Hal Baylor

            On Friday morning I ran through singing and playing “Tout a été dit cent fois” (It’s Been Said a Hundred Times) by Boris Vian. Then I adjusted my translation and sang and played that. Tomorrow I’ll upload it to Christian’s Translations. 

            I worked out the chords for the intro and line and a half of “Gloomy Sunday” by Serge Gainsbourg. 

            I played my Martin acoustic guitar during song practice for the first session of four. 

            I weighed 86 kilos before breakfast. 

            I went online to a site named Etiket and through Google Pay I bought 30ml of Ganymede perfume for $175 after tax and arranged for it to be shipped to my daughter Astrid in Montreal. It’s considered to be a “leather fragrance” but Astrid says she likes it because it makes her smell like a robot. 

            I weighed 86.1 kilos before lunch, which is the heaviest I’ve been at midday in 18 days. 

            I took a siesta.

            I weighed 86.2 kilos at 16:00. That’s the most I’ve weighed in the evening in two months but to be fair this is before my usual bike ride downtown and back and so it would probably be less at 17:00. 

            I compared the video of my electric guitar song practice performance of “The Accordion” on August 14 to that of September 3. September 3 was when there was a rattle on the Kramer when I played the B flat chord, so August 14 wins that round. 

            At around 18:00 I left for downtown to go to George Elliott Clarke’s tenth Poets Breaking into Song event in the Canadian Music Centre at 20 St. Joseph. It’s usually still daylight when I ride up Brock Avenue to Bloor but now it was after dark and I could appreciate the Christmas lights decorating the houses. At Bloor and Bathurst there is no sidewalk on the south side of Bloor because of the construction of the new Mirvish Village complex. Pedestrians are supposed to walk on the north side but they continue making their way on the south side, even though it puts them almost out onto Bloor Street. As I was passing a woman with a small dog on a leash the dog started barking and lunging at me. The woman walking the dog let out a maniacal laugh. 

            There were already about ten people at 20 St Joseph hanging out in the reception area where the free wine was. Giovanna Riccio arrived after me. I came over while she was chatting with the person who’d brought the wine and lingered since she was the only person there I knew at that moment. She introduced me to Ron and he offered me a choice at wine. I told him to choose for me from among the red because I was more of a beer person. He told me he’d visited a whiskey factory in Ireland where the left over mash from the whiskey making process is used to make beer. It is against the law in Ireland for whiskey to be aged shorter than two years. 

            I took a seat at the front on the aisle but exchanged the chair with arms that was there with one from the third row that had none. George arrived with a bandage on his forehead because he’d slipped and hit his head on his desk. I was thinking that if there is a scar he should have a rhinoceros horn implanted there. There was a young woman in the second row and when George saw her he called out “Dotter!”, which I thought was her name. Later he referred to her in the third person as his daughter Orillia. 

            As usual George was an engaging, passionate, and soulful host. There were poems by Irving Layton and Gwendolyn MacEwan, of the dead poets; also poems by Armand Garnett Ruffo and Yeshim Ternar, of the living poets who couldn’t make it there that night; and poems by Mansour Noorbakhsh, Giovanna Riccio and George Elliott Clarke. About three poems by each poet were read and the last of each of those poems after its non-musical reading, was presented as a song and sung by Laura Swankey. The music for two of the poems was composed by James Rolfe and the rest were by Juliet Palmer who played piano for all of the pieces. Mansour’s first poem would have worked better as a song than the one chosen and also Ruffo’s “On the Day the World Begins Again” would have been more suitable to be made into a song than the one that had been selected. Only the last two songs: Giovanna’s Barbie themed sound poem and George’s poem about Austin Clarke drinking in the Pilot Tavern in Yorkville were given melodies that approached being an adequate compliment to the poems. The rest seemed soulless, inaccessible, classically themed, and pretentiously ethereal. It felt with most of the poems that the music was composed and then imposed upon the verses rather than the composer making an effort to access the melody that already exists in the DNA of each poem. All of the poems were accessible to any listener when read as poems but for most of them the hoity toity melodies to which they were shotgun wed had no soul, no body, and no oomph and so the poems were rendered distant from the non-academic listener. 

            I’ve been trying to get George to let me take him to lunch and reminded him but he said now he is only available on the second Monday in January. 

            I chatted a bit with Giovanna but she was distracted by other engagers and so I slipped away. 

            I rode home in the dark through the hellish Friday night traffic with cars sitting every which way on Queen Street. 

            Since I got home so late there was no time to cook dinner and so I had an already cooked ham steak with potato chips, salsa, tzatziki and a beer. I watched season 5, episodes 18 and 19 of Green Acres. 

            In the first story Oliver gives a long speech to the County Bar Association calling for ex-convicts to be given jobs and to be accepted back into society after paying their debt. His speech becomes published in the local paper and shortly after that an old ex-convict named Willy shows up at Oliver’s door asking for a job. Willy says he has experience working on prison farms and so Oliver gives him a try. Willy shares the loft in the barn with Eb. But Willy has a hard time adjusting to life on the outside. When Oliver asks him to weed the corn Willy tells him he’d be more comfortable if he’d stand over him with a shotgun. Willy reminisces a lot about all of his friends back in prison and so on his first day off he goes to Pixley and breaks the window of a jewellery store so he will be arrested and sent back to the pen. 

            The cop who arrests Willie was played by Hal Baylor, who became a professional boxer after WWII. His first movie was an appearance in Joe Palooka: Winner Take All. He played Tiger Nelson in the 1949 boxing film The Set Up in which his fight with the star, Robert Ryan is considered to be one of the best choreographed boxing scenes in cinema history. He played a policeman in the Star Trek episode City on the Edge of Forever and he played a robot in one of my favourite films, A Boy and His Dog. He played Big Otis the Scotsman in Kellogg’s OK Cereal commercials. 

            In the second story, Oliver’s neighbour Horace Colby’s cow Irene keeps breaking through the fence of Oliver’s property and eating his crops. Oliver tries to scare her away by firing a shotgun in the air. Meanwhile, a man comes from the Salt Lake City Salt Lick Company asking if he can put up a billboard. Lisa says Oliver hates billboards. They are about to put up a billboard across the road when they hear Oliver’s shotgun and think he is firing at them. They speed away but the life-size fibreglass replica of a cow on top of their van falls off into the ditch with its legs in the air. When Lisa and Eb see it they think that Oliver has killed Irene. Haney comes along and knows that the cow in the ditch is a dud but lets Lisa believe it’s really Irene and says he’ll get rid of the body for a fee. Then he persuades Lisa to pay him to take their cow Eleonor and give it to Colby, then sells her to Colby for $35. Then Haney brings the fake cow to Lisa and tells her that he had Irene stuffed and that she should buy it to keep in the bedroom to remind Oliver not to kill any more cattle. Then Haney meets the Salt Lick sellers and they offer a reward for the return of their fake cow. Haney goes to Lisa and tries to charge her to take it away but she’s wise to him now and so he takes it for nothing. I weighed 85.9 kilos at 22:00. That’s closer to normal after having ridden my bike downtown and back.