I memorized the fifth verse of “Dis-lui toi que je t'aime” (That I Love You Now Tell Him) by Serge Gainsbourg and made some adjustments to my translation. There are three verses left to learn.
I played my Gibson Les Paul Studio electric guitar during song practice for the first of four sessions. I spent a lot of time doing retakes of “Sixteen Tons of Dogma” because I kept fumbling. At one point when it looked like I was going to make it all the way through the camera shut down to cool off. I finished the song, restarted the camera and made it through to the end, although I think I hit a wrong chord on the finale. There’s a guy who busks in the morning in front of the Dollarama. He has a guitar, which I guess he plays, but primarily he has a loud sound system and plays mostly Beatles songs over and over. Usually he starts around the time I’m finishing recording but this time he not only started early but decided to set himself up in front of my building and so he was a lot louder. My recording might be a write off this time if his karaoke was overwhelming.
Last night I tried converting the MP4 file of my September 5 song practice video to H264AVI. This morning I looked at the result and it looks good. It boiled 25 gigs down to 1 gig and I don’t see much difference in the two videos. I finally found a decent format and it put me in a good mood for the rest of the day. Over the day I converted September 6 as well.
Last night when I went to bed my guitar pick-up battery was still in the charger and the green light was still on as it had been all day. This morning when I got up the light was finally off.
I weighed 89.25 kilos before breakfast.
In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. On the Bloor bike lane I had the green light at Shaw when a car suddenly turned left and cut me off. I squeezed my brakes just in time to keep from slamming into the asshole’s vehicle.
I weighed 88.75 kilos at 17:45.
I was caught up on my journal at 18:54.
In the Movie Maker project to create a video for the studio recording of my song “Me and Gravity” I worked on synchronizing the thirty year old concert video with the studio audio. For my line “Out on the battlefield of dreams amid countless unmarked graves of schemes” my mouth isn’t shown until I sing “countless”. The video was behind the studio audio and so I cut out a bit of the Charlie Chaplin clip from Modern Times until they were lined up. For “unmarked” the video fell behind again but I only needed to cut a little bit of it after “countless” to synchronize them again. I got them lined up again for “I save the world and win the girl but walk away unknown”. Then there’s a lyrical pause before the chorus, which begins with me singing “Oh!” while jumping up and then “Me…” when I land. I got the jump synchronized with the studio audio. I’ll figure out tomorrow how much of the first chorus from the video I can use.
I uploaded today’s song practice video. Then I reviewed the rest of the September 7 video and the first 25 minutes of September 8. The Gibson went out of tune a lot. My performance of my song “Vomit of the Star Eater” is improving.
I had a potato with gravy and a steamed rainbow trout fillet while watching episode 9 of The Big Valley.
Victoria Barkley is at the local chapel to bring flowers for the altar and to donate money to the orphanage that the priest runs. A man named Tate approaches her about his being fired as a ranch hand yesterday. She tells him that Nick warned him about drinking on the job. Suddenly there is an earthquake (this is California after all). Tate comes to in the wine cellar. Victoria regains consciousness a minute later. There was one more person in the church when the floor collapsed, a pregnant First Nations woman called Naomi. Her nation is referred to as “Mollock” in this story but there is no such Nation and it seems to have been a corruption of Miwok. Since this show’s location is supposed to be California’s Central Valley, the nation would be Interior Miwok. But there is a Modoc nation on the border between California and Oregon, which is probably the nation being referred to but Naomi is supposedly from the Modoc reservation which would not be in that area. Tate finds a bottle of wine but Victoria smashes it. She remembers that her family once owned a gold mine that the cellar was part of and so there must be tunnels. They start searching the walls for doors and find one but it’s blocked. Tate finally manages to batter it with Victoria’s insistence. Both Tate and Naomi are somewhat fatalistic about the situation. The door opens to a mine tunnel and so they make their way in. Meanwhile Victoria’s children are searching for her. They know she went to the church but the padre thinks she got out okay. A looter has been captured and one of the items in his possession is Victoria’s purse, which he found in the church. They realize she must have gone down with the floor into the basement. The brothers head there to start clearing away the roof rubble to get below the floor. Under them Naomi tells Victoria she doesn’t want the baby and that she wants to die. Victoria tells her to stop feeling sorry for herself. She’s been rejected by her nation because she is carrying a white man’s baby and the father is married and doesn’t want her either. Tate guesses that the father is Ralph Snyder, the owner of the general store who has a reputation for making late night visits to the reservation. Above them the brothers are digging the rubble when Heath sees gold flecks in a rock. He asks if there was a mine there and Jarrod says there was. Heath says there must be records of the entrances and Jarrod says they must be at the recorder’s office. Heath goes there and Ralph volunteers to help him. While Heath is searching there he suggests that Ralph look for records at the land office. Later Heath comes to the land office and catches Ralph setting fire to some records. Heath beats the story about Naomi out of him. Later his wife Ann confronts him about why he wanted to destroy the records. Down below Naomi is in too much pain to go on. The tunnel they are in branches into two. Victoria suggests to Tate that they each go ten meters into a tunnel and then come back. The one Tate picks collapses and that’s the last we see of him. Victoria just assumes he’s dead and doesn’t even call his name. Such a weird end to a character who calls out to be redeemed. This is a strange and poorly written story. Heath says all mines have an escape outing. Nick says their old ranch hand Jeff Wilson used to work in the mine and maybe he remembers. He says there was once an exit in Little Canyon. They head out there and eventually it comes back to him and they find the mine entrance. They have to dynamite it to get through. Meanwhile Naomi has her baby but dies. Another weird ending of a character, especially since there should be some attempt by the writers to not so indifferently erase a First Nations character. Victoria and the baby are rescued. Ann Snyder wants to adopt the baby and suddenly Ralph is somehow willing to act like the father that he is biologically.
Ann Snyder was played by Audrey Dalton, who was born in Dublin. She studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. Her film debut was in The Girls of Pleasure Island. She starred in This Other Eden. She moved to Hollywood and co-starred in My Cousin Rachel and Sardonicus.
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