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One thing with regards to cycling that I ofttimes associate with addiction is the tendency to push it further. As with bike maintenance and cycling itself, the mutual exercise is to push it to The Edge, even if we can’t candidly say what The Edge in truth is because not a single soul has yet come out of it alive. In any case, any cyclist may begin with an entry-level bike, like say a Shimano Sora drive train. He then finds out what a P5k divergence amongst a Shimano Sora and Tiagra bike parts may do to his cycling performance, so that he takes to upgrading his bike all the way to the DuraAce group set. The same holds unfeigned in cycling. Almost always cycling has been in regards to pain and misery, which most people effortlessly recognize. But what they forget is the pleasure that a body gets from cycling. I don’t know in regards to drug addiction but I’m beauteous sure that cyclists are not all stupid to sweat and suffer for nothing. There ought to be something in it that is, at the very least, likeable. But when do you say enough? I wouldn’t want to be caught alive saying that while in the middle of a harsh 100-mile bike push. But perhaps it is all right. After all, I am not into competitory cycling. Still it’s hard to think regarding it. What is more disturbing is the modify in modus vivendi that cycling has brought upon me, and to friends I have known through cycling. If I learned anything from college, it is that there is a thin line that separates sideline from addiction. And we are walking that very thin line, finding truth as we did in the following: Your bike has more mileage that your car. You got rid of your La-Z-Boy to accommodate the bike inside your room You turn into a morning person. And habitually make out before sunup, like it is night. You see girl cyclists second, their bikes first. You know what they mean when someone is being a “pain in the ass.” You almost always need three extra servings of rice. You know where the best places in your neighborhood are, to bike as well as to eat. You don’t eat, you devour. Your skin color is only a little fairer than the village idiot’s. You think that 44-36-40 is not an overweight wench, but a desirably pretty gear symmetry you want to set up on your bike. You have disturb getting to work by 8 a.m., but you don’t have any difficulties waking up at 5 in the morning for a weekend bike push. You ride less in the neighborhood, where the roads are bad and you can’t speed up, and more on indicated bike tracks and highways. You become an environmentalist, and give rise to huge disgust at tricycles. You no longer need a handkerchief to blow your nose. You receive crashes not only as a part of competitory cycling, but an chance as well to upgrade bike parts. You empathize with road kills. You shop for a car and consider not it is engine or transmission capacities, but it is room space and rack add-ons to fit your bike. You have more bike jerseys than polo shirts. (Excerpt from Philippine Bicycle Diaries) Most helpful customer reviews 83 of 88 people found the following review helpful. Bicycle Diaries is the best kind of art, a work that brings the reader along on the artist’s journey. Bicycle Diaries is a physically beautiful book, hardcover with no dust-jacket, yellow embossed letters cheerfully identify the title and author while a black silhouette of a rider draws the reader forward. An observant reader will notice a tiny bicycle peeking out from the spine at the bottom of page 11 and on each odd page thereafter the bicycle has makes more progress. Fanning forward through the pages sets the tiny typeset bicycle free, racing across the pages in the oldest style animation, persistent vision holding tight to the bike while the pages blur past. Ever the artist, be it in music, lyric, print, or type, David remembers that a book can be more than just a file on a Kindle. The tiny animation is just one example of the playful digressiveness of this book. While he casts a loving and critical look at the world, David is always conversational. He ponders, rants, muses and marvels. He reflects on how our cities reflect our minds. We build what we value, but our shaped world shapes those values. In an age where it seems that every celebrity has a publicist and a book that screams “look at me”, David is instead riding his bike down interesting streets and pausing now and then to say “Hey, look at that!” He profiles interesting buildings, streets, people, cities and artists. He’s structured the book as a series of chapters each concentrating on a city such as Berlin, Buenos Aires, Istanbul, Sydney or New York, but the book is not a mere travelogue. In Manila, he uses the life story of Imelda Marcos as a springboard for contemplation of the way we each build the mythic stories of our lives. In Buenos Aires he considers geography, faith, death, music, art, unemployment, sex, the pack behavior of dogs, politics, football, gentrification, nightlife, and worker ownership. In every place he rides, he finds the unique and the common and connects the local with the global. Bicycle Diaries is an intensely human and humane book, a book that echoes in print the sense of “My God, how did I get here?” that David expressed years ago in the Talking Heads. To an interesting person like David, all places are interesting and he consistently reminds us just how interesting humans are. We are the ones building the human world — we don’t just travel the world, we make it. David’s work takes him out in the world, a world he shapes with songs and images. As he’s ridden more, in more places, he’s become more of a cycle activist, using his talents to shape the world to be friendlier to humans and bicycles. He’s designed and installed bike racks in New York City, he thinks about helmet design and he works with transportation planners. And most importantly, he’s written a wonderful book, a book that reveals the simple delight of riding a bike through an amazing world. 64 of 76 people found the following review helpful. 46 of 56 people found the following review helpful. Some sections of the book do describe what is seen, heard, and thought while riding a bike. The description of riding from a section of Buffalo (actually, he was in a suburb at the start of the ride, and he eschews suburbs to a fare thee well) to Niagara Falls is one such description as is his account of riding from downtown Detroit to, and past, 8-Mile Road, but even these are brief, sketchy in observation, and woefully lacking in understanding and interpretation. Yeah, Byrne has numerous comments about rust belt cities, but nothing he thinks or says is a reflection of what he has actually seen from his bike–his comments are just stereotypic notions about Buffalo and Detroit (at least his text about Buffalo did not mention snow) that could have been embroidered into a discussion without ever leaving a pent-house condo in ever-growing cities such as Atlanta, Houston, or Los Angeles. His thoughts have little to do with what he actually saw on his trips, because he missed many important sites and many of those sites he did note, he failed to interpret wisely. I have made the Buffalo to Niagara Falls ride at least a dozen times (though I have sense enough not to ride the dangerous-to-bicylists Maple Road past Hooters (now closed), Fuddruckers, Commerce Drive and Sweethome Road as he did on his ride) and have walked from downtown Detroit to 8-Mile Road at least three times, and I could write a great deal more than a few paragraphs from what I have seen from just those experience and and still avoid the cliches of Detroit not being there anymore and dissing franchise chain restaurants. What he says about cities is actually sophomoric–not wrong, just not astute and woefully lacking in insight and resolution. But the real kicker about this book is not that he fails to see much from his bike rides, it is that most of the book has nothing to do with bike rides. He goes on to a great extent about Baltimore, Berlin and other cities without even mentioning bicycling. A better title for this book would have been The Musings of a Man Sitting Late at Night in His Hotel Room When Visiting Some of the Great Cities of the World in Which I Rode a Bike Once in a While. If you are a David Byrne fan and want to know more about what he thinks about this and that of urban and suburban life and his comments on certain cities, then this book might interest you; but if you think you are picking up a book by a bicylist who describes his observations and thoughts while biking some of the great cities of the world, this is not the book for you. |
Wonderful views of our world
This should have been a New Yorker article
Not what it is hyped to be
