Christian's Blog: Hedda Hopper

On Thursday morning I searched for more chords for "Les dessous chics" (Lingerie Chic) by Serge Gainsbourg but all of the sites just repeated the same set. I worked them out for the intro, the first verse and most of the second verse. I'll probably have the whole song done tomorrow.

It was so windy this morning that not a single bird was out. A few squirrels ventured onto the wires but they had to really hang on. The short, tailed squirrels seemed to struggle more and one had to turn back twice before finally making it across Queen Street.

A guy in the alley at the back of the Dollarama parking lot was making his daily deliveries to the Dollarama when the shrink-wrapped vertical pile of boxes he was carting flipped over in the wind. He had to open up the plastic and cart the boxes in smaller bunches.

I weighed 84.9 kilos before breakfast.

I worked about an hour on my Medieval Literature essay and it feels like it is coming together. The official deadline is tonight at midnight but I asked for a week's extension by email and I'm pretty sure I got it but she doesn't really respond to emails. Anyway, once it's done I can get back to finishing my English in the World paper. The ideal would be to have it done before the weekend is over because I have a lot of stuff I want to do besides writing essays next week.

I weighed 84.4 kilos before lunch.

It was raining in the afternoon so I didn't want to take a bike ride, but I needed to go to the supermarket and headed to Freshco. I bought a bag of black grapes, two bags of green grapes, strawberries, blueberries, bananas, cinnamon-raisin bread, two pork chops, kettle chips, a jug of orange juice, a jug of limeade, Greek yogourt because they were out of unsweetened skyr, Irish Spring soap, and Arm and Hammer toothpaste. It turned out that the Greek yogourt was also sweetened.

I weighed 83.8 kilos at 16:56.

I was caught up on my journal at 17:45.

I worked for more than two hours on my essay and put some good ideas down but so far my paper is only about half as long as it's supposed to be. I still need three more pages. These are the paragraphs that I worked on:

In Julian of Norwich's 15th Century work, A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman she writes of a long-standing desire to witness the suffering, the wounds, and the passion of Christ. This initiates some visions that she has while lying in what she believes to be her death bed. While gazing at a crucifix with the image of Jesus wearing the crown of thorns, she sees warm, fresh, red blood trickling down from Christ's head. This is the partial fulfillment of her wish to look at Christ's wounds, and a little later this same living crucifix further fulfills her wish when he shows her the place where the spear pierced his side. During this same illness, her wish to witness Christ's passion is granted when she sees a vision of his face withering into death while descending through four shades of blue. Near the end of Julian's sickness, after she chooses Jesus as her heaven and anticipates that future happiness, she sees the revelation of a blissful Jesus. Each of these visions appear to be drawn from the unknown and shaped into the character that the wish dictates. But fear also has the ability to sculpt manifestations from the outside.

In The Book of Margery Kempe, when Margery is struggling between fear of damnation and a wish to be damned, she sees demons with open mouths waiting to devour her. But Margery's subsequent visions are of Jesus and they express a mixture of spiritual passion blended with her prevalent sexual desires and her obsession with fashion. Unlike many of Julian's visions of Jesus, Margery's apparitions of her saviour are always beautiful, to fit with her aesthetic preferences. Her first vision occurs while she is restrained in her bed as Jesus appears sitting beside her in her bedroom, in the form that she imagines him to have had as a young man. She finds him to be superlatively attractive and pleasing, as well as handsomely dressed in a fine purple mantle. This vision is a collage of Margery's wish fulfillments. Her imagination's construction of Jesus has not only come to grant her freedom from her terror of damnation, but it also provides her with a good-looking, well-dressed man to gaze upon while she is in bondage on her bed. There is a sexual undercurrent to Margery's spiritual relationship with Jesus as she repeatedly has the desire while looking at crucifixes for his hands to be freed from the cross so that he can take her into his arms. She is disgusted with the act of having sex with her husband. But her vow of chastity seems to be partner-dependent, as she admits to desiring another man sexually and offering herself to him. Her dislike of having sex with her husband is supported by Jesus when he tells her to compromise with him by agreeing to eat with him on Fridays if he will agree not to have sex with her anymore. Christ's appearances before Margery play an integral role in her sex life.

I had a potato with gravy and my last steak while watching season 4, episode 4 of The Beverly Hillbillies.

The Clampetts are becoming famous in Hollywood because of their wealth and their quirkiness. But now that Jed owns Mammoth Studios there is a struggle between Drysdale's desire to tear down the studio and famous columnist Hedda Hopper's insistence that it be preserved for the sake of Hollywood's future.

Hedda seeks out Jed on the western street where the mock-up of Dodge City has been built. When Granny sees Hedda she thinks she's looking for a man because she's wearing what they call back in the Tennessee Hills "a courting hat". Hedda says she's been wearing hats like that for thirty years and Granny thinks it's sad that she hasn't landed a man for that long.

Hedda finds Jed and takes him on a tour of Hollywood. She shows him the Hollywood Walk of Fame and the footprints of all the stars. He can't believe all these stars defaced the sidewalk with their footprints. He's especially shocked that Mary Pickford did it. He can understand Clara Bow because she was a rascal but sweet little Mary! Hopper tells Jed that many of the stars with their prints in the cement were Mammoth Studio stars and she asks him if he wants them to be remembered just for their names in the cement. He says no but misunderstands her intention.

He proceeds to start covering over the foot and hand prints of the stars with fresh cement. He gets arrested but released on Hopper's recognizance. He understands later that she wants him to keep making movies. So he makes a movie in the old western town and invites Hopper to see it.

It's a hilarious old style silent film featuring the Clampetts, Drysdale and Jane. It's called "Little Orphan Elly". Elly plays a Mary Pickford type innocent living with her bedridden Granny. Drysdale is the villain banker who comes for the mortgage and threatens to foreclose unless he either gets his money or Elly marries him. Granny offers to marry him. He's chasing Elly when Honest Jed arrives on his horse. He tells Drysdale he'll pay the mortgage and so Drysdale leaves. Elly asks, "How will you get the money". Honest Jed says, "Steal it". Then Drysdale enlists the aid of Juanita the irresistible dance hall queen played by Jane Hathaway. He tells her to vamp Honest Jed. When he comes back with the money he falls victim to the batting eyes that no man can resist. He is about to give her the money when Jethro arrives playing a Rudolph Valentino type with eyes no woman can resist. He and Juanita dance while Jed frees Granny and Elly. Granny and Elly dance, then Jed kisses his horse and rides away.

After seeing the movie, Hedda Hopper heads for the western town, gets in the bulldozer and destroys the town, saying "Hollywood will thank me!"

Hedda Hopper played herself. She ran away from home at 18 and got a job in the chorus of an opera company. She met and married DeWolf Hopper and they went to Hollywood together. She started playing small vamp parts in silent movies and then moved to supporting roles. Her first movie was The Battle of Hearts in 1916. She co-starred in Virtuous Wives in 1918. She became known as Queen of the Quickies. In 1936 she started a gossip radio show and two years later her famous Hedda Hopper's Hollywood column was born. DeWolf Hopper is the person who made Casey at the Bat a famous poem by repeating it on the radio about 10,000 times. She appeared in over 120 movies before retiring from acting. She was Republican and close friends with Howard Hughes, Ronald Reagan and William Randolph Hearst. She hated communists and was one of the major forces behind the Hollywood blacklist. She refused to get on a plane until Hughes inspected it. That's funny considering that he crashed his own plane once. She was always attacking Joan Bennett in her column, which caused Bennett to send her a skunk with a note reading, "You stink!" Hopper kept the skunk and named it Joan. Hopper declared that she was going to put a stop to Elvis Presley before he corrupted clean cut youth. She couldn't type or spell and so she always dictated her column to a typist over the phone. After she exposed Joseph Cotten's extramarital affair he met her at a party, pulled out a chair for her and kept it out, causing her to hit the floor. He received flowers from dozens of people for the gesture. Elizabeth Taylor told her to shut the fuck up. Hopper hated Citizen Kane because she saw it as an attack on her friend William Randolph Hearst. Her son William Hopper played Paul Drake on Perry Mason.