Anguish

The two worlds conjoined in the title of playwright-director Timothy McNeil's “Machu Picchu, Texas” are metaphorically linked by constants in human experience - in particular, the enduring propensity for senseless violence. At one point in this affecting and superbly realized new play, a cynical professor of history makes the connection explicit: the fact that some of the ancient Incan city's populace were beaten to death for no clear reason makes it “just like Texas, only with sandals and feathers.” In a present-day Houston suburb, tensions and conflicted loyalties erupt among two families and their friends in the wake of a random, unprovoked assault that's left Charlie - a gentle man beloved by all who knew him - confined to a wheelchair.

Somebody is going to get killed out there. I've said it a hundred times, thought it a thousand. The only question was, what ballplayer would have to die on the mound before something was done to protect pitchers? The issue, in the news again after Toronto Blue Jays pitcher J.A. Happ was felled by a line drive Tuesday night, is personal with me because it happened to my son Matt. Twice. He was struck in the face by a line drive in a high school game and on the side of the head during a scrimmage in college.

Actions such as those reported in your article "The Anguish of Afghanistan" make President Reagan's calling the Soviet Union an "evil empire" the understatement of the year. CLARENCE B. SANTOS Los Angeles

MEXICO CITY - Security forces have taken part in many kidnappings and disappearances in Mexico, and the government's failure to investigate most cases only compounds the anguish of their families, according to a scathing new human rights report. The report released Wednesday serves as an indictment of the administration of former President Felipe Calderon, who left office Dec. 1, and poses urgent challenges for his successor, Enrique Peña Nieto. Against the backdrop of a military-led offensive against powerful drug cartels, an estimated 70,000 people were killed during Calderon's six-year term, according to authorities and media tallies.

Cowardice is the word I use to describe the past and present Turkish government for not admitting their most heinous crime of the 20th-Century: the Armenian Genocide. Ignorant is the word I used to describe the editorial writer responsible for writing the slanderous "Anguish and Policy" editorial. GAYANE MARKARIAN La Canada

Your article (Nov. 2) on the recent deaths in Iraq of four soldiers serving in the California National Guard's 1st Battalion, 184th Infantry Regiment, touched my heart and made me cry. Thank you also for remembering the others who have died from their company. Cpl. Glenn Watkins was serving in our son's squad when he was killed earlier this year. I wish I had a photo of him to send to you; his photo being absent from the others in your article saddened me. I can understand the anguish families feel about having our sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters and friends at risk every day. Our day revolves around our son's online messages.

He spent much of his life consumed by what the three men on the screen before him had done. He stared at the glossy, bloodshot eyes of the man in the middle, the one who had so casually demonstrated how he slit his victims' throats, who explained how his hand grew so sore he often switched to stabbing them at the base of the neck. They were gaunt figures now, impoverished men trudging the rice ponds of northwestern Cambodia. They had agreed to confess their roles in the Killing Fields, first for a documentary film, "Enemies of the People," and then here, in a video conference with survivors in Long Beach.

MANOHLA Dargis' review of the stagy "Frida" was spot on ("A Portrait of 'Frida' That's All in the Framing," Oct. 25). Frida Kahlo was obviously more interesting than we are being shown in this melodramatic telenovela of a film more appropriately titled "Treinta-something." I could have easily watched Julie Taymor's stunning representations of Kahlo's work and madness for two hours, because there's nothing beautiful about its weak attempt at portraying her emotions. Greg Reeves Westwood I think Dargis expects to see the pain that Kahlo captured on canvas reproduced on Salma Hayek's face: "The best Hayek can do with her lovely face is cloud it with worry, but the face of Frida Kahlo demands anguish."

I am writing this note teary-eyed. Hurting for the Lapins and for myself. Your column (Joseph N. Bell, View, Nov. 2) has reawakened the ache in my heart that never quite goes away. It's been over eight years since the phone rang in the early morning hours and we learned that our 36-year-old son had just died of a heart attack. I don't believe the anguish of losing a child can ever be fully understood by anyone who has not experienced it. One grasps at straws of comfort and clings desperately.

Oct. 2-8 is Mental Illness Awareness Week. Too often we pretend that mental illness--just like the homeless, just like the elderly, just like latchkey kids, just like teen-age runaways--doesn't really exist. While you're reading this, some person in your neighborhood wishes he were dead; some person in your town is thinking about killing herself; some person in your city is figuring out how to do it; some person in your state is selecting the gun, pills, knife, or roof that he'll use; and some person in this country just did it. Perhaps the anguish of that person is ended, but it has not yet begun for those around him. The personal anguish and pain of the mentally ill and their friends and relatives won't make the sports, business, or entertainment sections of the paper: In our society, these are thoroughly unnewsworthy events.

The two worlds conjoined in the title of playwright-director Timothy McNeil's “Machu Picchu, Texas” are metaphorically linked by constants in human experience - in particular, the enduring propensity for senseless violence. At one point in this affecting and superbly realized new play, a cynical professor of history makes the connection explicit: the fact that some of the ancient Incan city's populace were beaten to death for no clear reason makes it “just like Texas, only with sandals and feathers.” In a present-day Houston suburb, tensions and conflicted loyalties erupt among two families and their friends in the wake of a random, unprovoked assault that's left Charlie - a gentle man beloved by all who knew him - confined to a wheelchair.

Araceli Magdalena Rodriguez remembers precisely when her son first said he wanted to be a policeman. She went to the market one day in their community near Puebla, Mexico, when he was 4 years old and returned home empty-handed after a pickpocket stole her wallet. "Where are my bananas?" Luis Angel Leon Rodriguez asked his mother. When she told him what had happened, the boy said he would grow up to be a police officer and catch the thief. Nearly 20 years later, Luis Angel became a federal police officer, but when his mother told me the story Monday afternoon on a visit to Los Angeles, she was in tears.

Milan, Italy - From the American side of the Atlantic, the debate over Europe's economic future often sounds like a bloodless, mind-numbing discussion of currency zones, bank recapitalization and interest rates. But in countries with fragile economies like Spain and Italy, it takes on real-life urgency. Pain is everywhere. Unfinished construction sites litter classic landscapes, monuments to businesses that have failed and bank loans that didn't come through. In Italy, where I have spent the last three weeks, the unemployment rate has topped 10% and news broadcasts have given lavish coverage to a wave of suicides by small-business owners who couldn't meet payrolls or tax bills.

The rain had washed away his daughter's smile by the time George Shi reached the parking lot. Gently, he glued a new flier over the old one, smoothing each crease, until her photo and his message again shone clear: REWARD: $200,000 to anyone who helps find her killer. It is all Shi can do, nearly two years after his daughter, Donglei Shi , was strangled and her body dumped in an Alhambra park, leaving behind a case with no witnesses and little evidence. Donglei, also known as Kyral, was Shi's only daughter, the older of two children.

"Another Happy Day," a title laced in sarcasm, stars Ellen Barkin as a woman drenched in sorrow, barely able to staunch the tears. So if you're in the mood for misery, you'll love the company here. A sister, mother, wife and ex-wife, Lynn (Barkin) belongs to a badly shattered family, the sort of nasty bunch that has enough money and time to make one another miserable. They've been brought back together for the wedding of Dylan, her estranged oldest son (Michael Nardelli). The other option, I guess, would have been a funeral.

The day was a jarring reminder that for those whose lives have been torn apart by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, elation on one side often equates with anguish on the other. "It's a day of victory and pride to have my son back in my lap!" cried Umm Khalid, who embraced her son Fouad Abu Amrin, 39, for the first time in 15 years as he stepped off a prison bus at the Rafah crossing in the Gaza Strip. Older and grayer than the 20-year-old who was sentenced to life in prison for murder, Abu Amrin was one of 477 Palestinian convicts released Tuesday in the first step of a 1,027-for-1 exchange for kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

I am writing in response to your article, "A Living Doll" (Times, March 13). This was one of the most disturbing articles I have ever read. Mrs. Beverly Hill is cruelly and selfishly casting aside her daughter's friends and education so that she may bask in the glory of her daughter's participation in countless degrading competitions. This is a dangerous path upon which Mrs. Hill is traveling. By treating her daughter like a goddess and not like a 4-year-old who will eventually grow up, she is almost guaranteeing the anguish that awaits this child.

Lucian Freud, a British artist who gained fame for his intense and deeply textural nude paintings, has died. He was 88. Freud, the grandson of the pioneering psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, died Wednesday at his home in London following an illness, according to a representative for his New York dealer, William Acquavella. The artist's best-known works feature subjects in anguished, anti-erotic poses, their psychology externalized onto their fleshy bodies. He liked to use impasto, a technique involving the thick application of paint, to create his highly textured portraits.

The novel "Wingshooters" is a searing, anguished novel about racial bigotry in a small, insulated Wisconsin town named Deerhorn, where people who were born there tend not to leave. These hard-working, mind-our-own-business townspeople have to contend with a biracial outsider, 9-year-old Michelle, with a Japanese mother and a white American father, who has been left with her paternal grandparents and never retrieved by her cold mother and feckless father. She comes to love her grandparents, especially Charlie Le Beau.