We had a couple of real dangerous days due to rain, ice, and snow, but not so many as to constitute a disaster. Deer tracks right on the back deck overlooking the slough!

Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from Seattle, Washington; Orlando, Florida; Frankston, Texas; York, Pennsylvania; Birmingham, Alabama; Jamaica, New York; San Mateo, California; Salon-de-Provence, France; Riverside, California; Royal Oak, Michigan; New York City, New York; Novato, California; Lombard, Illinois; Portland, Oregon; San Jose, California; Los Angeles, California; Somerville, Massachusetts; Bozeman, Montana; Battle Creek, Michigan; Hamilton, Ontario; ???? Sweden; Oakland, California (Take care in the East Bay!); Singapore, Singapore Island, and Olsztyn, Poland.

Watch for revisions 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!
NEW --Launching NOW! Outre Space Cinema -- Featuring: 1930's Rocketry, Spitfires of the Spaceways and Cellulose to Celluloid, Flash Gordon in 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: The Hockaday Museum of Art has two new shows -- Seldom Seen, from the Permanent Collection, and First Nations Artists -- Contemporary / Traditional. We still have Crown of the Continent, and Ace of Diamonds.

Media Watch: Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan on the Golden Globe Awards broadcast -- I'll be gawd-diddley-dammed! He introduced a minute or so of clips from Slumdog Millionaire, a movie shot on Khan's home turf in Mumbai, India by some of the same folks who gave us those dawg-assed 28 Days zombie flicks. However, Slumdog Millionaire is earning rave reviews around the world, and won Best Dramatic Film that night, along with three other awards. Good for everybody involved!
The beautiful women of Hollywood wore mermaid dresses and tail-draggers that rarely flattered their figures or general looks. Somebody somewhere keeps score on the Red Carpet, not I, except to note that model Brooke Burke, the champ of Dancing with the Stars was announcing from there.

Almost Eighty Years Ago:

This dress from 1930 would have blended-in very well at the Golden Globes of 2009.
Image from The Commodification of Fantasy

Rain on top of snow on top of ice -- two VERY close near-accidents just driving to work this morning. Involved with the Audubon bird count last Sunday too -- saw a Black-Capped Chickadee, lots of Blackbirds, plus Flickers and Blue Jays.

Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from Chino, California; Bixby, Oklahoma; Durham, North Carolina; Paradise, Montana (Real place -- locally famous for the shortcut between here and Interstate 90); North Oxford, Massachusetts; Los Angeles, California; South Deerfield, Massachusetts; Montreal, Quebec; Oakland, California, and Hamburg, Germany.

Watch for revisions 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!
NEW --Launching NOW! Outre Space Cinema -- Featuring: 1930's Rocketry, Spitfires of the Spaceways and Cellulose to Celluloid, Flash Gordon in 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: The Hockaday Museum of Art is getting ready for new shows. We will likely change Crown of the Continent a little, and continue Ace of Diamonds.

Media Watch: Superstars of Dance -- HA! Trash A Go Go Part III is more like it, and the trash just gets stinkier. There is a certain amount of praise in my opinionated damnation, especially for the Santa Monica street-dancer, but the overall production loses big-time in my view. It is inexcusable for a two-hour dance show to only have about a half hour of dancing.
Excellent stuff -- Indian temple dancer, Santa Monica POP-meister, Russian ballerina, Argentinian Tango queen, Australian male soloist (with a stupid torn shirt), Shao-Lin dance group, and I may have forgotten an excellent act or two.
There were a lot of good/fair/middling acts also, but there were many that just plain SUCKED -- and the main problem was CHOREOGRAPHY, rather than talent, high to low on the quality scale. Bad decisions undid many a good performer, and gutless conservatism dulled a show that was already besieged by dullness.
I've never liked host Michael Flatley's choreography anyway, and I like it even less after enduring the international ass-kissing that put the Irish team in first place -- believe me when I tell you that Celtic dancing is a much deeper art form than than the soul-less drivel "Loada Da' Dance" dribbles onto the public consciousness. As an announcer, Flatley ranks right down there with Lawrence Welk for rankness too, although he was pleasant enough as a guest judge on Trash A Go Go I (ABC's Dancing with the Stars) a few months ago.
The judging slowed the show down to a crawl -- having the order of voting the same every time was an avoidable bad decision. The multiple characters on the panel drained a lot of energy by just having so many there -- some of them were OK, some of them were pills. There was one judge who made me laugh, though -- the Chinese monk who repeatedly said "Bah, eight." He sometimes gave out a "Cho, nine," and rarely something higher or lower, but he was generally positive through his extreme reservedness. (Day-um! Even talking sketchily about the judges wastes time.)

Speaking about Dance:


Music: Le Cygne by Camille Saint-Saëns from the Carnival of Animals.

The Dying Swan
By Alfred (Lord) Tennyson

The plain was grassy, wild and bare,
Wide, wild, and open to the air,
Which had built up everywhere
An under-roof of doleful gray.
With an inner voice the river ran,
Adown it floated a dying swan,
And loudly did lament.
It was the middle of the day.
Ever the weary wind went on,
And took the reed-tops as it went.

Some blue peaks in the distance rose,
And white against the cold-white sky,
Shone out their crowning snows.
One willow over the water wept,
And shook the wave as the wind did sigh;
Above in the wind was the swallow,
Chasing itself at its own wild will,
And far thro' the marish green and still
The tangled water-courses slept,
Shot over with purple, and green, and yellow.

The wild swan's death-hymn took the soul
Of that waste place with joy
Hidden in sorrow: at first to the ear
The warble was low, and full and clear;
And floating about the under-sky,
Prevailing in weakness, the coronach stole
Sometimes afar, and sometimes anear;
But anon her awful jubilant voice,
With a music strange and manifold,
Flow'd forth on a carol free and bold;

As when a mighty people rejoice
With shawms, and with cymbals, and harps of gold,
And the tumult of their acclaim is roll'd
Thro' the open gates of the city afar,
To the shepherd who watcheth the evening star.
And the creeping mosses and clambering weeds,
And the willow-branches hoar and dank,
And the wavy swell of the soughing reeds,
And the wave-worn horns of the echoing bank,
And the silvery marish-flowers that throng
The desolate creeks and pools among,
Were flooded over with eddying song.

The poem and music inspired Michel Folkine to choreograph Pavlov's famous dance in 1905 -- Nobody did more to bring Ballet to the wide world than Anna Palova (1881-1931). Originally-French traditions were transformed in the crucible of Czarist Russia and it's Francophile aristocracy. Artists like Pavlova made the art form transcendent.

Repeated snow storms -- lots of them. NO travel for me over those very dangerous mountains.

Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from Butler, Pennsylvania; New Rochelle, New York; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Melbourne, Victoria; Kosice, Slovakia; Louth, Ireland (Ya' gonna answer over there? Chris? Eavan? Roseanne? Rachelle?); Granite Quarry, North Carolina; Babylon, New York; Melbourne, Australia (stayed a long while); San Antonio, Texas; Sacramento, California; Los Angeles, California; New York City, New York, Rome, Italy; Napa, California (That you, Cedric?), and Dallas, Texas.

Watch for revisions 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!
NEW --Launching NOW! Outre Space Cinema -- Featuring: 1930's Rocketry, Spitfires of the Spaceways and Cellulose to Celluloid, Flash Gordon in 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: The Hockaday Museum of Art is getting ready for new shows. We will likely change Crown of the Continent a little, and continue Ace of Diamonds. The Charles Russell Museum is handling the art run -- 1/2 day of travel for them, 3 days for me in this awful weather.

Media Watch: Stars themselves do not a movie make. I saw two examples from opposite sides of the Atlantic recently.
1) Don't Stop Dreaming, including Bollywood professionals Suniel Shetty and Rishi Kapoor, perhaps helping his relative Aditya Kapoor, who directed that terrible mess and shot it around Birmingham, England. (I kind of wish Birmingham would have shot back.)
2) The Aviator, starring Cate Blanchett, one of the best actors in the world, supporting Leo DiCaprio. The movie outlined some elements of the early career of wealthy recluse Howard Hughes, before mental illness dominated his life. Blanchett played Katherine Hepburn, yet another great movie actor and character in her own right. Director Martin Scorsese mixed firm dates with vague timeframes, and real people with composite characters. The film was far from a mess, but lost its focus, and unnecessarily repeated points which had been made earlier.
Both movies had too-abrupt endings which were very unsatisfying, except that Dreaming could have been MUCH shorter. In fact it would have been better if it wasn't made at all.

Concert Watch: George Clinton and the P-Funk All-Stars in Los Angeles January 2, 2009
With an unscheduled appearence by Sly Stone
(Thanks to P-FunkJazz)
Really just a so-so show, but it's LA so it's a fun homecoming. The band was up to let it hang but the sound system blew. (AS in blew OUT -- the concert was performed without monitor speakers, according to Ritchie "Shakin" Nagan.) This was the Club Nokia debut so let's blame it on the house.
The setlist wasn't all that interesting. Lots of adlibbing and vamping. George was magnificent on "Nig#g*erish". Pretty much the same ol bunch of songs. We had a ball sangin' aloud "I Got a Thang". Sly waltzed in all wrapped up incognito. He rapped a poem in tribute to George. Them two fools hugged and mugged. Sly tried to sang "If You want Me to Stay' then some humdrum makeshift mutterings and the band revs up for "Thank you". Sly came back in and got into the grrove but faded soon afterwards. Show was supposed to end at 12:30 AM, but George ran thangs up to 1:45 AM. Curfew violations in LA will wipe out your profit.
No sign of Blackbyrd (I didn't expect it) and a lot of the LA maggots were not to be found. Then again, I was nowhere around on the last two LA/OC shows. Mike was in good cheer, but cut his solo on "Bop Gun" with the first blow-out. Rouse was tearing thangs up including his guitar strings. That also a different song. Kim was on rollerskates for "Red Hot Momma". Kendra did "Bounce" and Shonda did "Somethin' Stank". I was on the opposite side with Mike and didn't get my usual pics of the funkdivas. George mentioned the "Gangstas" disc, but didn't play anything off it.
I did a "street-cop" off Danny's bag o' funk for the 2 disc SLEAZIEST OF THE GREAZE and his Teresa Jiminez GET STEREO disc. Vendor table was loaded down with shirts, CDs and DVDs. Lige had a new disc and they had the Shauna Hall DVD. I used my last $10 to cop the live Kendra DVD. Didn't see "Gangstas" on the table.
It was Lakers home game night and parking gets ramped up to $20. I wasn't paying that and hiked in from 6 blocks out. Draft beers were $6 and bottles were $8. That breaks my bank so I hope they don't come back to this venue again...Oh. Sheila E came out twice to invite us down to conga room for after party.

Click for a Larger Image
Actors as clones from Scorsese's Aviator -- 1st Row: Kate Hepburn, next to Cate Blanchett's portrayal of Hepburn; 2nd Row: Kate Beckinsale playing Ava Gardner instead of a vampire, followed by Ava Gardner; 3rd Row: Jean Harlow, alongside singer Gwen Stephani, playing Jean Harlow.

Repeated snow storms, but with warmish days in between. I don't miss ultra-cold temperatures. We saw a Great Blue Heron slowing down to land in the slough, which is frozen over.

Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from Greenbrae, California; Conyers, Georgia; Tokyo, Japan; Oakland, California; Houston, Ohio (Hello Tari DeVille!); Redmond, Oregon; North Arlington, New Jersey; Madrid, Spain; Washington Crossing, Pennsylvania, and Indianapolis, Indiana.

Watch for revisions 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!
NEW --Launching NOW! Outre Space Cinema -- Featuring: 1930's Rocketry, Spitfires of the Spaceways and Cellulose to Celluloid, Flash Gordon in 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: The Hockaday Museum of Art is getting ready for new shows. We will likely change Crown of the Continent a little, and continue Ace of Diamonds. The art run to Eastern Montana is scheduled for Friday and Saturday -- pray for me.

Concert Watch: Sylvester Stewart AKA Sly Stone December 28, 2008
(Thanks to "Drednut" in Long Beach, California)


I never go to shows all early and wait with anticipation, just P Funk and now this show. They had us waiting and waiting in line outside, then once they let people in there was a dj spinning for a long time. Finally the band came on, nobody original from the Family Stone in the band, youngish guys, don't remember any of their names, but his daughter Novena Carmel "Stone" (who has the band Baby Stone) was one of the singers, so I guess technically she is from the Stone Family;)
They played Dance to the Music without Sly, then they did this acapella beat box thing and got the audience to do it, and kept doing it for a really long time, and I thought "this shit is gonna drop into something really good, why else would they do this on the second song?" And then they just stopped! Weird.
Sly came out and cameras were everywhere! He sang If You Want Me to Stay, and it was nice, my first time seeing Sly live! He sounded real good, and was changing up some of the words.
Later they announced that it was a family affair and that Sly's sister Rose was in the house, so she came up and sang a few with them. Super sweet! The only thing is they would only play a couple minutes of each song and then Sly would stop the band! Plus, at this point it sounded very loose and unrehearsed. All the cats in the band could play their asses off, but it was still a loose show.
Part of the show that was weird was that they announced that they were going to be taking ideas from people in the audience, song ideas, hooks, and Sly would do something with it. These 3 people came out and sang a little thing on the mic, Sly talked a lot, and he messed around a little with the ideas on stage with the keyboard he was using (a small Korg keyboard, I think a microkorg with vocoder) while everyone in the audeince waited. The ideas weren't all that cool to me, so it was odd just having the audience wait and wait while he noodled around with the ideas.
Then he said he was gonna go backstage and make a song from them.
They took a break, then the band came back on stage without Sly, and they were just up there for a long ass time before they played. They did an original song of Novena's band Baby Stone, then I think a new original Sly song (without Sly). Then they said that we had some badass musicians in the house as the bassist started Thankyoufallletin me and George Johnson (Brothers Johnson) comes up! He's dressed all nice in a tie, and he gets up there and talks a whole lot, how he met Sly, someone bring me my guitar, help me with the settings on the amp, blah blah. Finally after like 5 minutes of talking they start jamming on Thankyou, but it has a distinct Brothers Johnson sound, which was cool to hear. Then they said (I forgot his name, not an original member I believe) from Graham Central Station was in the house, a brotha with grey dreads. He got up there on bass and sounded just like Larry Graham on the Jam, he was pretty bad. And George Johnson was still up there. Then Sly came back out and they were all up there together. That was cool as hell, but then he left real quick.
The guests came off stage and then Sly came back later. He had the people from the audience who gave their ideas come back and he had put together some song on a laptop and brought it on stage and played it in the house. Then these guys did their ideas and Sly kinda sang with them too. It was a long process. He also told some long-ass joke/riddle that was pretty anti-climactic.
All in all, it was cool as hell to see Sly live, and in a really small venue (probably 200-300 capacity tops) and he was on stage for a good part of the show. I was prepared for a no-show or a song or two, but got a lot more plus the guests. However, it was very loose, very unrehearsed, lots and lots of dead time and talking and confusing starts and stops, and it often seemed like I was watching a Sly and the Family Stone cover band. I'm glad I went tho!

My own reaction: It is good that Sly actually stuck through a whole gig, strange as the show sounded. I give him credit for trying out new ideas too. It is too bad he doesn't rehearse, though. His previous performance in Santa Rosa last October was a disaster for all concerned -- you can Google an eyewitness review if you want to read that sad story. Recovering from mental illness is difficult enough in private.

Extremely snowy weather has spread over both sides of the Continental Divide -- I am rescheduling the East Montana Art Run when we get clear roads. A pair of Raccoons visited us during our Monopoly game earlier tonight, eating the seeds and peanuts we put out for Magpies, Flickers, and Blue Jays.



Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from Louth, Ireland (Dammit, Chris, Rachelle, Roseanne, or is it Eavan? Leave a bloody comment!); Kosice, Slovakia; Brno, Czech Republic; Toronto, Ontario; Whitefish, Montana; Vancouver, British Columbia, and Schenectady, New York. Visiting our Spitfires were -- Madrid, Spain; Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio; Rochdale, UK; North Arlington, New Jersey; Whitchurch-Stouffville, Ontario; Blackwood, New Jersey; Mobile, Alabama; Westford, Massachusetts; Bangkok, Thailand; Dayton, Ohio; Bern, Switzerland; Riga, Latvia; London, UK; Queretaro de Arteaga, Mexico; Morristown, New Jersey, and Plain City, Ohio.

Watch for revisions 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!
NEW --Launching NOW! Outre Space Cinema -- Featuring: 1930's Rocketry, Spitfires of the Spaceways and Cellulose to Celluloid, Flash Gordon in 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: The Hockaday Museum of Art is getting ready for new shows. We will likely change Crown of the Continent a little, and continue Ace of Diamonds. The art run to Eastern Montana is officially SNOWED OUT -- white-out conditions on the roads to the east, high winds and winter snow storms.

Media Watch: Julie Taymor's production of Mozart's Magic Flute on the Metropolitan Opera broadcast. I have seen most of it on PBS, and it certainly is a thing to SEE! Wonderful masks and dancing creatures, plus the translation of the libretto is fun and easy to understand. They were hyping Taymor's DVD all through the show, and mentioning that some of the Met's recent High Definition broadcasts were available on DVD too.
Derek Jarman's stylized cinema version of The Tempest (1980) -- starring playwright/actor Heathcote Williams as Prospero, prolific actor/musician Toyah Willcox as Miranda, blue-skinned David Meyer as her Prince Ferdinand, Karl Johnson as a smouldering, anxious Ariel, and Lindsey Kemp's fellow mime/actor Jack Birkett as a damn ugly Caliban. The penultimate scene featured Elisabeth Welch singing Stormy Weather (Tempest/Storm -- get it?) with a dignity that did great honor to Ethel Waters and herself -- ten years earlier she'd starred on Broadway in Fosse's Pippen.
Some to-do has been made about gay imagery in Jarman's Tempest. Besides some frontal male nudity at the beginning, where the obviously freezing Mr. Meyer wades onto a COLD Scottish beach with his willie more prominent than I'd expect under circumstances which would normally shrivel a common male organ, there's very little else that seems to be exclusively homoerotic. Ms. Willcox displays her fullsome breasts soon afterward, with water nearby also, but she's inside by a roaring fire. Maybe the campy scene with Alonzo's sailors dancing around in crewman's whites counts, although I miss any eroticism whatsoever in that clumsy sequence -- it leads into Ms. Welch's song, after all. Compared to Jarman's homosexually-charged fantasy Sebastien, The Tempest could be made by a repressed hetero like Fellini himself. Yes, there are places where one may legitimately quibble -- Jarman's drunken castaways are certainly gay, but I think that particular image resides in Shakespeare's original text as well. The late Tudor theatre scene was as sexually ambiguous as the Royal courtiers who patronized the players. Women's roles were always played by men, and companies of boy actors were Shakespeare's strongest competitors.

Toyah Willcox is married to guitar genius Robert Fripp, and has had a long career singing, acting, and being on TV. Her characterization of Miranda was playful, dignified in her sensuality, and innocent, but she didn't get to speak lines like this:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

Merry Christmas, Boxing Day, Kwanza, Chanuka, and the upcoming New Year! Blue Jays and Flickers at the bird feeders. Deer on the lit-up grounds of the Conrad Mansion.

Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from Oakland, California; Wennigsen, Germany; Chicago, Illinois (Hometown of President-Elect Barack Obama); Mississauga, Ontario; Brooklyn, New York; New Orleans, Louisiana; Madison, New Jersey; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Greenville, South Carolina; Toronto, Ontario; Tampa, Florida; Woodbury, New York; Costa Mesa, California; Davenport, Iowa (one of the Quad Cities); Mesa, Arizona; Lisbon, Maine; Bangor, Maine; Knoxville, Tennessee (near an extreme ecological disaster); Washington, District of Columbia; Springfield, Virginia; Middlesboro, Kentucky; Saint Louis, Missouri; San Antonio, Texas (I saw a boat-parade on the River Walk on TV from there last night); West Bridgewater, Massachusetts; Everett, Washington; Garner, North Carolina; Plainfield, Illinois; Houston, Texas; Orlando, Florida; Rotterdam, Holland; Tucson, Arizona; Wales, Wisconsin; Medford, Massachusetts; Winter Park, Florida; Baltimore, Maryland; Bradenton, Florida; Via Del Mar, Valparaiso, Chile; Morris Plains, New Jersey, and San Diego, California.

Watch for revisions 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!
NEW --Launching NOW! Outre Space Cinema -- Featuring: 1930's Rocketry, Spitfires of the Spaceways and Cellulose to Celluloid, Flash Gordon in 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: The Hockaday Museum of Art is getting ready for new shows. We will likely change Crown of the Continent a little, and continue Ace of Diamonds. The art run to Eastern Montana is this Sunday and Monday.

Media Watch: Among my presents was a collection of Flash Gordon TV shows from the EARLY 1950's -- I hadn't even started school when they were broadcast. By pure coincidence, there was even one I remembered slightly -- Planet of Death, featuring an idol with a death-ray beaming from its eye, and Steve (Flash Gordon) Holland busting down encroaching walls with sheer strength, and stupid script-writing.
There was an unintentionally poignant sequence in another episode where Flash, Zarkov, and Dale went time-traveling back to Berlin, Germany in 1954 -- the devastation from WWII was widespead. Whole neighborhoods were piles of rubble. For comic relief, German cops chased the spacefarers in a Volkswagen, only to face paralyzer-rays when they caught up with the blonde giant at last.
The series was filmed in West Berlin to minimize costs, and the war-ravaged streets of the great city were used for unearthy settings here and there. The supporting cast was VERY sparse -- the same faces show up as villains in different episodes, hiding behind cheesy costumes and makeup. The women were dressed and made up to look downright frumpy, which is the WORST affront to the spirit of Flash Gordon possible!
The Buster Crabbe serials were on TV at the same time as Steve Holland's series, and the latter lost in every comparison. Ironically, renting the old American films cost even less than running the ultra-cheap international production.
Holland himself was a professional model, though, and became famous among Sci-Fi fans a decade later, for working with ace painter James Bama on dozens of Doc Savage paperback covers -- as The Man of Bronze (below), there was nothing quite like him until Fabio!


Crabbe's chapter-plays were exciting in their promise of outer-space thrills and adventure, but nobody has ever fulfilled those promises in motion pictures beyond what Universal's B-picture lot ingeniously, and sometimes laughably, cobbled together in the half-decade before WWII. Those threadbare 50's TV films were NOT Metropolis or Frau im Mond by any stretch of the Germanic Imagination. The partial fan-parody Flesh Gordon might have worked in the early 70's, except that the porno filmmaker who shot it was already in trouble with the L.A. Police Department, and was fortunate to complete the movie at all. (The less said about the 1990's sequel the better.) Dino DiLaurentis threw a lot of money at his Post-Star Wars version of Flash, but embers of life were only apparent when the cast was clowning around. (Kudos to Richard Riff-Raff O'Brien, and Brian Blessed.) A VERY flat two frames a second cartoon version had its advocates soon afterward, but I wasn't among their number. I wrote a little about the Sci-Fi Channel's 2007 version, but I was neither impressed, nor interested after a few episodes -- the pretty women resembled each other 'way too much, and the continuity was 'way too ridiculous.

Flash on the comics page:

Flash Gordon's original creator, Alex Raymond, was replaced by his assistant Austin Briggs, but the public at large did not embrace Briggs' style. Mac Rayboy took over the Sunday page, and did beautiful work to begin with (below -- circa 1948), but unfortunately, his art got gradually sloppier over time until his death in 1968.

Dan Barry led a team of comics professionals writing and drawing the long-running Flash Gordon daily strip. Bob Fujitani eventually got credit for his solid craftmanship after the same working group took over the Sunday pages too. Last of all, my cyber-pal Jim Keefe infused Flash's adventures with vitality and joy, going into the young 21st Century, and King Features is reprinting his strips today -- in newspapers and online.

A comic-book version of Flash Gordon tantalized fans in the late 60's as Raymond's disciple Al Williamson drew a few new stories, as did the magnificent ink artist Reed Crandall, in a series that barely made it to a dozen numbers, and expired in less-talented hands. This is the cover image of the second issue, published in 1966 -- a wonderfully stylized pencil and ink study by Eli Katz (Gil Kane), one of the leading comic book artists of the time, who was working his way out of his long tenure at Green Lantern and The Atom by freelancing for every company that existed. Williamson drew one more comic-book version of DiLaurentis' Flash movie fifteen years later.