Yule Heibel's Library tagged david_byrne →  View Popular

I love David Byrne's music, but in this essay for the Wall Street Journal I think he somewhat over-reaches himself. Why? The essay is muddled. He includes too many contradictory pronouncements. For example, that big and dense is good, but that you need the "village" thing for safety & security; or that LA isn't dense (I believe it is, actually); or that lack of density creates narcissistic attention-getting ploys; or that "human scale" needs to be achieved through some process of "compromise" (left undefined), and so on. Furthermore, his closing sentence really confuses me: "My perfect city isn't fixed, it doesn't actually exist, and I like it that way." He likes that it doesn't exist? What does that mean?

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