Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Transitions

Reading the previous post, you might get the sense that I’m a “leg man.” I wouldn’t deny that: legs, bare or enveloped, are very appealing to me; hallelujah, this has been a good year for boots. But obviously it’s personality that’s key. I’m not exclusively attracted to parts. Of course, there are places I linger over. The small of the back and the back of the neck, for instance. Lately, I’ve been fascinated by eyelids and that stuff smeared over them, that pearly luminescence. And don’t get me started on eyebrows.

Talk about transitions… Harrowing Imamura film last night: The Insect Woman, about the miserable situation of poor women in Japan through the still-feudal early 20th century through that filthy war and beyond into the economic redevelopment of the nation. There’s incest, rape, and prostitution, the protagonist becoming a madam before being abandoned by her “girls,” just as she abandoned her madam earlier. Japan’s still a deeply misogynist society, of course, but modernity has its benefits. Meanwhile, there was a disturbing reminder on NPR this morning of things not changing: Nepalese are selling their surplus daughters to landlords to be maids and sex-slaves; precisely what happens early in Imamura’s movie.

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