Jinkx Monsoon

            On Sunday morning I dreamed a woman I didn’t know told me I was handsome. I told her she had beautiful eyes (they were kind of a luminous light green). She rubbed her face against mine and it felt like we were going to make out soon. 

            I finished working out the chords for “On fait des rêves” (We Keep Dreaming) by Boris Vian. Tomorrow I’ll run through singing and playing it in French. I need to make some adjustments to my translation before uploading it to Christian’s Translations. 

            I memorized the fifth and sixth verses of “Et quand bien même” (And Even If) by Serge Gainsbourg. I’ll either have the whole song nailed down tomorrow or on Tuesday. 

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

            I noticed that the Samsung solid state drive I ordered from Amazon that was supposed to arrive on Monday is being delivered today by 20:00. Hopefully they’ll be more specific later because I don’t want to sit around all day. 

            I weighed 87.75 kilos before breakfast, which is the lightest I’ve been in the morning since June 1. 

            I wanted to take an early bike ride so I could research volume pedals at Long and McQuade. But the tracking for the package from Amazon doesn’t say anything more specific than today before 20:00. I checked the tracking at 11:50 and they claim they attempted delivery at 11:49. I think it’s bullshit like their first try with the other package a few days ago. I was checking the tracking constantly and I saw no indication that they were any number of stops away. I looked this up and found it’s a common problem. Apparently sometimes carriers just look at the door from the truck and then register an attempted delivery. Or maybe they don’t even go near the building and just say they attempted it to save time. If the GPS is not on then they probably don’t even bother. 

            Since the driver pretended to have attempted a delivery at 11:49 I had time for the early bike ride. I stopped at Long and McQuade to ask about volume pedals. A salesperson demonstrated their cheapest one which is the Boss FV30H. It seems fairly user friendly and one can also make a tremolo effect. The one he demonstrated was used for $100 but a new one is $169. It’s also $169 on Amazon but there’s another for $137 though I don’t know if it’s used. I’ll try Steve’s next time I take an early ride. 

            I weighed 88.45 kilos at 16:15. 

            I was caught up on my journal at 16:52. 

            I compared the videos of my acoustic performances of “Mamadou” on August 5 and August 9 of last year. I think August 5 has a crisper focus and my performance is more expressive, so August 5 wins this round. I compared August 15 to August 5 and there is extremely loud traffic on August 15, plus I look friendlier at the end on August 5. August 5 wins again. I compared August 27 to August 5 and there is almost no traffic noise on August 27 but the closing instrumental is kind of clumsy. I’m going to stay with August 5 for this round. I compared August 31 to August 5 and they are close, but I think I’m a little more expressive on August 5. I compared September 6 to August 5 and I think September 6 is better, plus it’s already synchronized in Movie Maker. So the acoustic version of “Mamadou” that I’ll upload to YouTube will be the one from September 6. Next there are nine acoustic takes of “The Post Colonial Breakdown” to compare. 

            In the Movie Maker project to create a video for the studio recording of my song “Angeline” I synchronized the concert video with the studio audio for half of the first of the last three lines: “and since I can’t see the…”. But then it went out of synch for “…bottom” so I added another psychedelic clip of Mickey Dolenz sinking underwater in the movie Head. Then I got them lined up again for, “I’ll resign myself to…” but it went out of synch again for “…falling”. So I added another clip of Jimmy Stewart falling in the dream sequence in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo followed by another clip from Head. That lined it up for the second repetition of “Since I can’t see the bottom…”. Then another clip from Vertigo helped line up the second repetition of , “…I’ll resign myself to falling”. Then another clip from Head got the beginning of the final line “and since I can’t…” in synch. Then for “…see the…” I added a clip from Vertigo for “see” and one from Head for “the” so that the concert video was lined up to show me singing “…bottom”. Then there is a pause that needed one more clip from Vertigo so that the concert video was in synch to show me singing the finals words, “I’ll resign myself to falling Angeline”. In the studio audio I extend the last syllable of “Angeline” longer than in the concert video and so I added a clip from the Greta Garbo silent film Wild Orchids and the scene of Greta in bed and finally sleeping. I added the effect of making it look like the camera is easing out from her. After that there is a moment showing Brian and I on stage as the song ends and then I added a fade to black. I might add an effect or two to parts of the video tomorrow but it’s pretty much done. I’ll publish it on Monday and maybe upload it to YouTube on Tuesday. 

            I got my cassette to MP3 player to play through my speakers. The tape I listened to has what seems to be a recording of a rehearsal with Brian Haddon of my song “Sixteen Tons of Dogma” and an interview of me on the Howl radio show on CIUT after the launch of my chapbook Vomit of the Star Eater. I played “The Princess and the Pea Happy Song” on guitar, broke a string, took a long time to tune, then sang my poem “Vomit of the Star Eater” acapella. These recordings were probably made in 1996. 

            I made pizza on naan with Basilica sauce, a chopped beef burger and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching season 14, episode 2 of Doctor Who. 

            In 1925 a music teacher is demonstrating piano for a school boy. He tells him about the Devil’s note that is supposed to summon the Devil. When he plays it there is a knocking from inside the piano and then out comes a drag queen named Maestro. The boy says they’re his daddy. The boy is listed in the teacher’s appointment book as Henry Arbinger but then the first initial joins the last name to read Harbinger. Maestro takes over the piano and makes Harbinger disappear. Maestro says they are Music. She talks to the teacher about the melodies trapped inside of him and asks if he’d like them to set him free. He says yes and so she begins to play and musical notation comes flying out of him until he collapses perhaps dead. Maestro winds the music around their baton and then eats it. Then they look at the fourth wall and say, “Now” and then begin playing the Doctor Who theme on the piano. 

            In the present Ruby tells the Doctor she wants to go to 1963 when the Beatles recorded their first album. They go back and get dressed in swinging London fashions. They visit the session and the Beatles are there but their songs are horrible and nothing even remotely as good as even their worst songs. In another studio Cilla Black is also recording and her song and lyrics are also barely musical. The Doctor and Ruby are shocked because it seems the world has lost its music. The Doctor sees a newspaper and history has already changed. In the cafeteria the Doctor talks with Paul McCartney and Ruby talks with John Lennon. They are both uninterested in music. The Doctor sees the Maestro’s face in a spoon. The Doctor hires a crew to hoist a piano from the studio to the top of the building. 

            From the rooftop the Doctor points out that he is living right now in another part of London with his granddaughter Susan. The first episode of Doctor Who aired at around the same time as the Beatles recorded their first album. Ruby asks where Susan is now but he says he doesn’t know. The Time Lord genocide rolled across time and space like a cellular explosion and maybe it killed her too. 

            Then he has Ruby play a tune she wrote on the rooftop and people who hear it are reawakened to music. Then the Maestro emerges from inside the piano and the Doctor runs away followed by Ruby. He says he can’t fight them. Maestro shouts, “I heard music, and music is mine!” The Doctor causes an intense light to emit from his sonic screwdriver that silences everything. But then Maestro puts her tuning fork in a puddle and it brings sound back. The Doctor says the Maestro must be part of the Pantheon (a group of transcendental beings that seek to cause chaos, that includes the Toymaker who the current two Doctors defeated last year). But beating the Toymaker tore his soul in half and he can’t survive it again. The Toymaker had warned him that his legions are coming. They go back to the present where they find the Maestro. They reveal that the Toymaker is their father. They say they have reduced music to aeolian tones which is to them the most beautiful of all. Every song unsung makes them stronger until they can steal the music of the stars. The Doctor asks how they entered the world and they say through the Lost Chord. The Doctor realizes that a different combination of notes would banish them. Their music begins to attack the Tardis and so the Doctor takes it back to EMI Studios in 1963. The Doctor plugs his sonic screwdriver into the sound board then grabs John Lennon’s guitar. If he can find the right chord and download it into the screwdriver he can use it as a weapon against Maestro. Suddenly the Maestro’s solid notation wraps around Ruby’s ankles and starts dragging her away. The Doctor finds her suspended in the air in the auditorium because she is the only human left with music inside. Maestro wants to eat the music that is in her and makes her sing but she begins to sing not with her voice but her soul and out comes “The Carol of the Bells”, which was playing the night she was born and it also begins to snow. They release Ruby and declare that she is very wrong. The Doctor goes to the famous Mrs. Mills piano, Maestro conjures a violin and they have a music battle. The Doctor hits several chords that cause harm to Maestro. But one wrong note causes Maestro to rally and they send their notation to attack the Doctor and Ruby and to send the Mills piano out of the room to the hallway. The Doctor and Ruby are trapped inside of instruments. But then John Lennon enters the hallway and approaches the piano. He is joined by Paul McCartney and together they play the missing chord that causes the piano to roll back into the auditorium and the solid musical notation pulls Maestro inside. Before it closes they say, “The One Who Waits is almost here!” 

            Then the Doctor tells Ruby that in all of his adventures there’s always a twist in the end. Then they break into a horrible musical number that is meant to be uplifting because everybody is doing the twist to it. But it’s not really good twist music. Seriously they could have come up with a better song.

            Maestro was played by Jinkx Monsoon, who graduated from Cornish College in Seattle with a degree in Musical Performance. She was the winner of Ru Paul’s Drag Race season 5 and Ru Paul’s Drag Race All Stars season 7. She’s released two albums: The Inevitable Album and The Ginger Snapped. She is co-star of the TV series Sketchy Queens.