I am not interested in Carmen Consoli’s new, fantastic, album Amuri Luci.
Carmen Consoli and the authentic in art
Category: Arts
Genova – il primo mese
Of all the difficulties, the one that surprised me was an inability to understand the amount the cashier says when checking out at a store, restaurant, etc. Numbers are second nature to me when reading or speaking but, as with all of my listening skills, my comprehension is lacking. Hearing “dicianovequarantacinque” isn’t the same as reading €19,45 and intuitively speaking that glob of words in your head. It’s not that much a necessary skill: when was the last time someone mis-charged you at checkout? And at every place except at a caffè I use a credit card where: the cashier says something, I hover my card over the ))) little radar symbol, and finally they shove a long piece of paper at me. Voila, my four bottles of wine are on their way home (I am of course kidding, I don’t have to pay that much for four bottles of wine).
Well it may have taken me a month to get here but I can finally understand. (Me: “I can COUNT!”. Everyone, patting me on the head: “…”).
Going through, at an angle
When I discovered Guy Debord and the Situationist International movement–and learned of their subsequent influence on the anti-capitalist French student protests of 1968–I knew it was a philosophy relevant to our days and, as they say, I would like to know more.
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.
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.
