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Let's just get this out of the way: Yes, Austenland is a fun movie. It's joyful, exuberant, and features good performances and snappy dialogue and pretty costumes. It's exactly the sort of thing to watch when you want to feel better about your life. Preferably while eating your favorite ice cream straight out of the carton. And it probably enhances the experience if you've recently ended a relationship, are in the midst of ending a relationship, or are thinking about ending a relationship. If you're currently in a happy relationship, you'll still find it entertaining, but really it's not meant for you.

Because here's the thing — the enjoyment of most things related to Austen requires the reader/viewer to be in a state of heartache. Preferably long-term, persistent heartache teetering on the brink of being positively unbearable.

This is why Austen is so popular with women and gay men. We're adept at heartache.

Austen fans are experts on pining. And what the vast majority of us pine for is Mr. Darcy. Even when we don't want to. Believe me, when I sat down to watch Austenland, I was determined not to fall for this Darcy. I'd already been through that with Colin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen, and had hardened my heart.

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Ushio came to New york in 1959, the beneficiary of a generous grant. And he made an impression.

"He is a genius," says curator Alexandra Munroe, leaning into the noun. She's the Guggenheim Museum's senior curator of Asian art, and she's been a fan for decades.

"He is a maker of ideas; he is a maker of cultural revolutions," she says. "He never cared about making money. I think he was fashioning himself after a radical artist — fashioning himself after a heroic radical artist, after even a [Jackson] Pollock for that matter."

If he aspired to be a Pollock-style titan, Ushio Shinohara chose other American icons for his subjects — that motorcycle not least among them. Inspired by the image of Marlon Brando astride his bike, he scrounged the neighborhood for cardboard — ubiquitous on the New York City streets — and he started creating his versions, both smaller than life and, like the one on his roof, much larger.

He's never had a bike of his own, though.

"Never," he laughs, disclaiming any knowledge of how the machines work. "And my temper is an artist's temper, sometimes up, sometimes down. Very, very dangerous, on a cycle."

He exorcises that temperament in part by pounding on those canvases. The creation of his boxing paintings is a performance in itself: He wears swim goggles and boxing gloves, with paint-absorbing foam attached to them with rubber bands. Often shirtless — and still trim at age 81 — Ushio dips the boxing gloves into his paints and hammers at the canvas, working from right to left, as if he's writing kanji with his fists.

After 40 Years And More, A Relationship In Flux

The film also captures the couple's domestic life. Noriko brushes her long gray hair and plaits her two braids; they eat dinner, do their artwork.

And they bicker — over rent and bills, and the son who seems to be following his father down the path into alcoholism. (Though Ushio, the film notes, quit drinking a few years ago.)

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North Korea has agreed to talks with the South to resume cross-border reunions of families separated for decades by the most militarized border in the world.

On Sunday, a spokesman for the Pyongyang's Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea, said it had agreed to talks, hosted by the Red Cross, that are to take place on Sept. 19 at the North Korea's Diamond Mountain resort.

In the past, temporary thaws in bilateral relations have allowed some families separated by the 1950-53 Korean War to meet briefly at the border.

But tensions that have accompanied the ascendency of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un stalled such meetings.

The North also shut down a joint industrial zone – one of the few areas of cooperation between the bitter rivals.

Last week, the Koreas agreed to work toward restarting the joint operation.

North Korea asked that discussion about resuming South Korean tours to its Diamond Mountain resort – another small area of cooperation — take place at a separate meeting. Those tours were suspended in 2008 when a South Korean woman was shot by a North Korean border guard after she reportedly wandered into a fenced-off military area.

Immigrant and farm worker rights groups came from Los Angeles to Bakersfield, Calif. by the bus load this week. Bakersfield, in the state's Central Valley, is farm country, and immigration is a complex issue here.

The groups were converging on the home of the third-most powerful Republican in the House, Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy.

Activists across the country are targeting a number of Republican members of Congress this summer, trying to pressure the House to take up the immigration reform bill passed in the Senate.

In Bakersfield, the protesters caravaned through the normally sleepy downtown, then held a rally and a march in the 100-degree heat to McCarthy's field office.

Maria Barajas, a 19-year-old recent graduate of Bakersfield High, welcomed the reinforcements.

"We've been coming here for the past, I'd say six months," she says.

Unlike the other protesters, Barajas wasn't holding a sign or beating a drum. She was just standing in a blue cap and gown.

"I want citizenship in order to go to a university."

Barajas moved to Bakersfield from Mexico with her parents when she was a little girl. The big farms here that produce much of the nation's fresh produce have long relied on immigrant labor — much of it illegal. Today Latinos make up half of Bakersfield's population.

Mayor Harvey Hall stood side by side with farm worker rights activists on stage at a rally earlier that day. "Our country needs a vibrant, strong and stable agricultural work force that is treated with dignity and respect," he told the crowd.

Hall is a Republican. In fact you'll find a lot of conservatives here who not only favor immigration reform, but also take a sympathetic tone when talking about people who are here illegally. Take Dean Haddock, who chairs the Kern County GOP.

"I don't want to really call it amnesty," Haddock says. "But if we come to a situation where we say, 'Look, we're glad you're here, we know you're here and we know you have needs and we know you've also produced and provided for our economy ... '"

Haddock wants to see a comprehensive immigration bill pass Congress. But he also says that the flow of illegal immigrants has to stop. The county has high unemployment, and a struggling economy. He says Bakersfield can't afford it anymore.

"The one thing that most Republicans, at least here in this area, see as the fix is securing the border," Haddock says. "Then we can go ahead and do all the other things of taking care of the people that we care about."

Make no mistake, Bakersfield and Kern County are still some of the reddest places in America. And unlike some congressional districts deeper into California's Central Valley, the area has a diverse economy, including Edwards Air Force Base and a big oil industry.

Bakersfield also has an influential Tea Party movement. Right now, McCarthy is getting just as much pressure from anti-immigration groups.

An ad running on local TV, paid for by a group called Californians for Population Stabilization, is one example. "Bakersfield Congressman Kevin McCarthy wants to bring in more immigrant workers to take jobs," the ad states. "He's even talking about legalizing 11 million illegal aliens making it easier for them to take jobs too."

While he's opposed to taking up the Senate's version of immigration reform, McCarthy does favor a step-by-step approach. That makes sense to Gene Tackett, a former Kern County supervisor turned political consultant. He says as House Majority Whip, McCarthy must fall in line with the Speaker.

"He may privately be working on that," Tackett says. "But he's not in a position to be able to push that because he's a soldier in this battle. He's not the general."

And anyway Tackett, a Democrat, says McCarthy's seat is safe, whether immigration reform passes or not.

McCarthy was in the Middle East and un-reachable this week while the pro-immigrant groups were marching to his office. Barajas says he has yet to speak to protesters. She has "deferred-action" status, which allows children who were brought here illegally to live and work in the United States for two years without the threat of deportation. Barajas says that's not good enough.

"I want to be a surgeon one day and what's the point of having this certificate, this degree that says I'm graduated, but I don't even have the citizenship to be out there and do what I want to do?"