Bicycle Diaries

David Byrne – yes, that David Byrne – is a committed cyclist and takes his folding bicycle with him whenever and wherever he travels. And what we have here is a collection of gentle, sometimes rambling chapters describing his cycling in the USA (San Francisco and New York) and around the world (Sydney, Manila, Istanbul, Buenos Aires, Berlin and London).

There’s not a lot about music. You won’t get the lowdown on Talking Heads, or Brian Eno or Bono. Instead he describes cities. He talks about the car and pollution. He wonders what it would take to get more people onto more bicycles and why they resist doing so. (He suspects his daughter won’t do it because it isn’t cool; she should try living in the Netherlands.) He writes about the mayor of Bogotá, Enrique Peňalosa, and his transformation of that city into a pedestrian-friendly place to live.

And because it’s also a collection of diary entries, it goes off at tangents inspired by a location he’s visiting. There’s an absolutely fascinating five or six pages on the way we look at ‘chaotic’ art produced by professionals such as Picasso, who could draw a straight line when he wanted to, and artists whose minds or bodies prevent them from producing anything but chaos. But it comes from them, and from the strange unknown, creative space in all of us, and for that very reason has something to offer.

Nothing to do with bicycles, but he wrote about it because a bicycle took him to the exhibition. And once there he, like I now do from reading about it, started looking at the world in a new, more positive, way.

It’s a nice book.