Word: waxen
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People in Pushkin's time were undoubtedly impressed by such Baroque elements of horror as waxen images, howling mastiffs, voices from the tomb, and winking corpses. Today's movie audiences, a comparatively cynical lot, realize that these are simply props and studio effects. Nevertheless, when they turn up in "The Queen of Spades," they are done well enough to cause several genuine shudders...
Less Brilliance. Realistic detail was the first thing to go: in painting a sick child, Munch began with a version showing the bed and the sickroom. His final version accented only the patient's waxen profile and the bowed head of her mother. Next Munch ditched the literary symbolism of the '90s which had encrusted his early works. The early Munch implied death's universality by showing a skeleton embracing a nude. Later he was satisfied to suggest the same theme by painting three girls on a bridge at evening, staring down into the dark, still water...
...Shiner's grave occurs a scene to raise a lump in the gullet of the steeliest projection machine. Snowy potters about, planting flowers, leaving a cross and "a glass dome, full of waxen flowers and fruit, with a marble scroll curling through the flowers, and SHINER, in fine long letters cut in it." He takes pictures of the grave, "and a heat of grief bit into him." He looks up, past "doves flying white in the blue," and prays, "Oy, you want to watch out. There ain't all that many of 'em. Please. Look after...
...city steeped in tradition and superstition. Ghosts as well as whores and gamblers haunted its streets and houses. The ghosts still do. New Orleanians swear that two waxen-faced Yankee soldiers parade through the corridors of a building on Constance Street, singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Dr. Deschamps, the dentist, hanged in the 1850s for murdering a girl he was trying to hypnotize, still haunts an apartment in 714 St. Peter Street. The Devil's own head hung on a gable in a house on St. Charles Avenue until gable and house were torn down...
...Presidenta, her waxen face as deadpan as it always is when she is not smiling, will insist time & again that her husband governs alone, neither asking nor getting her advice. "I am his wife," she says, "and I am interested only in social work...