The Bicycle Diaries is a suitable title for this book, although you should not assume this book is about bicycles or bicycling. For David Byrne the bicycle is simply an effective means of everyday transport. He loves the freedom, health benefits and human-scale perspectives afforded by riding his bicycle, but he is not interested in discussing bicycle equipment, clothing, riding technique, and such topics of interest for bicycle enthusiasts.
Through the bicycle, Byrne's life and the world around him takes a distinct form worthy of a diary. The bicycle is Byrne's silent partner, passive yet essential to the life he enjoys.
Byrne studies the human condition as many talented artists are apt to do, and he wields a keen sense for details. During his national and international travels, Byrne developed a habit of exploring the cities he visited by bicycle and forming connections with life on the streets in a way that is not possible if he were riding inside a car.
He found that riding a bike enhanced his ability to see, hear, smell and fully savor his surroundings and the people he encountered.
It became my panoramic window on much of the world over the past thirty years. Through this window I catch glimpses of my fellow man as expressed by the cities he lives in.
In the Bicycle Diaries Byrne interprets those precious glimpses though stories and social commentary.
Early in the book Byrne describes his ride from Buffalo, NY (my hometown) to see Niagara Falls. The ride takes him down Niagara Falls Boulevard, a sad arterial offering little comfort or safety for the intrepid bicyclist.
The NFB originates as an outsized strip of suburban big-box retail stores. Byrne fruitlessly searches for the humanity in it all.
There are no people visible anywhere, just cars pulling in and out of parking lots.
Further on, the NFB passes through miles of postindustrial wasteland--shuttered factories and toxic landfills--then though a ghetto, and then it unceremoniously deposits him before one of the Seven Wonders of the World.
Byrne observes the various built environments--urban, suburban, or small town--he encounters and tries to understand the meaning behind them. In most settings throughout the United States he finds dysfunction and missed opportunity.
In small-town Texas he senses a Puritanical streak at the root of their teetotalling laws and draws a connection with the town's spare building designs. In this case, all he wanted was to enjoy a glass of wine with his dinner.
I suspect that drinking...is considered a sign of moral weakness. The assumption that there lurks within us a secret desire for pure, sensuous, all hell-breaking-loose pleasure that is to be nipped in the bud, for pragmatic reasons...You never know what will come out of that bottle once you open it...slipping off of the straight and narrow could have serious consequences.
Drinking, therefore, became like drug use relegated to "bad" places like honky-tonks and dark, sad bars. Either way both druggies and drinkers tend to create their own countercultures. Being ostracized then creates the "bad" scenes that the punishment hoped it avoid.
As I said, the Bicycle Diaries is not a book about bicycles and bicycling.
He goes further to note how the same Puritanical aesthetic informs much of everyday America's building architectures in the towns and contrived landscapes he visits:
The whacky religious fundamentalism that drives much of the United States makes for places that on the surface don't betray any religious foundation at all. But it's there, a deep invisible base implicit in the landscaped industrial parks and weird nonspaces that evoke a nostalgia for the nonexistent.
In city after city, he wryly critiques the social and economic pathos he encounters. It's a dismal but often fascinating preoccupation.
He extensively covers the San Francisco-Bay region and its rich history of revolution-for-the-hell-of-it, from the Beats to the psychedelics to the modern-day digerati. While Byrne has no interest in re-hashing his personal fame as a musician, he recounts an experience of his while visiting this area which provides a fascinating view into his genius:
I first came out here in the early 70's, lured by the hippie eco techno worldview embodied by the Whole Earth Catalog. I joined a friend in an attempt to build a dome in a field in the Napa Valley. I eventually lost focus on the dome project and ended up busking with another friend on the streets of Berkley. He played the accordion, I played the violin and the ukulele and struck ironic poses...I realized at that time that I was more interested in irony than in utopia.
He also engages in a discussion about the pros and cons of Powerpoint as a mode of communication and veers off into a fascinating talk about our linguistic roots:
I am a prisoner of my language.
I wish cycling made me this interesting.
Eventually, Byrne arrives in New Orleans, and his wry critiques give way to hopefulness. He notes that more so than any other American city New Orleans is a city about living.
He openly debates how the citizens of New Orleans, unlike those in other poverty-stricken American cities, can possibly maintain such friendliness towards strangers, appear to be happier on the job, and have a somewhat more relaxed interracial relations. Was it influenced by the French Catholic church's historic attitudes sin and pleasure?...the fusion of African cultures?...or the propensity for businesses to be locally- owned and operated?
His oversea travels open up further possibilities and questions. In Adelaide, Australia, he notes a small group of Aboriginals congregated, enigmatically, alongside a bustling urban thoroughfare and muses:
...their physical presence advertises a deep, slow biological and geological history that this new European colonial world seeks to quietly cover over with a frenzy of commerce...
As I said, he sometimes wanders far from the bicycle, but these are the deep thoughts that a cyclist can entertain. In another scene he notices the pervasive application of video surveillance on London's streets and the British Government's ubiquitous warnings for people to stay "alert," which prompts Byrne to muse brilliantly about the nature of thought control, self-censorship and the mental hazards of suppressed feelings.
He has an amusing section about cultural stereotypes where he addresses the duality of English high- and low-culture:
The larger the front, the larger the back.
Through it all Byrne often returns to a fundamental question of why don't more cities and their inhabitants embrace the bicycle as a mode of transport. I strongly agree with his conclusion that for most, whether they live in New York or in Istanbul, it's a matter of social status.
Some will ask, "but isn't it dangerous, and where will I park my bike?" These questions get answered rapidly when there is a political will--or when the price of gas is five times what it is today. They are really just excuses, justifications for inaction--not real questions.
Byrne saves some of his most illuminated prose for a riff about our collective narrative. While visiting Manilla, he notes former Phillipine dictator Ferdinand Marcos carefully manipulated his public image and merged it with a national mythology.
Once "stories" like these are in place and accepted, one need only to supply the appropriate images and anecdotes to make them seem self-fulfilling and indisputable.
Living "in" a story, being part of a narrative, is much more satisfying than living without one.
He wonders about his own narrative. What about your "story?"
I enjoyed the ride with David. His prose is a lot like his spoken persona: witty, thoughtful and a bit disjointed.
For many years I found it surreal, amusing, and just downright weird to bike through dead zones, barren suburbs, or downtowns on the verge of becoming ruins...But the novelty has worn off a little, and now I am more drawn to destinations where I can bike on paths in parklands bordering on rivers and lakes rather than on shoulders of expressways sucking in fumes and risking my life.
Amen.
- As always, thank you for reading and stay in touch!
