Word: melancholia
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...Born in 1895, Larry claimed to be descended from the German-Jewish poet Harry Heine, the student of Hegel who converted to Protestantism and changed his name to Christian (!) Johann Heinrich Heine. His most famous poem, "Lorelay," set to music by Friedrich Silcher, has some of the melancholia (if not the elfin wit) that marked many Hart lyrics: "I do not know what haunts me,/ What saddened my mind all day;/ An age-old tale confounds me,/ A spell I cannot allay." And a quatrain Heine wrote for his wife Therese - "You're lovely as a flower,/ So pure...
...fool's war with gravity, a crash victim who finds his near death experience makes him feel alive, an earthbound stargazer who dreams of abduction by alien spacecraft. His voice is often sampled, distorted by synthesizers, his lyrics broken into elegiac fragments, shards of thoughts, mantras of melancholia. "I woke up sucking a lemon," Yorke sings on Everything in Its Right Place, and the phrase is repeated again and again in a plaintive sample. Throughout Kid A he returns to the theme of restlessness, rootlessness and confusion. On the ethereal jazz breakdown In Limbo, he croons, "I'm lost...
...sections and just bass and drums throughout the album, Turner waxes introspective with the breathy tone and plodding rhythm of the standard "Stardust." The album would be easily dismissible were it not for Turner's flights of interpretational fancy, which soar to great melodic heights yet still maintain the melancholia inherent to many tracks. On "I Loves You Porgy," he conjures simple sentimentality in a lush landscape of tender phrasing and introspective tones. Granted, not every single aspect of Ballad Sessions works. Turner's group doesn't gel when he attempts to change pace with Latin inflections...
...seem (as they seemed to the young Berenson a century ago) peculiarly congenial to modern eyes. His work is sown with recondite allegories, complicated quirks, unexpected twists of meaning. Despite its often ravishing formal beauty, it is full of unease. Apart from Durer's famous etching Melancholia, Renaissance art can show no more poignant portrayal of the way depression freezes both action and curiosity in its sufferers than Lotto's Portrait of a Young Man, circa 1530. It depicts its subject with sallow face, deep dark eyes and Hamlet-black clothes, idly toying with the pages of an unread book...
...spring Universal chief Tom Pollock declared, "Waterworld will not cost any more than $65 million." That number may have a sacred resonance at Universal, since it was the production cost for the studio's top hit of the '90s, Jurassic Park. And here Sheinberg and Pollock may slip into melancholia: virtually all Universal's megamovies of the past 20 years-including Jaws and Hollywood's all-time champ, E.T.: The Extraterrestrial-were directed or produced by Steven Spielberg, who last fall decided to form an independent multimedia company with fellow Poo-Bahs Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen...