Word: luridness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...agreement here? The '50s were the decade of crucial change in American popular culture. Rock 'n' roll, lurid comic books, the Beats, Brando, teenage-werewolf movies and the mainstreaming of black performers signaled a transformation from old to young, smooth to raw, upper-class to underclass. But there was another '50s culture that ran parallel to this one, sometimes interacting with it but often commenting skeptically on it. One culture was hot and angry, the other cool and comic. One was the geyser, exploding with sexuality; the other the mainstream, flowing unroiled. One was radical, the other liberal...
...There were a few differences between then and now. One was that the culture of vulgarity was still a minority one. Another difference was that the content of '50s anti-art, however loud or lurid, was harmless. (OK, except for comics like EC's "Vault of Horror," with its ripely illustrated cautionary tales of deceit and dismemberment.) And a third was, well, me: a kid who was as naive as he was curious. When Little Richard wailed, "I saw Uncle John with bald-head Sally/ He saw Aunt Mary comin' and he ducked back in the alley...
...sensationalist press was in lurid bloom. The Know-Nothing party flourished on nativist paranoias and disgust with immigrants. In a prose tract called "The Eighteenth Presidency!", Whitman referred to politicians as "pimps," "excrement," and "serpentine men." Slavery had the sanction...
...will spend 89 days being filmed for edited, same-day broadcasts five nights a week (starting July 5), and you get an idea of what so unsettled some continentals. Built from prefabricated modular units, it is perhaps the least homey-looking house $10 million can buy. The walls are lurid yellow and purple here, dead blue-gray there; the Ikea furniture is spare in the extreme. It is Martha Stewart's hell, a cold Bauhaus panopticon riddled with cameras...
...supernatural Clinton luck has carried the President sunnily through scandals, lurid humiliations, the fires of impeachment - enough mess to drive any other president to suicide. But does the luck work for both of them...