black History Month video and their bizarrely misjudged TV advert, which alienated much of their customer base practically overnight and was hastily withdrawn. And which rather illustrated how these things tend to signal that an organisation has taken its eye off the ball, and that the actual function it’s supposed to serve will likely be done less well.
…their bizarrely misjudged TV advert, which alienated much of their customer base practically overnight and was hastily withdrawn.
Do you mean this ad? The link in your Friday Ephemera post no longer works.
I also found this public statement about the ad.
It’s hard to understand how anyone who was not on drugs could ave approved that ad. But then, “woke” politics is a drug.
it does seem to be a DIVERSITY INITIATIVE with a theatre attached
Once upon a time, the economy of the town of Stratford – an otherwise unremarkable farming town – was completely dependent upon the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. Most of the downtown businesses actually closed up entirely during the off season, as they catered solely to the theatre employees and patrons. Seeing the potential coal mine in that canary, the town began trying to diversify its economy away from the Festival specifically, but it’s still almost entirely dependent on tourism by the wealthy middle class from Trawna and Nuyahk. It’s a chicken and egg debate[1] whether the diversified tourism caused the Festival to diversify away from Shakespeare or vice versa, but the Festival, which used to perform five to six Shakespeare plays and two or three other works, now performs only three Shakespeare plays, one popular musical, and a half dozen of the kinds of tediously avant garde “reinterpretations” that not-very-good playwrights think are pregnant with meaning[2].
Among the reinterpretations have been the “Schulich Children’s Series”, stage plays of classic children’s books and films from the 1980s and before. The affirmative action hiring has resulted in productions so terrible that I saw multiple families walking out in the middle of their adaptation of The Neverending Story. The problem is that Canada just plain does not have a whole lot of non-white people, and the largest of such ethnic groups culturally do not place a high value on theatre as a profession. So they’re not recruiting from a great talent pool.
The Festival went deep in debt to build a $100 million new theatre, only to never see it open due to the Chinese Lung AIDS closures. In summer of 2020 I managed to visit the town during one of our brief respites and the various shopkeepers and publicans all said the same thing: they could just about survive one year of this, but a second year would destroy the entire town’s economy beyond repair. Many boutique shops that had been in operation for 35 years were already closed or closing. I wasn’t able to make it back in 2021. I’m afraid to try when the restrictions are lifted for what I’ll find.
[1] Another thing to blame them for, I suppose, Muldoon
[2] I never pass up an opportunity to refer to Ann-Marie MacDonald as “Captain Power‘s girlfriend”, not least because she threw me out of a book signing for asking her to autograph my DVD box set of the show
Slide 9: “How comfortable are you welcoming new, younger, culturally and/or racially diverse audiences to the Stratford Festival?*”
Welcoming? No way in Hell am I going to volunteer to stand at the entrance and say “Welcome” to every patron. Or do they want me to stand up and applaud when a black person sits down near me? The smarmy language of the question just invites ridicule.
But more than that: Extremely few people would object to the presence of theater patrons of any race, ethnicity, or culture. There is no need to ask about that. And Stratford knows that. The real question is, as Daniel Ream says in his rephrasing, “How comfortable are you with ghetto swine?”
Ghetto swine? I had enough of them in the public school I attended, and in the local Scout camp’s abortive experiment with affirmative action for obnoxious ghetto punks. (In all my years of summer camp, that was the only case of actual fighting or even the threat of fighting.)
Also: I wonder what that asterisk means.
Daniel: Thank you for posting the slides and for your lengthy commentary.
but the Festival, which used to perform five to six Shakespeare plays and two or three other works, now performs only three Shakespeare plays
Unfortunately, people love the “idea” of Shakespeare, they just don’t love Shakespeare. In general, they just don’t know what to make of live theatre. Some think it’s like going to church where it’s a sin to make any kind of sound, while others think they’re at home on the couch watching something on the big screen tv and it’s okay to burp, fart and yell at the screen.
Shakespeare isn’t for the hoi polloi any longer, but the more you nurse from the public teat the more you’ll be expected to appeal to them.
Do you mean this ad? The link in your Friday Ephemera post no longer works.
Thanks, post updated.
It was quite extraordinary – both the misjudgement of how customers would likely respond, and then the lying about it afterwards. In the ad, the vamping boy – a pointed nod to transgenderism – isn’t, as John Lewis claimed, “oblivious of the unintentional consequences of his actions.” Instead, customers were treated to a display of antisocial self-absorption, a spoiled child in bad drag gleefully and deliberately trashing his parents’ home, which they were supposed to find affirming and adorable.
Wokeness often reveals a gulf in basic moral assumptions. An incompatible psychology.
Also: I wonder what that asterisk means.
I think it means ‘mandatory question’.
Thank you for posting the slides and for your lengthy commentary.
I really should just get my own blog. I can fill it with stories about tormenting Canadian “celebrities”.
people love the “idea” of Shakespeare, they just don’t love Shakespeare
In my experience Stratford’s audiences have fallen into one of two categories: yuppies and boomers who fancy themselves literati, and students of various ages who get bussed in as part of a field trip.
The Festival’s expanded playbill has absolutely brought in a wider audience, but that’s entirely due to the annual musical. Chicago and Little Shop of Horrors were smash hits; the couple of Gilbert & Sullivan operettas they’ve staged have not gone over well. The avant-garde plays are sparsely attended at best. I’ve seen two Schulich plays that were so bad that as I said, families were walking out[1]. The Shakespeare artistic direction has for some reason gone for stark, minimalist sets with fancy lighting tricks to imply stage dressing rather than, you know, actually having props and things.
All of this fart-sniffery has not been financially successful. At one point the Festival was selling late-season tickets at 2 for $15 in a desperate attempt to fill seats; the last two Shakespeare plays I saw there you could have fired a cannon into the audience without fear of panicking your insurance agent. The whole thing has rather the air of someone terribly over-leveraged spending like a drunken sailor to give the impression they are still successful, in the confused hope this will somehow bring in more money. At this point I’m hoping for a complete financial collapse and a takeover by a board with a sharper eye for the bottom line.
[1] If you make Artax the sarcastic comic relief sidekick you have fundamentally misunderstood the source material
I really should just get my own blog.
Fame and babes are sure to follow.
Fame and babes are sure to follow.
[ eyes the henchlesbians suspiciously ]
Really.
Wokeness often reveals a gulf in basic moral assumptions. An incompatible psychology.
That.
That.
And it’s often revealed inadvertently, obliviously. As in the case above.
stark, minimalist sets with fancy lighting tricks
A sure sign of lack of cash.
In my experience Stratford’s audiences
Not that it would compare to Stratford but Orlando had a pretty good one that we went to for many years. Usually consisted of two straight as-written Shakespeare plays and one set in a different time/place. Once they did Henry V set as a WWI story that was quite good. But slowly you could see the PC politics and such slipping in right about the time they started to include other playwrights. This was an outdoor festival and as I recall the rot got rolling the year after some protesters showed up to protest the Balkan war that Maggie Thatcher was so keen to get the US into. Personally I was opposed to that one but got very annoyed with a protester getting in my face about it. Absolutely absurd place to protest such a thing. This was around the time I tried to tell people how the left was going to politicize absolutely EVERYTHING. Bah. But what did I know?
people love the “idea” of Shakespeare, they just don’t love Shakespeare
Part of the problem is the archaic English. I have heard that this is not the case where Shakespeare is read/performed in translation, because the translators are free to produce editions in contemporary (and thus accessible) French or Italian or German or whatever.
stark, minimalist sets with fancy lighting tricks
But didn’t Shakespeare’s own productions utilize minimal props and scenery, for which Shakespeare’s highly descriptive language was a compensation?
I’m not attempting to deny your observations about current avant-garde productions (about which I know little) but only to suggest that minimalist is not necessarily bad and could be done for the respectable purpose of recreating the Shakespearean theater.
Usually consisted of two straight as-written Shakespeare plays and one set in a different time/place.
Interestingly, Stratford’s late artistic director Richard Monette delighted in, and was brilliant at, changing the set dressing and the direction to place the Shakespeare plays in different times and places as well. I saw Taming of the Shrew set in 1930’s Little Italy in New York, Richard III directed as if it were a Blackadder-esque black comedy, and Henry V in the same WWI setting (this seems to be quite a popular modification, the increasingly-inaccurately-named Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake has done this as well).
Part of the problem is the archaic English
Agreed. This is one of the reasons set dressing and not screwing around with PC casting matters. My date to the last Stratford staging of Othello was dreadfully confused; between the lack of any actual sets, the director using modern uniforms and dressing Emilia as if she was one of the soldiers (because muh repreezentayshun) she came away thinking the play was about some kind of military coup in an insane asylum.
By comparison when I saw Love’s Labour Lost it was directed as a three camera sitcom with the typical comic beats, but with full costuming and set dressing. My date had never seen any Shakespeare before but was able to follow the play and all the jokes handily.
One of the reasons Shakespeare endures is that his work really does transcend the original time and place. I can point to dozens of modern pop culture works that are just a reinterpretation of one of Shakespeare’s plays (like Sons of Anarchy).
in the same WWI setting
Yeah. I’m guessing Orlando just used Monette’s script(s). And/or others. I’m not one to dig too deep into such things.
Part of the problem is the archaic English
I may be wrong about this but I believe I’ve seen Shakespeare done with a slight modernization of the English language. It still had the feel of Shakespearian language but seemed not quite as difficult to get into initially. I’ve found, or at least did yeas ago before we gave up on the festival, that it would take me about 10-15 minutes to get into the flow/rhythm of it. I’m pretty sure there have been productions where I didn’t have that initial hurdle.
[ eyes the henchlesbians suspiciously ]
I think this babe is now working at the fine establishment next door.
Part of the problem is the archaic English
Which is why Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare, by Edith Nesbit, is much better. Because we can’t have archaic and Edith too.
Speaking of Edith and archaic, I met a two year old Edith yesterday.
What people think of ‘archaic’ is Shakespeare using words like ‘thee’ and ‘thou’…. it’s the pronoun wars all over again! But his English is in essence modern. A slight modernisation of Shakespeare wouldn’t be any more than a slight bastardisation of Shakespeare.
What people think of ‘archaic’ is Shakespeare using words like ‘thee’ and ‘thou’…
It’s a lot more than the pronouns. The Folger Library annotated editions should give many excellent examples of words that need explanation for modern readers.