Bruce Dern

            On Friday morning I worked out the chords for the first verse of “L'amour en soi” (Love in Essence) by Serge Gainsbourg. 

            At the beginning of song practice I plugged in my Kramer that just came back from the shop but there was a hum coming from the amp. When I switched on the distortion it was five times worse. I switched to my Gibson and there was no hum whatsoever with or without distortion. The Gibson sounded better although it’s still going out of tune quite a bit. I had to do several takes of “Vomit of the Star Eater” to get a decent one. It took two or three takes to get a tolerable version of “Sixteen Tons of Dogma”. I managed to make better use of my volume pedal on “Leave the Naïve Alone”. Usually I start with my foot on the pedal because there’s an instrumental intro but up until today I couldn’t coordinate to step on the pedal later in the song to do the other instrumental. This time I managed by putting my foot there on the previous verse so it would be ready when the time came to do it. 

            I weighed 87.85 kilos before breakfast. 

            Around 12:30 I headed for Li’l Demon with my Kramer and saw Gian on the street a little past Lansdowne. He said he was just delivering a guitar so I went ahead to his shop. It was still open and there was a woman there eating a salad. Gian came a few minutes later from the back. I told him about the humming problem and he said it hums because I have it switched to the neck pickup, which is a single coil pick-up. He said all single coil pickups hum and he demonstrated with several guitars. It seemed strange to me because I never heard a hum before but maybe it’s because I’ve been playing my Gibson which has no humming at all. He said the Gibson doesn’t hum because it has humbucker pickups. I asked if I could replace my single coil neck pickup with a humbucker and he said absolutely. He said he doesn’t sell them but I could get one in town for about $100 and he’d install it. Looking it up I see there’s a Kramer “Eruption” neck humbucker that I can get but if I want it in black I need to buy it online.

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride but it was sprinkling and got a little heavier as I headed downtown. I decided at Bloor and Brunswick to head south. I went to Harbord and then west to Ossington, south to Queen and then home. I made it before I got wet. 

            I weighed 87.5 kilos at 17:45. 

            While hanging my bike up I noticed the thermostat in the hall went dead. About a year ago I put in two rechargeable AAA batteries so I assumed they needed to be recharged. I put them in my charger and it didn’t take long at all. I put them back in the thermostat and the digits woke up. I still have the heat off but it won’t be long before it will need to be switched on sometimes. I’m going to buy a humidifier to protect my guitars before the heat comes on. 

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

            I changed the A string on my Gibson. The only one I had was a little bit thicker than the old one so I hope it’s all right. I need to buy more strings. 

            In the Movie Maker project to create a video for the studio recording of my song “Me and Gravity” I worked on synchronizing the old concert video with the studio audio for the fourth chorus. As with most of the song the concert video during that chorus drags slightly behind the audio so I had to cut out little bits to line them up for the lines “In the end”; “It’s all between” and “and gravity”. That brought me to the last instrumental before the final verse. The final instrumental at that 1994 El Mocambo concert is almost thirty seconds longer than it was in the studio. I cut out all the parts that don’t show me, including the parts that focus on Tom Smarda, who is not in the studio audio. Most of the instrumental just shows me dancing while the band is playing and I chopped out a few seconds of that. It doesn’t really matter what I delete in that section as long as what’s left over doesn’t look choppy. When I quit for the night there were nine seconds of the instrumental left to cut from the video. I’ll finish that part tomorrow and then deal with the last verse. 

            I uploaded this morning’s song practice video but I didn’t have time to review any more of September 12. 

            I had a potato with gravy and an end of a pork tenderloin while watching episode 26 of The Big Valley. 

            Victoria and Heath head out to open up the family fishing lodge, but even as they are leaving, the camera shows the wheel on their wagon is cracked. After a few hours of travel they find that the spring thaw has left a deep, muddy trench they need to cross. The horses get stuck and so Heath gets out to push. It’s at that point that the wagon wheel breaks, tipping the wagon, weighed down with heavy supplies on top of him. He can’t pull free and Victoria is not strong enough to lift the wagon. She rides one of the horses bareback in the direction of home to get help but on the way sees a man in the bushes. She asks him for help but he refuses. Victoria rides back to Heath and we see when she leaves that the man is wearing the leg irons of someone from a chain gang. Victoria returns to the wagon to get a rifle, then she goes back to confront the man who’d refused to help. She finds him trying to break his chains with a rock. Meanwhile two bounty hunters are also tracking Harry Dixon. Victoria points her gun at him and says she’s going to make him help. He says he can’t walk with the leg irons on and so she shoots and breaks the chain. She forces him to walk ahead of her despite the fact that he is in pain from the leg irons. He keeps on trying to take a break but she pushes him on. Meanwhile Heath is slowly sinking in the mud as he lies on his back and he’s trying hard to stay awake or else he’ll die. Dixon is wanted for murder but he says it was self defence and it was the only man he ever killed. Victoria does not care right now if he is innocent. Heath has to scare a wolf away with fire from his lamp. The bounty hunters can be heard approaching and Victoria is distracted long enough for Dixon to tackle her. They roll off the trail and Dixon grabs the gun so now he is in control. He tells her about how he fairly beat some bounty hunters out of their money in a poker game. When they attacked him later to get their money back he killed one of them. He says his mother and then his father abandoned him. He ran into his mother in a bar years later trying to pass for someone much younger by wearing a lot of makeup and working as a saloon girl. She denied knowing him and even bore false witness against him when he was accused of murder. Dixon then tells Victoria she can go but as she’s leaving he decides to help her after all. But he can barely walk because his ankle iron is cutting into his leg. He risks being heard by the bounty hunters and shoots off the iron. They make it to where Heath is and Dixon is able to clear some of the heavy supplies off him. Then he lifts the wagon while she pulls Heath free. The bounty hunters approach but Dixon makes it to the bushes. Victoria tells them she hasn’t seen Dixon. She asks for their help but they say they don’t have time. They ride away and Dixon runs in the opposite direction. 

            Dixon was played by Bruce Dern, who was trained by Elia Kazan at the Actors Studio. He made his film debut in Wild River in 1960. In The Cowboys he became the only man to kill John Wayne on screen and says he received death threats because of it. He co-starred in the original Broadway run of Sweet Bird of Youth. He starred in Smile, The Incredible Two Headed Transplant, Silent Running, Nebraska (for which he was nominated for an Academy Award), and Tattoo. He co-starred in The Trip, The Great Gatsby, Coming Home (for which he was nominated for an Academy Award), Black Sunday, The Driver, That Championship Season, The Burbs, Last Man Standing, Emperor, The King of Marvin Gardens, Support Your Local Sherrif, Diggstown, The Hole, and in Alfred Hitchcock’s final film Family Plot. He co-starred in the TV series Big Love. His ex-wife Diane Ladd, his daughter Laura and himself are the only family to received stars on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame in the same ceremony. His autobiography was called, Things I Probably Said But Shouldn’t Have.