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.)

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.

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.

Pearl Harbor Day is followed by the anniversary of John Lennon's murder nowadays. World War Two was the defining event of my parent's generation. Viet Nam and Korea were important, but not near as definitive, since they shared the world with their children then. I'd like to think that Music was a significant component of my own generation's definition. It may sound shallow -- except that it was a major cultural indicator in the long fight for social and racial justice which actually made gains overall, despite bitter reversals. Lennon's assassination was just a sick, stupid crime when compared to the impact of King's and the Kennedys' murders, but it diminished us nevertheless.
I have noted before how Pearl Harbor was the opening salvo in a concerted attack by the Japanese Empire on the Ameican/European imperial powers in Asia that was hideously successful on land and sea until it stumbled in the inconclusive Battle of the Coral Sea, retiring in good order to fight again. Without the unlooked-for luck the U.S. experienced at Midway, where four irreplaceable Japanese carriers went to the bottom, I dread the thought of what might have happened.
After their defeat, Japan became a major economic partner of the U.S -- I grew up in a world where a certain percentage of my local population went to Japan due to the draft, and came back with SOMETHING. Our popular culture also benefitted from inexpensive electronics (see my musings on music above), and even silly-assed monster movies, not to mention the cinematic masterpieces of Kurosawa. I chose to study Japanese Art History as a minor when I went to college, and got a great education in the process. I collected and advocated Manga from the late 60's onward, and I'm happy they are an international success. I've even driven Toyotas for twenty-five years, after driving Volkwagens for twenty years before that -- which leads to:
World War Two was a catastrophe that also involved Nazi Germany, and alliances between the United States, China, and the Soviet Union which shifted, changed, and set the political shape of the planet for the rest of the 20th Century. Pearl Harbor meant that the US also went to war across the Atlantic too. Without the huge forces of the U.S.S.R. brought to bear against the Third Reich, I also dread what might have happened there -- my father's friends and peers had their hands full fighting their own portions of Hitler's Wehrmacht. When he served in Germany after V-E Day, he was in the Military Police, who maintained order, and tried to keep the population from starving to death.
I became an internationalist of a sort, despite growing up in the white-bread suburbs of Post War America -- I had company in the generation I grew up with, who inherited contacts abroad due to World War Two.

Click to enlarge
Artist Kano Tanyu decorated the interior of the ultra-fancy Nikko Toshu-Gu with sober near-monochrome ink paintings to honor the memory of Shogun Tokugawa Ieasu, who founded a dynasty that ruled Japan in relative peace for 250 years. In return, the country sacrificed most foriegn trade, and contact with the world beyond its borders, though. Emperor Meiji moved the imperial capitol to Tokyo (Edo) from Kyoto in 1860 when the Tokugawa samurai gave up their hereditary power in order to form a modern government. By the end of World War One, Japan owned an international empire which was destroyed by their own aggression during World War Two.

Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from Vancouver, British Columbia; Langley, British Columbia; Unna, Germany; Bellingham, Washington; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Aston, Pennsylvania; Plainfield, New Jersey; Brentwood, New York; El Paso, Texas; Aston, Pennsylvania; Sorrento, Maine; Fayetteville, Arkansas; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (looking for Wanda Day); Santa Cruz, California (looking for Crimson Rose); Cape Neddick, Maine; Lancaster, Pennsylvania; Cedar Falls, Iowa; Gteborg, Sweden, and Columbia, Missouri.

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, with 116 pieces on display. We also have Crown of the Continent and Ace of Diamonds gracing our walls. Looks like the art run to Eastern Montana in December was revised again.
I'm still gathering CDs together for my lecture next week on Black Music in the U.S.A. -- a half hour of basics, and an hour of FUNK!, mixing all the elements together.

Media Watch: Tristan und Isolde by Richard Wagner live from The Met on Montana Public Radio for about five hours. Wagner's long, lush melodies are always pleasant, but this story of fatal adulterous love is as over-the-top as anything can be from the so-called Age of Chivalry -- some versions even include King Arthur, or his horny old man Uther Pendragon. Who knows? The long-lost seed of the original tale might be at the root for ALL the others. Supposedly, Wagner wrote much of this music for his mistress. Oh well, the lovers are still doomed and hopeless because of those dastarly magical potions -- Brunhilde lost Siegfried to one of those brews in another Wagner opera, and she made EVERYBODY pay. I remember seeing a Jean Cocteau movie retelling Tristan & Isolde too. Footsbarn Theatre toured Cornwall itself with their own version before I worked with them. It may seem declasse, but I always think of the Doo-Wop classic Love Potion Number Nine when this tale comes up.

Happy Birthday, Sagittarius!

Click to enlarge
A tribute of my own to Japanese Art and the Kano style -- digital ink with selected color, featuring my Sagittarian friend Ruth on one of our many walks in the western woods.