Word: seraglio
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...where Ron is sent to recuperate is an open sewer teeming with rats, drugs and whores. Back in Massapequa, Ron is now the flinching veteran used as a prop for patriotism, and family life is a ceaseless, sickening debate about the war. Even in Mexico, at a kind of seraglio for impotent veterans, he finds little sympathy among his own crippled kind. He looks into the angry face of his buddy Charlie (Willem Dafoe) and finds a mirror of his own grotesque despair. He has hit bottom...
...phallocratic one. One sees him at full stretch in Sleep, the painting of two life-size lesbians entwined on a bed. It proves the impossibility of distinguishing, at a certain level, between pornography and art. The painting has little to do with lesbian perceptions of sex: it is a seraglio scene, an enactment for men's eyes only. But despite the corniness of the flowers and pearls that allegorize Luxury, the creamy rose of those bodies, shadowed with olive and held within the complicated machinery of the pose, is a breathtaking pictorial achievement...
...York City Opera debut as Susanna. The following year, under Levine's aegis, she also bowed at the Met, in the small part of the Shepherd in Wagner's Tannhauser. By 1980 she was effortlessly hitting the high E's as Blonde in Mozart's The Abduction from the Seraglio at the Met. She had arrived...
...doubt that the popular pictures of the day exuded a fictive sensuality: the odalisque, her breasts exposed, her belly barely covered by harem trousers, lounging on a divan as she awaited a pasha's pleasure; swarthy eunuchs, armed with saber and musket, standing guard at the seraglio gates; the almah, or Egyptian dancing girl, clapping her castanets as she strips off her veils; the nubile concubine displaying her roseate flesh in a Turkish bath...
...crashing humiliations like getting exiled to a desert outpost and being sodomized (more than once) by the Pharaoh. These events are punctuated by various hexes and incantations, long processions to one temple or another, descriptions of statues and animals and peasants and eunuchs (many eunuchs) and life in the seraglio and the smell of different perfumes and incenses and precious stones and robes and linens...