WATCH: Salome and Lot in Sodom

The 1923 silent film, Salome, stars Alla Nazimova as the young Judean princess, and the hauntingly seductive Nigel De Brulier as Jokaanan, the Prophet. Based on the play by Oscar Wilde, with sets based on the illustrations by Audbrey Beardsley, the film lasts a little over one hour and cost $350,000 , an exorbitant amount for the time. The sets are fairly bare, relying on atmosphere and character interaction to move things along. The straightforward narrative follows the Wilde drama faithfully, in high camp fashion even by contemporary standards. Posturing and posing are the main acting methods. It’s an amazing work nonetheless. A failure at the time of its release, it was added to the Library of Congress National Film Registry in 2000.

Of more interest on this double-bill DVD is Lot in Sodom, a short (28 minutes) silent art film directed by James Silbey Watson, heir to the Western Union fortune and friend and patron of artists and writers of the 1920s, especially e. e. cummings. Watson used many interesting cinematic devices, such as multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, and blurring to retell the biblical story of the ancient sin city, its lustful inhabitants, and destruction, without resorting to such high-camp attics as seen in Salome.

WATCH and LISTEN: Wagner’s Ring Really Fast!

Every now and then, I pull out Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen and listen to the entire thing from beginning to end – without stopping. I have a variety of performances and formats to do this. At any moment I can listen to recordings by: Georg Solti, James Levine, Bernard Haitink, Hans Knapperstbush (Bayreuth 1951), Clemens Krauss (Bayreuth 1953), or Karl Böhm (Bayreuth 1967).

If I’m in the mood to sit for 15 hours, I can watch the version from the Metropolitan Opera (Levine), Bayreuth (Boulez), Bayeruth (Barenboim), Het Muziektheater Amsterdam (Haenchen), Gran Teatre del Liceu Barcelona (de Billy), or Staatsoper Stuttgart (Zagroesek).

I’m compelled to admit that my iPod contains the Solti recording as one long Playlist. But there are (actually) times when a shorter, less intense version is what’s needed to calm the inner Dunderlumkins. This 45-second German language clip just hits the right button for that.

If you’ve never heard Wagner’s Ring Cycle and are interested in learning what all the fuss is about it, Anna Russell’s explanation, The Ring of the Nibelungs (An Analysis), is also available on YouTube, and on CD titled The Anna Russell Album at Amazon. There’s also a transcript of her presentation here. It’s a good way to get the story under your belt and out of the way, so to speak.

There's no such thing as the perfect recording of the Ring. Each has merits and liabilities unique to itself. Personal taste comes into play when deciding which you prefer. At different time, different performances will seem right. For me, the Solti is the sound recording I always want to hear, and the Boulez Bayreuth video recording is hard to beat. The staging is inspired, and the interplay between Wotan (Donald McIntyre) and Brünnhilda (Gwyneth Jones) is unsurpassed in its pathos. Whichever version you choose, enjoy!

READ: C D B! by William Steig

Since my house was invaded by honey bees yesterday, coming in through a small hole they made in the ceiling, I thought it was time to pull off the shelf one of my favorite books from my days as a children’s librarian.

William Steig’s C D B! is forty pages of silliness for people of all ages. Each sentence is made of one-letter words, creating a wonderful puzzle. The reader must solve the puzzle to enjoy the humor. Try this one: D B S A B-Z B. (The bee is a busy bee.)

Each page is a new puzzle, accompanied by Stieg’s simple line drawings, made famous by his work in The New Yorker and other children’s books, including Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, Abel’s Island, The Amazing Bone, and the wonderful Shrek!

The Bee Man is due any minute. My faithful cat, Sophie, is locked in the bathroom. Most of the bees are still sleeping, so it’s time to go.

So, have fun. And – N Q 4 R E D N!

UPDATE: Those are Yellow Jackets, not Honey Bees. The Bee Man is not best pleased! Anyone know a good book about Yellow Jackets?

WATCH: Idiot

Adapting any literary work into a screenplay is fraught with problems from the start. Translating written words into images can be tricky, especially the internalized motives of characters. Reshaping a 900-page novel into a 2-hour film means leaving out some scenes, characters, conversations and thoughts the novelist believed important to the overall telling of the story.

When the masterwork in question is Russian, there is the added complication that most of the viewing audience will be intimately familiar with the story, and will harbor dangerous thoughts at any screenwriter or director who dares to leave anything out. Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Idiot is such a masterwork well beloved and known to Russian audiences. There have been dozens of stage and screen adaptations over the years, with the first film released in 1913.

In 2003, Russian television produced a 10-part series that is faithful almost to a fault, although this version, too, leaves things out. Two of Russia’s best young actors take the leads: the dark, smoldering Vladimir Mashov as Parfyon Rogozhin and Yevgeni Mironov as Prince Myshkin, the idiot of the title. Mironov, a talented stage actor, creates his character through the use of his body – tightly drawn up into himself, stiff, never blinking his eyes. When he walks he never swings his arms, and his feet are placed one in front of the other, giving him an unbalanced persona. When he finally relaxes (or lapses) into happiness, as when he hops up a set of stairs, you appreciate the incredible job Mironov has accomplished.

The young female leads are also good, with Lidiya Velezheva as Natassya Filipopovna, the object of both men’s unrealistic affections, and Olga Budina as Aglava Yepanchina, young and immature, and out of her league with the others. But it’s the veteran actress Inna Churikova as Lizaveta Prokof’yevna that holds the entire production together, from the first episode to the last scene of this stunningly beautiful production.

The English subtitles are something beyond the pale. They go by very quickly (have your hand on the pause button), occasionally run off the ends of the screen, and are often so badly translated that they are funny. When General Yepanchin has a heart attack, his young son Koyla screams, “Impact! Help! Help!” That makes a little sense, some of the other subtitles are just gibberish.

READ: A Village Life: Poems by Louise Glück

There is a certain amount of trust that must be given to artists – a willingness to follow them wherever their creativity takes them. From writing terse, exquisitely crafted poems, Louise Glück has entered the realm of the short story in verse form. It’s jarring, and not completely successful, but there are moments of bone-chilling clarity. For those moments alone, it’s worth the reader’s attention and commitment to her new poetic form.

The themes of the poems in A Village Life revolve around a fountain in a small, unspecified small town, although it feels like it may be somewhere near Averno, in Italy, the setting of her previous book. Poems concern the seasons, the necessity and unwillingness to accept the changes life inevitably presents, death, and uncertainty. Death, and our inability to accept it as part of life, is a major theme in many of the poems. From “A Slip of Paper” comes:

“To get born, your body makes a pact with death,/and from that moment, all it tries to do is cheat.”

During a panel discussion of poets, Glück said, “You have to believe that what you're doing as you're working has the makings of a miraculous utterance, you have to believe it. But if you continue to believe it, in the absence of evidence, if you begin to think that if nobody seems to like your poem it's because your poem is so harrowing and so violently perceptive that people are fleeing from it—that response needs to be examined.”

There are miraculous utterances in this collection of poems, and they are harrowing. And, if you find yourself fleeing from her poems by simply feeling the need to put them down for a time, the she’s achieved part of her goal as a poet.

WATCH: The Gay Desperado

One of the very few advantages of hot, muggy, smoky, sleepless nights is watching old movies on Turner Classic Movies. Last night it was The Gay Desperado, starring a very young Ida Lupino, the always entertaining Leo Carrillo, and opera star Nino Martini. Directed by Rouben Mamoulian in 1936, the story involves a band of Mexican train robbers who want to become American-style gangsters, a runaway rich kid and his fiancé, Mexican and American police, and a supposed bandit who wants to be an opera singer. It doesn’t matter that the plot is silly, there’s lots of great music. And who would ever guess that a radio station pick-up band would know the music to Celeste Aida!

Born in Verona, Nino Martini was a popular operatic tenor of the 1930s and 1940s who split his time between the New York Metropolitan Opera and Hollywood. At the Met he sang mostly the bel canto roles of Bellini, Rossini, and Donizetti, as well as the heavier Puccini and Verdi roles. He appeared in seven other films through 1948.

The film was produced by Mary Pickford and distributed through her United Artists company. Let’s hope there are more movies like this in the vault. Who knows how long these sleepless night will last!