Word: morbidly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Melancholy Obsession. The unabashed sexuality of so many of his paintings was not the only thing that kept the public at bay: his view of the world was one of almost unrelieved tragedy, and it was too much even for morbid-minded Vienna. He was obsessed by disease and poverty, by the melancholy of old age and the tyranny of lust. The children he painted were almost always in rags, his portraits were often ruthless to the point of ugliness, and his nudes-including several self-portraits-were stringy, contorted and strangely pathetic. The subject he liked most...
...laughed about my so-called 'death' before," he said last year, when his health seemed excellent and he smilingly scotched the sort of morbid rumor that forever comes up in the career of an aging giant. Of course he was not dead. The lines of his face had deepened and the skin had toughened. There was less gloss and more grey in his hair. But this was like seasonal change on a mountain. The basic topography was nearly permanent. He was, after all, Clark Gable...
...oldtimers on Prout's Neck still remember their famous neighbor. They tell of how he raised pink carnations behind his studio, and how, when it was hot, he wore a wet sponge on his head out of a morbid fear of sunstroke. He would slash away with his cane at clumps of elderberries, because he considered the elderberry "weak." His great passion was the sea, which he painted, not as something seen through a dream as did the more mystical Albert Ryder, but as man's restless, churning, ever-changing challenge...
...Another current song records the fate of a red Indian named Running Bear (Mercury) who leaps into angry rapids to swim to his Little White Dove. She dives in, too, from the opposite bank of the river, and they drown happily into the hereafter. But nothing in the 1960 morbid-ditty collection can touch Tell Laura I Love Her (RCA Victor), a best-selling ballad set in the flaming wreckage of a stock car. Tommy, the dying driver, has entered the race to win money to buy a wedding ring; he gasps out the hit tune with his dying breath...
Locomotive Chorus. When country singing came out of the hills, its highly developed morbid strain came too, and the form soon adapted itself to new material: guitarists began twanging out such up-to-date items as Old Man Atom with a locomotive chorus ("Hir-o-shi-ma, Na-ga-sa-ki"). When little Kathy Fiscus died at the bottom of a California well in 1949, the Ballad of Kathy Fiscus was probably inevitable, like the more recent Ballad of Caryl Chessman and today's Ballad of Francis Powers...