Original source: Patti Smith interview (The Talks)

"Ms. Smith, are musicians these days put on too high of a pedestal for your taste? I don’t believe people playing rock ‘n’ roll should have crowns. We’re not kings and queens. Anybody can play it."

One of my heroines, talking about the relationship between creativity and the city (or more specifically, how New York City --specifically the East Village--has lost its creative edge to favor the clean, high-end of the "creative industry"). This is a great interview!

"Look at cafes and there are no people sitting around writing poetry anymore. Just families, people with cell phones, business people, people setting up photo shoots and stuff like that. It’s a whole different atmosphere. It’s so stressful that I just leave. The way our big cities change sucks. People should be careful because we are losing the creativity. The beauty of cities was that they were edgy, sometimes even a little dangerous. Artists, poets, and activists could come and unify and create different kinds of scenes. Not just fashion scenes, scenes that were politically active. Big cities are getting so high-end oriented, business corporate fashion, fashion not in an artistic sense but in a corporate sense. I don’t know, for me that edgy beauty of cities is lost, wherever you go."