David Byrne's new book Bicycle Diaries is an enjoyable hybrid of several narrative forms. It's part travelogue, part analysis of urban planning, part memoir, part philosophical wandering, and part persuasive essay on the benefits of bicycle travel in big cities.
Byrne has been traveling by bike in New York for upwards of 20 years, and he usually brings a folding bicycle with him on his travels, using the bike instead of taxis, subways or buses to get around in the city during his visits. Often times, due to gridlock, he is able to arrive at a meeting or destination quicker by bicycle than by other means. Aside from this pragmatic benefit, Byrne writes that bicycle travel in the big city, whether it be New York, Berlin, or Manila, affords him a deeper sense of the pulse of the city: what it's people are doing, what's important there and how the city lives and breathes. A commute that would normally be fairly mundane and insulated in a taxi or by subway becomes a direct sensory connection to life in the city when the trip is made by bicycle. Of course, this comes with its dangers as well, Byrne tells us: you can get lost, you can end up in dangerous neighborhoods, you can get mugged (this happened to a friend of his).
As a famous musician and artist, Byrne spends a good deal of time traveling, and so Bicycle Diaries is divided into chapters that focus on what he is doing and thinking in various cities around the world, and generally his thoughts issue forth from one or more commutes he makes on his bicycle. So, in Berlin, he reflects on the re-unification of Germany--he visits the fascinating, absurd and terrifying Stasi Museum, a reminder the of pre-unified East German Soviet-Bloc oppressiveness. What he sees at the Stasi Museum reminds him of Stasiland, a book he'd recently read, as well as the abuses of surveillance by governments (including the post 9-11 US), the use of language as a means of control in oppressive and democratic states, and the rationalizations of tyrants, oppressors and their sympathizers. In Istanbul, he observes the tension between East and West in the rapidly declining, wooden Ottoman architecture and the ugly, Modern (International Style) apartment buildings. Byrne reflects on the ambivalence between East and West, "Modern" and "Pre-Modern" in Turkey's attempts to join the European Union. In Manila, he writes about his research for Here Lies Love, a CD based on the life of Imelda Marcos, and her complex relationship with class, power, politics and the people of the Philippines. He is a musician and artist, so invariably his thoughts turn to the art and music being made in each city. But as an artist, he is primarily concerned with how people live with each other in the myriad successful, sloppy, ambivalent, self-destructive and occasionally disastrous ways.
Byrne's observations and reflections are wide-ranging to say the least, and he often goes from description to philosophical questioning in the matter of a sentence or two. It's an exhilarating feeling, to engage with someone as observant and questioning of his surroundings as Byrne is. Maybe that's the best thing an artist can help us with: giving us an example of how to observe, reflect-upon- and make decisions about- the world we take for granted (regardless of where we live).
