A whole WEEK of Mondays as we start classes at the community college!
Then and Now -- Disappearing Glaciers of Glacier National Park.

Sitemeter Sez: Salt Lake City, Utah (Brine Shrimp seeker); Rock Hill, South Carolina; Baltimore, Maryland; New Delhi, India; Lancaster, Pennsylvania; Madrid, Spain; Paris, Ile-de-France; Castro Valley, California; Fort Worth, Texas, and Middletown, New Jersey.

The Mime Troupe Saga continues: 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.

Tears and Laughter about our broken health care system HERE

Media Watch: I enjoyed watching the So You Think You Can Dance highlight show -- especially Chelsea Hightower's performances. She's on Trash A Go Go now, and does all-right!
%$#@! America's Got Talent is a horrible show. I should really quit watching the sunuvaburch. Pimps in cowboy hats crooning Unchained Melody, church creatures who they're afraid to cross, and worst of all, David Hasselhoff singing. The one act I liked, "Acrodunk," was voted off -- they can entertain any sports arena in the country, though. GO FOR IT GUYS!

Reconstituted Imagery

In 1975, I spent a whole day and night in Paul McCarthy's office drawing a poster for the Mime Troupe's performance at U.S.C. -- listening to Reggae classics like The Harder They Come soundtrack, and the Wailers' Burning album, which were both fairly new at the time. Natty Dread would be released about a six weeks later, and Bob Marley would be an international superstar the next year.
I've remembered the composition of this poster well enough, but lost all copies of it years ago. For the Mime Troupe saga, I decided to make this digital reconstruction, showing my blue-pencil drafting, and marks which resemble black-ink stippling by my rapidiograph pen. The poster would have looked like this at about 11 P.M. and I would have printed the completely-inked version by 10 A.M.
http://theatrex.net/theatre/mt_pt6/home02.htm

Hot today -- went up to Glacier National Park to shoot some video, but didn't see any major wildlife. Trail of the Cedars was lovely as always.
Then and Now -- Disappearing Glaciers of Glacier National Park.

Sitemeter Sez: Paris, Ile-de-France; City of London, UK; District Heights, Maryland; Mountain View, California; Lisbon, Portugal; Portland, Oregon; Los Angeles, California; San Andreas, California; Sidney, Ohio; Bozeman, Montana; Brandon, Florida; Dublin, Ireland (Eavan? Izzat you?); Flower Mound, Texas (Bluebells of course), and Anchorage, Alaska.

Another Mime Troupe Saga chapter: 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.

Tears and Laughter about our broken health care system HERE

In The Community: Flathead Valley Community College starts classes TOMORROW! We're going to do a joint art show with the National Forest Service in a few weeks, and the Hockaday Museum will be involved too.

Media Watch: A sneak preview of Ken Burns' new PBS series -- The National Parks; America's Best Idea up in Whitefish. They showed segments from several episodes, and DID mention Glacier Nat'l Park more than once. Opening the scenic wonders of our nations greatest natural treasures to automobiles was mentioned as a bargain with the devil -- which it is, and we're still dealing with that fact.

The Forest's Spirit Endures!

Mother Earth was taken at the Trail of the Cedars in Glacier National Park. The hollow tree is still where it was before, but our model has moved to the Cascades since then!

Oh Man! It's been almost ten days, and I haven't posted anything here. The weather has been excellent, the college is getting ready to start classes early this year, I have some projects moving forward, but the wildlife haven't caught my eye much -- heckuva new waxing moon the last few nights, though.

Sitemeter Sez: Columbus, Ohio; Oakland, California; Rabat, Morocco; Paris, Ile-de-France; Maule, France; Sacramento, California; Flushing, New York; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Trondheim, Norway (origin of my mother's maternal family) and Manchester, UK.

Another Mime Troupe Saga chapter tonight: 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: I photographed the Duck Races up at Whitefish, Montana last weekend -- good silly fun for a variety of charities.

Ch-ch-ch Changes: Senator Edward Kennedy died today from brain cancer at 77 years old. President Barack Obama honored him in an email sent to me as a member of Organizing For America.
The magnificent songwriter Ellie Greenwhich also passed away. She was able to sing quite well, but never caught on as a performer, as fellow Brill Building inmate Carole King did. Greenwich had a minor hit as a member of The Raindrops, but great songs like You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling and River Deep, Mountain High will be her true legacy.

Media Watch: Bollywood backwash -- Mere Baap Pehle Aap (2008). What do these good actors talk about when they go home after working in something like this? Akshaye Khanna in another Cary Grant-styled comedy, but not a very good one. Khanna repeated the essence of his spiel about love from 1999's Aa Ab Laut Chalen -- sad, sad. Paresh Rawal and Om Puri as dumb-ass clowns. Beautiful Genelia D'Souza as a not-very-admirable ingenue. Archana Puran Singh as a mean police inspector, and East/West ambassador Naseeruddin Shah as D'Souza's manipulative father. Plot? The less said the better. Lots of European woman dancers in the song sections, well maybe Aussies and Americans too. They're OK, but a certain 'flavor' was missing in the small movements, compared to Indian women -- something about their training, rather than their looks.

The Great Salt Lake Mime Troupe Saga Continues!

An illustration from Samuel Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Gustave Dore. I borrowed this image for a poster in the early spring of 1975, advertising our "Special Concert Prior To European Tour." We couldn't use the word "benefit," and were subject to other restrictions, but some very nice people helped us out in our time of need, and these angels were my tribute to THEM. The current online saga completes my account of our California Tour, and this picture belongs in the next chapter -- our coast to coast trek to NYC and the charter flight to Europe on Capitol Airlines.

The weather got sunny by Monday, and warmed up a bit. There is a little nest of Killdeer (Plovers) in the field outside my office window.

Sitemeter Sez: Dusseldorf, Germany; Leasburg, Missouri; Dallas, Texas; Reseda, California; Oxford, UK; Rome, Italy; Maiden, North Carolina; Lees Summit, Missouri; Jacksonville, North Carolina; Menomonie, Wisconsin, and Corvallis, Montana.

New IMPROVED 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: Almost ready to go -- but 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: John Lithgow and Bill Irwin reciting out-there poetry on Montana PBS, followed up with Lithgow reading The Monkey's Paw by W. W. Jacobs. (Full text HERE)

Real Books: Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis -- hadn't read it for over thirty years, but enjoyed "Jack's" compelling language and yarn-spinning in their first flowering. I've mentioned that his last novel Till We Have Faces is his best, and my favorite, but in between he became an amazingly popular writer whose works continue to influence all readers of English.
I first heard of him in my teens as an avuncular British advocate of S-F as Literature, with a capital "L." Almost the next thing I heard he died. Same sad story with Aldous Huxley. Lewis' pal J.R.R. Tolkien burst into my conciousness next, and prompted me to investigate Lewis' writing further. I had good and bad times with Lewis' prolific output. I agreed with Tolkien's assessment of Narnia's weaknesses, though. Hell, I even read English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama, which was more fun than I expected it to be -- even led me to enjoy Ezra Pound's ABCs of Reading because of the two authors' enjoyment of contemporary Scottish poets north of Tudor England.
I also read The Dark Tower -- yuck! The late Kathryn Lindskoog wrote a book called Sleuthing C. S. Lewis, which insisted that Lewis Estate executor Walter Hooper forged this fragment and the other crappy story pieces in that very thin collection. Maybe she's right, maybe she's wrong, but the book isn't even worth reading. If Warnie Lewis, Jack's brother, really tried to burn this stuff, Hooper should have let him do it. Shame on Hooper for besmirching C.S. Lewis' name by publishing his discarded toilet paper. If Hooper made this shit up himself, double shame for his dishonesty and rotten writing. BTW -- I'm calling C.S. Lewis "Jack," his actual nickname, as if I knew him, which of course I didn't. Might as well play the same game everyone else plays in the Shadowlands.

Mime Troupe Saga -- Santa Barbara Is Online NOW!

(Click to enlarge.)
Katie Duck and Matthew Child dancing in 1975. Sometimes it seems to take as long to write about this stuff as it took to live it.

It's still raining, it's still pouring, and I ain't going to Polebridge, that's for sure! Start without me, Freekbass.

Sitemeter Sez: Modesto, California; Rome, Italy; San Francisco, California; Houston, Texas; Manchester, UK; Hopland, California; Ile-de-France; Kronobergs, Sweden; Hiwassee, Virginia, and Shanghai, China (All stopping by to see Flash Gordon)

New IMPROVED 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: Alan Hovaness on the radio! He was sure a fun classical composer -- made Seattle a brighter place when I lived there, and before, and after. RIP

Deepa Mehta's movie Fire (1996). A rather modest character study with adept observations about disfunction. Yes, there's a plot about two women loving each other too. Good flick! I thought Earth (1998) was better, but they're very different from one another. Ms. Mehta deserves many accolades for her courage, and filmmaking skills.

Hoo Boy: Bob Dylan was detained in New Jersy because he told some cop he was Bob Dylan. Shah Rukh Khan was detained at the Newark airport because he told some customs agent he was a movie star. Moving on to sanity now ...

Looking Back: A memory of Woodstock by someone who was THERE.

3 Days (+14,610) of Peace and Music by N in Seattle
Sat Aug 15, 2009 at 02:50:12 PM PDT (From Daily Kos)

I was at Woodstock.
There, I said it. I'm well aware that the number of people who'll tell you that they attended momentous events always vastly exceeds the actual count. It's often noted that, for example, that a couple of million people were among the 34,320 fans in the Polo Grounds on October 3, 1951 when Bobby Thomson hit the Shot Heard 'Round the World. (Parenthetically, Hall of Famer Dave Winfield was born on that very same day, in St. Paul MN.) In my case, though, it's the god's honest truth.
My experience of Woodstock was a bit different from what's usually reported. Yes, we had some difficulty getting to Bethel NY, but we were fortunate to have started the drive from Hartford, not South Jersey (where I lived at the time). So we didn't have to go to and through New York City. We ran into a lot of traffic, but we didn't run into anything like Arlo's bemused observation that "the New York State Thruway's closed, man!". My brother (then 15) and I had flown up to Hartford to travel to the festival with my Dartmouth buddies David and Bob. Unlike most of those who went there, we actually had tickets to the event ... my brother still has them.
We didn't have a really good idea of exactly where we were going. We had a roadmap, of course, but it had very little detail of the rural upstate area we were visiting. Somehow, though, we got to within a few miles of Yasgur's Farm. We pulled our tents out of the car, set up a little camp by the side of the road, and started walking with the crowd. We figured somebody had to know where to go.
Well, obviously somebody did, because we eventually arrived at the hillside on Max Yasgur's farm. The fences that were supposed to have separated ticketholders from everyone else had long since been trampled down, so we swung past the stage and began to work our way toward a piece of open ground. At exactly the time we stepped onto the grounds, the first percussive notes of Richie Havens's guitar rang out. As always with Richie, it was impossible to tell exactly which song was about to be played. According to Wikipedia, Richie's opener was High Flyin' Bird, but I couldn't find any video of that song. But the looooong intro in the Woodstock video below (Handsome Johnny) might have just as easily become High Flyin' Bird or any of the other songs in his set:
Friday's set ended in the dark of night, with Joan Baez leading the crowd in We Shall Overcome (video below). It had drizzled just a bit during the evening, but it wasn't really a problem that night. The entire crowd wandered off the hill afterwards. I have not the slightest idea how we were able to locate our campsite, but I know we did get there.
Many people were much the worse for wear as we headed back to Yasgur's farm on Saturday. Water and food were scarce -- the stores in the little village nearby, the site of the famed pond full of naked people, had long since sold out of everything. Thankfully, any number of the people living on the country roads between our camp and the venue generously offered water from their garden hoses to the endless stream of sunburned "freaks" walking past their homes.
We settled in for a long, wondrous, amazing day and night (and, it turned out, morning) of music that day. In the daytime, we heard (among others) Country Joe, John Sebastian, Santana, and Canned Heat. This was the first time I'd ever heard of, much less heard, Santana, and their set absolutely blew me away. It was rock combined with world music, with Carlos Santana's jazzy guitar and young Michael Shrieve's drumkit, creating an astonishing sound unlike anything I'd previously known.
The nighttime set was even better, except for one disappointment. This, as it turns out, was the only time I ever saw The Dead in concert, and they were, ummm, terrible. They made several attempts to start some of the tunes before they could figure them out. Unfortunate... But the rest of the night was sublime -- Creedence was clean and concise, Janis Joplin wailed out her set, Sly & the Family Stone generated enough energy and funk to power a city, and The Who played Tommy in its entirety as the sky went from darkness into daylight. The poor unfortunate Airplane was left to play its set to an exhausted crowd in the early morning daylight.

We couldn't stick around for the rain-soaked, muddy Sunday sets. No Cocker, no Ten Years After, no Band, no BS&T, no CSN&Y, no Hendrix. We didn't have to deal with the worst of the weather or the worst of the traffic jams in trying to get out of Bethel.

The reason? Because we college students had to get back to our summer jobs on Monday morning. I'd already begged off on Thursday and Friday, and it would be very bad form to miss Monday as well. For the record, I worked that summer at the Frankford Arsenal. I was, in the summer of 1969, a civilian employee of the United States Army. I rationalized it as "subverting from within", but I was participating in basic research on the protective effects of metal plating on steel when exposed to high ambient temperature and humidity. In other words, helping the Army figure out how to keep its weapons and materiel from falling apart in the jungles of Vietnam and Cambodia.
Woodstock was an irreproducible event. 3 Days of Peace and Music turned out to be exactly as advertised (and much, much more), despite logistical nightmares and serious weather problems. Unfortunately, the excitingly positive vibes generated by those 3 Days of Peace and Music couldn't last. The Woodstock Nation, born on August 15-17, 1969, came to an end less than four months later, at the Altamont Speedway on December 6, 1969.

Update [2009-8-15 18:21:15 by N in Seattle]:

In a post on my blog five years ago, I wrote a paragraph about Yasgur's farm five years on: I visited Max Yasgur’s farm. It was five years to the day after 450,000 of us celebrated those wondrous Three Days of Peace and Music. I recall that it took me a little while to get my bearings sufficiently to find the place ... I was now driving along roads I’d previously walked. There was no sign that anything momentous had ever happened on those grounds, just a big empty field. Nostalgia-seekers wouldn’t start descending on the site for another 15 or more years. On August 15, 1974, then, I walked into the middle of the Woodstock site and sat down, with absolutely no one else in sight. Nothing to disturb my recollections except the whisper of a breeze through waving grasses and the buzzing of insects. I drank in the quietude for a few reflective minutes, envisioning the vibe of five years earlier, and took my leave of that hallowed ground.

Dancing to good music is a primordial activity that's even deeper than tradition. Do it today. Do it tomorrow.
We did it yesterday!
Sunday update -- While it's on my mind, I want to mention meeting a man who PLAYED at the Woodstock Festival. Mike Heron was a Scottish-born musician who'd sold a lot of albums as co-founder of the Incredible String Band. He was a very pleasant man who made the effort to come to our own show in 1975. He enjoyed our work very much, and told us so. Validation like that from a major creative inspiration like Heron meant a lot to me then, and still does now!

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!