Bicycle Diaries

by David Byrne

  They’re all hippie sentiments, reworded.

  In the first dot-com boom, real estate prices in a hemmed-in city like San Francisco (or Manhattan) naturally went through the roof. Kids just out of school who were outside the dot-com world—young artists, musicians, writers, actors, eccentrics, and bohemians, the kind of folks for which this city was previously known (and who may have been the inspiration for the dot-commers)—got pushed to the margins or over to Oakland and elsewhere.

  In the late 1990s it all crashed, but the real estate prices never went back down to what they once were. The vast numbers of bohemian free spirits never moved back after they’d been displaced. The world did change quite a bit in the first dot-com revolution, but not as thoroughly, radically, and completely as some imagined. Not everyone was ready to live entirely online quite as fast as some had wagered.

  Maybe with Web 2.0, with its more socially interactive and responsive commerce-based Web sites—and with WiFi and faster bandwidth more widely available—some of those imagined changes in our lives might actually occur, but not with the stuff the first revolution promised. Who wants videocassettes delivered to their house in under fifteen minutes anymore?

  Paradoxically, as it does get easier and easier to marshal all sorts of services from our phones or laptops and access limitless information, the interest and demand for the stuff that can’t be digitized becomes greater: live performances, face-to-face gatherings, interactions, experiences, taste, tranquility. Those who frequent social networking sites come to value authenticity as a kind of compensation, since those qualities can be faked all too easily online.

  Let’s Get Lost

  The proselytizing and the we’re-gonna-change-the-world fervor, the ardor, and the nerdy zeal of the digerati do indeed seem to have been carried over from the various streams of eccentric enthusiasms endemic to this neck of the woods.

  Fringe groups have long been a tradition here. Even if it’s exaggerated by those who aren’t comfortable in this town (land of fruits and nuts) the Bay Area has a reputation for hosting cosmic anarchic spectacles of all types. Years ago there was the Temple of the People—not to be confused with the People’s Temple and the Kool-Aid of death. This earlier temple was originally based near Pismo Beach and was mainly influenced by theosophy, a kind of ad hoc mishmash of many religions and philosophies founded by Madam Helena Blavatsky in the 1870s.

  From a very different impulse and world came a not-so-dissimilar group. The Bohemian Grove encampments—rural retreats for the rich and powerful members of the San Francisco-based Bohemian Club—were also begun in the 1870s and still exist today. They feature performances and rituals in a woodland grove. Many U.S. presidents have attended these events, and the planning of the Manhattan Project began there. It’s all very secretive, and although networking is strongly discouraged, it’s hard to imagine that some bonds don’t get cemented out among the redwoods. If you went camping with Henry Kissinger wouldn’t you feel like you’d shared a common experience?

  Though the Beats were largely based in New York it was in San Francisco that many of the readings and settings for their books took place—here the Wild West met the cosmic East. So North Beach, with its Italian espresso bars and the nearby seedy dives of Broadway, is often more identified with that movement than New York is. Somehow the perception is that there was also an unbroken flow from the Beat generation straight on to the peace and love era a decade later. Neal Cassady—Jack Kerouac’s model for On the Road’s Dean Moriarty—was indeed “on the bus” with Ken Kesey, whose legendary acid tests featured the Grateful Dead—so it’s not that far-fetched an idea. The ’60s here produced the psychedelic rock movement, underground comics, psychedelic posters, the Whole Earth Catalog, be-ins, and the anarchic camp spectaculars created by the Cockettes, a legendary drag musical theatrical troupe.

  To imply that there is a link between the Cockettes and the dot-com world might seem a stretch to some, but the underlying theme of revolution for the hell of it runs straight through them all. The free-for-all of the blogosphere and the sheer nuttiness of the stuff that people post online partakes of a fair-sized hit of whatever. The sense of anarchic freedom prevails . . . and, I have to add, this bunch is okay with bicycles.

  I first came out here in the early ’70s, lured by the hippie eco techno worldview embodied by the Whole Earth Catalog. I joined a friend in an attempt to build a dome in a field up in Napa County. I eventually lost focus on the dome project and ended up busking with another friend on the streets of Berkeley—he played accordion, I played violin and ukulele and struck ironic poses. It was successful. I realized that at that time I was more interested in irony than utopia.

  The Dark Heart of Peace and Love

  I visit Mark Pauline at the warehouse base of his art performance organization Survival Research Laboratories. I’ve never managed to catch one of their public spectacles, but have read loads of interviews, watched videos, and heard accounts of awe-inspiring mayhem.

  On arrival, the place looks like an ordinary urban low-industrial building with an awful lot of machinery scattered here and there outside, most of it under wraps. Mark leads me from machine to machine explaining what each one does. One shoots balls of molten copper hundreds of feet and another shoots a giant flame eighty-some feet. They’re glorious and frightening. Shock and awe for the hell of it. Well, it is beautiful too.

  The following comes from their Web site:One of the main projects at SRL over the past year has been rebuilding the V-1. The V-1 was manufactured at SRL in 1990. It has served as both a high-powered, low frequency generator and a flamethrower/shockwave device in many SRL shows since that time. The design of the SRL V-1 pulsejet itself was based on dimensions gathered by American military and intelligence teams following WW2. It is an exact replica of the original German design.

  The [SRL] makeshift assembly worked well enough, other than the unnerving fact that each time the engine was run for any length of time, several valves would break off and disappear. This would reduce the output of the machine after about 30 minutes of use—enough operating time for an SRL show, but a potential safety hazard for the audience.

  These little hints about safety hazards and looming danger of course make the SRL projects all the more alluring. One unusual machine shoots a doughnut of compressed air. Mark described it as a kind of high-velocity, doughnut-shaped tornado. It can shatter glass when it hits a sheet of it flat on, but, when directed at people, Mark says it’s like being hit by a pillow. Of course, after witnessing an invisible burst shatter some glass, most people are terrified of this thing, even though, not being rigid like a piece of glass, they can’t be hurt.

  One of the most unusual items is the pitching machine (see next page). It uses a V-8 car engine to rev up two wheels, one on top of the other, to a superhigh speed. Then two-by-fours are fed into the gap and—wham!—they’re ejected at incredible speed. An ejected two-by-four can penetrate steel. This machine, made out of commercially available car parts, is a serious weapon.

  Needless to say, not too many museums or public programs are open to the idea of hosting an SRL show these days. It probably looks to an official arts organization like something that could easily be misconstrued as a how-to manual for maniacs and terrorists. Even though they take all necessary precautions to ensure that spectators can’t be hurt, the very nature of their performances are about extreme power, violence, and danger—and our attraction to those things.

  San Francisco has always had its dark side. There have always been gangs, subcultures, and fringe weirdness coupled with a desire to flirt with the forbidden and dangerous. Sometimes this impulse was about the idea that everything and every experience should be available to be known and that nothing should be forbidden. In this view one certainly couldn’t trust the government or the church to dictate what experiences might be pleasurable or useful, so best to just allow or try everything. Some experiential and psychic explorers had wonderful insights and epiphanies, and they
did break through to the other side, and some ended up with Jim Jones at the People’s Temple. The openness to the world of experience and to wide varieties of expression in this beautiful city can easily spill over into playing with fire—and denying that you might get seriously burned. Not that Mark and the SRL folks are dark or evil, but their machines certainly flirt with that power and mythology. It’s potent stuff.

  San Francisco isn’t the only place where light and dark are equally alluring, but it does seem that maybe here, more than in many other places—with the bright Mediterranean light, nearby ocean, and tolerant atmosphere—those forbidden fruits really flourish. Is it the fact that this town is about as far as you can get from Europe and the East Coast and still be on the mainland that allows all those groups to be semi-accepted and tolerated? There’s almost an admiration and respect for eccentricity and obsessive independent spirits here, whereas in a lot of other places independence and freedom are given lip service but that’s about it.

  I bike over to an alternative arts center called CELLspace where the publisher McSweeney’s has organized an event. The venue is a warehouse in a neighborhood of warehouses. I read from a book I’ve written and show PowerPoint slides as if I am a somewhat deranged motivational or religious speaker. Afterward all the other participants and I sign our books at a table, which is a little bit of a letdown after the nuttiness of the main event. Just as I become resigned to the business of signing books, a marching band bursts through the front doors and begins to play and “parade.” The Extra Action Marching Band has been at a street festival nearby and decided to stage an “intervention,” as they do from time to time—bringing a pleasant dose of music, anarchy, and baton-twirling girls in skimpy outfits to random events that they have decided need enlivening. Their playing has a great groove—Brazilian, Balkan, and original tunes all mashed together. The flag girls and boys and the baton girls are all in real marching band outfits combined with sequined G-strings, and somehow their twisted and skewed take on this all-American institution brings together a natural nostalgia for the thrilling sound of marching bands and the hedonistic sensual and sexual anarchy that is endemic to the Bay Area. Before too long I end up standing on a table dancing.

  After the show is over I go to the band’s rehearsal/living space in the Bernal Heights neighborhood where the Extra Action folks and their pals are having a party with live music—one band called Loop!Station consists of a guy playing cello through electronics accompanied by a young woman who manages to smile almost all the time while she sings. She says hi afterward and is still grinning. There is a genuine San Francisco light show in one room. Part of it consists of two movies projected onto the same screen on top of each other. And on another wall a projection through oil and water makes an old-school light show of blobby shapes. The Extra Action band regroup and perform another short set—how they have the energy after having played twice earlier (it is after two AM at this point) I don’t know. Their music and show seem to generate energy rather than use it up.

  I have the feeling I have entered a chaotic and somewhat sexy utopia. People have on all sorts of getups—Victorian hats and fake mustaches on some of the men, wigs on some of the women, and some folks wear not much at all. Haircut styles are all over the place. I am in a baby blue western jacket and golf shoes. The music is varied, and it is made with and generates sheer joy—that singer isn’t the only one smiling.

  Why do scenes like this develop here more than elsewhere? One of the Extra Action players has some connection with Survival Research Laboratories, which might be seen as a slightly more dangerous variation of this same impulse for release; a similar liberating, wild energy is let loose in both cases.

  Machines That Deceive

  Somehow, all this ecstatic anarchy leads me to wonder if the computational models of the brain have reached a stumbling block, a dead end, with recent attempts to untangle creativity. I suspect that to imagine, and thus to create, one has to envision something that doesn’t exist yet. Fictionalizing is thus very close to lying—it’s imagining the existence of something that isn’t literally true, and writing or speaking about it as if it is real. Most fiction aims to tell us a story in a way that leads us to believe it is happening or has happened. The motivations behind storytelling and lying are different, but the creative process behind them is the same.

  To have a truly creative machine we will inevitably end up with something like HAL, one that cannot only compute, calculate, and sort through a massive amount of information, but can also imagine, create, lie, and deceive. From the machine’s point of view there might not be any way of telling the difference between imagining and fibbing.

  We meat puppets have our morals, instincts, laws, and taboos to keep us in line, which are by nature human centered and therefore not universal. We would like to think that morals and taboos are God given and applicable to all human beings, but they really are just what’s good for us as a species—or sometimes only good for our tribe, nation, or particular geographical area. Well, this creative machine will have to be endowed with some equivalent to those laws and injunctions too. In addition, if it is to create in a way that we recognize it will also need to experience fear, love, hunger, and sadness. Our instincts and impulses, our gut feelings, are all part of how we think, how we make decisions and reason. We are guided by irrational impulses and emotions just as much as by logical analysis, so for a machine to truly think like us it will have to think emotionally at least as much as it does rationally. You can probably see where this argument is going.

  Machines that create might then need the whole kit and caboodle of human institutions—genetic motivations, social lives, and even a form of sex (desire, longing, mating, offspring)—in order to evolve religious and social networks that might serve, as they do for us, to temper the hatreds, deceptions, and narcissism that will inevitably emerge from this Pandora’s box. These social structures would only mitigate antisocial tendencies somewhat, as those same structures do with people. We can only make creatures in our own image—we cannot do otherwise—and the shit we sometimes get up to will be passed on to these “beings” as well.

  A counterargument to that sad conclusion might claim that if a bicycle is, for example, an improvement on legs, then maybe we can indeed invent some things that are better than ourselves? Well, physically, anyway. That’s toolmaking, I guess. Crows and chimps both fashion devices that reach where their beaks or fingers cannot, but that’s hardly godlike. For that, one would have to make a machine that is emotionally and cre atively “better” than we are. If it was, if we succeeded, there’s a good chance we probably wouldn’t be able to recognize the improvement.

  Escape from Alcatraz

  I bike over to the Taqueria Cancun, which has incredible tacos and burritos. Your choice of meat fillings—carne asada, pork, or chicken, naturally, but also head, tongue, and brains. Then I put the bike onto a Muni bus, all of which have bike racks up front (!). The bus I’ve chosen heads across the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito and Marin County. There are bike trails all over the headlands and around western Marin, much of which has been left as national preserve. One can spot hawks, vultures, mountain lions, and seals. The trails swoop and drop around and over the fog-swept barren hills. Eventually most of the paths end up dipping down to some little cove or hidden beach. From inside the headland hills you can’t see the city at all; even the Golden Gate Bridge is hidden.

  With the brisk air and the mist it reminds me of the bleak but beautiful Scottish highlands, though the rain drizzles less often here. In Scotland, as in Iceland and Ireland, there were once forests that covered the hills, but gradually they were all cut down, leaving a beautiful and strangely otherworldly terrain. There’s no denying that the legacy of man’s destruction is sometimes beautiful. Strip mines and dams are powerfully impressive. The sheep that now graze on the windswept slopes of Scotland ensure that no tree will manage to grow higher than a shoot, so even if a sapling could manage to get a grip on t
he boggy soil its chances of survival are slim.

  Here it is not as rainy, so the hills have not turned to peat bogs, and there are clumps of trees in the valleys among the scattered bunkers—built to defend against the imminent Japanese invasion.

  Inside and Outside

  I bike down Mission Street into the SoMa district. It’s midday and fairly warm, but passing an area of leather bars I see there are guys standing outside in full macho gay regalia. They must be suffering on a hot day like this, but maybe that’s the point. This part of town is flat, as it was created by landfill dumped over the rotting hulls of ships, so it feels different, slightly outside of the center of town, even though it’s right next to it. I stop to see an art show at the Yerba Buena Center featuring work that comes out of a place in Oakland called Creative Growth. Creative Growth is a visual arts center for people who are mentally and/or psychologically challenged. As a fan of a lot of what is often called outsider art I love some of this work.

  One of these artists, Judith Scott, obsessively wrapped things in yarn and twine, creating almost life-sized cocoons that are powerful, affecting, and sort of creepy. Giant totemic objects, talismans that seem to hold some mysterious personal juju.

  Another man, Dwight Mackintosh, did drawings that, as one studies them, are revealed to be composed of many layers of images, like stop-motion photos, all transparent and superimposed. They’re like those images that we’ve seen in old animated cartoons when a character moves super-rapidly and you see a dozen images of the character’s legs simultaneously, all overlapping to indicate speed. In Mackintosh’s line drawings there are so many arms and legs overlapping it’s hard at first to tell exactly what motion is being depicted or what the character is doing. Then it becomes clear—that’s a hand, that’s a . . . oh, it’s a penis. They’re all masturbating. At high speed, it seems.