Word: charnel
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When Satirist Ambrose Bierce proposed that wry definition of the charnel trade at the turn of the century, it was still possible to be buried for under $25. Today that sum would barely buy a spray of flowers. Last July, in response to charges of price gouging, the Federal Trade Commission ordered undertakers to provide price lists for their services. Now the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Denver is offering bargain burials...
Toward the end of his life, Guston was painting the world as a charnel house of gross dreams and irreconcilable conflicts: no satisfaction anywhere, except in the creamy, impasted paint, which remained as lavish as in his abstract paintings. The essential Guston is all there in a work like Entrance, 1979. It is about intrusion and helplessness, the mind's impotence to fend off its demons. A door opens, and in rolls a mass of Guston's standard images-the trampling, dismembered limbs, nasty enough even without the bugs that advance with them across the floor. Then...
Many of these implications rise from his service with the Marines in the Pacific during World War II and later in Korea: in particular, the series of Death Ships, schematic models of the floating charnel houses that vessels (including his own) were reduced to by kamikaze attacks. Likewise, the oddly titled Hutch-One Armed "Astroturf" Man with a Defense, 1976, is a grotesque and sardonic parody of the violent hero, a maimed golem with a boxing glove for a head. If much of Westermann's work is a continuous effort to exorcise the horrors of war, the materialistic defeats...
...this charnel house, the kind of madness that Pasqualino perpetrated on a smaller scale becomes massive. To stay alive, Pasqualino must summon up his last reserves of cunning. In one horrible, hilarious sequence, he tries to worm his way into the good graces of the female camp commandant (Shirley Stoler) by making love to her. She is a lesbian leviathan who tolerates his attentions only because of his very desperation. She uses his appetite for life to debase him, and he allows it. He even agrees to preside over the execution of fellow prisoners. All for survival...
...entertainment, Nightwork. A young pilot prematurely grounded by an eye ailment, Grimes answers the musical question: "What if $100,000 should fall into my lap?" That is almost literally what happens to him in the most improbable of settings - the St. Augustine Hotel (semibitter religious joke here), a Manhattan charnel house where Grimes works as night clerk...