Happy New Year! We counted birds for the Audubon Society out of our windows yesterday -- Chickadees and Juncos were the winners, but two Bald Eagles showed up too. We've had icy gray midwinter weather.

Footbarn's Celebration of Theatre: Theater X-Net

Starring: Ida Rubinstein Belle Epoch Russian/Parisian beauty.
Ida's Places in Paris -- from my first jet-lagged 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: Make a resolution as the days get longer to click on The Hunger Site every day.

In The Community: Look for updates on the Hockaday Museum of Art's Website.

Media Watch: Speaking of weather, the annual Tournament of Roses Parade was blessed with sunshine and warmth, over 1200 miles away in Pasadena, California. I still enjoy watching live broadcasts like this, even though ex-Presidents' funerals make their way onto the air too. I heard Christina Aguilera roaring through a live mic over couple of songs' worth of canned music in Times Square on New Year's Eve -- good touch. Producer/host Dick Clark has recovered enough from his stroke to talk a little, but he sounded gruff. It obviously wasn't near as easy as it used to be for him.
TCM found some obscure Sci-Fi flicks from the 50's and ran them on New Years Day, after a spate of Marx Brothers films. There were some I'd never even heard of, and I can't wait to wallow in that drek after we finish taping them. The Blob is the last one -- it's theme was written by Hal David and Burt Bacharach, but that low-grade hit song was NOT the real start of their fertile partnership. They didn't formally join up for another few years.
The Lord of the Rings as we know it, took form after Tolkien was rewriting the whole thing backwards -- after finally completing the story for C. S. Lewis and his other friends, who gathered together weekly as "The Inklings." I bought and read ex-Inkling Christopher Tolkien's collection of his father's drafts. What might seem to be a continuation of The Hobbit metamorphing into a Heroic Fantasy version of War and Peace is constructed in almost the opposite manner. I appreciate Prof. Tolkien trying to adjust his narrative style to suit the characters and situations -- there are glimmers of William Morris, Sir Walter Scott, and the Icelandic Sagas, but the writer who was following these literary lights actually knew and understood their works. Tolkien's OWN voice is still my favorite element -- the Truesilver of the tale.


One more go-round with Ace Books!

Name Those Characters! Some reviewer once mentioned that "...at least (Jack Gaughan) had read the book." as a way of belittling Barbara Remington's Ballantine covers. He didn't read very carefully -- Fellowship of the Ring has Gandalf front and center, but I can't identify anyone else. Those hooded guys maybe work, but there were no swordsmen wearing pointy hats. Two Towers shows a flying Nazgul , but he's riding a black Pegasus rather than a Pterodactyl. Return of the King makes an effort to evoke elements of the book -- I see Gandalf, a Gondorian, some figure with an axe whom might be Gimli, and a couple of smaller sword-bearing figures befitting the tale. The big hooded creature could be Sauron, Saruman, or a Ringwraith, lurking behind a spikey towering stone. I tend to favor subjectivity in commercial art, so I approve of Gaughan's third cover. However, Remington's work was even MORE subjective. I especially enjoyed the spell it cast on Fellowship of the Ring's cover. IMHO -- BRem's overall design possessed a colorfully bold pizzazz which outstripped Gaughan's somewhat hackneyed imagination.