Дэвид Бирн - Bicycle Diaries

I have a few hours free so I head off on my bike toward Niagara Falls, which is not that far from Buffalo, though it ends up being farther than I thought. I ride on the shoulder of a road that is lined with chain stores, none of them specific to this area. Everyone who works in them is therefore an employee hired by some anonymous distant corporation. They probably are only allowed to make small decisions and they have almost no stake or investment in the place where they work. Marx called this alienation. Communism may have been a sick dream, but he was right about this aspect. Of course, I can’t see any of the people who work in these places along the shoulder of the highway. There are no people visible anywhere, just cars pulling in and out of parking lots. I pass Hooters, Denny’s, Ponderosa, Fuddruckers, Tops, Red Lobster, the Marriott Hotel, the Red Roof Inn, Wendy’s, IHOP, Olive Garden . . . and roads with names like Commerce, Sweet Home, and Corporate Parkway.

Now I pass some Niagara Falls information joints. I must be getting closer! Then, farther on, there is motel after motel. Years ago, this area used to be a prime honeymoon spot—though now it’s a little hard to imagine anyone honeymooning here except in an ironic way. An ironic honeymoon? Anyway, who would want to honeymoon on a stretch of highway that looks like it could be anywhere in America?

Farther down the road—and I’ve gone at least ten miles now—there is evidence of the massive electrical power generated by the still-invisible falls. The sun is beating down and I’m feeling weird, hot, and a little tired . . . this landscape tells a strange story. Somewhere, off in the distance, is an amazing and awe-inspiring natural phenomenon, yet I pass by land that is unfit even to be industrialized, and has therefore been abandoned—an egret stands in a muddy stream among old tires and bits of busted signage. The mostly closed Lockheed plant on a rise looks disturbingly like a contemporary jail.

I arrive at the town of Niagara itself, which is a peculiar ghetto of black and Italian immigrants. I pass Italian grocery stores, hair salons, and liquor stores. I stop for a sausage sandwich and a Gatorade. A pale woman of maybe seventy sits in front of an ashtray overflowing with butts, leafing through a Country Weekly magazine. I suggest she might get sunburned on a hot day like today. She sniffs and ignores that warning and instead shows me a photo of Alan Jackson in her magazine. He’s her favorite—“this year”—she says.

The falls are truly amazing. Out of nowhere, one emerges from this crappy town to signs pointing to the bridge to Canada, border guards, and the park. As one approaches the falls one can see a strange mist rising in the distance and the air is now cool, as if one had entered a giant air-conditioned room. I stand at a rail and stare at this mighty weirdness, looking, looking, as if prolonged looking will cement this thing in my brain, and then I turn around and head back.

The Struggle, the Show

I saw an amazing video called The Backyard. It’s about backyard wrestling—kids imitating WWF hijinks and then pushing them a bit further, a little more extreme. They use bats covered in barbed wire, jump into pits filled with fluorescent lightbulbs, set one another on fire, and of course hit one another with chairs and ladders, just like they’ve seen on TV, but it’s all more DIY.

It’s jaw-dropping—hilarious and sometimes horrific. It’s hard to look as a kid slices himself with a razor to make the blood flow so it will all look more real.

In some cases their parents cheer them on.

Much of it is all about putting on a good but harmless show, as it is with the WWF, but a good show also seems to demand a certain amount of real blood, genuine risk, and danger. And sometimes these performers seem to get just a little carried away and the border between show and real life starts to get awfully fuzzy.

I ask myself, are these kids who—to borrow from the Trent Reznor song—need to hurt themselves to see if they can feel? Are they so feeling-deprived that any sensation, including pain, will do? Pain is a pretty easy feeling to achieve. Those on the receiving end of the punishment at these events often seem to stand there passively, waiting patiently to be smashed over the head with a fluorescent tube or trash can. The “punishment” appears to be accepted and unavoidable, almost wished for. Is it really punishment if one desires it?

Here then is what’s going on behind the placid suburban houses I’m biking by: wildly over-the-top shows, dangerous dramas, torture, pain, and shrieks of loopy excitement. My friends and I liked to play army in our suburban neighborhood growing up, but we weren’t nearly as creative as this lot—and there was almost never any physical contact.

Kodak Moments

I am in Rochester, New York, for an exhibition of my work and a talk at Eastman House, the former home of George Eastman, the founder of Kodak.

Mr. Eastman, as they refer to him here, never married, lived with his mother, and eventually killed himself with a gun. He left a one-line suicide note, which is on display: “To my friends: My work is done. Why wait?” He did the deed almost immediately after signing an updated will. Ever considerate, efficient, and maybe just a little obsessively neat, he placed a damp cloth across his chest to minimize any splatter before he pulled the trigger. George was physically ill and wanted to avoid further suffering.

There are clocks placed inconspicuously all over the residence. Most of them are hidden in corners of rooms and alongside paintings so Mr. Eastman could keep his servants punctual. They knew that he could always tell what time it was because, though he might appear to be looking at them, there was likely to be a timepiece somewhere right behind them. Every object and piece of furniture owned by him had an engraved tag (Prop of G Eastman) screwed into it on some hidden surface.

His mother’s bedroom, which was directly across from his, has two small beds in it placed side by side. George’s bedroom is now empty—only the fireplace remains. It was the scene of the suicide. I sort of suspect that George and his mom actually slept side by side, but maybe I have an overactive imagination.

In the center of Rochester there is a wonderful waterfall, a smaller but still spectacular Niagara where the Genesee River plummets into a deep gorge.

I biked by this cataract last time I performed here, sort of stumbling upon it by accident. The falls are pretty spectacular, and why the city hasn’t made them more of a focus is at first a puzzle. The writer Rudy Rucker says that thirty years ago one couldn’t even see the falls as they were so obscured by industrial pollution, so I guess that sort of answers that question.

I look around the gorge. Dominating one side is the almost abandoned Kodak plant, which doubtless used the river as both a source of power and as a dumping place for lots of photo chemicals. On the other side of the river are more factories and the remnants of a hydroelectric plant. It seems that this boomtown (the first boom was when the Erie Canal connected here, allowing shipping from the Great Lakes and Chicago up and down the Genesee and on down to New York City) happily made industry a priority and it soon dominated the waterfront on all sides. The river was almost hidden from public view throughout most of the town in those days. The mansions of the wealthy were situated well outside that industrial zone. George even had his own cows on his property, as he liked fresh milk.