Joan Taylor

            On Thursday my apartment smelled less like a burnt out building than it did the day before. Sometimes there was only a hint of burnt potato in the air but other times it was stronger.

            During song practice, although I was singing in French that morning I had the idea for a better translation of a line from the song “Un Violon, Un Jambon”, which I’ve been singing every day for the last few years. The verses paint a picture of social abandonment while the chorus offers the solution that if you hang a ham and a fiddle in your door it will let everyone know you are throwing a party with food and music and you’ll end up with a lot of friends. The problem was that I couldn’t find a way to fit the word “door” into the song and have it rhyme with “devil” and so I settled on the slant rhyme of window for, “Hang up a ham and a fiddle in your window / You’ll be making room for a whole lot of friends / and all your worries will just go to the Devil / until the night ends”. I was never quite satisfied with “window” here because one enters a doorway to a party. Today though it dawned on me that I could use, “Hang above your doorway a ham and a fiddle / … and all of your worries will just go to the Devil …”

            I’ve been working out the chords to Serge Gainsbourg’s song “Anamour” and there’s a point at the end of a verse leading up to the chorus where he sings a G7 chord to transition to the C chord at the beginning of the chorus. The G7 sounds awful to me and so I’m going to use F7.

            I had to work at OCADU in the early afternoon and so I took an early siesta at noon and then had lunch before leaving. I wanted to take my laptop with me to work on my essay and to update my journal and so I stuck my flash drive in my usb port and prepared to copy the updated versions of my journal and my essay. I tend to drag and drop from right to left but this time the flash drive index was on the right and my hard drive index was on the left. Before I realized what was happening I dragged the old file into my hard drive and replaced the latest one, thus I deleted all of Wednesday’s writing and some of Thursday. I was very pissed off at myself. I was able to recover Tuesday’s journal entry by copying it from Facebook, but for Wednesday I had to write it all out all over again. Fortunately it was fairly fresh in my memory. It’s a good thing I made the mistake with my journal and not my essay.

            I worked for Nick Aoki on the third floor of The Village By The Grange across from the main OCADU building. It was a pretty traditional foundation drawing class starting with one-minute poses and gradually increasing them to end with a twenty. I managed to get most of my Wednesday journal re-written on my breaks and Nick let me go almost twenty minutes early.

            I got caught up on my journal when I got home.

            I had a chicken leg, a boiled potato with chopped green onion and some gravy for dinner while watching Peter Gunn. This story began with a guy in a suit walking into the hallway of an apartment building from the stairs. The man is very big with a scar running from his eye to his chin on the left side. He busts into an apartment where Liz is making out with Roy. Roy tries to fight him off but the man knocks him aside and begins to strangle Liz. She tells Roy to get her gun from the drawer. He does so and shoots the man. Liz says the man is dead, that Roy and that she’ll take care of everything. Roy wants to stay but Liz reminds him of what the scandal would do to his family. Roy goes and then the man with the scar sits up and smiles. Roy’s father is the district attorney, Ralph Davidson and Ralph hires Gunn because he’s received a call from someone threatening to provide evidence that Roy committed a murder unless Ralph drops the case against a criminal named Yale Lubin. Ralph wants Gunn to find out what really happened. Gunn goes to a pool hall where a little pool shark directs him to a pinball player in an arcade who tells him where to find Liz. Gunn goes to Liz’s apartment, knocks out the guard outside her door, holds him up to the peephole and knocks. She opens it, and Gunn lets the unconscious guard drop in ahead of him. He lies to her that he found out her address because the cops were able to trace her call to the DA. Gunn wants the man with the scar and so Liz takes him to a restaurant in Chinatown where he meets Lubin. They sit at a table together and it seems all of the waiters and cooks also work for Lubin. Gunn tells him his plan won’t work without a corpse but Lubin tells him, “We will have soon!” Gunn informs him that he’s holding a gun under the table. The waiter pulls his gun but Gunn shoots him. Lubin runs but Gunn knocks him out with a chair that throws from across the room (that was a very unconvincing take down). The cook comes out and throws a meat cleaver at Gunn, which he dodges and the cook goes back in the kitchen. The man with the scar comes down the stairs with a gun and Gunn shoots him.

            Again, the story was pretty thin in this episode but the music was quite unique and wild, especially in the pool and the Chinese restaurant scenes.

            Liz was played by Joan Taylor, who did a lot of Westerns and was Chuck Conners’s love interest for two years on The Rifleman, but she is most remembered for “Earth vs. the Flying Saucers” and “20 Million Miles to Earth”.