Wolfe Barzell

            On Saturday morning I revised my translation of the fourth verse of "C'était une pauv' gosse des rues" (She Was a Poor Child of the Road) by Boris Vian. 

            I worked out the chords for all but the final verse and chorus of “Five easy pisseuses” (Five Easy Pieces) by Serge Gainsbourg. I should have the song done on Sunday and uploaded to my Christian’s Translations blog. 

            I played my Kramer electric guitar during song practice for the last session of two. 

            I weighed 85 kilos before breakfast, which is the lightest I’ve been in the morning in fifteen days. 

            Around midday went down to No Frills where the grapes were all too soft so I didn’t get any. I’ll replenish my supply at Metro later in the week. I bought two packs of strawberries, a bag of naan, two striploin steaks, mouthwash, salsa, honey, Ritz cheddar crackers, West Coast Dark coffee, spoon size shredded wheat, skyr, and Miss Vickie’s chips. 

            When I was unlocking my building my upstairs neighbour came up and said that he’d been trying to reach me for us to go to lunch at noon. I reminded him that we’d arranged to meet at 13:00. I put my groceries away and then met him outside. We walked to the Café Diplomatico in Little Italy. It took much longer to get there than I’d thought it would and David’s feet were getting sore. He had also skipped breakfast and so he was uncomfortable on two fronts. We sat on the heated patio but it was still cold and so we moved to a table closer to the heater. We both had meat lasagna and I had a pint of their house lager. I insisted on paying the cheque and David protested as usual but appreciated it. David showed me a picture of his 100 year old father who eats a lot of raw ox meat. 

            From there I took a bike ride downtown. There was what seemed to be an anti-pronoun protest coming up University and turning on Bloor as I approached and so I turned south. I followed what seems to be a new bike lane along the south of Queens Park and then heading east. I continued on Wellesley but somehow missed turning right on Yonge and didn’t notice until I got to Church. I went south to Maitland and then back to Yonge and south to Richmond, west to Peter, north to Queen and home. 

            I took a late siesta at 15:30 and got up a little after 17:00. 

            I weighed 84.8 kilos at 17:30.

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

            I reviewed the song practice videos of my performances of “Sixteen Tons of Dogma” from August 21 to 24. On August 21 and 22 I played my Martin acoustic guitar. On August 21 the take at 15:15 was not bad. On August 22 the take at 11:00 was pretty good except for the wrong chords I played. On August 23 and 24 I played my Kramer electric guitar. On August 23 the take at 14:30 had not a bad ending but the lighting was bad and so was the traffic noise. On August 24 the take at 13:00 was pretty good but had at least two obviously wrong chords at the end. 

            In the Movie Maker project to create a video for the studio recording of my song “Megaphor” I worked on trying to synchronize the concert video with the studio audio. It had seemed to me yesterday that they were more out of line on the new project than they were on the one that crashed. I’d copied precisely the old timeline to the new one and it works but seemed out of synch. At the point where it goes majorly askew I started working on deleting parts of the concert video to bring it in line with the audio. But suddenly realized that the point where it goes out of synch in the new video, with the line, “of the enemy’s secret” is exactly where it went off in the old one. That was when I inserted the clips from Fritz Lang’s movie Spies. So I copied all of those clips and it seems to be fine. 

            I cut and filed the last set of negatives that I scanned. I pulled another uncut strip from the wooden cabinet and unsleeved it but didn’t have time to clean it before dinner. 

            I made pizza on naan with Bolognese sauce, hot salami, and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching season 3, episodes 26 and 27 of Green Acres. 

            In the first story an old Hungarian man named Lazlo comes to Lisa from the old country with a recommendation from her uncle. He had saved her uncle’s life by hiding him from the Nazis in a wine barrel. He doesn’t want money for saving his life but he does want to be compensated for all the wine he drank. He fixes the stove pipe and the ceiling. Lisa asks him to stay. He says he won’t stay longer than four months. Oliver says he can’t stay more than a week. The next day is Kościuszko day, which is a Hungarian national holiday. Oliver wants Lazlo to leave but for some reason the Cannonball doesn’t run on Kościuszko day. Lazlo says he can fix Oliver and Lisa’s bedroom in three days. Oliver is interested in that because it has taken two years for Alf and Ralph to get almost nowhere in fixing the bedroom. He says if he can do that he night hire him permanently. But in one day all Lazlo does in nail up four pine boards. Lazlo wants Oliver to let him build a house on the farm and to send for his wife and children. Oliver tells him to leave but before he goes he puts a Hungarian curse on Oliver and everything he fixed for him suddenly falls apart. 

            Lazlo was played by Wolfe Barzell, who during the First World War went from Poland to Vienna, where he entered dramatic school and began to act in silent films. In 1926 he returned to Poland, and with the family immigrated to Toronto, Canada, then later traveled to New York, where he studied in Mendl Elkin's dramatic school and participated in "Unzer theatre". He travelled to Hollywood where he worked in film and later television. 

            In the second story, Oliver and the other farmers are undecided about what to plant in the spring. Their crops never make a profit. Oliver begins to do research into the agricultural history of the Hooterville Valley. He discovers that the one crop that grew abundant and large was rutabagas. It just wasn’t successful because there was no market for rutabagas. He convinces the other farmers to grow rutabagas but they go overboard in their efforts to create a market for them. They try to have a big parade and to get CBS to send cameras, and to get the UCLA football team to play Hooterville in the Rutabaga Bowl. Newt Kylie calls up Sophia Loren and she agrees to be the Rutabaga Queen. Lisa is selected to go up in a balloon and to float across the country while dropping Rutabagas advertizing Hooterville on populated areas. She lifts off before Oliver can stop her and almost gets shot down over Colorado because they think she’s bombing Denver.