I memorized the chorus of "Le Couteau dans le play" (The Knife in the Play) by Serge Gainsbourg.
I audio and video recorded my song practice while playing my Martin acoustic guitar for the first day of four. "Megaphor" seemed to come out okay but I spent most of the camera time in frustrating retakes of "Sixteen Tons of Dogma". After all that the ending had some wrong chords. Today was the halfway point of this rebooted recording project and so there are twenty one days to go.
I weighed 84.9 kilos before breakfast.
At around 11:15 I headed out on my bike for Topcuts at Yonge and St. Clair. Fortunately I had green lights all the way up the steep hill to St Clair. I got there just in time to be Amy's first client of the day. For the first time I asked her to leave my hair a little longer in the front. After watching videos of myself singing and playing guitar every morning this summer I saw that my hair looks better sweeping down from the right to the left. She made it short on the back and sides.
I weighed 84.4 kilos before lunch, which is the lightest I've been at midday in two weeks.
I weighed 84.9 kilos at 16:00.
I chiseled more black quartz and some amethyst from the pieces of the rock I found six years ago.
I was caught up on my journal at around 17:30.
I reviewed this morning's song practice video. The light was bad for the third day in a row. Megaphor came out okay and I think most of the French songs were fine but I played a couple of wrong chords at the end of Sixteen Tons of Dogma.
In the Movie Maker project for creating a video of my song Sleep in the Snow I finished watching Nanook of the North. It's only in the final minute that there is video that I can potentially use. It shows snow blowing outside the igloo, the dogs sleeping in the open and Nanook sleeping inside. I cut it down to about thirty seconds. I imported the snow scene from The Wizard of Oz and edited that down to twenty one seconds. There's still some more of that I can do without.
I finished writing my Statement of Purpose which is supposed to accompany my application for the MA in Creative Writing. I'm not sure what is expected of a Statement of Purpose so maybe after I send it to George Elliot Clarke he'll advise me to revise it:
All poems have songs in their DNA. Whenever anyone speaks poetry they stand on the threshold of melody. The Bible was sung, as were the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Iliad, the Divine Comedy, and many other ancient literary works. Beowulf was at least spoken and probably chanted long before it was written down. When I began performing my poetry in public the words came out in song, but there is also a subtle melody evident whenever anyone communicates with their voice. When we talk we are attempting to sing because it is a naturally liberating urge.
What I have to offer is a talent for rhyme, rhythm and melody that gravitates towards a pre-Gutenberg approach to writing. My verses dance to the back beat of a time when poetry could fly unencumbered by the mechanical mutilation that amputated poetry of its musical wings. I want to explore the melodic ancestry that calls out from the depths of every poem and liberate poetry from the its static cage. Every poem that dips into its sonic roots becomes an incantation of engagement with the listener and reader. The Medieval poetic scribes were clearly still connected to the oral traditions, as were the later Decadents like Baudelaire, and Oscar Wilde who praised rhyme as the one note that English literature has added to the Greek lyre.
Poetry informs us what is inside but oral poetry brings the inside out. It is a break out, a breaking of ground, a defiance of classification, a breaking of rules, including our own. Oral poets are outlaws robbing the bank of the inner mind. They follow no rules other than to track them as a hunter to kill, cook and eat them.
An example at the University of Toronto of a poet who follows the rules to break them is Dr. George Elliot Clarke. His sculpting of language merged with rhythm riffs into a sensual, percussive word music that rips our mental clothes off without us minding at all.
With his rich command of vocabulary he has the ability to not only marry sophisticated words and street language, but to do so in ways that create a type of syllabic symphony when they are read aloud. Because of this his writing takes on an odd but effective hybrid of academic and down and dirty language, as if he’d turned a reference library into a barrelhouse. This is especially evident when he reads aloud as he emphasizes certain syllables and he may repeat entire lines once or twice for meaning and rhythmic effect like the choruses of songs.
I propose to explore further the inherent musicality of text by awakening the songs that sleep within. From 1993 until 2000 I wrote a weekly series of poems called Commentaries on the Gumby Bible. This produced more than 350 poems in chronological order, following the questions of cosmology, spirituality, sexuality, social alienation, humour, parenthood, and romantic attachments that bubbled up as I passed through those years. Most of this writing remains rough drafts of prose, but I plan to develop them into up to seven books of poems in song form that sing of my life and those around me.
I scanned the rest of a set of colour negatives from the spring of 1987 that have a lot of street shots as well as pictures of my cats Siva and Sakti. Then I did another set from the same time with more street shots and some shots of my ex-girlfriend Brenda's best friend Suzanne. A third set had images of Brenda, of my ex-girlfriend Whitefeather and my friend Tom Smarda. I started on the last set that's in a dated sleeve. After this I'll need to depend on memory. I'll probably have all of the negatives scanned before fall and then I'll start on the hundreds of slides I've taken.
I had a potato with the last of my gravy and a piece of pork loin while watching season 5, episodes 2 and 3 of Petticoat Junction.
In the first story Betty Joe is suddenly worried about her domestic potential as a wife since she doesn't know how to cook. Kate sets about to try to teach her, but meanwhile Billie Joe has an audition at the Flamingo Club and when Kate sees the skimpy outfit that she plans to wear she insists on being her escort. She is interfering and annoying the Flamingo owner until she calls Hooterville and hears that something happened at the hotel but is not told what. Somehow Kate has the impression that Betty has eloped with Steve. But what happened is that Betty served Steve burnt macaroni and cheese and he had to have his stomach pumped. Joe sees Billie in a short dress and she explains that it's a mini dress. He says she should give it back to Mini because it doesn't fit her.
This story was directed by Ralph Levy, who was the main director for the show. He also directed 66 episodes of The Jack Benny Program, and 44 episodes of The Alan Young Show. He directed the pilot episode of I Love Lucy which was not aired for fifty years. He died the day it was. He directed the movies Do Not Disturb and Bedtime Story.
In the second story Betty Joe starts receiving box after box of flowers from a secret admirer. Everyone assumes that the sender must be wealthy to afford so many flowers. But finally Eb reveals that he is the sender and can afford it because he has a new job at the Pixley Florist and he gets flowers from canceled orders. When Betty learns that Eb is her admirer she wants to let him down easy. So she arranges with Steve for him to pretend they are a couple. Eb arrives and finds the two sitting on the porch swing. When Betty tells Eb she's with Steve he wants to fight him but Kate convinces Eb that Betty is too square for him. After Eb leaves, Betty and Steve are still sitting on the swing and Steve kisses her. She says there's no more need to pretend but Steve says, "Who says I'm pretending?" So this is the beginning of the romance between Betty Joe and Steve that leads to their marriage fairly quickly. Linda Henning and Mike Minor, who played Betty and Steve got married in real life but it only lasted a few years.
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