Carlo Fiore

            I spent Thursday at home and got caught up on my journal. I paid my rent by email transfer but I didn’t feel like going out even for the two blocks in the rain to pay for my November phone service.

            I practiced my song “Lonely Mass Murderer’s Blues” three times.

            I re-read William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and Experience” and “The Book of Thel” a couple of times because I plan on writing my essay on some of those poems, though I haven’t figured out which ones.

            I watched the second episode of Peter Gunn. This story begins in a jazz club called The Big Eye. A piano player named Martin Swift is introduced, the curtains open and Swift falls forward dead with a knife in his back. A xylophone player named Streetcar Jones is charged the murder. Gunn goes to talk with the band leader, Lido, who tells him that Streetcar had a good reason to kill Swift but then most of the other musicians did too because Swift was a plagiarist. Gunn goes to see Streetcar in jail and finds him playing on the bars of his cell with his xylophone mallets. “How do I take these swingin bars with me?” “The problem is where you’re going.” “I go where it swings, or it swings where I go. I’m not sure.” Gunn asks Streetcar if he ever said he wanted to kill Swift. “No, I said eliminate … Just turn him off …” “I’m afraid I don’t understand.” “Semantics. Sometimes words are a drag … You know what’s with jazz? A lot of cats get with it up to a point but they never really dig it. Understand doesn’t cover it. Dig is the only way I know how to say it.” Gunn meets Streetcar’s lawyer Norris and his daughter Sally. Norris tells him to stop investigating the case. Gunn refuses and winds up getting beaten up by a couple of thugs. Gunn arranges for Sally to meet him at The Big Eye. She’s surprised to see Streetcar out of jail and playing there. Gunn tells her that Streetcar got released because there is new evidence. Three years ago in Buffalo a sax player was killed by his wife. Swift was a witness and Sally got off but over the last three years she’s paid him $100,000 in blackmail and that’s why she killed him. Her two thugs come along and she tells Gunn to go quietly. Gunn leaves with the thugs but Gunn’s friend Lieutenant Jacoby follows and shouts at them as they are leaving the club. Gunn begins fighting with the thugs. One of them pulls a gun and Jacoby shoots him while Gunn knocks out the other. Sally is arrested.

            Jacoby was played by Herschel Bernardi, who later starred in the sitcom, “Arnie” and had a very successful run as Tevya in Fiddler on the Roof. .
            Sally was played by Patricia Powell but this is one of the only things she is known for.

            Streetcar Jones was played by Carlo Fiore, who was most famous for being a close friend of Marlon Brando. They studied acting together but Fiore didn’t achieve any success because he had very little talent, although it looked like he was really playing the xylophone with the band in this Peter Gunn episode. He used to hang out with Brando on film sets and then they’d go off and carouse. Fiore was hired by Stanley Kubrick to write a screenplay for Laughter in the Dark, but it seemed to fall through. Fiore was a junkie and he may have been a pimp since he used to procure women for Brando. Brando cut off their friendship because Fiore’s reputation was endangering Brando’s attempts to get custody of his son Christian.