3-22-08: Really, it’s spring today. Proof came this morning with a rat-a-tat-tatting that scared the cats into flight, gave me and Kat a start. But we knew what it was: mechanical sound, rapid, something we’d heard two times before. The story began with a similar clanging one day while I was puttering about the house. I thought, what in the hell was that noise. It came, it went, it alternated well over an hour intermittently. And it sounded like something in the furnace room downstairs. Searching high and low, and only hearing it once in a while, I was unable to locate the source or the site. I called the plumbing outfit that had installed our forced air heater some twenty or more years before, even before we owned this place over the last twenty or so years. They came a couple a days later and were examining everything while I held a flashlight, not wanting to be left out of the loop. When they’d checked everything they could think of, the oldest of the lot said, “You know, some years ago I had a similar situation like this. It turned out it was a woodpecker pounding on an exhaust pipe on the roof.” At almost the exact end of his comment, the rat-a-tat-tatting began again. It rang through the furnace just like some wheel clanging, then stopped, and started again in a couple of minutes. I grinned at the guys and rushed upstairs, outdoors, and leaped up onto my picnic table top to peer over the roof. Sure enough, there was a spotted bird about 12 to 15 inches tall, just flying off and away to a nearby pine tree. I went back down to the basement, said “yes” you were right, it’s a bird, not this old plane. We all laughed and they left me to my wonderment. So, today, he or she is back, a sure sign of spring. I’ve tried explaining the phenomenon to my cats who are attentive, but seem skeptical of my explanation. They’ve been fooled before, they remember, so are a bit wary of my tales anymore. I’ve yet to capture by photo the bird at work, but here’s my pen drawing interpretation of it pausing just after sending it’s message or call to a mate, I presume.

Helena has grown in its arts interests and endeavors. We’ve grown generally. It’s nice to have a large commercial-artistic development through these operas, in addition to our regular plays, performances, presentations, exhibits, events and other ARS in town. The “branding” of Helena as the “West’s Learning Center for the Arts” or whatever the L O N G moniker the consultant wanted to hang around our necks says, contemplated learning the arts from craft (tie flying) to art (painting and sculpture). Consultants claimed that we could capture this brand by being something similar to Chautauqua in the East.

There’s little public stir in the news about the “brand” unless there’s a publicized meeting, and then the attendance seems quite low. I’ve made only one of probably four meetings with the consultants/promoters so even I’m not fully informed of the interest or a “buzz” about a Helena “brand.” The one meeting I attended suggested that it would take some time to develop the ideas and graphics needed to establish a brand, and thus, I think the Summer is available for most of us to get involved and informed sufficiently to use or detract from the branding effort. We were asked one morning in the No Sweat Cafe if we were aware of the effort, if we were supportive, and if we had ideas to help develop the concept and its implementation. Kat related her interests and mine and suggested we were following the effort as best we could.

This blog’s title is in a small way an attempt to address this branding of Helena. I found a helenars on the Internet, so reversed the ARS to the front of Helena, simply to begin a test of ideas and information as they can be represented on this site. According to the consultants, every town can boast of it’s most beneficial and beautiful offerings, most the same as all of the others: history, old town, fishing, hunting, nearby skiing, et al. What the consultants said they’d found and were most impressed about Helena was it’s depth of artistic and intellectual developments, but not of one or a few things. Thus their effort to promote an idea of arts learning, but only if we provide it.

We’ve the world famous Archie Bray pottery works along with the usual cast of artistic and craft developments underwritten by the community such as a museum of fine arts, writers of some fame, artists of national repute, and recently an acknowledgement of our community symphony and its exceptional challenges in the last five years. There’s more and at some time a list is to be developed and publicized on the opportunities to learn here in Helena and the surrounding valley, maybe in nearby communities too.

When I came to Helena in the 1970s there still stood and operated briefly the remnants of the Broadwater Hotel and Spa, a Natatorium covering a natural hot spring and of world-famous status at the turn of the 20th century. Later I knew a bond salesman from Minneapolis who had stayed there when the place had more of the remnants of its former grandeur who told me it was as elegant as the old photographs portrayed. Helena, it seems, was like most places with a storied history and large wealth base from mining, banking, merchandising and finally the state’s government.

Well, even with our newly examined pride, Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama soon will visit Butte (AKA Butte America and recently the final resting place of Evil Kneivel) some 65 miles away. Butte IS the seat of much democracy through union development in the mines at the end of the 19th and the early 20th century when a vast amount of mineral wealth created much of current day Montana. Some claim Helena stole the Capitol out from under Butte’s feet, but many of us still honor Butte in many ways one of which is through eating those pasties (meat and vegetable pies, not the stuff you cover nipples with).

Enough for now. More will follow.

Wednesday, 3 PM, and I’ve given myself a break from, gack, taxes. Meeting tonight, then dinner out. Last weekend my wife and I, and about 200 others, watched the Met Opera’s presentation of La Boheme. Really wonderful stuff, music, voices, acting, staging, and all on a 30 foot high screen. We found two seats in the front section, back row, and it was a difference of looking up at the screen versus looking at the screen between the next row and the one we were in. The seats recline and make the viewing even more pleasurable, maybe causing one to sleep in an uninteresting or boring movie or, I doubt. in an opera. I really liked the role of Mimi played and sung by Angela Gheorghiu, who’s about 43 years old and some voiced the opinion of her being too old for the part of a gay young woman in Paris. However, I liked her role and thought it most sultry as well as plausible: thank something for differences of opinion, eh. Like on the “war” on terror…. But I digress, as usual. Here’s a photo of Gheorghiu pulled from a Dogpile search for here image today; there’s a beauty on the San Francisco Opera web site, but that one awaits another posting day. Just another fine arts week in little ol’ Helena, Montana.

Besides blathering about American English, I’m reading Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices by Christopher Locke. He’s known as the Rageboy on the Internet, NOT the bearded Muslim fellow who seems to appear in many public scenes in Pakistan, I think it was. Chris is worth a read for his broad interests and readings himself, purportedly focused on Gonzo Marketing. I’m reading him because of my interest in “branding” Helena, as well as the State of Montana, two events underway this Summer. More about branding later.

I’m also chagrined at the lack of housing options in this town. I’d like to live downtown, I think in a cooperative housing arrangement, and am pursuing more knowledge about this form of ownership and costs. There’s to be a conference this May, I think, that will explore cooperative housing more. I’m told by a U.S. Housing and Urban Development official that the conference should answer many of my questions, and he’s given me several web sites to review materials prior to the conference.

Jeez, the Lewis and Clark County Library is FULL of stuff I’d like to read, but so many books and magazines, so little time. I’ll make a dent, not really noticeable as much as the yahoos who keep marking up some of the books I read.

If you haven’t yet, come visit Helena, MT. Great little community with the same problems throughout the country; growth and poorly guided at that, pollution of air and water via same growth. But we’re a friendly community, with the same differences of opinion, fact, beliefs that plague the world too. Still, we’re worth a stop if you’re traveling through.