Sitemeter Sez: Lyon, Rhone-Alpes; Bren, Germany; Oakland, California; Littleton, New Hampshire; Valencia, Spain and Warsaw, Poland.
NEW Mime Troupe 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: Seldom Seen II and Larry Johnson's photos of local characters are on display at the Hockaday Museum of Art, and the school show is making way for the Plein-Aire paint-off at the start of June. Dan Fagre's show will go up again next week -- it is about the vanishing glaciers of Glacier National Park, and 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.
Last week, I ran sound for Carol Buchanan's public discussion of her historical novel God's Thunderbolt -- The Vigilantes of Montana at the community college. Here's the link to a live-blog of the event.
Media Watch: Montana Public Radio has run serious Memorial Day programming since 10 AM. The first Decoration Day was celebrated by the Grand Army of the Republic in 1868. There is a two-hour special on the air about music from different wars. So far, the story of bandleader Glenn Miller in WWII has been the most amazing. He survived German bombs in England, but he and his airplane disappeared over the channel on his way to France as the fighting was winding down. Adrian Kronauer spoke and played a couple of Viet Nam era tunes.
The program has deteriorated into lousy propaganda about Gulf War I, skipping the Reagan years when Oliver North took Ayatollah Khomenhi's money and ambushed Nicaruagan coffee pickers with it, after the Ayatolla sent a suicide bomber to kill nearly 200 U.S. Marines in Beruit.
Support Our Troops -- Bring Them Home!
(I've put Mongo Santamaria on the CD player.)
Movies: Another "Kultur" video, from the company which produced the Baryshnikov tape reviewed yesterday, only this one is about J.R.R. Tolkien and the roots of his success with The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. There are short interviews with the old professor himself, one of his sons, and a daughter. Biographer Humphrey Carpenter has several scenes where he uncomfortably expresses his opinion. Rayner Unwin of Unwin & Unwin, the first reader of The Hobbit outside of Tolkien's family gets a few minutes too. He was paid a shilling for writing his book report -- "The best shilling our company ever spent!" he says smiling. There are also many stills featuring Tolkien's own competent illustrations, plus many more by the Brothers Hildebrandt.
This very flawed tape ignores an all-too-important fact about J.R.R. Tolkien -- he was an avid reader of Fairy Tales and Fantasy, besides his studies in ancient poems and sagas. He and his literary friends exchanged letters about near-contemporaries like David Lindsay and Lord Dunsany, plus he acknowledged Andrew Lang explicity in Tree and Leaf, as well as the Brothers Grimm. His fellow-Inkling Jack (C.S.) Lewis was a devotee of Science Fiction, and based his character Ransom on his friend "Tollers." The persistant pressure of the Inklings as a major force in finishing Lord of the Rings is never even mentioned.
What IS mentioned is the wretched animated features made from his works, but they are properly dismissed as wretched, and the point is made that Tolkien never lived to see them. BTW -- Christopher Tolkien, an Inkling himself, is correct in stating that his father would have disliked Saul Zaentz/Peter Jackson's films too.
Do You Like Hitchcock? by Dario Argento is NOT one of the Italian horror-maestro's best flicks. There is one fairly original scene where the abyssimally dumb protagonist narrowly escapes an evil pursuer despite a broken leg and a malfunctioning motor-scooter, but the rest of the thing is a montage of Hitchcock adaptations. This gimmick gets old too quickly to be fun, convincing, or suspenseful.
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