Yma Sumac

            On Friday morning I finished posting “Des vents des pets des poums” (Farting Up a Storm) by Serge Gainsbourg on my Christian’s Translations blog and started memorizing Gainsbourg’s “Titicaca”. The song is about a woman that is said to be an Inca princess that the speaker wants to have sex with. Of course Titicaca is a lake between Bolivia and Peru but Gainsbourg is saying he wants to plunge in her “Titicaca”, meaning her vagina. I suspect that the character is inspired by the singer Yma Sumac, who claimed to be the last Incan princess.

            I went to Freshco in the late morning where I bought raspberries, grapes, cinnamon bread, a pack of chicken drumsticks, old cheddar, three bags of milk, oven fries, spoon size shredded wheat, orange juice and olive oil.

            I had spicy oven fries for lunch.

            I finished my second reading of The Picture of Dorian Gray. It really is a great book and I’m glad to have read it again although it was time consuming given that my essay is due in five days and I’ve barely started it. I did make three and a half pages of notes while reading though.

            Having worked twice this week doing short poses by body and especially my hip was sore since Wednesday morning. On top of that I’d been too busy to do my afternoon exercises. I finally did them that Friday while watching the ending of the accidentally silent Naked City episode “The Sandman” and the first six minutes of another one that downloaded without audio called “A Turn of Events”.

            As far as I could tell The Sandman was about a washed out boxer that had killed a cop and when his brother or friend ratted on him, in an emotional moment he killed him as well.

            “A Turn of Events” begins with a man in an office looking out on Coney Island getting shot by a hand coming through a door. The wife is interviewed and a gun is found in her drawer. That’s as far as I got.

            I wrote a second page for the rough draft of my essay on Artist as Outlaw. I talked about both Oscar Wilde’s and Charles Baudelaire’s use of Satan as a rebel figure. In a mockery of the Roman Catholic mass Baudelaire wrote “Les Litanies de Satan” (The Litanies of Satan), not because he was a Satanist but because he wanted to put the church in its place. Wilde’s character of Lord Henry is clearly that morning star who fell from heaven as a rebel. Lord Henry’s artist friend Basil is a metaphor for the creator and Dorian Gray himself is Adam. The painting of Dorian becomes an externalization of his own soul.

            I started working on the third page of the first draft of my Indigenous Studies essay.

            I had a potato, a chicken leg and gravy for dinner while watching Zorro.

            With the story arc of the first nine episodes finished this tenth story stands alone. It begins in the fort with the soldiers discovering one morning that their flag has been replaced with Zorro's symbol of the letter zed (zeta in Spanish). They try to get it down but the rope has been removed and none of them can climb the pole. When Captain Monastario sees it two peasants begin to laugh and so he has them arrested. He tells them that their punishment is to repair the stable roof by sunset the next day or else receive sixty lashes and sixty days in jail. They will need thirty buckets of pitch from the tar pits, which are many kilometres away, and they will be given no wagon and no help. This is an impossible task. When Don Diego hears of this he feels bad that the prank he pulled as Zorro has caused such suffering of innocent people. Meanwhile Monastario decides that the only way to catch Zorro would be to have an ally among the people he serves. He pretends to give Sergeant Garcia a dishonourable discharge from the army so that he can go undercover as a peasant. He is shunned by everyone but Don Diego who buys him a drink. Garcia tells Diego that he wants to join forces with Zorro. Later Zorro comes to see him and tells him to meet him at dawn at the signpost of the La Brea Rancho. Garcia goes to tell Monastario but Zorro follows him and learns of the plot. At dawn Monastario, Garcia and several lancers arrive at the signpost where there is a note telling Garcia to meet him at San Vincente Rock at the base of the mountains. They ride several kilometres to the rock but on it is painted the message for him to meet him at the top of the mountain. They climb to the summit but of course Zorro is not there. Meanwhile back at the fort a soldier receives a written order forged in Monastario’s hand to put every bucket at the fort into Monastario’s coach and to drive it to the tar pits. At the pits Zorro forces the soldier to fill the buckets with pitch and to take them back to the fort to help repair the roof of the stable. Zorro cuts several bushes and moves them to camouflage the tar pits and then he rides to meet the returning soldiers. He taunts Monastario and leads him on a long chase. Zorro's horse jumps the tar pits but Monastario and his men wind up tumbling into them. The roof gets tarred and so does Monastario.