Bicycle Diaries

by David Byrne

  The fact that demagogues, advertisers, marketing experts, and religious leaders have learned to tap into these powerful innate instincts and behaviors is often unfortunate, but maybe inevitable. Their exploitation of our abilities is regrettable because they are using them exclusively for their survival. Our own adaptation is being turned against us. However, since it is natural that we have these abilities, maybe it is also natural that they be exploited and that some folks will inevitably become more skilled at the art of exploitation and manipulation than others.

  However, as powerful and irresistible as buzzwords and the like are, it is sometimes possible to resist them, or at least to be aware when they are being employed—whether for better or for worse. One can at least make a decision as to whether one wants to be or will allow oneself to be manipulated and/or self-deluded, or not. There are times when a certain amount of self-delusion is “good”—when it allows us to accomplish a necessary task, or create something unlikely or new. (If I’m in the middle of writing a song I don’t want blunt criticism, for example.) It might even allow us to have the nerve to speak out, and in those cases denial—of a sort that gives us hope—might be deemed worthy.

  The two biggest self-deceptions of all are that life has a “meaning” and that each of us is unique. One can see that evolving a built-in obscuring mechanism for those depressing and inevitable insights might be of practical use. Okay, maybe in a sense we are unique: the huge numbers of available combinations of traits, propensities, body types, and experiences that make up each of us is unimaginably large. Our variety is immense, but still it must be restricted within certain boundaries or we wouldn’t be able to recognize ourselves as types at all. What we are is somehow simultaneously “infinite,” but always similarly shaped. Almost infinite variety within severely restricted limitations.

  Maybe what we think of as self, of us as individuals, of each of us with unique personalities and character, also exists in dogs, and might even extend down the food chain as far as insects. Insects with character and personalities? Why not? Why stop with doggies? An insect might be just like me. I, what I call I, might not be unique after all. The range of possible combinations of character traits might extend both up and down the evolutionary tree. There might also be just as many personalities in each species as there are among us humans. Our inner policeman says to us, “don’t even think that” when we stray into a forbidden thought zone like this and begin thinking thoughts that might drive us crazy or inhibit much-needed action—thoughts like, Maybe I’m not unique at all. He sometimes says it for our own good—to keep us from going insane and to allow us to do the things we need to do. As a species we have to have our little delusions.

  The other self-deception—that life has meaning—is famously dealt with by religions all over the world. Our susceptibility to this comforting idea is impossible to deny. I would argue that while religions might indeed be a lot of superstition as well as an unfortunate excuse for violence and countless horrors, they might also serve a purpose. It would seem that at the very least they make it easier to go on, to function, to make and do, if one believes that our own (human) lives have a meaning.

  Remade

  Though Berlin was remade after World War II had reduced much of it to rubble, progress was hobbled by the Wall and by the occupation on both sides of that barrier—the Soviets in the East and the Yanks and British in the West. Vast areas in what used to be the center were located close to the Wall and were left as fields and vacant lots, sometimes occupied by gypsy caravans and flea markets. It was as if they knew the Wall would eventually come down, so these spaces were never developed. Since 1989, with the Wall and most of the occupiers gone, a strange new city has arisen. In one former prewar center, Potsdamer Platz, the massive new edifices of the corporate state have gone up—Sony, Mercedes, Siemens, and others have new steel-and-glass buildings there. Nearby, the new government center, rapidly relocated here from the tiny town of Bonn, is also trying to find its place. A transportation hub has opened that was built by moving the river and then putting it back. None of this development is organic; it’s city planning on a massive scale. It’s a colossal experiment that poses the question, Can one create a (vibrant) city center from scratch?

  I bike around Mitte where the galleries and cafés are now being elbowed aside by luxury boutiques, as they were in SoHo in New York. And a couple of years after I began writing this I now sense that Berlin is indeed being acclaimed as a cultural capital, perhaps even as the cultural capital, of Europe. Despite some areas of towering corporate glass and accompanying wastelands of concrete plazas it does indeed seem as if the impossible can happen—a once vibrant city, a center of European culture, has come back to life.

  Istanbul

  Ride a bike in Istanbul? Are you nuts? Yes . . . and no. The traffic here is pretty chaotic and there are a number of hills, but in recent years the streets have become so congested that on a bike I can get around the central city—in the daytime at least—faster than one can in a car. As in many other places I’m almost the only one on a bike. Again, I suspect that status might be a big reason for this—bike riding, in many countries, implies poverty. I rode around Las Vegas and was told that the only other people on bikes there were people who had lost everything, probably through gambling. They’d lost their jobs, families, houses, and, I guess—ultimate insult for an American—their cars. All they had left was a bicycle to get around on. As cheap cars become available I’m afraid lots of folks in India and China will ditch their bikes as quickly as they can so they too can be elegant modern car drivers.

  I pass cafés full of people intensely playing backgammon or smoking hookahs. I get some designer knockoffs at a shoe store. The minarets of the mosques make handy landmarks. I love this city. I love its physical location—bounded by water, dispersed across three landmasses, one of which is where Asia begins. Its way of life, which seems Mediterranean, cosmopolitan, and yet tinged by the deep history of the Middle East, is intoxicating.

  Mostly I stick to the many roads that run along the Bosphorus and the Marmara Sea, thus avoiding the many interior hills. Occasionally I see some old wooden houses, so one can imagine what this place must have looked like before they all collapsed or were set on fire.

  Ugly Modern Buildings as Religious Icons

  As I bike around I note that the old buildings—wooden houses, nineteenth-century European-style palaces, and Ottoman-era edifices—are dwindling. Everywhere I see bland concrete apartment buildings going up. I wonder how buildings and neighborhoods of such obvious character can so easily be eliminated. What is everyone thinking? I sound a bit like Prince Charles in this, but I wonder, how is it that no one can see what is happening?

  Throughout the world the international style, as the Museum of Modern Art calls it, has been used as an excuse for every bunkerlike structure, atrocious housing project, lifeless office building, and ubiquitous, crumbling third-world concrete housing block and office. Crap the world over has the imprimatur of quality because it apes, albeit badly, a prestigious style. Why has this style caught on so thoroughly? Why, all over the world, are beautiful cities being turned into a giant maze of gray upturned bricks with grids of identical windows in them?

  Maybe, I think to myself, these structures express something. Something more than the bottom line on a developer’s budget. Maybe, besides being easy and cheaper for the developers to build, they also stand for collective desires and aspirations of some sort. Maybe they represent or symbolize, for many people, a new start, a break with all the previously built things that have surrounded the townsfolk. And, especially in old towns, new buildings represent an end to history. They declare, “We will not be like our fathers! We are not ruled by the kings, czars, emperors, shahs, or any of those idiots from our past. We, a modern people, are different. We are no longer peasants. We are no longer hicks or hillbillies. We want no part of the visual system associated with our past, however noble it might be, and of which our memories are
made. The weight of our history smothers us. It is, for us, a visual and symbolic prison. We will make a fresh start, like nothing ever seen on the face of the earth. (God knows, the Chinese are doing this in leaps and bounds.) And, if we have to do some damage in the process, then so be it.” At least that’s the emotional logic I imagine many people here and elsewhere feel.

  These new buildings may not be beautiful. They may not even be utopian, as some architectural scholars and theorists of modernism might have hoped, but they are cheap, functional, and they don’t remind people of anything that went before. The walls are straight, not crooked and wobbly, with angles that are, thank God and modern engineering, at 90 degrees, and the plumbing works—for now. For better or worse, they imply a self-determination. They say, “the future will be ours.” The new generations will shrug off the weight of countless millennia and symbolically declare themselves free. Wrongheaded maybe, ugly for sure, but free. And there lies the religious, ideological, and emotional element inherent in these monstrosities.

  These buildings represent the triumph of both the cult of capitalism and the cult of Marxist materialism. Opposing systems have paradoxically achieved more or less the same aesthetic result. Diverging paths converge. The gods of reason triumph over beauty, whimsy, and animal instincts and our innate aesthetic sense—if one believes that people have such a thing. We associate these latter qualities with either peasants—the unsophisticated, who don’t know any better than to build crooked walls and add peculiar little decorative touches—or royalty and the upper classes—our despicable former rulers with their frilly palaces, whom we can now view, in this modern world, as equals, at least on some imaginary or theoretical level.

  Here is a photo of Salvador, Brazil, where a district of warehouses and colonial commercial buildings has almost been completely transformed into a bland everytown business district. A musician friend there offered that these zones, once so full of character, should have been treated “like European cities.”

  A crane fell here in Manhattan today as I type this. It killed four by last count and smashed a neighboring building. Another building went down two weeks ago, and the week before that part of a Trump building collapsed and a man was beheaded.

  In the guise of uplift and progress, these buildings actually dehumanize people when they don’t kill them outright. Although they are all made of identical materials—reinforced concrete, glass, and steel—they don’t soar and swoop like the interstate highways, dams, and bridges made of the same materials. The graceful arcs of interchanges on the expressways and autobahns are not mirrored in these condo blocks. Neither are they meant to last like those structures. The future is here, in spirit, for an instant—but it will disappear, it will crumble, before our very eyes.

  So instead of a small number of really impressive “monuments” such as those that survive from the disdained historical past, our century will leave, across the planet, a sprinkling of almost identical structures. It is, in a way, one vast global conceptual monument, whose parts and pieces are spread across the world’s cities and suburbs. One city, in many locations.

  They’re doing it in New York right now. All over town almost identical concrete and glass buildings are rising. Many are going up so quickly that one wonders if the speed of construction isn’t just a way to get them up before anyone can object. Now, with the credit/economic disaster in progress, the heat is truly on to spend any previously allocated money. Some towers have the names of famous architects attached, others do not. Visually it’s often hard to tell them apart—they are all, ultimately, designed by the developers, while the starchitect is simply another kind of logo that can be applied in an attempt to distinguish one building from the other.

  On a previous trip to Istanbul I had been invited by a group called the Dream Design Factory to do a public art installation during the Istanbul Biennial. The biennial is fantastic. Not all of the art is great and most of the artists are new to me—many hail from Turkey, Syria, Greece, Egypt, India, Iran. Not very many artists in the big Chelsea galleries are from those places, not yet. The exhibit locations are in wonderful old structures scattered around town—factories, warehouses, and customs offices, even in the Roman cistern that lies under part of the historic district.

  My piece won’t be in one of those places. Instead, I’ll be installing in an as-yet-unrented space in a modern shopping center that is not quite in the center of town. At least it will have lots of foot traffic. I’m a little disappointed about it not being centrally located, but it’s great to be here. My show will be some bus-shelter-sized lightboxes with computer-manipulated images of personal weapons and money. They are meant to look like glitzy contemporary ads, so the shopping mall location might not be so bad after all. I stay at the Pera Palas Hotel, a slightly run-down joint that was once, in the days of the Orient Express, the height of elegance. Hemingway, Garbo, Hitchcock, and King Edward III stayed here, as did spies such as Mata Hari and Kim Philby. Atatürk stayed here too, and his room, number 101, is kept as a museum.

  Pera Palas Hotel elevator, Istanbul, 1994.

  Sakip Sabanci

  The next day the Dream Design team meets me at the hotel and we drive along the Bosphorus. The team is led by Arhan, who looks like a Turkish Tin Tin, with one shock of hair sticking up in front. The Dream Design Factory does graphic design as well as events, promotions, fashion shows, and raves. We are also joined by Esra, a young woman who seems to have arranged today’s field trip, and Arhan’s friend Saba, an elderly Turkish artist who now lives on the island of Elba, off the coast of Italy. It’s raining, traffic is snarled as usual, and I’ve seen this route before, on my bike, so I drift off to sleep in the backseat of the car. I can hear Saba, a bit of a Marxist, announce on seeing the spate of new billboards that have sprung up: “Who owns my vision? Who owns what I see?”

  The mix of Esra, a young and cosmopolitan woman, Saba, the leftist artist, and Arhan, the designer-entrepeneur-raver makes for an interesting crew.

  After a while I am awoken by Esra—“David, we’re here”—to the sight of a huge white gate, which opens in front of the car. At the top of the driveway is a giant mansion overlooking the Bosphorus. On the left is a slightly smaller, more modern house on the same property. I head for the big house, still half asleep. “No, not that one, the other one,” someone shouts. Passing by a massive picture window, I wave at a woman sitting on a sofa with a child in the tasteful contemporary interior.

  The woman meets us at the door. Strangely, she isn’t much taller than she was when we saw her sitting on the sofa—her legs are shrunken and twisted by cerebral palsy. We are soon joined by her sister and offered drinks, which a butler in a double-breasted suit hurries off to fetch. Small talk. Apologies for not making it to the opening of my exhibition here. A silent woman who is not introduced feeds a child. I walk around examining the paintings in elaborate gold frames on the walls.

  Esra announces that we can see Sakip’s father’s collection if we like. I don’t know what kind of collection she’s referring to, but I’m game. We head for the big mansion after a cell phone call to alert the staff over there. The sister, nanny, and child stay behind. Sakip Sabanci was one of Turkey’s most successful businessmen. He’s also known for his philanthropy—he built hospitals and founded a university.

  We’re met by the same butler, who must have slipped out ahead of us. The house is a museum—in the Victorian sense. The ground floor is filled floor to ceiling with paintings, vases, period furniture, statues, and glass cases filled with silver objects. As we enter a room on the right, an announcement is made—“This is the blue room”—nothing more. Any questions about individual paintings are answered by the butler. We move through room after room. Saba, being of a certain age, recognizes the work of some fellow expatriate Turkish painters who relocated to Paris. Most of the other paintings are “Orientalist” in style, Ottoman-era romantic depictions of street life in Istanbul, although there are a few Russian romantic landscapes as w
ell—sunset over the Neva and views of St. Petersburg.

  The first floor, upstairs, is reserved for the amazing calligraphy collection. Ottoman-era pronouncements on law and policy, letters, and Qur’ans, of course, open to golden pages with elaborately embellished passages from the Book of Books. It’s all beautiful. Interestingly, the Ottoman and Asian calligraphy pieces are much more impressive to our contemporary (Western) sensibilities than the more typically Western paintings and sculpture on the floor below. The Western and especially the Orientalist paintings to us smack of a dated colonial romantic vision of the East that some of us would like to believe is in the past. Those paintings remind us a little too clearly of our prejudices and smugness. Whereas these calligraphic works seem, for the moment at least, perfectly in synch with contemporary Western sensibilities—text as art, the word as thought made beautifully tangible—even if they might have been oceans apart from those abstract and formal ideas at the time when they were made.

  Belly Dance Party

  Upon returning to the hotel, I rendezvous with a group of Turkish expatriates (who now live now in Belgium, New Jersey, and Chicago) and upon the arrival of a Kazakh gentleman, we depart for the Sulukule neighborhood to eat, drink, and be entertained by low-rent belly dancers. This gypsy neighborhood, a thousand years old, is almost all run-down houses and tea shops filled with people hanging out on the semipaved streets in the cold night air. Sadly, the whole neighborhood is threatened with demolition now, as it’s coveted by real-estate developers.