Arctic cold -- the block heater is plugged in when I'm not driving. The sunshine is welcome, and I expect sunnier weather when and if we have that promised thaw, starting tomorrow.

Looking North from Dry Bridge Slough.

Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from Madrid, Spain; Palm Harbor, Florida; Medicine Hat, Alberta; San Francisco, California; Oakland, California; North Arlington, New Jersey; Bors, Sweden; Tempe, Arizona; Tampa, Florida, and Manchester, UK.

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 has two new shows -- Seldom Seen, from the Permanent Collection, and First Nations Artists -- Contemporary / Traditional. We still have Crown of the Continent, and Ace of Diamonds. We had a wild weekend staging Dan Fagre's show for installation, and hosting a memorial service for a wonderful patron who died too young. I got my first compliment about the Bull Head Lodge video -- THANKS Doc!

Media Watch: Rarely-serious Lady GaGa is on the road internationally with the sometimes-funny Pussycat Dolls -- she's keeping her publicity going on the Internet with videos. I even joined her MySpace army for a lark. Mea culpa -- I mistook Christina Aguilera's superhero ad on TV for a Lady GaGa ad earlier on this blog. The fiber-optic white hair they both wear lately sure fooled ME.

Slumdog Millionaire came to our little town! Young Dev Patel was excellent as Jamal Malik, as was Freida Pinto, as Latika -- Jamal's one true love. Anil Kapoor was villainously crafty as the two-faced game show host -- one of the many villains in the flick. Jamal's brother was played well by Madhur Mittal, and the children who portrayed the three protagonists at various ages are all testimonies to the skill and compassion of co-director Loveleen Tandan. If English director Danny Boyle wins an Academy Award, the whole Indian crew deserves one.
The movie is very grim -- the slums of India are dreadful in every way, but the fantastical plot, and happy ending, help ease the pain of witnessing this cruel social failure. The character of real-world Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan appears in a surprisingly funny, obviously untrue, low-comedy sequence, but he's portrayed by another actor. One of Bachchan's many jobs is as highly-visible host of the game show which supposedly makes the fictional protaganist rich and famous. He's referred to in the film three times to some extent, even as an answer to one of the questions. ("He's the most famous man in India!" says Jamal.) -- Anil Kapoor's TV host is despicable, though, and calls in corrupt policemen to torture the innocent Dev Patel for supposedly cheating. This unsavory riff is very common in Indian movies, as I've noted before, plus the ugly convention, and reality, of violent crimelords is an important element in Slumdog Millionaire too.

A digital mashup of images featuring Lady GaGa from MySpace. In the foreground she greets our new president with an imprompu dance from a video I believe was shot in a rehearsal loft, in the background she's preened and posing for a publicity shoot in a studio. I'm a new "friend" on said site, but she's actually working somewhere abroad, and I doubt if I'll ever hear from her anyway, or see her in the flesh. If I do, I'll congratulate her for being brash and original.