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. 
