Sunday 29 August 2021

Rosemary's Baby


            On Saturday after midnight before going to sleep I did my usual search for bedbugs and found none. But I've found a total of ten in the last fifteen days and there's no pest control appointment until eighteen days from now.
            I revised my translation of the third chorus of "La java des chaussettes à clous" (The Tap dance of the Hobnail Boots) by Boris Vian: "These are the hobnail boots / friends of all the shy policemen / best dressed but with the beast in / and those are the charming reasons / for the hobnail boots." 
            I worked out the chords for half the first verse of "Chavirer la France" (Bowling Over France) by Serge Gainsbourg. 
            During song practice, about halfway through the seventh song my B string broke. I didn't have any new ones so I scavenged the one from my Oscar Schmidt. 
            I weighed 89.3 kilos before breakfast. 
            My upstairs neighbour David and I were scheduled to go for lunch today at noon. I should have suggested 13:00 because I always go to the supermarket at noon. I went at 11:30 and put a note on my door saying I'd be back in a few minutes. 
            At No Frills I bought four bags of cherries, two pints of strawberries, some 2 in 1 shampoo-conditioner, some Milanese pasta sauce, mango-lime salsa, skyr and Greek yogourt. When I got home it was 12:08. 
            I cleaned the cups in one of my muffin pans, so now I just have to finish the top and then do the bottom. These pans aren't as time consuming as the square baking pan was. 
            David didn't come around noon and so I thought that he might have mixed up the time and thought our date was for 13:00. But he didn't come then either and I figured he might have thought he'd said Sunday. 
            I weighed 89 kilos before lunch. I had four cream crackers with five year old cheddar and a glass of lemonade. 
            I took a siesta and when I got up and went to the kitchen I saw David in the hall just coming home from work. I called to him and sure enough he'd thought that we were having lunch on Sunday. I told him the plan had been Saturday but Sunday was better for me anyway. We're going to Ali Baba's.
            In the afternoon I took a bike ride to Yonge and Bloor. A couple of weeks ago they finally put up posts along the Bloor bike lane east of Spadina, but they're the cheap kind that are easily knocked down like the rest that run west of Ossington. Not like the solid metal posts they put up on the newest part of the lane east of Ossington. 
            The construction in the middle of Yonge just south of College has been going on for several months now and it's still narrowing Yonge for a block. I figure that it must have something to do with the subway since they wouldn't be raising a building in the middle of Yonge. I looked it up later and saw that they're building a second entrance to College Station and a concourse in between the two entrances. It won't be finished until 2023 but I assume they won't be blocking Yonge for that long. 
            I weighed 88.4 kilos when I got home. 
            I took a few pictures of my full vaccination receipt because I need to convert it to a pdf and upload it to the ucheck website. U of T requires all students to upload proof of vaccination now, or proof of exemption, or else be tested every week. 
            I worked on my poem series "My Blood In A Bug." 
            I skimmed through "Rosemary's Baby" looking for something to extract for the video I'm making of my song "Instructions For Electroshock Therapy" that would match the line "Undress the patient and then lay them down just like a sacrifice." About 45 minutes in I found exactly what I was looking for. I might chop it up and change the sequence though. Tomorrow I'll import the film into my Movie Maker project and start trimming it. I'm pretty sure I saw Rosemary's Baby years ago but I'd forgotten just how amazing it is. Say what you will about Roman Polanski but the guy is a genius.





            Another powerful and totally bizarre film of his is "The Tenant", in which he directs himself. He moves into the top floor of a building into an apartment that had previously been rented by a woman who committed suicide. All of her clothes are still in the closet and he begins wearing them and then keeps trying and failing to kill himself over and over. Jumping out the window and limping back up, then crawling back up with broken bones. After finally thinking he's done it he wakes up toothless and immobile in bed and screaming as the camera slowly zooms in on his mouth. At least that's how I remember it. 
            There was a wicked rain storm near the end of the movie that continued afterwards. The leak from the inside top of my left window frame in the living room that I told the landlord about several months ago began again and I had to use several paper towels to mop up the water.
            I made pizza on naan with Milanese sauce, a cut up beef burger and extra old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching Gomer Pyle. 
            In the first story Gomer, Duke and Frankie are out on the town with very little money. They decide they have enough for a movie and so they get Gomer to spend his lucky dime calling the theatre to find out what is playing. But after he hangs up more than $41 in coins comes spilling out of the phone. Duke and Frankie think they've struck it rich but Gomer insists on returning the money to the phone company. However no one at the company knows what to make of Gomer wanting to give the money back. They keep passing him off to different people until finally he comes to Mr Corbett, the CEO, who thinks it's a prank and makes a joke of it. Finally Gomer goes to Sergeant Carter who advises him to simply go back to the phone and put the coins into the slot. But when he is doing that he drops some and while he is picking them up a cop comes along and thinks he's robbing the pay phone. At the police station the two detectives interrogating him don't even believe he's a marine. Gomer insists they call Sergeant Carter and when he comes they believe Gomer is a Marine but the circumstantial evidence against him is still overwhelming and Gomer goes to jail. Finally Carter brings down Corbett who clears it up. Later Corbett visits Gomer on the base and thanks him, asking how the phone company can repay him. Gomer arranges for each member of the platoon to get a free long distance call. 
            In the second story Duke shows that he has a talent for doing impressions. One night on the town Gomer, Duke and Frankie decide to take in the talent light at the Jade Club. When they walk in a female contortionist with a cold is performing. There are a few other acts and then the MC asks if anyone in the audience wants to come up. Gomer stands up and says Duke will do it. After some coaxing Duke gets up on stage and becomes quite comfortable at the mic. He does an impression of Gomer, but it's his impression of Sergeant Carter that really impresses the audience. Duke wins the $25 and gets invited to feature the next night. Three sergeants that know Carter happen to be in the audience and think it would be a funny prank on Carter to invite him down to be insulted. Gomer also invites him because he innocently believes that Carter will be flattered. Carter and Bunny arrive just as Duke takes the stage and so he doesn't know Carter is there. Carter does not appreciate Duke's impersonation of him and is about to leave when Gomer goes up to the mic and introduces Carter, saying he is a very good sport. When Carter hears everyone applauding him suddenly he feels better about the impersonation. He gets up on stage and hams it up, doing an impression of himself. Then he begins to sing in a very bad voice and clears the room. 
            My neighbour Benji knocked on my door to tell me that the landlord called to say there was another leak downstairs. I assumed it was caused by the leak in my living room. But when Raja came half an hour later he was uninterested in that leak because he said it was coming down below my bathroom. Once again I told him there was absolutely no overflow from that area. I also handed him my letter of response to his "second warning letter." We argued for a long time about the leak that he'd never fixed and he kept saying that he'd fixed it. We went around in circles because he said that I should have called him when it leaked again. I told him last winter that it leaked whenever there was heavy rain or snow so why should I call him over and over about it. I told him he should have told me he'd thought he'd fixed it so I could tell him he hadn't. If he'd been hired to fix it he wouldn't have come to do the repair without letting me know. It would be like fixing a radio without turning it on afterwards. He called me a "fucking idiot." I told him not to insult me. He once again tried to see if there was an overflow in the bathroom. When he came up with nothing he started to argue that my bathroom was going to cause health problems for the other tenants and that next time he would bring a camera to take pictures. I think he looked at the black stains that were in my toilet bowl and assumed that it was shit, but it was coffee stains that could be wiped away in two seconds.

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