Barbarella – An Echo That's Reversing

Barbarella the Smuggler–Losing the thread

My writing has been inconsistent.

This is not unprecedented and not without cause. Many time before I’ve involuntarily, shamefully, paused on an idea I’ve loved, the story, returned, and finished. I’d thought that I would compose more while in Italy but stress and uncertainty from different directions has slowed not the ideas but the manifestation of those. I still have that “voice in my head” that elaborates on the story and the melodies and the structure as they should be, but… don’t act on it.

verse 5, where the people show her their most cherished possession: a map that can tell the future

The Barbarella Library, one year on

Updated 10 Jan 2026

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.

Sitting in on an auction

[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

Jean-Claude Forest Barbarella Painting Original Art (Cinecittà Studios, 1967) at Heritage Auctions

Spectacle

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)