Cold winds and sunny days. Small spots of open water with a few Ducks and Geese setting down during their Spring migration.

Sitemeter Sez: Chicago, Illinois; Halifax, Nova Scotia; Jamaica, New York; Vancouver, Washington; Somewhere in Korea; South Jordan, Utah; Somewhere in the USA; Grays, Thurrock UK (Where in the British Isles is THAT?); Tallahassee, Florida; Unknown, Canada; Worcester, UK; Grenoble, France; O Fallon, Illinois; Whitefish, Montana.

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 -- UPDATED!





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. Also check into Terra Sigilata blog -- donate $$$ to cancer patients just by clicking onto the site.

In The Community: The Auction of Miniatures is on the walls! All students are admitted FREE this year to the Hockaday Museum of Art, thanks to Pacific Steel & Recycling. We're also having a public preview party next week.
Check out Fall for Glacier too -- a fundraiser for several programs that make Glacier National Park even better!

Website/Blogger News: Two separate fans of Ida Rubinstein have written to me for help with their respective projects in Toronto and London. Her legendary sensual allure and intense connections with some of the finest artists of her era still piques intrigue and rumors.
I'm no expert, just a derivative visually-oriented cyber-biographer when it comes to the High Patroness of this Blog, but I tend to concur with Toni Bentley about her intimate life. What the Heck? I'm willing to be surprised about Ida, and I hope other Rubinsteinophiles find new facets of her incredible career!

Media Watch: I'm giving Trash A Go Go another chance. The opening number featuring the pro dancers was excellent, except that Maksim seemed to be sitting this season out. It was all-male night, and there were some good-looking young guys among the contestants who were actually able to dance. A singer named Mario tore the place up with Karina Smirnoff. There were too many token old comics -- Gutenberg wasn't too bad, and drew a pretty good partner with Anna, but I doubt he's going to do as well as John O'Hurley. Jimmy Kimmel's former partner was terrible and should be thrown off first for his lousy attitude. Comedy magician Penn Gillette should probably go next, unless he improves greatly.
On a better show -- BreakSk8 was sent home on America's Best Dance Crew. If I was the producer I would have kept all of the last four contestants through the season finale and given 1st, 2nd, 3rd place awards plus an honorable mention. BrakeSk8 went out with their heads high, and a fine speech from their leader. JabbaWockeeZ choreography was elegant and masterful, despite the lousy music they were given. Even though I'm not mentioning the other two groups, there were no losers, except for that stupid idea of mixing Broadway and Hip Hop.

George Clinton on Singapore media, being a good sport by eating some fruit reputed to be the worst-smelling stuff on Earth.

Spring is approaching fast! The Pope sez that you can't celebrate St. Patrick as a saint on St. Patrick's Day this year 'cause its on Monday of Holy Week. I'm not Catholic, but everybody start drinkin' NOW -- Pope's orders!

Sitemeter Sez: Den Haag, Holland; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Edison, New Jersey; San Francisco, California; New York, New York; London, UK; Thousand Oaks, California; Miami, Florida; Havre, Montana; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Jamaica, New York and Honolulu, Hawaii.

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 -- UPDATED!





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. Also check into Terra Sigilata blog -- donate $$$ to cancer patients just by clicking onto the site.

In The Community: Dr. Scott Wheeler did well at FVCC's 2008 Honors Symposium last night. I'll be a spectator tonight at the play Addict.
The Auction of Miniatures is going up next week, right after everything else comes DOWN. All students are admitted FREE this year to the Hockaday Museum of Art, thanks to Pacific Steel & Recycling.
Check out Fall for Glacier too -- a fundraiser for several programs that make Glacier National Park even better!

Theater/Theatre:

My friend Katie Duck with Magpie Music/Dance on Monday, March 3 at the Bimhuis in Amsterdam Music: Alfredo Genovesi-gitaar, Hilary Jeffery-trombone, Oscar Jan Hoogland-piano Dance: Katie Duck, Melvin Fraenk (standing on head), and Alexandra Manasse (head shaved bald). Also dancing that night were Maria Mavridou and Bruno Isakovic; Light: Petyr Veenstra (thanx to Katie's site.)

Still cold, but it LOOKS like spring weather. The Deer are grazing around Dry Bridge Slough,and the water birds are hoping for a thaw.

Sitemeter Sez: Louth, Ireland; Dumfries, Virginia; Los Angeles, California; Nijmegen, Netherlands; Charlotte, North Carolina; Antrim, U.K; Harker Heights, Texas; Bellevue, Washington; Clarksville, Tennessee and New York, New York.

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 -- UPDATED!





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. Also check into Terra Sigilata blog -- donate $$$ to cancer patients just by clicking onto the site.

In The Community: Tomorrow, my friend Dr. Scott Wheeler is doing a lecture for FVCC's 2008 Honors Symposium called Why Care About History? right on campus -- I will be there running the tech at our new facility in the Arts & Technology Building starting at 7PM. I'll be a spectator at the play Addict in the theater in the same building on Friday.
The Auction of Miniatures is going up next week, right after everything else comes down THIS week. All students are admitted FREE this year to the Hockaday Museum of Art, thanks to Pacific Steel & Recycling.
Check out Fall for Glacier too -- a fundraiser for several programs that make Glacier National Park even better!

All Around the World for the FUNK: Moscow TV mixed up George Clinton with Garry Shider when they covered the P-Funk concert there on March 6th. We are promised a review from Singapore soon. The touring group was only a fraction of the full band -- Shaunna Hall and Shider were the main guitarists. Shaunna's fellow San Franciscan RonKat Spearman was doing bass and vocals. (Cyber-pal Gina Hall lives with Spearman, and I don't think Shaunna's related to Gina, so I didn't say Ms. Hall above. Shaunna also probably knew my friend Wanda Day before she passed away ten years ago -- this particular Hall was involved with Four Non-Blondes too. One of these days we may meet!)


George and some of the abbreviated Funk Mob on Moscow TV -- thanks to a video found on Darryl Moon's Funk Store. I think that's Kendra Foster at the right, but I'd just have to guess who the guys are -- maybe Steve Boyd and Paul Hill.

Cold and clear weather -- those big piles of snow are slowly melting mid-day.

Sitemeter Sez: Clarksville, Tennessee; New York, New York; Singapore City, Singapore; Somewhere in California; Lower Waterford, Vermont; Bombay, India; Medina, Ohio; Lansing, Michigan; Highland Park, New Jersey; Las Vegas, Nevada; Burnaby, British Columbia; Bellevue, Washington; Castro Valley, California; Lincoln, Nebraska; Howell, New Jersey and Amsterdam, Holland.

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 -- UPDATED!





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. Also check into Terra Sigilata blog -- donate $$$ to cancer patients just by clicking onto the site.

In The Community: The Auction of Miniatures is going up next week, right after everything else comes down THIS week. All students are admitted FREE this year to the Hockaday Museum of Art, thanks to Pacific Steel & Recycling.
Check out Fall for Glacier too -- a fundraiser for several programs that make Glacier National Park even better!

Media Watch: Sarah Brightman's TV version of Symphony was featured during Montana PBS' fundraising week. It was recorded last January at Stepan's Cathedral in Vienna, Austria. She sang Canto della Terra and Saeai Qui with an Italian tenor named Alessandro Safina. The former was awe-inspiring! Her duet with counter-tenor Fernando Lima was OK, but my favorite pairing was The Phantom of the Opera (Is In Your Mind) with a very powerful, direct singer named Chris Thompson. (He's bald and wears glasses, like me.) Gothica/Fleur du Mal epitomized the kind of High Art/Rock I like so much when it's done well -- lots of drums and strings, plus that full soprano voice!

Listen to the Music of the Night!


Sarah Brightman in Vienna -- redigitized from an unknown Austrian newspaper via Johanna Ouwerling's Fansite in the Netherlands. The paper photographed Brightman in a RED dress, but I liked her BLACK dress better. She also wore a mostly WHITE dress in the video too -- all three had similar bodices, so I dyed the red dress black with Photoshop. The guitarist at the left was with her in Spokane a few years back when I saw the Harem tour.

Gray and cold. Yesterday was sunny and cold.

Sitemeter Sez: Burnaby, B.C. (Canada); North Liberty, Iowa; Amsterdam, Holland; San Francisco, California (reading one of my best posts), and American Fork, Utah (another curious reader about Punk Rock and KRCL-FM in Salt Lake about 25 years ago.

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 -- UPDATED!





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. Also check into Terra Sigilata blog -- donate $$$ to cancer patients just by clicking onto the site.

Media Watch: America's Best Dance Crew is down to four groups now. It has the same structural weaknesses of any competition show, but has been better than most so far. Buckethead clones The JabbaWockeeZ are doing very well. BreakSk8 continue to amaze me with their wheeling and dancing. Kabba Modern are young, athletic, talented, and witty. Status Quo are from the streets of Boston, and are AUTHENTIC in every way, plus fearless stunt-dancers. The weakness of this competition format is that all four of these groups deserve recognition and respect for what is unique in each of their acts. Nobody on that stage is a loser. BTW -- I thought using songs from Quincy Jones/Michael Jackson's Thriller suppressed the creativity of the groups. The more the songs were mixed-up, the better I liked the dancing.

A stray reader from Iowa took the trouble to place a comment on my blog claiming I had a "very foul mouth." Well, I say do say "fuck" sometimes, and coin phrases like "DE fuckin' grading" when I want to emphasize something. So does Neil Simon, and so do unnumbered other male and female writers. I have a very broad vocabulary, and do not wallow in gutter-talk by any means. When speaking of music, FUNK is a perfectly respectable word.
I will admit to being VERY dismissive of the TV show Your Mama Don't Dance, and hostile to it's concept. I'll acknowledge Iowa's vague, unhelpful, anonymous comment by expaining my perspective on what I saw. What made me angry was the fact that young professional dancers want to WORK, and they will do most ANYTHING to utilize their training. The show in question auditioned these vulnerable people and sprung their parents on them as surprise partners after the fact. Every one of the parents I saw were frankly inept, and their families' personal problems were none of the audience's business. What might have been good-natured fun for a few moments was agony to watch as onstage presentations -- the professionals were held down, the non-pros looked like they were suffering, and the judges looked pained to say anything about situations that didn't warrant judgement of any kind. I know it was the contestants' choice to be there, but it was humiliating for all concerned. I will never watch that show again, and offer no apologies for being appalled to the point of profanity.

Buckethead PRECEEDED Jabberwocky / Jabberwockies / JabbaWockeeZ


(Click to enlarge image.)
JabbaWockeeZ works as a unit, and the white masks help unify their pieces. Ace guitarist Brian Buckethead Carrol has used his white mask and isolation movements as visual gimmicks for almost twenty years. Here he is multiplied many times, ala' JabbaWockeeZ, playing in the band Praxis with Bill Lasiwell, my friend Bernie Worrell, and P-Funk All-Star Lily Haydn on violin.
Digital reinterpretation of images derived from photos by D. Oppenheimer and others.

March's lamb is hiding from the lions -- we've had snow and cold since the weekend.

Sitemeter Sez: Louth, Ireland (Email me, Eavan!); Brockville, Canada; Portland, Oregon; Somewhere, France; Azalea, Oregon; Sao Paulo, Brazil; Issoire, France (near Footsbarn); Missoula, Montana; San Jose, California; Amsterdam, Holland; Salem, Missouri; Niagara Falls, Canada; Canyon, California and ???? United Kingdom.

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 -- UPDATED!





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. Also check into Terra Sigilata blog -- donate $$$ to cancer patients just by clicking onto the site.

Media Watch: Yomama Don't Dance -- another dance elimination contest show, hosted by Trash A Go Go loser Ian Whatisname (Who was slagged by those judges for seeming to be unable to 'show enthusiasm' for dancing with double-champ Cheryl Burke). Bob Fosse stalwart Ben Vereen is on the panel, and half of each team are professionals to some degree. The trouble is, the pros are dancing with their PARENTS -- DE fuckin' grading!
Electioneering and the coverage thereof is intense -- rank propaganda dominated discourse this last week, which meant poor judgement on many fronts. Sen. Clinton's campaign assigned their camp-followers from the national press to a men's room in Austin, Texas. The toilet-humor jokes about that incident were predictable, but funny.

Let's get FUNKY our own selves!

George Clinton and the P-Funk All-Stars are essentially going around the world on a short tour:

03/06/2008 08:00 PM - B 1 Maximum, Moscow (Not QUITE following Lady Kier)

03/08/2008 08:00 PM - Java Jazz, Jakarta,

03/10/2008 08:00 PM - Singapore Jazz Festival, Singapore

03/15/2008 08:00 PM - Sunburst KL MUSIC Festial, Kulua Lumpur

Back in the USA -- 04/05/2008 08:00 PM - Swamp Thing and Crawfish Fest, Austin, TX


"Uncle Jam" clownin' it up during Fleet Week last year.
Uncle Jam's a righteous kinda leader -- just demanding funk n' groove from 'ya!