Clouding over and trying to snow in the Flathead Valley -- there was enough to make the morning commute dangerous yesterday, but it all melted by noon. A well-meaning young man dumped his bicycle right behind me on the slippery road yesterday in the early AM. Luckily he was uninjured and got right back up before anybody slid into him. I have new tires, but still felt unsteady making that same turn -- I know I fishtailed a little.

Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from Spanish Town, Jamaica; Bordeaux, France; Noisy-le-Grand on the Ile-de-France (Paris is big); Montreal, Quebec; Lurkers from Daily Kos; Duluth, Georgia; Vancouver, British Columbia; Frederick, Maryland; Emporia, Kansas; Albuquerque, New Mexico (see below); Copiap, Chile; Chesterland, Ohio; Palatine, Illinois and Morehead City, North Carolina.

New revisions 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 including my efforts on his Flash Gordon Resources Page -- along with actual creators like Alex Raymond, Al Williamson, and others!

Charity Alert: Play the FreeRice Game -- improve your vocabulary, and donate food to the United Nations. 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. BTW -- AIDtoCHILDREN.com is a bit simpler than FreeRice Game.

In The Community: The Hockaday Museum of Art's Autumn Salon has two more weeks to run. We will likely change Crown of the Continent a little, and continue Ace of Diamonds. The art run to Eastern Montana in December was revised again.
I'm finalizing my lecture this week on Black Music in the U.S.A. -- a half hour of basics, and an hour of FUNK!

Media Watch: Keith Jarrett playing Shostakovich piano pieces on Montana Public Radio -- absolutely brilliant! I've always liked Jarrett's compositions more than the old Soviet weasel's anyway, and he found the beauty within them, buried under the Stalinist safeness. I enjoy Prokofiev very much, so I have nothing against Soviet artists per se. If you wanted to get the late Frank Zappa's goat, all you had to do was compare him to Shostakovich.
Out of the blue, I got an email asking for permission to reprint my memory-piece about The Beatles White Album from Paul Ingles in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I said yes, and listened to the third installment of his White Album Listening Party last night. The program featured a very entertaining digital mashup combining BOTH versions of Revolution.
Later, I took a look at the Listening Party Web Site, and my words were transcribed there that very evening -- Paul made a slight revision though, and arranged my words to fit the order of the album. It was a good change and made my post more clear. I'm going to stick with my old version on this blog, though, because that was the way the DJ played the record in 1968.
The voice of the 19-year-old me, sitting in that parked car outside of the U of U football stadium, comes through over the gulf of time, possibly because I wrote it so fast. I was looking for fun and funny from The Beatles, plus musical innovations, and the White Album delivered those things to me in a double helping.
I see the voice of contemporary me creeping-in with words of anxiety about John Lennon. At that time I thought he was just sardonic -- I had no real awareness about the serious challenges he faced in his life then.
Personally, my favorite musician at the time was the mercurial Michael Bloomfield, and my favorite groups were Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Grateful Dead -- guitar gods from the San Francisco Bay. Eric Clapton/Cream and Jimi Hendryx were just starting to claim the popularity they had earned over the previous year and a half, and Jeff Beck was asserting himself at last. Sly & the Family Stone created an wave of Funk that encircled the whole world, which the Temptations in turn sailed to the top of the charts. This was a period where neither the Rolling Stones or Beatles really led the way in Rock, but my young self didn't quite notice, or care, when there was so much music from other sources to hear and enjoy.

This basic composition of album art, advertising the University of Utah's campus-only radio station, inexplicably stayed up on the main kiosk in the Student Union Building for almost two years between 1968 and 1970, on the same floor with the bowling alley, barber shop, pool hall/card room (ahem), art gallery, movie theater, and the fast-food "Huddle" -- an epicenter of alternative culture and politics that rivaled the Cosmic Aeroplane. We planned more than a few anti-war rallies and demonstrations in sight of these same pictures, set up some outrageous art shows, and rediscovered Bride of Frankenstein and Busby Berkeley for ourselves. The elegantly nude cover of Paul Mauriat's Love Is Blue album imitated Wanda Embry's famous body-paint poster. These four portraits of the Beatles were all that came with the White Album, besides minimal liner notes.