> Hi Martin
> Here are the questions. I ask you to answer till Tuesday if it is OK
> for you. Don't limit yourself - it'll be better if your answers'd be
> the most detailed.
> So here it is.
> 1. What do you like in Moscow?
I like the insanity and bloodbaths. The heightened disdain towards extremes of attitude, fashion, incivility, riotousness, good taste, order, legality and aesthetics. I like the pride and the dirt. The crows and the perma-sleet. I like the crocodiles in the soup and the beggars in the pipeline. I like the Gods, the Guns, the Girls – the mullets and the winkle pickers, the plastics and the peaches. The snowflakes in the railway carriage and the cigarette butts on the beaches. I like the reek of sweating money and the crude orgiastic fetish for oil based products. I like the violent disparities and the colour of the railings; yellow grey and pastel green – then purple alleys beckon like death traps, collapsing into galleries. The sky breaks like a renegade, with untold indignance pouring out her tedipidity in vast swathes of beneficent gloom!
2. Which places do you prefer to stay - the caffe and to walk around?
I prefer to stay enraptured by marvel and wonderment and at the same time be close to an escape hatch, so’s to be in the right place, in the case of a mad axe-maniac at the wheel of a Bentley mounting the pavement and rushing headlong through the crowd of innocently slavering window ogglers, faster than the speed of fright. I prefer to stay in the kaleidoscopic margins of the infernal imagination. I prefer to stay in bed. I prefer to stay in the hotel at the end of the rainbow with the living and the dead. I prefer the hot Church and the dog dead railway, the river and the frog pond and the bubble of fidelity, at the distance of a dream – I prefer to be in the dark mirror of tomorrow, beneath the cloud of unknowing, yearning for remittance. I prefer to be huddled against the shadow of the icicle – manacled to the radiators from outer space. I prefer to be on the edge of a scream, spraying irrevocable mists of translucent effervescence from the fountain of calamity and humiliation. I also like the Udon café in Novoslobodskaya and that room in the Tretyakov gallery which has a little picture of Chekhov tucked away in some dusty corner. And I like to be at home with my little boy, looking out of the window, at cats.
> 3. What you don't like in this city?
The omnipresence of corpulent provocations. Suntans and buttercups. The elevation of the cabbage as an organic ornament. The absolute lack of a hot dog. The absolute plague of dogs. Feral people left for dead. Phlegm is distributed more freely than my sensitivity can fail to betray. Vicious drunken brawls and caterwauling mayhem on public holidays, I also find distressing. New Year must be stopped immediately and replaced with a nicer holiday involving ‘one man and his dog’ exhibitions or ‘how to smoke a pipe whilst gently snoozing’ master classes held in the public square. I’m not keen on ‘fashion TV’ flashing its lurid indignity out of every tawdry espresso bar either. Also, it’s impossible to watch a film with Russian dubbing over the English original. I think you’ll find that many people rail against this atrocity much more than they care about the fact that there are only three hundred blue whales left in the world.
4. What can you tell about people? How can you describe them?
People are the quandary of quandaries. Awesome in their ambiguity. Terrifying in their destructive phases. Insatiable and corrupt. Modest and forgiving. Proud as nails. Infallibly coarse. Degenerate and sophisticated. Generous and wanton. Stupid, ignorant and bastardly. Wise, holy, inscrutable. People are ugly, hideous, alien, fearsome and atrocious. The beauties are the beasts and the beasts are beatified. Cherubs and moonbeams, deviants and deadbeats. They say one thing, think another and do something else. They shock you, they tease you, they love you, they appease you, they mock you, they cheat you, they leave you for dead. People are roaring great effigies of Gogolania, convoluted into a scream of sparks, showering the methane thin evanescence of your soul, with massive indictments against its lethargic tendencies. What a piece of a work is a man? How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving, how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension, how like a God! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals – and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? No, man delights not me – nor woman neither – though by your smiling you seem to say so.
> Wait for your answer,
> Anna
Afisha didn't use my own answers but, being creative, made up some of their own which were better suited towards inflaming the odd reader.
http://www.afisha.ru/article/8150/page6/
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