Wednesday 8 November 2023

Buffy Sainte Marie


            On Tuesday morning I worked out the chords for the eighth verse of "C'était une pauv' gosse des rues" (She Was a Poor Child of the Street) by Boris Vian and for the second and third verses of “Your Under Arrest” by Serge Gainsbourg. 
            I played my Kramer electric guitar during song practice for the third session of four. 
            I weighed 85.3 kilos before breakfast. 
            Around midday I finished putting a third coat of primer on the edges, tops, bottoms and in between spaces of my kitchen counter. I’ve got a little bit of primer left and so tomorrow I’ll apply it to the decorative rectangular grooves at the centre of the front of each door and drawer. Then I’ll go and buy to purple paint I plan to put on top. 
            I weighed 85.1 kilos before lunch. 
            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and for the whole ride I was singing “He’s An Indian Cowboy in the Rodeo” by Buffy Sainte Marie. 


            On the way back I was riding along Queen just west of Bathurst and still singing when a young guy came riding his bike on the wrong side pretty much straight at me until he veered. I gave him a disapproving look and he seemed to notice. About a minute later he rode up beside me and asked me what I’d said to him. I told him I was singing and he said, “Nice try” before turning back around. 
            Okay, so about Buffy. First of all, she looks like a First Nations person. I’ve had a Haida girlfriend and a Cree girlfriend and Buffy looks Cree. I spent three years hanging out at the Native Canadian Centre and she looks like a First Nations person. Until that recent CBC article I’ve never heard anyone comment that Buffy doesn’t look like she’s Cree. People can now freely associate based on the CBC prompt and declare that she looks Italian but nobody ever said so before. But let’s say she isn’t Cree. That doesn’t mean she has no reason to believe that she is. All she had to do was look in the mirror. If the Italian Sainte Marie family really are Buffy’s birth family there must have been some sort of trauma to make her seek an entirely different identity. There have been hints of abuse from a brother. No one has gotten through childhood without having wished at least once that they were adopted. If she looked in the mirror and saw herself as distinct from her family she may have concluded that she must be First Nations. She may have begun to act upon that belief, in which case there is no reason to believe she lied about her background. It’s also possible that she is telling the truth and that she really was adopted. There was scooping going on long before the official sixties scoop. In 1941 there were many First Nations babies born under the radar of the government. Only about half of First Nations children even went to school at that time. There have been cases where doctors signed papers saying that they delivered a child that was really adopted. There are many possibilities other than Buffy being a liar. I would say that she has given far more to First Nations communities than she has ever taken from them. Why rob her of a legacy now that she is 82 and near the end of her life? 
            I stopped at Freshco because I was almost out of grapes but all of their grapes were too soft. So I walked over to Metro and bought four bags of red grapes.
            I weighed 85.2 kilos at 17:30. 
            I was caught up on my journal at 18:07. 
            In the Movie Maker project for my September 3 song practice I synchronized the audio and the video. Then I saved a copy as “Time of the Yo-Yo (electric)” and began evenly cutting out sections of the beginning of the audio and video timelines to isolate that one song. But suddenly the two timelines were out of synch again. The audio seemed behind so I cut out bits of it until it was closer to the video but it felt like the audio was a different file. 
            I switched to the Movie Maker project to create a video for the studio recording of my song Megaphor. I continued removing sections of the clip from the movie Ziegfeld Girl and got it down to about 34 seconds. I’ll need to remove a half a minute more before I can use it in the main video. 
            I went back to the September 3 project to check if it really was in sync and it was. So I saved it again as “Time of the Yo-Yo (electric)” and that was in synch too but at one point it sounded like it was way off. Then I looked again and it was okay. I’ll work on it tomorrow and might actually have the video published and ready to upload. 
            I scanned two sets of uncut colour negatives. One had street shots and nature shots, especially flowers. The other had my ex-girlfriend Brenda in her apartment on Maynard in the house that is now the Buddhist temple. There were lots of shots of her dancing at a party in her polka dot dress. There are 34 full sets of negatives left to scan. 
            I had a potato with gravy and the last of my roast beef while watching season 3, episodes 4 and 5 of Green Acres. 
            In the first story Oliver’s tractor breaks down as usual and he wants to call the factory in Fargo for parts but Sarah the operator is on her lunch break. Then she has gone home to baste a pot roast. He finale gets so fed up with the service that he circulates a petition and takes it to the Public Utilities Commission. But the commission has no authority over any telephone company that has less than 42 subscribers and Hooterville only has 34. Oliver argues with the president of the phone company, Roy Trendell, who is the son of Sarah the operator. Several episodes ago Hank Kimball said Sarah was his mother. This show is extremely inconsistent. Trendell asks Oliver if he thinks he can run the phone company better than him. Oliver says he can and so Roy gives him the keys. 
            The second story is a continuation of the previous one. On the morning after Oliver took over the phone company there are already complaints about the service. Sarah the operator has quit since her son Roy is no longer president. Oliver and Lisa go to the phone company office but Oliver doesn’t know how to operate the switchboard. The switchboard short circuits and he has a taxidermist who is a part time electrician fix it. After several hours Oliver still can’t figure it out and gives up. He dozes off and while he is sleeping Lisa figures out the complicated system of the switchboard. Oliver goes home to bed and leaves Lisa there.

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