One of David Byrne's Bike Racks, which can be found throughout NYC
This has to be the fifth post out of the 120 posts that is on David Byrne, which is overkill, but I’m very excited to get The Bicycle Diaries in the mail. Am I wrong to hope that it is like a Walter Benjaminesque mediation on cities, as he bikes through NYC, London, Buenos Aries, Istanbul, Berlin and beyond? Am I wrong to hope that it could be a companion piece to Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City? Perhaps I will use it in Urban Sociology soon…
Our values and hopes are sometimes awfully embarrassingly easy to read. They’re right there – in the storefronts, museums, temples, shops, and office buildings and in how these structures interrelate, or sometimes don’t… Riding a bike through all this is like navigating the collective neural pathways of some vast global mind.
