Planet Mars was the biggest, brightest object in the morning sky. Planet Earth and this big red rock are drifting apart for the next generation, instead of coming close enough for an interplanetary handshake every two years, like they've done for the last little while.

Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from tiny Tamworth in Staffordshire, UK; Louth, Ireland (Gotta be Eavan Brennan!); Cherry Hill, New Jersey; Dundee City, UK; Madrid, Spain; Salt Lake City, Utah (Searching for Wanda Day. I hope they Google'd Theater X-Net for her pictures); Cincinnati, Ohio (Bootsy Collins is doing his James Brown Tribute Concert TOMORROW night) and finally Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (Reading about Ringo Starr and Frank Frazetta.)

REAL SLC Punk, not the movie, 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
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!





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: Make a Holiday Resolution to click on The Hunger Site every day. Also check into Terra Sigilata blog -- donate $$$ to cancer patients just by clicking onto the site.

In The Community: A long day yesterday at the Hockaday Museum of Art -- when we do a group show, it takes a while for everyone to come in and get their work. We cleared Donna Gans' gallery in one afternoon, though! I also had to take a couple of older paintings over to the Abbrescia Gallery for cleaning/restoration -- work that's done by the square inch.

REAL Books: H.P. Lovecraft's Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath -- a romp through his Dunsany-esque cosmos, with Randolph Carter in the role of a conquering hero instead of as a victim of blasphemous curiosity. Read it online HERE. My friend Brian Aldiss calls Lovecraft "an atrocious writer," and Colin Wilson's opinion was the same -- it makes me laugh that both of them wrote books and stories expanding on his themes. Brian even won an award for The Saliva Tree, which owed much to The Color Out of Space. Aldiss' vivid portrait of the Suffolk marshes was far beyond Lovecraft's skills, but the Providence recluse was undeniably able to weave a certain literary spell.


The Two Queen Azuras
(Click the pic for a better view)
I'm in the midst of updating Spitfires of the Spaceways. Here's a comparison of Alex Raymond's Azura -- Witch Queen of Mongo from the Flash Gordon comic strip in 1935 (above), and Azura -- Queen of Magic from Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars in 1938 (below).

H. P. Lovecraft was still alive and writing when Alex Raymond drew Mongo's Queen Azura as a hot but sadistic femme fatale who outright lusted after Flash. The Martian Azura was frigidly cruel in Beatrice Roberts' portrayal a few years later. Censorship was extremely powerful in 1938, so this Saturday morning serial was as sexually repressed as a traditional East Indian movie. Ms. Roberts entered two Miss America Pagents a decade earlier, and won the Evening Gown competition both times. She was noted for affairs with Robert (Believe It Or Not) Ripley and Louis Mayer, so she possessed a sensual dimension that nobody would have ever guessed from THIS role. Raymond worked from live models after Flash Gordon achieved success, so there were people who actually sported the physiques he delineated in his classic Space Opera.