On
Monday morning I deleted my first attempt to post my translation of “Le
complainte du progress” by Boris Vian on my blog because text was appearing in
different font sizes that I couldn’t correct. Instead I pasted the whole thing
again directly into the HTML so it just appeared as a big block of text with no
indents and no italics. Now I can just make all the changes I need from scratch
without having to deal with it looking differently than I want.
I finished copying down the lyrics
to “Bébé Gai” by Serge Gainsbourg and I'll start working on a translation
Tuesday morning.
I worked on my journal.
This was the first day in a few in
which the morning didn’t get away from me. I had time to wash the section of
the kitchen floor in the hallway from the beginning of the big shelf at the
southwest corner of the room. In the next few days I’ll probably have time to
pull the shelf out into the second floor hallway and wash the floor in the area
where it stands.
While taking pictures of my progress I dropped my camera and the
batteries fell out but it seemed to be still functional when I put them back
in.
I threw out the rest of the sausage
dressing because I think it had the same contamination as the turkey I’d used
it to stuff. I also poured boiling water on the container in which I’d stored
it.
I had tuna with salsa and chips for
lunch.
In the afternoon I did my exercises
while listening to Amos and Andy. In this story Kingfish becomes haunted by the
voice of his conscience for all the scams he has run over the years. He swears
he is going to change. To prove it he takes a worthless stock certificate that
he’d acquired a few years ago and throws it in the garbage. Normally he would
try to sell it to Andy. But then Andy comes to ask Kingfish if he knows any
stock he can buy. Kingfish runs into a dark closet and asks his conscience to
tell him not to cheat Andy. Since it says nothing he goes ahead and sells the
defunct Alaskan Cannery stock to him. Then to avoid paying Andy back he tells
him that the cannery went out of business because whales at all the salmon and
then all the rivers turned to desert. Then he tells Andy that he went to the
government and got officially declared a pauper, with paper papers and a pauper
badge and now he is allowed to stand in any breadline in New York and bring
guests along too. But then Kingfish’s conscience attacks him again and he writes
Andy a cheque for the $150 he's paid him for the stock. But the cheque is bad.
I worked on my poem series, “My
Blood in a Bug”.
I thawed the four lamb chops that I’d bought on the Saturday before
Christmas and had one with three small potatoes, a sautéed yellow pepper and
some gravy while watching Joker. I don’t want to give too much away in this
review because it’s full of surprises and I recommend that people see it.
This story gets so much into the core of what could possibly make
someone like the Joker tick that even if there is no sequel it can’t help but
inform how The Joker will be portrayed in the future. It shows a childhood of
abuse, a psychologically damaged young man in a dependent relationship with his
mentally ill mother. One particularly interesting element is that Arthur has a
condition that causes him to laugh hysterically for no apparent reason and he
carries a card that he hands to people to explain it to them when he loses
control. Arthur aspires to be a stand-up comedian but he’s the only one that
thinks he’s funny. He lives in a poor and violent neighbourhood. He has a job
as a clown but gets attacked by bullies.
This film is very much about the division between rich and poor. The
villain of the story is Thomas Wayne, the wealthy father of the boy that will
grow up to become Batman. Three young executives of Wayne Enterprises are drunk
on the subway and when they hear Arthur laughing they begin to beat him up.
Arthur pulls a gun and kills them all. All that is known is that it was a clown
that killed the privileged men and he becomes a symbol of revolution.
Another compelling idea is Arthur’s mother’s claim that Arthur is
actually Thomas Wayne’s illegitimate son and that she and Wayne had been lovers
when she’d worked for him as a servant. She was dismissed and committed and
Wayne claims she’s delusional, but there is still a possibility that it’s true,
which would render the relationship between Joker and Batman far more
interesting than it ever was before.
Arthur is filmed performing at a stand-up open mic and laughing so
uncontrollably that he can barely tell his jokes. One ironically funny line is
when he tells the audience, “When I told people I wanted to be a comedian they
all laughed at me. Well, nobody’s laughing now!”
The film clip gets the attention of Arthur’s idol, old style late night
talk show host, Murray Franklin. He invites Arthur on his show, basically to
make fun of him. Arthur becomes increasingly more violent as the night of his
TV debut approaches. I won’t reveal what happens next other than that chaos
ensues and the Joker becomes the messiah of bedlam.
This movie is extremely intense and disturbing because we find
ourselves identifying with a psychopath. I would be shocked if Joaquin Phoenix
doesn’t sweep all the major acting awards for his performance as The Joker. I
give it an A and highly recommend it.
I’m done watching all the movies I
wanted to watch from 2018 and 2019.
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