The cold weather dropped over a meter of snow around Browning, Montana -- just on the other side of the mountains from here. Those poor people on the Blackfeet Reservation didn't need THAT. May Day looked more like March or early April.

Sitemeter Sez: Santa Barbara, California; Oakland, California; Stafford, Virginia; Sherman, Texas; Columbia Falls, Montana; Amsterdam, Holland, and Dublin, Ireland.

MUCH more history 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!
MORE UPDATES! Outre Space Cinema -- Featuring: 1930's Rocketry, Spitfires of the Spaceways and especially Cellulose to Celluloid, Even more Flash Gordon comparisons from 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: Montana On The Move, New Artists, are on display at the Hockaday Museum of Art, but we're also showing Seldom Seen II and Larry Johnson's photos of local characters.
Dan Fagre's show has come down for awhile, but will go up again in May -- it is about the vanishing glaciers of Glacier National Park, and is a true labor of love by Fagre and other scientists from the USGS. Here's another website comparing glacier photos from the early 20th Century and recent decades.

Media Watch: The Metropolitan Opera season may have ridden into the Twilight of the Gods, but Lyric Opera of Chicago presented Manon (1884) by Jules Massenet. I might have written about this longish song-fest before, but it is an example of the aesthetics of Belle Époque Paris. If there had been a real Phantom of the Opera, this work would express his world -- one of rich men riding roughshod over the young, beautiful, but no-so-wealthy. Phantom Erik was mainly a Stage Door Johnny, after all.
Zombie Honeymoon (2004)on DVD -- not the worst movie I've ever seen, but I can't recommend it to anybody, because it's too %$#@! stupid to be horrifying or funny.
I'm watching Hellboy II (2008) by Guglielmo Del Toro a little later -- I like my junk to have good taste, at least.

Of Monstrous French Patrons, Beauties, and Beasts

(L to R) Beatutiful Linda Hamilton and latex-mug specialist Ron Perlman, star of Hellboy II, in their Comic-bookish Beauty and the Beast TV series. Josette Day and Jean Marais in Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, yet another French tale of patronage and power over young women, first written down in the 1740's.