Sunday 28 August 2022

Paul Julian


            On Saturday morning I worked out the chords for the intro to "Sermonette" by Boris Vian. 
            I memorized the third, fourth and fifth verses of "Scènes de manager" (Unsightly Public Scenes) by Serge Gainsbourg. I might have the whole song nailed down tomorrow morning. 
            I weighed 85.1 kilos before breakfast, which is the lightest I've been in the morning in two weeks. 
            Around midday I went down to No Frills. As I was locking my bike a woman I didn't recognize was walking by with a guy and she said to me, "It's good to see you're still around!" Then I think she realized I didn't know or remember her and she explained, "We used to see each other all the time. Be well!" If she had stopped I might have asked her where she knew me from so I don't know if it was a case of mistaken identity. 
            The grapes in the supermarket were all too soft and there was no price on the cherries, so I didn't get any. I bought a watermelon, a pack of strawberries, another of blueberries, two plastic baskets of peaches, a pack of three striploin steaks, maple barbecue sauce, Guinness barbecue sauce, a bag of kettle chips, and a container of skyr. 
            When I got home I went back out to buy a six-pack of Creemore. 
            I weighed 85.5 kilos before lunch. I had Breton crackers with five-year-old cheddar and a glass of limeade. 
            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. 
            I weighed 84.6 kilos at 17:09. That's the lightest I've been at that hour in over two weeks. 
            I reviewed seven videos of me playing my translation, "A Ham and a Fiddle". June 9 was pretty good, but my hair looked weird and I was a little close to the camera; June 11 was good too, plus the distance was right, the light was better, and my hair looked less messy; June 13 was also good but my guitar might have been slightly out of tune; June 15 was pretty good and I was smiling but the pop blocker was up to my chin; June 16 was quite good and I looked good as well; June 18 was pretty good and the distance was right; June 20 was pretty good but the light was harsh. I didn't really flub any of these performances. It's a striking contrast to two years ago when I decided that this song wasn't ready to be uploaded to You Tube. 
            I gave up on looking for videos of someone holding a brain and changed my search to old footage of tent revival preachers laying hands on people's heads to heal them. I think I can use a clip from an Oral Roberts video because he always had a camera behind him and so the person having their head grabbed was always well photographed from the front. I bookmarked a couple of old Oral Roberts videos and I'll download one of them tomorrow. 
            I chronologized a few more hard copies of my transcripts of the Gumby Bible group poem. 
            I made pizza on a slice of Bavarian sandwich bread with Basilica sauce and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching two Bugs Bunny features from 1980. But the first feature turned out to be a short that was included in the second feature and so really, I only watched one feature. 
            In the first story, Bugs Bunny is lamenting that everyone else is not as loving as he is. Even the rocks and flowers don't appreciate his affections. Suddenly a carrot is dangling from a string in front of him. He bites the carrot and is drawn up into a flying saucer piloted by Marvin the Martian. The carrot is drugged and so Bugs sleeps all the way to Mars. When he wakes up and realizes where he is he demands that Marvin return him to Earth. But Marvin says that we mustn't disappoint Hugo. Bugs asks, "Who is Hugo?" just before a giant hand grabs him. Marvin explains that he caught Hugo in the Himalayas. Bugs says, "Oh no, not again!" Hugo is the same Abominable Snowman that Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck encountered many years before. Hugo is and always has been obsessed with having his own pet bunny rabbit. But Bugs tells Hugo that he doesn't want a rabbit but rather a robot and he convinces him that Marvin is a robot. He then shows Hugo how to make Marvin into the living mechanism of a wristwatch. Bugs gets into the flying saucer and then asks Hugo to throw it at the Earth like a frisbee, which he does. 
            The special is called "Busting Out All Over" and begins with the story of Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd as children that I saw yesterday. 
            The second story is the one I just described featuring Bugs, Marvin the Martian and Hugo the Abominable Snowman. 
            The final segment is a Wile E Coyote-Roadrunner chase and begins with Wile E going off a cliff and entering a cloud. He lingers there until he opens the cloud and realizes he's going to fall. He sees Roadrunner on the other side of a canyon and tries to pole-vault across but falls. He tries riding a rocket several times but it either goes without him and he falls, points downward and hits the canyon bottom, or slams him into a wall. He tries to drop a safe on the Roadrunner, but it pulls him down and then lands on him. He tries to throw a frisbee with a stick of dynamite, but the dynamite falls out and explodes next to him. he lays out giant flypaper on the road but catches a very angry giant fly. He gets a box of exploding tennis balls and hits one at the Roadrunner, but it bounces off the arm of a cactus back to him. He hits it again, but it springs back after hitting a power line and lands in the box of exploding balls. He chases the Roadrunner through a pipe that gets narrower. On the other end, they have both shrunken down to miniature size. Wile E calls for the Roadrunner to go back through the pipe and so he does, returning to his normal size. But Wile E emerges still as a miniature version of himself. Wile E catches the Roadrunner even though the Roadrunner is now comparatively gigantic. But now he's too big to kill and eat. 
            The voice of the Roadrunner saying "Meep meep" was done by Paul Julian. He started out as a layout and background artist for Leo Schlesinger and became renowned for his modernist cityscapes. He painted murals on the government payroll all around Southern California. He directed the animated film, "The Hangman" which won over 15 international awards. He provided artwork for several Roger Corman films, including "Dementia 13" and "The Terror". 




            I searched for bedbugs and didn't find any. 
            I finished translating a Serge Gainsbourg song from 1964 that I'd overlooked years ago.
            I chronologized a few more hard copies of transcriptions of the Gumby Bible group poem.

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