We need some rainfall -- no doubt about it. It is hot, but the place I'm renting is cool from all the foilage around it. Deer were jumping the rock walls at Conrad Mansion last evening.

Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from Levallois-Perret, France; Buffalo, New York; Columbus, Ohio; Ballston Spa, New York; Toledo, Ohio; Clifton, New Jersey; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Topeka, Kansas; London, England; Doorn, Holland; Maplewood, New Jersey; Pompano Beach, Florida; Newport News, Virginia; Sammamish, Washington; Amarillo, Texas; Bolton, UK, and Blythe, California.

Check out 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: The college will be starting Autumn Semester in earnest -- just as soon as Summer Semester ends in equal earnest.
Current shows at the Hockaday Museum of Art include Rails, Trails, and A Road -- honoring the 75th Anniversary of Going To The Sun Road in Glacier National Park, plus Ace Powell -- Ace of Diamonds and Native American Interpretations from our permanent collection.
Museums & Music -- our final Sunday of the Summer will be a party spread between the other two county museums.

Road Photos, featuring THE ROAD:

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US Highway 2 through Northern Montana -- parallel to the Burlington/Santa Fe/Great Northern Railway tracks, also known as The Highline. It goes all the way from Seattle to Minneapolis, but after ten hours, I turned south at Culbertson to go to Sidney, which was MUCH greener.

Media Watch: Did I write about satellite radio on my trip last weekend? Too bad -- I'm writing about it now! The rolling windswept plains weren't much for scenery, but they served me well for listening to Jazz and Blues. Gary Burton was as good a host as he was before, playing some music by Carla Bley with a personal story about this great contemporary composer. Charles Mingus continues to satisfy the deepest depths of my soul, as he did when I discovered him for myself at the age of sixteen. John Coltrane and Miles Davis were just magical in their creativity. One special treat was Muddy Waters singing The Blues Had A Baby (And They Named It Rock & Roll) another was the Newport Jazz Festival recording of Got My Mojo Working from 1957 -- one more tune I enjoyed in my teenaged years, thanks to the Salt Lake Public Library.
The second hop between Sidney and Lewistown had its musical highlight with a performance of Puccini's La Bohème from 2003. I prefer the interplay between wild Musetta and Marcello rather than doomed Mimi and pathetic Rudolfo, but my vote doesn't count. Gloom seems to dominate Opera. It is very interesting to me that Arturo Toscanini conducted the premiere in 1896 -- his life overlapped mine slightly, and his very NAME meant Classical Music when I was a kid. In the 50's, Opera was often treated as an artifact of an indefinitely distant past, even though Puccini had passed away only three decades previously.
As sad evidence, Billy Budd (1951) by Benjamin Britten was on the radio the following day. Whatever the motivation for it, that English-language drama sounded like a second-rate comedy troupe's take-down of an opera -- the music is atonal, the words are cringingly melodramatic, or outright laughable, despite its tragedy and the subtext of repressed homosexuality. Gotta change the station -- Ahhhh, Duke Ellington does the trick! They still program a lot of Jackie Wilson on Channel 5 too -- one of the BEST singers who ever graced the airwaves.
One more fun anomaly came to my ears on the BBC -- a correspondent told about The Knight of Sainte-Hermine, a long-sought novel by Alexandre Dumas Sr. The great popular author was writing one more serial before he died, and quite a few episodes had been published in French newspapers -- well they finally found his lost manuscript, and some brave soul will attempt to finish the story.

You mean Three Musketeers Dumas?

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My favorite Constance -- Raquel Welch in a digital jam from a couple of modeling sessions, plus her excellent acting in Richard Lester's Three (Four) Musketeers.