It is a day of "white shadows" it is cold and frosty this morning -- where there are cast-shadows, the white frost makes a sharp-edged image on the ground.

Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from Middletown, Ohio; Richmond, Virginia; Buffalo, New York; Sana, Yemen; Addison, Illinois; Bronx, New York; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Newark, New Jersey; Brooklyn, New York; Tucson, Arizona; Holyoke, Massachusetts; Mexico City, Mexico; San Jose, Costa Rica; Meacham, Saskatchewan; Edmonton, Alberta; Dearborn Heights, Michigan; Sterling, Virginia; Toronto, Ontario; Kokomo, Indiana; Forestville, California; Ashburn, Virginia; Delmar, New York; Louth, Ireland; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Las Vegas, Nevada; Boca Raton, Florida; Tulsa, Oklahoma and Valencia, Spain.

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 is finally set.
My lecture this week on Black Music in the U.S.A. is been cut to less than an hour, so I'll concentrate on FUNK, since it brings the elements of Gospel, Blues, Jazz, Rock, and Hip Hop together.

Media Watch: "The Chess Players," AKA Shatranj Ke Khilari (1977) by Lifetime Achievement Oscar winner Sanjit Ray. It is a sumptuous costume drama set in Lucknow, India where the British East India Company deposed their puppet king Wajid Ali Shah in 1856. The two chess-playing protagonists let the foundations of their lives slide away from their control while indulging in their pleasures, just like the hapless king. There isn't much real plot, and the historical events surrounding the situation are rather didactically explained in English-language segments starring Richard Attenborough as a Scottish imperialist doing Lord Dalhousie's dirty work. The movie gets most of its power from the photography, costumes, sets, settings, and the main actors' slow realizations of unwanted changes in their lives.

Poet, Songwriter, and Patron of the Arts Wajid Ali Khan.
(Indian Muslims had no taboos against portraying people.)

There are subtexts too -- India's first war of independence started a year later, which the primary audience for Ray's movie would know about in detail -- including the story of Wajid Ali Khan's wife Begum Hazrat Mahal (one of many) leading a take-back of Lucknow, and declaring their 14 year old son Birjis Qadr the legitimate king for the duration of the so-called Sepoy Mutiny.
The resultant British annexation of the whole sub-continent as "The Raj" was just about the most bizarre episodes of the whole Imperial Era in the scale of its arrogance. The Indian National Congress formed a generation later in 1885 -- it may have taken awhile, and it wasn't very pretty, but the people finally took their country back by 1947 under the leadership of Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi, and other nationalists.