Word: fleshly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...high mesa framed by a fiery desert sky, the dancers appear: with eerie spectral masks, flesh painted in earthy clay and turquoise colors, and swathed in skins. The kachina priests whirl through the dusty streets of the village clacking tortoise rattles, chanting, waving yucca switches. Hopi legends say these "messengers of the Creator" have returned from the San Francisco mountains to begin anew the natural and spiritual cycle of planting and harvest. The desert will be blessed and purified and nourished by rain. An hour's drive north of the high mesa, on desolate scrubland wreathed by a dark...
...their cells at dusk. These prisoner/guards--called trusties--beat other inmates with a devilish tool called a strap, a leather slab with a wooden handle that, when handled "properly," can knock a victim six inches into the air. They tortured them by running pins and razor blades along the soft flesh under their fingernails. They gang-raped them in the barred dormitories where each prisoner slept with an arm flung over his eyes to block out light from the naked light bulbs that were never turned...
Still, it is easy to see why Italy's guardians of public morals are upset. The novel is a highly styled fictional essay that depicts the middle class as wallowing neurotically in money and flesh while young terrorists wait in the wings to put them out of their misery...
...which cheek is conflated with buttock, mouth with vagina, have a wonderful tenderness and power as plastic surfaces. Even the plumpness of the bronze cast provides the suggestion of skin, while the slightly fuzzy texture of the metal further equivocates, not with the look, but with the feel of flesh. In some ways, the shapes of Marie-Thérèse, smooth and closed, are like the totemic bone forms of Picasso's grotesque anatomies of the '30s, the projects for immense figure-based sculptures that he fantasized building along the Côte d'Azur. But their whole import is different...
...stage, as in films, men of the cloth are sometimes made out of whole cloth. That is not the case with Mass Appeal, where as playgoers, we come to know and cherish two men as creatures of flesh and blood, and perceive in them aspects of our common strengths and weaknesses...