Blogging from France: First of all, these European keyboards are different from those in North America. If there are more typos than usual (and they ARE usual on this blog) blame it on that! There's an important entry in my Webmater section, and general thoughts after the Hunger Site link.

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

Webmaster Notes: I visited four places my first day in Paris that had some kind of connection with Ida Rubinstein, and took pictures of three of them. The fourth was The Village Voice Bookstore, where Ida's most recent literary biographer, Toni Bentley, made a personal appearence earlier this year -- check her website for details.
The gentleman behind the counter at Village Voice helped me locate the nearby Rue Vanneau where Ida had her studio before WWI. The exact addresses are somewhat in dispute, but I took photos of newer buildings on the sites of 52 and 54. Number 82 is near Andre Gide's home on the corner, so it is already a destination for literary pilgrims. He also gave me directions to the #63 bus stop which made my journey to Place des Etats-Unis much easier -- Rubinstein built a magnificent home at Number 7 Place des Etats-Unis that was either ransacked or razed by the Nazis in WWII, or both. There is a modern boxlike building standing where Ida used to live.
I got a few shots of the theater where she became famous during the VERY important debut of the Ballet Russes in 1909 -- it is now designated The Paris Musical Theater on tourist maps, but it's name is still Theatre Chatelet (Shah-TEE).



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 Summer advances! Click on The Hunger Site every day.

Traveller's Tales: My hotel is near the Charles DeGaulle Airport, but that means I'm almost an hour our of Paris via public transportation. It is remarkable what one sees as one travels -- grafitti has been sprayed on every reachable surface trackside all of the way into Paris. There are a lot of "brown belts," decaying housing, and large-scale industrial construction along the way too. I sat with the people who live there on my way back to the hotel. They were mostly working people of all races and varying urbanity -- Africans in bright robes, daishikis, and wrapped dresses mixed with teens wearing hip-hop clothes, side by side with Muslim women in head scarves, and women from every continent dressed sleekly in the latest fashions.
Speaking of fashion -- there's a whole museum devoted to it off of Woodrow Wilson Blvd.
I oriented myself by starting at Notre Dame Cathedral and the Louvre Palace grounds. The camera worked well after it's long journey, but the noontime light made photography difficult. I guided myself to the aforementioned Village Voice Books, and had a fabulous lunch in the restaurant next door. The waitresses spoke English very well, and one even had a California accent because her father lived there! People-watching couldn't be better, but those damn Gaullois (Go-wah) cigarettes foul the air everywhere.
I'm glad I walked, but I'm equally glad I introduced myself to the busses and Metro. Tomorrow will be much easier as a result. The stations are logically laid-out and clean. Paris is also pretty clean for such a big scrambling city. All those trees are a godsend in this hot (80 - 90 degrees F) weather. The drivers watch for pedestrians, but I'm glad that I'm not going to deal with these busy crowded crazy-quilt cities as a driver on my trip -- Bourges looks pretty compact.

Hot -- much hotter than usual, even at night now. We put up a little improvised barricade on our back deck to discourage a Skunk who included our bird feeders on his/her nightly route.

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 as Summer advances! Click on The Hunger Site every day.

In The Community: Arts In The Park is very pleasant under the trees -- our annual fundraising open-air art show brought in an extra fifty visitors to The Hockaday Museum of Art itself yesterday. Mellow music seems to be the order of Sunday morning at the park -- Steve Eckles played an hour of esquisite classical guitar, and the Celtic Music group Tra La Gael was playing under the gazebo just before I came over here to open the Hockaday for my four-hour Sunday shift. On Friday we had the Blue Onion blues band rocking the leaves off the trees in the late afternoon, and I think we have a country group turning up their amps after 3 PM today.
I am going back this afternoon to shoot a few more pictures and help tear down the event. This marks the beginning of my eighth year working for this small, but important, art museum.

Media Watch: Trying to read myself to sleep during hot nights sometimes means Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan Triumphant -- an early-30's potboiler featuring Joe Stalin (as himself) sending an assassin to Africa to kill our ape-man hero; a downed aristocratic English aviatrix; a near-naked blond girl from the mythical African bush who befriends her; Abyssinian slave traders (led by yet another Communist rabble-rouser from Italy); and a lost nation of white religious fanatics inhabiting a dead volcano somewhere in Africa's upper Rift Valley. The Americans include an likeable, if absent-minded, male geology professor; and a hit-man on the run from Chicago. Tarzan's native allies, the Waziri, save the day with modern high-power rifles.

Picture Break! Tarzan Triumphant cover and various Tarzan illustrations by the late Roy G. Krenkel, whose career was overshadowed by friend Frank Frazetta. (I also included the magazine where this story was first serialized circa 1931.)

Ace Books started an Edgar Rice Burroughs revival in the early 60's when some copyrights lapsed, and they put out unauthorized paperbacks with fabulous covers by R.G. Krenkel and the recently-unemployed Frank Frazetta. After the legal battles were over, Ballantine Books published authorized editions of the complete Tarzan and Mars books, while Ace got the rights for Pellucidar, Venus, and other works -- for awhile one out of every thirty paperbacks sold in the USA was by E.R.B.

I Read The News Today (Oh Boy): It's a damn shame that Burroughs' second-rate pulp fantasy from the Great Depression has so many parallels with villians who actually plague our real world today. The history of the Bush II Administration reads like a bad satire about a government of stooges, led by religious fanatics and shameless thieves whose stated objectives are to louse things up -- the Merde-ass Touch as someone on DailyKos once said.
I spoke at length with a beautiful Israeli lady at Arts In The Park who was selling jewelry made from ancient coins. Her husband and family are living under artillary fire, as are her neighbors -- by whom I mean Moslems, Druse, and Christians, all over the Levant, who are at war -- led by idiots who just want to see their faces on TV, and hear themselves "talking tough" as their people suffer and die -- the same kind of heartless criminals who are governing my country.