Welcome David Byrne and His Amazing Folding Bicycle

David Byrne says "much of Seattle" is "vibrant and full of life." He wrote it down in black-and-white in his new book, Bicycle Diaries. But there is another paragraph that summons up Seattle, too.

There is often a highway along the waterfront in many towns. Before these highways were built, the waterfronts, already dead zones, were seen as the most logical places from which to usurp land for conversion into a concrete artery. Inevitably, little by little, the citizens of these towns become walled off from their own waterfronts, and the waterfronts become dead zones of yet a different kin--concrete dead zones of clean, swooping flyovers and access ramps that soon were filled with whizzing cars. Under these were abandoned shopping carts, homeless people, and piles of toxic waste. [...]

Much of  the time it turns out the cars are merely using these highways not to have access to businesses and residences in the nearby city, as might have been originally proposed, but to bypass that city entirely.

The book itself was drawn from Byrne's blogging (don't miss his take on the Kindle) and I suppose it's only fair to warn you that it's at least as much a diary as it is about traveling around the world's cities by folding bicycling. Luckily, David Byrne's diary is much more interesting, so far as public consumption goes, than yours or mine. Well, mine, anyway.

Byrne begins with a survey of "American Cities"--"Most U.S. cities are not very bike-friendly"--before tackling Berlin, Istanbul, Buenos Aires, Manila, Sydney, London, San Francisco, and New York. It's an idiosyncratic travel writing. Gypsy-like, Byrne peers deep into the soul of each place, and while familiar landmarks appear, they are often seen through an interpretive crystal ball.

The heavily illustrated book never quite breaks away from its blogged birth--the structure relies heavily on when the initial inspiration to write struck, and Byrne's head was clearly in vastly different stylistic spaces: Compare "Sydney. Hooley freaking dooley what a weird and gorgeous city!" with "Flying into Tegel Airport in Berlin I look down at the neatly ordered fields and roads--even in the surrounding forests the trees are in neat rows--and I think to myself how this entire country, the landscape, everything as far as one can see, has been ordered."

Biking around Berlin generates further discourses on German urban manicuring, Rudolf Hess, cultural identity, the demise of the CD, Thomas Hirschhorn's mannequin-hand art, and beauty and anti-beauty trends in art (with a short history of Vienna's actionist movement and Otto Muehl's sex commune--complete with photos).

Byrne also visits the Stasi Museum, ruminating on surveillance and the lifespan of retributive justice, and very casually mentions that the "two biggest self-deceptions of all are that life has a 'meaning' and that each of us is unique."

By contrast, the chapter on Manila is largely a history of the Imelda and the glory and glamor of the Marcos years--America's Camelot writ small. Then Byrne wanders into a brothel by accident. ("To be fair, not all western/Filipino relationships are necessarily about power or sexual fantasy.")

There is of course a lot about music, and meetings with musicians, planned and unplanned. In Greenwich Village, Byrne happens to hear the mother of Savion Glover sing at a jazz bar while waiting for a friend to go on. A few pages later, you're reading about the design of bike helmets. At some point you realize that this book never ends. Sure, there are 297 numbered pages, but there is no exit. You are, for better or worse, living in David Byrne's brain.