On Thursday afternoon I worked at Central Technical School and then went home. That evening I went back downtown to Mudds Cabaret where I played Angeline’s tape over the sound system. Mary Milne came a little later and I played it again for her. Neither Mary or I stood up to read our poetry this time since Mudds had given us Tuesday nights for our own open stage and we planned on starting that on November 23. Mary drove me home.
On Thursday morning I finished working out the chords for “You’re Under Arrest” by Serge Gainsbourg. I still have to run through playing the whole song in French and English. I’ll do that to morrow and then upload it to my Christian’s Translations blog.
I played my Martin acoustic guitar for the first of two sessions.
I weighed 85.8 kilos before breakfast, which is the heaviest I’ve been in the morning in a week.
Around midday I went over to the hardware store and picked out the colour of paint I wanted for my kitchen counter. It’s called “Berry Patch”. The salesperson Mikey mixed it up for me and chatted. He remembered that I wanted to paint part of my kitchen floor in a checkerboard pattern in lieu of tiles but suggested that I check out a film set supply place called Rottblott’s. He said they have peel and stick vinyl tiles that would be more durable than paint and would only cost about $1.25 a tile. He says he knows about the place because he works in the film industry. I asked him if they sell other interesting things and he said it’s a dangerous place to shop because they have lots. Mikey complimented my motorcycle jacket and said he has one like it. Tomorrow I’ll probably paint the counter. Mikey doesn’t think I’ll need more than one coat since it’s already primed. So I might have some left over to do the ends of the counter and even the shelves.
I weighed 85.3 kilos before lunch.
In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown. I’d just started out on O’Hara when almost across the street from my place I saw a box with some dishes inside. I took a black plate, three dark green ones, one small crystal style plate and two martini glasses. I found that the construction that has constricted eastbound bike traffic along Bloor from Spadina to Avenue Road for the last few months is finally over and there’s a new bike lane divided off with concrete rather than posts. I stopped at Freshco on the way home where I bought five bags of grapes, two packs of raspberries, bananas, a pack of five-year-old cheddar, a pack of hot Genoa salami, and Full City Dark coffee.
When I got home I realized that I’d forgotten to buy toilet paper and so I rode over to Vina Pharmacy to get some. When I got home I realized that I’d bought Sponge towels by mistake even though I already have some. I walked back and got the toilet paper.
I weighed 85.1 kilos at 18:15.
I was caught up on my journal at 19:30.
I returned to the Movie Maker project for my September 3 performance of “Time of the Yo-Yo” but it was still glitchy. It allowed me to split a section of the audio timeline but wouldn’t let me cut it. I had to save what I’d done, close down Movie Maker and open it again in order to cut the section but then it wouldn’t allow me to drag it to the beginning until I saved, shut down and returned. I was able only to do one thing at a time then keep shutting down and returning several times until I got the audio and video synchronized. But the song was still not isolated and so I had to cut more off the beginning which once again put the audio and video back out of line. This is going to take forever if it keeps behaving this way. I’m going to need to cut the video at the exact beginning I want and then since the audio always falls behind I’ll have to synchronize it. Synchronizing it in little bits will take too long. I spent extra time on this up until dinner and skipped working on the Movie Maker project for my song “Megaphor”.
I grilled ten chicken drumsticks and had two with a potato and gravy while watching season 3, episodes 8 and 9 of Green Acres.
In the first story Eb doesn’t wake Oliver up in the morning like he usually does. When Oliver goes looking for him in his room in the barn loft he finds a note announcing that he has eloped with an unknown girl. Eb sends his cousin Walter to replace him while he is away. But Walter is an out of work bartender from Stankwell Falls and knows nothing about farming. He worked at the Stankwell Falls Cocktail Lounge but it was closed down because it had a crooked claw machine. Oliver takes Walter to Sam’s store to get some farm work clothes. Walter recognizes Sam from Stankwell Falls where apparently he had a fling with Gladys the cocktail waitress. Hank Kimball comes in and Walter remembers Hank’s drink, which is scotch and goats milk with a slice of orange and two olives. When Oliver takes Walter to his corn field he tasks him with pulling up the weeds. But when Oliver returns he finds Walter has pulled up all the corn because he thought the corn stalks were the weeds. He tells Walter to drive the tractor but he ploughs up a tomato patch and drives the tractor into the Ziffel’s living room. Mr. Haney tries to sell him several items from the Stankwell Falls Cocktail Lounge including the bar, the claw machine, and Gladys the waitress. Haney mounts a neon sign reading “Cocktail Lounge” on Oliver’s porch. That night a couple sees the sign and comes in for a drink.
In the second story Oliver is complaining about the bills he receives for all of Lisa’s purchases. One of them is a bill from East River Van and Storage in New York. They’ve been getting a bill of $96 from them every year for three years but Lisa doesn’t remember what she put in storage there. There is still a hole in the roof from when Alf and Ralph ran the phone line into the house. Oliver tells them to fix the hole and they do but they disconnect his indoor phone. They say he can’t have the phone without the hole and so he has to use the phone at the top of the pole again when he calls the storage company. They won’t tell him what is being stored and so he tells them to ship it to him. An enormous crate arrives and inside is a giant sculpture made from pipes and chains. Lisa remembers when she sees it that it’s a sculpture by Stavinsky that she bought for Oliver as a birthday present. It wouldn’t fit onto their New York terrace and so she’d put it in storage. It’s a bird bath complete with cat scarer. It also hums in the wind and is a lie detector that sprays water in people’s faces when they don’t tell the truth. Hank Kimball recognizes it and says his sister has a Stavinsky that makes popcorn. Oliver wants to get rid of it and decides to donate it to the county museum. Mr. Bennett comes from the museum but tells Oliver that what he has is a fake Stavinsky. But then he looks at the graffiti reading “Karl Marx is a hothead” on the crate the sculpture was shipped in and says that it’s a genuine Dooley Higgins. Oliver tells him that he can have the Higgins as long as he takes the sculpture. But when the sculpture is gone Lisa feels bad that Oliver doesn’t have a birthday present and so three weeks later another gift arrives: a life size replica of the Eiffel Tower made entirely out of coat hangers.
Bennett was played by George Ives, who played Doc on the sitcom Mister Roberts. He played Douglas Aldrich on The Jim Backus Show. For twenty years he was the western regional director of Actors Equity. He married Faith Flagg the daughter of James Montgomery Flagg who created Uncle Sam and the original “I want you” US military recruitment poster.
After dinner I went back to the Movie Maker project for “Time of the Yo-Yo” and suddenly the program allowed me to split, cut and drag again without having to shut down. I cut the video up until the beginning of the final take of “Time of the Yo-Yo”. That put the audio a full song behind the video. Maybe I can get them synchronized tomorrow.
On Wednesday I worked all day at Central Technical School. After work I called Angeline and she met me at the Second Cup. She loaned me a tape of her songs and showed me some photos of her paintings. I was impressed. We hung out for a few hours and I took her to Ludwig Zeller’s collage show. We hugged goodbye at Bloor and Avenue Rd. That evening I posed at Joe Morse’s studio and he played Angeline’s cassette for me. Her songs were good but her voice was incredible.
On Wednesday morning I worked out the chords for the third and fourth choruses and part of the last verse of “You’re Under Arrest” by Serge Gainsbourg. I might have the song done tomorrow.
I played my Kramer electric guitar during song practice for the final session of four.
I weighed 85.5 kilos before breakfast.
Around midday I used up the rest of the primer to touch up the decorative grooves on the front of the kitchen counter doors and drawers. The very last of it I put onto the usually unseen area where the counter meets the stove. Tomorrow I’ll probably go to the hardware store to buy the dark but warm purple paint that I have in mind.
I weighed 85.8 kilos before lunch. I had Triscuits with five-year-old cheddar and a glass of limeade.
When I got up from my siesta it looked like it was raining pretty hard but when I went out onto the deck it was actually graupeling and it was slippery. I got ready to take a bike ride but decided not to go because it looked like I’d get wet and might be even slip.
I weighed 85.6 kilos at 16:00.
I was caught up on my journal at 16:45.
In the Movie Maker project my September 3 performance of “Time of the Yo-Yo” I had the audio and video totally in synch. But when I tried to evenly cut the beginning of the session to isolate that one song it threw the audio out of line. When I’d undone the cuts and put everything back the way I’d started they were in synch again but if I placed the cursor further down the timeline it played out of synch, even though when I started from the beginning they were in synch when it got to where I’d previously placed the cursor. On top of that the waveform didn’t match the audio. I restarted Movie Maker a few times and even restarted my computer but it still behaved the same way. I suspect it’s because the audio is in MP3 and not WAV but I couldn’t use a WAV format because it distorted the Audacity recording. The only thing I could do is cut the beginning of the video until almost the beginning of “Time of the Yo-Yo” and then work on resynchronizing the audio. I got them almost lined up but then Movie Maker started freezing whenever I tried to cut a small bit of the audio. This last problem has happened before and the next day it was fine and so we’ll see if it’s back tomorrow.
I opened the Movie Maker project to create a video for the studio recording of my song Megaphor. I had no problem continuing to remove sections of the clip from the movie Ziegfeld Girl. That may be further evidence that Movie Maker’s problem is with the MP3 audio format, since I had no problem editing the video.
I went to scan a set of colour negatives but it turned out they are slides and not ones that I took. They seem to be slides to accompany a presentation on how the dinosaurs went extinct. None of the images were very good and so I threw them in the garbage. I scanned a set of colour negatives with pictures of my ex-girlfriend Brenda and her friend Susanne. There are thirty-two more uncut strips of developed film left to scan.
I made pizza on naan with Basilica sauce and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a beer while watching season 3, episodes 6 and 7 of Green Acres.
In the first story Oliver is still the president of the Hooterville Phone Company. After all these years of her being mentioned on Petticoat Junction and Green Acres we finally meet Sarah the telephone operator. Lisa goes to Sam’s store to buy food for dinner. She wants a meal in a can but Sam suggests Dee Dee’s dehydrated Mason Dixon chicken dinner, which looks like white powder in a plastic bag. Ralph says her mother is making Dee Dee’s New Orleans pompineau and it comes with a dehydrated bottle of wine. Lisa pours the powder into boiling water and later what comes out are a chicken leg, corn on the cob, corn bread, mashed potatoes and a slice of baked apple pie. Oliver hires Alf and Ralph to connect his kitchen phone but in doing so they make a big hole in the ceiling.
Sarah was played by Merie Earle, whose first paying job was as a model for a Polaroid ad. She appeared in a series of Dodge commercials as the hot rodding grandmother represented in the Beach Boys song “Little Old Lady From Pasadena”. She played Maude Gormely on The Waltons. At the age of 78 she appeared in her first film, Fitzwilly. She was supposed to make her Broadway debut at the age of 88 in The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man In the Moon Marigolds but she broke her hip and had to cancel. She didn’t get another chance before she died.
In the second story Oliver still owns the phone company and puts Eb on the switchboard. But it’s too difficult and he quits. Lisa serves hot water soup for lunch and Eb loves it. Hank Kimball accidentally orders thirty tomato pickers for Oliver even though he won’t need them for a week. He asks of the pickers if any of them know how to operate a switchboard. A woman named Carmelita raises her hand. She also has problems figuring out the system and quits. Lisa talks to Carmelita in Hungarian and she answers in Spanish but they understand each other. Oliver says that’s impossible and Lisa accuses him of being against the United Nations. Oliver decides to take out a full page ad offering the phone company for sale. Before he can do so Haney makes him an offer of $500 and Oliver accepts until Haney says Oliver has to pay the $500. Oliver pays him $8. But Haney begins to gouge his customers, charging them for every call and for three minute blocks of time that last ten seconds. Oliver is picking his tomatoes because all the pickers are working elsewhere. Fred comes up with a shotgun at Haney’s back saying he either has to pick Oliver’s tomatoes or get tarred and feathered. Fred and Sam give the phone company back to the reluctant Oliver.
On Tuesday I worked in the morning at Central Technical School then I went down to the Ontario College of Art where I ran into Spirit. She wanted me to take her to Ludwig Zeller’s collage show on Friday. I called Angeline and she agreed to meet on Wednesday. I worked that evening at Western Technical School.
I played my Kramer electric guitar during song practice for the third session of four.
I weighed 85.3 kilos before breakfast.
Around midday I finished putting a third coat of primer on the edges, tops, bottoms and in between spaces of my kitchen counter. I’ve got a little bit of primer left and so tomorrow I’ll apply it to the decorative rectangular grooves at the centre of the front of each door and drawer. Then I’ll go and buy to purple paint I plan to put on top.
I weighed 85.1 kilos before lunch.
In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and for the whole ride I was singing “He’s An Indian Cowboy in the Rodeo” by Buffy Sainte Marie.
On the way back I was riding along Queen just west of Bathurst and still singing when a young guy came riding his bike on the wrong side pretty much straight at me until he veered. I gave him a disapproving look and he seemed to notice. About a minute later he rode up beside me and asked me what I’d said to him. I told him I was singing and he said, “Nice try” before turning back around.
Okay, so about Buffy. First of all, she looks like a First Nations person. I’ve had a Haida girlfriend and a Cree girlfriend and Buffy looks Cree. I spent three years hanging out at the Native Canadian Centre and she looks like a First Nations person. Until that recent CBC article I’ve never heard anyone comment that Buffy doesn’t look like she’s Cree. People can now freely associate based on the CBC prompt and declare that she looks Italian but nobody ever said so before. But let’s say she isn’t Cree. That doesn’t mean she has no reason to believe that she is. All she had to do was look in the mirror. If the Italian Sainte Marie family really are Buffy’s birth family there must have been some sort of trauma to make her seek an entirely different identity. There have been hints of abuse from a brother. No one has gotten through childhood without having wished at least once that they were adopted. If she looked in the mirror and saw herself as distinct from her family she may have concluded that she must be First Nations. She may have begun to act upon that belief, in which case there is no reason to believe she lied about her background. It’s also possible that she is telling the truth and that she really was adopted. There was scooping going on long before the official sixties scoop. In 1941 there were many First Nations babies born under the radar of the government. Only about half of First Nations children even went to school at that time. There have been cases where doctors signed papers saying that they delivered a child that was really adopted. There are many possibilities other than Buffy being a liar. I would say that she has given far more to First Nations communities than she has ever taken from them. Why rob her of a legacy now that she is 82 and near the end of her life?
I stopped at Freshco because I was almost out of grapes but all of their grapes were too soft. So I walked over to Metro and bought four bags of red grapes.
I weighed 85.2 kilos at 17:30.
I was caught up on my journal at 18:07.
In the Movie Maker project for my September 3 song practice I synchronized the audio and the video. Then I saved a copy as “Time of the Yo-Yo (electric)” and began evenly cutting out sections of the beginning of the audio and video timelines to isolate that one song. But suddenly the two timelines were out of synch again. The audio seemed behind so I cut out bits of it until it was closer to the video but it felt like the audio was a different file.
I switched to the Movie Maker project to create a video for the studio recording of my song Megaphor. I continued removing sections of the clip from the movie Ziegfeld Girl and got it down to about 34 seconds. I’ll need to remove a half a minute more before I can use it in the main video.
I went back to the September 3 project to check if it really was in sync and it was. So I saved it again as “Time of the Yo-Yo (electric)” and that was in synch too but at one point it sounded like it was way off. Then I looked again and it was okay. I’ll work on it tomorrow and might actually have the video published and ready to upload.
I scanned two sets of uncut colour negatives. One had street shots and nature shots, especially flowers. The other had my ex-girlfriend Brenda in her apartment on Maynard in the house that is now the Buddhist temple. There were lots of shots of her dancing at a party in her polka dot dress. There are 34 full sets of negatives left to scan.
I had a potato with gravy and the last of my roast beef while watching season 3, episodes 4 and 5 of Green Acres.
In the first story Oliver’s tractor breaks down as usual and he wants to call the factory in Fargo for parts but Sarah the operator is on her lunch break. Then she has gone home to baste a pot roast. He finale gets so fed up with the service that he circulates a petition and takes it to the Public Utilities Commission. But the commission has no authority over any telephone company that has less than 42 subscribers and Hooterville only has 34. Oliver argues with the president of the phone company, Roy Trendell, who is the son of Sarah the operator. Several episodes ago Hank Kimball said Sarah was his mother. This show is extremely inconsistent. Trendell asks Oliver if he thinks he can run the phone company better than him. Oliver says he can and so Roy gives him the keys.
The second story is a continuation of the previous one. On the morning after Oliver took over the phone company there are already complaints about the service. Sarah the operator has quit since her son Roy is no longer president. Oliver and Lisa go to the phone company office but Oliver doesn’t know how to operate the switchboard. The switchboard short circuits and he has a taxidermist who is a part time electrician fix it. After several hours Oliver still can’t figure it out and gives up. He dozes off and while he is sleeping Lisa figures out the complicated system of the switchboard. Oliver goes home to bed and leaves Lisa there.
On Monday I worked for the Ontario College of Art at the Stewart building until 16:00. I met Mary Milne somewhere to further make plans for our upcoming open stage and then we went to Crickets early. A woman came in enquiring about that night’s open stage and I had a strong feeling about her. There was something attractive even though she wasn’t in great shape. I chatted with her, found out that her name was Angeline and got her number. She read on the open stage and her poetry was very good but she left pretty quickly after everyone had performed.
