Another lovely spring day. Everything is greening up -- so much that I had to use my string trimmer yesterday.

Sitemeter Sez: Rajkot, in Gujarat State, India, and Boskoop, Holland.

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.





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: Hustling paintings back and forth today from the Hockaday Museum of Art.
Check out Fall for Glacier -- a fundraiser for several programs that make Glacier National Park even better!

Travel Tales: My out-and-back trip between Kalispell and Anaconda, Montana went very well. I stopped for Espresso in Missoula, and took a look through our sister Missoula Art Museum, housed in an expanded Carnegie Library, which just happens to sit adjacent to Missoula's very well-attended Saturday Market. There are many possibilities for walk-in traffic at their location. Alicia, the receptionist outlined some good ideas while we chatted briefly. MAM had a great display of the late David Shaner's ceramics -- they have much more display space than we had when we showed his work a few years back. I was also impressed by Molly Murphy's beadwork on the top floor.
It was an easy two-hour roll to Anaconda after that. The load-out went well, and was I ever ready to move about after driving all day! For music, I listened to a live Mozart opera from the Metropolitan Opera in NYC. When I couldn't hear the opera, I had Funkadelic on hand from the mid-70's. Let's see: Cosmic Slop; Standing On The Verge Of Getting It On; and Tales of Kidd Funkadelic, featuring my friend Michael Hampton, and his predecessor Eddie Hazel. Another friend of mine, Bernie Worrell was all over those albums, plus Parliament's Funkentelechy and the Placebo Syndrome. The very last Funkadelic album was Warner Brothers' Electric Spanking of War Babies, with contributions by Sly Stone, his classic bandmates, and cyber-pal Rodney "Skeet" Curtis. I played THAT through the Mission Valley on the way back. In addition I included some Blue Note Jazz, especially Art Blakey and Herbie Hancock.


Nancy Cawdrey's American Silk Road will grace the walls of Anaconda's old City Hall, now called the Copper Village Museum May 15, 2008 through June 15, 2008.

Further venues: MonDak Heritage Center Sidney, Montana July 8, 2008 through August 4, 2008; Lewistown, Montana Sep. 1, 2008 through Sep. 30, 2008; Liberty Village Arts Center, Chester, Montana Nov. 4, 2008 through Dec. 1, 2008; C.M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, Montana Jan. 3, 2009 through Feb. 27, 2009



(Above) A historical photo of Anaconda, Montana. The City Hall building I visited is in the distance at the left, and the smelter stack is further away at the right.

Just driving to this town brought up some old emotions of mine. I worked for five years at a copper mining operation twenty miles west of Salt Lake City, Utah when I first went to college. I can remember at least three episodes where I almost lost my life, and could dig up any number of unpleasant experiences that I'd rather forget. Kennecott Copper Corporation, my employer, was a competitor of Montana's Anaconda Company -- their mine was in Butte, with the smelter located a few miles away in Anaconda. Kennecott's mine was in Bingham Canyon, with the smelter about ten miles north, by the Great Salt Lake. I worked for their railroad, which hauled ore between the mine, the concentration mills, the smelter, and the refinery. I also spent some collegiate quarters at the Magna concentrator, and the smelter, facing heat, cold, dirt, and danger. They are still operating, but I am thankfully long gone.


Now and Then -- (L) One of Anaconda's hilltop smelters in the 50's. (R) Just an empty stack remains as a landmark today, recalling the times when untold tons of earth were crushed, melted, and rendered down into copper and other non-ferrous metals between 1886 and 1980, when the Anaconda Company shut their mines and related operations down. The polluted overburden still remains -- piled up on the foothills around town. When I was growing up, the combined populations of Butte and Anaconda exceeded the population of my hometown. They are less than a twentieth of Salt Lake City's size now.