Happy New Year! The mixed fog, snow, and rain continues for the third day. We cancelled our reservations for dinner because we'd prefer to stay OFF icy roads after sunset. I shot some after-dark photos of the Hockaday last night, while the Christmas lights are still up, and it was almost too slippery to walk around here, much less drive.
We have been visited by Coyotes, Raccoons, and Deer, plus Pheasants, Bald Eagles, Magpies, Blue Jays, Flickers, and Hairy Woodpeckers. Small birds have included Finches, Chickadees, and beautiful charcoal-colored Juncos.

Updates are coming: 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!

Charity Alert: Resolve to click on The Hunger Siteevery day you go online this year!

In The Community: It was my turn to walk through the Hockaday today, even though we are closed until Tuesday. I changed a couple of floodlights, but everything else was fine. (I noticed that the director had been painting during the break.) Hockaday Museum of Art

Media Watch: All sorts of stuff -- I lost last night's post to a computer lock-up, so I'm going to wait before I review it all. I watched C-Span today in between NFL Football games, and enjoyed David Denby's conversation with Brian Lamb about his memoir Great Books.

Ladies of Flash Gordon and the influence of Edgar Rice Burroughs! See the newly-added pictures in my previous posts!

Updates are coming: 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!

Wildlife and Weather: A wonderful, but wet, snowfall continues from yesterday. A Great Blue Heron just spent a half-hour on Middle Foy's Lake.

Charity Alert: The Hunger Site can use your clicks.

Media Watch: The History Channel was running a show about the culture and history of vaguely-known Gauls, calling them Celts. Well the ancient Greeks and Romans may have named certain groups of barbarian invaders Gauls, but that doesn't mean they were Celts. The scholars point to a very wide range of diversity amongst the sub-cultures found in the scant and scattered archeological records of my ancestors, and I don't think we have any reason to be sure about what we know and don't know about them as a group. They didn't use writing themselves, and what was written about them was by the hands of their enemies. Their mysteries remain unsolved in the tantalizing mists of time.


From those same folks who brought you Beowulf!
Late Pagan Anglo-Saxon Art -- East Anglia circa 625 A.D.
The same filmmakers also tackled the subject of England in the Dark Ages -- an ugly violent period of tribal migrations, piracy on land and sea, illiteracy, periodic famine and ruin, which came to an end in Britain with the arbitrary milestone of the Norman Invasion and the ascendency of the somewhat-literate trans-European cultural milieu we now call the Middle Ages. There were more of the same afflictions, but fewer migrations. The Black Death, Mongol Invasions, and Ottoman Empire didn't destroy what existed of European civilization, thanks to dumb luck and Providence.
The filmmakers were able to cram what few facts are known about the British Isles between 409 A.D. and 1066 A.D. in an hour-long show. For most of Europe it would have been a tougher task -- the outlying Irish monastaries provided a frail structure for literacy to endure in the North, and the written history of Britain has fewer gaps as a result. (Gaps I said? They are actually CHASMS of ignorance. We still do a lot of guessing.)


A face from the Dark Ages -- 7th Century bronze helmet
from the Sutton Hoo ship burial site in East Anglia (England)
One of Charlemange's few lasting accomplishments was a firm establishment of written language on the continent after 800 A.D. -- good for our civilization, because the entire British Isles were suffering Viking attacks for another two centuries or more. (Those ancestors of mine -- always fighting amongst themselves.)

Wildlife: A big male Whitetail Deer crested the hill over Foy's Lake Road yesterday. He bounded down the slope and took two fences in two leaps at the bottom. We slowed our car down to watch him cross the road in front of us.

Watch for Updates: 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: Dark all day, but still above freezing. A beautiful snowfall began at twilight.

Media Watch: We saw the DVD version of Bride and Prejudice with Ashwarya Rai the other night. One of the movie companies involved with the production is Pathe -- that name has been around for almost 100 years. The director Gurinder Chadha really dropped the ball right at the beginning with her characterization of the leading man. He possessed more negatives than the viewer could reasonably forgive later in the movie when she tried to turn him into a worthy match for Ms. Rai's character. The English lyrics mixed with Bollywood-style songs were kind of lame too. We are still hoping for a popular breakthrough for this genre. B&P was far from being a bad movie, but it wasn't strong enough to break any barriers.
Those Flash Gordon serials make great time-fillers during laid-back Holiday afternoons. I noticed many influences from Edgar Rice Burroughs -- especially from the Mars stories, which made sense in the 1930's, when Tarzan was a huge hit in the movies too.
Flash was an intentional competitor of Buck Rogers -- a Space Opera from the pages of Amazing Stories featuring a 20th Century aviator (resembling popular hero Charles Lindbergh) who awakens from suspended animation 500 years in the future. Buck rockets about a space-faring society resembling Zane Grey's Wild West and Raphael Sabatini's Spanish Main.
Flash is more of a heroic explorer. He just falls into his original mission to save the Earth (or rather accidentally parachutes onto Dr. Zarkov's estate) with Dale Arden clinging to his shoulders. After they blast off to Planet Mongo, the Earth people cope with one emergency after another, much like Edgar Rice Burroughs' characters do as they discover new worlds, lands, and peoples. There are old labyrinthine palaces, wastelands inhabited by monsters, primitive tribesmen, kings, emperors, princesses, mad scientists, and secret caves and tunnels connecting all of them. Powerful, mysterious rays do fantastic things!


Chessmen of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
J. Allen St. John's cover for the hardback book 1922 (Left)
Argosy cover by P.J. Monahan 1922 (Right)
St. John's eclectic mixture of the extraterrestrial and ancient in Burroughs' version of Mars inspired Flash Gordon comics and movies.
Burroughs was a leader in popular fiction, and he was followed by many disciples. Harold Foster (Tarzan) and Alex Raymond (Flash Gordon) were two of the best, drawing vivid newspaper comics from his inspiration. The movies made from these characters were only shadows of his creations, but they resonated with the public over many generations.
In 1940 Flash Gordon was about to be brought down to Earth, by command of King Features Syndicate. Raymond was turning more and more work over to his assistant Austin Briggs. Flash's last movie serial looked backward rather than forward -- those tailored Robin Hood/Prisoner of Zenda costumes told of subdued aesthetics compared to the barbaric armor plate of earlier series. Those same Tesla Coils and Van der Graff Generators in the labs told of a stasis of imagination, reinforced by the ten year old Rocket Ships.
Actual reality was pretty scary that year -- World War II darkened China and Europe, and modern technology was killing people by the thousands. Emotionally wounded Charles Lindbergh was making Isolationist speeches. 'The Future' was not the same pleasant fantasy it had been a decade earlier. Juvenile chapter serials wouldn't disappear for a decade more, but they had passed their creative peak.


Frank Frazetta paints Flash Gordon's archetype cavorting in Edgar Rice Burroughs' Lost Continent (Beyond Forty), with an ingenue from Savage Pellucidar and some lions from Tarzan's Africa circa 1964.

Merry Christmas! An incident in our neighborhood was mentioned in the Law Enforcement section of the local paper today -- Last Friday, while I was shopping, my wife saw a pair of Labrador Retrievers trapped in the near-freezing waters of the aereation pond on Middle Foy's Lake -- the rain-slick ice made it impossible for them to escape. She quickly called the right people and both animals were saved. She was also still shaken by the near-tragedy when I got home.

Updates are coming: 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: Low 30's (F) and gray skies again -- banks of icy fog rolling through. I see stars as I write, but I hope that doesn't mean a deep freeze.

Charity Alert: Make your holidays merrier by clicking on The Hunger Site.

Wildlife: More gross stuff, plus a possible answer to an earlier question. We heard Coyotes howling right after I wrote yesterday's blogpost. I grabbed a flashlight and looked out the back, but my neighbor had beaten me to the punch, waving a big powerful floodlight back and forth over the lake -- I saw no Coyotes, but I saw some inert lumpy things near the same neighbor's ice-fishing spot. I thought nothing of it until this morning, when those lumps turned out to be another deer carcass. Yuck! It's possible that the Coyotes are responsible for last week's body too. We wondered why the Bald Eagle couple by the pond didn't feed on these things like the Magpies did. Was it because the carrion was too close to people's houses?

Media Watch: Whatever else, the day started on a sublime note -- literally!
Montana Public Radio played a complete performance of Vivaldi's Gloria, sung by an all-woman Norweigian choir. (It was originally written for a convent in Venice.) I just stayed in bed until the beautiful singing was over.
There was only one NFL Football game on TV today -- Chicago isn't perfect, but it has a better team than Green Bay this year, and the Bears beat the Packers in Wisconsin during their approximately 150th matchup. (No pregame show, I was busy cooking.)
In the kitchen, I watched part of the third Flash Gordon serial (1940). Errol Flynn's Robin Hood and Sigmund Romburg's Student Prince inspired the costumes -- both in the movie and in Alex Raymond's original strips of the time. The good guys started out smart, fast, and effective, but something happened halfway through and they began bumbling around, getting captured, and otherwise padding the plot. (Uh oh, is THAT it?)
There was a nasty spy named Lady Sonja, but the women's characters were generally passive to a fault. Prince Barin and Princess Aura were portrayed by other actors -- the Prince was much slimmer and quicker, but this version of the Princess had no charisma whatsoever.
You are STILL missed, Priscilla Lawson -- Princess Diana (Wonder Woman's given name), Princess Leia, and Xena, Warrior Princess, all benefitted from your leadership as Princess Aura!


Carol Hughes as Dale Arden (Left) strikes at evil Lady Sonja (Right)
played by Anne Gwynne. Later Dale gets the best of Sonja, but a gas
bomb knocks her out cold the next second, and she's captured again.
Inset above is Shirley Deane as Princess Aura (in name only).
Inset below is Queen Frija of Frigia played by an as-yet-unknown actress.