Karen Black

           On Monday morning I started playing and singing “Arthur, où t'as mis le corps?” (Arthur, Where’d You Put the Corpse?) by Boris Vian in English. But I only got through the first two verses and the first chorus because I haven’t memorized my translation and the chords are with the French lyrics. So it will take a few days for me to finish running through the song. 

            I worked out the chords for most of the chorus of “Malaise en Malaisie” (Malaise in Malaysia) by Serge Gainsbourg. 

            I weighed 87.5 kilos before breakfast. 

            I worked a bit on my essay on the keyword “Monstrous” as it appears in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and essays on Picasso’s use of African masks. 

            I saw a small and healthy bedbug crawling on my desk. I called the landlord to remind him to call pest control like I did two weeks ago. He told me pest control complained that I didn’t leave my place last time. I find that hard to believe. The technician found no traces of bedbugs and so there was no reason to leave because there was no reason to spray. He still refuses to treat the other apartments unless the tenants complain, even though Steve from Orkin told me that all the units need to be checked otherwise the bedbugs will just keep crawling from someone else’s place into mine. The landlord said he’ll have them come and spray my place.

            I weighed 87.2 kilos before lunch. 

            I took a siesta and when I got up, I had an enormous bowel movement. One log took three flushes to go down and then the toilet was half plugged for four flushes more. 

            I took a bike ride to Bloor and Manning, then went south to College. Since there was no light there, I turned west and then went south on Shaw to Queen and then home. 

            I weighed 86.3 kilos at 17:00. It must have been that monstrous bowel movement I had before my bike ride that contributed to dropping a kilo since before lunch. Either that or my scale is off. 

            I was caught up on my journal a little after 18:00. 

            I worked on my keyword assignment. The word “monstrous” is a generally negative adjective. Only when it means “big” could it sometimes possibly be positive. When Marlow refers to Kurtz’s “monstrous passions” in Heart of Darkness he means something negative. But when Rubin says the African masks in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon convey “something that transcends our sense of civilized experience, something ominous and monstrous such as Joseph Conrad’s character Kurtz discovered in the heart of darkness” he is saying that monstrosity is something positive in both Conrad’s novel and Picasso’s painting. 

            I had a potato with gravy and a chicken drumstick while watching an episode of Adam-12. 

            In this story, the background situation is that Reed’s dog has eight puppies and he’s trying to find homes for them. One fellow cop gets angry with him for trying to give him a puppy and another would take a pup if his wife wasn’t allergic to dogs. 

            In the first situation, they investigate a break-in at a warehouse and catch a man and woman.

            Then a little boy stuck his head through the bars of a fence but then couldn’t get it out. First Malloy tries greasing the kid’s head but when that doesn’t work, they use the jack from their car to separate the bars just enough for the boy to get free. 

            Finally, they go to an attractive woman’s home where she says she saw a prowler try to get through her bedroom window. She is very flirtatious with Malloy. Reed tells her that what she needs is a dog to protect her. Susan agrees to take one but wants Malloy to pick it out and then personally deliver it to her. Later Malloy reminds Reed that it’s against the rules to fraternize with the people they meet on the job so it would be best if Reed and his wife deliver the puppy to Susan. He says that giving the puppies to single women living alone is a good idea and he says he’s got several girlfriends that might each want one. 

            Susan was played by the great Karen Black, who studied under Lee Strasberg and made her Broadway debut in “The Playroom” in 1965. This Adam-12 episode was in 1968 and even in this small part she was outstanding. The next year she became a star when she appeared in Easy Rider. In 1970 her performance in Five Easy Pieces earned her a Golden Globe award and an Oscar nomination. In 1974 she won another Golden Globe for The Great Gatsby. She co-starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s final film, “Family Plot,” in “Trilogy of Terror,” in Rob Zombie’s “House of 1000 Corpses” and in “Burnt Offerings.” She co-starred in “Day of the Locust” for which she was nominated for another Golden Globe. Robert Altman inspired great performances from her in “Nashville” and “Come Back to the Five and Dime Jimmy Dean Jimmy Dean.” She wrote and sang two songs in “Nashville” and was nominated for a Grammy. She co-starred in “Invaders from Mars”. I didn’t realize that she’d died in 2013. She preferred independent films and was considered representative of the new Hollywood. She was called by one critic “Hollywood’s off-centre icon.”