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.
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.
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.
…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.
