Munch himself had a difficult relationship with his father and an affair with Millie Thaulow, the wife of his teacher, patron and distant cousin Frits Thaulow, and was devastated when she ended it.
Curiously, the decidedly unkempt Bar do Bin Laden here in Rio's distant suburbs, where dozens of patrons gather until past midnight during the Games, isn't the only saloon in Brazil named for the Saudi who was hunted down and killed in Pakistan in 2011.
If anything, there seemed to be an attempt to point a finger at Hezbollah's patron, the more distant Iran.
("I feel like I'm out of town," chirped a recent patron, having arrived from distant Williamsburg).
The good news is that, in keeping with his charge that the incumbent is distant and out of touch, none of the patrons had heard much from Senator Lautenberg.
But other companies take a less hands-off approach, promising patrons the chance to become chums with distant figures of unnatural grace.
From the deck on the lake's edge, the multigenerational patrons seem unhurried, on vacation, as they watch the distant water crafts, the antics of friendly ducks and, not least, some glorious sunsets.
The manager of a movie theatre in the Balkans, presumably with a distant leer at Will Hays, offered "The Rage of Paris" to his patrons under the fetching title, in Croatia of "He Wants to But She Doesn't".
Suddenly, from the distant family circle came a flurry of applause from a small group of smiling patrons.
Many of the smaller Gulf states have, until recently, quietly worried as much about Saudi Arabia, a state that was created by conquest under an extremist Wahhabi ideology, as about the more distant regional heavyweight over the water.Uncle Sam's clodhoppersThe Arabs' discomfort with their superpower patron has been another reason for toning down differences with Iran.
