If it was up to me, I would put up one of those automated solar-charged animal-crossing lights I saw in Yellowstone at the corner of Woodland Drive and South Woodland -- "Buck" and his deer family were schlepping across the highway there at dusk last night, heading towards Dry Bridge Slough. It was a little warmer this AM, but the valley reeks of smoke and you can't see the mountains.

Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from MySpace (Looked at some of my artwork.); Portland, Oregon (Searching online for the late George Kugler); Santa Barbara, California; and Brooklyn, New York

Remembering my friend George-O 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.

Thanks to Jim Keefe (Visit his Website) -- the LAST Flash Gordon illustrator of the 20th Century, and Flash's first illustrator of the 21st, for his recommendations -- HERE!

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

In The Community: With any luck at all, we'll get the Inuit Art show installed at the Hockaday Museum of Art this weekend.

Media Watch: OK -- we'll see what the Sci-Fi Channel's version of Flash Gordon does to Alex Raymond's Hawkmen this weekend. (They are calling them Dactyls.) My educated guess is that whatever they do will be done on a low budget.
I caught an episode of a strange series called Painkiller Jane on the same network last week -- it borrowed the "Id Monster" from Forbidden Planet. The whole thing actually resembled La Femme Nikita without the Nikita's upscale style, but I couldn't quite make out if it was Pro-Fascist, uh ... Republican, or Anti-Fascist in it's viewpoint.


(Clockwise starting in the Upper Left) From 1936 -- Priscilla Lawson as Princess Aura, Jean Rogers as Dale Arden, Buster Crabbe as Flash Gordon, John Lipson as King Vultan of the Hawkmen, Charles Middleton as Emperor Ming, Ornella Muti as Aura in 1980, Brian Blessed (Foreground) as Vultan in 1980, Unidentified Movie Extra (Background) in 1980, and Alex Raymond's Hawkmen circa 1935. That cross-like image of hawk wings at the top, Dale's denial of Flash, and his subsequent torture have some oddly Biblical implications. Luckily, Aura will show up with one of those Un-Biblical ray guns and save our hero's life again soon.