Salomé's Dance

Aubrey Beardsley, 1894

The death of John the Baptist is treated twice in the New Testament: in Mark and in Matthew.  The passage from Matthew (14:3-10) is by a small margin the more succinct:

For Herod had laid hold on John, and bound him, and put him in prison for Herodias' sake, his brother Philip's wife. For John said unto him, It is not lawful for thee to have her. And when he would have put him to death, he feared the multitude, because they counted him as a prophet. But when Herod's birthday was kept, the daughter of Herodias danced before them, and pleased Herod. Whereupon he promised with an oath to give her whatsoever she would ask. And she, being before instructed of her mother, said, Give me here John Baptist's head in a charger. And the king was sorry: nevertheless for the oath's sake, and them which sat with him at meat, he commanded it to be given her. And he sent, and beheaded John in the prison.

The daughter is not named in the bible, but she is, as Shalomit or Salomé, in the writings of Josephus, whose history of the Jews was written within a century of when the events described in Mark and Matthew were said to have occurred. I'm not a biblical scholar or a historian, so I can't speak to the historical accuracy of the passage above, but as with so much of the bible, as literature, it ain't bad.  From the bare bones of the biblical account, with an assist from Josephus, the story was fleshed out to portray the eternal tension between the worldly, the lusty, the decadent and profane represented by Salomé, and the heavenly, abstemious, pure and spiritual represented by John the wild eyed prophet, whom the unrequited desire of Salomé destroys, thanks to the lust that her dance enflames in the heart of his captor.

Oscar Wilde, who encountered and derived inspiration from the story outside the bible in writings of Gustave Flaubert and paintings of Gustave Moreau set about dramatizing it for the London Stage.  Before it got there, production (which was possibly to include the participation of Sarah Bernhardt) was halted on the basis that it was to depict biblical characters-- a no no in British law at the time.  Wilde had long wanted to write a French play anyway, so in 1893, Salomé was published in French in Paris.  An English translation appeared in 1894.  Wilde was in Newgate Prison in London serving 2 years of hard labor for "gross indecency"-- a charge for homosexuality that authorities could get to stick when sodomy could not be proven-- when the play premiered in Paris in February 1896.  Richard Strauss produced a German opera version of Wilde's play in 1905.  The original Salomé from that production was reluctant to dance the Dance of the 7 Veils so a stand-in did it for her in what has become the tradition for performances of the opera.

An epic movie version starring Theda Bara premiered in 1918.  It caused a major ruckus in the US and had to be edited to suit the standards of the provinces.  For whatever reason, it did not stand the test of time and is now considered lost.  

In 1923, Alla Nazimova, a Russian emigrée already with a storied Broadway career behind her and now head of her own movie production company in Hollywood developed a new film adapation of Wilde's Salomé with herself in the title role.  In her design, Nazimova hewed closely to the visualizations of Aubrey Beardsley whose famous illustrations graced the first English language edition of the play in 1894.  Nazimova (also the founder of the legendary Hollywood hotel dubbed the Garden of Alla) was the original Anna Biller: she wrote, directed, produced, edited, did lighting and costumes for her films.  Commercial failures though they were, they were outstanding pieces of work nevertheless.  Her Salomé is considered among the first art films in the US.  For this reason it was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 2000. 

British composer Charlie Barber created an outstanding score for the film which was released as an album in 2009.  The Dance sequence is below:

Barber's score appears to have been matched to the film in snippets, but to see the whole thing in one go, you can fortunately avail yourself of this version featuring another original soundtrack by another contemporary British composer, Mike Frank.  (If you'd like to imagine your own soundtrack you could always mute it, I suppose.)

Cuomophobia

In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, while Trump and his administrators were preening before the cameras daily, downplaying the threat when they weren't out and out exacerbating it, our liberal media was pushing forward Andrew Cuomo, New York's governor as an alternate savior.  Cuomo too was giving daily conferences while COVID ravaged his state and especially its namesake city, not just showing up Trump but leaving some left over for New York Mayor Bill DiBlasio with whom Cuomo publicly sparred, pulled rank, grandstanded while New Yorkers died in frighteningly large numbers. 

The Democratic primary was sputtering to its end-- as soon as Bernie Sanders had begun pulling away from the pack in the early states, the rest of the field aligned behind the theretofore underperforming "front runner" former Vice President Joseph Biden.  With the novel coronavirus bearing down and more than half of the primaries still to go, the schedule paused as states struggled to figure out how to conduct voting in the midst of a pandemic.  While Biden continued to betray a decline in cognitive functioning at every reluctant appearance, there was serious talk for a moment there about making a switcheroo to Cuomo at the democratic convention in August.  Cuomosexuality became a thing-- the suggestion of nipple studs beneath the governor's polo shirt its paraphernalia.  Breathless liberals were treated periodically to comical humanizing displays of sibling rivalry between the governor and his heartthrob younger brother (and COVID survivor), CNN host Chris Cuomo on the younger Cuomo's nightly news program.  The governor didn't get the 2020 nomination but he did swing a lucrative book deal to write a chronicle of his management of the pandemic and an international Emmy in November for COVID leadership.  As reported in the New Yorker:

For the better part of a year, Cuomo revelled in the role of America’s stern, steady stepfather, in contrast to Trump’s deadbeat-dad act. In October, he published a book titled “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the covid-19 Pandemic.” That month, in a Profile in The New Yorker about his handling of the pandemic, Cuomo said, “If you don’t believe that the truth wins, you can’t do the job. You have to believe that the right thing gets appreciated in the long run. Only the long run matters.”

 But as usual, the part of the story to which we were privy by grace of our media gatekeepers was incomplete, and as has been revealed recently, misleading.  While the unafflicted liberal segment of the country was falling in love, Cuomo was cheating-- taking $2M in contributions from the Greater NewYork Hospital Association and its executives and members, and having his team insert language into legislation to exempt the corporations providing care to older New Yorkers in nursing homes from liability for cost cutting decisions made to maximize profits -- legislation emulated if not cut and pasted into similar statutes in 26 other states--even though according to information collected by New York state representative Ron Kim the protection in those states demonstrably resulted (as anyone who bothered to think it through could have predicted) in a larger number of nursing home deaths of COVID than in states without it.  Furthermore, the Cuomo administration has recently admitted to fudging numbers to understate those deaths by nearly half by excluding patients who contracted COVID in their nursing home if they subsequently died in a hospital-- a measure taken they explain as a means of protecting themselves from prosecution by Trump's Justice department.  Under fire, Cuomo reportedly personally phoned his most effective critic Kim at home in order to threaten him with destruction.

Cuomo, a scion of former New York Democratic governor  Mario Cuomo is merely exceptionally entitled.  But this is why it takes a global financial crisis or a pandemic that occurs under republicans' watch to get a democrat elected.  Republicans are masters of messaging and they have to be because the impacts of their policies are devastating to the people who elect them. Democrats meanwhile are content to be the fallback party for when Republican policy implodes.  They have decided good government is for chumps.  The grownups would like you to know we're beyond protecting the little guy, even though the little guy is 99% of the electorate. 

Land of the Lost

George Herriman

Life before GPS: Some of my most vivid memories from earliest youth are of me sitting crammed into the back seat of the Pontiac station wagon with my siblings (before seatbelts and comfort), my mother on the passenger side of the front seat seething, mumbling curses to herself, all of us freezing or sweltering depending on the season in the makeshift parking lot of some liquor store or other late night establishment in the midst of an unfamiliar urban landscape in any Z-list city of the American Northeast waiting for my father to return from an expedition for directions out of this decrepit hellscape back to whatever route we had wandered from.  The engine was off because we were  probably in desperate pursuit of gas thanks to my dad's odd flirtation with an empty tank particularly on long journeys.  I probably accompanied him on one of these excursions for directions because I can vividly see the interiors of the stores he'd park us outside of and the denizens within-- like their surroundings, relics of an even earlier time.  It's black inside -- the darkness seems to absorb the overhead lighting before it can reach any of us down below, and the shelves are sparsely arrayed with ancient dusty bottles, boxes and cans that are presumably sitting there waiting for the proprietor to break even on them.  The old guy behind the counter is annoyed at the disturbance of my father even though he's bought the late edition of the city paper and a family size bag of chips in return for the information.  My cuteness has no effect on him.

I'm afraid for my life and thrilled at the same time.

Odds are pretty good the directions are flawed or poorly absorbed by my father as he only learns trying to reproduce them on the streets, and a second opinion has to be mined from another storefront proprietor before we are tanked up and back on our way on the great American highway.  Hence the abundance of those memories; the weighted importance they have in the formation of my mind. 

 As a child, I was no help in these situations. I was permanently lost, the embodiment of the phrase "Wherever you are, there you are."  But throughout my life I have somehow gained an affinity for dislocation. I've become a craver of the journey over and above the destination. 

There's nothing quite like careening at high speeds through unfamiliar landscapes with the comfort of your usual surroundings or the certainty of your ultimate destination hours or days away from you.  On either side of you, proliferating blurred experience of cars, houses, businesses, people.  All of them strange but familiar, all of them fleeting but eternal.  Remarkable semblances of your usual existence in novel packaging.  You're passing life by for a change and the change is exhilarating.  You could plot out every meal, every bathroom break, every pause for rest on a journey, but I prefer to wing it, relying on fortune alone for the satisfactions of needs and desires as they arise.  Sitting in the window off the main street of some byway, eating what the locals consider food you sometimes can't help but wonder about the parallel universes that fill up the map wherever you go-- the lives that the locals lead; the things they hold dear, their rituals and institutions.  It's all become the same in corporate 21st century America, sure.  An Applebee's in Elyria is going to be just as bad as the one a mile from my home, but the one in Elyria that I'll never see again with the mustachioed chef flirting with the waitress while her boyfriend is sitting idling in his GTO in the parking lot waiting for her shift to end is still going to be exotic. 

When you are between places, you are elusive.  Before cell phones you could not be reached.  Before mobile SMTP apps, mail did not come to you.  But even in this hyperconnected age, the act of traveling especially by car, and especially under your own steam, inhibits connectedness as usual.  In transit, you are to others a vague notion, at best a 2-D image, your other dimensions a mystery to all but you and your traveling companions.  

With GPS, you don't have to wonder where you are anymore or to engage with the citizens of the environment you find yourself in to find a way out.  That's all well and good but I know what I'm missing.  It never quite escapes my attention that if GPS knows where I am, I'm not really lost.

Nevertheless give me an expanse of time where I'm between places, unmoored.  I'm truly happiest when I may know where I'm going but I don't know where I am.  

George Herriman

Attention, Class