The Plovers, or Killdeer, are ready to hatch their baby birds -- they'll run around in little clusters any day now. I saw a Whitetail Deer by the Stillwater River, drinking from a tributary midday on Friday morning. Occasional rain and thunderstorms -- the weather "broke" after almost a week of atypical heat.

DANCE at the Hole In The Wall: Theater X-Net

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

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Sitemaster Sez: Slowing down as the 4th of July weekend progresses, but I had a reader from Oregon stick around for awhile yesterday.

Media Watch: Cable/Satellite TV forgets nothing -- The Monkees movie Head (1968), co-written and co-produced by Jack Nicholson. He did a few cameos, and we're pretty sure we spotted Dennis Hopper too. Ex-theatrical actor Davy Jones did a rather tedious soft-shoe with A-List choreographer Toni Basil -- their main gimmick was cross-cutting the film between Jones in a White & Black suit, and a Black & White suit. If that sounds lame, it's because it was.
Frank Zappa spoke to Jones on-camera after the number -- "Pretty white! ..." he said, in part. (Digression: Frank Zappa was also on the Monkees TV show once -- pretending he was Mike Nesmith while Nesmith pretended to be Zappa. It was definitely an off-beat segment. I suspect that the late Mr. Zappa liked bubble-gum Pop more than he ever admitted.)
Actor Mickey Dolenz was almost funny -- just like he was on the TV show. If his material was good, he made me laugh back then, but he couldn't keep grimacing his way through one dreary pastiche of Hard Day's Night after another without boring me to tears. His singing voice was only good for a limited amount of time too -- Carol King's Porpoise Song, from this movie, dived to the bottom and stayed there. Dolenz was very lucky to record I'm A Believer when his show was fresh -- good song! (Composer Neil Diamond's version is better -- Dolenz borrowed his growls, slurs, and other vocal mannerisms from the original record -- in the late fall of 1966 my sister reminded me that Diamond sang it himself on American Bandstand during the summer, before the general public ever heard about the Monkees.)
Where were we? I think I just digressed again, but Head was just one digression after another anyhow -- OK, Dolenz tried to make a Coke machine in the sand dunes seem funny, but it was just as lame as Jones' dancing -- sorry, Mr. Nicholson.
Musician Peter Tork was naturally funny, but he was always odd-man-out somehow, and became further and further isolated as the act, and this movie, dragged on. He was the first to leave the group, around the time of Daydream Believer -- Davy Jones' best recording.
Musician Michael Nesmith kept landing on his feet -- one or two of his own songs showed up on their multi-platinum albums. He knew how to say his lines funny, even if they weren't written all that well. When the Monkees phenomenon was at it's end, he had hits of his own as a writer and a singer. He even had a good moment in Head -- leading the band, singing and playing a fairly good tune at the beginning of the picture.


The sixties weren't necessarily about drugged-out ineptitude and vulgarity -- this is a section of a contemporary reality-as-abstract image from the British Pirelli Calendar in 1968. See the original here: ©Pirelli UK Tyres Ltd/Harri Peccinotti