I just read this amazing book—Bicycle Diaries—by David Byrne and I feel like I’ve been to some great cities—Berlin, Istanbul, Buenos Aires. OK, not really. Nothing takes the place of actually going somewhere, but I did thoroughly enjoy being transported, in mind, to these cities through Byrne’s musings on his experiences moving about by bicycle.
He’s right when he says that nothing gives the unique vantage point of being on a bike. You get to really be among the life of the city, just a little above pedestrian level in terms of sight lines, but right in the mix. You get to shimmy through traffic, navigate narrow, winding streets that would be a nightmare by car. I love it!
When I lived in DC, I commuted to work and around town on my bike. It was the best. I did a bit of this in Chicago, too, but didn’t get into it at that point in my life. It was only in DC that I really was all bike all the time. DC is a great city for biking, on one hand, because it’s pretty small and the parts you’d want to go to are even smaller. But, the drivers in DC are rude and not particularly bike-friendly folks, as a whole. Everybody is so important. One morning on my way to work, I somehow wiped out. I fell off my bike and actually wrecked it. Looking back, I think maybe I was actually hit by a car. I mean, how would I just wipe out, out of the blue? It was pretty early in the morning, like 630 or something. I was on the way to the gym. Oh well. I survived.
In his book, Byrne makes all kinds of cool, thought-provoking observations, which I’ve taken the liberty of noting below. But, please go out and get this book. It’s the kind of book that’s sure to hit everyone in a slightly different way. In later posts, I may try to expound on what some of these most memorable snippets meant to me.
It sounds like some form of meditation, and in a way it is. Performing a familiar task, like driving a car or riding a bicycle, puts one into a zone that is not too deep or involving. The activity is repetitive, mechanical, and it distracts and occupies the conscious mind, or at least part of it in a way that is just engaging enough but not too much—it doesn’t cause you to be caught off guard. It facilitates a state of mind that allows some but not too much of the unconscious to bubble up.
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…the fate of the CD, and of recorded music in general. Stefan [Sagemeister] has just been to South Korea, which he describes as being a few years ahead of us in some respects—he says no one there buys CDs anymore. In fact, when he wanted to buy a CD copy of something he’d heard he had to go to a specialty shop to obtain it—as one would in Europe or North or South America to buy a recording on vinyl.
We wonder about the fate of the images and design associated with LPs and CDs—something he’s been involved with quite a few times. He reminds me that the linking of image and music is a result of the fact that vinyl scratched easily, so it needed sturdy board packaging. And until relatively recently even those packages didn’t come with images, credits, liner notes, etc.—music packaging was originally generic. However, I found out that when Alex Steinweiss designed an early album sleeve for Beethoven’s Eroica symphony, the package caused sales to increase 800 percent. So design is nothing to sneeze at…But it might soon be back to just the audio without all the rest of it thanks to the digital world, where many folks buy digital versions of just the one song they like…
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The two biggest self-deceptions of all are that life has a “meaning” and that each of us in unique. One can see that evolving a built-in obscuring mechanism for those depressing and inevitable insights might be of practical use…
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One theory regarding language is that it is primarily a useful tool born out of a need for control…what’s amazing to me is that if we accept this idea, then what may have begun as an instrument of social and economic control has now been internalized by us as a mark of being civilized.
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Living “in” a story, being part of a narrative, is much more satisfying than living without one. I don’t always know what narrative it is, because I’m living my life and not always reflecting on it…
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Creative work is…a machine that digs down and finds stuff, emotional stuff that will someday be raw material that can be used to produce more stuff, stuff like itself—clay to be available for future use.
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Any kind of taxonomy might be as good or valid as any other, though we might not know for sure until some time in the future when a scientific paper “discovers” that hexagonal or bulbous shapes, or similar colors or textures are functions that in some way determine content, in the way that the form of a DNA molecule defines and is its function. Form doesn’t follow function in that case—form is function.
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The past is not a prologue to the present; it is the present—morphed a bit, stretched, distorted, and with different emphasis. It’s a structurally similar, though very much contorted, version of the present. Therefore in a sense, time—history—can, at least in our heads, flow in either direction, because deeply, structurally nothing has really changed. We think we’re going in a line through time, making progress, advancing, but we might be going in circles.
What we call history could be viewed as a record of how basic social forms have distorted or morphed. It simply changes shape, but the underlying patterns and behaviors are always there, under the surface—as they are in biological forms.
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