It's raining, it's pouring, and I may change my mind about going to Polebridge tomorrow.

Sitemeter Sez: Menomonie, Wisconsin; Someone from Sweden, and Corvallis, Montana.

NEW Mime Troupe Saga Chapter 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

Many thanks to Toni -- she sent me an autographed copy of Winter Season; A Dancer's Journal (1982) for making a video of her presentation at Harvard University about Ida!




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: Mark Ogle's remarkable retrospective is still up at the Hockaday Museum of Art, plus Dan Fagre and Lisa McKeon's show is on the first level -- about the vanishing glaciers of Glacier National Park, it is a true labor of love by scientists from the USGS. Here's another website comparing glacier photos from the early 20th Century and recent decades.
The Hockaday Museum of Art's Face Book Site (There's a link to the conventional website there.)

I was running the tech for guest speaker Joseph Lisle Williams when he presented a lecture at my college about surviving a bear attack in Glacier National Park 50 years ago. Don Dayton, the ranger who shot the bear and saved the young man's life was at the event too. If you want to read more about it, his sister wrote a blog about her brother and the lecture HERE.

The other month, 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.

A statewide "town meeting" style videoconference about the USA's health care crisis. There were many advocates from different political views, and a few ignoramuses, but the consensus was clear: No more bankruptcies or losing homes because of injury or illness!

Tears and Laughter about our broken health care system HERE

Media Watch: More of Montana Public Radio doing the '40th Anniversary of Woodstock.' Late at night, though, and I've slept through some of it. There were five vinyl discs worth of live music from that festival released soon after the event, and I had them all. The inner liner of the second album showed the awesome amount of garbage hundreds of people had left behind them at Max Yasgur's farm. My favorites over the years have been: Canned Heat's Woodstock Boogie; Paul Butterfield's Everything's Gonna Be Alright; The Who's Summertime Blues; Sly and the Family Stone's Dance to the Music/Hey Music Lover medley; and Jimi Hendrix's whole set. There are plenty of honorable mentions which I'll ignore for now, but I'll say that I was a Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young fan who wanted that band to succeed very badly. I got my wish, largely as a result of Woodstock accelerating their exposure. It was too bad that the Grateful Dead reportedly played lousy, and suppressed the release of their set -- they were my favorite group at the time.

Hoo Boy -- America's Got Talent is pretty damn ugly. The surviving acts are at the mercy of professional stagers right now, and I disagreed with most of the decisions made by those so-called pros. I was glad to see Boston's break dance crew Status Quo (SQ Entertainment) return to the main stage, but was very unhappy that they lost out in the votes, partly because of interference by AGT's production staff. (Same thing happened to Memphis, Tennessee's street acrobats.) There was a trio of pretty women (triplets) who suffered the most from bad presentation -- whomever is in charge of their act needs to honor their dignity in the future. They are beautiful and talented. Nobody needs to force 'sexiness' on them. They do some things better than others, but any decent director can sort out many ways of showcasing their abilities, without allowing the humiliating debacle which tripped them up this last week.
Gag! I really disliked a singing group who look like a countrified version of Simon Cowell's opera travesty Il Divo -- cynicism and pimping is toxic. I thought that all of this week's winners belonged in the bottom seven instead of the top five.
On a positive note, I was impressed with the ventriloquist who won last season's competition.

A digital sketch of iconic Grace Slick as she looked about the time of her Woodstock appearance, introducing pianist Nicky Hopkins as the sun rose. I saw her perform live twice in those halcyon days -- Jefferson Airplane was one HELL of a good group!