First real winter snow yesterday -- about four or five inches, and a precipitous drop in temperature to zero degrees (F!)

Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from Inver Grove Heights, Minnesota; Roseland, Virginia; Orange, Connecticut; Brentford, UK (London); Milton, Ontario; Irapuato, Mexico; New Rochelle, New York; Bet Dagan, Isreal; Birmingham, Alabama; Manchester, UK; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Ottawa, Ontario; Edmonton, Alberta; Houston, Texas, Lpez Mateos, Mexico; Brooklyn, New York; Cleveland, Ohio; Pueblo, Colorado; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Bussigny, Switzerland; Ljubljana, Slovenia; Toronto, Ontario; Austin, Texas; Zagreb, Croatia; Barnard, Vermont; Tacoma, Washington; Saint Paul, Minnesota; Lynn, North Carolina (I once knew a North Carolinian named Lynn); Charlotte, North Carolina; Oakland, California, and Las Vegas, Nevada.

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 one more week 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 is finally set.

Ch-Ch-Changes: Talented model Bettie Page succumbed to pneumonia and heart failure at the age of 85. She was a prolific worker in the 1950's, and her clothed, semi-clothed, fetishistic, and nude images captured the imagination of millions in a pinup industry that literally flirted with illegality, as I've mentioned before.
Some of her work was destroyed in order to settle legal judgements, but the sheer volume of her prolific career survived in stacks of yellowing "men's magazines" that were rediscovered by her original fans' children.
Her sheer, raw talent created a sensation in the Post Punk era, and an informal underground appreciation society developed during the 80's -- exemplified for a start by artist Dave (Rocketeer) Stevens and extraordinary model/actor/entrepreneur Brinke Stevens. Page finally stepped up and acknowledged her work during the 1990's, making a career of signing commissioned art based on her remarkable photo sessions for the rest of her life.
There was a lot more in her personal history, both good and difficult, but she was a true artistic icon -- RIP.

Neon Betty -- a digital collage of several photos from the 50's, by ME, with implied tributes to various figurative artists like Andy Warhol, Pat Nagel, and Helmut Newton.
(Click to see a slightly larger image.)