Arlene Dahl

            On Tuesday morning I worked out the chords for the first four verses of “Glass securit” (Security Glass) by Serge Gainsbourg. 

            I played my Kramer electric guitar during song practice for the first of two sessions. 

            I weighed 87.1 kilos before breakfast. 

            I finished reading "Ruined Landscapes: Anglo-Saxon Literary Landscapes, Ecotheory and the Environmental Imagination" by Heide Estes. Ruins are resurrected and transformed into new art by the very act of describing them. 

            I also read a couple of times the tenth century poem "The Ruin" from the Exeter Book. It’s probably describing the ruins of the ancient Roman temple in the city of Bath, England. 

            I weighed 86.4 kilos before lunch. My copy of The Buried Giant arrived in the mail two days after I finished reading it. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and stopped at Freshco on the way back to buy grapes and cheese. But they only had one bag of relatively firm red grapes. So I got that and a pack of five-year-old cheddar and then went over to Metro to get four more bags of grapes. 

            I weighed 85.9 kilos at 17:45. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 19:00. 

            I wrote three handwritten pages in stream of consciousness on the topic of ruins based on the things I’ve been reading over the last few days. I started transcribing my notes and here’s what I have so far: 

            Beauty in Ruination Ruins evoke satisfaction, remorse and sadness. When we look at ruins we reconstruct them in our minds. What we see is not the ruin but rather some unbroken semblance of what was ruined or some new form constructed from the unbroken fragments of the original. But at the same time we also want to ruin modern art and architecture that is still intact and replace it with something new. For example the altering of faces on billboards to make them look like skulls, vomiting colour coordinated Jello on certain museum paintings, and the ceremonial burning of a mound of books are all creative post post modernist demonstrations of ruination. We want to reconstruct the old and deconstruct the new. We do not delight in the ruin of great art and would like to see its ruins resurrected. But at the same time there is something aesthetically pleasing about deterioration. Age itself is ruination and there is beauty in the process of the aging of artistic shapes such as architecture and its materials, sculpture and even living organic shapes like human faces. Old buildings like the 160 year old place where I live with high ceilings that don’t exist in new apartment buildings. Ruins evoke a sense of pity and we want to witness the ruin renewed. But there is also a delight in the mystery of ruins. For instance, would we love Stonehenge as much if we knew its exact purpose, who created it and when? When we study Medieval literature we explore the ruins of a language. Most Medieval texts are ruined.

            I had a very small potato with gravy and two porkchops while watching season 1, episode 16 of Burke’s Law. 

            The story begins with the actor Gene Barry, who plays Amos Burke, singing “C’est si bon” at a party. Gene Barry was a professional singer before he became an actor and he sounds pretty good in this imitation of Maurice Chevalier. While he’s singing the doorbell rings and he continues singing while answering it. Then there is a shot and he falls to the floor. The next scene has Amos Burke investigating the murder that we have just witnessed. It turns out the person killed was Snooky Martinelli. To the surprise of Tim and Les, Burke looks at the body but doesn’t notice anything strange about it. Tim points out that the corpse looks just like him but Burke doesn’t quite see it. Snooky had a house guest named Seraphim Parks. Tim points out that the Seraphim are the highest order of angels. Burke finds her in bed brushing her hair 200 strokes but she loses count as Burke begins to ask questions. He asks her to name the other house guests. She says Binky Faucet and Louis Simone the race driver were at the party. The next day Snooky’s picture is on the front page and Burke is starting to see the resemblance. Burke goes to see Binky Faucet who is played by Carl Reiner faking a British accent. He was Snooky’s house guest for eleven years. They had an argument on the night of the party and he left early. He tells Burke he was discharged from the British Army because he killed a man. Tim and Les go to see Louis Simone who tells them Snooky stole his wife but having had the same wife made them like brothers. If he’d wanted to kill him he would have done so in Paris in a better atmosphere and when he was still passionate about his wife. Burke comes home and finds Seraphim lying on his couch. She says the door wasn’t locked. He decides to take her to dinner. She chooses Chez Charles. The house piano player Jango Jordon arrives and Seraphim shouts out, “Play it Jango!” Seraphim says Snooky had a fight with Carlos Varga at Chez Charles before the party. Burke calls the office to have them check on Varga. When he comes back into the dining room Seraphim is sitting with Jango at the piano. Jango is played by Hoagy Carmichael who is playing his own compositions and sings his song “How Little We Know”. Burke finds the former boxer Varga at a men’s grooming salon with his hair in curlers and getting a manicure. He says Snooky was his patron. Snooky didn’t understand him but his wife Eva Martinelli did. She’s arriving by boat from Mexico today. Burke comes to meet her ship. She calls him Snooky as she’s getting off. He plays along but later she says she knew he wasn’t Snooky. Back at Chez Charles, Burke is on the phone when someone takes a shot at him from outside a window. Les finds out that Eva Martinelli left the ship by helicopter for twelve hours before resuming her journey. Burke goes to confront her about it and thinks at this point that she’s the murderer. She says Snooky wired her and so she flew to him but what he wanted was more money. She says she could have killed him but was back on the ship when it happened. Burke goes back to Chez Charles and finds it closing but gets a cup of coffee at the bar. He talks with Jango who admits he was married to Eva. Burke says that Jango killed Snooky and then shot at Burke to throw him off so he’d think that Burke was the target all along. Burke says they have footprints that the killer left outside Snooky’s room. Jango pulls a gun and tries to get away but trips over Seraphim’s high heels which she is always leaving lying around. Later Burke and Seraphim are in his Rolls drinking champagne from those same shoes. Burke finds a feather and thinks that maybe she really is an angel. 

            Eva was played by Arlene Dahl, who after high school won the Miss Reingold Beer contest of 1946. She won a modelling contract and did some local theatre. She went to Hollywood at the age of 21 and signed briefly with Warner Brothers. Two years later she was at MGM where her first film was The Bride Goes Wild. She co-starred in Slightly Scarlet, A Southern Yankee, Reign of Terror, Scene of the Crime, Ambush, Three Little Words, watch the Birdie, Inside Straight, No Questions Asked, Caribbean Gold, Jamaica Run, Here Come the Girls, The Diamond Queen, Woman’s World, Bengal Brigade, Wicked as they Come, Fortune is a Woman, and Journey to the Centre of the Earth. On TV she hosted The Pepsi Cola Playhouse in the 1953 season. In 1959 she quit acting and became a writer on astrology and a beauty columnist. Later she formed Arlene Dahl Enterprises and marketed cosmetics, perfume and lingerie. One of her six husbands was Fernando Lamas by whom she was the mother of Lorenzo Lamas.