Tom Lowell

            On Friday morning I ran through singing and playing “La vie grise” (The Grey Life) by Boris Vian and made some adjustments to my translation. Tomorrow I’ll upload it to my Christian’s Translations blog and start preparing it for publication. 

            I memorized the first two verses of “Shotgun” by Serge Gainsbourg. 

            I played my Kramer electric guitar for the second session of two. 

            I weighed 86.4 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around midday I pulled the stove out and measured off the last row of squares to complete the checkerboard pattern on my floor. I put down the Frog Tape and then painted the one whole black square on the left corner and the fifth of a square in the right corner, leaving a white square in between. I also touched up some of the other black squares I’d already done. It’s so hard for me to paint a black square without making a mess of a nearby white square. I’ll still need to do more touch ups when all the tape comes off. 

            I weighed 86.4 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:30. I weighed 85.6 kilos at 17:30. 

            I reviewed the song practice videos of my performances of “Joanna” and “Joanna Dances Lightly” from August 27 to September 3. On August 30 and September 2 the camera battery timed out before I played these songs. On August 27 and 31 I played “Joanna” on my Martin acoustic guitar. On August 27 the take at 20:00 was pretty good, there was low traffic noise and it looked good. On August 31 the take at 4:00 in Part B was pretty good. On August 28 and September 1 I played “Joanna Dances Lightly” on the Martin. On August 28 the take at 16:30 was one of the best. On September 1 the take at 22:00 was pretty good and looked good. On August 29 I played “Joanna” on my Kramer electric guitar and the take at 4:15 in part B was okay but I could have looked friendlier at the end. On September 3 I played “Joanna Dances Lightly” on the Kramer and the take at 8:00 in part B wasn’t bad. This one is already in Movie Maker. 

            I downloaded the dream sequence from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and converted it to WMV. I imported it into the Movie Maker project to create a video for the studio recording of my song “Angeline”. I copied it to the end of the timeline and cut out everything but the part where Jimmy Stewart’s character is falling in the dream. I inserted the edited clip into the main video at the beginning of the first chorus just after I begin singing “Ohhhhhhh”. It looks really good there. I shaved off the end so that the concert video is synchronized with the studio audio when I sing “Angeline” but then the video jumps ahead again for the line, “I feel I’m falling through your sadly spoken dream”. So I need to add another video to push the concert video back. I already have a video in mind for that, which is a 1949 Alice in Wonderland film that shows Alice falling. Another falling scene that just occurred to me is when Micky Dolenz is made to appear that he’s jumped off the Golden Gate bridge in the movie Head. He falls in slow motion so that could work either for this or a later part of the video. I’ll download the Alice clip tomorrow. 

            I grilled pork back ribs and had four with a small potato and melted butter while watching season 6, episodes 14 and 15 of Green Acres. 

            In the first story Eb has been dating Darleen Wheeler for two months and now even though he doesn’t want to get married he asks her to be engaged with him. He was engaged to her at least a year ago but this show doesn’t seem to care about continuity. Instead of a ring he gives her the watch fob that he won for coming in fourth in a bowling tournament. Darleen is fine with that but her father isn’t. He says not to come back unless he has a decent engagement ring. Lisa gives him the ring that Oliver gave her, which he says cost him $2000. Mr. Wheeler has it appraised and gives it back saying it’s only worth $8. Lisa tells Oliver she knew all along it wasn’t a real diamond but didn’t want to hurt his feelings. Lisa goes to see Wheeler and they discuss the situation over a couple of glasses of fire water. Last season Wheeler was a teetotaler. Lisa tells him that if he accepts the watch fob for an engagement present then they will accept the cheap dowry of an imitation lace table cloth and bridge chair that he was going to provide for Darleen. 

            In the second story Lester Luster from Luster Paints comes to offer Oliver a deal. They will paint his house for free if he lets them take before and after photos for advertizing their product. Oliver agrees but when they try to paint, every time they brush the paint on the house it is sucked into the wood and disappears. Mr. Haney, the previous owner says the house is made of Mississippi chitlin wood, which is extremely porous. He says one needs a pore key to close the pores of the house. Luster finds that Haney is right but that when the pore key is used to close the pores one can hear the wood gasping for breath. They decide to forget the whole thing. 

            Luster was played by Tom Lowell, whose first acting job was in The Twilight Zone episode “The Changing of the Guard”. He played Alan Harper on The Lucy Show. He appeared several times on The Carol Burnett Show as an uncredited stock player. He played Rocky the motorcycle beatnik in an episode of The Addams Family. He co-starred in the Disney film The Gnome Mobile. He played Private Billy Nelson on the drama series Combat. He is now the theatre director for the Bishop Alemany High School in Mission Hills California.