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'Bicycle Diaries,' by David Byrne
By Chris Carlsson, San Francisco Chronicle, 20 September 2009 [Link]
David Byrne is just a few years older than me, and from his early days with the band Talking Heads to his later work as an international musicologist and producer, he's been a presence in my cultural life. His new book is a personal, thoughtful odyssey across a dozen cities, places that his busy career has taken him, and places that he in turn has taken his bicycle.
Reading "Bicycle Diaries," I was revisiting cities and even museum exhibitions that I toured in the past few years, apparently missing our hero by only days or weeks. He starts out in London, where cycling is slowly but surely expanding its presence in the traffic mix (just this April I was surprised at how many more cyclists I saw crisscrossing the city than I'd seen two years earlier). But his book only reports on cycling conditions in passing, and if you're a fan of bike tech, or any kind of gearhead, this is not the book for you.
On the other hand, if you're a cyclist who appreciates the bicycle for the ways it helps to erode the atomization and social mediations imposed by cars, mass media and modern life in general, then you'll find in Byrne's ruminations a kindred spirit and a critical thinker who doesn't stop at the first obvious insight. As a free thinker, he doesn't always land in places that I agreed with, but his paths were enjoyable and provocative, not to mention quirky and personal.
In most cities he travels to, Byrne visits art museums and artists, which takes him into some extended meditations on the role of artists and how they fit into the economic life of cities. He comments with awe on an exhibition at the Tate Modern in London that presented printed pages from the 1930s magazine USSR in Construction. The magazine was put together by brilliant artists whose influence on design and print media continues to the present.
In Berlin Byrne is amazed by the wide, dedicated bike lanes and courteous, law-abiding cyclists and pedestrians. While there, he bicycles to a remnant of the Black Forest and compares it to our collective fairy tale/Hollywood ideas about old forests, and feels sad that his own "visual reference for an unmediated forest derives from images in fiction and movies." He takes the saga of returning Jews and Westerners, getting back their pre-Cold War properties, to muse on bigger questions of immigration and justice, declaring that "it is increasingly hard for anyone anywhere to say 'I belong here and you don't.' Human migrations have never stopped, they're endless, and mingling is tough, but it can often be fruitful - a source of innovation and creativity." Important and difficult questions: "When does the clock for justice and reparation run out, if ever? ... Is anyone native to anywhere? I think, in most cases, not."
In Istanbul and Buenos Aires, Byrne cycles around alone, wondering why nobody else gets out of the gridlocked traffic to glide through on a bicycle. He concludes it's a combination of an absent political will and a cultural abhorrence of bicycling. It may just be a matter of time, as bicycling is once again an ascendant transit choice across the planet. It was, after all, a pretty lonely activity even here in San Francisco as recently as the early 1980s.
A bicycle rider gets to the odd corners, the unreachable neighborhoods, the seedier districts, and from these locations different ideas about history and development emerge. San Franciscans will appreciate Byrne's extended riff on how freeways wrecked cities and waterfronts across America, with concrete arteries walling off cities from the waterways that were their original reason for being founded. The highways weren't designed to access the cities anyway, but often to allow motorists to "bypass the city entirely. The highways allowed people to flee the cities and to isolate themselves in bedroom communities. ..." But the same urban design makes the cyclist or pedestrian "feel unwanted, like an interloper, like you don't belong."
Byrne visits San Francisco, sort of, but most of his chapter has him in Silicon Valley or in the northern counties. He recalls busking in Berkeley in the mid-1970s, when he realized (like most of his contemporaries) that he "was more interested in irony than utopia."
Byrne ends his book back in New York, where he organizes a daylong forum for ordinary people, biking advocates, city planners and police to discuss biking as a means of transport. Knowing his own cultural history well, he makes sure to integrate art and entertainment, asserting "if culture, humor, and politics can mix, making our city a better place to live can be fun." Ultimately, he advocates bicycling as a good way to observe and engage in a city's life - even for a reticent and often shy person like himself. The pleasure of cycling overlaps with basic needs for social interaction, and if a guy in his mid-50s can find happiness on a bike, shouldn't it be possible for most of us?
This article appeared on page F - 4 of the San Francisco Chronicle
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