aflatmirror

For some reason, I've gotten pretty into Big Country lately? I'd never heard of them before the Todd in the Shadows video about them back in the summer, though I have since heard their big song in the wild (in a Dick's Sporting Goods of all places).



I like 80s alt rock, I like the melodic grammar of celtic folk music, I like big stupid reverb-ass 80s drums, I like some tight vocal harmonies, I like a sadboy tenor absolutely sending it, I like the Springsteeny bittersweet emotional urgency, so I was kind of destined to lose my mind a little bit. The song and the first record took a minute to grow on me, actually--the Springsteen comparison (which I've seen prior critics make as well) holds true also in the sense of "you're too good a lyricist to hurl out the words so quickly/indistinctly", and that made it hard for the song to find immediate purchase in my head, if that makes sense. But the shimmering urgency of all the songs on that first record, The Crossing, is infectious. Every live clip I've seen of them is utterly unreal, the guys' joy in playing together just pours out the screen, and I think The Crossing remains my favorite Big Country record because it, most completely of any of them, captures that live energy. You feel four achingly young men thrilled to be playing together and amazed to have found an audience.

Not to link to my God is Dead post a third time, but I feel an odd echo of VDB's story in theirs, or perhaps specifically Adamson's. Buoyed up to unexpected heights early on, clearly gifted, looking like everything is ahead of them, but something never quite clicks in trying to live up to that potential. Striving and turning themselves inside out looking for it, slowly ground down into despair (ten years after The Crossing, their album opener has the line "I walked out of the silver mine, my pockets filled with sand"). And in how the story ends.

But those first three records of theirs are worth remembering. I meant to talk about them more in detail, but I try to write these in one sitting and I'm fading now. I guess this works as a little bit of an overview of my thoughts/feelings on the band?

PS - I'd like to post on here more regularly in the new year.

I don't have much to add to this, it's just a sweet little story I wanted to share:

The Crane Wife by CJ Hauser

I got a job in May, which is why I haven't posted as much on here. It takes up most of my attention and mental energy, which is I think more of a factor in not Doing much lately than it taking up my time.

I have a lot of stuff I want to do--I found that article by linkhopping around the small web, which is something I've been growing a bit of a hyperfixation on the last couple days, imagining hosting options and domain names and tech pipelines for a hypothetical little digital plot of my own. I've been guiltily percolating a newish novel idea since January, guiltily because it hasn't translated into any words on paper (I'm both mortified to talk about it and bursting with the desire to do so). I'm wanting to learn to sew, but that's also been more of a mental hobby of picking out patterns and grabbing little bits from work (a quilt shop) and imagining projects than actually doing anything. It's just a weird holding pattern of having reached what was a goal for so long, and yet nothing else has changed. A bit of the "now what?" has settled in.

We've reached that late summer early fall serotinal period a bit earlier than usual, by my personal demarcation point of the leaves on the local black walnuts starting to turn yellow. They're the first tree around here to turn for the fall. But the Joe-Pye weeds are still in full bloom, little pink cloud banks by the sides of the road, and the blessed interval of cooler weather we've been having has come to an end, so summer isn't really done with us yet.

And the seasons turn also for the bike folk! It's one of the wackier parts of the calendar, in between the Tour and the Vuelta a España. A bustle of activity with Vuelta tuneup races like San Sebastian and Vuelta a Burgos; the awkward middle child of World Tour one-weekers, Tour de Pologne; the half a metric ton of salmon for winning KOM race; and a sprinkling of random French races like Tour de l'Ain. Folks are gearing up for the (men's; the women's was in May) Vuelta or Worlds, they're announcing their plans for the rest of the 2025 season, they're announcing team transfers for next year.

I dunno. Time moves on, with or without me.

It's kinda funny that I haven't yet written the post about the best part of the race. Consider that a sign of just how much catching my breath and "wtf just happened"-ing I've done since Saturday

This Giro started slow and weird, the first week dominated by Mads Pedersen; then a chaotic second week, where we had an unorthodox GC battle of mostly the GC guys vs the race itself rather than the GC guys vs each other. I counted four different teams when all was said and done who lost their original GC leader: Quick Step, Lidl-Trek, Bora, and UAE (not even counting Bahrain, where Tiberi just blew up at some point and GC leadership ended up going to Caruso, nor Ineos, who kept their leader Bernal but lost key domestiques and had Bernal himself fading badly by the end).

When I last left you all, Roglič and Ayuso were technically still in the race, but the inclusion of Bora and UAE in the list above should tell you that did not remain the case for very long. Roglič crashed once more on stage 16, the first day in the mountains, and that was the last straw. On the bright side, that did enable us to see what Pellizzari could do when riding for himself: podium one of the hardest stages of the race and vault up 9 GC positions in one day, ultimately getting in the top ten of a grand tour that he spent the first two thirds of as a domestique. Ayuso hemorrhaged time on stages 16 and 17, and then, as though that wasn't enough, he got stung in the face by a hornet or bee or something. I don't know how the team allowed him to start stage 18 with one eye literally physically swollen shut like an Animal Crossing character, but he did mercifully bow out in the first few kilometers. I was not at all expecting the Giro to end with me feeling so bad for Ayuso; I came in feeling neutral to mildly negative about him but ended up at "jesus christ this kid cannot catch a break".

In terms of GC action over the last week:

Stage 16: Del Toro's top rivals (Carapaz especially, but also Simon Yates and others) go on the offensive and take back a few seconds to a couple minutes. Not a full-on crack from del Toro, but not a good sign for his chances on the queen stage of the race, stage 20 on the Finestre. With Roglič gone and Ayuso down like 15 minutes in one day, people generally believe the Giro is between del Toro and Carapaz, leaning toward the latter as the stronger climber of the two and the one who has proven himself a grand tour winner. Del Toro might hold on to pink by the skin of his teeth...

Stage 17: ... but instead he finally gets that stage win he'd been chasing since Siena. Carapaz moves up into second over Simon Yates.

Effectively no GC change on stage 18, but Bora do scavenge a stage win with Nico Denz (from a comically deep breakaway recursion, he was maybe the fuga de la fuga de la fuga?) out of the remnants of their Giro.

I'll be honest that I do not remember anything about stage 19 besides del Toro taking exactly two seconds on Carapaz (coming second and third in the stage to take six and four bonus seconds respectively), and Simon Yates being a bit grouchy afterwards for very mysterious reasons.

Bringing us to stage 20. Like I said, the queen stage of the race, with the lads climbing the Colle delle Finestre, a storied climb in the annals of the Giro. And speaking of Simon Yates and deep mysteries, one of those stories is his.

Background time. Simon Yates had been leading the 2018 edition of the Giro ever since stage 6. On stage 19, so close to taking it home, the race went up this very same road. For reasons unclear (that Yates has never gone into in years since, other than to say it's not that he was sick), he lost disturbingly close to 40 minutes in one day, on the one climb. Dropped 17 places in GC. Chris Froome went on a solo raid that day to claim the maglia rosa for himself; indeed, by this time in the present Giro people were referring to the offhand possibility someone other than del Toro or Carapaz might pull off a GC coup on the Finestre "pulling a Froome".

I'll tell what happens next from my point of view. I check the live tracker at some point in the morning, either right before I leave for work (~8:30 EDT/14:30 CEST) or right before I go in (about an hour later). I think I remember Wout being up the road, which, good for Simon if so. I don't remember now if Simon had already attacked the other GC guys at this point. I go about my morning.

I go on my lunch break around 12 and check up on the lads. To my immense surprise, Simon Yates just won the Giro. While I was gone, he bridged up over to Wout, who did what he did for Jonas in 2022 on the Hautacam and gave the ride of a lifetime to deliver Yates to the final climb. What happened to our erstwhile leaders? They were so focused on marking and avoiding attacks from one another that neither went to close down Yates (they do end up filling out the podium, Isaac del Toro second in only his second grand tour, Richard Carapaz third). Weird, frustrating and kind of disappointing from them. But tbh, as a Visma fan and lover of the over-the-top highs of Romance in cycling, I'm too far gone on everything else to care. Yates is crying the whole time in all the post race interviews, Wout's recreated one of the moments that made me love him as a rider, my boys in yellow are winning again, I'm wishing I could have seen Adam Yates' first reaction to all this (imagine you're one of del Toro's top domestiques, he's isolated far up the road from you, and then you hear your twin brother on another team just beat your team in a perfect inversion of what happened to him on this same climb seven years ago: what a cacophony of emotion!)

Nobody asked me what happened when I got back from lunch, so I was apparently able to make my face be normal.

So yeah, a wild fucking ride! It's not every day one of your interests reminds you so intensely why you love it.

Whither now the bike dudes? The Criterium du Dauphiné next week, the traditional tune-up race for the Tour. It'll be the first we've seen of Pogačar since Liège, of Remco since Romandie, of Jonas since Paris-Nice (!!!). Tour de Suisse the week after that. Then, of course, the Tour de France.

This second week has been a bit of a "wait, wasn't the Siena stage just the other day? How has it been a week already?" kind of affair. Not that it's been boring—on the contrary—but just that each day comes so hot on the heels of the day before, dominated by these punchy break-focused stages in a way that can make it hard to keep it all straight.

( Discussion below )

While I'm waiting for...sources...to upload the women's Saturday in hell from earlier today and gearing up for the men's race tomorrow, I decided to give this movie a rewatch. It's excellent: deliberate and attentive in a way that matches the pace of the sport, a voice and eye that lets the natural drama of the race shine through without over-embellishment. A lovely time capsule of the cycling world of 50 years ago.

Plus ça change...

Guys cracking their bare heads open on the pavé will have you wondering how more riders didn't just drop dead before helmets became the norm.
For some reason the steak for breakfast bit always gets me. Carbohydrates hadn't been invented yet in '76.
Old-timey diagnostic medicine being 80% taking people's pulse, 15% poking them and 5% miscellaneous also always gets me. Also, 40 is nothing compared to Induráin, whose RHR at his peak was apparently under 30.
Them wheels: waferrr-thin, holding up like ten kilos of bike and another maybe 80 of (pre "maximizing watts per kilo by minimizing the denominator") rider.
The break gets like ten minutes of leash, though at that margin it seems to my modern eyes more like they get the run of the dog park. Pacing: also not yet invented yet in '76.
In 2025, a reigning TdF champion starting in Paris-Roubaix is insanity. In 1976, it's just "oh yeah, Bernard Thévenet is here too".
Just a little thing, but the lack of English is noticeable. Teams communicate in French or Italian or Dutch according to their nationality, the race officials and TV broadcasters in French. The world feels a little smaller and slower.

...plus c'est la même chose:

Feed zones, somehow exactly the same.
Likewise the marshals marking out the route, not that there's any real reason for the technology of "guy with a sign and a whistle" to have been superseded.
The doomed early break ridden for exposure was not, for some reason, something I thought had such a long history.
The little electric razor or epilator De Vlaeminck uses on his legs at the beginning was another "wait, they had those in the 70s?" moment.
Just the vibes of the riders? Usually young men of older generations come across to me as seeming older than their years by modern standards (I've been listening to a lot of Joy Division lately and Ian Curtis is a stellar example of this), but something about the way the guys carry themselves here is recognizably that of 20-somethings. De Vlaeminck in this film has the eyes of a boy, is the best I can do to further verbalize or explain it.
This was hard to fit into the "things that are different"/"things that are the same" template, but the film diplomatically omits that by this point in his career, Mathieu van der Poel's granddaddy was firmly in his Do Drugs To Keep Up With The Young'uns era. Another callback to my post about God is Dead, since Poulidor and VDB were both under the auspices of Mr Homeopathy Horse Doctor Bernard Sainz.

The Wittgenstein of the title is Paul, one of Ludwig's brothers. He lost his right arm in World War I and afterward commissioned piano pieces "for the left hand only", as the lyric says. The verses reference the suicides of two of their other brothers: Rudolf poisoned himself, referencing his homosexuality in one of the notes he left behind, and Kurt shot himself just before the end of the war when his unit all deserted.

The road cycling season properly began today at Omloop Nieuwsblad (or at Faun Ardeche if you're French). For better or worse, a continuation of themes from the pre-season races.

( Spoilers beyond )

The first couple races of the World Tour are here with the women's and now the men's Tour Down Under. I don't know if the vibes were off at first with the racing or with me, but I felt like I was just kinda going through the motions until today, when stuff finally clicked.

( spoilers below )

This is from an account by a man who managed to be assigned to the same army company and deployed to the front with his lover, and it's the sweetest most romantic thing I've ever read (translation mine):

»40 bis 50 Meter vor dem Feinde, im oft recht traulichen Unterstand, vergaßen wir unter dem Pfeifen der Kugeln und dem Donner der Geschütze, daß draußen der Weltkrieg tobte, daß dort der Tod an allen Ecken lauerte. Da habe ich erst recht empfunden, wie treue Freundschaft beseligt. Erst da kam ich zu der Erkenntnis, daß ich nicht ein ,Enterbter des Liebesglücks' sei, sondern ein vom Schicksal besonders Begünstigter, geradezu ein ,Glückspilz'« .

40 to 50 meters in front of the enemy, in the often quite cozy shelter, we forgot, amongst the whistling of the bullets and the thunder of the artillery, that outside the Great War was raging, that death lurked around every corner. There I discovered for the first time how blissfully happy loyal friendship makes one. For the first time I came to the realization that I wasn't denied the happiness of love, but instead was especially blessed by fate, a real lucky devil.

p. 288