SNOW! Bright and white, but it's a touch too warm for it to stick through tomorrow.

Sitemeter Sez: Winston Salem, North Carolina; Toronto, Ontario; Albuquerque, New Mexico and Louth, Ireland (Love To Ya' Eavan!)

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!





Many 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: Check into Terra Sigilata blog -- donate $$$ to cancer patients just by clicking onto the site. Keep that Resolution to click on The Hunger Site every day.

In The Community: The Hockaday Museum of Art features abstractionist George Gogas, our annual Children's Show, and local High School Art Show. I'm glad there wasn't much snow to shovel off this morning.
The Music of Carmen is the theme of one more Honors Symposium session tomorrow -- it's a ticketed event with the Glacier Symphony & Chorale.
Check out Fall for Glacier -- a fundraiser for several programs that make Glacier National Park even better!

Media Watch: The Metropolitan Opera was doing a Phillip Glass piece from 1979. There's as much to SEE as there is to HEAR, but I've always enjoyed Glass' music anyway.
I saw Shekhar Kapur's second Elizabeth movie with Cate Blanchett on video. It wasn't as bad as I feared, but I wouldn't call it a good movie either. Clive Owen was OK as Raleigh, and Geoffrey Rush was excellent as Lizzie's loyally psychopathic Komissar, but no amount of quality acting could have saved that sorry-assed script.
Sir Walter Raleigh is an interesting historical figure. It's JUST possible that he was Elizabeth I's lover, but he led his own rambunctious life with and without her favor. The movie packs too many events into the time before 1588, including some that didn't happen until later. I'm afraid that Raleigh's closeness to Good Queen Bess created many enemies for him, and they pounced after her death. Despite all of his other crimes, I doubt very much that he conspired against King James, but the fact that an aquaintance did was enough to send him back to the Tower of London for a decade or so. His brutal pirate attacks in America after his release convinced James' government to send him to the headman's block.
The movie mentions pirate Sir Francis Drake and Admiral Lord Howard once. Pirate John Hawkins and explorer Martin Frobisher are not mentioned at all. Whatever part Raleigh played in the desperate fight against Phillip II's Invincible Armada, it was not central to the campaign, despite the movie.
The defeat of the Armada was an object lesson in persistance -- the English and Dutch were outmanned and outgunned, but they prevented the Spanish invaders from achieving most of their goals just by fighting back. The all-important rendevous with the Duke of Parma never happened, and Drake's earlier raid on Cadiz meant there were fewer warships sailing against them too. The fireships scattered frightened Spanish captains, and when the weather turned bad, the fleet couldn't hold together as the English kept attacking. More than a third of the ships were eventually lost, and less than half of them returned to Spain.
The filmmakers blew their opportunity to make a cinematic drama of the Armada's fate, even though they tried to make hay out of Elizabeth's REAL speech at Tilbury:
I am come amongst you as you see at this time, not for my recreation and disport, but being resolved, in the midst and heat of battle, to live or die amongst you all - to lay down for my God, and for my kingdoms, and for my people, my honour and my blood even in the dust. I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king - and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which, rather than any dishonour should grow by me, I myself will take up arms ...
She wasn't exactly in harm's way at the time, but if Spain's luck had changed, they would have sailed right up the Thames Estuary, where she spoke those words.
I think this gang stuck with costumes and romance because they were easier to plot ala' Harlequin Books. The Godfather-like intrigue and violence came back from the previous movie because they'd gotten away with it before.
Not that the Elizabethan Age wasn't cruel or violent, it was! Mary, Queen of Scots, was as arrogant and double-dealing as the movie said, and the Armada was sent partly as retaliation for her execution. Phillip II might have been a heartless ideologue, but he wasn't an idiot, and his family's empire endured for over two more centuries, to the great misfortune of most of it's subjects.
After seeing Helen Mirrin's miniseries about Bessie, I'm pretty sure Kapur is hustling the money for a third movie as I write this -- the rise and fall of Royal Cousin Essex, for sure, with maybe Bill Shakespeare and Burbage's theaters around London Bridge thrown in for good measure, perhaps. I hope I'm wrong.
In the meantime, Cate Blanchett still deserves Academy Awards for all her good acting!


Australian-born Cate Blanchett in an extensively-reworked image from a fashion modeling session. She's married with at least two children, and it's fun to acknowledge living actors with private lives that are private!