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 (a minute or so?) with each note elongated. And then I will enter them into the Dorico app with only a suggestion of aligning note changes across staffs. Precision is not important.
[ed.: This was back in Oct, just now cleaning up and posting even though I never really finished my thoughts.]
A month or so back I found a painting of Barbarella that Jean-Claude Forest created at Cinecittà Studios during filming of the Jane Fonda movie. It is one of only two that he painted there and one of them was up for auction at Heritage Auctions. According to the site, the painting/s were missing for almost 60 years. I could only imagine what it will sell for. Well, I guess I don’t have to imagine because I’m sitting in on the auction right now (12 Oct) just to find out (and because art auctions are kinda fun). Let’s go…
2024 October 12 – 13 International Comic Art Signature® Auction #7381
But a lie that can no longer be challenged becomes a form of madness.
Over the past six or so months I’ve on and off been reading Guy Debord’s The Society of Spectacle. I had encountered his ideas in an essay which used them to explain much of modern social media, key is applying his observation of how capitalism molds “people” into “consumers” in such a way as to make their primary identities not only what they purchase, but the act of purchasing. See: YouTube videos of product influencers and the post-apocalyptically odd phenomenon of pre-teens making thousands of dollars a week off of unboxing videos. “Apple is better than Windows” has supplanted the identity of ideas with the identity of product.
(as always: my understanding of him may be a bit naive)
Continue reading SpectacleI’ve finished the films I hadn’t already seen from the Arrow Giallo Essentials and have watched a few more from YouTube and kanopy (the streaming service from the public library system). The problem with those public sources, besides the risk of Extremely Low Quality, is they are rarely in the original Italian and so you have to suffer through the dubbed version. However, the new year brings with it an attempt to stay on budget so I won’t be buying any more Blu-rays if I can find it streaming.
I started at some point to give years names. This may have/probably has been inspired by the completely unfortunate aspect in the novel Infinite Jest where the US sells years to corporations in order to make money. After corporate purchase years would become: The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, or The Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster, etc. It’s a bleak mirror within a literary conceit of pretty much what we’ve become.
So, less bleakly, I started to give my years themes. This, 2025, is The Year of Italy.
Continue reading The Year of Italy