Moving SUX! Ya' have to do it sometimes, but only mentally-disturbed people could enjoy the dislocation it entails. We had a little rain late at night -- that's fine, but wait until I'm all moved-in to rain in the day willya?

Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from NYC, looking for Gretchen Mol -- they found a Bettie Page collage instead, along with well-deserved praise for Ms. Mol's acting in the movie The Notorious Bettie Page.

Remembering my friend George-O 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!
Spitfires of the Spaceways
UPDATED! Wilma Deering & Dale Arden to the rescue; Bodacious Princess Aura I; Hapless Aura II; The fiery Emperor Ming; The Orson Welles Rumor Debunked; and BOTH incarnations of Jean Rogers!
Read my latest Spitfires in Context essay.

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 his recommendations -- HERE!

Charity Alert: Keep that resolution to click on The Hunger Site every day.

In The Community: The elevator broke down during the FIRST week of classes in the only two-story building at Flathead Valley Community College. The son - of - a - gun worked FINE all summer too! Our movie about Inuit (Eskimo) Art is still on for next month, in conjunction with the Hockaday Museum of Art's exhibit.

Media Watch: M. Night Shyamalan's Lady in the Water wasn't as bad as the critics made it out to be. It was a monster flick -- no more, no less, and pretty entertaining on the whole. Shyamalan became famous with the great movie Sixth Sense, but few people have such good fortune at all, much less serially -- ask Orson Welles next time you contact the dead.
There were some riffs in Lady in the Water which reminded me of Charles Williams' excellent Place of the Lion -- an over - the - top English fantasy novel about the supernatural world of Angels and the ordinary world of Mortals making contact with one another -- which meant destruction for us mortals unless things were put aright. Williams became a close friend of C.S. Lewis during WWII, and his intense Christian Mysticism influenced Lewis' subsequent writings -- not necessarily for the better, as J.R.R. Tolkien stated in his letters. I tend to agree with Tolkien -- That Hideous Strength was the least interesting of the Ransom Trilogy, and was written in Williams' style. The Narnia books were an outright rejection of Tolkien's anti-allegorical aesthetic about Faerie Stories, to their detriment. (Applicability -- YES, determined by the Reader. Allegory -- NO, imposed by the Author.)
I've only RE-read The Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe, and have no interest in re-reading any of the others. I agree that allegory spoils the willing suspension of disbelief -- especially in the Narnia books.


One of the great Mystical Epics is John Milton's Paradise Lost, written in the 17th Century. Don't even TRY to tell me that Williams, Lewis, and Tolkien weren't influenced by it in the 20th Century. This illustration of Angelic conflict in Milton's poem is by 18th Century mystic and proto-Romantic William Blake.