Pat Quinn

            On Tuesday morning I continued to try to find a way to hear all of “Ghetto Blaster” by Serge Gainsbourg as recorded by his wife Bambou. There’s an excerpt of two verses on Apple Music. Yesterday I downloaded the iTunes app but the song isn’t on their list. So this morning I started subscribing to Apple Music and gave them my banking information because I thought it was an app like iTunes and that it would only charge me for each song. But then I saw they were going to take $15 a month from my account so I closed down the application before agreeing to the price. Hopefully they’re not going to charge me. I then realized that the excerpt has the second and third verses complete and it’s the same melody as the first and fourth verses and so I memorized the first and second. I should have it done on Wednesday.

            I played my Martin acoustic guitar during song practice for the second of two sessions. 

            I weighed 87.2 kilos before breakfast, which is the heaviest I’ve been in the morning since March 2 but it’s two kilos lighter than this time five years ago. 

            I searched for Paulinus of Nola’s poem of consolation to Pneumatius and Fidelis whose young son Celsus had died. V.E. Watts compares this poem to “Pearl” because Celsus is also described like the dead girl in “Pearl” as being part of a procession of virgins around the Lamb. So far I couldn’t find the entire poem but he starts off by telling the mourning parents that their grief over their child is sinful: “Devoted parents, please stop sinning with all these tears. You risk making devotion a moral failure. To grieve for a blessed soul out of devotion is disloyal. Vicious is love that weeps for a person who is now rejoicing with God”. This is similar to the way his own child who the “Pearl” mourner meets outside of the City of God, rebukes her father for his mourning over her. 

            I weighed 86.7 kilos before lunch. 

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

            I weighed 86.6 kilos at 17:30. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 18:37. 

            I found and downloaded from Library Genesis the pdf of a book containing all Paulinus of Nola’s poems. I read poem 31 which has his consolatio to Pneumatius and Fidelis after the death of their young son Celsus. It has the part that can be compared to the poem “Pearl”: 

            If you long to enjoy Celsus forever, you must ensure that the heavenly court lies open to you also. A holy faith, a life that knew no sin, and piety of heart kept him chaste in body, so our confidence is assured that he has reached the land of heavenly dwellers where the flaming altar of God gives protection to the saints. Believe that Celsus will accompany the Lamb who is King, a child newly joined to the bands of virgins. It is certain that the kingdom of heaven belongs to children such as you were in age, purpose, and faith. 

            In the novel Pearl, Marianne’s innocent observation that “consolatio” is missing a letter speaks to the incompleteness of the kind of mourning that stresses the belief that the person being grieved over is in a joyful place and therefore one’s sadness over their passing is inconsequential. 

            I had the last of the wedge fries with gravy and two slices of pea meal bacon while watching episode 14 of Amos Burke: Secret Agent. 

            Burke is in Barcelona and on a date in an upscale restaurant. Farid, his men and his girl Jasmine come in. Burke’s date takes the compact from her purse and it is a speaker. They’ve bugged Farid’s table. But the bug is discovered in the pepper mill and so one of Farid’s men distracts the maître d’ while another does something to the reservation phone. When the phone rings he answers it and it blows up. 

            The next day Burke is in the market when a man bumps into him. Then Jasmine approaches Burke to inform him that someone has just stolen his wallet. Burke catches the man and gets his wallet back, then thanks Jasmine. They chat briefly and then she leaves. Then Burke goes to thank Santos, the pickpocket and fellow agent with whom he’d arranged to have his wallet stolen. 

            Burke meets with “The Man” and refers to him as “General” for the first time. Farid is a former ruler in Egypt who is smuggling weapons into Spain to prepare to prepare for a return to power in Cairo. 

            Burke distracts a guard in front of Farid’s home with the recording of a woman’s voice in the bushes. He knocks out the guard and then climbs up to Jasmine’s room. She doesn’t seem very surprised. He tells her he knows why she’s with Farid, because he’s promised to help her parents in Cairo. He says he knows them and is interested in helping them. She kisses him and he “accidentally” undoes her necklace. It falls to the floor and he gives it back to her but it’s a copy with a bug inside. Burke returns to his hotel room where he finds the elderly British agent Agatha Caruthers waiting for him. 

            Later Burke meets Agatha at her basement wine shop. It’s the same set with the curved stairway that often serves as a dungeon in other stories. 

            Agatha goes to the restaurant where one of Farid’s men is drinking. She picks his pocket of a cigarette case and sets it on Burke’s table. At the door Burke “accidentally” bumps into Farid’s arms dealer Van Zandt and shows him the cigarette case. That makes him think Burke is one of Farid’s men and he goes with him. Burke takes him to Agatha’s shop to question him where Agatha drugs his wine with truth serum and he tells him the arms are being brought to the forest. Before he can say which forest he is shot by one of Farid’s men. 

            Farid discerns there must be an enemy among them leaking information with a radio transmission, otherwise Burke and Agatha wouldn’t have known about the cigarette case. He searches all the rooms. 

            Farid has an argument with Jasmine and yanks off her necklace, then discovers the bug. She says she’s innocent and someone must have switched the necklaces in her room. He believes her. 

            The next day after Farid leaves his house, Agatha disguises herself as an elderly Spanish lady who has come to talk with Jasmine about a dress she is making. She mentions Jasmine’s parents and so Jasmine goes with her to the wine shop where she meets Burke. He promises her parents will be removed safely from Cairo. But when they leave the shop Burke and Jasmine are captured by Farid’s men. They are taken to the lumber camp where the weapons are being stored, including a large stockpile of napalm. While looking at it all Burke discretely sets a small lens on top of the crates of explosives. The sun is shining brightly through the lens as Farid orders Burke and Jasmine against the wall and tells his men to get their rifles ready. The stockpile explodes and Farid and all of his men are killed. 

            Jasmine was played by Pat Quinn, who was a student of the Maharishi in the 60s. Around that time she worked as Marlon Brando’s secretary. She played Alice Brock in Alice’s Restaurant. She co-starred in Zachariah. She was the director of the Young People’s Program at the Strasberg Institute in Hollywood in the 1990s. The thing is Pat Quinn doesn’t look much like the character she was supposed to have played. 

            There is a British actor named Patricia Quinn who would have been twenty at the time but was supposedly still studying in England when this show was filmed. The British Patricia Quinn is famous for her role in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. She doesn’t really look like the actor who played Jasmine either. 

           It might be an IMD mistake since those happen but maybe the producers of Amos Burke Secret Agent were able to exoticize Pat Quinn to make her look Egyptian.