Word: hypochondriac
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Stan Brakhage, 37, a husky hypochondriac who lives with his wife and five children in a log cabin in Colorado, has radically rewritten movie grammar. By fragmenting his films into frames, Brakhage has established the frame in cinema as equivalent to the note in music; whereupon he proceeds to make films with frames the way a composer makes music with notes. His Art of Vision, an attempt to do for cinema what Bach did for music with his Art of the Fugue, is an ambitious example of what Brakhage calls retinal music. One problem: to watch the violently flickering flick...
...nice guy-and a great individual." He is that all right. He is the grinning practical joker who passes around a perfume vial labeled "Apple Blossom," which actually is a stink bomb. He is the "Dominican Dandy" who dresses all in blue and cream. He is the mild hypochondriac who changes doctors with the wind and claims that he can't sleep properly in San Francisco because of "something in the air." He is the grand master of his trade. He is the stay-at-home who plays for hours at a time with his three daughters...
Churchill could be a difficult patient. He was something of a hypochondriac, Moran says, "and he takes instinctively to a quack." Once, when Sir Winston was planning to join General Alexander's army in southern Italy, Moran demanded that he take along a bottle of mepacrine, an antimalarial drug. Churchill resisted, telephoned Buckingham Palace to see if King George had ever taken the stuff (he hadn't). Wrote Moran: "Winston is just incorrigible. He has only to press a bell to bring into the room the greatest malarial experts in the world; instead, he asks the King...
Papa had a bad temper, says Hotch. When he drank, he sometimes grew quarrelsome and querulous with his fourth wife, "Miss Mary," whom he adored and once described as "my pocket Rubens." He slyly made sport of pestering strangers by extravagantly praising something they wore. He was also a hypochondriac, forever lugging around samples of his urine. He was convinced that he had skin cancer (his own diagnosis), and grew his beard to cover the white scaling on his face...
Oscar Levant's public image, if he still has one, is a blend of an exhibitionistic hypochondriac, an acerb wit, and a concert pianist who knows far more about music than he ever applied to the keys. All these Levantine facets faithfully reflect the man; or, to put it another way, he reflects them. The distinction is academic. After a lifetime largely devoted to his own self-construction, Levant himself probably cannot draw the line between the real Oscar and the one he invented. This book comes as close to defining it as its author will ever...