On Thursday morning I finished translating
"Bourrée de complexes" (Buried in Complexes) by Boris Vian. Next I
have to memorize it in French. I also memorized the first verse of “Variations
sur Marilou” by Serge Gainsbourg. This one is going to take a while because
it's a seven and a half minute song with lots of lyrics.
This
was the first time I’d video recorded my song practice in almost three years.
Since I’ve already uploaded both “Le poinconneur des Lilas” and “L’alcool"
and their translations to YouTube, after seven years of singing them every day
I've removed them from my rehearsal and added two new songs to my daily
practice. I’d previously been only singing “Comment te dire adieu” and “Eliza”
every few days. There are a lot of songs that I want to play but there is just
no time and so some songs I sing every few days and others I only sing one
verse and a chorus every few days. So now two songs by Jacques Brel that I’ve
been doing in fragments for years will be done all the way through about once a
week.
One
thing that I noticed from my 2017 videos is that I didn’t look very friendly
and so I made an effort to smile more and to behave as if I had an audience
that I wanted to know I was friendly.
There
are two conflicting things that come along for me with the sense of being
watched that I get from playing in front of the camera. One is that I perform
better when it feels like there is an audience, but the other is that I get
nervous and fumble my chords and sometimes the lyrics.
Around
midday I washed and scrubbed about a quarter of the area under my kitchen
table. There's just one patch of blackness left that one could see while standing at my door.
I
had kidney beans and salsa with kettle chips for lunch.
At
16:45 I took a bike ride. I skipped my exercises because I wanted to stop at
the supermarket on my way home. At Bloor and Bay a woman had a pink sunburn
that matched her purse. I’m all for fashion but when one is coordinating
sunburns with purses I think it’s taking it too far.
At
Freshco I got three bags of grapes, a pack of strawberries and another of
raspberries. I bought a strawberry rhubarb pie, a loaf of Bavarian sandwich
bread, some Danish blue cheese, some raspberry Greek yogourt, a box of spoon
size shredded wheat and a bag of kettle chips. One of the long time regular
cashiers was there shopping and speaking in Portuguese with her parents. It was
the first time I’d seen her out of uniform and she looked very nice with her
hair up and wearing fuzzy tights and sparkly short top.
Before
dinner I uploaded the video that I’d shot that morning and found that I’d had
the camera too low so that it was looking up my nose. Also the microphone was
blocking my face. I’ll have to raise the camera for next time, tilt it slightly
down and maybe stand back a bit. I won’t get a full sense of how it sounds
until I combine it with the microphone recording later on.
I
had a potato, some peas, two chicken drumsticks and gravy while watching “The
Bull Skinner”, which is episode 26 of the 1958 Alfred Hitchcock produced TV
series "Suspicion". I had started downloading a torrent containing
eighteen stories from the series a year ago and so I figured it was time to try
to watch it despite the fact that all the data was not complete. This episode
had only downloaded 35% and so while it teased me with the story enough to draw
my interest I couldn’t make sense of it because it jumped through to the end of
the hour long story in about fifteen minutes. I decided to try to find a video
of it to stream and there was one on Daily Motion, albeit with some annoying
commercials breaking it up in the wrong places.
In
the story Frank lives with his wife Doris in a small trailer home and he works
driving a bulldozer for a highway construction company. I'd never heard
bulldozer drivers referred to as "bull skinners” before and I can’t find
any reference to the phrase online, so maybe the writer invented it. It doesn’t
make much sense since the bulldozer is not even being metaphorically skinned
while it's being operated.
A
man named Peters, who has no experience with road construction is hired as a
supervisor. Frank resents this because Sam the foreman had promised him the job
when it came up. Sam explains that the hire came from above and it was out of
his hands because Peters is someone’s nephew. To make matters worse Peters
rents the trailer next door to Frank’s and becomes friends with Doris. The
relationship is platonic but Frank resents the fact that Doris and Peters have
so much in common. He plays the flute and she likes the same kind of music.
They discuss books that they’ve read and so on. At work Peters tries to be
friendly with Frank and suggests that they be on a first name basis. Peters
says his name is “Ev" and explains that his mother was from England and
that the name Evelyn is a boys name over there. But Frank begins to make fun of
him and he gets the other men laughing at the name as well. Flustered, Peters
backs away from them and stumbles underneath a bulldozer blade that comes down
and amputates his arm. Perhaps Frank feels guilty but now he thinks that Peters
blames him for the accident and that he is out to get him for revenge. Frank
becomes more and more obsessed with his suspicion to the point that Doris packs
her things and tells him she’s leaving him. The next day Sam sends Peters to
Frank with a message from Doris but Frank refuses to take any messages from
Peters. Peters climbs onto Frank’s bulldozer and places the message there.
Perhaps Frank thinks that Peters has tampered with his bulldozer as when Peters
drives away in the small open motor cart that he uses to get around the site,
Frank borrows someone else’s bulldozer and goes after Peters. He doesn't hear
the other guy shout that there is no pressure on the brakes. Frank tries to
catch Peters and run him over but loses control and goes over a steep section
of the unfinished road and dies. The message from Frank’s wife was, “I changed
my mind. I'm home."
Doris
was played by Sally Brophy, who acted on Broadway and on television before
becoming a theatre arts professor. She appeared on several TV series and was
one of the stars of the western show Buckskin.
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