A little rain, a little sunshine, and life is good. The Farmer's Market has vegetables at last!

Sitemeter Sez: The Flash Gordon Gang -- Midrand, South Africa; Middletown, Connecticut; Staten Island, New York; Evansville, Indiana; Amboy, Indiana; Warrenton, Virginia; Park City, Utah; Newark, New Jersey; Bors, Sweden; Richardson, Texas; Allentown, Pennsylvania; Madrid, Spain; Gainesville, Florida, and Las Vegas, Nevada.

MORE New Mime Troupe 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: Mark Ogle's retrospective at the Hockaday Museum of Art had a wonderful reception. 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.)

Last Friday, 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 week, 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.

Media Watch: Another old Bollywood movie starring ace actors Madhuri Dixit, Sanjay Duit, and Salman Khan from maybe the early 90's. Too bad it was a rather lousy version of Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac (1897). Duit didn't play a psycho, like Rostand's Cyrano, but he WAS supposed to be a poet, who won the heart of a fair maid by his good heart and good words. A Netflix reviwer complained about the costumes -- so could I, but the overall moviemaking was just SO bad. I wouldn't know where to start.

Ch-Ch-Changes: Michael Jackson died yesterday -- he wasn't even fifty-one. All joking aside, he hasn't looked like himself for a long time. His physical frailty frankly scared me. I'm not going to speculate, but I'll be surprised if his fatal coronary wasn't directly related to the medical games he played with his body. The last time I saw him on TV was at James Brown's funeral a number of years back, where he shook hands with Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton as they all mourned the passing of a friend. M.J. did not look well, and I thought it might have been jet-lag, because he'd flown in from Bahrain.
That being said, he was one of the most talented performers to have ever mounted a stage. Tracing back, I liked his record Black & White in the early 90's, although the video didn't really make it with me; Man in the Mirror during the late 80's; The albums Thriller and Off the Wall when he first became a man, and more than half of the Jackson 5 recordings. We Are The World was a worthy effort, but I MUCH prefered Bob Geldoff's Do They Know It's Christmas. I happened to see Michael Jackson's 3D movie Captain E-O at Disneyland, around 1988, and had a very good time watching it.
May you be at peace, Mr. Jackson.

What was that about something completely different?

A redigitized portrait of Madhuri Dixit -- first-rate dancer and excellent movie actor. I heard that she lives in Denver, Colorado now, but she made a "comeback" film not too long ago for her loyal Bollywood fans.

Happy Summer Solstice! (see below) We've had some much-needed rain over the last few days too.

Sitemeter Sez: Atlanta, Georgia; Des Plaines, Illinois; Auckland, New Zealand; Suncook, New Hampshire; Frederiksborg, Denmark; Columbia Falls, Montana; Lima, Ohio; Tampere, Western Finland; Lumberton, New Jersey; Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Whitefish, Montana.

MORE New Mime Troupe 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: Mark Ogle's retrospective is going up at the Hockaday Museum of Art. 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.)

Last Friday, 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 week, 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.

Media Watch: An old movie starring Amitabh Bachchan (1978) where he plays a character named Sikander. I can't fault the acting -- especially by the dancer/courtesan, but it didn't add up. Bachchan made so many GOOD movies like Amir, Abkar, Anthony, or even the dawg-assed violent Sholay in the early part of his career, that I think this one is best left to the completists.

Time and Timelessness

A digital sketch of a composition
I once printed on an intaglio press circa 1972.
Mysterious Stonehenge and the puzzles of Geometry stirred together by a young American art student after reading Gerald Hawkins' Stonehenge Revealed, which described how a mainframe computer analyzed the astronomical nature of this famous pre-historic monument, three or four years before I saw the place with my own eyes on Salisbury Plain while I was living in England.
Led Zeppelin's Battle of Evermore was playing on a nearby stereo:
The queen of light she took her bough
And then she turned to go,
The prince of peace embraced the gloom
And walked the night alone.
Oh, dance in the dark night,
Sing to the morning light.
The dark lord rides in force tonight
And time will tell us all.
Oh, throw down your plow and hoe,
Rest not to lock your homes.
Side by side we wait the night
Of the darkest of them all.
I hear the horses thunder
Down in the valley blow,
I'm waiting for the angels of Avalon,
Waiting for the eastern glow.
The apples of the valley hold,
The seeds of happiness,
The ground is rich from tender care,
Repay, do not forget -- no, no!
Oh, dance in the dark night,
Sing to the morning light.
The apples turn to brown and black, the tyrants face is red.
Oh, war is the common cry, lift up your swords and fly.
The sky is filled with good and bad
That mortals never know.
Oh, well, the night is long, the beads of time pass slow,
Tired eyes on the sunrise, waiting for the eastern glow.
The pain of war cannot exceed
The woe of aftermath,
The drums will shake the castle wall,
The ringwraiths ride in black -- ride on!
Sing as you raise your bow,
Shoot straighter than before!
No comfort has the fire at night
That lights the face so cold.
Oh dance in the dark night,
Sing to the morning light.
The magic runes are writ in gold
To bring the balance back -- bring it back, bring it back!
At last the sun is shining, the clouds of blue roll by,
With flames from the dragon of darkness
The sunlight blinds his eyes.

It is Summer all right -- I'm complaining that we need more rain!

Sitemeter Sez: Someone from The Netherlands, searching for Josie Biereye; Madrid, Spain; Rollins, Montana (looking at Carol Buchanan's live-blog); Columbia Falls, Montana; Webster, New York; Singapore; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; Grand Junction, Colorado; Cluj-Napoca, Romania; Oakland, California; Orange Beach, Alabama; Milwaukee, Wisconsin (One of the Cheney/Mills family); Portland, Oregon; Houston, Texas; Atlanta, Georgia; Chesterfield, Massachusetts; Slough, UK (between London and Heathrow Airport), and Warm Springs, Montana.

MORE New Mime Troupe 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: The Plein-Aire Paint-Off is up at the Hockaday Museum of Art, fresh off the artists' brushes. 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.)

The other week, 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.

Media Watch: A videotape made from a film shot by the Royal Ballet in 1959 -- featuring Margot Fonteyn at the height of her powers, just before she started dancing with Rudolph Nureyev. The director was Paul Czinner, and it is pretty well filmed -- Gawd only knows how many takes they had to repeat for all those medium, long, and closeup shots. Michael Somes is Fonteyn's co-star, but the men's choreography was pretty dull in the first two pieces -- Swan Lake Act III, and fragments of The Firebird. (By the way, it is Igor Stravinsky's birthday today.) I liked the third section best -- quite a large segment of Ondine by Hans Werner Henz. There were more parts for men, and the guys all danced, rather than just postured and held the lovely ballerinas. The production was rather old-fashioned, even for the late 50's. The costuming tended to favor heavy fabrics, and the scenery was somewhat confining and overwrought. Fashions in both Modern Dance and Ballet would favor more lightness and sensuality onstage, even when this film was first released. Nureyev's career would soon literally take off, and male ballet dancers would leap at the chance to follow him into the air. Quick, strong, and charismatic Margot Fonteyn was by far the most inspiring aspect of the entire picture, and instead of retiring at the end of the decade, as was her plan, she became an even greater star.

What are the neighbors up to, lately?

I snapped this shot of a Whitetail Deer while walking near Woodland Drive last Monday evening about sunset.

Some cold nights with frost in some locations. The calendar SAYS it's Late Spring.

Sitemeter Sez: Gurgaon, India; Needham, Massachusetts; Renton, Washington; Albany, Oregon; Houston, Texas; Atlanta, Georgia, and Cerritos, California.

MORE New Mime Troupe 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: The Plein-Aire Paint-Off is up at the Hockaday Museum of Art, fresh off the artists' brushes. Dan Fagre and Lisa Keown'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.)

The other week, 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.

Media Watch: Analog broadcast TV's supposed to go bye-bye after today. We'll still have it around here with low-power stations. There's only one network affiliate with a digital signal in this isolated area.

Congrats to NPR's Performance Today for their coverage of the Van Cliburn Piano Competition this year.

Montana Public Radio played Duke Ellington's important 1956 performance of Crescendo in Blue during drive-time today. It was from the restored live tapes which constitute Ellington at Newport (Complete). Paul Gonsalves' incredibly long and brilliant sax solo with Duke and a rhythm section is still unsurpassed. I heard an Afro-Beat International program not too long ago about Boston native Gonsalves' familial and musical roots in the Cape Verde Islands and New England whaling ships.

I finished the video of Toni Bentley at Harvard, and won her enthusiastic approval. Next, I'll add some new photos to Ida Rubinstein's Website, thanks to Toni's scholarship.

Ida Rubinstein (High Patroness of our Blog) as Spring, in the painting Femme avec des Fleurs by Romaine Brooks circa 1914. In her lecture, Bentley made a joke about a drawing showing Ida's legs nearly emerging from right below her bosom. This painting isn't quite as obsessive, but Rubinstein WAS lean and high-waisted, with very long limbs.

Perfect Spring weather -- warmth followed by rain on THIS side of the Rocky Mountains, but snow on the eastern side. Welcome to Montana.

Sitemeter Sez: Pico Rivera, California; Kaysville, Utah; El Cajon, California; Gttingen, Germany; Louth, Ireland (Hey There); Pittsboro, North Carolina; Edmonds, Washington; Perryville, Missouri; Zagreb, Croatia; Lausanne, Switzerland, and Los Angeles, California.

NEW Mime Troupe 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: The Plein-Aire Paint-Off is up at the Hockaday Museum of Art, fresh off the artists' brushes. Linda Tippetts had to drive home through snow (see above). Dan Fagre and Lisa Keown'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

The other week, 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.

Media Watch: The Last Winter (2006) Directed by busy Larry Fessenden, who also co-wrote and co-produced it. Ubiquitous Ron (Hellboy) Perlman was an unpleasant crew chief in a doomed Arctic outpost, and I recognized journeyman actor Kevin Corrigan too. Fessenden did a cameo as a guy who was dead most of the time. The stunt-ravens from Britain got the best lines, and almost everybody croaked. I kind of like Fessenden's offbeat vampire flick Habit (1996), but thought this one was pretty derivative and uncompelling, despite being shot in Alaska and Iceland.

(Click for a larger image)
A multi-media re-creation of Katie Duck (L) and Debra Ryals (R) dancing under the theatrical lights at the Aspen Highlands Lodge just before New Year 1974-75. There are more of these painterly memory pics at http://theatrex.net/theatre/mt_pt5/index.htm

Oh no -- the streams and rivers are at full runoff, with local flood alerts, and they're talking drought because May was so dry towards the end.

Sitemeter Sez: Marion, Pennsylvania; Florence, Kentucky; Oakland, California; Arlington, Virginia; Stafford, Virginia; Alkmaar, Holland (nice little place in the tulip country); New York City, New York, Barcelona, Spain; Waroona, Australia; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Houston, Texas; The islands of Trinidad & Tobago, and Liege, Belgium.

NEW Mime Troupe 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: Everything upstairs is making way for the Plein-Aire paint-off now that June has begun -- the new work will go up starting Saturday, fresh off the artists' brushes. Dan Fagre'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

Last week, 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.

Time Passages: The great Blues singer Koko Taylor passed away at the age of 80.
Montana Public radio devoted the whole evening to her music. As I said on Daily Kos: "The folks in the white-bread towns of NW Montana and the Native American reservations in between all love the Blues, and Ms. Taylor's being honored in her passing."

Media Watch: Some damn Bollywood flick with popular leading man Saif Ali Khan and ace comic actor Johnny Lever. I'm not even going to look up the title because it was so ridiculous. What little plot it had was concerned with mean fathers-in-law and a fake kidnapping. It was supposed to be a comedy, but was tedious to a fault instead. A lot of talent and money gone to waste. IMHO
Even the best players can strike out -- changing the subject, pitcher Randy Johnson just won his 300th game. I saw him play live in Seattle almost twenty years ago. He is six and a half feet tall, and throws really hard. Only about two dozen pitchers have won so many games in the last hundred and fifty years of Baseball history.
I've seen another one of that small circle play in front of me -- Nolan Ryan, but thanks to TV, I've also seen Warren Spahn, Steve Carlton, Tom Seaver, Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux, Don Sutton, the classy Phil Niekro, the cheating Gaylord Perry, and the whiney Roger Clemens. I was listening to the radio broadcast when Perry won his 300th around 1982 -- after that victory, American League umpires started throwing him out of the game at the first sign of his beloved, but illegal spitball, and he ended his career in the National League.

U.S. President Barack Obama visiting the Gizeh Plateau, across the Nile from Cairo University, Egypt, where he delivered a measured and moving speech earlier today. The Great Sphinx rises over him -- a possible image of definite pyramid-builder King Chephren from approximately 4000 years ago. Never forget that Humanity itself and Western Civilization arose out of Africa. It is good to acknowledge those facts, and give something back when we are able.