kip/bot/blog

Just started reading David Byrne’s Bicycle Diaries this morning. The book, which has all the charm of David Byrne, has a great story to it. Byrne started riding his bike as a way to stop dealing with cabs, get a little exercise, and as a superior way of going to clubs to hear music.

Eventually, after discovering the folding bike, he began travelling and touring with a bike and riding around the cities that he visited. (He blogs about his biking now.) He found that, while on his bike, he was:

more connected to the life on the streets than I would have inside a car or in some form of public transport: I could stop whenever I wanted to, it was often (very often) faster than a car . . . and I didn’t have to follow any set route.
…
This point of view — faster than a walk, slower than a train, often slightly higher than a person — became my panoramic window on much of the world over the last thirty years — and it still is. It’s a big window and it looks out on a mainly urban landscape. … Through this window I catch glimpses of the mind of my fellow man, as expressed in the cities he lives in. Cities, it occurred to, are physical manifestations of our deepest beliefs and our often unconscious thoughts

The other urban thing is a nifty sticker campaign, by graphic designer Mike Joyce. The sticker reads “More Jane Jacobs, Less Marc Jacobs”.

Sad little footnote. Lots of people started defending Marc Jacobs to him. Worse still, lots of people asked who Jane Jacobs is. We don’t have a contemporary urban critic who celebrates city life . . . Steven Johnson is doing some of that, but I think we lose that voice to his technology and science history writing.

Just saw in his blog that David Byrne has published/will publish Bicycle Diaries an account of his biking around his hometown of NYC and around countries where he’s touring and travelling. It seems kind of cool — after getting hooked on biking in NYC, he started taking a folding bike with him on his travels. I used to work on 12th and Broadway and would see Byrne fairly regularly on his bike — he was elegant, cool, looking at everything with that sense-of-wonder smile. Can’t wait to see the book. (I also saw George Plimpton and Spalding Gray (RIP) in the neighborhood a lot. Plimpton rode what we now seek out as a vintage bike with a ridiculous white basket with a blue flower on the front).

Interesting sidenote: Byrne’s book has already been published in Serbia and the UK, but will be published in mid-September quickly followed by a half-dozen other countries. One of those stars more beloved abroad than here.

Finally, here’s a video from WSJ online of Byrne’s partipation in the bike rack contest that he judged and participated in:

In a crowded subway, this was sitting on a seat. For forty minutes, a stream of people eagerly approached the empty seat, spotted the napkin, momentarily considered moving it/asking about it before deciding to stand.

I’ve been very pissy about the small town == real comments recently (I grew up in a small town, now I live in NYC, have a trailer upstate on five acres and they’re all real to me.) But this incident was just one in a stream of “I love my city” proof points.