Cool mornings, warm by mid-day. A doe and two spotted fawns by Woodland Drive.

Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from La Joya, New Mexico, Mexico itself; Vancouver, British Columbia; Louisville, Kentucky; Herndon, Virginia; Boxmeer, Holland; Greensboro, North Carolina; Birmingham, UK; New York City, New York; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Austin, Texas; Aliso Viejo, California; Cedar Park, Texas; Erie, Colorado and Cha, Colombia.

A shout-out to fellow Montana blogger ZenPanda from Great Falls!

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: 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.
Still getting ready for that visit by Charlie Russell scholars this upcoming week.

Ch-Ch-Changes: Nashville session guitarist Jerry Reed died earlier today. He was known for his own hit records, and appearances in movies like Smokey and the Bandit, but I think he deserves a LOT of credit for helping re-launch Elvis Presley's career in the late 60's.
He was also a background picker on the excellent, though obscure Bradley's Barn album by the Beau Brummels.


Listen HERE
The Beau Brummels' original drummer Jon Petersen recently passed away too -- Watch videos of Sal Valentino, Ron Elliot, Ron Meagher, Declan Mulligan, and Petersen at Valentino's own site.

Media Watch: Ian Tyson is coming to town, and Montana NPR is playing a couple of hours of Ian & Sylvia (Fricker)'s prodigious output of quality songs and good singing, including guitarist Amos Garrett and The Great Speckled Bird electric band. NICE!

Real Books: Great Balls of Fire -- An Illustrated History of Sex in Science Fiction by Harry Harrison (1977) I picked this odd oversized paperback at a garage sale. Harrison is one of Science Fiction's BEST authors, with an all-too-rare sense of humor, and productive imagination. Bill The Galactic Hero and Make Room, Make Room! were major events in my teenaged life, and still read well today. He became famous for The Stainless Steel Rat.
Great Balls of Fire is a ramble rather than a history or treatise, published at the time Star Wars tapped into a mass audience for S-F. Harrison is correct in noting Phillip Jose Farmer's The Lovers (1952) as a long-overdue crack in the dike of a genre that often wallowed in the swamps of commercial pulp literature through much of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.

Virgil Finlay was the dean of S-F illustrators for nearly thirty years.

There was a lot of laughing at obvious silliness and brass breastplates, but there were some paragraphs that were treasures, since they told about Comics and Sci-Fi during the 50's from an insider's point of view. (see quotes below)

Click for a larger image.
For good and bad, the juvenile Buck Rogers was a Science Fiction icon for over a generation -- here is one of young Frank Frazetta's covers (circa 1952) for the Famous Funnies reprint anthology series which was an early form of Comic Book, approaching the end of its run. About this same time, Harrison worked with Frazetta at Entertaining Comics -- founded by M.C. Gaines, who first re-bundled newspaper comics as magazines in depression-era New York. The company later evolved into Mad Magazine, thanks to Harvey Kurtzman (especially), Al Feldstein, and Bill Gaines.

The overt and covert sexual nature of many illustrations is more obvious in the comic books. They reached the zenith of success during and after the war ... Unlike the pulp magazines, the comics could be published with little or no restraints on their contents ... Many comic publishers were just black paint on an office door ... the editor's fee would be $100 an issue, and an equal cheeseparing budget for contents would be announced, a deadline declared. Agreed? Agreed ... For his fee the editor would contact other starving artists and writers who would work for the lowest fees ... In order to make both ends meet the editor would probably write and draw most of the magazine himself, then submit bills under different names ... most of the time the magazine went directly to the engraver -- after a careful count to see if there were the right number of pages ... So who cared what went into the comics? The answer is that no one did, really ... I was there, they can't con me ... There were, and are, no good writers in comics, just good artists.

Written by someone who worked his way out of those sweatshops to worldwide literary acclaim. These words were published just before writers like Timothy Truman, Allan Moore, and Frank Miller altered the course of the comics medium towards it's cinematic future. I think he was talking about the New York scene he knew twenty years earlier -- the best comic artists of the mid-70's seemed to justify Harrison's criticism by illustrating pretty dull, derivative stories in publications like Metal Hurlant or Vampirella, despite veneers of sexual frankness and rampant fetishism.

One illustration in Harrison's book was this exceptionally fine figure study by Enrique (Enrich) Torres, without all that darn lettering.
Images via GCD for academic use -- characters belong to the copyright holders.