An ENORMOUS Golden eagle was swooping over that %$#@! Deer carcass in the lake -- he/she can HAVE it, if they can get at it. Officialdom is "passing the (ahem) buck" about who's supposed to get it outta there.

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 Spring (Ha!) resolution to click on The Hunger Site every day.

In The Community: Check out our new design at the Hockaday Museum of Art's Website -- still more changes to come! The public reception ran smooth Friday night, quite a few people were headed towards an environmental lecture at the neighboring Central School Museum. Happy Earth Day Weekend!

Media Watch: We recorded Ed Wood's Plan Nine From Outer Space off TCM last night, along with the same director's Bride of the Monster -- both have Bela Lugosi and Tor (Swedish Angel) Johnson in their casts.


Maila Syrjäniemi Nurmi as Vampira again! Our Finnish Succubus is back on the blog, complimenting the Swedish Angel in this ultra-low budget movie which was lucky enough to have been circulated around TV stations across America as part of a package of "creature features." The great George Romero himself praises Plan Nine as a classic of it's genre.

No snow stuck in the Flathead Valley itself, but the mountains were white all the way down to about the 3300 foot elevation (1000m). Both a Bald Eagle and a Blue Heron were seen at Middle Foy's Lake yesterday.

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 Spring (Ha!) resolution to click on The Hunger Site every day.

In The Community: Check out our new design at the Hockaday Museum of Art's Website -- there's still more changes to come! That multi-media presentation about the late Walter Hook premiered at the Member's Reception last night, and looked really good - congrats to Linda Grinde for getting it all together. We have a PUBLIC reception tonight.
Men and Women in the Military by Lt. Colonel Kevin Farrell finished off the Honors Symposium on a quality note. There was a tonne of information, but it was well-paced and organized. One thing Farrell didn't say was, "Good soldiers are good soldiers, no matter what sex they may be," but his history strongly implied it. His thesis was that sex integration of the Armed Services has largely been driven by military needs and expediency, plus the demands of civilian society on their troops over time.
The audience was lively, and many issues came up -- especially the fact that more women have died in the Iraq Invasion/Occupation than in all other US wars combined. Other things were mentioned -- like recruitment for both sexes in volunteer Army and Marine units is difficult in a time when combat duty is certain, but our Navy and Air Force have waiting lists. The existence of both sexual assault AND normal sexual behavior creates problems which are far from solved, but are neither unsolvable, nor fatal to the integrated services.

Media Watch: Bollywood movie stars Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai were married today -- best of luck to that very visible couple! We liked watching Dhoom II in a Calgary movie house last Thankgiving. It featured both actors, but informer Rai's very first screen-kiss was with policeman Bachchan's criminal nemesis Hrithik Roshan late in the second half -- an audience member called it "doing a John Abraham," since Abraham previously made screen-kissing respectable in Indian films. Ms. Rai looked more like she was tasting a lemon, but it wasn't exactly a tender scene in the plot either.


Three of my favorite movie divas, and they are all from India!
(L to R) Ace dancer Madhuri Dixit, bit-player turned star Urmila Matondkar, and versatile Aishwarya Rai.

Predictions of snow -- overcast, steel-gray skies, so it just might happen. Pick a canyon, any canyon, and Spring just turns to Winter. We saw a Merganser on Middle Foy's Lake yesterday -- hope it finds a mate and nests there.

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 Spring resolution to click on The Hunger Site every day.

In The Community: Check out our new design at the Hockaday Museum of Art's Website. Still scrambling to do that multi-media presentation about the late Walter Hook for Thursday night's members' reception. We have a PUBLIC reception on Friday too. I'll be there. Men and Women in the Military is the subject of our last Honors Symposium, with Lt. Colonel Kevin Farrell tomorrow evening. Last week's symposium was interesting for it's review of findings known by Piaget and other honest researchers for a couple of generations. There was none of the feared right-wing cant, either.
In another workshop about the human brain we learned that Developmental Psychology can been reinforced by empirical brain studies now, for the first time in history. Functional MRI's continue to back up ethically-done studies which once had to be based on statistics, plus allow new theories and investigations. I'm glad to say that ideology and political fads largely lose-out when examined by scientific techniques.

Media Watch: Real Books -- I picked up and read a paperbound photo-book from 1978 about the origins of Big Apple Circus on a sand-spit near New York City's Battery Park. This organization still thrives twenty-nine years later! Read the Wikipedia article. My acquaintences Hovey Burgess, Judy Finelli, and Phillip Pettite played a part in making their first season a reality. I might as well include their Website. Good going!


The Fratellini Brothers -- real-life archetypes of modern circus clowns. One of their grandaughters, Annie Fratellini was important to the genesis of the Big Apple Circus, and she trained many other fine performers as well.

Rainy day -- the whole place is greening up at last, except the mountains are getting whiter. Goldfinches are eating at our tube feeders.

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 Spring resolution to click on The Hunger Site every day.

In The Community: Check out our new design at the Hockaday Museum of Art's Website. I'm scrambling to do a multi-media powerpoint presentation about the late Walter Hook for Thursday night. I can't be there because of the last Honors Symposium, but I'll be setting up in BOTH places.

Media Watch: Sixty years ago Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in Major League sports. He was an excellent ballplayer, but was also chosen to be a pioneer of Racial Integration because of the iron control he had over his temper. There is still a lot of work for our society to tackle nowadays, but Robinson's legacy will always remain great.

Junque-O-Rama -- Dancing With The Stars featured an INCREDIBLE performance by Jullien Hough and Apolo Anton Ohno. Hough insisted the Samba was her favorite dance, and proved it. She might have looked kinda goofy in her tigress leotard, but all was forgotten when the two of them moved.

Jeff Foxworthy reportedly said about the Dixie Chicks, "I understand the songs on that album are great, but I listen to country radio so I haven't heard them yet..." He might have actually said a few more things too, since he was hosting the Country Music Awards last night, but this somewhat-bitter joke says quite a lot.
Hmmm -- If you laugh at slantwise remarks about the Dixie Chicks, might you just be a ... redneck??
Laugh if you want -- when opinions are just opinions, everyone is entitled to theirs.
One thing I do know -- if someone really supports the wrongheaded, corrupt, and failing actions of the Bush Administration, they are a fellow-crook or an abject idiot. Facts matter, and the criminals of Bu$hCo are lined up on the wrong side of reality.

Our college's flags are at half-staff. We're all sad about the horrible news from Virginia Tech -- condolences to everybody's family. There are lessons to learn, but let's get through the mourning first.

I was in the mood to watch a documentary about Yves St. Laurent -- what a great artist! He deserves a lot of credit for his achievments in making women's clothes which freed the people who wore them to be comfortable and express themselves. It would take a book or two to really explore his contibutions to High Fashion and the clothing industry as a whole. The film featured some wonderful moments with St. Laurent himself speaking to an unseen interviewer -- we all shared a seat at the feet of his wisdom. That's what good filmmaking is all about!


(Above) Yves St. Laurent around 1967 -- Artist As A Young Man, with one of his models, and himself circa 2002. (Below) Some sketches by this remarkable man, and samples from his wonderfully funny and successful Mondrian series in 1965.

Another springlike day - following a Sunday of alternate wind, hail, snow, rain and sunshine. The mountains are socked in with snow, and the rocks are literally bursting with water from unseen fissures.

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 Spring resolution to click on The Hunger Site every day.

In The Community: We have a new design at Hockaday Museum of Art's Website! I will continue to integrate our new logo into the various active pages. This project was interrupted by my recent illness -- took me a couple of hours to reconstruct what I'd done four weeks ago, and undo the mistakes I'd made when I was sick.

Media Watch: Book TV had a panel discussion at the University of Chicago about plagiarism with author Jonathan Lethem, jurist Richard Posner, faculty member Francoise Meltzer, and moderator Lawrence Weschler. There are reasonable guidelines in Academia and Journalism (although they are violated constantly), but when it comes to Art the subject gets interestingly vague. Lethem asserted and re-asserted that all creativity comes from somebody's influences, mostly because it's a fact. Issues like copyright infringement have an important place, though, and there are currents of social hysteria within the subject too. The discussion ended without any conclusions.

If this is Art -- count the influences!


All-50's starlet Claudia Barrett swoons in the arms of stuntman George Barrows, dressed as the helmeted pseudo-simian Robot Monster in Phil Tucker's campy classic, filmed in Griffith Park around 1953. Barrows himself may be about to swoon in that monkey suit if it's summer in L.A! (Some early Willis O'Brien dinosaur footage is spliced in the film here and there, if ya' watch for it.)