We must shed the old stereotype of anarchists as bearded bomb throwers furtively stalking about city streets at night.
In Middle America men are awakening. Like awkward and untrained boys we begin to turn toward maturity and with our awakening we hunger for song. But in our towns and fields there are few memory haunted places. Here we stand in roaring city streets, on steaming coal heaps, in the shadow of factories from which come only the grinding roar of machines. We do not sing but mutter in the darkness. Our lips are cracked with dust and with the heat of furnaces. We but mutter and feel our way toward the promise of song.
As I write, Johnny Rotten's first moments in "Anarchy in the U.K." - a rolling earthquake of a laugh, a buried shout, then hoary words somehow stripped of all claptrap and set down in the city streets - I AM AN ANTICHRIST - Remain as powerful as anything I know. Listening to the record today - listening to the way Johnny Rotten tears at his lines, and then hurls the pieces at the world; recalling the all-consuming smile he produced as he sang - my back stiffens; I pull away even as my scalp begins to sweat.
Each day when you see us black folk upon the dusty land of your farm or upon the hard pavement of your city streets, you usually take it for granted and think you know us, but our history is far stranger than you suspect, and we are not what we seem.
The idea (for the painting 'Room in New York', 1932, ed.) had been in my mind a long time before I painted it. It was suggested by glimpses of lighted interiors seen as I walked along city streets at night, probably near the district where I live (Washington Square, New York, fh) although it's no particular street or house, but is really a synthesis of many impressions.
We're told cars cause pollution. A hundred years ago city streets were ankle deep in horse excrement. What kind of pollution do you want? Would you rather die of cancer at eighty or typhoid fever at nine?
I love just seeing shots of New York inside of a fictional movie that are not controlled. I do not like shots with extras, I have to say. I don't mind extras in other scenes, but I love New York City streets just as they look. I don't even care if someone looks at the camera. It doesn't bother me.
A Song of the good green grass! A song no more of the city streets; A song of farms - a song of the soil of fields. A song with the smell of sun-dried hay, where the nimble pitchers handle the pitch-fork; A song tasting of new wheat, and of fresh-husk'd maize.
The great trains howling from track to track all night. The taut and telegraphic murmur of ten thousand city wires, drawn most cruelly against a city sky. The rush of city waters, beneath the city streets. The passionate passing of the night's last El.
I love New York, even though it isn't mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it.
The morrow was a bright September morn; The earth was beautiful as if newborn; There was nameless splendor everywhere, That wild exhilaration in the air, Which makes the passers in the city street Congratulate each other as they meet.
Girls took to dressing like boys, and though women had obtained the vote, we had swiftly moved on to pursuing flashier freedoms: necking in cars and smoking cigarettes and walking down city streets in flesh colored stockings.
They were playing old Bob Dylan, more than perfect for narrow Village streets close to Christmas and the snow whirling down in big feathery flakes, the kind of winter where you want to be walking down a city street with your arm around a girl like on the old record cover.
There is a horrifying loneliness at work in this time. No, listen to me. We lived six and seven to a room in those days, when I was still among the living. The city streets were seas of humanity; and now in these high buildings dim-witted souls hover in luxurious privacy, gazing through the television window at a faraway world of kissing and touching. It is bound to produce some great fund of common knowledge, some new level of human awareness, a curious skepticism, to be so alone.
Willy DeVille knows the truth of a city street and the courage in a ghetto love song. And the harsh reality in his voice and phrasing is yesterday, today, and tomorrow - timeless in the same way that loneliness, no money, and troubles find each other and never quit for a minute.
The streets and alleys of the ward were notoriously filthy, and the contractors habitually neglected them, not failing, however, to draw their regular payments from the city treasury.
We're told cars are wasteful. Wasteful of what? Oil did a lot of good sitting in the ground for millions of years. We're told cars should be replaced with mass transportation. But it's hard to reach the drive-through window at McDonald's from a speeding train. And we're told cars cause pollution. A hundred years ago city streets were ankle deep in horse excrement. What kind of pollution do you want? Would you rather die of cancer at eighty or typhoid fever at nine?
On the long dusty ribbon of the long city street, The pageant of life is passing me on multitudinous feet, With a word here of the hills, and a song there of the sea And-the great movement changes-the pageant passes me.
These New York City streets get colder, I shoulder every burden every disadvantage I've learned to manage. I don't have a gun to brandish. I walk these streets famished.
When I walk, I try to set a fairly brisk rate. I love walking outside. I hate machines like treadmills. The path that I have chosen to walk is just city streets, but you see pretty houses, trees... my routes have some hills in them; it's not just straight walking. You have to exercise your heart and lungs.
Chasing a burning girl down a city street is a lot harder than it sounds. Civilians tend to stop and stare and this turns them into human bowling pins. Slow whiny bowling pins.
I can't stop being in parades. I just love dancing on floats that move really slowly on the city streets in the early morning.
City of prose and fantasy, of capitalist automation, its streets a triumph of cubism, its moral philosophy that of the dollar. New York impressed me tremendously because, more than any other city, it is the fullest expression of our modern age.
Crime in the city streets is more than a political issue. It's a too rampant fact.... In Indianapolis they have come up with a most sensible, affordable approach to the problem. Policemen are assigned their police patrol cars for personal use after hours. They are encouraged to use the police car while taking the family shopping, to the movies, and everywhere one takes one's family. As a result, says the Police Chief's assistant, we may have as many as 400 cars on the street instead of 100 or so per shift. [And] the presence of the police car obviously indicates the proximity of policemen.
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