Hey Dublin! (and the World at large) I'm running off to Fort Collins, Colorado for a ten-day "vacation" this afternoon -- Helena, Montana tonight, Casper, Wyoming tomorrow, and Fort Collins on Friday. Wish us good weather, Eagles flying, and lack of Deer running across the roads.

Footbarn's Celebration of Theatre: Theater X-Net

Starring: Ida Rubinstein Belle Epoch Russian/Parisian beauty.
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! Spitfires of the Spaceways
Watch Dale Arden rescue Flash Gordon for a change!

Charity Alert: Keep that resolution as Autumn settles in! Click on The Hunger Site every day.

In The Community: I'll be back in time for the opening of Members Only! Autumn Salon at the Hockaday Museum of Art.

Media Watch: Noam Chomsky on CSPAN, talking about his book Empire and Survival --scary stuff. Our great linguistics professor does not really hate Amerika -- just the bad things done in our country's name. (Too bad there's so many of them.)
Ex-newscaster Sarah Chayes was speaking on CSPAN too, plus guesting around the Mainstream Media about her book The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban. She actually LIVES in that terrible place now, helping the common Afghani people cope with overlapping Warlords, Drug Lords, and the resurgent Taliban. I'm sad to see that times are getting more dangerous for her, and all well-meaning people there.
I taped Jean Cocteau's two most famous movies from TCM last night: Beauty and the Beast, and Orpheus. I will testify that those films were major aesthetic influences on my life.
Cocteau was a friend and patron of Ida Rubinstein. He was smittem by her beauty during Paris' Belle Epoch She later produced HIS first version of the Orpheus legend -- From Ida's Website: Orphée (1926) -- A mime-drama by Jean Cocteau, Music by M. Arthur Honegger, Costumes by Alexander Golovin, performed at the Paris Opera. (Based on original works by Roger-Ducasse and Alexander Ziloti in 1913-14)
Cocteau's movie was made the same year I was born, and is a visually stunning, but very uncomfortable parable about a man who becomes obsessed about a mysterious dark-haired woman who is literally his own death. I know Orpheus contains references to many things in Cocteau's world, but I don't know what they are -- try Wikipedia for a start.

Footsbarn in Action!


Rosanna, Rachelle, and Rhonna prepare for the great Puca Ritual.

As always, greetings to Dublin. The warm sunny Autumn weather here feels like the phenomena we call "Indian Summer" in America. We see Deer anytime of the day or night or anyplace lately, including our driveway.

Footbarn's Celebration of Theatre: Theater X-Net

Starring: Ida Rubinstein Belle Epoch Russian/Parisian beauty.
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! Spitfires of the Spaceways
Watch Dale Arden rescue Flash Gordon for a change!

Charity Alert: Keep that resolution as Autumn settles in! Click on The Hunger Site every day.

Media Watch: Monsters & the Curse of Frankenstein was mostly gossip. Say what you will about irresponsible Godwin, Shelly, Byron, and the wreckage they made of their families -- they were very creative people in a reactionary society which feared all creativity in the wake of the French Revolution. Mary W. Shelly's unhappy life resulted in not only the first Science Fiction novel, but her labors for Byron, and on behalf of her doomed husband as an editor, were indispensable in preserving some of the greatest English poetry of the 19th Century.
To me, one of the saddest aspects of her hard years trying to achieve proto-Victorian respectability was that it extinguished the inner fires which forged new visions for our world. She did it because of need, as a good mother, and I can only fault her society. Her only surviving son was noted as an unimaginative ultra-conformist by his contemporaries.
That's it for the book Monsters! The following notes are from other reading: Both Lord Byron's and Shelly's lineages ended before Queen Victoria's passing.
Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Frankenstein share a family tree with the Computer! Mary Wollstonecroft Shelly's half-sister Claire Claremont bore a child by Lord Byron. She was present during the "Haunted Summer" of 1816 when Frankenstein's monster emerged from Mary's imagination.
Byron's companion Dr. John Poldori created an irresistible but evil gentleman Vampyre that season, who was obviously modeled from the amoral peer in Poldori's Gothic novel of the same name -- the same literary archetype who re-emerged as Count Dracula and Lestat de Lioncourt.*
Byron's only legitimate daughter Ada Lovelace grew up to became a friend of the brilliant scientist Charles Babbage. She is often given credit as being one of the first computer programmers, based upon her writings that described applications for Babbage's seminal Difference Engine. She lived her entire life in a repressive aristocracy which punished her socially for whatever achievements she made. After she died from cervical cancer, her son was sent away by his father and perished at sea, extinguishing the Byron line.

*For the sake of clarity, I'm skipping any analysis of Sapphic vampire Carmilla in the excellent story by LeFanu circa 1872.

It's Footsbarn Picture Time!


(Right) Dr. Noilie nearly loses her mind in the wake of the "utter disaster" wrought by her Homo Haereticus experiment. (Left) Joe the Entrepeneur leads benumbed Vincent the Mayor aside.