September can be so nice, if you're not under a hurricane. Bless the people who are beset by southern storms this year.

Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from the USA and the World, only they are undergoing maintenence right now. I've added Big Sky Blogroll to my Friendly Sites list.

Check out ROCK against Reaganomics 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.





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 his recommendations -- HERE!

Charity Alert: 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.

In The Community: Current shows at the Hockaday Museum of Art include Rails, Trails, and A Road -- honoring the 75th Anniversary of Going To The Sun Road in Glacier National Park, plus Ace Powell -- Ace of Diamonds and Native American Interpretations from our permanent collection. I am doing tech for the Shroud of Turin forensic chemistry lecture at the college later today.

Media Watch: Puccini's Madama Butterfly, with it's grim colonial-era story, and painfully beautiful arias on Montana Public Radio via the San Francisco Opera.

Digitally-interpreted Patricia Racette as Cio-Cio-San in the San Francisco Opera's production of Madama Butterfly. This opera was a cultural cliche as I was growing up in the 50's, when many neighborhood fathers spent time in Japan and silken kimonos were common household souveniers. The popular song Love is a Many Splendored Thing was derived from Puccini's Un bel dì vedremo (One fine day we shall ...) Unfortunately, this work of high musical art plus Gilbert & Sullivan's tuneful, but silly, Mikado reinforced bigotry and ignorance rather than knowledge in Suburban Amerika. To tell the ugly truth, common U.S. servicemen mostly knew their host nations via servants and/or prostitutes, often rejecting any other perspectives. Opera icons "Butterfly" and "Brunhilda" were considered cultural cartoons in the same class as "Bosko" or "Betty Boop" when it came to cheap laughs. Hopefully, things have changed -- the use of Cio Cio San's name, and Madama reflects a rediscovery of this piece as music rather than sentimental fiction.
I am also working on a video made at Bull Head Lodge, once the summer home of Charles M. Russell. It has been in other families' hands for about four generations, and this is just a discrete peek out it's window onto Lake McDonald. Once the place was a formal tourist attraction, but it hasn't been that way since Russell's death in the 1920's. A group of scholars met there last week, thanks to the owners.