The weather is getting warmer, but slowly. The daily rain is good for the lawn, which needs cutting again. A Killdeer (Plover) sings to me daily at the college.

Sitemeter Sez: Concord, California; Chester, South Carolina; Aiea, Hawaii; Bremerton, Washington; Houston, Texas; Sandy, Utah; Mc Lean, Virginia; San Leandro, California; Tehran, Iran; Houston, Texas; Salt Lake City, Utah, and Hanover, New Hampshire.

MUCH more history 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!
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: Seldom Seen II and Larry Johnson's photos of local characters. Montana On The Move, New Artists, are on display at the Hockaday Museum of Art.
Dan Fagre's show has come down for awhile, but will go up again next week -- it is about the vanishing glaciers of Glacier National Park, and is a true labor of love by Fagre and other scientists from the USGS. Here's another website comparing glacier photos from the early 20th Century and recent decades.

Media Watch: Trash A Go Go is about where I guessed it would be at the final. That inept cowboy is gone, personable though he might have been. Li'l Kim bloomed late among the good dancers, so she might have missed the final anyway. I'd say that Gilles has the inside track and Shawn is the dark horse -- Melissa seems to be recovering well, and it wouldn't bother me at all to see Tony Dovolani win one of these things. I don't like the "next pro" contest, although I like the pros themselves. Aussie champ Kym Johnson dancing with a worthy partner was refreshing to see, as was big ol' Macksim taking orders from the young, but formidable, Russian lady. The Funk band which began the results show started strong, but kept everything on one level -- oops. The late James Brown might have kept his performances keyed up too, but he always varied the dynamics, even if he just went from frantic to frenetic.
I saw a movie called The Girl In The Cafe (2005), originally shown on BBC TV -- it was a rather nice romance, but had a flaw or two in its plot. Acting was NOT the problem. Congrats to everyone in the cast. I wish more movies would try to tell their stories this directly, even if they fail.

A digitized sketch of author Toni Bentley, from a rather alluring publicity photo. I'm making a DVD where I synchronize her voice with her slide show about Ida Rubinstein, held in April 2009 at Harvard University. We're also having a little cyber-fun picturizing her introduction, since there are no video or photos from the seminar -- can't have several minutes of BLACK talkin' atcha, can we?

Many rainy days still -- spring showers, though. I've mowed my lawn twice this season, since it tends to clear up in the afternoon.

Sitemeter Sez: Atlanta, Georgia; Bern, Switzerland; Columbia Falls, Montana; Louth, Ireland; Atlanta, Georgia; Somerville, Massachusetts; Boston, Massachusetts; Brighton, UK; Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island; Oakland, California; Calgary, Alberta; Los Angeles, California; Saint Petersburg, Russia; New Bern, North Carolina; Orange, France; Herndon, Virginia; Helena, Montana; Madrid, Spain; Warrenton, Oregon, and Auckland, New Zealand.

MUCH more history 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!
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: Seldom Seen II and Larry Johnson's photos of local characters. Montana On The Move, New Artists, are on display at the Hockaday Museum of Art.
Dan Fagre's show has come down for awhile, but will go up again next week -- it is about the vanishing glaciers of Glacier National Park, and is a true labor of love by Fagre and other scientists from the USGS. Here's another website comparing glacier photos from the early 20th Century and recent decades.

Media Watch: Between Love and Marriage -- was a fairly well-acted movie featuring Urmilla Matondkar (2001). I've noticed that she plays "crazy" pretty well for such a beautiful woman. She portrayed a model, which meant lots of cheesecake, and did some fancy dancing too. It was NOT an exploitation flick by any stretch of the imagination, though. All the characters had dignity.
The Hulk II (2008) starred ex-comic book editor Stan Lee as a hapless victim of Gamma poisoning from a Brazilian soft drink. Oh wait -- that was just a short cameo. Sonofagun's been in about every Marvel superhero flick since the 90's. I remember when Bob Oksner satirized him as Stan Bragg in DC's Angel and the Ape circa 1970. He's loudly promoted Marvel superheroes since about 1941, when he went to work for his cousin, publisher Martin Goodman.
The rest of the movie wasn't bad, and even captured some of the old Marvel Comics magic in its continuity. Edward Norton played wimpy Bruce Banner well, and Liv Tyler did alright as beleagured Betty Ross. Gil Kane's "Abomination," another Gamma-metamorphosed creature, emerged from the magazines and video games as one of the villains in this sequel to Ang Lee's interpretation of Hulk from a few years back. It was a better visualized effort, I'll admit -- looks like someone is planning a future Avengers movie, since Robert Downey Jr. makes a closing appearance as Tony (Iron Man) Stark. How they'll do it, I'm not sure, but it will take the introduction of a couple more characters. If the Marvel cinema franchise can hold the public's interest for another generation, it will be fun to see. In fact, the franchise will fail UNLESS the public continues to have fun seeing these Comic Book Movies! (Wonder how Wolverine is doing?)

Avengers Assemble!

The Avengers series started to get interesting when Stan Lee and Jack Kirby reintroduced Captain America, literally frozen in time. I once had a conversation with Jack about these days, when he competed head-to-head with well-established DC Comics and their Superman/Batman books, not to mention their own successful updates of Flash, Green Lantern, Atom, and the Justice League.
"I wanted to take their readership away from them!" Kirby said, "And managed to do it after a couple of years."
As a consumer, before I ever met Kirby, I enjoyed the freshness of Marvel Comics in my early teens, especially the continuity between various magazines which helped establish an imaginative sub-world that was unique to their productions. Years later, when I started collecting back issues, this particular comic was one of my first major "finds" in a used book store.
Art by Jack Kirby and George Roussos (as George Bell) 1963-64

Lots of rainy days lately -- the skies tend to clear up around noon, though. Canadian Geese are nesting at the Slough, and the Osprey are vying for territory.

Sitemeter Sez: Chicago, Illinois, Flushing, New York, Manchester, UK; Bronx, New York; Moscow, Russia; Newark, New Jersey; Austin, Texas; Houston, Texas; Nesbit, Mississippi, Mobile, Alabama, Copenhagen, Denmark; Mexico City, Mexico; Madrid, Spain; Eatontown, New Jersey; Bors, Sweden, and Puteaux, Ile-de-France.

MUCH more history 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!
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: Montana On The Move, New Artists, are on display at the Hockaday Museum of Art. We're also showing Seldom Seen II and Larry Johnson's photos of local characters.
Dan Fagre's show has come down for awhile, but will go up again in May -- it is about the vanishing glaciers of Glacier National Park, and is a true labor of love by Fagre and other scientists from the USGS. Here's another website comparing glacier photos from the early 20th Century and recent decades.

Media Watch: Trash A Go Go let a good dancer leave, instead of the inept cowboy. I can't really blame the judges this time, but L'il Kim and Derek Hough shouldn't have gone. That guest-dance around the Macy's star was too much ass-kissing for my liking (that chain-store sponsors these things, but REALLY!) The comedy was pretty funny, for a change, and the pro competition wasn't too bad -- the Man from Mars partnered with the bulgy Bionic Soap Opera Announcer, and the Russian Lady made the formerly-clumsy Track Star actually DANCE! If Tony and Melissa aren't just getting by on topical anesthetic, they have a chance to win. BTW -- I liked the Jazz singer after he warmed up a little.

Concerts: The great social activist and folk singer Pete Seeger celebrated his 90th birthday earlier in the week with a big concert at Madison Square Garden.
Some of the guest performers included: Ben Harper, Joan Baez, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Tom Paxton, Richie Havens, Bruce Springsteen, John Mellencamp, Emmylou Harris, Kris Kristofferson, Tom Morello, Rufus Wainwright (plus his mom & aunt the McGarrigle Sisters). Ani DiFranco rewrote "Which Side Are You On?" to include lyrics condemning Reagonomics and boosting feminism. Michael Franti added a rap to "Dear Mr. President." Bela Fleck and Tony Trischka did a banjo duet.

From NY Daily News:
Seeger himself didn't sing during the 4-1/2 hour event, but he did lead the audience through songs like "Amazing Grace" and "Goodnight, Irene." Of course, Seeger's whole point was always to get the audience to do the crooning, to therefore democratize the music and stress plain voices as the most true. The crowd used theirs loudly and often, and, in so doing, gave Seeger his ultimate birthday gift - uniting people in song.


George Clinton & P-Funk are on the road again!
Story/photo by Leigh Armstrong, Tampa Bay Times April 24, 2009

Even after years and years of being a music legend, George Clinton still portrays an awesome energy that can't easily be matched...
After waiting around for nearly 90 minutes, the band finally started to go on stage. With the entire stage of Jannus (St. Petersburg, Florida) crowded with performers of Parliament Funkadelic, Star Child came on in his signature diaper and blazer to get people pumped up for Clinton ...
Starting out with Pump it Up, the band immediately went insane with the groove and audience soon followed. From his guttural voice to the barking at women, Clinton has not lost any of his edge. And the P-Funk All-Stars' performance is so often emulated by other bands, but none can quite catch the true spirit of the music that they represent. Honestly, there's only one way to describe seeing George Clinton and the Parliament Funkadelic.

Funky.

Set List: From jsoul99 -- The show was only 2 hours last night The band got on stage @ 9pm and venue pulled the plug at 11:00pm. George came on for first song standing on the verge. The band was In rock mode last night straight funkadelic
The whole band was there except richie (Percussionist Richie Nagan)
here is the set list what I can recall from memory
standing on verge/pump it up/ bustin loose
you got a thang
red hot mama
make my funk the p-funk
we want the funk
up 4 the down stroke
bounce to this
shoot your shot
get down like james brown
maggot brain
one nation under groove
(marcy griffin song)

venue pulled the plug

My friend Michael Hampton, digitized from a news photo of the St. Petersburg gig.

The cold weather dropped over a meter of snow around Browning, Montana -- just on the other side of the mountains from here. Those poor people on the Blackfeet Reservation didn't need THAT. May Day looked more like March or early April.

Sitemeter Sez: Santa Barbara, California; Oakland, California; Stafford, Virginia; Sherman, Texas; Columbia Falls, Montana; Amsterdam, Holland, and Dublin, Ireland.

MUCH more history 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!
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: Montana On The Move, New Artists, are on display at the Hockaday Museum of Art, but we're also showing Seldom Seen II and Larry Johnson's photos of local characters.
Dan Fagre's show has come down for awhile, but will go up again in May -- it is about the vanishing glaciers of Glacier National Park, and is a true labor of love by Fagre and other scientists from the USGS. Here's another website comparing glacier photos from the early 20th Century and recent decades.

Media Watch: The Metropolitan Opera season may have ridden into the Twilight of the Gods, but Lyric Opera of Chicago presented Manon (1884) by Jules Massenet. I might have written about this longish song-fest before, but it is an example of the aesthetics of Belle Époque Paris. If there had been a real Phantom of the Opera, this work would express his world -- one of rich men riding roughshod over the young, beautiful, but no-so-wealthy. Phantom Erik was mainly a Stage Door Johnny, after all.
Zombie Honeymoon (2004)on DVD -- not the worst movie I've ever seen, but I can't recommend it to anybody, because it's too %$#@! stupid to be horrifying or funny.
I'm watching Hellboy II (2008) by Guglielmo Del Toro a little later -- I like my junk to have good taste, at least.

Of Monstrous French Patrons, Beauties, and Beasts

(L to R) Beatutiful Linda Hamilton and latex-mug specialist Ron Perlman, star of Hellboy II, in their Comic-bookish Beauty and the Beast TV series. Josette Day and Jean Marais in Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, yet another French tale of patronage and power over young women, first written down in the 1740's.

The weather's still too damn cold for this time of year, with bloody localized snow flurries. That small herd of Deer still haunts South Woodland Drive, and the Osprey are still trying to live on fingerling fish out of Dry Bridge Pond, and fighting each other a bit.

Sitemeter Sez: Oakland, California; Sherman, Texas; Columbia Falls, Montana; Amsterdam, Holland; Dublin, Ireland; Oakland, California; Baltimore, Maryland; San Marcos, California; Santiago, Chile; Washington, District of Columbia; Columbus, Ohio, and Alameda, California.

MUCH more history 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!
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: Montana On The Move, New Artists, and The Auction of Miniatures are up NOW at the Hockaday Museum of Art, but we've put up a portrait exhibit in its place, including Larry Johnson's photos of local characters. Dan Fagre's show has come down for awhile, but will go up again in May -- it is about the vanishing glaciers of Glacier National Park, and is a true labor of love by Fagre and other scientists from the USGS. Here's another website comparing glacier photos from the early 20th Century and recent decades.

Media Watch: Trash A Go Go 'Chuck'ed Julianne Hough and her singer-boyfriend. He really wasn't very good, but I think Jewel's old man is worse. Unfortunate Melissa may be too injured to continue, but she and Tony Dovolani are going to give it another try. There's a tall guy in the pro competition who looks remarkable when he dances, otherwise he looks remarkably like a man from Mars. Speaking of which, Mr. Thicke, the guest singer on the results show, was total Kitsch. I kinda liked the busy Beethoven 5th Symphony goof-around, but the fake soul song was gawd-awful. (I wonder if he's related to 'bleh' Canadian comic actor Alan Thicke?) It was good to see Edyta dancing with a real dancer, though.
I like seeing/hearing President Barack Obama's press conferences -- nice to know a smart guy is trying to deal with the reality of the world, but I still wish he'd named his puppy 'Bark' Obama.

Where was I? Oh Yeah!

My friend Karen Quest plays a stilt-walking cowgirl named Lucky Starr, who stands head, shoulders, and more above all the the others! I videotaped her on the grounds of the Puyallup Spring Fair near Seattle, Washington last week.
(Photo from www.cowgirltricks.com)

The weather stayed on the cold side, with occasional snow flurries. A small herd of Deer haunts South Woodland Drive, and the Osprey are trying to live on fingerling fish out of Dry Bridge Pond.

Sitemeter Sez: Colorado Springs, Colorado; New York City, New York; Dortmund, Germany; Kassel, Germany; City of London, UK; Castle Rock, Colorado; Naperville, Illinois; Gainesville, Florida; Anchorage, Alaska, and Staten Island, New York.

MUCH more history 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!
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: Montana On The Move, New Artists, and The Auction of Miniatures are up NOW at the Hockaday Museum of Art, but we're moving everything down to the Hilton next Friday to sell it all, and putting up a portrait exhibit in its place, including Larry Johnson's photos of local characters. (Starting later today.) Dan Fagre's show has come down for awhile, but will go up again in May -- it is about the vanishing glaciers of Glacier National Park, and is a true labor of love by Fagre and other scientists from the USGS. Here's another website comparing glacier photos from the early 20th Century and recent decades.

Media Watch: I saw two versions of the Bollywood crime drama Don -- the original (1978) starring Amitabh Bachchan, and a remake (2006) with Shah Rukh Khan. Hmmm -- looks like the latter actor is doing Don 2, due for release in 2010. I liked the '78 movie much more -- the ridiculousness of its plot was redeemed by the supporting cast, and several ingenious touches during certain scenes. There's a sprawling messiness in classic Bollywood that I find charming. Refining that energy in modern times tends to expose logical flaws, even though the filmmakers try to compensate with technological sleight-of-hand. Bollywood is best at sentiment and romanticism, in my opinion, and I thought the '78 movie carried off these elements better. The large, looming prescence of Bachchan made things more convincing too.
I like Shah Rukh Khan quite a lot, comparing him favorably with Cary Grant, which is high praise indeed. Prolific Amitahb is much like India's James Stewart, and can play rough guys very well when the script calls for it. Khan wasn't a near as compelling as a sociopathic gangster. BTW -- ex-male model Arjun Rampal was excellent in the '06 film, as well as Kareena Kapoor as one of Don's early victims, but the original actors were awesome too!

Arjun Rampal as a sympathetic high-tech cat burglar in 2006's version of Don, filmed among the high-rise buildings of Kuala Lampur, Malaysia. He was a fairly good villain in Shah Rukh Khan's production Om Shanti Om the next year.