It has been snowing in the mountains, but the valley has been mostly spared. There has been various forms of precipitation freezing on my %$#@! car windows every morning this week, that's why I said MOSTLY spared. I had to scrape that $#@! off before I could drive to work.

Sitemeter Sez: Andjar, Spain; Louth, Ireland (My email works, Eavan!); Hillsboro, Oregon; Berrien Springs, Michigan; Dunnellon, Florida (again -- looking up Bernie Worrell); Great Falls, Montana; Singapore, watching George Clinton's video, and Casalpusterlengo, Italy.

ROCK against Reaganomics 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!
NEW --Launching NOW! Outre Space Cinema -- Featuring: 1930's Rocketry, Spitfires of the Spaceways and Cellulose to Celluloid, Flash Gordon in the Saturday Matinees and Sunday Comics -- UPDATED!





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: Keep that 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: The Auction of Miniatures is on the walls! All students are admitted FREE this year to the Hockaday Museum of Art, thanks to Pacific Steel & Recycling. We're also having a public preview party next week.
Check out Fall for Glacier too -- a fundraiser for several programs that make Glacier National Park even better!

Media Watch: Trash A Go Go's second chance. That means Dancing With The Stars, if Homeland Security/ABC is peeking in. I won't put up with double-standards among the judges this season. The best dances over the last two nights featured ice-skater Kristi Yamaguchi and singer Mario. The next tier includes two more hunks, a Hollywood actress, and a Broadway actress. The bottom tier has a few interesting personalities -- Marlee Matlin is profoundly deaf, and it is remarkable that she dances at all. Priscilla Presley did alright, but I wasn't as impressed as the judges were. Monica Seles looks like she's grown taller since her Grand Slam days, but her footwork on the floor wasn't as good as her movement on the tennis court. The three male comics aren't going to last.

Turn and face the strange CHANGES! -- Arthur C. Clarke passed away at the age of 90 a few days back. There's a lot to say about him, and the media is loaded with it. For just one example, here's a diary from Daily Kos written by fellow SF writer David Brin. The comments below it tell of the many ways Clarkes' books and stories affected people around the world. There were other diaries on that site about Clarke as well, and they are worth looking at, for those who have the time.
I never met the great man. I missed my one chance to see him in the early 60's when he gave a lecture in downtown Salt Lake City. My friends Steve and Craig heard him speak, and observed him walking back to the Hotel Utah as they were waiting for the bus. Where was I? Probably attending what the LDS church called "Mutual Improvement Association," where my Boy Scout troop met. I lost out BIG TIME that night. To end this report on a positive note, Steve Kapsimalis was on the board of Salt Lake's Hansen Planetarium when I was last there. He was also in the U.S. Air Force, and nearly qualified as an astronaut. He was as avid a Science Fiction reader as I was, and we expanded our imaginative horizons with Clarke's books and other authors. Craig Dangerfield was the most discerning reader among us, and influenced our literary footsteps well.
Since others have done so, I guess I'll say which novels and stories of Arthur C. Clarke had the most effect on me. The City and the Stars is more than its episodic plot. There is poetry between the lines of what was sold as a paperback space novel. It can't say that I caught on to everything he was communicating on my first reading, but there was something there that called me back. His non-fiction essays caught my fancy more than his tales after that, although I loved being entertained by Childhood's End and his classic short stories. My high school physics teacher used Tales from the White Hart to help us understand the scientific method, and his strategy worked. We also got more laughs than normal out of an already-funny book.
The movie 2001, A Space Odyssey was something special -- a respectable SF movie is always welcome. Stanley Kubrick succeeded in stunning the whole world with his vision, and helped advance the art of photographic effects. Clarke's introduction to his novelization of the movie is an overlooked treasure. His anecdotes about working with Kubrick are modest and humorous. I especially like how he presented his 2001 book as "what I thought Stanley meant..."
I was a somewhat-active SF fan in those days and witnessed a 2001 controversy among writers and critics within the field I wanted to join as an illustrator. Analog Science Fact/Science Fiction regretted that the movie wasn't more like Clarke's book. Leading firebrand Harlan Ellison was loudly critical of Kubrick's film, but the general public didn't agree with him. Neither did I -- the subjectivity of Space Odyssey is one of its major strengths, as is it's unexcelled use of technology as art. What little plot exists may be called trivial or somewhat contradictory, but the BIG image is very powerful. I personally saw the minor plot-points as satire, since everybody was trying to deceive one another -- no wonder the computer went insane.
Ellison backed up his challenges to 2001 by editing two superb anthologies of Dangerous Visions. Stanislav Lev made his own SF movie as a defiant response -- unfortunately, it was too slow for most audiences to endure, but Solaris still succeeded as a work of art on its own. (See "respectable SF movie" above.)
I was pleased by the further success of Clarke's Rendevous with Rama, and I thought 2010 was remarkably bold in facing the madness of the Cold War by using the world-famous images from the venerable movie to mirror the stupidly destructive attitudes of the time. I believe it made a difference too. The popular success of SF at the time gave Clarke an audience of more than a billion people, for a start. The sobering calculations of Nuclear Winter were working their way into the minds of even the most selfish ruling elites. (Thanks to Carl Sagan, and important others like Andre Gromeko.) I believe that Clarke helped make it alright for a critical mass of humanity to think and feel differently and more positively. (When the flick followed, it only relayed a hint of 2010's vision. It was respectable in its way, and reasonably entertaining, although it missed being art.) Speaking of that period of time, here's one more link -- the late Carl Sagan praises Arthur C. Clarke in 1983.
Nobody's perfect -- the less said about Clarke's collaborations with less-than-stellar writer/editor Gentry Lee over the last decades of his life the better.


City and the Stars was a thoughtful revision of Clarke's first novel, Against the Fall of Night. The final image of City/Stars is the Earth being pondered from space. Arthur C. Clarke was co-anchor with Walter Cronkite during live TV coverage of the Apollo flights, which I watched whenever I could. The astronauts of Apollo 10 had cameras, and took this justly-famous image of our home planet while orbiting the Moon. (Slightly 3-Digitized from the NASA photo.)