video & quotes

[Florina Codreanu]

For those that weren't present today, here you have the link to a short documentary on urban culture made by a student (in case you are curious, the music from the beginning and ending is Amon Tobin, a trip-hopper): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0aON-FmImo

Also, some food for urban thought:

1. “Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.”
Susan Sontag quotes (American Writer, Activist and Critic, 1933-2004)
2.  “The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant-heap. But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind.”
Lewis Mumford quotes (American Writer, 1895-1990)

 

3. “Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.”
Jonathan Raban quotes
4. “The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.”
Marshall McLuhan quotes (Canadian communications theorist Educator, Writer and Social Reformer, 1911-1980)

 

5. “Commercial jazz, soap opera, pulp fiction, comic strips, the movies set the images, mannerisms, standards, and aims of the urban masses. In one way or another, everyone is equal before these cultural machines; like technology itself, the mass media are nearly universal in their incidence and appeal. They are a kind of common denominator, a kind of scheme for pre-scheduled, mass emotions.”
C. Wright Mills quotes
6. “URBANITY, n. The kind of civility that urban observers ascribe to dwellers in all cities but New York. Its commonest expression is heard in the words, "I beg your pardon," and it is not consistent with disregard of the rights of others. The owner of a powder mill Was musing on a distant hill -- Something his mind foreboded -- When from the cloudless sky there fell A deviled human kidney! Well, The man's mill had exploded. His hat he lifted from his head; "I beg your pardon, sir," he said; "I didn't know 'twas loaded." --Swatkin”
Ambrose Bierce quotes (American Writer, Journalist and Editor, 1842-1914) Book: Devil's Dictionary quotes

 

7. “Racial injustice, war, urban blight, and environmental rape have a common denominator in our exploitative economic system.”
About: Problems quotes, Society quotes, Trouble quotes, Difficulty quotes, Injustice quotes.
8. “PEDIGREE, n. The known part of the route from an arboreal ancestor with a swim bladder to an urban descendant with a cigarette.”
Ambrose Bierce quotes (American Writer, Journalist and Editor, 1842-1914) Book: Devil's Dictionary quotes

 

9. “Not many sounds in life, and I include all urban and rural sounds, exceed in interest a knock at the door”
Charles Lamb quotes (English Critic, Poet and Essayist, 1775-1834)
10. “They may be America's last pioneers, urban nomads in search of wide open interior spaces.”
Cathleen McGuigan quotes   11. “They have no home town, urban life is standardised and they come from a place called Generica” John Perry Barlow quotes   12. “I don't believe anybody can be protected with high confidence from car bombs in urban areas. The Israelis and the British have worked as hard on this problem for years as anybody can. They have not provided an adequate protection for their population against car bombs in urban areas. That's -- that is a very, very difficult threat.” William J. Perry quotes   13. “A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork. What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements are connected by an ‘and’ not by a ‘but’.” John Berger quotes (English Painter, b.1926)   14. “For Cambridge people rarely smile, / Being urban, squat, and packed with guile.” Rupert Brooke quotes (English Poet, 1887-1915)

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Florina Codreanu
ir...@yahoo.com, codreanu...@gmail.com
florina....@lett.ubbcluj.ro
(004) 0740 091 395
Plopilor 61/15, 400379 Cluj-Napoca
http://florinacodreanu.blogspot.com/