Word: flesh
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Reznor's self-flagellating rampage continues unabated through scenes of "Human junk just words and so much skin/Stick my hands through the cage of this endless routine/Just some flesh caught in this big broken machine...
Working on the premise that homosexuals have a far greater awareness of the flesh--having been taught since childhood to suppress its desires and control its longings--he began by "summoning the body," and traipsed his way through the audience, extolling the praise of one man's foot, a woman's fingers. Then, towards the end of the show, he summoned the body again. But this time, these were the fingers of a friend, trampled and broken by policemen at a gay rights rally, or the smashed arm of someone victimized in a "queer-bashing" incident...
Since the acting is superb and since Crowe both wrote and directed Singles, only he can be blamed for any shortcomings. One flaw is his attempt to incorporate too much into his characters' lives. He neglects to flesh out subplots like Janet's breast enlargement, Linda's miscarriage, and her month-long environmental trip to Alaska...
...thinks. The ring of figures in Dance (II), 1909-10, refers back to a long tradition of representations of Bacchanalian dances, from the ancient Greeks through to Poussin. The color is almost as simple and emblematic as that of an Etruscan vase: blue sky, green billowing earth, red flesh inflected with deeper, Indian-red drawing. It could not be more vivid or explicit, or better attuned to the fresco-like scale of the canvas. And yet how provisional these dancers seem, compared with their ancestors; how deliberately imperfect, within the brusque signs for arched back, swollen belly, prancing, dragging, reaching...
...that can be thought can be written," says Rhodes, quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson. Fair enough, but writing explicitly about sex requires a more delicate touch. It takes only a few pages to realize he is in the grip of graphomania. Flesh must become word. His style swings from confessional to clinical, from pop psych to steamy paperback prose: "Her body fired explosively, every muscle contracting, and her back arched grand mal off the bed from the abutments of her feet and her shoulders." A passage comparing his own orgasm to a thermonuclear explosion may start a chain reaction of giggles...