A little rain, a little sunshine, and life is good. The Farmer's Market has vegetables at last!

Sitemeter Sez: The Flash Gordon Gang -- Midrand, South Africa; Middletown, Connecticut; Staten Island, New York; Evansville, Indiana; Amboy, Indiana; Warrenton, Virginia; Park City, Utah; Newark, New Jersey; Bors, Sweden; Richardson, Texas; Allentown, Pennsylvania; Madrid, Spain; Gainesville, Florida, and Las Vegas, Nevada.

MORE 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: Mark Ogle's retrospective at the Hockaday Museum of Art had a wonderful reception. 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.)

Last Friday, 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 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: Another old Bollywood movie starring ace actors Madhuri Dixit, Sanjay Duit, and Salman Khan from maybe the early 90's. Too bad it was a rather lousy version of Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac (1897). Duit didn't play a psycho, like Rostand's Cyrano, but he WAS supposed to be a poet, who won the heart of a fair maid by his good heart and good words. A Netflix reviwer complained about the costumes -- so could I, but the overall moviemaking was just SO bad. I wouldn't know where to start.

Ch-Ch-Changes: Michael Jackson died yesterday -- he wasn't even fifty-one. All joking aside, he hasn't looked like himself for a long time. His physical frailty frankly scared me. I'm not going to speculate, but I'll be surprised if his fatal coronary wasn't directly related to the medical games he played with his body. The last time I saw him on TV was at James Brown's funeral a number of years back, where he shook hands with Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton as they all mourned the passing of a friend. M.J. did not look well, and I thought it might have been jet-lag, because he'd flown in from Bahrain.
That being said, he was one of the most talented performers to have ever mounted a stage. Tracing back, I liked his record Black & White in the early 90's, although the video didn't really make it with me; Man in the Mirror during the late 80's; The albums Thriller and Off the Wall when he first became a man, and more than half of the Jackson 5 recordings. We Are The World was a worthy effort, but I MUCH prefered Bob Geldoff's Do They Know It's Christmas. I happened to see Michael Jackson's 3D movie Captain E-O at Disneyland, around 1988, and had a very good time watching it.
May you be at peace, Mr. Jackson.

What was that about something completely different?

A redigitized portrait of Madhuri Dixit -- first-rate dancer and excellent movie actor. I heard that she lives in Denver, Colorado now, but she made a "comeback" film not too long ago for her loyal Bollywood fans.

Happy Summer Solstice! (see below) We've had some much-needed rain over the last few days too.

Sitemeter Sez: Atlanta, Georgia; Des Plaines, Illinois; Auckland, New Zealand; Suncook, New Hampshire; Frederiksborg, Denmark; Columbia Falls, Montana; Lima, Ohio; Tampere, Western Finland; Lumberton, New Jersey; Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Whitefish, Montana.

MORE 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: Mark Ogle's retrospective is going up at the Hockaday Museum of Art. 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.)

Last Friday, 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 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: An old movie starring Amitabh Bachchan (1978) where he plays a character named Sikander. I can't fault the acting -- especially by the dancer/courtesan, but it didn't add up. Bachchan made so many GOOD movies like Amir, Abkar, Anthony, or even the dawg-assed violent Sholay in the early part of his career, that I think this one is best left to the completists.

Time and Timelessness

A digital sketch of a composition
I once printed on an intaglio press circa 1972.
Mysterious Stonehenge and the puzzles of Geometry stirred together by a young American art student after reading Gerald Hawkins' Stonehenge Revealed, which described how a mainframe computer analyzed the astronomical nature of this famous pre-historic monument, three or four years before I saw the place with my own eyes on Salisbury Plain while I was living in England.
Led Zeppelin's Battle of Evermore was playing on a nearby stereo:
The queen of light she took her bough
And then she turned to go,
The prince of peace embraced the gloom
And walked the night alone.
Oh, dance in the dark night,
Sing to the morning light.
The dark lord rides in force tonight
And time will tell us all.
Oh, throw down your plow and hoe,
Rest not to lock your homes.
Side by side we wait the night
Of the darkest of them all.
I hear the horses thunder
Down in the valley blow,
I'm waiting for the angels of Avalon,
Waiting for the eastern glow.
The apples of the valley hold,
The seeds of happiness,
The ground is rich from tender care,
Repay, do not forget -- no, no!
Oh, dance in the dark night,
Sing to the morning light.
The apples turn to brown and black, the tyrants face is red.
Oh, war is the common cry, lift up your swords and fly.
The sky is filled with good and bad
That mortals never know.
Oh, well, the night is long, the beads of time pass slow,
Tired eyes on the sunrise, waiting for the eastern glow.
The pain of war cannot exceed
The woe of aftermath,
The drums will shake the castle wall,
The ringwraiths ride in black -- ride on!
Sing as you raise your bow,
Shoot straighter than before!
No comfort has the fire at night
That lights the face so cold.
Oh dance in the dark night,
Sing to the morning light.
The magic runes are writ in gold
To bring the balance back -- bring it back, bring it back!
At last the sun is shining, the clouds of blue roll by,
With flames from the dragon of darkness
The sunlight blinds his eyes.