Momus. A Walking Interview by Francesco Tenaglia

Author:Francesco Tenaglia [Tenaglia, Francesco]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Noch
Published: 2015-09-21T00:00:00+00:00

M:

I like the countryside. I can see the appeal of going to live on a Scottish island in complete isolation, but not for very long. For me the best is touring: when I'm in Europe I'm in a different city every couple of days. This is something that I really like. That sense of being on a train and moving through a landscape reaching a city and recognising once more the familiar books on someone's bookshelves or seeing the values I price very highly but in slightly different contexts: when I'm in Italy I see a book by Brecht in Italian and when I'm in Berlin I see the same book in German with a different cover. I love that because the constant is that I love Brecht, and this way I can see Brecht from different angles. Small towns kind of scare me because there are bored people in small towns and if you look like me you could be attacked or shouted at. There were football fans the other day in Brescia and they were shouting and I was scared.

FT:

Weirdly enough, London is a big city where I have the same feeling of too much energy or I get the impression that people might want to get involved in a fight just for the fun of it. In Italy I get that feeling mostly in small towns, as you noted.

M:

Yes, London is like a huge small town. I don't know why people feel the authority to shout at you: people driving vans or commercial vehicles are the self appointed judges of passers-by. On the contrary, in Japan you will have signs of construction workers bowing to you; there will be agents wearing electric lights outside construction sites whose sole purpose is to bow to the people who walk around there to let them pass safely. There's a sense of great respect and consideration for the citizen. In England, if you're a woman, you'll maybe receive a comment on your breast and if you're a man then there is going to be people that will say you're gay. But now, luckily, construction workers are mostly Polish. There is a song from Jarvis Cocker called "Fat Children" that is about the killing of man by the hand of a bunch of fat kids, he specifies the size because street kids used to be very skinny, literally hungry. Now they are fat so maybe this results in losing their edginess.

FT:

The area we are walking in had a lot of left-wing centri sociali (squatted spaces) until the late '90s or early '00s that introduced also some interesting new music to Milanese audiences. I feel nowadays, to participate in a youth culture you really don't have to have or display any form of political affiliation, it has become less and less relevant.

M:

You see that's one of the big disappointments in my life, that people don't make rational political affiliations: they will tend to affiliate on the base of a group or contextual ties.

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