Lodovico Pignatti Morano - As the narrator stalks Nicola through the streets of Milan and its outskirts, what began as a casual friendship develops into an obsessive attachment, a crisis of identity connecting two hustlers, and a struggle against the quiet oblivion usually hidden by the web of tics and affectations that constitute a personality

Lodovico Pignatti Morano, Nicola, Milan. Semiotext(e), Jun 2014


It was the lies he told that reminded me of that past of mine that I hadn't encountered in a while. He was telling me the kinds of lies where the teller implies that things that have only happened to him once are long-running habits. Things about too much whiskey, Céline and De Sade, eating alone in expensive Japanese restaurants, knowing nobody (this last fact he would continue to repeat in later meetings, it seeming more barbarously unreal each time). -- from Nicola, Milan

Vaguely employed as a brand strategist in a B-version of the Italian Glamour export economy, the twenty-five-year-old unnamed narrator of Nicola, Milan is an international loner, watch checker, tip leaver, shit-talker, drifting from bar to airport lounge, taxi to hotel foyer, drunk and caffeinated at the same time, trying to explain to you the finer points of how to pitch an idea of Italy to Americans.
But when he meets the slightly older, richer, and worldlier Nicola, he becomes fascinated with him, seeing Nicola as a transcendental exemplar of the international-creative class culture he both envies and loathes. As the narrator stalks Nicola through the streets of Milan and its outskirts, what began as a casual friendship develops into an obsessive attachment, a crisis of identity connecting two hustlers, and a struggle against the quiet oblivion usually hidden by the web of tics and affectations that constitute a personality.
Combining a Houellebecq-like sense of the psychic malaise beneath the surface of contemporary cultural life with the dispassionate voice of a police report, Nicola, Milan tells a story of perverse, asexual frenzy emptying out into the void
In the chosen land -- a Milan full of bored rich people too dumb to know themselves -- a man longs to know Nicola, a cruel and ineffable hustler. What's it like to really 'go home' with Nicola? I could not turn away from the answer -- trashy and female, dangerously hot. Nicola, Milan reads like a part of the secret literature that it wishes to penetrate. - Tamara Faith Berger

"Nicola, Milan is a ravishing and delirious search through the blinkered and fraught consciousness of a man who has invested far too much of himself in someone else -- or who he thinks that person is. This compact book seethes with ambiguous sexuality, while an enticing darkness constantly beckons. Lodovico Pignatti Morano's arresting debut gazes unflinchingly into the most gnarled and obsessive crevices of the human mind." - Peter Mountford

The churn of human movement is the one thing that no one mentions when you move to the city and join the creative classes.
Partly this is because most people in the arts are themselves caught in the whirling currents. And partly this is because no one likes admitting that being a member of the creative classes isn’t that much different than working any other stupid job.
There used to be some unique benefits (weird sex, hard drugs, bodacious living) but these were actualized out when Republicans realized they too could declare, publicly, their love of fucking and shooting smack.
Now the only differences between the creative classes and everyone else are worse pay and the perpetual threat of being ostracized by your political allies when you use stale jargon to describe the marginalized.
As you age, you develop the ability to comprehend the churn. You understand the tides. You realize that in, say, New York, every four years are marked by an actual, measurable cycle.
There is always an incoming class of actresses, actors, writers, musicians, painters, sculptors, video and performance artists. They are always replacing an outgoing class of actresses, actors, writers, musicians, painters, sculptors, video and performance artists.
And these departed aren’t clueless aspirants. The clueless last twelve calendar months before failing back into the American Middle West’s warm obscurity, doomed to walk an uncertain term while insisting that Chicago is a major city and Detroit-style poverty can make wooden artists into real boys.
The ones who last the full four years are, generally, those with some small measure of success. Group show, stories or poems in literary journal, stint as understudy, some commercial bookings, maybe a novel. Alas, this turns out unsustainable. And so they disappear.
Sometimes you find yourself in an East Village bar, years after you have left the city, talking to an actress who is saying things that are indistinguishable from things another actress said to you four years earlier and indistinguishable from things another other actress said to you eight years before.
And you see yourself hovering above, like it’s 1918 and you’re a peasant in Portugal and you’ve been struck with influenza and your fever has generated a dissociative state.
Your consciousness is attached to your body through a transparent silver tendril and you can see the pointlessness of it all, all the striving, all of the imaginary pretense of making your mark, of generating a point of view, of becoming one of the benighted idiots who believe that they too can achieve something measurably different from all the hundreds of thousands who’ve gone before.
But it’s the Twenty-First Century. Even if you do join the 0.00001% who make it last, all that’s waiting is an apartment decorated in ersatz mid-century modern, airkisses in Topher Grace’s house above Sunset, being told by John Green how awesome it is to be awesome with awesome people who are also awesome :), pretending that Steve Aoki is a talent rather than the guy you see in the Vitamin aisle at Erewhon. All that’s waiting are dinner parties where you must overlook the fact that some of the other guests are the children of war criminals. All that’s waiting are those doleful moments when you read Salman Rushdie’s tweets whilst being frigged sans mercy like the heroine from a piece of minor Victorian erotica.
It’s 2014. You were born too late. Every city looks the same. There’s nothing left to buy. Your money is worthless. Your success sucks cess.
It is this mood which animates Lodovico Pignatti Morano’s Nicola, Milan, published last month by Semiotext(e).
Morano’s anonymous narrator works in some vague capacity as a lower cog of the creative classes. He follows a man named Nicola around Milan.
Nicola, in his thirties, appears in possession of himself and his position in the world. Nicola is a higher level cog of the creative classes.
You have seen him in every European city upon which your holy foot has trod. You have watched him watching Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards projected on a wall at The Standard’s rooftop pool party. You have imagined his sex life and felt pity for his dates. You imagine him bumming for nylons in the American zone. You apprehend the man but never know him. He is a blank cipher about whom Morano’s protagonist and you are doomed to wonder: Who the fuck is this guy? How the fuck does he live? How the fuck do any of these people live?
In the same state as everyone else, hairless apes driven by the banality of evolutionary impulse disguised as bodily functions. In the same state as everyone else, titillated by behavior that exists either in accord or in conflict with the dictates of an imaginary civilization.
Personality is the illusory quirk of consciousness attached to base meat by transparent silver tendrils.
The protagonist finds Nicola in bars, at parties, at home. The protagonist imagines Nicola’s travels and travails. The protagonist reads a woman’s blog about her sexual affair with someone whom he presumes is Nicola. The protagonist attempts to piece together the jigsaw monster. The pieces fit but reveal no image. There is little more to Nicola than a slightly embarrassing man sewing symbolism into his clothing and forever threatening to write.
Nicola is threatening to write because Nicola is a creative.
And all creatives are full of stories.
They’ve much to say about Joshua Tree. They really, really, really want to talk about Palm Springs. 
One is impressed yet again with the necessity of Semiotext(e). (Full disclosure: my own book ATTA was published in the press’s Intervention Series.)
In an era where every publisher feels obsessed with a kind of pointless American immediacy– the kind that appears in FULL CAPITALS AND BOLD TYPE– it’s impossible to think of any other outlet that would issue a book as High European as Nicola, Milan that is: (a) not a translation (b) not a reprint (c) not from an established author.
What other press would publish this as a new novel from a relative unknown?
Which is a shame, as reading Morano reminds us that even though certain approaches have fallen into disfavor with the creative classes, these tools remain valid as methods and modes of expression.
The drifting, the aimlessness, the purposelessness are all to great effect. There is a real pleasure in engaging with a new work in the style.
Highly recommended. - Jarett Kobek

As you casually travel between foreign countries, each landing and departure creates a shadow that trails you. When you reach a final destination, they then graft onto your skin like the fine dust of fuel exhaust.
For the Easy Jet-set creative class, the moment of one’s arrival is relative to their audience. Without one it’s possible to endlessly wander the streets of foreign cities and remain a shadow. You live in your mind and draw up lists of a city’s specifics – of the nightly frequented bars and their oversized ice cubes that melt slowly in a glass, of the distracted conversations held on recent travels, or of “Céline and de Sade.”
An unnamed protagonist arrives into the empty city of Milan as a shadow. As a young brand strategist, he works to obscure emptiness, constructing the grand narratives of heritage, craft, material, and taste – all to be exported as luxury. Quickly he meets Nicola, the man that he could become if he stayed in Milan for long enough. The shadow now has an aspirational obsession with Nicola, who embodies the tenuous life of the neither rich nor poor – the life that trades in the currency of access. Nicola grants his shadow access, bringing him to well-attended parties and luxurious dinners across Italy. These favors are not out of friendship, but rather from a need for affirmation that he is, in fact, the man he claims to be.
As their relationship progresses the stench emerges from a man who’s character fails to be as desirable as the stories, travels, expensive clothing, furniture, and books that fill his otherwise empty life. In the face of this emptiness, and Nicola’s incapability to do the job that the brand strategist does so well, the protagonist’s once strong desire for Nicola is followed by miasmic repulsion.
The perverse relationship between these men, as one shapes the tastes and desires of another, produces the protagonist’s internal dialogues and speculations that unsettlingly confirm that things are just as bad as you had imagined. The sociopaths around you are, in fact, taking stock of the details. By cataloging the details in Nicola’s life, a dark economy of the creative class is revealed, one where details become currency traded within a community of people that guard their knowledge, carefully modulating the release of any sign that they know too much or too little. - Dena Yago

Lodovico Pignatti Morano’s Nicola, Milan is in many respects a coming-of-age novel, but it affects less a traditional bildungsroman and more a postmodern shrug. A novel about a young man who moves to Milan “to steal someone or something’s cultural authority,” it is a search for meaning in a milieu made up of only surfaces, where identity appears to be little more than a snakelike change of skins. The dubious triumph of Nicola, Milan’s narrator amounts to a forfeiture, a realization that his feelings of emptiness and barren insignificance which characterize the book’s world are indicators that the present is thinning at the elbows, pointing toward the next attractions in postmodern capitalism’s perpetual changing vogue. 

Restless and unnamed, Nicola, Milan’s narrator is a twenty-five year-old expatriate from London, who works as a “brand strategist,” but this is mostly titular since he never seems to work at all. The narrator meets Nicola at a party, and quickly becomes obsessed with him. Nicola, in his thirties, is the creative superior to Morano’s narrator. He has access to all the parties, drugs, and new artist; he has age, experience, and connections that the narrator doesn’t. Almost immediately the narrator imbues Nicola with mystery and power. Indeed, Nicola has the “cultural authority” the narrator covets, and the older man becomes a role model of sorts. Early in the novel, the narrator begins consciously aping Nicola’s behavior: “I try to familiarize myself with [Nicola] descison-making process, to get comfortable with his intuitions…I try to find situations similar to his and superficially behave the same way I observed him behaving.”

And much of the book continues this way. Nicola moves, and the narrator follows, watching his every move, puzzling over who he is, what his motivations are, and what, if anything, they mean. In the way that echoes the Existentialist fiction of the earth 20th century, Nicola, Milan is a novel of a young man’s experience of meaninglessness and alienation. But unlike the existentialists’ discovery of authenticity in profound freedom and individual responsibility, Morano’s narrator comes to the realization that there’s no essential self to be alienated from, and no significance more meaningful that pulling off a daring new fashion.

In 1967, French social theorist Guy Debord described our world in his influential text Society of the Spectacle as one where “everything that was directly lived has moved away into representation.” Morano’s world could just as accurately be described in this way, and it comes as no surprise that Morano’s publisher is Semiotext(e), which has been long at the forefront of publishing writing on capitalism and the individual under the shadow of Debord and other likeminded theorists. Morano’s description of Milan seems to draw directly from Debord’s understanding of the contemporary world—what he called a “spectacular society.” For Debord, all individual activity is mediated by capitalism and the to-and-fro of commodities. Finding meaning outside of the market is impossible. For Morano’s narrator, this takes the form of his inability to find any sense of himself or Nicola as an individual outside of purchase and affectation.

Mid-way through the novel, the narrator and Nicola discuss a jacket that Nicola is having custom made. The jacket will have “all my personal references, the things people know me by, my hotel room number I always take, my old nickname, the logo of my more famous blog from when I was in L. A….” Nicola’s jacket is emblematic of the spectacular form of identity itself. He is attempting to create some stable sense of self through designing his own commodity. And soon, after this discussion, the narrator imagines himself wearing the jacket, becoming Nicola, but in doing so, realizes that there’s nothing beneath the symbolic spectacle that Nicola uses to represent who he is, that his life is no less a playacting than anyone else’s: “‘Anything he can do I can do,’ I tell myself, believing it sincerely, somewhat moved by the truth of the statement I’ve made to myself…It is true, a profound realization, another shifting of the ground bboreeneath my feet.”

This fundamental hollowness of the individual is mirrored in Morano’s dispassionate style of writing. At times his prose reads like the disengaged notes of an ethnographer writing a study of the moneyed and schmoozing members of Milan’s creative class: “He’s wearing a white suit, it probably cost a million euros.” There is a semiotic allowance made for these Tweet-like observations of who’s present at dinners, bars, and parties, what they are wearing, what Nicola is doing and with whom as Morano shows how each person who populates this Milan has carefully crafted their exterior personas. Morano never gives away any more than the characters do, never dips into omniscience. As the narrator says when describing Nicola’s apartment: “Things appear as signs, they exist in a descriptive capacity.”

In this way, the narrator depicts a Milan where everything is a carefully constructed series of symbols, never representing anything more profound than the artist who made them, the store they were bought from. It’s a Milan that “exists only as much as the name of a city stamped on a luxury brand shopping bag,” where self-actualization isn’t any sort of expression of a fundamental self, but a recurring fashioning and refashioning. To read Morano’s short, sharp book is to follow a narrator in a fruitless quest for something more, some kind of agency beyond the spectacular world. In a sense Nicola, Milan is a search for a round character in a sea of flat ones, which makes for somewhat disconcerting reading, as the emptiness of everything is described literally, and yet through the seeking eyes of Morano’s narrator, potentially hiding significance. This terseness, combined with the narrator’s suspicion that there is some depth beneath the façades resemble the tension and suspense felt in the best literary thrillers.

Late in the novel, the narrator stalks Nicola online, finding pictures from Nicola’s mythic time abroad—in Mexico, China, and Los Angeles. Despite the narrator vividly imagining Nicola in these places, the pieces never fully fit together to form a whole person. The narrator’s obsessive Goggle-ing also leads him to a blog that refers to a man whom he presumes to be Nicola. The blog outlines a sadomasochistic relationship between Nicola and the blog’s author:

The girl writes about things that, as far as Nicola’s image is concerned, never happened—and this makes me nervous as I sit in front of the computer, reading material freely available to the public, with nothing but a genuine curiosity; they are the zones one never sees in him. It dawns on me that these things she describes actually happened with him, in Milan. And later, as I begin to attach his face to the action, I grow perturbed.

After so long seeing only surface it finally seems the narrator has found some sort of hidden self to Nicola: an identity or a core, an essence. Like a ball of mud rolling down a hill, as the narrator obsesses over Nicola’s online artifacts, imagining him in all manner of situations beyond his ken, the Nicola-fetish picks up more and more significance completely independent from reality. In studying Nicola, the narrator begins to see how the styles and affections don’t cohere and form a whole, cogent identity. When, beneath it all, the narrator discovers a private life to Nicola—a somewhat transgressive one, but still essentially common love affair—he is thoroughly disappointed and quickly begins to fade away from Nicola’s circles in Milan.

It is perhaps no accident that Lodovico Pignatti Morano has made his narrator a brand strategist. After graduating from London’s Goldsmiths University, where he studied Fine Arts, Morano moved to Italy to work in the cycling industry, working with such legendary Italian bicycle brands as Cinelli and Columbus. Although Nicola, Milan is his first novel, Morano is the author of the book Cinelli: The Art and Design of the Bicycle and the editor of a monograph on the Italian Sportswear pioneer Massimo Osti. As Morano explores the emptiness and ciphers of the Milanese creative class in his identity thriller we sense that he knows firsthand the banality of corporate branding, the fiction behind commodities, all of which he dramatizes in Nicola, Milan. These fictions, these banalities are at the core of Nicola’s betrayal because it isn’t that there was another hidden and more significant life, but that it was just as lacking in depth as the surface life which Nicola publicly enacted. When the fetishized commodity is truly viewed up close, it can be seen as the imperfect object it is.

Morano’s narrator’s dissatisfaction that beneath the surface of Nicola is nothing less quotidian than secret sex is also at the heart of the fast changing, never significant, setting of the novel. Fundamentally, dissatisfaction is built into the world of this book, for if a brand (or identity) were to satisfy, the consumer would never need to buy another, or another, or another. Nicola, Milan is a search for the unmediated, and the acceptance that doesn’t exist. And this tense and somewhat fatalistic book is a bored sigh, the resignation that in a world structured by the fickleness of postmodern identity there is no “self” putting on the clothes, just a person-shaped rack. - Charlie Geoghegan-Clements

 

Lodovico Pignatti Morano, Cinelli: The Art and Design of the Bicycle. Rizzoli, 2012.

A beautifully illustrated survey of more than sixty-five years of work by one of the most pioneering and influential names in bicycle design. Since Cino Cinelli began making frames in Italy in the 1940s, Cinelli has set the standards for bicycle and component design. Cinelli has led the evolution of professional cycling and defined the ideal of the classic bicycle: from the classic Supercorsa racing frame to the cutting-edge MASH fixed-gear pursuit bikes ubiquitous on the urban riding scene; from innovations such as the first plastic racing saddles to the controversial Spinaci handlebars, banned from competition; and from timeless components, such as the Alter stem, to iconic meetings of art and design such as Keith Haring’s treatment of the hour record-setting Laser. With contributions by legendary riders such as Felice Gimondi and Gilberto Simoni, and by collaborators, from artists like Mike Giant to designers such as San Francisco’s graphic impresario Benny Gold, and featuring a conversation between fashion designer Sir Paul Smith and Cinelli president Antonio Colombo, Cinelli is the definitive look at how beauty and technology can meet in this simplest form of design.