As the Temptaions once sang: Oh how I wish that it would RAIN! Let it RAIN... Red skies at morning -- forest fire warning. Red skies at night -- diffused f%@#in' light. Three Whitetail Deer ran in front of me at Dry Bridge last night. What were those white ducks we saw -- escaped domesticates?

Remembering my friend Georgio 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
UPDATED! 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!
Read my latest Spitfires in Context essay.

Charity Alert: Make a resolution this Summer to click on The Hunger Site every day.

In The Community: Special events at the Hockaday Museum of Art will start up next week, and continue to Labor Day Weekend. I'm going to be hauling stage risers between Whitefish and Kalispell after next weekend for Music & Museum Sunday, August 26 -- there are some things about performing arts that I do NOT love. Wonder if there's some of those things closer into town?

Media Watch: Besides the TV and Radio being full of forest fire updates --
Ridiculous -- The VERY silly Epic Movie on DVD. Parody is often considered the lowest form of comedy, and this flick provided no proof to the contrary. The funniest moment for me was the Mutant Academy sign saying "Home of the Wolverines." (If you are an X-Men fan you'll get the joke.) Carmen Elektra as a "nude" blue mutant was OK, and Narnia adaptations deserve all the derision they get and more.
Sublime -- Magpie collective workshop week -- August 27-31 in Amsterdam, Holland
August 27 Monday 19:00-21:00
BRAIN STUDIES OT301 health studio - 2 euros
Brain Studies is a laboratory initiated by Sylvain Meret for performing artist. The aim is to confront different disciplines which involve a practice or an access to understanding the relationship between the body and the brain l(neuron sciences, hypnosis, clinical case study, meditation, cognitive science ect). Brain studies session's takes place through out the year. You can join the Brian studies mailing list to be up dated on sessions that take place and to receive reports about this work. In this lecture we will focus on how the brain works when we perform and improvise by articulating the different organisations of the brain: the low brain (the reptilian brain) that we have in common with basic animals in the evolution - the middle brain (mammalian brain) that we have in common with more evolved animals - the third brain (the neo cortex) the most recently evolved part of the brain found only in human beings. We will also discuss the duality of right and left brain (reason and intuition)
August 28 Tuesday and August 30 Thursday 13:00-14:00
WONDERLAND OT301 studio 1 - 4 euros (children for free)
The performance moves from being FOR the children to being WITH the children and offers them a carefully guided adventure of the senses and the imagination. Wonderland performances take place through out the year every last Sunday of the month at the OT301 studio 1. These two performances are placed within the Magpie collective workshop week in order to pen their season to Amsterdam families.
August 29 - Wednesday 19:00 - 21:00
MAGPIE CONFERENCE studio 1 OT301 - 2 euro entrance
Lead by Vincent Cacialono - Developing and expanding existing knowledge about Improvisation practices, methodologies, critical languages and theories - Magpie has developed its' practice from the use of Instant Compositional notions traditionally seen in music which emphasize an interest in the ongoing study of composition, a fluid process, and continuum, intertwined with formal methods of creating. Improvisation in Magpie is used as a means to acquire high levels of complexity and depth in their performance work without high production cost. (Say what the people can expect to do at the conference - interactive or listen and watch?)
August 31 Friday 21:00
MAGPIE PERFORMANCE OT301 studio 1- 5 euros (3 sets)
Music: Mary Oliver (violin), Michael Moore (winds), Cor Fuhler (electronics), Wilbert de Joode (counter bass), Yannis Kyriakides (electronics), Colin McLean (electronics), Andy Moor(electric guitar), Rosemarie Heggen (counter bass)
Dance: Alexandra Manesse, Makiko Ito Katie Duck, Masako Noguchi, Vincent Cacialono, Kyungsun Beak, Sharon Smith, Sylvain Meret, Martin Sonderkamp, Michael Schumacher
Light: Ellen Knops
September 1 Saturday 15:00
Improvisation Saturday sessions / Studio 7 eerste nasaustraat 7 Amsterdam
Improvisation Saturday sessions are centralized by Magpie. The sessions are open to all dancer, performers and musicians who have a desire to meet, dance, play, discuss and collect. These sessions do not have a workshop leader. The rent is split between the groups of artists who come on the Saturdays.
On September 1 Saturday Magpie has been given the studio 7 to open the Saturday sessions for the season. No rent needed! Starts 15:00 and goes until people are tired.


Katie Duck and Michael Schumacher of Magpie Music/Dance -- all new digital image by ME from a video shot by Justin Morrison.

As the Coasters (Robins) once sang, we're ...diggin all the scenes at Smokey Joe's Cafe. Real clouds and very intermittent rain, but the low pressure keeps smoke out of our eyes! (Look at the picture near the bottom of this post.)

Remembering my friend Georgio 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
UPDATED! 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!
Read my latest Spitfires in Context essay.

Charity Alert: Make a resolution this Summer to click on The Hunger Site every day.

In The Community: Workaday tasks at the Hockaday Museum of Art until the poetry reading next week. The new building at the community college is taking a lot of my day, but we see progress as we work. The new theater space is ready for shows, and I saw one tonight -- Play On, about a fractious group of actors in an ill-starred amateur production. The Current Events video I shot around their rehearsals last week is running on local cable TV now.

Media Watch: Condensed from DailyKos.com:
Collateral damage, the 35W bridge, and the value of theater by Leggy Starlitz Tue Aug 07, 2007 at 11:18:20 AM PDT
It was August 2, 2007, the official first day of the Minnesota Fringe Festival. At 10pm, my wife and I went to the Southern Theater in Minneapolis to see our first show of the Fringe - 62, by the Third Rabbit Dance Ensemble. John Munger, the artistic director, took the stage, and announced that due to recent events, they would not be performing their usual opening number, deeming it too lighthearted and silly for our heavy hearts that day. A tear formed at the corner of my eye, unbidden...Twenty hours earlier and some 200 yards away from the Southern Theater, the 35W bridge over the Mississippi River had collapsed. None of us in that room knew how many of our fellow citizens were still in the rubble, crushed in their cars or drowned in the river. None of us in that room knew for sure that no friends or relatives or aquaintances or friends of friends were dead. Perhaps some in the room knew someone who was still missing, or someone who survived. For a moment, the Southern Theater was silent... we all, unintentionally, held our breath together.
After the show, outside the theater, it was unnaturally quiet. The usual roar of traffic on 35W was gone. Figures on the street were out of place... exhausted police and rescue workers, bleary journalists looking for a quiet beer. Trucks with satellite uplinks were parked in the alleys. Half a block down the street, a road repair truck with a ROAD CLOSED sign blocked the Washington Street onramp to 35W northbound, yellow police tape strung behind it to fend off pedestrians...
So now we know what the thing we call "collateral damage," in other contexts, really feels like. A bridge is gone, as abruptly as if bombs had dropped. Different causes and circumstances of course, but comparable consequences in real peoples’ lives.
To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, a bridge out with numerous dead and severely wounded is a bridge out with numerous dead and severely wounded is a bridge out with numerous dead and severely wounded.
Think about it. If you live in Minneapolis, or have sympathy for those of us who do, think about how it must feel if your local bridge is destroyed by an American bomb. The same concerns come to mind... are your friends and loved ones all right? Did anyone you know die? Did you drive over that bridge yourself earlier in the day? And now, an American bridge has fallen - not from bombs, but from the negligence and incompetence of the same government that bombs bridges elsewhere. Are we anything but "collateral damage" to those in Washington? Do they feel our pain?
Left there, this seems little more than an existential crisis. We fear and we grieve, but the problem is so large, and we are so small.
How do we relieve ourselves of this pain?

John Munger gives us an answer ... In this painful time let us remind ourselves that during the siege of Sarajevo about 15 years ago one of the few activities that persisted and continued through the siege was the theaters. People actually risked their lives from sniper fire to attend performances. Almost none of those performances could possibly have been of the highest imaginable caliber, nor lavishly produced, nor commercially proven popular vehicles. That’s how badly the citizens of Sarajevo needed the spiritual sustenance that comes from the profound shared communal experience of live performance. That’s one of the things they valued enough to take as it comes, warts and all.

And this, I think, is the source of much of the existential crisis of American society. How many people go to see locally produced plays anymore, or dance, or concerts? When is the last time YOU saw a show? And when is the last time you watched something dreadfully stupid on television? ...the artists don't care that no one else cares, or at least they don't let it stop them. People write poems about their childhood and read them to a half-dozen other slam poets in some coffeehouse. They stage Shakespeare in community centers and church basements. They grab guitars and play their hearts out to the drunks over at the bar. They weld sculptures together in the garage and scatter them all over the yard. They speak out because they must speak out....
We live in a world where bridges may just fall out from underneath us. That fear, that grief, that anger, it has to go SOMEWHERE. Here in Minneapolis, we're blessed. We have the Minnesota Fringe Festival, the largest unjuried theater festival in the country...On sunday night, we watched KIPO!, a show of songs and dances from Tibet, produced beautifully and authentically by our local Tibetan community. At the end of the show, we were reminded that literally millions of Tibetans have been killed, and they are not allowed to perform these songs and dances in their homeland, or to honor His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Here, in America, they have the freedom to preserve their culture, waiting for the day when Tibet is free again and they can sing and dance on the roof of the world.
Some years ago, I was lucky enough to catch a reunion tour by Plastic People of the Universe, the famous underground rock band from Czechoslovakia. Milan Hlavsa, the bassist, had the most disfigured nose I have ever seen. It looked like someone had chained him to a wall and beaten him half to death, then left it to heal unset. Which is probably exactly what happened. The injustice this band faced for the crime of rocking led Vaclav Havel to write Charter 77, and ultimately led to the Velvet Revolution in 1989, when Czechoslovakia became a free nation. Remember, in the 1970s, you could be beaten or jailed for even SEEING a concert by the Plastic People of the Universe. People went anyway.
Art is freedom - whether or not you live in a "free country" where you can say what you like. Those who, quite literally, hate freedom (although they often love to use the word), hate art as well. When they look for someone to scapegoat and persecute, someone to strike fear into the hearts of citizens, artists are at or near the top of their list. That's why artists are the targets of the Commmunists, the Nazis, the fundamentalist mullahs and ministers.
... publicly performed art is community, and compassion. When we go see a show, we see the rest of the audience as well, and we share an experience with them - even if they're different from us. And we share what the artists feel as well. And when we experience the feelings of others, we feel compassion, and togetherness, and community. But compassion and community are ALSO the enemies of those who wish to control us. Besides keeping us afraid, they must keep us divided as well. When we're together with others in our community, we're less afraid of them, and also less afraid of those we haven't met yet. This is why They would rather have you watching television... it keeps you AWAY from your community, keeps you from feeling connection with and compassion for your neighbors. It keeps us divided, as we passively absorb "entertainment" in our living rooms, behind locked doors and privacy fences, angry and alienated and afraid...So go! See a show! See a local band. Watch a play. Watch a dance show. Listen to a poetry slam. And not some famous big-name touring act, but someone LOCAL. Someone who lives in your town, someone who shares your experiences... someone who is also afraid that someone they know might be lost in the ruins of a fallen bridge.



Forest fire smoke pours into the Flathead Valley from Thompson Falls, about 150 miles away -- looking southwest from the western city limits of Kalispell near sunset August 3, 2007. Photo by ME!

The air is officially hazardous in Flathead Valley today because of the forest fire smoke. Governor Schweitzer has declared an emergency, and some communities are being evacuated as I write this. They are having the same troubles just north of us in Banff National Park too. Smokey Bear is even wearing a respirator!
UPDATE: Towards late afternoon, the barometer started to drop, a wind blew from the Southwest, and the smoke rose above our heads. One could see long distances, including the numerous plumes from the fires. There are some big rolling clouds overhead, and they are welcome to rain on us!

Remembering my friend Georgio 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
UPDATED! 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!
Read my latest Spitfires in Context essay.

Charity Alert: Make a resolution this Summer to click on The Hunger Site every day.

In The Community: I made a display book of Great Northern Railway calendars for the Hockaday Museum of Art. They are monthlies from 1928 to 1932, with a few gaps. These calendars are famous for Winold Reiss' portraits of resident Blackfeet -- they were employed by Glacier National Park as greeters before the Great Depression and Going To The Sun Road changed everything in the mid-30's. Later, Great Northern Railway calendars became single-page posters, but still featured Reiss' portraits. We will have this book available for public perusial as soon as a few more things are done.

Media Watch: The new Flash Gordon Sci-Fi Channel series is scheduled to start on August 10. I have NO expectations for it at all, but if they do a good job, I'll be pleased and surprised. The idea of Space, as some kind of a freebooting Spanish Main out of Rafael Sabatini -- with swords, ray guns, and rockets was already an anachronism by the time I was born. During the mid-50's I enjoyed a pale imitation of Flash called Space Patrol in Kindergarten and 1st Grade, but somehow I missed out on Rocky Jones and Tom Corbitt, Space Cadet where I lived. Speaking of pale imitations, male model Steve Holland played Flash Gordon in an authorized TV version of King Features' space hero. Unfortunately, EVERY expense was spared in the production, and it was a laughing-stock. The Buster Crabbe serials were television staples in those days, so Flash came out second-best to himself on the tube.
Flash's original creator Alex Raymond had quit the the strip before I was born, and his assistant/replacement Austin Briggs was long-gone by the 50's too. Dan Barry's daily comic was well-drawn by an army of ghost-artists, but unimaginativly written. Mac Raboy's once-beautiful Sunday page became sloppier with each passing year until his death in 1968. Al Williamson and other first-rank Comics artists tried to revive Flash's popularity, but they struggled -- despite excellent work on their part, and well-received reprints of Raymond's originals by the Nostalgia Press. Jim Keefe was the last newspaper artist to make a go of re-creating the magic of the mythos, and his Flash Gordon is still syndicated as reprints.
Around 1980, in the wake of Star Wars, a big-budget Flash Gordon feature came out with colorful supporting actors like Topol, Max Von Sydow, Brian Blessed, Timothy Dalton, and the great Richard (Riff-Raff) O'Brien -- however, colorless Sam Jones was the star, and TV clock-puncher Melody Anderson sleepwalked as Dale. Italian model Ornella Muti LOOKED good as Princess Aura, but her clothing ads were sexier than the footage in that film. The script was so unfocused that everyone's part seemed like a cameo. Queen's soundtrack was excellent, except for the embarrassingly scant and purile lyrics. Williamson did some promotional comic books for the flick, but DiLaurentis' movie wasn't good enough to create much excitement.
To tell the truth, the silly porn flick Flesh Gordon has been the best homage to the original Flash Gordon serials until now. Some long-time Science Fiction fans were able to "send up" their classic spaceman in style by working on the movie set -- maybe the Sci-Fi Channel's new project will create some demand for this neglected labor of "love" as a contrast of some sort.

George Clinton & The P-Funk All Stars are doing a VERY short tour out west, but nowhere near me or Montana:
Aug. 11 - Santa Fe Muzik Festival, Santa Fe, NM
Aug. 16 - San Manuel Casino, Highland, Ca.
Aug. 17 - Orleans Casino, Las Vegas, NV
Aug. 18 - Greek Theatre, L.A., Ca.


One example of a Great Northern Railway calendar by Winold Reiss from the time period of the Hockaday's recently-acquired collection. For other examples of Reiss' varied artwork visit THE REISS PARTNERSHIP.