Wildlife: A new visitor -- a larger-than-ordinary Bald Eagle caught a fish about 9:30 this morning out of the lake.

NEW Web Site: Theater X-Net

Featuring: Ida Rubinstein Belle Epoch Russian/Parisian beauty.

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

Weather: There was a lot of cold mist and fog banks underneath a blue sky while the temperature stayed around 15 degrees (F) during the day and even the night.

Charity Alert: Click on The Hunger Site to feel warmer.

In The Community: The Hockaday Museum is going to do some student outreach days this winter -- especially reaching out to Flathead Valley Community College students. There is a Flathead Valley Educators exhibit starting next month, so we'll build on that.
Speaking of which, it's ironically funny hearing lame excuses about deadlines from adult teachers who have to hear those same lame excuses from adolescent students.
That Christmas party for the college employees was videotaped (not by me). I will be burning over a dozen DVDs of it before I'm done. We are even streaming the dam' silly thing over our (secure) network. While there are warm feelings going on, we're going to recruit for NEXT year's party.

Media Watch: Ice skating on TV -- ice skating on the lake too, but not as masterful.
We watched The Giant Gila Monster, and Bela Lugosi Meets A Brooklyn Gorilla last night. If you like 50's cars, the former is right up your alley, uh -- drag-strip. The latter is a shameful waste of film promoting an inept pair of Martin & Lewis imitators.

Movie Review, with Cool Car Pics!
This photo belongs to the aforementioned site,
and is used simply to motivate the viewer to visit there.

(Cross-posted on DailyKos.com) I shouldn't have let the following get me down so badly, but it did -- the local newspaper published a letter to the editor today, purportedly written by an eleven year old. The kid was whining about Christmas being threatened, and pleading to not have his or her Christmas taken away. There's no way of knowing if it was from a real child with those concerns, but I am absolutely certain the letter resulted from the phony "War on Christmas" hysteria promulgated by the American Taliban -- the only campaign about our traditional Holiday Season that even exists is by them. There is no other.
(I do not choose to say the names of Fox's biggest blowhard, or the (Im)Moral Majority's former spokesmouth.)
What saddens me is "Happy Holidays," or Merry Christmas" are now given and taken as offensive statements for the first time in my life. There is a lesson here in the power of propaganda, but it is ugly. This unnecessary rage and unprovoked defensiveness during a time of year when people want to be happy is part of a deliberate public campaign. I can't understand why someone would want to inflict these bad feeling on their neighbors, but they have.
It is as if they've chosen to pour kerosene in the public water supply, so that everybody has to share a vile taste in their mouths and suffer digestive problems -- for no other reason than they wanted to exercise their power to make them feel that way. The answer would be to take that kind of power from such mean-spirited vandals with legal action.
As far as public media goes, such stomach-turning manipulators should lose their credibility immediately, but the public happens to believe in free speech first, and are slow to take sanctions against the worst abusers of this privilege. I would prefer to hear them laughed off of TV and radio, but nobody's laughing.
I now propose everyone say "Happy Holidays," "Merry Christmas," Happy New Year," and every good thing we can think of to every stranger and acquaintance we meet -- I hope every single holiday YOU have will be happy!

Wildlife: How did those three deer get into my boss' garden? Either an open gate, broken fence, or they leapt over six-plus feet of wire -- none of which are good news.

NEW Web Site: Theater X-Net

Featuring: Ida Rubinstein Belle Epoch Russian/Parisian beauty.

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

Weather: Temperatures in the teens and twenties today. The overcast sky is a little depressing, but the newly-gravelled roads are a somewhat safer.

Charity Alert: Take a longer walk after clicking on The Hunger Site today!

Media Watch: Lotsa John Lennon on radio and TV yesterday, but I said my piece about him already. Fox Movie Channel surprised me by showing Porky's in primetime last night. In fact, I saw Kim Cattrall in her famous early movie role as the clownish "Lassie" while I was clicking through. I can put up with vulgarity if it is part of a funny script or scene, but vulgarity isn't necessarily funny on it's own, as this movie painfully demonstrates. Revenge of the Nerds followed, and the same observation applies to it.
It is funny that one arm of the Fox media octopus shills for the humorless American Taliban while another arm pimps these Jr. High School smirk-fests.
Ironically, there were two John Waters movies on another network -- Cecil B. Demented and the brilliant Polyester. Vulgarity is only ONE of Waters' many tools in filmmaking -- he mostly trades in wit and satire.
Strangely enough, Beavis and Butthead was recycling on MTV2 -- new videos interspersed with decade-old cartoon clips. I hope Thursday isn't supposed to be "Vulgar Night" on satellite TV.


Kim Catrall in City Limits (1985), as mocked on Mystery Science Theater 3000 in Season 4 (1992-93). Joel (silhouette center) is preserving what little there is of Ms. Cattrell's modesty with a convenient umbrella. Crow T. Robot (R) and Tom Servo (L) help with the wisecracks. Kim Cattrall actually visited their studios near Minneapolis to congratulate them on the witty way they took that movie down, and how Crow T. Robot "fell in love with her" in the framing sequence. The MST 3K crew rarely had to face the objects of their derision, and I bet it made them squirm a little when she was so nice to them. (They tell this story in their book.)

Wildlife: The two large Bald Eagles were cavorting around the small ice-free spot on Middle Foy's Lake after sunset in the deep blue fading light.

NEW Web Site: Theater X-Net

Featuring: Ida Rubinstein Belle Epoch Russian/Parisian beauty.

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

Weather: The arctic blast is ending here in Northwestern Montana. It flirted with 0 degrees (F) today, but never got quite that low. It looks like we'll have temperatures in the teens and twenties for awhile.

Charity Alert: Take a short walk after clicking on The Hunger Site!

Media Watch: John Lennon was remembered on TV and Radio today. You could tell the ones who really cared about Lennon by whether they mentioned the name of his murderer -- the guy who tried to steal fame twenty-five years ago by killing a man who had earned it. You'll never hear or read his name from me.
MY favorite John Lennon record, outside of the Beatles, was a very abstract Phil Spector production with this chorus:
Power to the people!
Power to the people!
Power to the people!
Power to the people ... Right On!
My favorite Beatles records are Dizzy Miss Lizzy, Slow Down, and Bad Boy by Larry Williams, a now-obscure New Orleans singer and songwriter, who hit it big just once with Boney Maroney. They are all sung by John Lennon.
I am also very fond of Lennon's plaintive Ticket to Ride among his many fine Beatles originals.
Let's talk about people who still live exciting lives:
YES -- Yoko Ono: A website by the Japan Society, outlining her very original artistic career. I highly recommend her book Grapefruit, first published in 1964. Here's a few excerpts:

PAINTING TO HAMMER A NAIL
Hammer a nail in the center of a piece of glass.
Send each fragment to an arbitrary address.
1962 Spring

PAINTING TO EXIST ONLY WHEN IT'S COPIED OR PHOTOGRAPHED
Let People copy or photograph your Paintings.
Destroy the originals.
1964 Spring

CLOUD PIECE
Imagine the clouds dripping.
Dig a hole in your garden to put them in.
1963 Spring

TRAVEL PIECE
Make a key.
Find a lock that fits.
If you find it, burn the house that is attached to it.
1963 Spring

ANIMAL PIECE
Take one mannerism from one kind of animal and make it yours for a week.
Take another mannerism from another kind of animal and make it yours without dropping the previously acquired mannerism.
Go on increasing mannerisms by taking them from different kinds of animals.
1963 Summer

I don't think we need a picture today -- Thanks Yoko!

Wildlife: A huge Rough Legged Hawk was precariously perched on the top if a skinny spruce tree on Lakeshore Drive yesterday.

NEW Web Site: Theater X-Net

Featuring: Ida Rubinstein Belle Epoch Russian/Parisian beauty.

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

Weather: Arctic blast -- it is 1 degree (F) right now, but the sky is steel gray. I wonder if it will snow? (Update: 11:30 AM -- it's snowing.)

Charity Alert: Outside it's FREEZING, inside you can click on: The Hunger Site.

Media Watch: It's December 7th today. There are articles throughout the Media about the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor and it's aftermath. Tora, Tora, Tora was on TCM the other night -- it isn't the greatest movie ever made, but it's good -- especially for a war film, in that it's mostly about people who are part of extraordinary events as actors and reactors.
I was born eight years afterward, and grew up with WWII defining my times for good and bad -- it was the nuclear trigger for the "Baby Boom" for one thing. (I think my parents likely would have met anyway, since they both lived in Salt Lake City.)
That damn war was probably inevitable, given the circumstances after WWI, but I think that a worldwide determination NOT to succumb to "The Inevitable" gained some strength and power after 1945, despite some serious setbacks. We may yet see our way through these terribly irrational times of today without "The Worst" happening to us all.


About 25 years ago I saw an art show by a woman whose family was driven from their home on the West Coast and imprisoned in a Utah concentration camp during WWII because they were of Japanese descent. I don't remember her name, but one of her images quoted an Utamaro print with the All-American silhoutte of Superman perceptible through the canvas of a wall tent -- as a prison guard rather than a protector. The camps were mostly populated by women, children, and the elderly, because Japanese-American men of draftable age were sent off to fight the Nazis in Europe.
This unknown Utamaro (above) with Siegal & Shuster's Superman defacing the corner cartouche envokes her memory.

Wildlife: The eagles caught a fish -- swooped on in and hauled it out of the aereation pond yesterday.

NEW Web Site: Theater X-Net

Featuring: Ida Rubinstein Belle Epoch Russian/Parisian beauty.

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

Weather: Arctic blast -- it was 0 degrees (F) this morning, and the sunshine is bright, but COLD.

Charity Alert: Stay inside some more and let The Hunger Site do your charitable work out there.

Media Watch: I've been researching old television shows for a Web project about the 50's -- seen from a kid's-eye view. It's remarkable how advertising drove the popular media, and still does. What's more remarkable is how the extreme numbers of people who made up the TV audience turned a low-grade derivative medium into America's "King of Culture." Today's Pop Culture phenomenon began with Radio's success a generation before, which owed a lot to live "vaudville" theater and it's international inventory of experienced entertainers who sharpened their skills in front of thousands of paying customers a month. That's just the SHORT version of the story -- any big river has many feeding streams, and I didn't mention movies or literature -- yet.


George Reeves as Superman,
changing to Clark Kent and back.
Superman was: Inspired by Philip Wylie's pulp Science Fiction novel Gladiator in 1930; Created by teenagers Jerry Siegal and Joe Shuster in Ohio; Sold to National Periodical Publications in New York who had been re-packaging newspaper comics, but needed original material for their new "comic books." His success in 1938 was the backbone of this upstart medium; He was re-interpreted on radio, in the newspapers, and in a series of animated cartoons by Fleischer Studios; Cowboy actor Kirk Allyn played him in a black and white chapter-serial, with stunts by Fleischer-style cartoons; National's editor Whitney Ellsworth moved to Los Angeles, overseeing a full-length movie, plus the enduring TV series -- both starring George Reeves who died as the 50's ended.

Wildlife: Raccoons on the back deck again -- clearing the snow off the box feeder for me, to an accompanying cat-chorus from behind the sliding glass door.

NEW Web Site: Theater X-Net

Featuring: Ida Rubinstein Belle Epoch Russian/Parisian beauty.

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

Weather: Full-blown blizzard Monday morning. Gotta transfer that follow-spot in this muck.

Charity Alert: Stay inside and let The Hunger Site do all your charitable work for you today.

Media Watch: NFL Football -- Every game I watched was like a college match, with one team dominating the other. There were moments when the losing team got close, but too few to be much fun. I like Tony Dungey, coach of the Indianapolis Colts, and I'm glad he's won 12 games in a row this season. Pre-game madness concentrated on playoff possibilities, which was interesting, since some teams with winning records may not make it. MAD-TV's Frank impersonated Andy Rooney, and drew some laughs. CBS started out with German supermodel Gisele Bundchen introducing the NFL Today show, interspersed with lots of tittilating lingerie runway shots from the Victoria's Secrets TV special. Their competition at Fox, Jillian Barbarie, was minorly funny, but she was dressed prettily for the occasion in a light skirt and a heavily brocaded bustier which showed almost all of her anatomy from the ribcage on up.
Guess what? PBS is showing the Cream reunion concert on Great Performances -- the order of songs is different from the DVD, and the mix seems more centered on the drums, which I always liked the best anyway.
Ellen DeGeneres did her much-ballyhooed show from New York at Lincoln Center -- overlooking Columbus Circle through a huge curving window. Except that it was in NYC, there wasn't all that much to ballyhoo about -- lots of taped Ellen-in-the-street stuff, but her guests got hardly any camera time. Bon Jovi did a fair musical spot, and Kim Cattrall wore an outfit that displayed her breasts, but made the rest of her body look dumpy because of bad cutting and too many folds in the wrong places. She's a very good comic actor, but you wouldn't have known it from her appearence on the show. She made a splash with the cover of her new book, so I'll splash it here as well:

Wikipedia's take on Kim Cattrell
Buy her book, if she's going to go this far to entertain us for free!

Wildlife: THREE Bald eagles staking out the aereation pond on Middle Foy's Lake -- a small white-headed Bald Eagle sometimes sits there too.

NEW Web Site: Theater X-Net

Featuring: Ida Rubinstein Belle Epoch Russian/Parisian beauty.

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

Weather: Intermittent skiffs of snowfall and low temperatures the last few days. It got down to 5 degrees (F) on Sunday morning.

Charity Alert: Stay inside and click on The Hunger Site -- warm up your feet AND your heart!

In The Community: Just about 600 people visited the Hockaday Museum during Friday night's Art Walk! It was a beautiful, but chilly night -- it was sublimating snow one second to the next. That's a chemical term for jumping from one state (humid) to another (snow) without going through the intermediate step (rain). A nearby framing shop was giving away shots of whiskey to Art-walkers in order to ward off the chill -- it was pretty easy to uh -- see, who visited there! Hockaday Museum of Art
I missed the annual Christmas party for Flathead Valley Community College employees, but I delivered and picked up a follow-spot used for the "entertainment." Everyone seemed to have had a real good time.

Media Watch: Some of my adolescent vices are gaining respectability -- Severely condensed from Carly Berwick's article "Why Have There Been No Great Women Comic-Book Artists?" in Arts and Letters Daily.
(Note: The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MOCCA) in New York will mount an all-female exhibition called "She Draws Comics" from May through September 2006):
In case anyone still doubted it, comics are now officially an art form, with the opening this month of Masters of American Comics in Los Angeles. The first exhibition in an American art museum to set forth a canon of graphic masters, it is on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art and the University of California's Hammer Museum from the 20th of November 2005 to March 12, 2006. The 15 masters, selected by independent curators John Carlin and Brian Walker with input from Art Spiegelman, include: (click each link for examples)
Lyonel Feininger (The Kin-der-Kids)
George Herriman (Krazy Kat)
Winsor McCay (Little Nemo)
Milton Caniff (Terry and the Pirates, Steve Canyon)
Charles Schulz (Peanuts)
Jack Kirby (Fantastic Four, X-Men)
Harvey Kurtzman (MAD, Little Annie Fannie)
Robert Crumb (ZAP, Weirdo, etc.)
Art Spiegelman (Maus)
Chris Ware (Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth)
Gary Panter (Jimbo)

MY take on the matter -- Feininger became a successful and popular "Modern" studio artist, but he only had tangental influence on Comics as an artistic field. Kin-der-Kids was ambitious, but it was also a commercial flop, and not that many people saw it.
Winsor McCay succeeded commercially where Feininger failed, and created some of Comics' finest works before WWI.
George Herriman's bold and beautiful drawings may be an acquired taste, but once you acquire that taste there is a whole world of intoxicating pleasure in front of you, and an emotional resonance that is rare in any art. Milton Caniff created adventurous "movies on paper" in a dramatic chiaroscuro style that partook of both photography and cartooning. Charles Schulz entertained the world with a poignancy that was never mawkish or sentimental.
Kurtzman created MAD, but he moved on, partly but not completely of his own will. His creation thrived in the hands of Al Feldstein, Bill Gaines, Mort Drucker, Don Martin, Dave Berg, Al Jaffee, and the "Usual Gang of Idiots" who followed his tenure. Good as they were, they never surpassed Kutzman's collaborations with Wallace Wood, Joe Orlando, Bill Elder, or Jack Davis. I must say that Kurtzman and Elder, his long-time partner, never matched their best works in MAD again either. Congratulations to the brilliant editorship of Hugh Hefner for keeping this team in print over the subsequent decades.
I was lucky enough to meet Jack Kirby (Jakob Kurzenberg) and his wife Roz. They treated me warmly at their home whenever I visited Los Angeles. Jack was one of the major artistic forces in Comic Books from the early 1940's to the late 1970's. He and his partner Joe Simon helped write the rulebook for making this art form succeed financially. After that partnership broke up, he made a new alliance with the Marvel Comics Group, took on the well-established Superman/Batman team, and beat them at their own game with characters like The Incredible Hulk, The Fantastic Four, The X-Men, and The Avengers, in whose pages he revived his old creation Captain America, Living Legend of WWII. He designed the whole look and style of Marvel Comics -- which enfolded other characters like Spider Man and Daredevil. He signed on with the DC (Superman) company again for several series of New Gods comics in the early 70's -- they were critical successes, and their characters still have occasional revivals. Marvel brought him back again in the late 70's, but he wasn't able to save them from another of their occasional bankruptcies by himself -- even though his Eternals series was first-rate. He fell out of favor with the fans during the 80's, but enjoyed a final burst of well-deserved fame and success with Topps Comics, a Marvel co-production, before his passing in 1993.


My friend Jack Kirby gave me a signed copy of this portfolio when my theater group and I were slaving on the road in early 1975.
His son Neal was the publisher, and I traded Jack some of my Mime Troupe posters in return.

Robert Crumb embodies the word prolific -- even if you may not like what he does, or his attitudes, he has a work ethic and drive to create, which puts him in the foremost rank of Comic artists. ( Comix in his case.) I've met him, but it wasn't in any context where I could make friends. I would say he is a mirror of our society without hesitation -- so he's weird -- so's our society.
Art Spiegelman's biographical stories of WWII's Holocaust (Shoah) wouldn't have happened without Harvey Kurtzman, Robert Crumb, and Will Eisner (see below) leading the way. Spiegelman's acumen in publishing RAW Comics has also been a beacon to those of us who love progressive storytelling in pictures. Gary Panter (pronounced "Painter") not only was a stalwart for RAW Comics, but helped design the fabulous "Pee Wee's Playhouse" TV show. I am not familiar with Chris Ware's work, but I will rectify that situation.

E.C. Segar, Frank King, and Chester Gould weren't mentioned in the article, but I'm glad the creators of Popeye, Gasoline Alley, and Dick Tracy were included in the two museums' exhibits. There are still some serious omissions in this list, not to mention the foolishness of trying to establish a canon anyway. I suspect Ms. Berwick is being ironic in her use of the term, although these museums seem to be laughably straight-faced about it all. Masters of American Comics
Alex Raymond belongs on ANY major list for his gorgeous work in creating Flash Gordon, Jungle Jim, Agent X-9, and Rip Kirby. Harold Foster's Sunday pages of Tarzan and Prince Valiant defined excellence for the Comics genre. Burne Hogarth's own exuberant Tarzan was a triumph of inkwork and design. Will Eisner demonstrated that Caniff could be outdone for "movies on paper" in Comic Books. As far as deep humor and thought go in newspaper comics, Walt Kelly's Pogo was a masterpiece. Eisner's disciple, Jules Fieffer is still able to match wits with any age's version of Jonathan Swift.
Other great practitioners besides the aforementioned include: Harold Gray (Li'l Orphan Annie), Reed Crandall, Al Capp (Li'l Abner), his ex-assistant Frank Frazetta, Steve Ditko (Spider Man, Dr. Strange), Frank Miller, Neal Adams, Gus Arriola (Gordo), C.C. Beck (Captain Marvel), Mac Raboy (Capt. Marvel Jr. and Flash Gordon), Joe Kubert, George Carlson, Russ Manning (another quality Tarzan interpreter), John Severin, Rich Corben, Moebius, Alejandro Jodorosky (uh, oh -- some of 'em aren't Americans) ... I could go on, but we haven't even got to Japanese Manga yet, and it's time to STOP!