Travel Book Review ~ Bicycle Diaries by David Byrne

Bicycle Diaries by David Byrne.  First published 2009 by Penguin USA. ISBN 0571241034. 297 pages. Click here to see if we have a copy of this book in stock.

I snapped Bicycle Diaries off the bookshop shelf as soon as I saw the author and title, I didn't even bother to read the cover blurb. I'm a huge fan of David Byrne from his work with Talking Heads, as well as his movies (I must be the only person in the world to claim David Byrne's True Stories as one of my all time favourite movies). So yes, this 'book review' is biased to begin with.

David Byrne has been cycling around his home city of New York, and the world, while touring for the last thirty years. Bicycle Diaries is a collection of thoughts and reflections from his diary entries made after cycling in cities including London, Berlin, Beunos Aires, Istanbul, Manila, New York and San Fancisco.

Needless to say I loved this book to bits.  Being an obsessed urban hiker I connected with the common theme of ambling around cities as an observer, and the flow of thoughts that such wandering and observing inspires. I must admit I had to push myself through a few sections of the book that were a little highbrow for a yob such as myself. On the other hand my partner Alison, who is far more cultured than I, skipped through the book in utter delight.

As with all my reviews, I could blab on endlessly about the how good the book is, and you would have no reason to believe me because I would really like to sell a copy to you; so I select a favourite passage or two from the book and leave it up to you...

The Saint of Unemployment (Buenos Aires, Argentina.

I ride farther out from the center of town. I don't have a destination. I stumble upon a feria - a village fair - this one an outdoor festival that celebrates gaucho and country culture. It takes place in a small plaza out in the suburbs. On the way I pass a queue of people. One sees only the line, no destination or end - just people standing patiently, and occasionally inching forward, but toward what is unclear. This line is so long that it disappears somewhere down the road, and where it ends is too far away to tell. The line snakes through a succession of neighbourhoods, in and out of small town centers. It disappears from my view and then incredibly it suddenly appears again. It's four kilometres long at least. Half a million people or more, so I am told later, waiting to see San Cayetano, the patron saint of the unemployed. This is the saint that people pray to when they are in need of work, and today is his day. All the local roads in the area around the church where the saint is housed are blocked off by the police. The people come to pray for work, for employment. Some of them come carrying a few stalks of DayGlo-dyed wheat, which they will take home in remembrance, while others leave with nothing.

City of Vampires - Buenos Aires, Argentina.

...Socially, this town appears to be like New York - late shows, people out till morning light - but in some ways its even more a late night hang than New York is or ever was. A vast majority of restaurants are open here till at least four AM - many more than in New York. And the streets are packed at three thirty! The movie theatres have regular shows starting at one thirty AM, and these movies are not Rocky Horry Picture Show, or some typical midnight movie - even El Ray Levin (The Lion King) was letting out at three AM! Then, after the movies let out the audience inevitably goes out to eat or to have a drink. Whole families are out strolling in the middle of the night! When do they sleep? As in the larger cities of Spain, people eat late - never before nine thirty - and then they might catch a show that starts in the wee hours.

A city of vampires. Do any of them have day jobs? Do they keep these hours all week? Are there two separate societies - night people and day people? Two shifts, two urban populations that never meet or cross paths? Are they using coke or massive amounts of yerba mate tea to stay up? Or have they snuck in a little siesta after work while the rest of us were having dinner on New York time?

I fade around four AM and go back to the hotel to crash.

Emergent Architecture - Manila, Philippines

Binondo is the area I end up biking to today. Karaoke machines are everywhere. Right on the street! Even little stalls in this funky old city centre have them. This is a neighbourhood of winding streets and vendors, many with tiny one table emporiums. The traffic slows to a crawl here, or is relegated to bikes and little trucks that bring supplies and goods to the vendors. Regular traffic seems to avoid these areas, as the narrow streets are too crowded with pedestrians and the overflow from the stalls inevitably slows the movement of motor vehicles. Here the custom decorated jeepneys are the largest vehicles on the streets and even they can only inch forward while attempting to pick up passengers, but I can move faster than most of them on my bike. The area is a great place for walking too - and for Christmas gifts (at this time of year), fresh fish, medicines - tables. How many kinds of things can be stacked in little pyramids of common denominator in the world of stuff?

Why is it that all third-world markets are structurally more or less the same? I am reminded of similar ones in Kuala Lumpur, Cartenega, Marrakech, Salvador and Oaxaca. It's almost as if these markets were all designed by the same person the world over, as if they take very similar forms everywhere. The human scale and the pleasant chaos must be part of an unconcious, though thoroughly evolved, plan, as are the smells and the piles of refuse here and there. One of the stall owners sweeps the rainwater and mud out of the street with a broom. This is evidence to me of an unwritten layout, a subconscious form, and an invisible map which extends even to an unwritten system of self-maintenance. I suppose this recurring pattern and structure emerges because human scale automatically self regulates the manner in which similar goods are best sold, how they are most efficiently displayed, and where. It is as if some genetic architectural propensity exists in us, that guides us, subtly and invisibly, and how to best organise first a kiosk, then a stall, and from there add incrementally as our innate instincts guide us until soon enough there exists a whole marketplace and neighbourhood. Some tiny part of our DNA tells us how to make and maintain places like this in the same way that genetic codes tell the body how to make an eye or liver. That architect who designed all those markets the world over is us. Could it be that our genes tell us not just how to make ourselves but how to make the built external world? I'm glad the whole city hasn't been malled, as some guidebooks claim.

On art:

Another great artist, Frances Alys, a Belgian who now lives in Mexico, paid five hundred Peruvians to form, side by side, a huge line, and they were instructed to shovel the sand of a massive dune that lies in the desert south of Lima as they inched forward, step-by-step, continually shoveling. Theoretically they were moving the whole dune, imperceptibly, as the massive human chain of laborers made its way across the hill. "Maximum effort - minimum results" was his catchphrase summarizing the effort.

I assume that in some way these works are a comment on both the exploitation of the local labor force and the gulf between rich and poor in many Latin American countries. The exchange for cash for absurd or loaded behavior is sort of funny, and more than a little sad. In an art context it's shocking - but one becomes used to it on the streets, where people willingly perform tedious and repetitive tasks for very little money. It reminds me a little of bum fights - a rumoured L.A. practice in which young men would pay homeless guys on skid row to fight one another and then they'd circulate videos of the results. It was a debasing, disrespectful, and degrading way to treat other people. Getting cash for shoveling sand or memorizing a meaningless phrase may be disrespectful, but it's hardly as demeaning as getting punched for cash.

Bicycle Diaries by David Byrne.  First published 2009 by Penguin USA. ISBN 0571241034. 297 pages. Click here to see if we have a copy of this book in stock.