David Byrne's "True Stories"

Last night, on the recommendation of a friend, I watched the 1986 film "True Stories" by Talking Heads frontman and noted urban design and cycling advocate David Byrne.  It had some great commentary on fossil fuel age transportation, including this great quote from Byrne as he drives past the soaring elevated sections of a highway junction (clip):

"Well, I suppose these freeways made this town and a lot of others like it possible.  'They're the cathedrals of our time,' someone said.  Not me."

Bryne also comments facetiously on the bland, garage-fronted, person-less suburban landscape, calling it beautiful, and recognizes the featureless, modular, inexpensive metal building as "the dream modern architects had at the beginning of this century finally come true, but they themselves don't realize it."  He addresses the issues of suburban sprawl and excessive consumer culture and links the two quite well through scenes at the mall and in the home of a women who never leaves her bed.

The most prophetic moment moment of the film comes from a monologue given by the founder of the town's largest company, a computer manufacturer named Varicorp.  He predicts the rise of the creative class, a group of people who work independently of large corporations, live without separate concepts of work and home life, the weekday and the weekend, and working not for a living or for a place in heaven but "working and inventing because they like it."  This really struck me.  Twenty-three years later we have the live-work suite, the most popular unit in new development, and a mixing of uses (residential and commercial) as the primary means to creating high-quality urban environments.  Check out the monologue in this YouTube clip.  it's something you need to see.  Like my friend Matt, I highly recommend the film to any urbanist.