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Christmas vacation starts today!
We are heading to Northern Italy first,a stopover in Bergamo.Its the cheapest and easiest way to get to the Czech Republic from Palermo (no direct flights).
It looks quite cold there, compared to Sicily.Prague seems a bit colder and Cesky Krumlov even more so..my partner is quite happy,she likes the cold a lot (and she’s hoping for some snow too).
People are making [these cool gift wrappers](https://www.reddit.com/r/lotrmemes/comments/1pq7we3/took_advantage_of_the_black_friday_75_off_custom/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) and I’m so jealous. I could do it at home, but it’ll take me forever. Besides, noone would appreciate it 😞
We were talking about public toilets today with the spouse. As I said before, I was so happy when I was in Japan that there were so many public toilets for free everywhere and you never had to worry when out and about. This is basically non-existent or very inadequate in many places. I was saying that if there were more free public toilets, train stations in big cities would smell less like pee, for example. But my husband said that people are pigs and would just trash and vandalise or homeless people would move in.
I don’t know. What do you guys think? Should there be more free public toilets? I guess there’s no person who didn’t get annoyed while doing errands outside because there was nowhere to go, but I can kind of see my husband’s point, too.
My favorite Netflix show is back!
Culinary Class Wars Season 2
There’s a strange story that popped up around an “Asian Eyes” photo/meme of this year’s Miss Finland. She said a friend took the photo and made the meme without her permission. The meme garnered steam online and several parliamentary members of the Finns party decided to post their own photos of them doing the same thing, so it’s now an international incident. Seems quiant enough for a political controversy.
I ordered something off Temu for the first time two months ago and it’s still in transit. I’m losing my mind. I can’t proceed with the project I’m in the middle of because I’m waiting for an important component that’s been stuck in Kazakhstan for over a week 😭
Last night I ended up listening to [Hard](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8fwWZD159k) by Sophie. It’s one of my favourite songs by her, about a decade old by now. Whenever I listen to hyperpop these postmodern thoughts take over me, and this time I started thinking about Gérard Grisey’s writings on musical time. Which is something I think about a lot anyway. Grisey divided time into three parts that he called the skeleton of time, flesh of time, and skin of time.
The skeleton of time is what could be called quantitative time, like how many beats there are in a minute. You can point out that this is the onset time for this event. Manipulating this time is simple enough. You can make it slower or you can make it faster. You can move between the two instantly, you can slide between them linearly, you can have a predictable curve, or you can have a more stochastic process. Obviously if the tempo ramps up you will experience acceleration of time, or vice versa if it slows down.
The flesh of time might be called qualitative time, and it’s a bit harder to explain. I like to think of these two in terms of semantic information and aesthetic information respectively. If the skeleton is points on a line, flesh is what fills them. You can have steady sonic events and if all those sounds are the same it’s pretty calm. But as soon as you’re surprised with new sonic information, even if the skeleton stays the same, it has an affect on your perception of time. It takes more from you to process the new sound and this can make the moment feel shorter. Manipulating this is a more esoteric process, since your perception might not be the same as mine, but this is I think exactly because of that the more interesting aspect of time.
Shortly, skin of time is basically where the piece’s time meets with the listener’s time. Not something the composer has power over. I as a listener might be super bored and this affects how time passing feels to me, which means my interaction with musical time will be different.
Back to Hard, there’s so much of this going on. Sophie’s sound design was so incredible, she used a lot of inharmonic metallic sounding snares and things like that which always change a little bit. There is a cacophony of different timbres, all constantly morphing, and a couple of times an island of relative sonic simplicity emerges which makes you realise how much your mind was racing. It’s really great. I love this shit.
Bergamo Alta.. the weather is actually not so bad here, cloudy and about 8° at 4pm.
I had a very good local polenta dish for lunch, with wild boar ragù.. great for cold days! It’s a beautiful smaller city for wandering, particularly the older and higher part (Alta) on top of the hill.