It has felt more like Spring as April winds down -- mild days, but unpredictably cold nights. The birdbath even froze one morning! The damn Blogger page was malfunctioning Sunday, so I'm posting this a day late.
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 ArchiveTheater, 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 Spring finally gets into gear to click on
The Hunger Site every day.
In The Community: We are getting more ambitious with plans for the
Hockaday Museum of Art's Website.
Media Watch: The History Channel showed a couple of off-beat WWII documentaries called
Weird Weapons. Among their stories were early ICBMs, prototypes of the ISS, and a shuttle-like Space Glider. One particularly mean-spirited idea from Germany was the Space Mirror, which was reconsidered by the USA during the Vietnam War -- it's an orbiting device for concentrating sunlight on an unfortunate spot on Earth. Just because we can do things like this doesn't mean we should -- the hemisphere-wide light pollution alone would be intolerable, much less the stupidity of making our world less inhabitable. The enormous amounts of money spent "weaponizing" science and technology are serious indictments against the wisdom of our so-called enlightened modern societies.
They also had a scary show about Gen. William T. Sherman and his march through the Confederacy. War is one crime after another, and Sherman was a war criminal. Whatever contributions his crimes had on the Union victory, they were still crimes, and had social effects which poisoned our entire country for most of another century, as did the crimes of Slavery, and treason of the southern states in taking up arms to defend their stupid and evil system. I guess I should say something about Sherman's violence against Native Americans after the Civil War, but the whole subject is too depressing for me right now.
Following David Lean's first movie as director, with the great over-actor Robert Newton no less, TCM played some low-budget drive-in howlers from the 50's -- I myself enjoyed seeing a full-length print of
Plan 9 From Outer Space for a change. Most of the time it has been trimmed to fit TV time schedules -- without the average viewer noticing or caring. I will always defend Edward D. Wood Junior's ingenuity, but his mistakes are legion, and he was nonchalant past the point of carelessness. Tim Burton's bio-pic
Ed Wood was more about the last days of Bela Lugosi than Wood, plus Burton sacrificed many facts to the idol of cinematic drama. The movie ends with the premiere of
Plan 9 -- Johnny Depp, as Eddie, says "This is what I'll be remembered for!"
Well, that sentiment is mostly correct, but Wood's work has also been re-evaluated over the years, and I'm not the only one who agrees that he was far from the worst director of all time. The third movie in TCM's "cult" festival was Dan Kellogg's
Killer Shrews, which was almost unspeakably dull -- lacking even enough inadvertent humor to leaven the indigestible mess. It's predecesor,
Bride of the Monster starred Bela Lugosi and Tor Johnson, and Wood overcame the inexperience of himself and his crew to piece together a tolerable product for the market and times. The laughable, but still-bearable sequel
Night of the Ghouls was never released, but he wrote the screenplays for some wacky exploitation flicks like
The Violent Years and
Orgy of the Dead. The book
Nightmare of Ecstasy pinpoints Wood's morbid alcoholism as the key to his failures in life, by means of oral reminisces from the people who knew him, and also loved him.
Book TV gave me a moment of optimism when Lecturer/Asst. Dean Schuyler (pronounced Skyler) of the University of Virginia performed some research which demonstrated the power of women's votes after 20th Amendment, contrary to anecdotal "common wisdom" that they simply mirrored men's votes. (More about this subject, and the efficacy of voting itself, in the future!) Another program spoke about Manhattan during Prohibition -- more anecdotes, for sure, but statistics have bourne out the fact that more people of all classes in the US drank alcohol AFTER the 18th Amendment, and the Volstead Act tried to legislate one of Humankinds oldest vices/pleasures. The humorist Robert Benchley was mentioned as an example. (Nothing was said about his famous literary ally Dorothy Parker, or the rest of the Algonquin Round Table, but they were over-romanticized heroes of booze-as-inspiration afficianados -- similar to the drug-fueled Beats and Pranksters of later generations, like mine.)
EVERY Day is Earth Day!('cause we can't live anywhere else)
Mother Earth, as portrayed with the aid of an anonymous friend and sometime model. Our Earth needs all the filial devotion it can get!
Digital reinterpretation from the original image by M.E.
