We need some rainfall -- no doubt about it. It is hot, but the place I'm renting is cool from all the foilage around it. Deer were jumping the rock walls at Conrad Mansion last evening.

Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from Levallois-Perret, France; Buffalo, New York; Columbus, Ohio; Ballston Spa, New York; Toledo, Ohio; Clifton, New Jersey; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Topeka, Kansas; London, England; Doorn, Holland; Maplewood, New Jersey; Pompano Beach, Florida; Newport News, Virginia; Sammamish, Washington; Amarillo, Texas; Bolton, UK, and Blythe, California.

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: The college will be starting Autumn Semester in earnest -- just as soon as Summer Semester ends in equal earnest.
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.
Museums & Music -- our final Sunday of the Summer will be a party spread between the other two county museums.

Road Photos, featuring THE ROAD:

Click for a larger image.
US Highway 2 through Northern Montana -- parallel to the Burlington/Santa Fe/Great Northern Railway tracks, also known as The Highline. It goes all the way from Seattle to Minneapolis, but after ten hours, I turned south at Culbertson to go to Sidney, which was MUCH greener.

Media Watch: Did I write about satellite radio on my trip last weekend? Too bad -- I'm writing about it now! The rolling windswept plains weren't much for scenery, but they served me well for listening to Jazz and Blues. Gary Burton was as good a host as he was before, playing some music by Carla Bley with a personal story about this great contemporary composer. Charles Mingus continues to satisfy the deepest depths of my soul, as he did when I discovered him for myself at the age of sixteen. John Coltrane and Miles Davis were just magical in their creativity. One special treat was Muddy Waters singing The Blues Had A Baby (And They Named It Rock & Roll) another was the Newport Jazz Festival recording of Got My Mojo Working from 1957 -- one more tune I enjoyed in my teenaged years, thanks to the Salt Lake Public Library.
The second hop between Sidney and Lewistown had its musical highlight with a performance of Puccini's La Bohème from 2003. I prefer the interplay between wild Musetta and Marcello rather than doomed Mimi and pathetic Rudolfo, but my vote doesn't count. Gloom seems to dominate Opera. It is very interesting to me that Arturo Toscanini conducted the premiere in 1896 -- his life overlapped mine slightly, and his very NAME meant Classical Music when I was a kid. In the 50's, Opera was often treated as an artifact of an indefinitely distant past, even though Puccini had passed away only three decades previously.
As sad evidence, Billy Budd (1951) by Benjamin Britten was on the radio the following day. Whatever the motivation for it, that English-language drama sounded like a second-rate comedy troupe's take-down of an opera -- the music is atonal, the words are cringingly melodramatic, or outright laughable, despite its tragedy and the subtext of repressed homosexuality. Gotta change the station -- Ahhhh, Duke Ellington does the trick! They still program a lot of Jackie Wilson on Channel 5 too -- one of the BEST singers who ever graced the airwaves.
One more fun anomaly came to my ears on the BBC -- a correspondent told about The Knight of Sainte-Hermine, a long-sought novel by Alexandre Dumas Sr. The great popular author was writing one more serial before he died, and quite a few episodes had been published in French newspapers -- well they finally found his lost manuscript, and some brave soul will attempt to finish the story.

You mean Three Musketeers Dumas?

Click for a somewhat larger image.
My favorite Constance -- Raquel Welch in a digital jam from a couple of modeling sessions, plus her excellent acting in Richard Lester's Three (Four) Musketeers.

Perfect summery weather -- however there's a lightning-caused forest fire southwest of us, along the fastest road to Idaho and Washington. I've seen almost a half-dozen spotty fawns around the area since I got back. Last Monday I drove up to Glacier National Park -- the Going To The Sun Road is in the midst of reconstruction, but it is still fun!

Roadwork in Glacier Nat'l Park on Monday, Aug. 11, 2008 -- they've taken all the old asphalt away, and have blown up a few overhanging rocks. This section, between the Loop and Haystack, will be repaved in September.

Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from Dallas, Texas; East Lansing, Michigan; Ipswich, England; Louth, Ireland; Fort Worth, Texas; Port Hawkesbury, Nova Scotia; Fairfax, Virginia; Stratford, Connecticut; Reykjavk, Iceland; New York City, New York; Cascade, Montana; Tacoma, Washington; Charlottesville, Virginia; Silver Spring, Maryland; Seattle, Washington; Chicago, Illinois; Morgantown, West Virginia; Great Falls, Montana (stayed awhile); Charlotte, North Carolina; Rio De Janeiro, Brazil; Los Angeles, California; Cape Town, Western Cape; Oxford, England; Toronto, Ontario and Cardiff, Wales.

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.

Media Watch: So You Think You Can Dance showed some excellent choreography this season. The announcer and judges showed some personality for a change, and my favorite dancer won the grand prize. In fact, their final ten contestants were all first-rate dancers.

More Road Photos:

Click to enlarge images
Charlie and Nancy Russell's home (L) and art studio (R) in Great Falls, Montana. Part of the Charles M. Russell Museum in a pleasant neighborhood on the north side of town.

Three days on the road, but I finally made it home tonight! I saw many Rough-Legged Hawks, a Pheasant couple, Mule Deer, Horses and Cattle along the way. Sidney, Montana is a remarkably pleasant community on the North Dakota border -- Sandy and Leanne of the MonDak Heritage Center were very friendly and helpful to me. Lewistown was unusually stately for a Central Montana town, with a tidy business district, well-kept neighborhoods, plus plenty of shady trees and water -- many thanks to Corinna and Jeniffer at the museum! I saw ONE more in Great Falls this morning -- the Charles M. Russell Museum, which includes the old cowboy's home and studio.

Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from Buenos Aires, Argentina; Whittier, California; Sudbury, Ontario; Fairfield, California; Kearny, New Jersey; Clarksville, Tennessee; Crawley, UK; Missouri City, Texas; Rotterdam, Holland; Mesa, Arizona; Meriden, Connecticut; Winston Salem, North Carolina (lookin' for the P-FUNK!); Sarnia, Ontario; Cherry Hill, New Jersey; Spring, Texas; San Antonio, Texas; Lake Havasu City, Arizona and Chattanooga, Tennessee (Choo-choo Ch-boogie!)

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: My mad dash to Sidney, Montana at the far East end of Montana for the Hockaday Museum of Art is DONE! The next two transport trips for Cawdrey's show won't be near as intense.
Our current exibits are 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.

Media Watch: Watched old movies as I winded down from the road or tried to sleep.

I put up with a couple of WWII movies -- one was a strange technicolor flick about Navy flight surgeons in 1940 San Diego starring Errol Flynn and Fred McMurray. Half the science they spoke about was probably classified during the next twelve months.
Guadalcanal Diary was a sad, jingoistic, approximation of one of the most critical military adventures in world history. The book, Guadalcanal Diary by Richard Tregaskis, was written by what we'd call an "embedded" reporter today. The Landmark Books version I read in 6th grade left a lot of the desperation and horror untold, but allowed some reality to remain between the covers. The movie from 1943 was as numbing as novacaine, and wasn't particularly entertaining either. There were many better war movies made in those days -- even some fairly crappy ones were better than this.
This series of pitched battles over a forward airbase, hurriedly cleared by Imperial troops in the jungles of the Solomon Islands, and seized by the USA, resulted in massive losses of irreplacable troops and ordinance on the Japanese side, but practical training, hard-won intelligence, and successful templates for amphibious assaults on the Allied side -- but the back-and-forth took most of a year, and the US could have been defeated at several junctures, before its industrial might was fully mobilized.
The miracle of Midway loomed large, since a sudden lack of aircraft carriers provoked the Japanese attempt to extend the reach of their ground-based planes -- nobody guessed that America's methodical response would eventually doom the whole Empire.

I also caught parts of two Doris Day films in the morning -- a very early effort from the year I was born called My Dream Is Yours. It was pretty bad, although Bugs Bunny made an appearence, and Eve Arden was her always-excellent self. TCM also showed Girl In The Glass Bottomed Boat (1966) -- Doris Day was 42 years old, and no girl. She had a grown son who was producing first-rate albums for Columbia Records. Whomever produced this flick made it a peep show featuring undignified glimpses of her unclothed body. (Hopefully using a stunt double at crucial moments.) Her movie career was starting to fall apart because of changing times and bad management decisions. She had earlier stepped into Marilyn Monroe's final role in a dreadful remake of My Favorite Wife.

Doris Day in her mermaid costume from The Glass Bottomed Boat. To be fair, she was in excellent physical shape, and looked strong, vital, and healthy, whatever they made her wear. This insensitive, sexist movie was more victimization than comedy. The knockabout humor was sub-slapstick, and the jokes were too humiliating to be fun. Despite Doris Day's bad experiences as censorship faded, my generation was capable of accepting "older women" as "sex symbols." Carol Baker, Angie Dickenson, and Anne Bancroft come to mind. Jayne Mansfield was well-known, and would have had more popular success if her movies hadn't been so exploitive and bad. Mitzi Gaynor, Julie Newmar, and Cyd Charisse were on TV just enough for us to know they were around -- but the nightclub scene where they thrived withered as the 60's ended.
The movie-going public included millions of teenagers like myself who had grown up seeing Doris Day as a star from our moms' generation. The more discerning of us knew her as a fine singer, but her style of Pop was passe in 1966. (I grew to defend her fabulous music, and still do!)
Most importantly for our drive-in demographic, the LAST thing we wanted to see on our movie screens were nude and semi-nude pictures of our MOMS -- especially a mom who had projected such a sugary image over the years. Boat was sold as a supposed spy flick, and Doris Day as Honor Blackman seemed embarassingly wrong.

Exhibit A1 -- Honor Blackman circa 1966
My favorite of all of 007's female co-stars. Some actresses were better than others at being comfortable in their skin.