Instead of RAIN showers, we're getting METEOR showers -- sometimes you just can't win. The high pressure traps forest fire smoke next to the ground, which obscures the view, and stinks, and ... (why go on complaining?)

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: Keep that resolution to click on The Hunger Site every day.

In The Community: Working at the Hockaday again on Sunday -- must be summer. Special events at the Hockaday Museum of Art will rev up this week, and continue to Labor Day Weekend, after which I'll have my weekends off. We already have Lowell Jaeger's anthology Poems Across The Big Sky in our gift shop, ready to sell at the Poetry Reading this Thursday.

Media Watch: I didn't find the Sci Fi Network's new version of Flash Gordon all very compelling, but it was better than I feared. (Hmmmm -- faint praise without excessive damnation.) Their too-stupid, uncharismatic Ming wandered around like a pompous office-boy executive, rather than a ruler. He might have been a disguised satire of George Bush, or an indictment of stupid elites who sponsor nonentities like this in positions of importance. Ming was originally created in the 1930's when charismatic dictators and wannabes actually ruled over large populations. His larger-than-life character made a formidable arch-villain against whom the heroes could forge alliances among the strange life-forms of Mongo.
The woman actors were all beautiful, but the makeup and costuming made them look too much alike. The over-riding plot was an echo of Kathy Ireland's Alien from L.A. -- a dog-assed show from 1988 which owed an awful lot to Dino Di Laurentis' Flash debacle of 1980 mixed with Journey to the Center of the Earth and Blade Runner. I don't quite feel like writing about all their variation-points yet, though.


As other inmates of Ming's seraglio surround his Imperial Wickedness in 1936, Princess Aura (Upper Left) smirks in lustful glee as the hypnotized Dale Arden (Center) faces "a fate worse than death" as the Emperor's concubine, leaving Flash Gordon to Aura's wiles. This none-too-original idea came from Alex Raymond's comic strip, and was repeated in the Universal serial, the 1980 movie, and the Sci Fi Channel's mini-series.