David Byrne's "Bicycle Diaries" -Cycling Through the Cosmos

Bicycle Diaries is "panoramic window on urban life over the past 20 years—a big window positioned at bike level, that looks out on a dense man-made landscape." Filled with postcard-like black-and-white photos, Bicycle Diaries is a first-person account of former Talking Head David Byrne's experiences biking through various cities around the world, from London to Istanbul to San Fransisco and, of course, New York. The book is due out in September.

At The Daily Galaxy we're hoping it will be a Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance type view of the cosmos in the 21st century. With a highly personal mixture of humor and intense curiosity, his publisher Viking writes, Byrne records his thoughts economics revealed in shop fronts and history in door frames, on globalization, world music, urban planning, fashion, policy, architecture, cultural dislocation. Byrne explains why efforts to increase bicycle use may solve some of the world's pressing transportation and energy concerns

On his website, Byrne has posted personal comments on music and, occasionally, on the impact of the Internet on the recording industry.

Elsewhere, on his website Bryne's writing foreshadows the intense insights we'll see in his diaries, where he shows an intense pyschological awareness and probing, painful questioning on a series of psychological/emotional portraits of Bryne as a doll: " Myself calm as I go up in (mental?) flames. A happy man drowning in love?"

"Making a doll of oneself is an act of real psychological healing and of possible personal danger. To be liberated from one’s own appearance — to see and feel what one always feels to be a part of oneself, one’s own looks embodied in an outside thing, a little homunculus, separated from one’s own flesh and blood, out in the world — brings a sense of freedom, and with it, some feeling of imminent danger. A little plastic offspring… in love, in pain, pissed off, ecstatic. I want to help him, but I don’t know how. And I don’t even know what to call him. I hope he’s all right. Maybe he will do the things that I’ve always dreamed of… and maybe he’ll suffer the accidents of fate that I’ve avoided."
"Bicycle Diaries" is coming out this fall in hardcover and on CD.