Bicycle Diaries

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Overview

A round-the-world bicycle tour with one of the most original artists of our day.

Urban bicycling has become more popular than ever as recession- strapped, climate-conscious city dwellers reinvent basic transportation. In this wide-ranging memoir, artist/musician David Byrne-who has relied on a bike to get around New York City since the early 1980s-relates his adventures as he pedals through an engages with some of the world's major cities. From Buenos Aires to Berlin, he meets a range of people both famous and ordinary, shares his thoughts on art, fashion, music, globalization, and the ways that many places are becoming more bike-friendly. Bicycle Diaries is an adventure on two wheels ...

See more details below

More About This Book

Overview

A round-the-world bicycle tour with one of the most original artists of our day.

Urban bicycling has become more popular than ever as recession- strapped, climate-conscious city dwellers reinvent basic transportation. In this wide-ranging memoir, artist/musician David Byrne-who has relied on a bike to get around New York City since the early 1980s-relates his adventures as he pedals through an engages with some of the world's major cities. From Buenos Aires to Berlin, he meets a range of people both famous and ordinary, shares his thoughts on art, fashion, music, globalization, and the ways that many places are becoming more bike-friendly. Bicycle Diaries is an adventure on two wheels conveyed with humor, curiosity, and humanity.

Editorial Reviews

From Barnes & Noble

If you encounter David Byrne in New York or, for that matter, in Paris, Istanbul, or Buenos Aires, chances are the co-founder of the Talking Heads will be pedaling on a bike. Ever since the early eighties, this versatile musician, visual artist and filmmaker has been getting from Point A to Point B on his convenient, lightweight, and, as it turns out, ecologically-friendly bike. In Bicycle Diaries, which features cycling jaunts around Berlin, Manila, San Francisco, and all the aforementioned cities, Byrne proves that his rides haven't been just mindless exercises. In fact, they provide the stimulus for observations on a plethora of subjects, including cultural differences, urban planning, music, visual arts, globalization, and even the collapse of civilizations. Fast-paced road trips; now in paperback.

Geoff Nicholson
Inevitably the diary format gives the book a random, scattershot quality: Byrne is in no sense a "programmatic" bike rider, and he admits he's sometimes just skimming over the surface of the cultures he encounters. Even so, his interests and activities—cutting-edge art exhibitions, rock festivals, a subversive PowerPoint presentation about PowerPoint presentations, a belly dance party—and certainly his personality are singular enough to give the book consistency and coherence…The book, then, is partly about cycling but also about whatever Byrne happens to have on his mind at the time, and fortunately a lot of it is quite interesting.
—The New York Times
More Reviews (2) Fewer Reviews
From The Critics
…despite the title, this is no travel diary. Byrne's reflections are as varied as the countries he visits: He muses on everything from urban planning to bike helmets to art criticism to Latin music, often on his bike (but not always). Even if you don't own a bike and have no plans to mount one, you'll pedal through the pages of Bicycle Diaries in no time; the book is full of musings by a compelling eccentric.
—The Washington Post
The Barnes & Noble Review
When David Byrne stops moving, does he fall over? And when stationary, is he liable to be found leaning carefully against a wall? Conversely, does his bicycle make unannounced domestic appearances -- by the fireside, perhaps, on a rainy day, or near the kitchen table when food is laid out? Fans of the great Flann O’Brien will know where I’m going with this: If Byrne, as recorded in Bicycle Diaries, has truly explored the world’s great cities en vélo, then according to the theory of “atomic interchange” propounded in O’Brien’s The Third Policeman he must by now be part bicycle, and his bicycle part Byrne.

Let us examine the case. Bicycle Diaries takes the form of a light travelogue or pedalodyssey, with Byrne -- ex-frontman of Talking Heads, current artistic all-rounder -- gliding on his fold-up two-wheeler through Istanbul or Berlin or Sydney, popping into galleries, playing music, talking to interesting people, thinking thoughts, reading books, and then recording his impressions as to the essential nature of the place and its degree of bicycleability (these last two quantities being not unrelated.) So with The Third Policeman in mind, we must ask: After all this international pedaling about, and so much hard atomic contact between rider and seat, exactly what percentage of David Byrne is still David Byrne? His prose style, certainly, would seem to suggest a preponderance of bicycle-atoms. “Most often when listening and not dancing,” he writes in the “London” chapter of Bicycle Diaries, “I choose music with singing as I find that the arc of a melody, combined with harmonies and a rhythmic pulse, can be incredibly emotionally involving. We call these songs.” Yes, I suppose we do. Elsewhere Byrne tellingly refers to humans as “poor little meat puppets” and offers the speculation that “while religions might indeed be a lot of superstition as well as being an unfortunate excuse for violence and countless horrors they might also serve a purpose.” Pure bicycle-speak.

But this is disrespectful, isn’t it. Byrne is a musical visionary, a great lyricist too, and as far as I’m concerned he can write whatever the hell kind of book he wants to write. Besides, the functional and mildly alienated tone of his prose actually works rather well in this context: his is a bicycling mind, with a point of view -- as he explains in the Introduction -- “faster than a walk, slower than a train, often slightly higher than a person.” And if, in this light swoon of two wheels whirring, some of the things that occur to him are a little banal, well, others are quite interesting. In Buenos Aires, for example, pondering the strange absence of bicycles from a city so temperate, flat, and cleanly laid out, he concludes that the answer is simply “cultural abhorrence”: “The cycling meme hasn’t been dropped into the mix here, or it never took hold,” he muses, before pedalling off into an excursus on the theories of Jared Diamond.

Also: The world is fascinating. Byrne in Bicycle Diaries is the complete postmodern tourist, open to everything, concepts at his fingertips, keenly -- but not too keenly -- interested in a certain hovering, numinous sensation that he gets around shrines and places of worship, and so he makes a very good guide. In the recession-bitten town of Millvale, Pennsylvania, just outside Pittsburgh, he finds a Croatian church containing tempera wall paintings by the midcentury artist Maxo Vanka. The imagery is explosive: factories belch infernal smoke; angels weep as a top-hatted industrialist peruses the stock quotes; the Virgin, her face a stark grimace of compassion, separates two struggling soldiers, while Jesus takes a bayonet to the side. Smutty with Allegheny Valley coal dust, the murals knock Byrne out: he dubs Vanka “the Diego Rivera of Pittsburgh.”

Byrne also spends some time in Manila, where in contrast to Vanka’s devotion he finds the relics of secular idolatry -- gauzy, soft-core homages to Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, painted dreamscapes designed to propel the blighted First Couple into the realm of national mythology. Not that we ourselves are immune to such things, Byrne is quick to note: “The desire to find a slot for oneself in the collective national psyche runs deep. George Bush and Ronald Reagan were often photographed wearing Western clothes despite one being a New England WASP and the other a Hollywood movie star.”

So much for neutral observer Byrne: there’s also plugged-in Byrne, international art scene Byrne, whose connections in each city tend to be deep in that city’s culture sector. (“My friend C and I have lunch with two youngish guys who run an art gallery here...”) And then, of course, there’s bicycling Byrne, threading his way with spindly, helmeted heroism past every bus-shaped Scylla and whirling Charybdis-like junction that the modern city can throw at him. Biking à la Byrne means ecology, geekiness, a way of piercing into the world: skateboarding for the cerebral, if you like. The bicycle, fundamentally, is a machine in two dimensions -- which is why we appreciate so heartily the sight of a fat man on a bicycle. Byrne is not fat: he is tall and pointy and possessed of a certain angelic remoteness. But he loves to ride, and look at things, and he thinks, moreover, that the hour of the bicycle may be upon us. He applauds the bike racks sensibly installed on San Francisco’s Muni buses; “New Yorkers,” he ventures, “are at the point where they might, given the chance and opportunity, consider a bicycle as a valid means of transportation.” He is very interested in a new prototype helmet that can be slipped inside various “skins”: “a warm woolen skin with earflaps for cold winters, a porous mesh skin for hot summer.” He feels the cold, and he feels the heat, and he thinks about his fellow beings. More man than bicycle after all. --James Parker

James Parker is the author of Turned On: A Biography of Henry Rollins (Cooper Square Press), and a correspondent for The Atlantic.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780670021147
  • Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
  • Publication date: 9/17/2009
  • Pages: 320
  • Product dimensions: 5.30 (w) x 8.40 (h) x 1.10 (d)

Meet the Author

David Byrne is cofounder of the music group the Talk Heads as well as a visual artist. He has released several solo albums in addition to collaborations with Twyla Tharp, Robert Wilson, and Brian Eno. He lives and bikes in New York City.
Customer Reviews
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  • Posted December 24, 2009

    Thought-provoking and entertaining.

    This book challenges our preconceptions and delves into the mechantions which create or destroy successful urban communitites. It also reflects on art as accepted and sold by the establishment and questions the foundation of ingrained assumptions and prejudice.

    4 out of 5 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted September 16, 2010

    Not a cycling book

    This is not a cycling book, despite the name. It's just his observations on the places he's been. Coincidentally, he rides a little folding bike around, but that has nothing to do with what he writes. So don't expect an account of his many bike rides. If that's what you want, you'll be sorely disappointed. I was.

    2 out of 4 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted February 1, 2012

    Obnoxious

    I thought this book was boring and pretentious and the author came across as if he was preaching to us.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted January 4, 2012

    Very insightful

    I was given this book by my girlfriend because of my interests in the Talking Heads and cycling. However, after reading it, I can say that I would have enjoyed this book immensely even if I did not have those interests. Being in the diary format, it does delve quite a lot into Mr. Byrne's personal insights and feelings on many things; urban life, culture, music, and of course cycling. This last topic, despite the title of the book, is surprisingly less present than one would think. Despite this, I found The Bicycle Diaries to be a very intriguing and thought-provoking read.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted December 5, 2011

    Fine By Mr

    I enjoyed this very much. Byrnes unique voice & honesty in his perspective is always refreshing in this world of competing cleverness & cynisism.

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  • Posted November 1, 2011

    Not Just Bicycling

    I bought this book because I wanted to read David Byrne's experiences cycling in different cities around the world. While I got a flavor for that, just as much of the book is spent on Byrne's personal political, social and moral beliefs. That's OK, but not what I expected from a book titled "Bicycle Diaries." Perhaps Byrne could have titled the book "It's Not About the Bike" ... oh wait....

    0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted September 25, 2011

    more from this reviewer

    Entertaining stories and perspectives

    Byrne's unique perspective makes for interesrting and entertaining stories.

    0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted December 27, 2009

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    Posted September 26, 2009

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    Posted September 26, 2009

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    Posted June 5, 2011

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    Posted December 1, 2009

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    Posted December 12, 2009

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    Posted December 15, 2009

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    Posted August 28, 2009

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    Posted November 10, 2009

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    Posted October 9, 2009

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    Posted December 27, 2011

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