Stuff and Moonshine

Our heroine, Hagar Stanley, is a Romani girl running the Lambeth pawn-shop of her deceased uncle-by-marriage until her cousin turns up to claim it. In the meantime items pawned at the shop often lead to sensational adventures.

While all this is going on, Hagar’s love interest, a sweet nerd named Eustace Lorn, is mostly offstage having his own adventures while trying to track down her cousin Jimmy “Goliath” Dix, so Hagar can transfer the shop to him and get back to her life; and a plot involving characters with names like “Mr. Vark” and “Larky Bill” is working its way towards a violent end.

OK, first off, this book is very late-Victorian, in both language and attitudes; at the same time, it has stuff like Hagar, herself a minority facing a lot of prejudice, using her detective skills to prove the innocence of a West Indian housekeeper framed for the murder of her employer. Also a reference to an attempted kidnapping of Sun Yat-Sen that I had to look up and can confirm was ripped from the headlines of the time.

The references I’ve found online treat Hagar of the Pawn Shop as detective fiction (the chapter I just described was adapted as an episode of The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, albeit with a white housekeeper), but a lot of the chapters are more what I’d class as sensation stories, a bit too late for penny dreadfuls and a bit too early and the wrong side of the Atlantic for pulp magazines.

Moreover, about half the time Hagar is involved in the set-up of a story and then nopes out, deciding (rightly) that the situation is too dodgy and she wants no part of it; or recognizing that it’s past her ability to intervene. At which point the narrative will leave her in the pawn shop and follow the new characters for the rest of the chapter so the audience can watch events play out. They usually end with somebody getting their comeuppance in a supremely over-the-top way. I suspect the Doylean explanation here is that Hume wanted to use up some unpublished stories but couldn’t find a logical way to write in Hagar as the main character.

Anyways, worth a glance if you want some period intrigue and to learn some new Victorian cockney slang terms (my favourite is “rhino.”) I haven’t yet found a copy of the tv episode that doesn’t have stutters and blarps all over the soundtrack.

Friday night I came across this video on YouTube of Dorothy Donegan at the 1980 North Sea Jazz Festival. Full concert, and she’s amazing. Also read about Pannonica de Koenigswarter, “The Bebop Baroness”—as in, she was an actual Baroness (and Rothschild heiress, and WWII Resistance radio operator), and she was friend and patron to many bebop jazz legends, especially Thelonious Monk.

Last weekend’s painting session had produced work that felt a little too unfocussed. I know I’m trying to give myself permission to not worry about whether the art is good or bad (with weed to help keep me from second-guessing myself), but I decided this week to go back to tracing photos with the phantom-liner, and while sober, before getting down to painting.

Oh, Thursday’s Pontoon Palace included “Hot Pants In the Summertime,” which has to be the most 1970s song ever committed to vinyl.


Saturday we got out of the neighbourhood for a few hours to avoid the din of the air show. I picked up a couple of vintage paperback mysteries at BMV downtown: Having Wonderful Crime and another one whose title I don’t recall at the moment, something like Die Any Time After Tuesday.

Andrew put on Zardoz this morning, which I’d never actually watched all the way through. It’s sort of like H.G. Wells by way of Kenneth Anger, isn‘t it? I suppose that midpoint would actually be Aldous Huxley. It’s also rather The Prisoner-ish. May the UK was just Like That in the late-sixties-early-seventies.

Then we had our first Shingrex shots—we’re not old enough to get them covered by OHIP, but I thought it was time we had them; I’m classing this as part of the maintenance and repairs we’re getting done with the proceeds of Andrew’s pre-1940 Weird Tales.

Andrew is currently at home resting after his shot, and I’m at the coffee shop.

ETA—the second paperback was indeed titled Die Any Time, After Tuesday (1969), and it was trashy but entertaining. It had a narrative style that at first made me think of Tumblr’s “she breasted boobily down the stairs,” except that’s a parody of the sort of story where it’s ostensibly from the heroine’s own perspective, but the author can’t stop emphasizing how hot she is. DAT,AT is narrated by a private eye who can’t keep his eyes off any of the female suspects, so lines like “I followed the beige silk bounce of her high-riding bottom, and it kept me entranced all the way to the dressing room” make perfect sense from his PoV. (Not really a plot spoiler; but as things turn out, I’m pretty sure the character he’s describing is asexual, possibly also aromantic)

In addition to Dolly Parton, we just lost Tim Curry. I had a look at his memoir that came out last year. It’s quite good.

At least Mel Brooks is (a) still alive and (b) just organized a film festival celebrating his birthday by showcasing his 20 favourite movies (only one of which, The Twelve Chairs, is a Mel Brooks movie.)

Trying not to be over-confident, but new gig seems to be going ok. Yesterday I took over the job of labelling folders and discovered they hadn't till now been using mail-merge to simplify the job of creating sheets of labels; so I've managed to accomplish one thing here at least by streamlining that process.

Saturday I went to my first counter-protest in a while. Feel kind of so-so about it--it's massively annoying to be followed, filmed, and taunted by a right-wing YouTuber who keeps getting in your faces and trying to provoke you into saying or doing something he can edit into a "look how loony the Left is!!!!" video. I kept reminding myself he was at the level of a middle-school bully, or at most somebody who captained his high-school debate team and thinks that still makes him the smartest person in the room at all times.

Sunday, Andrew and I went to Taste of the Danforth, though in practice that just meant going to the Scribe bookstore* and a nearby pub afterwards, which we could have done at any time. We did get gelato afterwards from a booth though.

* He got a teaching edition of Frankenstein, I got a first edition of S.S.O.T.B.M.E.--An Essay On Magic by Ramsey Dukes (aka Lionel Snell, aka Lemuel Johnstone, etc.)

Finishing my first full week at Unnamed Production Studio. Still don’t have an email account, but I’m monitoring the Admin email, the Front Desk email, and the Info email from the website. The latter has a pretty huge backlog of what appear to be unread messages and questions, so I’ve been trying to forward or at least file them. The unsolicited script pitches I’ve been told to ignore, which is fine by me as most of them seem pretty tepid (and then there’s the large number all sent by one guy who appears to be a MAGA type in the US; I’ve asked and received permission to just block his emails).

There are queries from people asking about specific production details, including somebody trying to identify a song/artist from “the party scene in episode 2” of a series the studio made twenty years ago—I’ve forwarded the question to someone here who handles music licensing.

I was kind of aware there was a community who investigate this stuff, I just didn’t know their name for it: Lostwave. At least two bands ended up getting a second chance due to people like this—now that might make for an interesting script premise, though I’m not sure how best to structure it—maybe a dual timeline? One plot thread could follow a band in the ‘eighties or ‘nineties who get together, record a demo but never get their break and eventually give up and go into other careers; while the other story is about some music fans in the present day who find a bootleg track and devote themselves to solving the mystery of who wrote and performed the song.

In a similar vein, I’ve become obsessed this week with Kaleidoscope/Fairfield Parlour, a British psychedelic band who sixty years later sound almost like parody or pastiche. They never made it big—apparently their record label wasn’t great at distribution, plus they were up against some very heavy competition—but they’ve picked up a reputation as forgotten/underrated classics, and their lead singer Peter Daltrey (no relation) was persuaded to do a mini-tour in 2017 with some younger musicians recreating the sound. I’ve watched this video of him singing ‘(Further Reflections) In the Room of Percussion’ at least a dozen times now. I notice the 2017 version shifts the lyrics to past tense.

So apparently the federal government has nixed the proposed expansion of the Island airport to accommodate jet planes. The No Jets march scheduled for tomorrow is going ahead, but will be a victory celebration.

(Doubt Andrew will be up to marching, but he’s very pleased we won’t have louder air traffic along the waterfront, and we might go down and watch.)

For the past few years I’ve been following US news via Wonkette, and for the past few months been reading and occasionally adding to the comment threads there. This was mainly because I took a shine to some of the regular commenters—it felt a bit like hanging out at a snarky but good-humoured cocktail party where everyone had a paper bag over their head.

Anyway this evening I read that one of those regulars, FukuiSanOta, died suddenly yesterday. No details yet. From his posts I’d gathered he was a Silicon Valley engineer, British by birth, with a love of vintage racecars and intoxicating substances. Apparently his real name was Gav Ashdown, and he was only about a year older than myself. Everyone in the comment thread’s pretty downhearted. I think it’s good, in way, that we can get so attached to people we only know as words on a screen.

His friend and sparring partner, Gallbladder, just posted a eulogy that contains the phrase:
But that was Fukui: an enigma wrapped in an enchilada.

In which I try to figure out if the sign-painters’ apostrophes that annoyed me in this transcription of Marc Bolan’s The Warlock of Love (1969) were errors that had crept in, or part of the original text. Spoiler—they’re Marc’s fault; and/or the galley proofreader’s. That said, the weird pagination style seems to have come from the 1992 reprint by the Tyrannosaurus Rex Appreciation Society.

Still thinking about the poems themselves. Like T. Rex’s songs, I find them uneven, sometimes terrific and sometimes corny. I prefer the ones that read like Bolan didn’t reach for his thesaurus:

 

The vanquished Sun
Is like the withered yolk
Of a weathered egg.

Or the ones where there’s a punchline to cut through the gilding:

Sleek Andromeda swirling in an undershift,
a pimple temple like on her portcullis longship
lip. I dance on her gliding stomach of fibs and
erect my many coloured mast in her belly-button.
Take a cheekbone, any cheekbone, lay it pastely
on a furnace brasier and look for sand. Marrow
melts, mud squelches and belches over my
handsomely haunted hand but no sand.
A beach I whimper I need to bask upon a sun-dipped
dripping moon of beach. My face feels the draft now,
my shaggy face lags like a quilled pig — my bones
burnt and not a seed of sand remains only a high
forked pitch of light cine-marly sailing my sagging
dripping wood-wild skipping face.
And now reader I have only half a head.

“Climate.us is live. Built by members of the team behind Climate.gov, this new independent nonprofit website keeps trusted climate information easy to find, easy to use, and harder to erase.”

A 1916 portrait of two Sikh cavalry officers is on loan to the AGO for the next two years, making it the first time the painting has travelled outside the UK.

Confirming the presence of sand cats (Felis margarita) in Libya. Headline somewhat oversimplifies things—the YouTube video was just the start of it, and the wildlife photographer who’d posted it spent the next few years doing research with the assistance of local guides.

The first 22 minutes of the pilot for Jake’s Journey (1988). I’d heard of this pilot, but never seen anything more than one publicity still. It sounds like the network probably wouldn’t have given the series a chance, even if Graham Chapman’s cancer had buggered off and let him be—the usual “Americans won’t understand the humour” stuff. From this video, it has a bit of a Time Bandits meets Labyrinth kind of feel, though obviously on a much lower budget.

Speaking of oddities, I saw Love Happy (1949) a couple of days ago, and it’s better than I’d been led to believe. Especially if Harpo’s your favourite Marx—I looked on Wikipedia afterwards and he’d originally scripted it as a solo project called Diamonds in the Sidewalk. So Harpo’s the main hero of the story, Groucho has a couple of scenes and also narrates in voice-over, and Chico’s…mainly just kind of there, except for one terrific scene where he and Leon Belasco have a piano and violin duet/competition.You also get to see bad-guy Raymond Burr torture Harpo (who of course won’t talk) in various ridiculous ways, which is probably at least one viewer’s kink.

I have just been made aware of the Thursday-morning WMBR show Pontoon Palace.