Wildlife: Two small family groups of deer were grazing around the neighborhood as I drove home last night.

New Website: Theater X-Net

Featuring: Ida Rubinstein Belle Epoch Russian/Parisian beauty.
Read more about Ida in Sisters of Salome by Toni Bentley

Visit: Michael's Montana Web Archive
Theater, Art, Flash Gordon, Funky Music and MORE!

Weather and Charity Alert: Freezing rain over already-icy roads. I couldn't leave for work until after sunrise, and even then I slid in a few places. No tire ever invented can grip these surfaces. Click on The Hunger Site rather than drive your car AT ALL today.

In The Community: Flathead Valley Community College is open because we have one more day of finals. How do you reschedule THEM?
I'm off the hook for painting at the Hockaday today because of the weather, plus we lost a staff member yesterday to a full-time job elsewhere -- the first week of January is gonna be busy! (I have this premonition of the director calling me on Dec. 28th asking if I feel like painting...) Hockaday Museum of Art

Media Watch: I'm reading a collection of essays by Ray Bradbury -- Bradbury Speaks : Too Soon from the Cave, Too Far from the Stars (William Morrow 2005) His colorful poetic words are always a joy for me to read -- these short pieces are very personal and conversational, but I continue to learn and be inspired by this enthusiastic, eloquent man.
Excerpt of an excerpt -- all rights reserved by HarperCollins Publishers:
About Writing -- My Demon, Not Afraid of Happiness (undated)
I have a strange and incredible muse that, unseen, has engulfed me during my lifetime. I have renamed my muse. In a Frederick Seidel poem, I found a perfect replacement, where he tells of "A Demon not afraid of happiness."
This perfectly describes the Demon that sits now on one shoulder, now on the other, and whispers things that no one else hears.
My Demon warned me one night years ago when I saw some glum theater at UCLA. Later I said to the director, "You want me to stick my wet finger in a wall socket for electrocution. Instead I will screw a brighter bulb in the same socket and light the room."
So my Demon warned me off such encounters and provided invisible material for my future life.
Dandelion Wine, for example, began as an essay in Gourmet magazine in 1953, and over the years my Demon tripped me, sprawling, into a novel to be read in American schools.
On my twenty-fourth birthday, I discovered Winesburg, Ohio, which is indeed not a novel but a short-story collection by Sherwood Anderson. How fine, I thought, if someday I could birth similar grotesques to inhabit Mars.
My Demon, provoked, secretly made travel plans to landfall Mars, live there, and arrive at an unplanned novel, The Martian Chronicles...
A short tale, "The Black Ferris,"melded itself into a screenplay for Gene Kelly, and when Kelly couldn't find the money for the film, I spent three years turning the screenplay into the novel Something Wicked This Way Comes.
Then at last there is my late-on offspring From the Dust Returned, commenced when I drew skeletons, age six, to scare my cousins, continued in secret when I helped redecorate my grandparents' house with Halloween broomsticks, and ended with a gothic story, "Homecoming," rejected by Weird Tales as needful of Marley's ghost and lacking Poe. I sold the story to Mademoiselle, and over the years it grew in rain and mist and arrived in fogs as a novel just last year.
What we have here, then, is a very unusual approach to writing and discovering, not knowing the outcome. To move ahead on a blind journey, running fast, putting down thoughts as they occur.
And along the way my inner voice advised:
If you must write of assassinations, rapes, and Ophelia suicides, speak the speech, I pray thee, poetry in your breath, metaphors on your tongue. Remember how glad Iago was to think on Othello's fall. How, with smiles, Hamlet prepared his uncle's death.
Shakespeare and my Demon schooled me so: Be not afraid of happiness. It is often the soul of murder.
"Speak your love!" he advised an audience on Book TV earlier this year, and told the story of how a blown-down roller coaster at Santa Monica Pier turned into The Foghorn, which led to John Huston taking him to Ireland to write the movie version of Moby Dick, further leading to worldwide recognition of his vast talent.
He tells the tale in Too Soon from the Cave, Too Far from the Stars about how post-WWII public school students educated their teachers about him and other "Science Fiction" authors by taking these books to school and convincing their instructors to read them. A simple and true story -- I was one of those myriad students, and I was exceedingly proud to see Dandelion Wine and Fahrenheit 451 as part of our curriculum by the time I got to high school.


J. Allen St. John succeeded Frank Schoonover
as illustrator of Edgar Rice Burroughs' fanastic novels. Warlord of Mars is mentioned by Bradbury in Too Soon from the Cave, and this is probably the cover he saw as a youngster.