Monday, December 03, 2007

Warming up -- a little too much, in that rain on frozen ground is unpleasantly messy, and I sure hope the roads don't glaze over at night -- might find myself ice-skating to work!

Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from Seattle, Washington; Bad Reichenhall, Germany; Terre Haute, Indiana; Worcester, Massachusetts; Edinburgh, Scotland; New York City, New York and Boston, Massachusetts.

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: NEW stuff on the website of the Hockaday Museum of Art.

Media Watch: Leon Fleisher, Steve Martin, Diana Ross, Martin Scorsese and Brian Wilson were honored by the Kennedy Center over the weekend -- the show is due to be broadcast on December 24th. My totally impertinent thoughts:
Leon Fleisher -- A concert pianist who lost the use of his right hand to a neurological disease, but put himself through years of risky operations and therapy to play with both hands again at the high artistic level he demanded of himself. He also promoted compositions which emphasised the left hand by Gunther Schiller and others. Admirable for sure!
Steve Martin -- Funny guy! I saw him looning out on Saturday Night Live when I was right off the plane from Amsterdam in 1978. The next thing I saw when I woke up was Chuck Barris' Gong Show. (Today's Amerika just ain't the same.) I liked his movie All of Me with Lily Tomlin, but I'm pretty indifferent to the rest of them.
Diana Ross -- The Supremes were one of the BIGGEST groups in the world during Rock Music's second flowering in the mid-60's -- they even shared the cover of Time Magazine in the spring of '65. My favorite record of theirs was 1966's You Can't Hurry Love. The Supremes ' success was a team effort, though, and even though she was a major player on the team, I thought her work diminished as the team changed around her, especially when she went solo. Her movies were OK, and so were her records for awhile. I personally think her greatest achievement during the 70's was in resurrecting awareness of the great Billie Holiday. I would think better of her if she'd sing with Mary Wilson and Cindy Birdsong in order to do justice to the great Supremes legacy, but I have NO say in that matter.
Martin Scorsese -- He's made some excellent movies, and blundered more than once, but nobody's perfect. I admire Taxi Driver and Casino, and thought he did alright with Bob Dylan: No Direction Home. I've seen The Last Waltz quite often, and blogged at length about it. It's too bad he loused up so bad in his attempt to film Nikos Kazantzakis' Last Temptation of Christ, one of the greatest novels of all time. The book alone should have shut up hacks like Pat Buchanan, but Scorsese's movie just wasn't good enough to stand on its own against right-wing schoolyard bullies and their agenda to enshrine ignorance as a national value.
Brian Wilson -- Pop genius, who I have also blogged about. His re-assembly of SMile was an act of emotional courage which has few parallels. He leads a group once known as the Wondermints, who are excellent beyond the ability of words to describe. He was also central to the success of the Beach Boys -- what started out as a mixture of Four Freshman harmonies, Dick Dale "Surf" guitar music, and Rhythm & Blues in Hawthorne, California became something altogether
different. He was rightfully sued by Chuck Berry for stealing the tune for Sweet Little Sixteen and using it in Surfin' USA, and competed toe-to-toe with heavyweights like Phil Spector in the Pop charts. He genreously wrote a song for the Ronettes which turned out to be one of his best -- Don't Worry Baby. He also held his own during the British Invasion, but all that hard work led to a long series of nervous breakdowns, aided and abetted by drugs, a dysfunctional family, and an unscrupulous ex-psychiatrist.

Theatre/Theater: Katie Duck has left the building uh -- country! She is enroute to her next workshop in Madrid, Spain: 6-9 December at Studio Tres. Contact: irene@estudio3.org for information.
From Estudio3's Website (translated by Yahoo's Babel Fish):
DANCE: TECHNIQUE, IMPROVISATION, COMPOSITION This factory is directed to musical dancers and interested in extending its dominion of the space of the Performance by means of a Inter-disciplinary artistic activity. The heating and the exercises will be directed to see how the eyes, the ears and the thought work in coordination with the movement, the sound and the time. The improvisation sessions will be developed around the concepts of pause, fluidity and exits, centering the attention in the joint of the body, the dance, the memory and the presence. The objective is to generate a situation in which dancers and musicians can increase their confidence in their capacity for the live dance, articulating subjects of composition without using previous materials. Katie Duck: Dancer, coreógrafa and pedagoga. She has comprised of the company Salt Lake City MIME Troupe. From 1976 she lives in Ámsterdam and she has crossed Europe like performer of single, duetos with Carlos Traffic and improvisations with local musicians. In Italy she formed the company GROUPO, with which she presented/displayed the productions Ruttles, The Orange Man, Brown eye Green eye and Mind the gap ... professor in the Dartington College ... composition, improvisation and technique in the AHK of Amsterdam ... she has worked with musicians and artists who share their passion by the dance performances, music and text. She has worked next to TristanHonsinger, Michael Moore, Derek Bailey, Alex Maguire, Michael Vatcher and many other artists ... the Fijnhout Theater, the Muiderpoort Theater, the Melkweg Theater and the Frascati Theater ... Magpie Music Dance Company. 6, 7, 8 and 9 of December from 10 to 15 hs.



Magpie Music/Dance featuring my friend Katie (center, etc.) improvising with Justin Morrison, Michael Schumacher, and Andy Moor from a video on http://katieduck.com

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