On
Sunday in the early afternoon I did my laundry. The Laundromat wasn’t very
crowded for a Sunday. Once my things were in the wash I rode down to No
Frills. I got blackberries,
blueberries, Ponkan mandarins, bananas, grapes, avocadoes and tomatoes, plus a
pack of plush toilet paper. Before taking my groceries home I stopped off to
move my wash to the dryer and to take my sweat pants home to hang over the
chin-up bar.
I’ve been watching a video of Arcade
Fire’s concert this past summer at the Best Kept Secret Festival. It’s
interesting to compare the Austin City Limits concert from early in their
career and this one. They still put lots into their performances and their song
choruses, with almost the whole band singing to create a kind of anthematic
wall of sound.
When I got home with my laundry I
gave my chain some DW-40 before hanging the bike up. It had been getting almost
rusty from all the salt and snow.
I had tomatoes and avocadoes for
lunch. My wifi signal from the donut shop downstairs was crowded out, so I
watched a bit of an Ernie Kovacs Show I’d downloaded a couple of years ago.
Most of his characters are ridiculously ineffectual people that are unaffected
by their own failings. He and his wife, Edie Adams seemed to be the perfect
show business couple. She was gorgeous, sexy, could sing and dance and was able
to play a wide variety of characters in the many sketches that her husband
wrote for her. She would sometimes be visibly trying to keep from laughing when
they were in scenes together. In one, he was Matzo the Magician and she was his
lovely assistant. She would serve him a drink between every trick, none of
which worked. Once he successfully guessed that an audience member had picked
the seven of diamonds from a deck of cards, but then he accidentally dropped
the deck to reveal that all the cards were sevens of diamonds.
I took a siesta after lunch.
I worked on a couple of paragraphs
of my English essay:
Only men are named or described in Howl, while the women are generic and
faceless, with no identity or individuality. The only described female
icons are the poet’s versions of the three
Fates of Greek myth, and in calling them “one-eyed shrews” Gins berg reduces each one to an unruly vagina. The
Fate “of the heterosexual dollar” corresponds to Lecheries, who determines how
long someone lives. One needs money to survive and a gay man in that era could
not usually make money without pretending to be heterosexual or at least
keeping quiet about being gay. The idea of the dollar being heterosexual would
have been emphasized for the author by the many prominent advertisements
featuring and aimed at heterosexual couples whose lives together are enhanced
by a given product. The shrew “that winks out of the womb” corresponds to Clothes,
who spins the thread of life in the womb. The Fate Apropos, who was said to cut
the thread of life at the end, in Howl, snips and tames an artist’s endeavors.
The poet’s description of this final Fate snipping and taming the results of an
artist’s labours, suggests that he is negatively sexualizing editors and
critics by effectively calling them unpleasant cunts. The overall result of the
combined efforts of these shrews of fate is to interrupt young homosexual love.
They pull a young man into the heterosexual world and away from homosexual
experimentation.
In contrast to
Howl, in The Wasteland women appear as individual characters that are often
drawn from myth. Eliot invents a tarot card depicting the Belladonna, who is
also the lady of the rocks and the lady of situations. Belladonna in plant form
is the poisonous Atropos Belladonna, which coincides with the same mythical
Fate of death that is referenced in Howl. It is an unpleasant hallucinatory
drug that can also enhance sexual experiences. The Lady of the Rocks refers to
a manifestation of the Virgin Mary, but the rocks represent the sterile end
situation of the wasteland. Eighteen lines later the Virgin Mary returns to
ring the bells of a church nine times, with the ninth toll having a dead sound.
There are nine months in a pregnancy and the final toll being dead suggests a
stillbirth.
I watched The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. The story begins with a
young couple on vacation in Mexico. They stop in the countryside for a picnic.
As they are getting out of their car, a man in a jeep, driving at top speed, almost
runs them over. The wife, Laura, persuades her husband, Mark, played by Peter
Graves, not to peruse the driver but to enjoy the day. Mark takes a nap while
Laura goes exploring. When Mark wakes up, Laura is still not back from her
walk. He goes looking for her and finds her dead from strangulation.
Next we see mark in the local jail
but he is let out soon after.
Mark’s sister in law Louise and her
husband Alex come down from the States for the funeral. They hope to bring Mark
back home with them but he insists on staying to find his wife’s killer. Louise
and Alex decide to stay as well, to see if they can persuade Mark in a couple
of days.
Mark goes to see the police chief,
who tells him that they have a suspect, but not enough evidence. He invites
Mark to participate in the investigation by hanging around the harbour to see
if anyone recognizes him. He does what he is asked and when he steps into a
boat supply store he discovers that the proprietor is the man that had almost
hit Louise and he a few hours before she died. He goes to tell the police chief
about him and the police chief confirms that he is the man that killed Louise,
but he still does not have enough evidence. He asks Mark to make friends with
the killer so that he will let his guard down. It isn’t hard to do because the
man named Theodore Bond is also from the States and he doesn’t have any friends
in this small Mexican town. Mark takes Theodore back to his hotel room, plies
him with drinks and soon Theodore is talking about how he thinks that most
women deserve to be punished. Mark goes back to the police chief but finds to
his frustration that the information that he’s gotten so far won’t stand up in
a court of law and what is needed is a signed confession. The police chief
tells him he has business at the capital and that he won’t be back for a couple
of days. Mark decides to take matters into his own hands. He tells Louise he is
going to kill Bond. Mark has bought a boat that he asks Theodore to visit in
order to give him some advice. When Bond gets there Mark locks the door and
tells him that he’s going to kill him. They struggle, but we don’t see what
happens next. Meanwhile, Louise tells Alex what Mark had said about killing
Bond. They go to look for Mark at his bought but only find blood and some marks
to indicate that someone has been thrown overboard. Back in town they see that
Theodore Bond is very much alive so they can only conclude that he has killed
Mark.
Next we see Louise, dressed
seductively and sitting at the bar of a tavern where Theodore is occupying a
table. She catches his attention by dropping her purse and then begins to flirt
with him. After several drinks, she takes him to her hotel room and when she
rejects his attempt to kiss her he tries to strangle her. That’s when Alex
comes out from behind the curtains with a gun. He tells Bond that he could turn
him in for his crimes but that would be an embarrassment for his mother and
sister, who live with him. He makes him write a suicide note and Theodore does
so willingly because he thinks that the idea is for him to fake his own
suicide. Alex corrects Theodore that he really is going to commit. He takes him
to the bell tower of the town hall and ties a rope around the bell, then he
makes a noose, slips it around Bond’s neck and tells him to jump. Just then
Louise brings the police and Theodore confesses while he’s being taken away.
Bond was played by renowned
character actor, Albert Salmi, who 27 years later shot his wife and then
himself.
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