A film by Pedro Almodovar.
All the thematic elements your little heart desires. A meditation on memory, grief, violence, degradation, and survival.
words: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Skin_I_Live_In
images: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EolQSTTTpI4
Inside Drapchi prison near Lhasa, Chinese guards beat Tibetan nuns and monks with rubber hoses filled with sand.
They applied electric cattle prods to their bodies, sending wire cranked juice through skeletons, extracting screams. Denounce the Dalai Lama, screamed one soldier, a young lackey from Human Province. He tightened metal screws around a woman’s wrists, bending them back at a horrendous angle until she screamed from pain, Never!
He wiped her blood off his broken glasses and increased the pressure. It was a job.
I am doing my DUTY, he screamed.
Save my face, sang a Chinese girl, an innocent victim of the national genocide one-child policy wringing out a mop made of spider webs inside water rainbows.
She languished in a large bland cavern classroom at a private business university in Fujian. It was private because all the students had failed higher level exams for more prestigious universities. They settled for this prison. She cleaned crumbling uneven cement floors with strands doing her Duty.
Beijing operatic actors fashioned death masks for their performance in a funeral formula.
She pedals her New Star bike into Siem Reap for iced coffee. It's cold and delicious. Men play chess slapping wooden pieces, gesticulating at high decibels.
Kick boxers on a plasma screen pummel each other with knees and gloves and violent fury to the endless delight of invisible millions with displaced latent aggression after a recent genocide.
WHAM! KILL HIM! KILL HIM! YES!
Saturday and Sunday afternoons are filled with masses of boys and men in cafes screaming at a television.
KILL HIM! KILL HIM! KILL HIM!
Idle men sit in shaded empty white tourist vans waiting for bodies brushing dust.
Looking busy is fun.
Greetings,
In Baghdad, Iraq they sent out dog killer squads. They liquidated 58,000 stray dogs in three months. Point and shoot.
This morning before 6:00 a.m. in a small sleep southern Cambodian river town the frustrated alpha simian male next door to a guesthouse finally had enough of his barking mongrel, one of many roaming yapping and screwing in the street.
His wife was sweeping (a national sport) around tables and chairs in an open covered room of computers where students visit in the afternoon to connect. The dog was a nuisance, like her kids and husband. The dog ran around yapping, causing her and her husband anxiety. Rising anger exploded when her Tarzan grabbed a big stick and started beating the dog.
It didn't take a humane society expert to know by the sound of the beating and canine screaming that the dog was doomed. This orchestra of rising screams, fear, panic, anguish, and whimpering rose, climaxed and dropped dead.
Neighbors ignored the reality. His wife swept. Life is short, nasty and brutal. The law of the jungle.
Neighbor dogs, sensing death, howled in their chorus as orange and black butterflies danced at dawn.
Metta.
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