Word: harrowing
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...traditional apology for prostitution--that hookers serve a valid social function by providing sexual and emotional services to men who can't find them anywhere else. Director Sgarro, in his offhand way, is suggesting that prostitution is a joyful business, marred only by those occasional raids by those mean, harrow-minded policemen who spoil all the fun. He's not remotely interested in the thousands of women who have turned tricks on 42nd Street for 5 bucks a shot, who have been beaten by the cops, their pimps, their johns, their boyfriends, and who will always be poor, Xaviera, always...
...take a job playing piano at a nearby hotel pub. At 17 he quit school just two weeks before final exams and joined a decent band called Bluesology, a rhythm-and-blues outfit. From 1964 to 1967 he was on perpetual tour. Typical gigs were at the South Harrow British Legion and the Nottingham Rowing Club...
...KAFKA's short stories, an explorer arrives in a small, poor, and remote country, garrisoned by soldiers who wear uniforms that are much too hot but that serve as reminders of a faraway home. The ruler of this country has invented an ingenious method of punishment, a sort of harrow that cuts the text of a broken law into the lawbreaker's flesh. The script is so intricate that it takes a full twelve hours before the lawbreaker is dead...
Because the script is so very intricate, it seems, it is difficult for outside observers like the explorer to understand. In fact, the aging, sentimental officer who operates the harrow tells the explorer, only the lawbreaker himself can be said to have no trouble with the script--and this even if, as often happens, he is a person of little education. "It is not easy to decipher the writing with the eye," the officer explains, patiently. "But our man deciphers it with his wounds...
...then with mounting disapproval, as officers who appealed to their sense of justice and tradition inflicted prolonged punishment on people from a distant country. For the precise correctness of Kafka's officer there was the clinical detachment of various Rostows and Kissingers. For the mechanical sharpness of the harrow there were the exploding blades of the latest anti-personnel bombs. And though the Vietnamese refused to play the part of Kafka's passive lawbreaker, they, too--even in the act of fighting back--could decipher their suffering's meaning, if violence on such a scale can be said to have...