Wednesday, June 1, 2011


Word of the day: lickerish : desirous, lecherous

What's new? Well...

1) We found a place in Statesboro! It will be the nicest house Julia and I have ever lived in. Big bedrooms, big dining room, big living room, big yard, new cabinets, new furnishings... I wished we lived in it now. I wished we lived in it yesterday...

2) We're gonna get nice furniture, a grill, patio furniture, a pool for Gabriel. I can mow the lawn and garden...

3) My last day of work is July 15 - or the 14th, I haven't decided yet. About 25-30 days left.

4) Julia's mom is coming to town next week.

5) When she leaves, we head for Pittsburgh. We'll see two Frank Lloyd Wright homes in less than a week.

6) I might get a job ('might') at GSU in Julia's department.

7) Our air conditioning here in the apartment smells like cat urine at times.

8) I can't get enough of No Strings Attached. Every movie needs Kevin Kline, Ludacris, and Greta Gerwig in support. It's my favorite Natalie Portman movie. It might be my favorite movie by director Ivan Reitman - and he made Ghostbusters and Animal House.

9) I wish Friday Night Lights was on every TV season for the rest of my life.

10) I'll miss buying "clearance" DVDs like The Roommate, Freaky Friday, You Again, The Fighter, Up, and The Hurt Locker at work for less than $2.

11) I hope that Greg Iles' Third Degree will be the worst book I read this year.

12) Blue Valentine is a riveting drama, beautifully hued, naturalistic, sodden, with first-rate performances by Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams.

13) I want to read more John le Carre.

14) Julia and I can't wait to go to La Berry all the time...

15) Moving will be expensive - and so will de-clawing the cats - but we'll get it done! As Philip Roth said, Goodbye Columbus!

Hail, Philip Roth! Hail, Statesboro!

Monday, May 9, 2011

Monday, May 9


Word of the day: nostrum : a questionable remedy or scheme; a panacea

Hi, all! Hi, Jules!

It's a beautiful Monday, which means that Julia is home for a longer stretch of time than she usually is; that'll be the case on Wednesdays too!

Mother's Day weekend was nice. Julia got two pairs of shorts, a new wallet from Fossil, a nice new sleeveless shirt that shows off her nice cleavage and upper body. We had dinner at Whole Foods ("Where?" in Grandma Pooch's words) last night and today we'll have a nice dinner and see a good movie (hopefully). This past weekend, we saw Something Borrowed, a really enjoyable romantic comedy taken from the Emily Giffin novel. It was really charming, frothy and funny, with an attractive cast (I found Kate Hudson's performance blissfully insouciant and winning). We had a wonderful dinner at Bravo's, bought The King's Speech, and had some divine Tiramisu. Julia also cleaned my clock at Scrabble, which was expected since I exhibited too much braggadocio beforehand.

Speaking of The King's Speech, I loved it! I didn't want to love it. I'm not sure I even wanted to like it, assuming it would be stodgy, old-person cinema, but it was fresh and funny, with a moving central relationship and flawless turns by Oscar winner Colin Firth and nominee Geoffrey Rush.

From Prada to Nada shouldn't work at all, but it does - modestly, moderately, of course, but it's breezy and harmless.

The Way Back has more impressive cinematography and location shooting than the last ten movies you've seen, but the story is pretty compelling too. Ed Harris is superb (but when is he not?) as the lone American in a group of escapees from a Soviet Gulag camp forced to trek through Mongolia, the desert, and over the Himalayas to freedom in Peter Weir's exciting, vivid account of a really remarkable, unfathomable story. (Kudos too to Colin Farrell for consistently underappreciated work.)

Books: Jonathan Dee's The Privileges, a runner-up for this year's Pulitzer, is so perceptive, acute, and laceratingly generous, it deserves more than reasonable comparisons to the work of Jonathan Franzen, whose blurb on the back says it all. How Dee gets us to empathize with a class of people it's almost impossible not to envy and hate (wealthy New Yorkers), is something of a miracle. The opening chapter, in which we jump in and out of the thoughts and feelings, of a group of people in Pittsburgh for a wedding, is flat-out stunning, inspiring.

Harold Robbins' A Stone For Danny Fisher (1951) is an earnest, heartfelt tale about a boy growing up in New York City during the Depressions, forced to scrape by as a pugilist and, later, a vending machine salesman. Full of feeling, tons of melodrama. This was actually the blueprint for the Elvis Presley movie King Creole, a silly, snarling little piece of fluff.

Stephen Carter's New England White is informative and intelligent, but way too long. It starts out well enough as a thriller about an influential African American power couple at a Yale-like campus and the body of a dead economist (the long-ago lover of the wife) they discover along a back road. The story traverses academia and black politics and has more than its share of juicy White House intrigue, but it should have climaxed far sooner than it did.

Two thanks to Julia:
1) For being a fantastic mother, compassionate, tender, lenient, loving.
2) For getting me into books on CD!

Today's artist, who I know little to nothing about but who was referenced once or twice in The Privileges, is the French avant-garde painter Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985), who left the family wine business during World War II to focus on his simple, distinctly primitive style. He was the definition of an "outsider artist" and was fascinated by the naive art of children and the insane, coining the phrase "art brut," which simply meant 'raw art,' to describe their pictures' unrefined, antagonistic, violent force. Quite a few of his works can be seen at the Guggenheim. He was fond of assemblages, combining found objects and various other elements into a larger, multi-dimensional whole. He painted in oil a lot too, using an impasto often thickened with sand, tar, and straw, creating an unusually textured surface. Towards the end of his career, continuing to focus on art free from intellectual concerns, he turned to sculpture, producing works in polystyrene. The above painting is Cyclist With Five Cows, a work from 1943 on display at the MOMA.




Thursday, April 21, 2011

My wife...




Word of the day: mot juste : the perfect word or phrase to communicate precisely what you mean to say

Today's post treads a different path....

100 Things I Love About My Wife!

1) Her sense of humor. She's so funny and witty, never offended, full of funny mot justes (to use the word of the day), verbally deft, witty as anything.
2) Her intelligence. What more can I say here? She's brilliant.
3) The way she's so patient in dealing with moronic CCAD students.
4) Her voracious appetite for reading. She introduced me to a lot of my favorite books - Lonesome Dove, The Kite Runner, Middlesex, The Forgotten Garden. She reads more than I do, but I catch up to her by the reading I sneak in at work...
5) That she has worked hard to get a good job and got it. I'm so glad that she's doing exactly what she wants to do.
6) She's a perfect mother. Absolutely perfect: compassionate, caring, detail-oriented, flexible, warm, with a sense of humor. I can't wait to have another baby with her.
7) The way she always sleeps to my left in bed and sits to my left on the couch.
8) She's a first-rate cook and I love how we have favorite meals together (tater tot casserole, bacon pasta, chicken parmesan, different soups, etc.)
9) The way she always gets me gifts every holiday - great gifts, too, thoughtfully choosing items/clothes/books I need but wouldn't get myself.
10) Knowing that there's no place she'd rather be than with me and that she's there beside me when I go to sleep and...
11) That she's there when I get up. I enjoy seeing her face in the morning - I don't even mind her morning breath or when she tastes like hazelnut coffee.
12) She's a wonderful daughter. She cares so much for her father, is understanding, forgiving, persistent, and so, so reliable.
13) All of the above apply to her as a sister as well. She keeps track of her family, makes sure everything is well.
14) I know my mom and dad thinks she is the greatest daughter-in-law imaginable, and I treasure how well she gets along with my (often scatterbrained) mom.
15) The way she soaks up TV shows she likes. TV night with her is so enjoyable and relaxing.
16) Her worldly knowledge, the way she creams me in Jeopardy.
17) The way she can be dirty and crude, anything but elitist and high-minded. She has a nice lust for the raunchy.
18) That she got me hooked on Ken Follett.
19) How she is so well-travelled. I can't wait for our family to take so many trips together.
20) That she lets me be who I am.
21) That she can be wild and crazy, if the rare situation requires it.
22) Her height.
23) The way her Chicago accent sneaks through every now and then, really chomping down on a hard 'a.'
24) That she asked me out!
25) That I am able to see her and talk to her multiple times a day, no matter how zany and divergent our schedules are. Also, that throughout most of the time we have lived together, I've been able to see her a sizable portion of almost every day.
26) Her butt.
27) Her sense of fashion. She always dresses well, has nice accessories and shoes...
28) On that note, she knows what looks good on me and I would be stupid to buy anything for my self to wear without first consulting her, for she's rarely wrong.
29) That we like the same types of music.
30) That we had similar high school experiences and "came of age" around the same time.
31) That we were both picky eaters as kids.
32) That we only really like to do things with each other (and Gabriel).
33) The way that, six years after I met her, I still think about her all day long, wonder what's she doing, what she's watching, eating, or thinking at a particular instant.
34) That she's a good kisser.
35) She has excellent hygiene. Even when her pits stink after a long, sweaty day of teaching, it's amusing, endearing.
36) That we're both early to bed and early to rise...
37) She rarely gets sick. She's healthy, she takes care of herself.
38) She's almost always in a good mood.
39) The way she makes me want to learn more about art. I know so much more about art now than I did before I met her and I just want to soak up more and more...
40) The way we generally think the same things are stupid...
41) Watching romantic comedies with her... And movies like The Substitute 2.
42) How she got me into eating more desserts. Or, really, any desserts.
43) She's a good writer, good speller, terrific public speaker.
44) How she used to leave me notes in my lunchbox when I started at HPB.
45) The way she gets annoyed when I hold her or cuddle against her when eh wants to do something or needs to get somewhere.
46) How her favorite restaurants are the same as mine.
47) The way she thinks about a dining experience weeks before it actually takes place.
48) (In the old days), Taking walks with her.
49) Everything about her in terms of her thoughtfulness, maternal instincts, compassion, understanding, goodwill, ease, and pliability in regards to Gabriel.
50) She pushed out a 10-lb, 9-oz. son!
51) Sometimes, she grooms me!
52) She loves our cats!
53) The way she took charge of paying all the bills.
54) Her calm, cool demeanor in times of crisis.
55) How we can look back at some strange traveling/trip experiences with levity and fondness.
56) That we almost never fight and when we do, I know that's it's my fault. Why? Because she is everything I could ever want in a wife, let alone a person, and that if it's not working, it's because I'm not giving enough, for she gives me everything she has every single day.
57) How she knows me better than anyone else on the planet and always will.
58) How she teases me when I attempt an accent.
59) How we play board games together.
60) She's one formidable Scrabble player.
61) Her shoulders. All that rowing paid off. I love feeling how strong she is when I massage her.
62) That she's never too embarrassed to tell me anything.
63) We generally have the same sense of humor.
64) That I'm always discovering new things about her - anecdotes from her youth, tales abroad, etc.
65) How loyal of a friend she is to Hallie.
66) Reality TV. Reality TV. Reality TV.
67) I know that she's a first-rate professor. Further, I know that she would have been the kind of professor I would have liked and appreciated.
68) She has strong morals, a low tolerance for ignorance, is accepting, self-mocking, attentive, thoughtful.
69) She doesn't smoke. She doesn't like fast food. She doesn't stay up late. She rarely curses. She wasn't a Bridezilla. She's not into herself. She's not prissy. These are all plusses.
70) She isn't superficial.
71) She has knockout legs - strong thighs (although she doesn't like them), really firm calves.
72) Her little quirks: how she doesn't like salad dressing, Peter Gabriel, Desperate Housewives, New York accents.
73) She isn't superficial. Money isn't that important to her.
74) She's never predictable, but she does have a routine. I usually know what she wants and is thinking, but I she never allows me to take her for granted or (hopefully) get complacent.
75) She is great to shop with. In and out, no loitering or lingering.
76) She got me on to boxer-briefs and now there's no looking back.
77) She gives me confidence. I like how attracted she is to me. She has always made me feel good about myself.
78) She has terrific arms. Nice biceps. 
79) I can go on about how sexy she is without really trying to be. She is a confident, secure, independent, giving woman.
80) She has a snacky tooth like me and likes an occasional beer, but feels no need to drink too much to have a good time.
81) She is always on my side.
82) Did I already say that she produced Gabriel?
83) How her celebrity crushes are pretty much the same ones I would have if I were a girl.
84) How a perfect date with her - a matinee, early dinner, a movie and dessert at home, followed by a massage and an early turning-in - makes me think it's the greatest thing in the world.
84) How she isn't too "girly" or demanding.
85) How so many of her favorite movies are mine too.
86) How ticklish she is and the firm manner in which she tells me to stop doing something - "Okay, I don't like that!"
87) How hearing about her day never gets old.
88) How she used to make me mix CDs.
89) She's very graceful, easy on the eye. She gives off a sense of security, pride in appearance, happiness.
90) The way she tells me she doesn't like something if she doesn't like it. No beating around the bush with her.
91) I know that I have quirks, peculiarities, and I savor the way she points them out to me. There are numerous examples of this.
92) How I want to spend every day of the rest of my life with her.
93) I know how great of a mother she will be to our next kid.
94) She's always nice to strangers, polite.
95) She's always supportive.
96) She likes nature, parks, swimming, going to the beach/pool, hiking, or just lounging around. She is in good shape (even during periods when she can't workout), has marvelous stamina, is direct, thorough, not afraid to admit she made a mistake, affectionate (but, thankfully, not a fan of PDA).
97) How hard-working she is.
98) That she's not afraid to fart or burp around me. (Like I said, she's not too girly and has never been afraid of openness). If she weren't my wife, she would be my fiancee. If she weren't my fiancee, she might still be my soulmate. If she weren't my soulmate or fiancee, she would still be my best friend.
99) How we don't have to "do" anything to still have a great time.
100) Ah, 100 things. I could probably think of 100 more, but I said I'd stop at 100 and, like Julia, I like to keep my word.  The 100th thing I like about her?...
That I could easily think up 100 more things I like about her with little struggle!  
Until next time!



Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Welcome Back


Word of the day: nugatory : trifling, worthless, ineffective

Long time, no post!

Here's what's new on the homefront: I'm been working, of course, enjoying any free time I can get with Julia. I got a good head of steam going with my novel, finishing up a screenplay, and starting a novella. I've started applying for jobs in Georgia, planning future day trips... Less than 3 months of HPB!

Gabriel, the lazy listener, is continuing to grow, babbling like crazy, enjoying the hell out of his life.

Julia is super-busy, teaching at 3 schools, wrapping things up at Denison, winding down at the great CCAD, and traversing to and from Marion. It's good to see her doing what she loves. She's reading like crazy too!

Let's see, here is a hasty, ridiculously concise round-up of movies Julia and I (or just I) have seen over the last month:

- Rabbit Hole is probably the best movie I've seen in a good year. It's one of the most extraordinary depictions of grief I've ever seen, every bit as good as the Pulitzer-Prize winning play by David Lindsay-Abaire (who penned the screenplay), moving, with the finest performances of Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart's careers.

- Unstoppable is a straight-up, full-barreled, well-shot adventure with Denzel Washington and Chris Pine as the everyday men in charge of stopping an out-of-control train carrying dangerous chemicals.

- The Resident is a decent direct-to-DVD B-movie with Hilary Swank as a new tenant in a New York City apartment with a creepy landlord (an effective Jeffrey Dean Morgan).

- Fair Game, a patient, slow-burning, layered re-enactment of the Valerie Wilson affair, has Sean Penn and Naomi Watts as Joe Wilson and Valerie, and their relationship, heated, antsy, well-versed in each other's passions, anchors the film.

- It's Kind of a Funny Story isn't. It's a blah affair, with all sorts of likable actors (Zach Galifinakis, Emma Roberts, and Viola Davis among them) in a nothing story about a whiny, lost kid checking into a psychiatric wing at a Brookly Hospital, from the writer-director team of Half Nelson no less.

- Due Date has some big laughs, and Robert Downey Jr. and Zach Galifinakis certainly deliver as the mismatched traveling companions, but it's never as hilarious as you keep waiting for it to be. Still, it is funny, as all Todd Philips movies are.

- Never Let Me Go is a devastatingly poignant adaptation of the Kazuo Ishiguro novel, a subtle, composed, diligently-etched tale with masterful performances (Carey Mulligan earns particular kudos). It's a story full of big ideas, the kind of movie that lodges in your conscience and nestles there for days - we bask in its sadness, the pull of the inevitable in Ishiguro's ineluctable world of mystery.

- The Switch is a modest comedy, with Jason Bateman on point as the New Yorker who is the father to his best friend Jennifer Aniston's son, a fact she is unaware of. It's an amusing, affecting situational comedy.

Well, next time I'll talk about some books I've read recently, but I'm almost out of time. I want to get some work done while Gabriel is still sleeping and try to come up with some ways to entertain him this rainy afternoon.

Today's artist is the great sociological photographer Jacob Riis, who emigrated to the U.S. from Denmark in the latter half of the 20th century. He was an acclaimed journalist, but spent his early years in New York living on the streets. He is most famous for his black-and-white photographs of the dirty neighborhoods, the violent slums, and the dangerous alleyways of New York City. He snapped shots of it all: overcrowded apartments, rundown tenements, poor children sitting on the curbs, half-dressed kids leaning out of smeared windows. He was one of the first artists to make use of flash photography and he utilized it in in his seminal, still-studied How the Other Half Lives, an 1890 novel/expose on the deteriorating conditions of the inner city. Critics accused him of being a muckraker, of staging his photos, of seething with disdain and condescension for his subjects.
The above image is one of his most famous photos, "Bandits Roost," in which thugs stand outside an alleyway at 59 1/2 Mulberry Street in Manhattan, a notoriously crime-infested, scary neighborhood, later torn down.


Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Tuesday, Mar. 15


Word of the day: etiolate : to deprive of sunlight, vigor; to make weak, pale, sickly

Well, the stay-cation is almost over. It's been a bundle of fun. Gabriel has been flat-out weird, in the sense that his naps are all over the map. We've played games, read, taken Gabriel to the mall, had an amazing date (dinner at Bravo Italiano being the highlight) and seen some first- rate movies.

Unknown was a full-barreled blast, with plenty of ingenious twists, another solid action turn from Liam Nesson, and some pungently seedy location work in Berlin.

The Greatest was a finely-tuned gem, with attention to detail and scenes so poignant and raw in their anguish that it's advisable to look away from the screen. Carey Mulligan, Pierce Brosnan, and Susan Sarandon are at the top of their games, and Johnny Simmons as the left-behind younger brother is equally affecting.

Life as We Know It, like almost every other Katherine Heigl film, received some below average reviews, but it's a poignant pleaser, often very funny. Shot in Atlanta and directed by Greg Berlanti (creator of the WB's marvelous Everwood), the film forgoes sitcom-tidiness, pat, predictable characterizations. It's a little more gnarled, idiosyncratic than what's to be expected. Heigl and Josh Duhamel are very charming.

Heartbreaker is a funny, likable French film with the charismatic Romain Duris as a stud whose job it is to break up relationships. Two guesses as to what happens when he finds his latest assignment is to sever the union between a beauty (Vanessa Paradis, lovely, barely withstanding a distractingly huge gap in her teeth) and her flawless British husband. Any film that features both a Monte Carlo setting and not one or two but three scenes of Duris aping the climactic number to Dirty Dancing has at least two things going for it.

Today's name-the-star quiz: Valentine's Day, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Tyler Perry's The Family That Preys, The Golden Compass, P.S. I Love You, Rumor Has It, Bee Movie, Fred Claus, Little Black Book, Around the World in 80 Days, Failure to Launch, American Outlaws, Dragonfly, Rat Race, The Waterboy, North, Dick Tracy. One Oscar. Two additional nominations. Hugely likable, versatile, stage and TV performer. Name him/her.
(By the way, the previous quiz's answer is Julianne Moore.)

Looking at the NCAA tournament brackets, I am at a loss as to what's going to happen. I'm usually terrible at predicting the games, but here goes. These are the teams I think will make the Elite Eight: North Carolina, Ohio State, Duke, Connecticut, Kansas, Notre Dame, Pittsburgh, and St. John's.

The above painting is of Christina of Denmark, Duchess of Milan. (I'm probably telling you stuff you already know, Julia). It was done by Hans Holbein the Younger, the court painter for Henry VIII. Henry, the English king during the Protestant Reformation, was worried about the possible invasion of England by the now-allies France and the Holy Roman Empire (a Catholic alliance), set out to find a bride from a foreign duchy or country, a country, like England, who had willful disregard for papal authority, and might be willing to be allies with England. His trusted painter Holbien, a German who had done remarkable portraitures of Thomas More and Erasmus among others, traveled to Milan to take the above portrait of Christina, niece of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Henry was beside himself with joy and excitement when he saw the painting, but, alas, the marriage, for purely political and bureaucratic reasons, was never to be. It's not clear if Henry ever even met Christina. On a side note, some time later, looking for another prospective bride, Henry found his bride-to-be Anne of Cleves to be far uglier than the portarit of her done a few months earlier by Holbein. Furious, betrayed, Henry eventually divorced her and took out his disillusionment not on Holbein, but on his long-time minister and adviser Thomas Cromwell, who had negotiated the marriage, beheading him after a stint at the Tower of London.

Pizza tonight! Yippy skippy!

Thursday, March 10, 2011

Stay-cation



Word of the day: agelast : someone who never laughs

A stay-cation! Six days off! I'm looking forward to hanging out with Julia and Gabriel, watching movies, starting Rosetta Stone, going on a date, maybe dropping by the park, finishing the book I'm reading now, watching some basketball...

Last night, we watched The Next Three Days, a dynamite, crackerjack thriller with Russell Crowe as a Pittsburgh professor planning to break his wife (Elizabeth Banks) out of prison, where she is serving a life sentence for killing her boss. Written and directed with sturdy, mounting tension by Paul Haggis, the film gets off to a terrific start, slows down during its middle leg, laying the groundwork for a brilliantly staged chase scene, one of the best in recent memory. One of Haggis's feats is that he isn't afraid to have his characters remain so unlikable and unsympathetic for so long; Crowe's relentless, one-track insistence of Banks' innocence really tests the audience's goodwill. Sharply edited, well-acted, full of fine location shooting, it's a real winner.

I can't say as much for Stone, a dreary, one-note drama with a lot of build-up and little to no payoff. Robert DeNiro is the caseworker who takes on titular prisoner Edward Norton, never aware that the latter is trying to manipulate the older, listless, about-to-retire man into a relationship with his wife (Milla Jovovich). The movie is intriguing for a while, but there's simply no culmination to any of the drama, no resolution (let alone a satisfying one) to the escalating tension. There are lot of religious overtones and,, frankly, a little of that goes a long way.

Paranormal Activity 2 freaked me out big-time. I felt it was a more vigorous workout than the first one, creepier, eerier, with bigger scares, slightly diminished only by its abrupt ending.

Another piece of trivia: Can you name the 4-time Oscar-nominated star who has been in the following films: the voice in Eagle Eye, Next (with Nic Cage), The Shipping News, Evolution, the-SNL-skit-made-into-a-movie The Ladies Man, the remake of Psycho, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Assassins (with Sly Stallone and Antonio Banderas), Benny & Joon, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, and Madonna's Body of Evidence?

Because I'm approaching the last hundred or so pages of Kate Morton's The Forgotten Garden, a first-rate novel, in which the great portrait painter John Singer Sargent is a minor character, I decided to include one of Sargent's most famous paintings, Madame X, a work that unleashed a furious scandal when it was shown at the Salon in 1884 because of its suggestiveness of sexuality and the pale, pasty skin tone of the woman, modeled on the socialite Madame Gautreau. Sargent eventually left Paris.

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Wednesday, March 2



Word of the day: diophysitic : possessed of two distinct, conflicting natures

Sick day! Sick day! Because of a larger-than-expected bonus check, the fam went on a shopping spree today and it felt great. The purchases: a Blu-Ray player, two Blu-Ray movies, a new Nikon camera, a Wii games, and various other necessities. Julia also got some plus-sized bras today.

Gabriel has been sick this week and, naturally, I caught the bug; so did Julia, although not as virulently. The Oscars were a bust, a boring, indifferent bust. James Franco was leaden and smug, and there were absolutely no surprises in terms of the winners.

How do I love Julia? Let me count the ways... A million, a trillion, a zillion ways! Gorgeous, firm, brilliant, witty, honest, an outrageously good, caring mother, hardworking, sexy. Unreal.

Have I seen any movies this week? Hmmm, the only thing knew was Woody Allen's You Will Meet a Tall, Dark Stranger, an enjoyable old bit of the same old, with a first-rate cast (Naomi Watts, Anthony Hopkins, Josh Brolin, among others), the usual neurotic woes (although the screenplay isn't littered with the fall-back one-liners of old), some curiously anonymous London location shooting. It would be fun to try and compose a list of Hollywood and British stars, those with Oscars, those who have merely been nominated, who haven't been in one of Allen's movies.

Trivia: Can you name the Oscar-winning actor who has starred in the following movies, some of the worst-reviewed movies ever made?

Joe Dirt, The Country Bears, Gigli, The Stepford Wives, Balls of Fury, Click, Domino, Envy, The Rundown, Kangaroo Jack, Wayne's World 2, and America's Sweethearts.

Think about it.

Today's artist is Winslow Homer. The above painting is Gloucester Harbor from 1873. Largely self-taught (it is rumored that he learned to paint by copying photographs), Homer (1836-1910) began his career as an illustrator before he travelled along with the Union army during the Civil War, etching out powerful portraits of tired, weary soldiers, nervous, flopping horses. These images became famous in Harper's. He is most famous, however, for the watercolors of the Maine shore; he spent the final years of his life in Prout's Neck, Maine. Unlike the Hudson River School artists, he didn't sentimentalize nature although his paintings do tend to memoralize mid-century innocence. He used watercolor to convey the immediacy of experience - beautifully.

Did you guess the quiz's answer? If you did, try this one: Which Oscar-nominated actor has appeared in the following clunkers:

Yogi Bear, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, 50 First Dates, Christmas With the Kranks, Crossroads (yes, the Britney Spears vehicle), The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Pearl Harbor, Evolution, Loser, Celtic Pride, Blues Brothers 2000, Feeling Minnesota, Sgt. Bilko, Tommy Boy, and Casper.