Mark Barkan

            On Tuesday morning I started working out the chords for “Valse Dingue” (Mad Waltz) by Boris Vian. I memorized the second verse of “Toi mourir” (Then You Die) by Serge Gainsbourg. 

            I video-recorded most of my song practice and audio-recorded the whole session. I made it through my song “Megaphor” after two or three tries. I even got through all the main verses of “Sixteen Tons of Dogma” but I lost track of the chord sequence for the epilogue which is sung to the tune of the song “Sixteen Tons.” Maybe I was so excited about having gotten through the song I became distracted at the end. I think I did pretty good with most of my translated songs. 

            I weighed myself four times before breakfast and twice my weight was 85.2 kilos while two times it was 85.5 kilos. I’ll go with 85.2. 

            In the late morning finished scrubbing the final open section of my kitchen floor in the northeast corner of the room. I still had a bucket of fairly clean water and so I used it to wash the east end of the counter. I did an initial wipe of the north wall where that area of floor ends and knocked a lot of paint chips onto the section I’d just cleaned. I vacuumed them up later. There will be more paint chips, since washing that wall is my next project, all the way up to the ceiling, including the two shelves. 

            I weighed 84.8 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. 

            I weighed 84.7 kilos at 17:15. 

            I got caught up on my journal at 18:40. 

            I uploaded the two videos that I shot of my song practice this morning and skimmed through them. Sometimes I play parts of songs too fast, so I’ll have to work on that. 

            I searched for videos that show notorious mental hospitals and found an edition of the Fifth Estate hosted by Adrienne Clarkson in which she does a report on the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal. It shows a video of the hospital from above and from the front, so I think that will work. I downloaded it with 4K Downloader. Tomorrow I’ll import it into Movie Maker to convert it into the format of the video I’m making for my song “Instructions for Electroshock Therapy”. While it’s there I’ll try to crop out the Fifth Estate watermark. It’s not actually on the image but rather in the black outside the frame, so I wouldn’t be losing anything if I can crop it. 

            I made gravy with my chicken drippings from yesterday. I had some with a potato and a chicken leg while watching episodes three and four of The Archie Show. 

            In the first story, the gang takes a tour of the local Navy base. Reggie is very knowledgeable about nautical talk but Jughead says that when he uses nautical talk he gets his mouth washed out with soap. The boys fall into the water and find a laundrymat on the base to dry their clothes. They borrow three sailor suits from someone’s laundry and Reggie wants to go out and walk around in them. Archie doesn’t think it’s a good idea but Reggie insists that it’s fine. On the dock is Principal Weatherby in his Naval Reserve uniform. He is there to meet the commodore. But Hotdog is running and slams into Weatherby, knocking his glasses off. His uniform hat lands on Hotdog’s head and through his dim vision, Weatherby thinks Hotdog is the commodore. When he encounters Archie, Reggie, and Jughead he does not recognize them and can only make out the uniforms. He commands them to board the Commodore's hydrofoil. Despite Reggie’s nautical knowledge, he gets seasick. Archie takes over but doesn’t know how to drive a hydrofoil and so they have a crazy ride. Just as Weatherby starts to recognize the names the sailors are calling each other, like “Jughead” and “Archie”, he gets knocked out. They get him back on land and find his glasses. Weatherby is about to punish them when the Commodore compliments him on his exhibition of hydrofoil manoeuvres and promises him a unit to train in the handling of hydrofoils. 

            The Dance of the Week is “The Beanie”. Put your right hand on your head and your left hand in your baby’s left hand. Then switch hands. The Archie’s then perform “Truckdriver” by Jeff Barry. 

            In the second story, Reggie has been taking advantage of Jughead’s easygoing nature to play mean tricks and practical jokes on him but Jughead is oblivious. Jughead passes the bus station and meets his double, a young man named John L Sullivan Jackson, Junior State Karate Champion. He goes by the nickname “Jughead”. He’s just visiting town and is waiting for his bus. He asks Jughead where he can get a malted and he directs him to Pop’s Choclit Shop where Archie, Betty, Veronica, and Reggie are hanging out. When Reggie sees what he thinks is the Jughead he knows, he tries to play more dirty tricks. This tougher Jughead lets him get away with it once but when he ties his shoes together and makes him trip, he starts spinning Reggie around and finally tosses him in a garbage can. Reggie promises never to pick on him again. Then when Reggie sees two Jugheads he runs for the hills. 

            In the first story of episode four, Archie, Jughead, and Reggie learn the circus is in town and go there to get part-time jobs. But Reggie thinks they should become circus performers. He dresses Jughead as a lion tamer and Hotdog as a lion. Then he and Archie dress as trapeze artists. But as Archie and Reggie are climbing the ladder to the trapeze we learn that Reggie is afraid of heights. Meanwhile, Jughead mistakes a real lion for Hotdog. When he realizes his mistake he runs, with the lion in pursuit. Archie starts swinging on the trapeze and Reggie doesn’t want to be left alone on the platform so he grabs the bottom of Archie’s tights. Reggie is swinging so low to the ground that he snags Jughead and Hotdog and inadvertently rescues them from the lion by lifting them up. Reggie and Jughead land on horses and then end up between elephants that toss them in the air and they wind up on the trapeze again. Then all three fall, but Hotdog pushes a big container of water under them and they fall safely, except for Reggie who lands in the cannon for the human cannonball, which the lion fires. 

            The Dance of the Week is The Hamburger. Hop on one foot, then the other, then both, then stop. Rotate one arm and then the other, then hop, hop, hop. Stop, then hop. 

            The Archies then perform “Catching Up on Fun” by Ritchie Adams and Mark Barkan. The song was recorded the same year by The Love Generation. 

            In the second story, Reggie is trying to stop Jughead from tagging along when he and Archie go out with Betty and Veronica. So he buys an old wreck of an airplane for a dollar and gets a DJ to announce on the radio that Jughead won it in a contest. He thinks it will occupy all of Jughead’s time but then Archie decides to help Jughead fix it up and the girls hang out to watch. Reggie goes off to take a nap. Jughead takes the plane for a spin and it turns out Reggie is asleep in the back. The plane goes through a crazy ride, sometimes with Jughead not even steering. They almost crash several times and fly upside down for a while. The engine conks out and the plane loses parts in the air. They have to land Flintstones style by sticking their legs through the bottom of the plane. 

            Mark Barkan started as a Brill Building songwriter. His first hit was The Writing on the Wall for Adam Wade in 1961. Then he co-wrote “I’m Gonna Be Warm This Winter” for Connie Francis, and “She’s a Fool” for Leslie Gore. His song “Pretty Flamingo” was a hit for Manfred Mann and he co-wrote the Banana Splits theme “The Tra La La Song”. In 1966 he produced the album Psychedelic Moods by The Deep. It was the first album with the word “psychedelic” in the title. Collaborating with Ritchie Adams he wrote songs for The Archies and The Monkees. They also wrote all of the songs for the Science Fiction musical “Toomorrow” starring Olivia Newton John.