Extremely snowy weather has spread over both sides of the Continental Divide -- I am rescheduling the East Montana Art Run when we get clear roads. A pair of Raccoons visited us during our Monopoly game earlier tonight, eating the seeds and peanuts we put out for Magpies, Flickers, and Blue Jays.



Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from Louth, Ireland (Dammit, Chris, Rachelle, Roseanne, or is it Eavan? Leave a bloody comment!); Kosice, Slovakia; Brno, Czech Republic; Toronto, Ontario; Whitefish, Montana; Vancouver, British Columbia, and Schenectady, New York. Visiting our Spitfires were -- Madrid, Spain; Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio; Rochdale, UK; North Arlington, New Jersey; Whitchurch-Stouffville, Ontario; Blackwood, New Jersey; Mobile, Alabama; Westford, Massachusetts; Bangkok, Thailand; Dayton, Ohio; Bern, Switzerland; Riga, Latvia; London, UK; Queretaro de Arteaga, Mexico; Morristown, New Jersey, and Plain City, Ohio.

Watch for 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 is getting ready for new shows. We will likely change Crown of the Continent a little, and continue Ace of Diamonds. The art run to Eastern Montana is officially SNOWED OUT -- white-out conditions on the roads to the east, high winds and winter snow storms.

Media Watch: Julie Taymor's production of Mozart's Magic Flute on the Metropolitan Opera broadcast. I have seen most of it on PBS, and it certainly is a thing to SEE! Wonderful masks and dancing creatures, plus the translation of the libretto is fun and easy to understand. They were hyping Taymor's DVD all through the show, and mentioning that some of the Met's recent High Definition broadcasts were available on DVD too.
Derek Jarman's stylized cinema version of The Tempest (1980) -- starring playwright/actor Heathcote Williams as Prospero, prolific actor/musician Toyah Willcox as Miranda, blue-skinned David Meyer as her Prince Ferdinand, Karl Johnson as a smouldering, anxious Ariel, and Lindsey Kemp's fellow mime/actor Jack Birkett as a damn ugly Caliban. The penultimate scene featured Elisabeth Welch singing Stormy Weather (Tempest/Storm -- get it?) with a dignity that did great honor to Ethel Waters and herself -- ten years earlier she'd starred on Broadway in Fosse's Pippen.
Some to-do has been made about gay imagery in Jarman's Tempest. Besides some frontal male nudity at the beginning, where the obviously freezing Mr. Meyer wades onto a COLD Scottish beach with his willie more prominent than I'd expect under circumstances which would normally shrivel a common male organ, there's very little else that seems to be exclusively homoerotic. Ms. Willcox displays her fullsome breasts soon afterward, with water nearby also, but she's inside by a roaring fire. Maybe the campy scene with Alonzo's sailors dancing around in crewman's whites counts, although I miss any eroticism whatsoever in that clumsy sequence -- it leads into Ms. Welch's song, after all. Compared to Jarman's homosexually-charged fantasy Sebastien, The Tempest could be made by a repressed hetero like Fellini himself. Yes, there are places where one may legitimately quibble -- Jarman's drunken castaways are certainly gay, but I think that particular image resides in Shakespeare's original text as well. The late Tudor theatre scene was as sexually ambiguous as the Royal courtiers who patronized the players. Women's roles were always played by men, and companies of boy actors were Shakespeare's strongest competitors.

Toyah Willcox is married to guitar genius Robert Fripp, and has had a long career singing, acting, and being on TV. Her characterization of Miranda was playful, dignified in her sensuality, and innocent, but she didn't get to speak lines like this:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.