Hey! It is about 10 degrees (F) cooler today -- those %$#@! forest fires are still burning east and west of us though, so the air stinks, and there are angry red trails of smoke in the Big Sky.

Remembering my friend Georgio at: 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!
Spitfires of the Spaceways
UPDATED! Wilma Deering & Dale Arden to the rescue; Bodacious Princess Aura I; Hapless Aura II; The fiery Emperor Ming; The Orson Welles Rumor Debunked; and BOTH incarnations of Jean Rogers!
Read my latest Spitfires in Context essay.

Charity Alert: Make a resolution this Summer to click on The Hunger Site every day.

In The Community: I went to the Hockaday Museum of Art to gather some contributions for the Salvation Army yesterday. We weren't open, but there were THREE people catching up on their paperwork while it was quiet. HOW QUIET WAS IT? It was so quiet, I didn't know they were there until I walked into their various rooms picking up orphaned stuff I was supposed to get a month ago.

Media Watch: I never cared much for Michaelangelo Antonioni's movies -- Vanessa Redgrave's bony shoulders didn't give me much of a thrill in Blow Up, and the goddamn film didn't have a real ending. I actually hated Zabriskie Point, except for the use of Pink Floyd's Careful With That Axe Eugene -- it was pointless beyond the contemporary accusations of nihlism, and I thought it was mean-spirited too. I really doubt that he understood or even thought much about Youth Culture in the 60's, except as fodder for exploitation. There were filmmakers who appreciated him, on a technical level at least. He just died at the age of 94.


Blow Up might have been an international hit, but not among the Drive-In crowd in the USA. Antonioni didn't really GET what was going on. He beat the audience with his Fellini-like schtick, rather than revealed what happened around us. Although their scene was irrelevant to the scenario, it was fun to see two of England's greatest guitarists, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page together in the Yardbirds. Ironically, Beck had been fired many months before the film was released. They also NEVER destroyed things onstage, except in this movie. (The Move and The Who wrecked equipment and props in real life.) Their rewriting of The Train Kept A-Rollin' as Stroll On unfortunately sucked, and didn't help the downward spiral of the group's popularity at all.
(L to R) Page, Chris Dreja, Beck, Keith Relf, and Jim McCarty -- Paul Samwell-Smith was already gone. The Yardbirds made the charts again with Little Games and Ha Ha Said The Clown later that year, but faded away in 1968. Peter Grant and Page remade the old corporation as Led Zeppelin in 1969. The Train Kept A-Rollin' started the show on Zep's first tours.