Friday, January 26, 2007

Is that snow, or is the fog just condensing in flakes? You can't even see the disc of the Sun behind the clouds at Noon.

Footbarn's Celebration of Theatre: 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!
NEW! Spitfires of the Spaceways
Watch Dale Arden rescue Flash Gordon for a change!

Charity Alert: Make a resolution as the days get brighter to click on The Hunger Site every day.

In The Community: The Traveling Medicine Show Opening ceremony Friday, January 26, 2007 5:30 to 8 PM -- FREE to the public. Three trunks of Native American Art and Artifacts -- Learn MORE
Trunk One: Ancient Case -- Bow and arrow, shield, parfleche etc. from long ago. Trunk Two: Traditional Case -- Ceremonial and everyday clothing, moccasins, dolls, cradle board, drum and pipe, decorative beadwork, etc. Trunk Three: Contemporary Case -- Current art, artists, and traditions.
Learn the stories of each trunk from Blackfeet artists Darnell Rides At The Door, David Dragonfly, and Rich Horn.

Hockaday Museum of Art

Media Watch: PBS' Great Performances showed Julie Taymor's production of The Magic Flute. Hats off to honor one of the late Jacques LeCoq's most famous students! The costumes and overall design were blindingly beautiful. You could see the blending of Asian and European traditions, plus Taymor's astounding originality in every scene. My favorite characters were three singers with removable mask/heads and BIG left hands -- comic sensibility reminding me of the Bread & Puppet Theatre. I enjoyed the Queen of the Night's design, and Erika Miklósa, the singer who played her part. I wasn't particularly fond of the English liberetto -- I didn't see the point, since they ran the translation in subtitles anyway.

Speaking of LeCoq, and his students:


Footsbarn Theatre has TWO productions in the oven right now -- this one, and a revival of their particular version of Midsummer Night's Dream. (R to L) Fredericka Haytor and Mas Sogeng operating diaphanous shadow puppets for L'Homme qui Rit as Hugo spoke and spelled it. Mas is originally from Java and brought along his own knowledge of masks and puppets to extend Footsbarn's already-vast vocabulary of these techniques. Ms. Taymor has nothing over this international bunch of fellow LeCoq disciples!

Thursday, January 25, 2007

It's been foggy for at least 24 hours here at the college -- I'll blame the Stillwater River for some of it. I'd be happier if I saw those Eagles eating more often by the aereation pond at Middle Foy's Lake.

Footbarn's Celebration of Theatre: 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!
NEW! Spitfires of the Spaceways
Watch Dale Arden rescue Flash Gordon for a change!

Charity Alert: Make a resolution as the days get brighter to click on The Hunger Site every day.

In The Community: We are testing security hangers at the Hockaday Museum -- spring clips are too big, so I'm going to try short lengths of chain in the design. Things like these help keep folks honest. Hockaday Museum of Art

Media Watch: Young Roald Amundsen was impressed by the story of Sir John Franklin's fatal attempt to sail through the Northwest Passage in HMS Erebus and Terror with over a hundred doomed crewmen -- so impressed that he completed Franklin's quest at the start of the 20th Century. PBS' Nova showed a couple of films which trace the efforts of Franklin, the investigators who followed his trail of death, and Amundsen's voyage through the Northwest Passage in his small ship Gjoa, following coastal charts created by the aforementioned English investigators. The bleached and scattered bones of the men who died in Franklin's disaster still litter the beaches of King William Island and the adjoining mainland. Crewmen buried along the way were disinterred and investigated over the years.
Nova's Arctic Passage Films. It's worth noting that the Gjoa Expedition also mapped the Magnetic North Pole, and Amundsen counselled against using the Northwest Passage for subsequent navigation because of it's extreme difficulty and danger. PBS' film doesn't mention the times when Gjoa had to be manually dragged through cold shallow water in the Simpson Strait.
Amundsen was also the leader of the first expedition to reach the South Pole in 1911. He was under weigh for a run to the NORTH Pole, when Peary's claim of success caused him to change his mind and sail to the Bay of Whales in Antarctica. Many Britishers still harbor resentment over Amundsen's decision to "compete" with Robert Falcon Scott -- another doomed English explorer.
It later turned out that Amundsen's flight over the North Pole via dirigible in the mid-20's was the first verified visit there as well -- Cook, Peary, and Byrd all cheated in their logs.
After WWI Amundsen sailed his ship Maud across the nothern edge of Russia, and went broke trying to explore the Arctic Sea. He became an advocate of using aviation for polar exploration, based upon common sense and his own experiences in extreme climates, but ironically died as the result of a plane crash in the high Arctic.
I've read Amundsen's book about his North Pole dirigible flight of 1926. Here's a link to a Wikipedia article about that crazy event, from another point of view.
Amundsen might have been single-minded to a fault, but he was by far the most methodical and successful of all the great Polar explorers -- his scientific achievements weren't equalled until the multinational efforts of I.G.Y. in 1958.

Lighter-than-air-ships stimulated the public's imagination in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Baron Von Zeppelin made the very first powered manned flight in the early 1890's over Lake Constance in a motorized gasbag which made his name famous. Weather limited the usefulness of these big machines, though -- Amundsen's airship Norge crossed from Europe to Alaska alright, but couldn't return across the Arctic Ocean because of the winds.
To demonstrate the imaginative spell Zeppelin's invention cast at the time, Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote a book in the 1920's where Tarzan himself flies an airship into the Arctic to find adventure in a prehistorically-populated land inside of our own planet, accessible from the Polar regions. Burroughs not only got Tarzan at the Earth's Core (1928) out of the project, but Back to the Stone Age (1935) as well! Buster Crabbe's movie-serial version of Buck Rogers was a Zeppelin pilot too.


J. Allen St. John's wraparound cover for Tarzan at the Earth's Core, with a portion of Roy Krenkel & Frank Frazetta's cover for the sequel -- Back to the Stone Age (inset). Both books relied on the romance of giant airships. The hollow Earth idea continued to show up for many generations in Science-Fiction and Pseudo-Science too.

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

A beautiful sunrise for a change -- followed by dreary fog. I notice that the Deer are foraging greenery during the thaws lately.

Footbarn's Celebration of Theatre: 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!
NEW! Spitfires of the Spaceways
Watch Dale Arden rescue Flash Gordon for a change!

Charity Alert: Make a resolution as the days get longer to click on The Hunger Site every day.

In The Community: One of our curators at the Hockaday Museum was injured in a car rollover. That means I'm the one who is hanging the Ace Powell minatures this week. They are cute, but there's a lot more frames and wires, hooks and nails than there are actual pictures!
Hockaday Museum of Art

Media Watch: I made me a drive tape of old Motown singles last night while our unworthy president belched out his constitutionally - mandated State of the Union address. I have very little tolerance for his stupid lies anymore. Sen. James Webb (D-Virginia) gave a short, eloquent rebuttal. (Both texts HERE)
...As I look at Iraq, I recall the words of former general and soon-to-be President Dwight Eisenhower during the dark days of the Korean War, which had fallen into a bloody stalemate. "When comes the end?" asked the General who had commanded our forces in Europe during World War Two. And as soon as he became President, he brought the Korean War to an end. These Presidents took the right kind of action, for the benefit of the American people and for the health of our relations around the world. Tonight we are calling on this President to take similar action, in both areas. If he does, we will join him. If he does not, we will be showing him the way. Thank you for listening. And God bless America.


Magpie Music/Dance in Amsterdam deserves some attention!


Katie Duck/Appenzeller in 1975 with Matthew Child -- as good a dancer who has ever leapt across a stage.

"COOL NIGHT FEVER" / MUSIC/DANCE 301 mini-festival 26/27 January
Doors open 21:00 / Late bar till 03:00 / Entry price 6 euros / 4 sets each night

OT301 - Overtoom 301 - Amsterdam

FRIDAY 26TH JANUARY

21:30
Music; Oscar-Jan Hoogland [piano] + Colin McLean [computer]
Dance; Katie Duck, Kim Yun-gue + Kyungsun Beak
22:15
Music; HilaryJeffrey [trombone] + Rozemarie Heggen [double bass]
Dance; Makiko Ito, Lily Kiara + Amelia McQueen
23:00
Music; Michael Moore [saxophone, clarinet] + Andy Moor [guitar]
Dance; Malgorzata Haduc, Alexandra Manasse + Sylvain Meret
23:45
Music; Colin McLean, Andy Moor, Hilary Jeffrey, Oscar-Jan Hoogland, Rozemarie Heggen + Michael Moore
Dance; Alexandra Manasse, Makiko Ito, Sylvain Meret, Katie Duck, Kim Yun-gue , Kyungsun Beak, Lily Kiara, Amelia McQueen + Malgorzata Haduc

SATURDAY 27TH JANUARY
21:30
Music; Hilary Jeffrey [trombone] + Oscar-Jan Hoogland [piano]
Dance; Katie Duck, Sylvain Meret + Laura Moro
22:15
Music; to be confirmed
Dance; Makiko Ito, Natanya Den Boeft + Ailed Izurieta
23:00
Music; Colin McLean [computer] + Andy Moor [guitar]
Dance; Alexandra Manasse, Tinneke Veenhof + Amelia McQueen
23:45
Music; Colin McLean, Andy Moor, Hilary Jeffrey + Oscar-Jan Hoogland
Dance; Alexandra Manasse, Makiko Ito, Sylvain Meret, Ailed Izurieta, Tinneke Veenhof, Natanya Den Boeft, Amelia McQueen, Laura Moro + Katie Duck

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

The damn bird-bath may be infecting our cats with Giardia. We have to figure out a way of watering the birds without the kitties drinking too. We don't leave out near enough seeds to feed the Deer, but I'm glad to say they don't look overly thin.

Footbarn's Celebration of Theatre: 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!
NEW! Spitfires of the Spaceways
Watch Dale Arden rescue Flash Gordon for a change!

Charity Alert: Make a resolution as the days get longer to click on The Hunger Site every day.

In The Community: Native American art and artifacts from the Northern Plains, and Blackfeet artists take center stage at the Hockaday Museum of Art this Friday. It looks like we'll have a video crew there as well, as we "open" the traveling "trunk" show.

Media Watch: AMC showed a "DVD" version of William Friedkin's The Exorcist -- meaning it was letterboxed with all sorts of gossip flashing on the screen beneath the picture the while the film was running. It was great fun if you left the sound off, but sure got in the way of the story otherwise. There are too many adverts on that channel anyway, so I'm not sure this trick will help them keep their audience. The wretchedly laughable Exorcist II (1977) followed -- I liked Bob Logan's Reposessed (1990) a lot better than William Peter Blatty's stupid Exorcist III from the same year. Logan's script was lame, but funny sight gags were plentiful.
Speaking of demons -- Jacques Tourneur's Curse of the Demon (1957) was on TCM over the weekend -- a delightfully direct horror movie where the Supernatural just walks up takes over Reality for awhile. Tourneur also directed many well-photographed and well-acted genre films like: Cat People (1942); I Walked with a Zombie (1943); The Leopard Man (1943); Out of the Past (1947); and Berlin Express (1948).


Tourneur wanted to keep Demon footage out of his movie, and he was probably right -- however, I like this particular movie monster. It was made in the mid-50's when dawg-assed flicks were in flower, and this Demon stood "head and shoulders" above the competition for cheap scares -- except for maybe the rompin' stompin' Godzilla.

Sunday, January 21, 2007

Fairly steady snow -- it only builds up an inch or two at a time. The soft temperatures cause midday melts. Raccoon tracks came from across the street to the North -- Little Foy's Lake. Our two resident Eagles seem to be hunting together, and there's a little family group of Whitetail Deer poking under logs trying to get at the Pheasants' Sunflower seeds.

Footbarn's Celebration of Theatre: 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!
NEW! Spitfires of the Spaceways
Watch Dale Arden rescue Flash Gordon for a change!

Charity Alert: Make a resolution as the days get longer to click on The Hunger Site every day.

In The Community: Native American art and artifacts from the Northern Plains, and Blackfeet artists take center stage at the Hockaday Museum of Art this Friday.

Media Watch: NFL Football -- today's winners go to the Superbowl. These conference championships are often better than the supposedly "big game."
Some oddly interesting stuff on TCM's usually-drab Cartoon Alley -- Daffy Duck as a WWII commando fighting Nazi vultures -- with a rotoscoped Adolf Hitler; Bugs Bunny "missing his turn at Albuquerque" and being chased through the Black Forest by Marshall Goering. Bugs rides the same horse dressed as the same Valkyrie he played a decade later in What's Opera Doc?. He also meets Hitler, and scares both villains off by impersonating Joseph Stalin; In the early days of Television, before I was even in 5th grade, cartoons like these were included in the indifferent rotation given to children's programming. For artistic, commercial, political, and social reasons, many WWII cartoons, and others, were later weeded out of garden-variety TV. (My friends Bob and Parley Holman were particularly fond of these time-specific media indulgences.) One cartoon I can't remember seeing as a kid was originally titled Gremlins From The Kremlin, which TCM played between Bugs and Daffy. Madcap director Bob Clampett cast Der Fuhrer himself piloting a bomber, solo, over the Soviet Union, which then falls apart in the skies, due to innumerable tiny Russian-stereotyped Gremlins sabotaging his plane to the tune of Volga Boatman. I'm sure the Cold War was a factor -- a mask of Stalin causes 'Adolf' to freak right out at the end.
Book TV tweaked my imagination with Jeff Sypeck speaking about his book Becoming Charlemange, and made my stomach hurt with Politically Incorrect Shakespeare -- the latter being re-fried, decades-old, right-wing propaganda, meaning lies, about Demonic University Professors supposedly stifling our cultural heritage. ('Nuff Said!) The former was about grim mideavel warlord Karl Der Gross (LOVE that name) becoming a major fountainhead of Christian Legend as my ancestors slowly acquired Civilization. In reality, Emperor Karl played an important part in prompting Europe to climb out of it's Dark Ages pigstye, and legends of his reign inspired many people over the following centuries.
Real Books -- I'm reading The Shakespeare Wars by Ron Rosenbaum. I am NOT a scholar, but the expansive vocabulary of words and phrases in Shakespeare's plays and sonnets always led me to suspect many hands in their creation. I doubt that he was a sovereign playwright in the mode of Moliere, Shaw, or O'Neill, but there is NO EVIDENCE for any of my suppositions. From what I am reading, there seems to be scant evidence for ANYONE'S suppositions about the authorship of Shakespeare's major works. Enjoy good live performances, or read the plays and poems -- you can't lose.

This ain't Shakespeare!

It's Chapiteau Bleu at Footsbarn Theatre's 35th Anniversary Celebration! Father Seamus (Shame-us) and his Sinful Sisters have dismounted from James' Velocycle, and are taking up a collection for booze. The Sisters string up their knickers in the cafe/bar for their street-theater entreaties. (L to R) Sister Christina, Sister Faustina, Sister Rachelle, and Sister - nah - Father Seamus under a veil, hustling another Euro or two.