Monday, August 03, 2009

Hot on Saturday, but it cooled down enough for gardening on Sunday. The Deer Family greeted me across from the Conrad Mansion.

Sitemeter Sez: Athens, Greece; Seattle, Washington, and Thief River Falls, Minnesota. Tuning in to Flash Gordon were Hopland, California; Neuilly-sur-Seine, Ile-de-France; Vxj, Sweden; Hiwassee, Virginia; Shanghai, China, and Birmingham, UK. I had an email back-and-forth with some fans over Princess Aura's skin color in the Sunday pages. (Lemon yellow through 1936 at least, like it or not.)

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


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: My own video shooting went well over the weekend, plus I stopped by the Bigfork Festival of the Arts -- hot as blazes on Electric Avenue, but the spirit of good fun was irresistible. I saw my talented theatrical friend Jesse Culp, and we talked about my video project for Katie Duck with the camera flung over my shoulder.

Princess Aura and her preceding Villainess/Vamp:

(L to R) Buxom Priscilla Lawson as Princess Aura (1936) and slender Myna Loy as Fa lo Suee (1932) in all their B&W glory. Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon was unabashedly derivative from its very beginning as a rival to Buck Rogers. The two space-heroes both fought devious "yellow peril" villains from the racist mold of Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu. Emperor Ming's character did not disguise his unoriginal origin, but at least Charles Middleton played him for melodramatic laughs. Aggressive Princess Aura was a direct copy of Fu's daughter, Fah lo Suee -- played over the years by Anna May Wong, Tsai Chin, and many others, with many names.