Bob Clampett

            On Tuesday morning I worked out the chords for the fourth verse of “Valse Dingue” (Mad Waltz) by Boris Vian. 

            I finished posting my translation of “La nostalgie camarade” (Only Nostalgia My Friend) and memorized the first verse of his song “Bana basadi balalo” (While All the Women Are Sleeping). It’s about the Zulu-Boer war. There aren’t many verses and there are a lot of repetitions in each verse of lines from the first verse and so it shouldn’t take long to learn this one.

            I video-recorded most of my song practice and audio-recorded the whole session. I had to redo “Megaphor”, “Sixteen Tons of Dogma”, and “The Accordion” a few times before getting them right. I’m only going to record three more sessions and then start to sort through the recordings for anything worth uploading to YouTube. 

            In the late morning, I finished cleaning the grooves that hold the sliding windows at the eastern end of my kitchen. It took until lunch time because they were filthy.

            I weighed 84.7 kilos before lunch. 

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

            I weighed 84.3 kilos at 17:40. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:30. 

            I uploaded this morning’s song practice videos. 

            I tried to import the concert video of Christian and the Lions at the Riot Gallery into Movie Maker to convert it from VOB to AVI but it only accepted the audio. I tried Cloud Convert but it looked like it was going to take too long and I didn’t trust that it would be a good conversion. I read that I could do it in VLC but that didn’t work. I downloaded Wondershare with a crack so I wouldn’t have to pay. It claimed it was repairing the VOB file but nothing happened after an hour. It still hadn’t moved by the end of the night so I gave up on it. 

            I grilled three sirloin steaks in the oven and had one with a potato and gravy while watching four Bugs Bunny cartoons. 

            In the first story Elmer Fudd is trekking through the desert to prospect for gold. Bugs happens to be there and wants to cause him trouble for no apparent reason. At first Bugs is wearing a cow skull and walks and sings along beside Elmer as he sings Oh Susanna. Elmer stakes a claim, digs a hole, and puts a lit stick of dynamite inside but Bugs keeps throwing it at Elmer. Finally, Bugs hands it to him and asks if he lost it. Elmer panics and thinks he’s going to die but the stick doesn’t go off. Bugs makes an exploding noise instead. Elmer goes after bugs with a gun until Bugs says gold has been found. Elmer asks where and Bugs points to his own gold tooth. Elmer shows he also has one of those. Elmer tries to hit Bugs with his pickaxe but it gets stuck in the rock wall behind him. Bugs cuts Elmer’s pants to show he’s wearing a corset. Elmer says to the fourth wall, “Don’t laugh! I’ll bet plenty of you men wear one of these!” Elmer dives down a hole after Bugs, but Bugs fills up the hole and says, “Ain’t I a stinker?” Elmer decides he’ll settle for Bugs’s gold tooth and there is a struggle. In the end, Bugs has two gold teeth. 

            The second cartoon is a concert in which a couple of vignettes happen during the music. The first piece is a waltz by Johan Strauss’s Tales from the Vienna Woods. Porky Pig and his dog are hunting Bugs. Everyone’s body movements are sort of to the beat of the music. Bugs takes the gun away and throws it into a hole in a tree but it disturbs a squirrel’s home and the squirrel fires at the three. Porky, Bugs, and the dog all think they’ve been hit. They each go through a dancing death scene but Porky and the dog realize they haven’t been shot. Bugs collapses. Porky and the dog cry to the tune of the music. Porky pulls Bugs’s hands apart to reveal he is wearing a bra and a tutu. Bugs slaps them and puts the bra cups over their heads. Then he dances away. The next vignette is Strauss's Blue Danube and it doesn’t feature Bugs Bunny. There is a mother swan in the river and her chicks following her. A little black duck tries to follow as well but the mother rejects him twice. Then a giant buzzard comes and grabs the swan’s chicks. The duck goes after it looking like a fighter plane. The buzzard lets go of the swan chicks and the duck hands him a TNT bomb which explodes and then the buzzard plays the harp. After that, the mother swan adopts the little black duck. 

            The third story begins in a US Army airfield. Bugs is sitting among the planes on top of a yet-to-be-loaded blockbuster bomb. He’s reading about gremlins sabotaging airplanes and he thinks it’s funny until a tiny little gremlin with a big hammer starts hitting the bomb to explode it. Bugs tries to stop him but in this case, it’s the gremlin that is the trickster and Bugs keeps getting hit over the head and other places. The gremlin lures him onto a plane and starts it up. It’s flying over the city out of control and the gremlin is about to crash the plane into a building. Bugs grabs the control and tilts the plane on its side so it goes between two buildings. Then the plane is very high and is crashing, going faster and faster to an impossible speed. But just centimeters from the ground the plane stops. The gremlin explains that it ran out of gas. 

            The fourth story is a variation on Jack and the Beanstalk. The giant has a giant garden with tree-sized carrots. Bugs is chopping one of them down when the giant stops him. Bugs challenges the giant to a duel. They have to stand back-to-back and then step twenty paces before firing. The giant walks around the world in twenty paces. The giant catches Bugs under a drinking glass but Bugs uses a glass cutter. The giant says, “You can’t outsmart me because I’m a moron!” The giant grabs Bugs in his fist and he’s going to crush him but Bugs says the giant has an interesting palm. The giant opens his fist to have his palm read. Bugs tells the giant that with his heart line he must be a Don Juan with the ladies. The giant says he’s bashful. Bugs whispers in his ear some love advice and then goes inside to bang on his eardrum. Bugs climbs up to his hair but the giant puts a hat on. Bugs sets it on fire. Bugs runs to the beanstalk and there’s an elevator inside. Bugs tells the giant he’ll have to take the stairs to the left. The giant steps to the left and falls from a great height to the ground. He says to look out for that first step, it’s a lulu. 

            After the Canadian artist Charles Thorson designed the original look of Bugs Bunny, it was animator Bob Givens who redesigned Bugs to make him less cute. Givens’s version is considered to be the real first appearance of Bugs Bunny. During the war he enlisted and worked on training films. After the war, he reunited with Tex Avery to illustrate Tom and Jerry cartoons. He worked on Looney Tunes films, Garfield and Bobby’s World before he died in the 1990s. 

            The Corny Concerto was directed by Bob Clampett, who from a very early age was interested in animation and puppetry. At the age of 17, his first job at Warner Brothers was animating secondary characters in the very first Merry Melody “Lady Play Your Mandolin!” He created Porky Pig, who first appeared in the 1935 cartoon “I Haven’t Got A Hat.” He was promoted to director in 1936 and his first credit under that title was “Porky’s Badtime Story.” In 1937 Clampett was the first artist to animate Daffy Duck in “Porky’s Duck Hunt.” He created the character of Tweety in “A Tale of Two Kitties.” In the early 1940s his cartoons became increasingly violent and surreal and he was influ-enced by Salvador Dali, especially in “Porky in Wackyland.” 

            He was fired in 1946 for diverging too far from what the producers thought was appealing to children. In 1949 he created the television puppet show “Time for Beany” for which he won three Emmy Awards and gained famous fans such as Groucho Marx and Albert Einstein. 

            In 1952 he created Thunderbolt the Wondercolt and Beany and Cecil. In the 1970s he toured universities as a lecturer on animation. John Kricfalusi, the creator of Ren and Stimpy cites Clampett as a major influence. 

            I searched for bedbugs before bedtime and didn’t find any.