Bicycle Diaries

by David Byrne

  A man named Jimmy takes the mic. He had introduced himself to me earlier. “I do Thursday nights,” was how he put it. Jimmy’s hair is hard to describe. It’s like a combination of a mullet and a Mohawk, but super slicked-back. He’s got on a black jacket and a tie with big yellow trumpets on it. He sings a standard (they all do, except Paul, who tends toward Stevie Wonder tunes), putting his heart and soul into it.

  The audience at Arturo’s, which is not a very big place, is usually a mixed bunch: some are paying attention to the singer, some are shoving food into their mouths, and some are talking to their friends. Sometimes all three at once. It’s not an ideal audience for an entertainer by any means, but it doesn’t seem to deter anyone here. Jimmy sings as if there is a whole theater out there, rather than people slurping down a slice. He’s singing to the back row, projecting; it’s incredible.

  Jimmy disappears for a second. He has an Asian pianist who has his eyes closed, so maybe he doesn’t notice Jimmy’s absence. Jimmy reappears in a cream-colored jacket carrying a matching cream-colored umbrella. He immediately launches into “Pennies from Heaven,” and one gathers these are the props he keeps on hand somewhere in the back of the restaurant specifically for this number. “Ev’ry time it rains, it rains . . . pennies from heaven” and up goes the umbrella, in the middle of this crowded room! Pizza is being served up, and folks are ordering wine using hand gestures, as the waiters can’t hear above Jimmy’s singing. No one here seems fazed or the least bit surprised by the corny umbrella gag. Jimmy’s jazzing up the song now, scatting and improvising—the tune is almost unrecognizable at times. He sometimes acts out the lyrics as he sings them, holding his hands in a praying gesture or grabbing Mrs. Glover to dance a step or two. They make an improbable couple. Now he’s got a little black hat on too. At one point his singing is so impassioned that he abandons the mic on the piano near the tip jar and begins hopping, really hopping, around the room singing at the top of his lungs.

  A Blackout

  Yesterday, at four thirty, while I was recording a vocal on my computer here at home, I sensed something had shut off unexpectedly. My musical and recording gear is all plugged into a kind of large battery that is designed to keep everything running on a concert stage for about twenty minutes if there is a power fluctuation or outage, so, despite the fact that all of New York City has just gone down, I am still working for a few minutes more, oblivious to what has happened. I shut my stuff down properly, leave my recording area, and check to see what made the odd sound. I soon realize the power is off, and looking outside the window I can see that it seems to be off everywhere—it’s a blackout all right. I fill up some containers with water, as the building’s pump won’t be filling the water tower on this or any other of these buildings until this is over.

  All the clocks—the ones with dials that is—on the nearby buildings now say four thirty. The digital ones are dark. By late afternoon there are traffic jams everywhere, and since I live near a tunnel entrance the traffic around here is stuck for hours. A few cabs roam around picking up people, but most eventually head home. It’s unexpectedly noisy. There are alarms going off everywhere. They started hooting right after the power went out.

  I ride my bike downtown to see if my office is okay. A Mexican kid on a bike asks me how to get to the Brooklyn Bridge—I guess he is going home and usually takes the train. I talk to him in Spanish and he says he is surprised, judging by my face, that I know some Spanish.

  My office had cleared out in a flash, they were pretty weirded out—memories of 9/11, I guess.

  After the sun goes down I ride my bike through Times Square, which is dark except for police vehicles. The great signs and the intense glow that can usually be seen for blocks have been shut down. The signs are just abstract shapes now. It’s even hard to make out what some of them are selling. The area is strangely crowded with people. The tourists are all still here, but don’t know what to do. Black shapes, moving in clumps. Thousands and thousands of people. Many are just hanging out. Maybe they can’t get home. An Irish bar on West Forty-fifth Street is open, and the crowd of drinkers spills out, filling the entire street.

  Hundreds of people are waiting at every bus stop—all hoping to get home to Queens, the Bronx, Brooklyn, or uptown. They too spill out into the streets, in clusters that surround the bus stop signs, or they just sit on the curbs, as bus service, though continuing, is slow and intermittent, due to there being no traffic lights. All traffic is moving slowly, tentatively creeping along in the almost total darkness, like you do when you walk around the house with all the lights off. When a bus comes it is a large, looming shape with two blinding lights in front. They emerge slowly from the darkness, like bioluminescent deep-sea creatures.

  People are all walking out in the streets, and they’re hard to see in some parts of town. There is a fat man at the intersection of Sixth Avenue and Twelfth Street directing traffic. He is using a sign—a piece of white cardboard on which he has scrawled “Stop.” At another intersection farther uptown a kid in baggy pants is also directing traffic, wildly, energetically; he’s having a great time. There’s no looting. It’s calm. People are helping one another out, and there are spontaneous parties.

  The stairway in my building is getting dark (the elevator doesn’t work, of course), and, one by one, the emergency lights in the stair shaft are failing. Flashlight beams now move erratically in the darkness as tenants look for their floors. Most of the tenants are now on the roof, drinking. I join them, briefly. We can see a financial brokerage building a block away. It’s lit up inside—bright as day—though there’s no one in it. We can see desks covered with paperwork, abandoned. I guess they have their own generator. Not much else for me to do now but go to sleep.

  In the morning I wake up and sense that it’s starting to get a little stuffy in here. Last night it was still cooler inside than outside—a remnant of yesterday’s air-conditioning—but that temperature difference won’t last long. It’s August, so having no AC it will take its toll. I heat up some leftovers for breakfast before they all spoil. The water pressure is down to a dribble. I have a jar of water in the fridge, but that won’t last long. Many shops and delis were open last night, selling their remaining stocks of sodas, snacks, and water out of dimly lit doorways. Sometimes they lit candles and scattered them on shelves. The candles made the delis all look like little shrines. There were long lines at hardware stores—for flashlights and D batteries. (I’ve got both.) Can’t get phone calls. (Though by using an old landline phone I have lying around I manage to call out.) Cell phone service isn’t working. Gas is working. I’m making coffee this morning.

  The traffic is noisy outside. What are they all doing out there? Where are they going? I notice that there are some scallops defrosting rapidly in the freezer, so I cook them for lunch.

  I go downtown again to my office and the power comes back on at around three PM.

  Kara, my Australian assistant, is moving back there with her boyfriend soon, and they’d scheduled a good-bye party for tonight in Greenpoint where they live. I assume that the party is still on, so as it gets dark I bike over the Williamsburg Bridge. The bridges are full of cyclists, as the subway and bus service is still intermittent, and from this vantage point I can see that not all the neighborhoods got their power back when the Village and SoHo did. Parts of the East Village are still dark, as is most of the Lower East Side. Uptown is all sparkling with lights. Parts of Brooklyn have power, and halfway across the bridge, where the lamps are being fed by Brooklyn, suddenly there is light. So, electrical power is political. I shouldn’t be surprised.

  E. B. White, Death, and Hope

  I read E. B. White’s skinny little book Here Is New York, which was written in 1948 as an assignment for Holiday magazine. I’m not sure many travel and leisure mags would accept a piece like this these days—it concludes with some very prescient meditations on death and war.

  When he wrote this essay, a few years after World War II, the UN b
uilding had either just been completed or was still being built. He points out that after that war all cities, New York being a prime example, were standing opportunities for massive carnage and destruction on a scale not hitherto imagined: “A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal passages, cremate the millions.”

  Whether because they were walled, like medieval ones, or because of the sheer numbers they harbored, cities once were secure refuges for their citizens. They were places where people not only met and haggled, but were also, to a degree, protected. Now, with the atomic bomb especially, as White points out, that protective aspect of what a city is has been turned upside down.

  But, he notes, just as this shadow begins to loom over great mixtures of humanity like New York, an institution, the UN, is rising to attempt to put an end to this threat. Death and hope simultaneously, as always.

  That the United States has clearly and brazenly taken an anti-UN stance in recent years—failed to pay their UN dues and often initiated acts in defiance of UN resolutions and principles—is a bad sign. The United States is not the only country to have done so, but it’s the biggest kid on the block and it sends a signal to all the other kids that such behavior is acceptable, a sign that death and fear is sometimes more powerful than hope, temporarily. The UN is far from perfect. Self-interested parties and nations skew its abilities to perform its mission—its members are human, after all. But the fact that that little ray of hope still exists, right here in mean, jaded New York, and that it cannot be corrupted by corporate lobbyists, religious demagogues, and crooked election rigging—well, there’s something to be said for that.

  The new World Trade Center is being built atop a thirty-story concrete windowless bunker. A monument to fear—a symbolic return to a medieval mind-set and walled cities. Even though we are united and connected in so many new ways, some are still building massive walls and fortifications that won’t really protect us from anyone determined and clever enough. Walls and concrete barricades aren’t really an effective means of protection these days—nothing is, really. All that interconnectedness that facilitated much of the explosion of megawealth over the last decade also facilitated the interpenetration of everything, so no one or no building is truly isolated and “safe” anymore. Safety is in getting along.

  I bike up to check out a show at the Studio Museum of Harlem. I follow the improved bike path north along the Hudson. It gets less crowded above 100th Street. I turn right on 125th and head east past churches and fried chicken joints, and I run smack into the African American Day parade on Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard. T-shirts are being sold that say I “heart” My Nose (or My Lips or My Hair). Shocking that this affirmation is still needed—that the models of beauty presented to us don’t include a lot of us—and it takes T-shirt slogans to attempt to correct things.

  On my way back home I see a nun on Rollerblades going up the Hudson River Park bike path, rosary flying behind her.

  How New Yorkers Ride Bikes

  There are more New Yorkers riding bikes than ever. And not just messengers. Significantly, a lot of young hip folks don’t seem to regard cycling as totally uncool anymore, which was definitely the case when I began to ride around in the late seventies and early eighties. I sense that we might be approaching a tipping point, to invoke that now clichéd term. New Yorkers are at the stage where they might, given the chance and the opportunity, consider a bicycle as a valid means of transportation—if not for themselves, then at least they will tolerate it as a reasonable means of transport for other New Yorkers. They might eventually try it themselves, and certainly they will accommodate it. They might even support and encourage it.

  So, with some tenuous optimism, I decide it might be time to try to give the biking-as-means-of-transport idea a little nudge by organizing some kind of public forum on the subject. I end up spending about a year trying to get a bike-related event off the ground, and am just about to give up when, through a connection with another project, the New Yorker magazine offers to sponsor the event at Town Hall. It is the perfect venue for something like this, having been historically a place where the issues of the day were aired and debated. Race (with Langston Hughes in 1945), birth control (with Margaret Sanger in 1921), and the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel (also in 1945) all were discussed on its stage.

  I imagine the event as an evening centered around a meeting, a forum, made up of ordinary people, biking advocates, and city reps from the departments of transportation, parks, health, and urban planning, as well as the police department. Interspersed with this forum would be bike-related entertainment—music, funny bits, and ironic slide lectures. Part of my personal reason for attempting this event is to ask the theatrical question of whether civic engagement, improvement, discussion, and action can be successfully combined with art and entertainment—if culture, humor, and politics can mix, and if making our city a better place to live can be fun. That idea is, for me, almost as important as this bike advocacy business. If the advocacy is going to be boring, then forget about it.

  Time passes; there are meetings with city agencies and with Yves Behar and fuseproject, his design company. In one part of the event Yves and his partner Josh will present a new kind of cool bike helmet, something nonsporty types might wear. Yves and company are intrigued by that idea, as is the Department of Health, of all agencies. Why the Department of Health and bike helmets? Well, getting your brains spread out on the street is pretty unhealthy. The Department of Health did a condom giveaway in New York City that fuseproject designed, and they’ve installed dispensers for free condoms in clubs, restaurants, and bars around town (placed near the bathrooms, I imagine). So there’s a preestablished relationship there. Should (corporate) funding materialize they’d love to do a massive helmet or even a bike giveaway—but that’s in the future.

  The fuseproject helmet prototype consists of a protective hard shell that can be slipped in and out of various skins—a warm woolen skin with earflaps for cold winters, a porous mesh skin for hot summer days. A very digital-technology kind of idea, variable skins. The idea is that third-party developers—fashion brands, sports gear brands, or anyone who wants yet another advertising platform—might eventually make their own skins and sell or fund them. This design also allows the commuter to lock the shell to the bike and stow the skin—the only part that touches one’s own skin—discreetly in one’s briefcase or handbag.

  As good as this is I personally sense that helmets might be an interim step toward integrated urban biking. Although they might always be a good idea, the wearing of helmets implies that cycling is dangerous, which at present it often is in cities like New York and London. But in other cities like Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Berlin, and Reggio Emilia in Italy, the bike paths and lanes are so safe the riders don’t feel the need to protect themselves. Cyclists in these places—kids, young creative types, businesspeople, seniors—also tend to ride upright with an elegant bearing; they’re well dressed, and even sexy. It’s a different attitude than the New York City head-down-into-battle approach.

  Maybe, for some, part of the thrill would go away if urban cycling became safe. But that might be the price to pay if it means more people will start using bikes to get around. That thrill isn’t really an appropriate thing to oblige schoolkids and seniors to be burdened with. Living in New York used to be a lot more dangerous in general, but that’s hardly something to get all nostalgic about. So, while we might need a cool, stylish helmet to be available right now, for everyone in a more perfect world it might be optional.

  Through Transportation Alternatives, a local advocacy organization, I am introduced to Jan Gehl, a visionary yet practical urban planner who has successfully transformed Copenhagen into a pedestrian- and bike-friendly city. At least one-third of Copenhagen’s workforce gets to work on bikes now! He says it will approach half soon. He’s not dreaming either. We here
in New York might think that’s natural and all well and good for the Danes, but New Yorkers are feisty and independent minded, so that can’t happen here. (Why people feel that driving a car makes one independent minded is a mystery to me.) But Gehl reveals that his proposals initially met with exactly that kind of opposition over there: the locals said, “We Danes will never agree to this—Danish people won’t ride bikes.”

  In one of his slide talks he shows before-and-after images of a street. Here is the after:

  Previously, the area bordering this canal had been used for parking; cars would drive along it looking for parking slots. This lovely spot was, not too long ago, primarily an ugly parking lot and a thoroughfare. Now it’s a destination. Cars are still allowed to drive here, but not park. And from that one small change the area exploded as a pleasant gathering place and even as a tourist destination. Expensive “improvements” by the city weren’t even necessary to allow this to happen. The customers and local businesses did the improvements—putting out chairs and installing awnings—though many of them initially complained that if people couldn’t park in front of their establishments their businesses would suffer. That seems to be how Gehl works, making fairly small incremental changes over many years, here and there, that eventually transform the whole city and make it a more livable place.

  Gehl has agreed to join the Town Hall event and give a short talk! He has recently been hired as an adviser by the city of New York and has made studies of situations in other cities—Amsterdam, Melbourne, Sydney, and London—in addition to the one he did in his native Copenhagen. The Department of Transportation here in New York has now asked his office for further recommendations. Whether they and the city listen is another matter, but it’s a heartening move.