The snowpack keeps building up slowly! There's been some snowfall every day. Unfortunately, a couple of back-country skiers lost their lives in an avalanche nearby. It's been the worst year on record for these kind of fatalities. Stay in-bounds, in the resorts -- our narrow canyons are death-traps with this type of snow.

Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from Cambridge, Massachusetts; Kirkland, Washington; Jamaica, New York (Yo Stozo!); Louth, Ireland (Love 'ya, Eavan!) and Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire UK.

REAL SLC Punk, not the movie, 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!





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!

All-round good guy Jim Keefe wrote me to say: Enjoyed the comparison from strip to film. Fun stuff!
Put a link on the Yahoo adventure strip group as well.
Hope you get a lot of hits. THANKS AGAIN JIM!

Charity Alert: Keep that Resolution to click on The Hunger Site every day. Also check into Terra Sigilata blog -- donate $$$ to cancer patients just by clicking onto the site.

In The Community: Nancy Cawdrey, The Collective Caravan, and Old West -- New Visions at the Hockaday Museum of Art. Check out the pictures!

Ch-ch Changes: (from an article by Gudjon Helgason) REYKJAVIK, Iceland — Bobby Fischer, the reclusive chess genius ...has died. Fisher died in a Reykjavik hospital on Thursday of kidney failure after a long illness. He was 64. Born in Chicago in March 9, 1943, and raised in Brooklyn, NY, Robert James Fischer was a child prodigy, playing competitively from the age of 8. At 13, he became the youngest player to win the United States Junior Championship. At 14, he won the United States Open Championship for the first of eight times. At 15, he gained the title of international grand master, the youngest person to hold the title. Fischer dethroned (Soviet Grand Master Boris) Spassky in 1972 in a series of games in Iceland's capital, Reykjavik, to become the first officially recognized world champion born in the United States.
As a champion, he used his eccentricities to unsettle opponents, but Fischer's reputation as a genius of chess was soon eclipsed, in the eyes of many, by his idiosyncrasies.
"Chess is war on a board," he once said. "The object is to crush the other man's mind."
Now's the time to express MY point of view, obscure and unimportant as it may be. Fischer was as famous as any Rock Star in the mid 60's and early 70's. I had friends who IDOLIZED him, even though his personality flaws were plain to see. Let's throw down some names from those days -- Eric Clapton? Janis Joplin? Jimi Hendrix? Jane Fonda? (See Below) Bobby Fischer was as well-known as ANY of them to the general public.
I was on West High School's Chess Team, even though I had little aptitude for the game. Three of our members were first-rank champions -- Abbas Riazi, Alan Taye, and my friend Jim Neilson. The next four were all pretty good too. My two friends Steve and Craig worked at the game, and I went along for moral support. I won all my matches, but c'mon -- if you're counting, you'll see I was number ten. Competition was fairly non-existant down there. If we wanted to claim the State Championship, we could have, but there was no formal award in existance at the time.
I stayed in touch with Jim Neilson for many years, and was able to see the world of competitive Chess through his eyes. I even replayed some of the Fischer/Spassky matches in 1972 from the local newspaper, with Jim's inscisive commentary to guide me, but I never got into the memorization or technique it took to really play the game. I had many other things distracting me, and NEVER related to Fischer's neurotic, hyper-petulant personality. I always thought he might be mentally ill, even when I was in high school, but I was saddened to see him repeatedly break down in public the way he did. I'd rather have been wrong.
Fischer lost his world title in 1975 after refusing to defend it against Anatoly Karpov. He dropped out of competitive chess and largely out of view, emerging occasionally to make erratic and often anti-Semitic comments, although his mother was Jewish. Fischer faced criminal charges in the United States for playing a 1992 rematch against Boris Spassky in Yugoslavia in defiance of international sanctions. In July 2004, Fischer was arrested at Japan's Narita airport for traveling on a revoked U.S. passport and was threatened with extradition to the United States to face charges of violating sanctions. He spent nine months in custody before the dispute was resolved when Iceland granted him citizenship and he moved there with his longtime companion, the Japanese chess player Miyoko Watai.
Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion from Russia, said Fischer's ascent in the chess world in the 1960s and his promotion of chess worldwide was "a revolutionary breakthrough" for the game. "The tragedy is that he left this world too early, and his extravagant life and scandalous statements did not contribute to the popularity of chess," Kasparov told The Associated Press.
Spassky, reached briefly at his home in France, said: "I am very sorry, but Bobby Fischer is dead. Goodbye."


Theater/Theatre: What's going on in Amsterdam today?
January 17 Thursday OT301 Melt - Performance Trust and Magpie 21:00
January 18 Friday Lunch Lecture with the Trust Company SNDO 13:30-15:00 / OT301 Music-Dance301 Melt - performance Trust and Magpie 21:00 + Karaoke party after the performance
Trust Dance Company - Artistic Director - Hyeong-hee Kim Dancers: Yun-gyu Kim, Ye-jin Gwon, Jeong-min Ju, Jeong-hyeon Kim, Jae-yeong Park, Myeong-gyu SongMusicians: Dong-kun Kim, Eun-yung Shim, Hyeong-Mo AHN
Magpie Dancers: Katie Duck, Michael Schumacher, Vincent Cacalano, Makiko Ito, Sylvain Meret, Eileen Standley, Kyung sun Beak, Justin Morrison, Manuela Tessi
Magpie Musicians: Cor Fuhler (piano), Andy Moor (electric guitar), Michael Moore (reeds), Mary Oliver (violin), Colin Mclean (electronics), Wilbert De Joode (counter bass), Rozemarie Heggen (counter bass)
Light design: Ellen Knops
Art designer (posters and flyers): Isabelle Vigier

Chess & The 60's


I was more interested in Art and the human figure than the game of Chess. (R to L) Sir John Tennile's Red Queen from Alice Through the Looking Glass; Anita Pallenberg as The Black Queen in Roger Vadim's cinematic interpretation of Jean Claude Forest's Barbarella comic strip; M. Vadim's lovely wife Jane Fonda in the title role, with flashes of her nude body amongst the psychedelic background; Vadim previously made Brigitte Bardot famous for that sort of thing, and the beginning of Barbarella is one of his best sequences, as the character wakes up in weightlessness. Clean nudity -- as erotic or innocent as the viewer chooses it to be.