“I was in Venice a while ago. I had an exhibition there. Venice is a beautiful city. I’d see wolfpacks of Americans, running around with Nikons flying off their backs, bursting into quiet squares with a great crunch, going, “Ahh, where’s Saaaan Marrrco?”
So I spent most of my time sitting in the back garden of a friend of mine. She has a back garden with high walls all around it, and all you can see is the tops of some other Venetian buildings. You can hear the gondolas going by.
I have the arrogance to believe that you can find out a lot more about a place that way, than you can by seeing the sights. I’ve seen San Marco a million times on postcards, and the real experience isn’t dramatically different. But I’ve never had the feeling of sitting in a Venetian garden and hearing that sound of the gondolas splashing by.
Just to sit in one place and to soak up the atmosphere of that place… I mean, all spots have the same atmosphere at a given location, and somehow I think tourist sights have been robbed of their atmosphere by being tourist sights. It’s as if taking too many photographs of something eventually makes it become unreal, become an image of itself. So I like, with music and with everything else, to stay in the same place for a long time… until I feel like moving somewhere else, then I stay there for a long time.”
and:
“I like talking about ideas. I find them terribly interesting. God! When I lived in New York, I used to like overhearing conversations at café tables. That’s a good way of finding out about a city, as well, much better than sight-seeing. In New York, everyone talks about themselves. The word “I” must permeate the air. If you could clean the air of every other word and just hear all the I’s sticking out, it’d be like rain… I, i, i, I, i, i, I…
Everybody just babbles on about themselves. They all think they matter to the effing world. As if the existence of any of us makes any difference to anything.”
Genius.
Both of these quotes are from an extensive interview with Brian Eno by Phil South.
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