On a bike, being just slightly above pedestrian and car eye level, one gets a perfect view of the goings-on in one's own town.
Interpretation
Riding a bike offers a unique perspective of your surroundings, allowing you to see your town in a new light.
David Byrne's quote highlights the distinct viewpoint that cycling provides, positioning the rider at an optimal height to observe the daily life and activities occurring around them. It suggests that this mode of transportation enhances one's connection to the environment and community, fostering an appreciation for the nuances often missed when traveling by car or walking.
In practice
Use this quote in a cycling campaign to promote the joys of biking in your community.
Forces that you might think are utterly unrelated to creativity can have a big impact. Technology, obviously, but environment, too. Even financial structures can affect the actual content of a song. The making of music is profoundly affected by the market.
When things get so absurd and so stupid and so ridiculous that you just can't bear it, you cannot help but turn everything into a joke.
I certainly agree that putting everything into little genres is counterproductive. You're not going to get too many surprises if you only focus on the stuff that fits inside the box that you know.
You create a community with music, not just at concerts but by talking about it with your friends.
Real sadness is such an all-encompassing intense thing that it takes you out of your humdrum existence. If you can still function, you want to show it while it's peaking. So when people tell you to cheer up, it's not always the best thing.
I find rebellion packaged by a major corporation a little hard to take seriously.
A poet is a bird of unearthly excellence, who escapes from his celestial realm arrives in this world warbling. If we do not cherish him, he spreads his wings and flies back into his homeland.
Writers write these male stereotypes, and it makes it ten times more interesting if a woman says the lines.
You can’t, if you can’t feel it, if it never Rises from the soul, and sways The heart of every single hearer, With deepest power, in simple ways. You’ll sit forever, gluing things together, Cooking up a stew from other’s scraps, Blowing on a miserable fire, Made from your heap of dying ash. Let apes and children praise your art, If their admiration’s to your taste, But you’ll never speak from heart to heart, Unless it rises up from your heart’s space.
By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that person knows himself or herself. You're sort of a predator, an invader of people.
When you write for a living and you can't do anything else, you know that sooner or later that the deadline is going to come screaming down on you like a goddamn banshee. There's no avoiding it...So one day you just don't appear at the El Adobe bar anymore; you shut the door, paint the windows black, rent an electric typewriter and become the monster you always were - the writer.
Adapting a novel is not really about being faithful to every word and every moment the author has created. It's more about that same story being filtered through somebody else's sensibility.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.