some blue some purple
“Cut to Sam Trench at roadside.
TRENCH: Well something certainly is happening here at Tolworth roundabout, David. I can now see Picasso, he’s cycling down very hard towards the roundabout, he’s about 7550 yards away and I can now see his painting . . . it’s an abstract . . . I can see some blue some purple and some little black oval shapes . . . I think I can see . . .
A Pepperpot comes up and nudges him.
PEPPERPOT: That’s not Picassothat’s Kandinsky.
TRENCH: (excited) Good lord, you’re right. It’s Kandinsky. Wassily Kandinsky, and who’s this here with him It’s Braque. Georges Braque, the Cubist, painting a bird in flight over a cornfield and going very fast down the hill towards Kingston and . . . Piet Mondrianjust behind, Piet Mondrian the Neo-Plasticist, and then a gap, then the main bunch, here they come, Chagall, Max Ernst, Miro, Dufy, Ben Nicholson, Jackson Pollock and Bernard Buffet making a break on the outside here, Brancusi’s going with him, so is Gericault, Ferdinand Leger, Delaunay, De Kooning, Kokoschka’s dropping back here by the look of it, and so’s Paul Klee dropping back a bit and, right at the back of this group, our very own Kurt Schwitters . . .
PEPPERPOT: He’s German!
TRENCH: But as yet absolutely no sign of Pablo Picasso, and so from Tolworth roundabout back to the studio.”
—Monty Python, from the very first Episode One: Whither Canada, 1969.
lights, lights. lights
“Mardis Gras, a time when the old town came alive with magic and beauty, flags and bunting, pennants, and lights, lights. Lights strung around Bienville Square, red, white, yellow, blue, orange, green lights, all flashing and glittering. The fountain in the Square wrapped in colored lights. . . .
The night, the purple and red night, the flaring flames of orange torchlight wavering hippity-humpity through the exciting, magic realm of Mardi Gras by night. The great colored floats glittering in gold leaf and silver leaf, the tinsel scintillation of the floats rocking along beside the white robed Negroes toting their white metal boards against which the yellow torch flames danced. The white-robed mules pulling the floats, and on the floats, the symbols that spelled out a complete fairy legend, or a tale from classic Greek. There might be a dragon with open mouth gasping out black clouds of smoke, a green-and-orange dragon accentuated with gold leaf. Or thered be a ship, a galley with oars moving, with a silver sail, and warriors standing there in golden armor, warriors jigging and dancing and throwing out red, blue, white, yellow strings of serpentine to the crowds illuminated by the passing torches. Warriors in golden shining armor, reeling with the jerk of the float, gayly taking a swig from a bottle and passing the bottle around to the other warriors, all of them leaping and throwing out serpentine and silver-wrapped chocolate kisses.”
—Julian Lee Rayford, from Cottonmouth, 1941.
jove and juno
“The very first opera publicly performed in Venice, Andromeda, was already elaborate, as [this] account printed in 1637 . . . shows: ‘The sky opened and one saw Jove and Juno in glory and other divinities. This great machine descended to the ground to the accompaniment of a concerto of voices and instruments truly from heaven. The two heroes, joined to each other, it conducted to the sky. Here the royal and ever worthy occasion had an end.’”
—Leslie Horry, from A Concise History of Opera, 1972.
a ‘spectacle’ opera
“It would perhaps be more correct to describe this romance of the Crusades [Franz Gluck’s Armide] . . . not as a ‘decorative’ but as a ‘spectacle’ opera, for Armida’s magically transformed garden and the holocaust at the end, when her palace goes up in flames, bring to mind Parsifal and Gotterdammerung.”
—Leslie Horry, from A Concise History of Opera, 1972.
jack of diamonds
“Jack of diamonds, Jack of diamonds
I’ve known you from old
Now you’ve robbed my poor pockets
Of my silver and my gold.”
—Clarence Ashley, from Coo Coo Bird, recorded October 23, 1929.
the white flown feet of sleep
“Night, a black hound, follows the white fawn day,
Swifter than dreams the white flown feet of sleep; . . .”
—Algernon Charles Swinburne, from Atalanta in Calydon, 1865.
the green bud and the red
“Between the green bud and the red
Youth sat and sang by Time, . . .”
—Algernon Charles Swinburne, from Prelude, 1871.
bruises green and black
“‘Though I gat bruises green and black,
I loved him never the less a jot; . . .’”
—Algernon Charles Swinburne, from The Fair Armouress, 1878.
stardawn
“And one bright eve ere summer in autumn sank
At stardawn standing on a grey sea-bank
He felt the wind fitfully shift and heave
As toward a stormier eve; . . .
And in his sleep the dun green light was shed
Heavily round his head
That through the veil of sea falls fathom-deep,
Blurred like a lamp’s that when the night drops dead
Dies; and his eyes gat grace of sleep to see
The deep divine dark dayshine of the sea, . . .”
—Algernon Charles Swinburne, from Thalassius, 1880.
flame i’ the air
“Oh what is the light that shines so red
’Tis long since the sun set;”
Quoth the youngest to the eldest maid:
“’Twas dim but now, and yet
The light is great.”
Quoth the other: “’Tis our sight is dazed
That we see flame i’ the air.”
But the Queen held her brows and gazed,
And said, “It is the glare
Of torches there.”
—Dante Gabriel Rossetti, from The Staff and Scrip, 1851-52.