Saturday, July 07, 2007

HOT weather -- hotter than Hell, and it's supposed to be Heaven on Earth around here. A huge forest fire sent up an anvil-style cloud to 40,000 feet, southwest of us in the Bridger Wilderness Area about 170 miles away.

Footbarn's Celebration of Theatre: 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, hapless Aura II, and an essay on bodacious Princess Aura I

Charity Alert: Make a resolution this Summer to click on The Hunger Site every day.

In The Community: Saturday at the Hockaday Museum of Art is more like it should be -- we have visitors ambling through, trying to escape the 100+ degree (F) heat outside. We have replaced India with "Indians" -- Our First Nations display went up in the lower gallery within 24 hours, thanks to our Traveling Medicine Show, good database software for planning, plus plenty of grunting and groaning on the part of the Director, staff, and I.

What's up at the Hockaday now:




Media Watch: Live Earth may be just one more Rock Concert, but I'm glad they still exist, and still help garner attention for issues like Global Warming. (Did I mention how hot it was today? Thought so.) Ex-VP Al Gore has been a good frontman. I'm looking forward to seeing the original members of the Police perform together again.


Live Earth is an intercontinental event -- there's even an obscure band made up of scientists from Antarctica! I have no idea if they lip-synch'd or not, but the Pussy Cat Dolls were one of the acts performing in Giants Stadium USA. These ladies are good when they're funny -- they started as a burlesque-of-a-burlesque act over a decade ago in Hollywood. (Digital re-interpretation of something that is probably copyrighted by SOMEONE, but I'm blogging a reflection of it to show what's happening in the world today!)

Thursday, July 05, 2007

More HOT weather -- 99 degrees (F) is higher than normal. Those %$#@! noisy fireworks are done for awhile. A pair of Deer were sighted by Dry Bridge Slough.

Footbarn's Celebration of Theatre: 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, plus hapless Aura II.
Watch for a new essay about bodacious spitfire Princess Aura I

Charity Alert: Make a resolution this Summer to click on The Hunger Site every day.

In The Community: The Hockaday Museum of Art 's 4th of July experiment didn't really fly -- we got about a half-dozen people. The Conrad Mansion's free tours and ice cream outdrew us by several hundreds, plus Independence Day isn't usually associated with art museums. I refined our Permanent Collection pages on the Web, though.

Media Watch: News outlets are reporting the death of Bill Pinkney, one of the Clyde McPhatter's fellow Drifters on Money Honey (1953). Pinkney played a major role in keeping the name of "The Drifters" on the road for five decades. (Read the Wikipedia entry HERE.)
I saw one version of the Drifters live, as part of a Rock & Roll Revival tour, around 1970. There are FOUR possibilities about which configuration performed that night: Bill Pinkney with a pick-up group The Tears; The Tears without Pinkney calling themselves the Drifters; Bill Pinkney with George Wallace, Al Fortsen, Mark Williams, and Benny Anderson; Johnny Moore with Rick Sheppard, Bill Fredricks, and Milton Turner (or Don Thomas). Whomever they were, they were excellent!
I saw one of Bill Pinkney's groups on TV soon afterwards (For sure -- I recognize him from his pictures on the news.) but that performance was fairly lousy. I suspected ongoing battles over their name had adverse effects on the music.
I saw the Revival at the University of Utah. One of my cohorts in SDS had been arrested for "public obscenity" at a protest rally on campus a few days earlier because of a few choice words he spoke at the microphone. I only mention that incident because the Revival featured a lot of sexual content, to the audience's delight. The "climax" of the evening was Chuck Berry performing My Ding A Ling, which was a brand new song in those days. My friend was never prosecuted -- partly because his lawyer mentioned the Rock & Roll Revival as an example of what the U of U allowed in actual practice on it's campus.


Over an ariel photo of the University of Utah in 1970, I have pasted some contemporary photo-details: Clockwise: Our student protest in the wake of Ohio State -- that's my friend, SDS President Jim Beaver at the lower right. I was somewhere in the crowd; A VW Bug like mine with a couple of ladies my age -- duplicating a scene I enjoyed many times, especially when I shot video in the Dance Department, right of the number 2; Me, posing as a SERIOUS Art Student, an inmate of the new Art & Architecture Building, left and above the number 4; The lower "Presidents Circle," where I froze my ass off going to basic core classes in the winter; A detail from the actual rally poster, miraculously preserved online by the U of U Library, right of the number 3 -- the Rock & Roll Revival concert I blogged about (above) occurred about a week later in the Student Union, above and left of the number 1.

 

Wednesday, July 04, 2007

It is supposed to be HOT today! Those damn fireworks were banging away until all hours of the night.

Footbarn's Celebration of Theatre: 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, plus hapless Aura II.

Charity Alert: Make a resolution this Summer to click on The Hunger Site every day.

In The Community: The Hockaday Museum of Art is OPEN on the 4th of July this year! We are located between the Main Street parade route and the free ice cream social at the Conrad Mansion. People are walking and driving all around us, so it's worth a try.

Media Watch: Stan Frieberg's The United States of America on the local NPR station -- just as funny now as it was at the end of the 50's. The bread and circus version of Amerika under which we are living now could stand a few laughs, but the damn CLOWNS are running the place instead, and bread is scarce.


John Fery, Austrian/American landscapist, did hundreds of canvases for the Northern Pacific and Great Northern Railway. It is still possible to find one of his works in a woodpile somewhere, but don't count on it.

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

It was just shy of being too hot to fence off the underside of my deck above the Slough. The cats had been hiding there, and creatures were bringing up things from the water which I didn't like seeing, plus the weeds were getting too lush. That chicken wire and black visquine plastic sheeting will take care of our problems!

Footbarn's Celebration of Theatre: 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, plus hapless Aura II

Charity Alert: Make a resolution this Summer to click on The Hunger Site every day.

In The Community: I'm facing a whole weekend at the Hockaday Museum of Art -- Jeff Wilson's show is coming down, and we're putting up some Ace Powell. There will be other changes in the office space, as well as the art.

Media Watch: At least there's Wimbledon on Network TV. When I first saw this tennis tournament in England I knew that the USA would like it, and it has. I was lucky enough to be watching when Arthur Ashe took the Men's Championship. It was a pity that his health failed and he died early -- Mr. Ashe was a brilliant athlete and a greater man.


A digital reinterpretation of Internet images in honor of the Wimbledon Tournament.

Monday, July 02, 2007

Another fine summer day! The Mallards in the Slough range in size from about six inches to almost 18 inches. It about time to take the canoe out there.

Footbarn's Celebration of Theatre: 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 and Dale Arden to the rescue -- plus Princess Aura II

Charity Alert: Make a resolution this Summer to click on The Hunger Site every day.

In The Community: The Hockaday Museum of Art on Sunday -- that's my lot this summer. It was mellow, so I was able to lay some groundwork for a very busy upcoming weekend. Jeff Wilson is coming DOWN!

Media Watch: I haven't had Cable TV since I moved, but I'm going to look into it next month. Broadcast TV really stinks, so I'm reviewing my VHS tapes and DVDs more than usual -- I've been doing much-needed maintenance on my Web pages too.


Shirley Deane as the anemic Princess Aura II -- except for the grin, she almost looks spitfire-ish here, as she attempts to flee an attack by Ming's soldiers in her own Forest Kingdom. She's actually paying the price of being too smug and trusting of Lady Sonja, the female spy swiped right out of Dumas' Three Musketeers. To be fair to Ms. Deane, her character had already been pacified, unsexed, and gentrified by Alex Raymond in the newspaper strip. Hollywood was just following his profitable lead in the serial. However, there's something about that Unicorn horn which might make Dr. Freud scratch his head if he ever went to see Saturday Matinees.
 
Read about Princess Aura II's misadventures HERE!

 

Sunday, July 01, 2007

Not too hot, but those convectional thunderstorms can bring high winds with them. Dry Bridge Slough had about six families of Ducks cruising the waters -- mostly Mallards.

Footbarn's Celebration of Theatre: 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 and Dale Arden to the rescue!

Charity Alert: Make a resolution this Summer to click on The Hunger Site every day.

In The Community: The Hilton Garden Inn event is finally over -- I was real flustered afterwards and missed an appointment. It could have been worse, but was still pretty bad. I also went over to the Hockaday Museum of Art to check my schedule and was busy for two and a half hours doing other things. I gotta get a day planner and find that PDA I put away.

Media Watch: That opera on local NPR station about those Carmelite nuns being executed during the French Reign of Terror in 1794 was tragic enough for the genre, but the music was far from compelling.


Delacroix's famous Liberty painting -- a metaphor of the French Revolution painted two generations later. I saw it myself in all it's greasy technicolor glory at The Louvre last August. This is a digital reinterpretation, referring to how we remember events in faded colors, with details that are unclear, and contexts which rise from the times when we reminisce.