Saturday 2 September 2023

Guy Scarpitta


            On Friday morning I worked out the chords for the sixth and seventh verses of "Au bon vieux temps" (In the Good Old Days) by Boris Vian. 
            I finished memorizing "Le Couteau dans le play" (The Knife in the Play) by Serge Gainsbourg and looked for the chords, but no one has posted them. On Saturday I'll start working them out. 
            I audio and video recorded song practice while playing my Martin acoustic guitar. I think I've been singing with the gain too high on the audio interface. There's too much clipping. I finished my last take of "Dance and Sing to Baby Pop" just before the camera timed out. There are two weeks left in this year's rebooted recording session. On Saturday I'll begin the first of four sessions with the Kramer electric guitar, then two with the Martin, two with the Kramer, four with the Martin and for the final two days I'll play the Kramer. Then I'll spend the fall reviewing all the videos to see and hear which songs are good enough so I can upload them and move on to new songs. 
            I weighed 85.1 kilos before breakfast. 
            Around midday I changed the A string on my Kramer electric guitar, in hopes that it will solve the problem of the rattling sound when I bar the B flat chord on the sixth fret. I'll find out during song practice on Saturday morning. 
            I completed my Canadian Common CV which seems to be one of the requirements for applying for any Masters Degree program. 
            I weighed 84.9 kilos before lunch. 
            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. 
            I chiseled some more amethyst and black quartz from pieces of the rock that I found six years ago. 
            I weighed 84.6 kilos at 17:30, which is the lightest I've been in the evening in ten days.
            I was caught up on my journal at 18:56. 
            I reviewed this morning's song practice video. I was weak on a couple of chords of "Megaphor". "Sixteen Tons of Dogma" was okay but the ending has been better. Some of my translations weren't bad. 
            In the Movie Maker project to create a video for my song "Sleep in the Snow" I synchronized the concert video with the studio audio for my line at the beginning of the final chorus, "Don't it make you wanna go to sleep in the snow" by adding a short clip from the 1922 film Nanook of the North of Nanook sleeping. But then the next line "Don't it make you wanna turn away and go" was ahead again in the video and so I added a short clip of Dorothy sleeping in the snow scene from The Wizard of Oz. I hadn't quite shaved off enough of the clip for the line to be synchronized. I'll do that next time.
            I scanned four more single negatives, one of a fancy lamppost at night, one of my newborn daughter from 1991, one of my ex-girlfriend Brenda, and a self portrait with the top of my head cut off.
            I roasted a pork loin and had a slice with a potato and gravy while watching season 5, episodes 16 and 17 of Petticoat Junction. 
            In the first story Joe's latest money making scheme is to take up bee keeping. But he mistakes hornets for bees and ends up causing the hotel to be infested. Kate has to send her guests to the Pixley Hotel while the place is being fumigated and then the whole family has to go and stay in Betty Joe and Steve's little cottage. 
            This episode was directed by Guy Scarpitta, who directed 28 other episodes of the show, eight episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies, and 19 episodes of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. As a film editor he was nominated for an Emmy in 1956 for his work on The Bob Cummings Show. He was the Associate Producer of Green Acres for the entire run of the show. 
            In the second story Betty Joe is spending money faster than Steve can put it in the bank. She agrees to stop spending from that minute on but doesn't mention that before that minute she bought a very long sofa for $100. At first she keeps the sofa in the baggage car of the Cannonball until she can find a right moment to break it to Steve. The moment doesn't come and so she decides to just put the sofa in the house before he comes home from work. But the sofa is too long for the house. She talks her mother into negotiating the return of the sofa to a store that has a no returns policy. The manager Mr. Agnew finally agrees to take the sofa back when she says she'll settle for the return of only $90. Then Steve decides to surprise Betty with a new piano but after measuring he concludes the house is not big enough and so he tears out a wall and extends the house. When Betty finds that out she now realizes the sofa will fit and so she asks her mother to buy the sofa back. But Agnew still wants $100 and so Kate pays it. Then Betty finds out about the piano and gets her mother to return the sofa. Again she has to settle for $90. Then Joe lets it slip to Steve about the sofa and he asks Kate to get it back. Now both the sofa and the piano are on the Cannonball but Betty can't choose. They have a singalong with the piano on the train while it's moving and finally Betty and Steve decide to keep both the piano and the couch.

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