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

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 in Summertime too! Click on The Hunger Site every day.

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

A hot wind started blowing from the south yesterday and pegged the thermometers around Flathead Valley. We are seeing fledgling Blackbirds now -- indistinct colors, traces of down, and short tailfeathers. Our cats are making bird noises when they see them, hoping to fool the babies no doubt.

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

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 this Summer! Click on The Hunger Site every day.

Sitemeter Sez: Belgrade, Serbia was reading about Ida Rubinstein again; Boston, Massachusetts and Varberg, Sweden were blogging through.

In The Community: We got our show of Blackfeet artists King Kuka (deceased) and Gary Schildt (alive) set up last night. Wall text, and touching-up are next -- Hockaday Museum of Art.
From our Web site:
New Acquisitions - Works of Blackfeet Artists King Kuka and Gary Schildt (July 6 through September 2)This exhibition will display recent donations to the museum’s permanent collection of eight bronzes by Gary Schildt from his “Huck Finn” series and sixteen paintings by King Kuka (1946-2004).
Gary Schildt, who was born in 1938 on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, received his art training at the San Francisco Academy of Fine Art and the City College in San Francisco, California ...and is well known for his oil paintings and bronze sculptures of contemporary Blackfeet Indian life.
Kuka, whose Indian name was Black Wolf, attended public school in Valier and then enrolled in the Institute of American Indian Arts, in Santa Fe, NM. He later completed a military service with the US Army and then enrolled in art education courses at the University of Montana. ...His work conveys a powerful source of spiritualism. ...Today, thanks to a special gift of Nancy and John Hubble, Kuka’s paintings will endure time and be preserved in the Hockaday Museum’s permanent collection.

Media Watch; OK, I admit it -- I'm still watching So You Think You Can Dance. They have nearly as much time devoted to commercials as to the show. It makes it easy to do evening chores, however.
Man, the news just gives me the blues sometimes -- I wish that lousy Fascist Koizumi wouldn't have been on my TV this morning, much less Worst-President-Ever Bush, not to mention a necessary discussion of the futile and hideous practice of torture by my own country on National Public Radio as I drove to work. The announcer repeated a cruel right-wing talking point about torture gaining useful information 1% of the time -- you can do better than that with a %$#@! crystal ball without defiling humanity.


Logan Pass, Glacier National Park; Saturday Afternoon June 24, 2006 -- from the East Side. The Going-To-The-Sun Road had opened just 24 hours earlier, and the vehicular traffic was slow. It took quite awhile before we got to the bottom on the West Side.

So far it's cooler than yesterday. There's a few clouds, and a lot of air pollution from this week-long high pressure. The Red Wing Blackbirds made a huge fuss in the reeds by the lake last night. We wondered what was going on for awhile, and then a skunk meandered out of the undergrowth to scarf up some seeds under the big birdfeeder in the Chokecherry tree.

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

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 this Summer! Click on The Hunger Site every day.

Sitemeter Sez: Komae, Tokyo (Japan); Missoula, Montana; Advance, North Carolina; Rockledge, Florida; Hialeah, Florida; Herstal, Liege (Belgium); Gilbert, Arizona; and Winnipeg, Manitoba. About half of them stayed around long enough to READ more than one thing.

Media Watch: Queer Eye For The Straight Guy had another gay client. It wasn't the best show I've ever seen, but there was one FUNNY sequence -- the client made an unholy mess in his new kitchen cooking up a tomato tort -- when it came time to serve it he just put the whole thing down in front of his (straight) roommates and his (very ill-at-ease) date and said "dig in" -- no plates, no napkins, no cutlery, no class. They gouged it with shared spoons etc. while the Fab Five mocked them from their remote apartment "I'll just eat off the floor!" -- the Queer Eye crew were hilarious. (This particular client wasn't a very apt pupil.)


Two young male Mule Deers on the Trail of the Cedars, Glacier National Park -- Saturday June 24, 2006. The snow has just finished melting at these elevations, and it's taken awhile for the vegetation to come up this year.

It is still hot (for this place). I spent yesterday washing my windows. We saw a pair of Bald Eagles at Middle Foy's Lake -- they soared around on the western side, and settled in a tall pine tree.

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

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 this Summer! Click on The Hunger Site every day.

Sitemeter Sez: El Centro, California; Calgary, Alberta; Serbia and Montenegro (researching Ida Rubinstein); Durham, North Carolina; and Salt Lake City, Utah -- they had been visiting http://theatrex.net too!

In The Community: ITV -- Distance education between Eureka, Libby, and Kalispell, Montana. We started at 7 AM yesterday (groan), but saved our students many hours of commuting time by teleconferencing.

Media Watch: Might as well hypnotize myself to sleep by reading Robert E. Howard before bed -- Conan the Swordsman, and Conan the Usurper. The former contained three Conan tales by Howard, and two other formerly non-Conan stories, posthumously re-written by L. Sprauge DeCamp in the 50's, to feature the barbarian freebooter -- DeCamp made his point that Howard's heroes were cut from the same cloth. See Wikipedia's Conan The Barbarian page!


This Bear was browsing for food near the highway over Chief Mountain Pass between the US and Canada. Whenever I moved, he/she moved, and this is as much of him/her as I got.
(Now WHAT was it that bears do in the woods? Hmmm...)

Summer 2006 is making it's prescence known. It has been hot (for this place) all weekend long. We travelled to Waterton Lakes, Canada for an overnighter and saw some big Mule Deer, high-flying Bald Eagles, and a brown-coated Bear! (Photos later)

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

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 this Summer! Click on The Hunger Site every day.

Sitemeter Sez: People are searching for The X-Men; London; The Spiegel Tent; Jillian Barbarie, and Tanya Memme.

In The Community: Sunday at the Hockaday Museum of Art again! We will include John Rawlings' invitation to build a ceramic installation in Egypt's Museum of Modern Art in our Autumn Newsletter!
We've had a visitor from Idaho, two from California, and a pair of local residents. The weather is ideal for hiking, water sports, and other outdoor activities, so I'm not expecting very many people -- there's always the possibility that some of the million-plus tourists from Glacier National Park will stop by, and THAT'S why we stay open through the summer.

Media Watch: A series of films called The Drug Years was running on several cable networks, including VH1. The filmmaker's perspective was actually GOOD! Fallacies of pro and anti-drug partisans are apparent in this documentary, and stories by interviewees are well-told. Biases are apparent, but the context stays matter-of-fact most of the time.
I could tell you some stories too -- in fact, ANYBODY from my generation can see analogues of themselves somewhere in those films.
I read Conan the Warrior by Robert E. Howard while travelling. It consists of three stories from the early 30's by the actual author who created Conan. The cover is a battle scene by Frank Frazetta, where our bare-chested hero stands on a mountain of foes, slaying one enemy after another. Inside Red Nails has a heroine named Valeria, a female comrade-in-arms who resembles Marvel Comics' Red Sonja character. Across the Black River has Howard mixing up Jack London and H.P. Lovecraft in almost equal amounts. Edgar Rice Burroughs always lurks in the background -- that's what the pulp magazine editors wanted!
The Conan paperbacks were a huge hit in the 60's, just for the covers alone -- the stories were re-edited by L. Sprauge DeCamp, and Howard's sub-world was explored by multitudes of new fans. Unfortunately, their demand for new Conan stories led to less-than-competent sequels. DeCamp did some fairly good work completing Howard's unfinished tales, but I didn't like Lin Carter or Bjorn Nyberg -- and there have been WORSE since then!
I suppose I should mention unworthy political hack opportunist Arnold Schwarznegger -- he was a fixture in Comic Book bodybuilding ads during the late 60's. As Mr. Universe and Mr. Olympia, his photos were used by many an artist for extreme muscular reference material. He really bulged-out before the mid-70's because of steroid use! (He claimed to have quit a few years before he made Pumping Iron.) When Arnold re-geared his career towards the movies, he grew his hair long, and re-took the Mr. Universe title in order to promote Dino DiLaurentis' Conan the Barbarian, which made him kind of a B-list star. Schwarznegger later made Conan the Destroyer with Grace Jones, and Red Sonja with Brigitte Neilsen. To tell you the truth, the only films of his I consider good are Pumping Iron and The Terminator. (Which put him on the A-List!) There are moments I like in his Conan movies, but I consider them Dawg-Assed -- each and every one.

The modern character Red Sonja is an amalgamation of the original Conan's female warrior/allies. Robert E. Howard reportedly used the name in one of his stories, and editor/writer Roy Thomas expanded her identity.

Red Sonja first appeared in Conan #23 -- artist Barry Windsor-Smith rendered her near the center of Conan #24's cover.
This cover is from the Grand Comic Database, which freely permits images to be used for scholarly and non-commercial purposes. Red Sonja and Conan are the property of their copyright holders.