Tuesday, August 18, 2009

The weather got sunny by Monday, and warmed up a bit. There is a little nest of Killdeer (Plovers) in the field outside my office window.

Sitemeter Sez: Dusseldorf, Germany; Leasburg, Missouri; Dallas, Texas; Reseda, California; Oxford, UK; Rome, Italy; Maiden, North Carolina; Lees Summit, Missouri; Jacksonville, North Carolina; Menomonie, Wisconsin, and Corvallis, Montana.

New IMPROVED Mime Troupe Saga Chapter 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


Many thanks to Toni -- she sent me an autographed copy of Winter Season; A Dancer's Journal (1982) for making a video of her presentation at Harvard University about Ida!




Visit: Michael's Montana Web Archive
Theater, Art, Flash Gordon, Funky Music and MORE!
MORE UPDATES! Outre Space Cinema -- Featuring: 1930's Rocketry, Spitfires of the Spaceways and especially Cellulose to Celluloid, Even more Flash Gordon comparisons from 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 including my efforts on his Flash Gordon Resources Page -- along with actual creators like Alex Raymond, Al Williamson, and others!

Charity Alert: Play the FreeRice Game -- improve your vocabulary, and donate food to the United Nations. 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. BTW -- AIDtoCHILDREN.com is a bit simpler than FreeRice Game.

In The Community: Almost ready to go -- but Mark Ogle's remarkable retrospective is still up at the Hockaday Museum of Art, plus Dan Fagre and Lisa McKeon's show is on the first level -- about the vanishing glaciers of Glacier National Park, it is a true labor of love by scientists from the USGS. Here's another website comparing glacier photos from the early 20th Century and recent decades.
The Hockaday Museum of Art's Face Book Site (There's a link to the conventional website there.)

I was running the tech for guest speaker Joseph Lisle Williams when he presented a lecture at my college about surviving a bear attack in Glacier National Park 50 years ago. Don Dayton, the ranger who shot the bear and saved the young man's life was at the event too. If you want to read more about it, his sister wrote a blog about her brother and the lecture HERE.

The other month, I ran sound for Carol Buchanan's public discussion of her historical novel God's Thunderbolt -- The Vigilantes of Montana at the community college. Here's the link to a live-blog of the event.

A statewide "town meeting" style videoconference about the USA's health care crisis. There were many advocates from different political views, and a few ignoramuses, but the consensus was clear: No more bankruptcies or losing homes because of injury or illness!

Tears and Laughter about our broken health care system HERE

Media Watch: John Lithgow and Bill Irwin reciting out-there poetry on Montana PBS, followed up with Lithgow reading The Monkey's Paw by W. W. Jacobs. (Full text HERE)

Real Books: Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis -- hadn't read it for over thirty years, but enjoyed "Jack's" compelling language and yarn-spinning in their first flowering. I've mentioned that his last novel Till We Have Faces is his best, and my favorite, but in between he became an amazingly popular writer whose works continue to influence all readers of English.
I first heard of him in my teens as an avuncular British advocate of S-F as Literature, with a capital "L." Almost the next thing I heard he died. Same sad story with Aldous Huxley. Lewis' pal J.R.R. Tolkien burst into my conciousness next, and prompted me to investigate Lewis' writing further. I had good and bad times with Lewis' prolific output. I agreed with Tolkien's assessment of Narnia's weaknesses, though. Hell, I even read English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama, which was more fun than I expected it to be -- even led me to enjoy Ezra Pound's ABCs of Reading because of the two authors' enjoyment of contemporary Scottish poets north of Tudor England.
I also read The Dark Tower -- yuck! The late Kathryn Lindskoog wrote a book called Sleuthing C. S. Lewis, which insisted that Lewis Estate executor Walter Hooper forged this fragment and the other crappy story pieces in that very thin collection. Maybe she's right, maybe she's wrong, but the book isn't even worth reading. If Warnie Lewis, Jack's brother, really tried to burn this stuff, Hooper should have let him do it. Shame on Hooper for besmirching C.S. Lewis' name by publishing his discarded toilet paper. If Hooper made this shit up himself, double shame for his dishonesty and rotten writing. BTW -- I'm calling C.S. Lewis "Jack," his actual nickname, as if I knew him, which of course I didn't. Might as well play the same game everyone else plays in the Shadowlands.

Mime Troupe Saga -- Santa Barbara Is Online NOW!

(Click to enlarge.)
Katie Duck and Matthew Child dancing in 1975. Sometimes it seems to take as long to write about this stuff as it took to live it.