Word: homer
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...only 51, Sargent decided to give up doing "paughtraits," as he disparagingly called them--except for those commissions he couldn't refuse, like a 1917 portrait of John D. Rockefeller. Sargent wanted to travel more and do landscapes, especially in watercolor--and next only to Winslow Homer, he was the finest American watercolorist of his time...
...ability to invest figures with a dignity and a power that verged on the sacral. He was one of the last artists to whom the rhetoric of grandeur seemed not only possible but desirable. Of course it had to be for a myth painter doing an Apotheosis of Homer. But Ingres brought it into portraiture, most notoriously with his over-the-top portrait of Napoleon (1806) in his imperial coronation robes, as frontal and opulent as a Byzantine god. So weird was this attempt at deification that even David, Ingres's old teacher, found it "incomprehensible...
Gordon's latest work--a fine, well-acted film, by the way--is based on the memoir Rocket Boys by Homer Hickam Jr., a former engineer at NASA who grew up in a small West Virginia coal town in the late '50s hoping to pursue a career in rocketry. This was against the wishes of his father, who in the movie says things like, "Quit wastin' time worryin' about Wernher von Braun," and "By golly, you'd find out [about life in the mines] soon enough...
...think I'm giving too much away to note that one, Homer makes good; and two, one of the film's final images is of Dad's arm giving Homer's shoulder a paternal blessing as a rocket soars impossibly high into a deep blue sky--a male-weepie moment to rival Field of Dreams' climax. An entire audience of NASA brass and astronauts was reportedly broken up at a preview screening in Washington, although when I checked this out with former astronaut Jim Lovell, the commander of the Apollo 13 mission, he gave me a cagey "not really" when...
Soon enough, my confusion turned to stunned disbelief as Mike Breen, the witty Imus sportscaster, confirmed the news, "Susyn Waldman of WFAN is reporting this morning that the Toronto Blue Jays have traded Roger Clemens to the Yankees for David Wells, Graeme Lloyd and Homer Bush...