Word: lurid
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Four Seasons; the riff of revenge in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant when a quiet young woman walks out on her longtime dominatrix to the bluesy strains of The Great Pretender; the logger-heading of fear and desire in a dozen Fassbinder movies, where the lighting is lurid, the sound track crackles with tinny music and drunken threats, the air reeks of death sweat. Each film is incomplete without the others. Each contributes its chapter to the 100-hour autobiography...
...Edie Sedgwick? She was a strikingly pretty young woman with a genius for self-destruction. Her pedigree and her rap sheet conspire to prove that truth can be as compelling as the most lurid novel: daughter of a distinguished, disturbed New England family; evanescent superstar of Andy Warhol's underground movies; blitzed-out druggie; a careless suicide at 28. The glamour, the abuse, the aristocracy of decadence-my dear, it's just too delicious...
After Beaver went off the air, lurid rumors circulated concerning the show's characters. It was as if Beaver fans, disillusioned by the late '60s, wrote their own contemporary psychic postscripts to the show. Beaver was said to have been killed in Viet Nam. Wally was reputed to have married either Barbara Billingsley or Raquel Welch. Eddie Haskell was rumored to be either Porn Star John Holmes (whom he resembles) or the wraithlike Alice Cooper. The collective unconscious of '60s America, resenting and yet longing for the simple verities of Mayfield, attempted to corrupt the suburban paradise...
...behind the spectacle of lurid testimony and legal gymnastics several disturbing issues have arisen which have since been eclipsed by the dicier reports of courtroom confrontation. The current lull in the action affords an opportunity for review...
...amiably human and relatively harmless idolatries of polytheism. The wrath of God becomes the dread mushroom and megadeath and firestorm-totality, cessation. It is not relative, like the old wars, but absolute, the utter blank of extinction. Nuclear war sits in the mind like the lurid medieval vision of hell: horrible-and yet, well, hypothetical...