Commuting

On Writers

“You must live like a bourgeois and save all your violence for your art.”

- Gustave Flaubert

Velo-Mencken

Bike Snob NYC on scooters:

At first it sounds like someone’s mixing a margarita or firing up a vibrator in a convertible or something—then you realize you’re not in a Van Halen video and it’s actually the diminutive whirr of yet another dandy on a neutercycle.

and on real cycling:

If you haven’t experienced the thrill of hitting the base of the Manhattan Bridge bike lane at a blistering 15 MPH with an elite group consisting of a young guy on a Bianchi Pista with chopped flat bars, a middle-aged gentleman on an dayglo mountain bike with thumbshifters and a chipped and yellowed pie plate, and a woman on a Bianchi Volpe with fully-loaded panniers and a blinky light on the back of her helmet, then you don’t know what a real shot of adrenaline feels like.

Read the whole post – the man warms up slowly but he hits a mighty pace on the finishing stretch.  Then read his entire archive.

Muynak

If there is no strong wind, people sit on little benches, leaning against the shabby and crumbling walls of their decrepit houses. It is impossible to ascertain how they make a living; it is difficult to communicate with them about anything…If one smiles at the people sitting against the walls, they become even more gloomy, and the women veil their faces. Indeed a smile does look false here, and laughter would sound like the screech of a rusty nail against glass.

- Ryszard Kapsucinski, Imperium.

Pour Les Grimpeurs

The vocabulary of cycling in English can be a makeshift thing that struggles to match the variety and precision available in other cycling cultures. That is not to say that it is bereft – to call an incline a “drag” perfectly captures the feeling of being pulled backwards, the sense that some joker has loaded ballast onto your machine or into your legs. But compare it to French – what price the bald engineer’s term “bicycle” next to “velo”, a word evocative of the speed of a bike gliding over a smooth road. There is nothing in English to convey the sense of the “randonnee”, a long ride done not for the sake of competition but for the personal challenge and the joy of the open road. And then, rather than “climber” there is “grimpeur”, a word that conveys immediately the sense of plastering yourself to the side of a mountain, hauling yourself up hand-over-hand, slowly chipping away at it with each turn of the pedals.

Heading out of the city through Rathfarnham, you eventually find yourself on Cruagh Road, narrow, tree-lined, winding upwards towards Sally Gap. It’s important not to take it too fast. Climbing is about settling into a sustainable rhythm, finding a low gear and a good cadence, not letting the burn in your legs get out of hand. On the hardest climbs you find your field of perception shrinking, until it becomes no more than you and the road. You reach inside yourself, recalling the most brutal climbs you have done before, leaning on the knowledge that you have endured worse in the past. Just keep the pedals turning…it becomes the sole mission, the only direction of your mind. When you reach the top, you are light-headed, conscious of nothing but your breathing and the lactic acid starting to ebb from your muscles. And then, once again, the world opens out before you, suddenly vivid.

Cruagh Road doesn’t offer that kind of walk across the coals, but it’s long and hard enough to give you a rush of satisfaction after you cross the first narrow bridge that indicates the worst is behind you. The trees fall away on your right and you can see Dublin, the urban patient etherised on the table, a grey-brown haze of monoxide sleeping gas floating above it. From up here, the sprawling city looks completely flat, as though it is water pooling up in the bottom of a basin, and you’re happy to be leaving it behind for the solitude of the mountains. Sally Gap is ahead, with its bleak, lunar landscape of peat bog scarred with turf-cuts.

For the dedicated grimpeur, there is an impressive resource in the form of the Challenge BIG, a website listing the thousand finest climbs in Europe, complete with maps and elevation profiles. There are fifteen in Ireland, Sally Gap and Wicklow Gap among them. Naturally such a site lends itself to a box-ticking mentality but each to his own. For me it will be a portal to many incredible rides, countless opportunities to flush the asinine demands of the working week from my mind, to experience the stark beauty of the mountains, and to submit once again to the iron discipline of the upward-leading road.

Awoken From My Slumber…

…by Mentasms, who I fear is going to be vaguely disgusted at my unregenerate rockism:

“List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.”

Evidently this one has been doing the rounds for quite a while – I think my spring has already been quite extensively shaped and is now sitting there looking as ugly and misshapen as countless seasons past. 

1. “These Foolish Things” – Teddy Wilson & His Orchestra, Lady Day: The Master Takes & Singles

There’s been a little flurry of bloggers outing themselves as not liking jazz now that Steve Albini has taken the curse off it.  But really, what is it that you’re saying you can’t get your head round? The musicianly polish and tastefully funky jams on Blue Note leave me pretty cold, doubly underwhelming because they’re so rafted with all the signifiers of jazz sophistication. But Black Saint & The Sinner Lady? Coltrane Live At The Village Vanguard? A Tribute To Jack Johnson? Or what about something as warm and full of life as this? The grain and phrasing of every second of this song knock me out.

2. Percy’s Song – Bob Dylan, Biograph 

I’ve been listening to Fairport Convention’s cover of this on Unhalfbricking for years now without finding anything remotely memorable about it – if anything, it was a major bringdown after the shimmering high of “Who Knows Where The Time Goes”.  Maybe it’s just too cluttered arranged for a full band, and it’s the intimacy of this recording of a very young Dylan that makes it work.  

3. “Power” – The Dead C, Vain, Erudite & Stupid

Kicking the corpse of rock music uphill.

4. “Lontano” – Ligeti/Nott/Berlin Philharmonic, The Ligeti Project Vol. 2

First fruit of the list from The Rest Is Noise. If the Rite of Spring was so insurrectionary, what would that audience have made of this? At least the Rite has roots in folk dance and pagan ritual, but Lontano and Atmospheres have something unearthly about them, something ominous and implacable in their sinuous, alien textures.

5. “So I Si Sa” – Super Boiro Band, African Pearls 2: Guinee – Cultural Revolution

Although fundamentally the work of the devil, mp3 players redeem themselves every time they cough something like this up from the depths of random shuffle, something that I must have heard half a dozen times before without ever really registering just how hot it is.  Exhibit B – that Quintete Sextete track that is a dead ringer for an early Pentangle track off the self-same disc.  

6. “I’ve Still Got You (Ice Cream)” – Pissed Jeans, Hope For Man

Pure genius.  The more you look around, the more you realise that people in western society can no longer muster enough super-ego to keep the bruised, self-indulgent child side of their character in check.  I can’t believe that Pissed Jeans decided not to stick with the name Unrequited Hard-On…must have felt they couldn’t live up to it.  It’d be a lot of pressure, having a name that good.

7. “The Big Takeover” – Bad Brains, Bad Brains

Look, I didn’t say it had been a great spring.

I’m not sure I even read seven blogs which haven’t already been infected and it seems a bit pointless asking all the Frank’s Apa people but let’s say: Inuit Scarlet Bikini Carwash, Lexicon Devil, Accentmonkey, any of the lads from Soundtracks For Them but especially Krossphader, Chocolate Court, Old Style Rabbit Tales Of Furry Fury and Undersea Community.

Ethiopia, 1975

The people below were so tightly squeezed together, their crippled limbs, stumps, and crutches so tightly intertwined, that they formed a single crawling mass, out of which dozens of arms stretched upwards like tentacles, and, where there were no limbs, innumerable gaping mouths extended upwards, waiting for something to be thrown into them. As we walked from one church to another, this gnarled, moaning, expiring creature below crept after us, and from it dropped every now and then an inert, already lifeless member, abandoned by the rest.

There had been no pilgrims here in a long while, to throw down their alms, and these cripples were unable to get out of the stony chasms.

“Did you see, sir?” Tadesse asked me as we made our way back to the village. And he said it as though to suggest he thought this the only thing really worth seeing.

- Ryszard Kapuscinski, The Shadow Of the Sun.

You Guys Want It Quieter? Or Louder?

What some people will never understand is that noise is compelling, that noise is a crucial vector for the unpredictability that is necessary to make the hoary ritual of the rock gig vital. Being a shambles does not make you unpredictable – incompetence is the flipside of buttoned-down professionalism, predictably piss-poor, routinely disappointing. Noise overloads your synapses, swamping your brain in a sensory deluge. It carries the risk inherent in introducing sound that can’t wholly be controlled, gambling the certainty of harmony and melody on a flight into the abyss. Noise is half the story with Pissed Jeans – it bleeds from every amplifier, feeding back through every mic and pickup in a coruscurating scree. Even when Dave Rosenstrauss’ bass amp cuts out (as it did for the first two songs) leaving only the Bradley Fry’s guitar and Sean McGuinness’ drums, it sounds like there’s a dozen people playing. When the bass comes back, the sound takes on a belligerent thickness that sinks deep into your innards. On the night, Pissed Jeans favour their slower songs, dragging the lurching, bludgeoning riffs out their instruments like every note pains them. It’s grinding, abject stuff, music to drown out the hell of the outside world. When they erupt into something closer to standard punk speed, you’re blindsided, knocked back by the distortion that’s lashing around like a downed power cable. This is something compelling, something that demands your attention and can’t be readily assimilated or ignored.

The other half of that story is Matt Korvette. Like Iggy Pop, or maybe more relevantly, David Yow, he plays on the revolting plasticity of human flesh, absentmindedly squeezing and folding the slippery flab hanging over the waistband of his jeans. Twisting, kicking out his absurdly long legs, contorting his body around the mic stand, howling his lyrics like a mushmouthed drunk screaming in an alley, he embodies the wrenching discord of the music. The threat implicit in a sweating, half-naked man towering over you as he staggers around the stage draws a wary eye, just as there’s a queasy, uncomfortable fascination in hearing him expose the emotions we usually keep tightly under wraps.

Judging from what others write about them, I’m not alone in seeing in Pissed Jeans the return of something I’ve been missing in rock music for a while. People have drawn a wide range of comparisons, be it to the Birthday Party (I don’t hear it), Flipper (getting warmer) or Black Flag (in “Damaged I” mode, definitely), suggesting that people are hearing what they want to hear, or else that noise offers a wide-open field for interpretation. The name Stickmen With Rayguns shows up like clockwork in every description of them but I suspect that most are cribbing that straight out of the press releases…it’s a name so good you can’t resist dropping it in, but in twenty years I don’t think I’ve even so much as seen it on an actual record. Clearly it’s time to fire up Hype Machine and see if there are any mp3s out there. Pissed Jeans blew me away on Wednesday night, even as they were blatantly struggling with their equipment, even when members of the band were making hurried exits from the stage to puke. The music was a visceral, cathartic blast and I still can’t figure out the reason for the dismally muted response from the admittedly thin audience. But as I say, some people will never understand.

Twenty More

The next twenty, from the Rest is Noise – I’ll edit with links later.

Panorama: Claude Debussy (DG)
Mahler, Sixth Symphony, Abbado/Berlin Philharmonic (DG)
Strauss, Salome, Karajan/Vienna Philharmonic (EMI)
Berg, Wozzeck, Abbado/Vienna Philharmonic (DG)
Janacek and Schulhoff, String Quartets, Tallich Quartet (Calliope)
Prokofiev and Ravel, Piano Concertos, Argerich/Abbado/Berlin Philharmonic (DG)
Stravinsky, Symphonies, Stravinsky/Columbia Symphony (Sony)
Ives: An American Journey, Tilson Thomas/San Francisco Symphony (RCA)
Gershwin, Porgy & Bess, Rattle/Glyndebourne Opera (EMI dvd)
Weill, The Threepenny Opera (“Berlin 1930″ edition, Teldec)
Shostakovich, String Quartets Nos 3, 7, 8, St. Lawrence Quartet (EMI)
Strauss, Metamorphosen and Four Last Songs, Karajan/Berlin Philharmonic (DG)
Xenakis, Orchestral Works and Chamber Music (col legno)
Stockhausen, Elektronische Musik, 1952-1960 (Stockhausen Edition No. 3)
Cage, The Seasons (ECM)
Feldman, Rothko Chapel (New Albion)
Part, Tabula Rasa (ECM)
Adams, Harmonielehre, de Waart/San Francisco Symphony (Nonesuch)
Lutoslawski, Third Symphony, Salonen/Los Angeles Philharmonic (Sony)
Golijov, Ayre and Berio, Folk Songs, Dawn Upshaw (DG)

The first ten here.

Road Paving

What has always made the state a hell on Earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven.

- Holderlin