Branca Midtown Quotes

There were a lot of people doing new and interesting things with rock. But I wanted to take it farther than that. My real influence was punk. I must have listened to the first Patti Smith album 300 times. ~ Glenn Branca

Yeah. I know, I'm so bridge-and-tunnel - for as long as I've been able to catch the train, I've been sneaking into the city to go to Midtown. Hang out with the bankers, merge some mergers and acquire some acquisitions. The whole thing just reeked of sex and rock 'n' roll to me. Can't you feel it in the air? Close your eyes. Feel it? I ~ Rachel Cohn

I like to read. I've become obsessed with fiction. And it's too bad: I'm a musician many people love and I myself am not part of the music scene. ~ Glenn Branca

I'm lucky to live in New York, a city that offers so many options for lunch. I can pick up dumplings from a Midtown food truck, grab empanadas by the dozen in Spanish Harlem or get a fantastic bowl of ramen in the East Village. ~ Marcus Samuelsson

I would encourage more development in the boroughs outside of Manhattan as well. I think it's great that this natural emergence has occurred in the lower part of Midtown, but there's tremendous potential in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island as well. ~ John Liu

Even souvenir seekers. One of the worst contaminants was fellow officers, especially brass grandstanding if reporters were present and eager to grab a video bite to slap on the twenty-four-hour news cycle. One more glance at the circular coffin. Okay, Amelia Sachs thought: Knuckle time ... A phrase of her father's. The man had also been cop, a beat patrolman working the Deuce - Midtown South; back then Times Square was like Deadwood in the 1800s. "Knuckle time" referred to those moments when you have to go up against your worst fears. Breadbasket ... Sachs returned to the access door and climbed through it and down into the utility room below the cellar. Then she took the evidence collection gear bag from the other officer. Sachs said, "You search the basement, Jean?" "I'll do it now," Eagleston said. "And then get everything into the RRV." They'd done a fast examination of the cellar. But it was apparent that the perp had spent minimal time there. He'd grabbed Chloe, subdued ~ Jeffery Deaver

I'm constantly revising and updating a piece until it's finally recorded. Once it's recorded, then it's over. ~ Glenn Branca

I'm never happy with anything. ~ Glenn Branca

Surprisingly, Manhattan casts a sort of undersized shadow onto Long Island. Where I grew up, everyone seemed totally disconnected from the city - ours could have been any suburb, anywhere - though when traffic was thin, it took us only half an hour to get into midtown. ~ Darin Strauss

It's important to have a fallback and other activities that keep you interested. I started acting when I was about nine or 10 years old. My father was a midtown firefighter so I always wanted to be a firefighter, but then acting came along. I have to have a plan B. ~ Jake T. Austin

The Empire State, a lonely dinosaur, rose sadly at midtown, highest tower, tallest mountain, longest road, King Kong's eyrie, meant to moor airships, alas. ~ Vincent Scully

Whoever owned this place, these cities, whoever owned those glittering glassy office buildings in midtown filled with the purr of money turning over, those refineries over the river in Jersey with their flames licking the air, they gave nothing back. They took and took and left their garbage choking the air, the river, the sea itself. Choking her. A life of garbage. Human garbage. She had had too little of what her body needed and too little of what her soul could imagine. She had been able to do little in the years of her life, and that little had been ill paid or punished. The rest was garbage. ~ Marge Piercy

It can and will be a more powerful sound but the orchestra has far more potential for expressive power. When I hear a great rock band it can make me feel alive, but when I hear a great orchestra it can make me feel human. ~ Glenn Branca

The people of midtown Manhattan, understandably, had a love-hate relationship with the FF. They loved having heroes in their midst, especially heroes as public and friendly as the Four. But the constant brawling and property damage had brought on civil suits, protests, and even the occasional death threat. Still, ~ Stuart Moore

I have a rule: Anything that can be done privately does not need to be performed publicly. It's why I love the gays but I hate their parades. Actually, I hate all parades. Marching to celebrate something you're born as seems silly. (As I write this, St. Patrick's Day is in full bore in Midtown. It's delightful how celebrating a heritage requires you to pick fights with strangers and then pee in a parking garage. The upside - the sea of clover-painted drunks moving in unison - might be the only green energy I've ever seen work.) And what's the point of a parade anyway? A bunch of yahoos who share some affinity, walking in one direction? Who decided this was entertainment? For previous generations, this was called a migration, or more often, refugees fleeing for their lives ~ Greg Gutfeld

As the trees turned red, then white, then naked as pitchforks, Margot and Xiao Chen immersed themselves in several forests' worth of pages, and I watched, tortured, as brick after brick of a new development was laid on the wasteland of Midtown West like slabs of gold bullion. ~ Carolyn Jess-Cooke

It was another blind date; this time her uncle had set her up. The plan: Meet outside of her fancy Midtown Manhattan office building. How would she recognize him? "I'll be the guy with the hole
in his boot," he told her. And there he was,
covered in dust from his construction job, with a
big hole in his fraying boot. What was supposed to be one drink turned into two . . . then a ride on the Ferris wheel in Toys R Us . . . then dinner. He wrote her this note exactly two months after their first date, delivering it rolled up and tied with a string, along with two red roses. They were married in July 2006.
(return ~ Bill Shapiro

Whatever works for the piece I'm thinking about is the way I write ... ~ Glenn Branca

No one on the street thought anything of the downtown girl dressed in black who had paused in the middle of midtown foot traffic. In her art student camouflage she could walk the entire length of Manhattan and, if not blend in, be classified and therefore ignored. ~ Alice Sebold

Silena, take the Aphrodite crew to the Queens-Midtown Tunnel."
Oh my gods," one of her sisters said. "Fifth Avenue is so on our way! We could accessorize, and monsters, like, totally hate the smell of Givenchy. ~ Rick Riordan

I started out in theatre and I definitely have wanted to add extra musical elements to my music with both imagery and text. ~ Glenn Branca

I really feel instrumental music can speak - can contain tremendous amounts of information - but it's speaking to your subconscious. ~ Glenn Branca

I'm just not arbitrarily choosing to have five guitars play one type of thing. In that way there's a definite similarity between a symphony orchestra and the 100 guitar symphony. ~ Glenn Branca

One hundred guitarists making lots of noise would not be something you'd want to listen to. ~ Glenn Branca

I want the music to be ambiguous. Its tone gives you a context in which to start visualizing what you're feeling with the music. ~ Glenn Branca

Mystery is what happens to us when we allow life to evolve rather than having to make it happen all the time. It is the strange knock at the door, the sudden sight of an unceremoniously blooming flower, an afternoon in the yard, a day of riding the midtown bus. Just to see. Just to notice. Just to be there. ~ Joan D. Chittister

But at that critical moment, detectives knew there was no way they could get to JFK in time from the hotel in midtown Manhattan. ~ John Solomon

Poverty of young men alone behind the
stairways, who practice
alchemy inside bottle caps, who know
the altruism of a last syringe. ~ Jim Carroll

Every year, I took a holiday. I went to Florence, there's this cafe, on the banks of the Arno. Every fine evening, I'd sit there and order a Fernet Branca. I had this fantasy, that I would look across the tables and I'd see you there, with a wife and maybe a couple of kids. You wouldn't say anything to me, nor me to you. But we'd both know that you'd made it, that you were happy. ~ Alfred Pennyworth

I never got home so early in my entire Manhattan career. This includes the time I had fifteen minutes to get home, change and go to the movie theater to stand on line for six hours for the midnight showing of "Twilight".
Don't judge me. My mother does that enough for twenty people. ~ Robert Halliwell

There's a saying we have in reality," Jess, the producer, told me, while we were sitting in Midtown. "Everyone signs. Most people want to be famous. Everyone thinks they could be a better Kardashian than the Kardashians. You see it now, with these apps, everyone likes to have an audience. Everyone thinks they deserve one. ~ Jia Tolentino

Music is about imagination. It's about thought. It's about creating something from nothing. ~ Glenn Branca

Brother John and I had our ears glued to the radio. It was a Sunday afternoon in early December 1941, and our football Giants were getting pounded by the Brooklyn Dodgers, an NFL team that played from 1930 to 1943 in Ebbets Field, a faraway ballpark I'd never seen. So far as I was concerned, Brooklyn was on the other side of the moon. The Polo ~ Ralph Branca

I think of myself of a primitivist. I have never had any of these electronic instruments and I have never had the slightest interest in using them. I use the computer as a tool, simply because it makes composing a lot faster. But I don't go on stage with a computer and make a lot of goofy sounds. ~ Glenn Branca