Picasso's African Face Lifts

            On Sunday morning it was the beginning of the sixth day of my cold. My throat felt a little less sore and during song practice, I had some of my voice back. I could actually sing rather than murmur the songs, although I was still hoarse and couldn't hit the highest note that I normally am able to. 

            I finished posting my translation of “Amour année zéro” (Love In The Year Zero) by Serge Gainsbourg and memorized the first verse of his song “Jet Society.” 

            I weighed 86.1 kilos before breakfast. 

            I weighed 86 kilos before lunch. I had Ritz crackers with five-year-old cheddar and a glass of raspberry lemonade. 

            In the afternoon as I was getting bundled up for my bike ride I had to take everything off again to use the toilet. I sat for about half an hour and purged a tremendous amount of black stuff. I felt a lot better when I'd finished. 

            I rode to Bloor and Ossington. On Brock Avenue, the icy obstacles that have been there since the storm a few days ago are still frozen in place. The Bloor bike lane had been mostly cleared and it was passable without my having to go out into traffic like I had for the last few days. I still had to ride slowly and carefully down Ossington. At Ossington and Queen was a young bearded busker singing in a high voice and playing guitar in the minus ten weather. On Queen, they've cleared away the snowbanks that were on the street but in some places that clearing has caused the snow to be spread out flat over my path making it more slippery. 

            I weighed 85.2 kilos at 17:30. I got caught up on my journal a little before 18:30. I finished reading the first third of Season of Migration to the North. Mustafa is telling the story of his thirty years in London and how he preyed upon English women, made them fall for him, and led them to suicide. 

            I read most of Chinua Ahebe's essay “An Image of Africa” which is mostly about how racist Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is but it also talks about how African art inspired Picasso and several other Cubists. The designs of some of Picasso's faces appear to be almost directly lifted from ritual masks of the Fang tribe of Africa. 

            I made pizza on a slice of Bavarian sandwich bread with sweet basil marinara sauce, a cut-up burger, and extra old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching an episode of The Addams Family. 

            In this story, Morticia and Gomez find a treasure map passed down from Peg-leg Addams the pirate. They decide to go on the adventure of looking for the treasure. They hire a couple of disreputable sailors and their boat, but Captain Grimby and his mate Mr. Brack decide to try to steal the map for themselves. They try to torture Fester into giving up the safe combination but he enjoys having his head in a vice. They only get him to talk after putting a gun to his head. Fester tries to warn them about the safe being booby-trapped but they don't listen and it explodes, causing them to run away. In the safe Morticia discovers Peg-Leg's codebook and with it, they decipher that Peg-Leg's treasure is actually buried under their house. They dig up a chest but it's full of gold-foil-covered chocolate coins, which Fester says are delicious. 

            Brack was played by Richard Reeves who appeared as Babe in five episodes of The Adventures of Superman. He also appeared in the first episode of Batman as the doorman of the “What A Way To Go-Go” nightclub. Although he usually was typecast as lower-class thugs, he was upper middle class and his father was a bank executive.