Day and night the Whitetail Deer are grazing our neighborhood as if they knew that hunting season was upon them. I haven't seen any males for quite a while, though. We have heard Coyotes lately, even during the afternoons -- our cats are coming in early, and they are NOT going out before 9 AM!

Footbarn's Celebration of Theatre: Theater X-Net

Starring: Ida Rubinstein Belle Epoch Russian/Parisian beauty.
Ida's Places in Paris, from my jet-lagged first day by the Seine.
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!
NEW! Spitfires of the Spaceways
Watch Dale Arden rescue Flash Gordon for a change!

Charity Alert: Keep that resolution as Autumn settles in! Click on The Hunger Site every day.

Media Watch: (Let's get this out of the way first.) Rob Zombie, Rock musician and director of House of 1000 Corpses was a guest host on TCM, and showed two of Russ Meyer's most famous exploitation flicks -- Faster Pusssycat, Kill Kill!, and Mudhoney. BOTH of these titles were later used for names of not-too-bad Rock bands.
The movies themselves were gritty black and white sleaze-o-ramas, starring women with huge breasts being brutalized by awful men, and striking back by doing more than their fair share of the killing in Faster Pussycat. Meyer was a first-rate cameraman who won a Bronze Star in WWII, and was commended for his combat footage of the Normandy Invasion on D-Day. He made his living shooting skin pictures, and what were called Nudie films in Postwar America. His actresses and models were most often strippers, prostitutes, and women whose jobs were various combinations of the two professions.The theme of these two movies is hatred of women, even though most of the male characters are pretty damned awful. What humor exists is crude, belittling, and the funniest scenes are only inadvertently so. Herschel Gordon's grossly violent stuff may have been in worse taste, Roger Corman's big money-makers might have had less craftsmanship, Hal Wallis' Annette, Frankie, and Elvis movies may have sported equally inept acting and scripts, but Meyer was still a pimp -- selling "forbidden fruit" at cheap prices.
Empowerment my ass, Camilla Paglia. From Kitten Natividad on back to the high school dropouts flashing for cash in the 50's, those women deserved better than what men like Meyer provided in return for their sensuality -- degradation, guilt, and very little money.

In The Community: Members Only Autumn Salon at the Hockaday Museum of Art was a big success. Over 180 people visited us and cast ballots for their favorites. We sold a number of pieces right away, but the buyers will have to wait until Christmas to take them home. My Footsbarn-inspired digital watercolor was VERY well received, but nobody's going to know who won prizes until after the night of the Kalispell Art Walk on December 1.
Speaking of Footsbarn, that's what I did at FVCC at the Intercultural Brown-bag Lecture on Monday, October 23 -- spoke about Footsbarn, that is. Their amazing story, and my admiration and enthusiasm for their art and work overcame the anxiousness I felt when attempting to present 35 years of theater history in less than 50 minutes. I have committed myself to another illustrated lecture next Wednesday for the college's Theater 101 class -- I ought to be committed, for sure. 2000 pictures are a lot of images to sift through, and selecting the best of them is a challenge!



Me again -- at the Hockaday Museum of Art, holding Masques On Parade, before we hung it on the wall.
View Masques Here!