Another springlike day - following a Sunday of alternate wind, hail, snow, rain and sunshine. The mountains are socked in with snow, and the rocks are literally bursting with water from unseen fissures.

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 Spring resolution to click on The Hunger Site every day.

In The Community: We have a new design at Hockaday Museum of Art's Website! I will continue to integrate our new logo into the various active pages. This project was interrupted by my recent illness -- took me a couple of hours to reconstruct what I'd done four weeks ago, and undo the mistakes I'd made when I was sick.

Media Watch: Book TV had a panel discussion at the University of Chicago about plagiarism with author Jonathan Lethem, jurist Richard Posner, faculty member Francoise Meltzer, and moderator Lawrence Weschler. There are reasonable guidelines in Academia and Journalism (although they are violated constantly), but when it comes to Art the subject gets interestingly vague. Lethem asserted and re-asserted that all creativity comes from somebody's influences, mostly because it's a fact. Issues like copyright infringement have an important place, though, and there are currents of social hysteria within the subject too. The discussion ended without any conclusions.

If this is Art -- count the influences!


All-50's starlet Claudia Barrett swoons in the arms of stuntman George Barrows, dressed as the helmeted pseudo-simian Robot Monster in Phil Tucker's campy classic, filmed in Griffith Park around 1953. Barrows himself may be about to swoon in that monkey suit if it's summer in L.A! (Some early Willis O'Brien dinosaur footage is spliced in the film here and there, if ya' watch for it.)