Bicycle Diaries

Forget Dos Equis Guy; David Byrne is my vote for The Most Interesting Man in the World. Where to begin (or end) with him?

His broadest public persona came thirty years ago as the singer, writer, and intellectual cornerstone for the Talking Heads. This band appeared in New York City in the mid-70s, during the time of Punk and Disco. But despite getting lumped by mindless critics into then-current paradigms, Byrne was always on his own path. Enamored of both heavy, complex beats, and Dylan-esque musings on modern city life, they produced over a six year period a number of performances which embedded permanently into the cultural psyche:

“Same as it ever was”

“This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco, this ain’t no fooling around.”

“Psycho killer, q’est que c’est?” Etc.

Their first two albums started out as slightly odd, beat-heavy pastiches which still resembled pop music of the time. But with “Fear of Music”, released in 1979, Byrne took the band into an uptight variant of proto-hip-hop. More spoken word than singing, but with substantial melodic background grounded by the husband-and-wife rhythm section of Jerry Harrison and Tina Weymouth, this strain really flowered with their next release, “Remain in Light”.

The centerpiece, “Once in a Lifetime”, asks a number of questions about the pull of the standard American Dream. “…you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife And you may ask yourself – Well … how did I get here?”. More revealing of Byrne’s true full talents, though, is “Seen and Not Seen”, a completely spoken track. He contemplates how, by force of will and consistency, he might change his facial structure into a more ideal form, then his personality would change to fit the new appearance, and he would become someone else, whom he hadn’t really set out to be.

Clearly, here is someone who is obsessively observant about the world around him, with a deep mind, but who operates with the sensibility of an artist. Over the years since Talking Heads faded away, he has remained centered on viewing and describing the world from his unique perspective, in all manner of media. Spoken word, photography, performance art, collaborative works with practitioners in other media, lectures, writing. He just can’t help himself; he must release all of the intricately evolved thoughts and feelings which flare up in him constantly. Luckily, he’s not just a performance or visual artist; he can also write. Not fluidly, and certainly not a novelist. But he doggedly, several times a month, has been adding to his online journal for the past six years.

His is not a blog, in the sense of frequent, minimally edited entries, but rather a collection of carefully researched, meticulously thought out essays, linked to the photos, stories and videos of the WWW. Really, you can open any of his entries, start reading at a random point, and be amazed at just what interests him and is going on inside his head. Just what we got hints of in his music.

Some of those entries have been collected and revised into “Bicycle Diaries”, published last fall. Except for the last chapter, and the epilogue, the “Bicycle” of the title takes a decidedly second place to the “Diaries”. This is a set of musings and critiques of cities around the world: London, Istanbul, Buenos Aires, Manila, Berlin, Sydney. And a number of American towns, San Francisco and New York most prominent. He travels frequently, sometimes to perform, sometimes to research projects, and sometimes apparently just to meet with other artists he has an interest in.

He goes to Manila after starting to write song-cycle about Imelda Marcos. He became interested in her background and how it meshed with the extreme intricacy of social levels within Filipino society. He visits Australia frequently, mostly as a tourist, because he likes the people and the land. Berlin attracts him at first as an isolated Western outpost within the Soviet bloc, and later, with freedom and its return as Germany’s center of power, for the blossoming cultural trends on display, and the contract of architecture between East and West. He goes to Buenos Aires to perform his current music, and ends up mesmerized by how the design of the city reflects the culture and vice versa.

In all these places, he perfunctorily starts with comments like, “San Francisco is philosophically and politically bike-friendly, but not geographically …” Since the 80s, he has got about cities primarily by bicycle, not for athletic or political reasons, but just because it seems practical to him. He takes a folding bicycle with him everywhere, and does not bother with usual bike clothing, just hikes up his pant leg and goes. Very little of the book centers on the bicycle as a means of transportation, much less transformation – his bike is very much in the background, seemingly no more important to him than his shoes.

His final chapter on New York, and the epilogue, do feature his efforts to improve cycling in that city, and comments on his life as a cyclist, which is certainly far different than mine as a triathlete, or mountain biker, of multi-day tourist. But I do bike commute, and connect with him on that level.

There are two key elements which aptly describe Byrne and partially explain the intelligence and remoteness of this book. Actually, these points come at the very start, and end. The book is without a dust jacket. The usual describing blurb and author photo and history are printed on the inside cover. The photo of Byrne shows him very neatly dressed, his usual short hair now mostly grey, his physique still trim. He has reading glasses in his breast pocket, and is seated in front of a floor-to-ceiling bookcase which seems filled mostly with thin monographs. He’s posed holding an unlit pipe (who smokes a pipe nowadays?!) in his left hand, and is resolutely staring into the distance to the camera’s right, not a hint of a smile anywhere on his face. Very cold, cerebral, thoughtful, and unapproachable. Where is the man who went wild on stage and screeched for his fans on myriad album cuts so long ago? Read the book, and we find he’s still in there, and always was.

His final words put a coda on that image. “Observing and engaging in a city’s life – even for a reticent and often shy person like me – is one of life’s great joys. Being a social creature – it is part of what it means to be human.”

If you want a flavor of the musings this book is filled with, check out his (as of this writing) most recent journal entry. But this book is a treasure; you can literally open any page at random, select any paragraph, and become immediately engrossed, wondering at what it must be like to live with those thoughts of his 24/7. Clearly a man who, even when alone, is never at a lost for entertainment and fascination.