The caressing, honeyed light in "Sin Nombre" beautifies and softens every ugly moment in this equivocating (inspirational yet hard-boiled) story about geographic and moral border crossings.
The color is excellent, supplying a lush, natural contrast to the carnage and stressing the gaudy allure of the urban bright lights and sin spots, where the Marines, to put it mildly, relax.
In the light of revelation, sin is seen as a deterioration of the fundamental disposition of a person toward God, rather than as a breaking of rules or laws.
Antagonizingly slippery, it was a monumental riff on "Moby Dick," and specifically on the chapter titled "The Whiteness of the Whale," Melville's obsessive, visionary, punched-out, raplike paean to the color that is all colors and no color, the color of sex, sin, light, race, God, blankness, the end.
There is a teaching in the Talmud that says an individual who comes before God after death will be asked a series of questions, the first one of which is, "Were you honest in your business dealings?" But it is the Ten Commandments that have weighed most heavily on the mind of Rabbi David Wolpe of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles in light of the sins for which Bernard L. Madoff stands accused.
His risky generalizations may suggest a seeming lack of recognition of Africa's varied and heterodox cultures, but that seems a minor sin in light of how deeply he attempted to understand it and how much of his life he spent there.
The special includes a glass of Vegas-brewed Sin City Light beer.
"Let us awake to life and warm our hands,/ And let our sins give light,/And glow upon this wilderness", he states in "It Is Time", yet the collection shows its strength when de Bernières abandons such attempts to be poetic, speaking plainly: "let us kiss on cold nights,/forgetting we are old".
In addition to the stock characters from various ethnic groups, there are, for example, the drug addict who wraps his narcotic in dissolving gum before the fast begins so as not to sin, the light-headed Turk ("he who eats his inheritance") who is a prodigal and a debauchee, the highway robber, the stutterer, and the policeman.
Grant us visions that shall lift us [strikeout illegible] from worldiness and sin into the light of thine own holy presence.
Wilkes is tens of thousands of records into the game now, so he knows how to turn a tiny basement with one red light into a house of sin.
