So many people want to be omnicelebrities: Rappers want to be
fashion designers, actors want to be musicians and vice versa, and
everybody’s a writer. But David Byrne is one of the few who succeed. He makes excellent music (duh), films
(True Stories), books (The New Sins), furniture (his
dresser-chairs), and PowerPoint presentations (“Envisioning Emotional
Epistemological Information”). He’s a genius and that’s all there is to
it.
But his new Bicycle Diaries, though it has an attractive
cover, is only so-so. Byrne writes about riding his bicycle in cities
around the world—New York, Berlin, Manila, Istanbul, and
others—and what he does while visiting them. You’d think David
Byrne would have a fascinating life (and he sometimes does), but a lot
of it is standard-issue travel-journal stuff. A representative passage:
“I ride my bike along the bike lanes here in Berlin and it all seems
very civilized, pleasant, and enlightened. No cars park or drive in the
bike lanes and the cyclists don’t ride on the streets or on the
sidewalks either.” Noted.
Some of his stories tell you something you don’t already
know—about an art/sex/cult commune in Germany, the rent boys of
the Philippines—but they’re spread too thin and are often such
flat descriptions that they don’t justify the rest of the
LiveJournal-quality content. (But he’ll be talking at a forum at
Town Hall about bikes and cities, along with urban theorist Mark
Hinshaw, the executive director of the Bicycle Alliance of Washington,
and some others. It sounds promising.)
Byrne’s The New Sins/Los Nuevos Pecados, on the other hand,
is fantastic. Created in 2001 as part of the Valencia Biennial in
Spain, The New Sins describes itself as a “laptop for the soul,”
but it’s really an I Ching for weird people that condemns virtues and
contains strange charts, photographs, and weird metaphysics that are
cousin to the Log Lady’s in Twin Peaks. Here’s the entry
condemning sweetness: “The voice of sweetness is the snake that offered
the apple. The soft murmurs, the whispered nothings, the gentle
words—they still the heart and cover poison with sugar. Sweetness
Dwells in the heart. The Heart is like the Sea, wherein dwells the
Leviathan, and creeping things innumerable. The Heart is like the
Egyptian temples—full of spiders, serpents, and snakes. It is a
treasure house of sin. A gilded palace in a lake of fire.” The facing
page is a photograph of three rows of ominous-looking pink rabbit
Peeps. It’s marvelous. 
