An Echo That's Reversing – more discussions on the Fine Arts, current events, programming, and what-not

Dove stavo?

One of the requirements of applying for an Italian Digital Nomad Visa is that you must have a physical address in the country, lasting for at least a year in the future, which meant that I had to get an apartment. Another requirement was that you had to provide proof that you are going to travel to Italy which meant that I had to buy an airline ticket to show the consulate that I, in fact, am really going to travel there. These two aspects of my DNV adventure collided last week. The tickets I purchased were, arbitrarily, for the 12th through the 19th and so even though I’m probably still far away from getting my visa I decided to take the week and visit my new city, Genova.

It was amazing. I am in love.

Fix It Again Tony

On 10 Apr 2023, I started taking Italian lessons on Preply with my instructor Marina. That was over two years ago.

Tuesday night was my last lesson before her summer vacation and my anticipated work visa and move to Italy. I don’t know what the next few months will be and if Italy will grant me a visa or if-and-when I restart lessons with Marina, but the current moment is emotional.

The Barbarella Library, one year on

It’s been almost a year and the virtual Barbarella library has grown considerably, now at 378 items from around the initial 40 at its release on 30 June 2024. At that point any new deployments of the website with bug fixes or new features only took a minute or so, but today it takes… considerably longer.

The physical library–a glass-windowed cabinet sitting in our main hallway–has grown to around 150 items from when I started back in Sep 2023, but my purchases have mostly stopped during The Year of Italy. Mostly.

Buona Festa della Repubblica

This past Monday, 2 June, was the 79th anniversary of when Italy, post-World War II in 1946 after the Fascists were defeated, voted to become a republic instead of a monarchy. Similarly, 6 June was the 81st anniversary of the D-Day invasion of Normandy in 1944, when the Allied forces began the liberation of Western Europe from the fascists. Also on the 6th: I had an interview at the Italian consulate in Miami to apply for my Digital Nomad Visa (Visto per Nomadi Digitali). In the meantime, our government has accelerated it’s move towards fascism in an increasing number of ways.

By Federico Patellani, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=118602953

Although the adventure is not over for me (and really doesn’t have an “over”) this is a huge milestone. These last five-or-so months have been the longest two years of my life. A timeline:

Barbarella the Smuggler–Carving from a block of stone

I’ve used this approach–or I guess mental construct–for a while. Since the second string quartet probably, when I started adopting a compositional style from Finnissy’s music. I’ll write on paper lengthy, lucid polyphonic phrases that are intended to stretch for many measures (several minutes) with each note elongated. I’ll enter them into the Dorico app with only a suggestion of aligning note changes across staffs. Precision is not important.