Wildlife: The Blue Jay is sticking around -- it waited for me yesterday when I went outside with fresh peanuts.



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

Weather: Despite occasional warm rains, it's still Indian Summer.

Charity Alert: The Hunger Site Clicking costs you nothing, but helps a lot.

In The Community: Speaking of rain -- we're having a groundbreaking ceremony at Flathead Valley Community College, which I am going to videotape -- especially our president on the ceremonial backhoe! There's a tent in place, just in case, but anything can happen.
The roof of the Hockaday needs a look too -- we spotted a leak under the flat side. Bother, bother, bother!
Hockaday Museum of Art Reminder: The Winold Reiss show is going Bye-Bye in TWO WEEKS!

Media Watch: George Clinton and his Funk Mob are going to be the subject of a documentary on PBS' Independent Lens!
One Nation Under A Groove You'll hear alot more about it from me as the date approaches.


The Parliaments circa 1967 -- (L to R) The late Ray Davis,
Calvin Simon, Fuzzy Haskins, Shady Grady Thomas,
and George Clinton
Tonight I'm going to see Norton Buffalo & the Knockouts at the Eagle's Club in downtown Kalispell -- fabulous live band! Creative instumental soloist and frontman in Norton Buffalo. Perfect timekeeper in drummer Tyler Eng.

Wildlife: Blue Jay in the box feeder! He/she likes peanuts, but so do the big ol' Magpies.



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

Weather: Indian Summer is pretty gray today -- we've had a few drops of rain, and it was a warm night because of the low clouds.

Charity Alert: The Hunger Site Clicking helps feed people.

Media Watch: PBS' American Masters -- Part 2 of Martin Scorsese's Bob Dylan film, No Direction Home. It picks up the story in 1964 and finishes in 1966, at the end of his European tour -- when he had the motorcycle accident which marked the beginning of a long isolation. The film mentions that he continued to write songs, but didn't tour for eight years. I could see why -- it was literally insane the way he and his band suffered all the normal road travails just to be shouted at and booed by ignorant adolescents and post-adolescents while trying to keep their bearings in a media world that alternately worshipped Dylan as a diety or cursed him like a devil.
Remember my remark yesterday about our rapidly-mutating society? It was in hyper-flux during that time, and would even get wackier. I didn't understand it at the time, but Dylan's withdrawl from the public was absolutely necessary to save whatever sanity he still possessed in the wake of the "Folk Rock Revolution," which dogged his ass after his own popular success. This film gives the viewer a glimpse of the pressures he faced, and his interviews show the inhuman strain he endured.
All that being said, what generated the aforementioned phenomena was the number and quality of Bob Dylan's songs. In the film, Columbia Records' laid-back country music producer Bob Johnson said words to the effect that Dylan was touched, or rather grabbed and shaken, by God in those days -- in respect to creating music.
As a young fan back then, I will attest to my astonishment in hearing one great song after another from this person's pen. Bringing It All Back Home was one of the very first albums I bought with my summer job money. Like A Rolling Stone was something nobody had ever heard before on the radio, and his Highway 61 Revisited album was unsurpassed for raw creative energy for many more years. Each one of his "old" albums were loaded with treasures too. In August of 1965 he set a record that will probably never be matched again -- seventeen songs of his, performed by himself and others, were listed in Billboard's Hot 100. What further knocked me out was the way his prolific streak continued on 1966's double-disc Blonde On Blonde.
At the time of his motorcycle accident his musical accomplishments were comparable not only to Leadbelly or Woody Guthrie, but also to Cole Porter, Rogers & Hart & Hammerstein, and you-name-whatever popular composer. His recent autobiography tells how he spent his time with his wife and growing family afterwards, but the great songs also kept coming too. That cryptic note at the end of Part 2 was an understatement. Several big books could be written about Dylan's influence on music and culture, but I ain't gonna write 'em, and I'm sure he ain't gonna read 'em either.
His records varied in quality afterwards, for sure -- his book tells how he tried to distance himself from the myths about himself this way, but there was still more fabulous unheard music in his vaults. Whomever sneaked the pirated Great White Wonder tapes out of upstate New York did the world a favor -- but I think it made Dylan angry -- so angry that he released trash like Self Portrait and Dylan. (The former has one or two good cuts, though.)
I was so happy when I finally heard albums like New Morning and Blood On The Tracks. I could do without Planet Waves or careless live recordings, but time continues to justify my hopes over the long decades when his awesome powers come back into focus. He claims that he doesn't write the way he used to write, and something tells me he's happy about that!

Wildlife: Magpies, Finches, Doves, and greedy little Squirrels in the box feeder.



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

Weather: I delare an Official Indian Summer -- if this weather lasts the rest of the week.

Charity Alert: The Hunger Site Click to help feed somebody.

Media watch: PBS American Masters showed 2 hours of a 4 hour biography of Bob Dylan.
The film was made by Martin Scorsese, and Dylan's work deserves this kind of thorough treatment. Like others of my generation, his songs made an incalculable impact on my life for many different reasons -- articulating them all would make a tremendously long essay that you are NOT about to read here.
I liked that color footage of a parade in Dylan's hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota from 1950. It was right to point out that Doggie In The Window was the most popular song of the 50's, and that young Robert Zimmerman dabbled unsuccessfully in Rock N' Roll before he committed himself to folk singing.
Shots of the early Folk Scene were very interesting -- from John Jacob Niles to Odetta to Woody Guthrie to Pete Seeger, the Weavers, the Lost City Ramblers, the Clancy Brothers, and my favorite -- Huddie Ledbetter AKA "Leadbelly," who died the year I was born. (1949)
I REALLY loved the interviews with the late Dave Van Ronk and Allan Ginzberg -- 50's/60's Greenwich Village was a place and time that rivals post-WWI Paris, or any other era you may choose to name, for creative ferment.
Dave Van Ronk's tale of House of the Rising Sun was pretty funny -- He had to exclude it from his live set because Dylan "stole" his arrangement of the Public Domain song on his first album, before Van Ronk had a chance to record it. The Animals later made an electified version of Dylan's crib, and Dylan himself had to stop singing it after House of the Rising Sun became a massive international hit for them.
Part One ended with footage from the Newport Folk Festivals of 1963 and 64, about when Time Magazine started calling him "Folkdom's Crown Prince," and our whole society was mutating quickly.

Wildlife: SAY WHAT?!? A huge Pileated Woodpecker was perched on a pole next to Highway 93, the main north-south conduit thru the Flathead Valley. Yuk! There ain't no bugs in that electrical pole, birdy, and those PCBs aren't good for you either.



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

Web Page News: The new "Comments and Responses" section is up at Theatrical Daze & Nights

Weather: Warm all day, cold at night -- almost Indian Summer-like.

Charity Alert: The Hunger Site Click to help make our world a better place to live.

In The Community: The Media Department here at Flathead Valley Community College was tagged by our local newspaper to help put on the Taste of Home Cooking Show -- a huge 1000 person cooking school/demonstration at the county fairgrounds. It was a HOOT! I ran two data projectors onto two 6 foot screens, fed by a camera suspended over the cook's table, plus I was shanghaied into running the sound board. I never would have gone to an event like this on my own, but it was tremendously fun -- all the more so for the surprise of it.

Media Watch: (Excerpted from Yahoo! News) A Bollywood love story based on a rural Indian folk tale, starring top actor Shah Rukh Khan, will represent India at the Oscars next year ..."Paheli" (Riddle), in which Khan plays the role of a lover who is actually a ghost, has been selected by the Film Federation of India to represent the country at the Oscars in the foreign films category.
This is the film we saw at that Indian movie theater in the mall in Toronto!
More than a dozen films were in the race for Oscar representation, including two others starring Khan: "Veer-Zaara", a love story involving a Pakistani girl and an Indian air force pilot, and "Swadesh" (Homeland).
We also have a tape of that movie -- EXCELLENT!
Other movies that had been short-listed included popular actor Aamir Khan's "The Rising", Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan's "Black" and "Iqbal", a story of a deaf and dumb boy who goes on to become a cricketer. "Paheli" ... tells the story of a woman abandoned by her money-mad fiance on their wedding day. A ghost who has fallen in love with her takes on the husband's appearance and romances the unknowing bride, played by popular Rani Mukherjee, but the husband returns five years later ...
No Indian movie has ever won an Oscar. In 2001's "Lagaan" was among the final five nominees in the foreign films category but lost out to "No Man's Land".
Oh the things that wash back on the tide! My friends and I published two isssues of a small undergrount portfolio/comic magazine called Aardvark in 1970-71. I got a call from my friend David Faggioli, who'd put up the money back then, about a man named Dan Fogel who wanted some scans of Aardvark's covers for his Underground Comix Price Guide. I happened to have those 35 year old mags stored nearby, so I scanned them and got 'em into Fogel's hands in time. I also wrote a blurb about Aardvark's contributing artists, including myself. It will come out in two versions -- a limited edition with Dan O'Neill's Odds Bodkins on the cover, and a slightly cheaper version sporting a photo cover of adult entertainer Teri Weigel. Yep, a whole lot of underground comix were X-rated, but my wife would kick my ass if I bought the latter edition of this catalogue.


Fogel's Underground Comix Price Guide
Dan O'Neill's Odds Bodkins "covers" Ms. Weigel
Order from Dan Fogel, Hippy Comix, Inc. 4516 Gregory Way
Richmond, CA 94803-2428 hippycomix@comcast.net
$39.95 or $29.95

Even more strangely, it turned out that SOME information about Aardvark was online, and there was even a database about small press publications which needed updating. My friend Jerry Bails is approaching the end of his astoundingly productive life, but he took time to key-in our info.

Wildlife: A huge Bald Eagle is hunting over all three Foy's Lakes. The Ospreys have migrated from their nests too.



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

Weather: Autumn has officially begun. The days are warm, and the nights approach freezing -- time to pick some more tomatos!

Charity Alert: The Hunger Site Click to help people, animals, and our world.

Media Watch: A nice movie on IFC about "Punk and Attitude," at least those are the keywords of it's title. If I wasn't still sick with the flu, I might research more of the details. This film is one of the few to trace what we call "Punk Rock" to it's origins in the garage bands of the 60's, plus important archetypes like MC5, New York Dolls, and the Stooges before the scene publically emerged from the Bowery of New York and the council houses of London in the mid-70's.
It acts as an oral history, since it is mostly interviews with players and on-the-scene witnesses, with fragmented film and video clips. It kind of stops at 1980, and finishes in the early 90's with a sketch of the sad Nirvana story, but it does mention that Punk endured on the road throughout the 80's, and developed the massive audience which later bought the records of Kurt Cobain, Soundgarden etc.
There was one glaring exception among the interviewees -- Robert Smith and/or other members of the Cure weren't in the film, nor was their band mentioned, but nothing's ever perfect.
Book TV -- An ass-kissing 'appreciation' of Jesse Helms, that vile boil on the backside of racist politics this morning. You bet I turned it off -- that guy can buy all the sychophants he wants -- too bad C-SPAN's one of them. You can see Karl Rove's vile 'conservative' octopus-ink permeating every news channel -- let's hope that the public learns to hate the smell and taste of that poison.
Yesterday C-SPAN showed speeches from a book festival in Washington DC for a welcome change -- Fred Roberts showed more personality than I'd ever seen him display, speaking about tracing his family to Poland and writing a book about his experience. Robert McNeil had an interesting subject: Do You Speak American? but his speech was mostly autobiography -- interesting to some degree, but not what I hoped to hear. Oh well.