Alan Jacobs

“Across the Borderline” was a big hit for Willie Nelson, and when Willie covers a song it’s usually the definitive version, but not in this case. The original, above, is the only version that matters, because the song just has to be sung by Freddy Fender, born Baldemar Garza Huerta in San Benito, Texas, a few miles from the Rio Grande. The players, according to the liner notes:

• Freddy Fender - vocal
• Ry Cooder - guitar
• Sam Samudio - organ, backing vocals
• John Hiatt- guitar
• Jim Dickinson - piano
• Tim Drummond - bass
• Jim Keltner - drums
• Ras Baboo - percussion
• Bobby King, Willie Greene Jr. - backing vocals

A Southern/Southwestern Americana supergroup! (The song was written by Cooder, Hiatt, and Dickinson.)

For years, when I listened to this song I thought I was hearing the great Flaco Jiménez on accordion, because he has often played with Ry Cooder over the years — listen, for instance, to his amazing playing on Cooder’s cover of the old Jim Reeves classic “He’ll Have to Go” — but apparently that’s Sam Samudio imitating an accordion on the organ. Sam Samudio was born Domingo Samudio, but is better known as Sam the Sham, leader of Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, the people who brought us “Wooly Bully.”

But the really interesting figure here is Jim Dickinson, the heart and soul of Memphis music — and the father of Luther and Cody Dickinson, AKA the North Mississippi Allstars. (Also a one-time drama major at Baylor, though he dropped out to return to Memphis.) There are a thousand Jim Dickinson stories but here’s one:

Dickinson was working at the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio when The Rolling Stones were recording there. When they got to “Wild Horses” they ran into a problem. Their road manager and occasional pianist Ian Stewart refused to play the song’s piano part. This was not unusual for Stewart, who had very defined ideas of what he would and would not play, though he didn’t always explain his reasoning to others. In any case, he refused, and Dickinson stepped in — and a career was born. He was always in demand after that.

Years later, Dickinson got to spend some time with Stewart and asked him why he refused to play that song. Stu said, “Minor chords — I don’t play minor chords. When I play with the lads onstage and a minor chord comes by, I lift me hands.” So there you go.

Dickinson’s popularity as a session musician was a function not of technique — he didn’t have much — but of feel. He knew just how and when to add a lick and, maybe more important, when to be silent. You can hear his perfectly tasteful restraint on both “Wild Horses” and “Across the Borderline.”

In a wonderful late interview, he explained how, after he was well established, he met an old Memphis musician called Dish Rag who revealed to him what he had been doing all along. Dish Rag told him that everything in music is about codes. Dickinson was a bit puzzled until he realized that Dish Rag meant “chords.”

He said, ‘This is how you makes a code.” He said you take any note then you go up three and four down. He was talking about keys, not half-steps or whole steps. He was talking about the keys on the keyboard. It was a physical thing I could see. Of course, it works anywhere on the piano. Your thumb ends up on the tonic note and what it makes is a triad. Dish Rag had no idea that’s what it was, but it was a code to him. So, with a triad chord in my right hand and an octave in my left, y’know, I kind of taught myself to play. That’s what I still do … listen to what I’m playing on “Wild Horses” — I’m playing a major triad or a minor with my left hand and an octave with my right … that’s all I play. It’s so simple it works in the studio. It creates space and tension and all the things you want a keyboard to do and it doesn’t get in the way of the damn guitar because rock and roll is about guitars. So, thank god I’ve had a career because I play simple and stupid. It really boils down to the simplicity of what I do. I had a friend ask about the Stones session once, he says “Tell me the truth man, you were holding back weren’t you?” I said, “Dude I was going for it with everything I had [laughs]. It’s just all I got.”

This feels like a big one, and is certainly a harbinger of things to come. We’ve had major rock stars die young, from accidents (Buddy Holly, Stevie Ray Vaughan) or drug abuse (too many to list); and we’ve had them last into middle age only to succumb to bad habits (Elvis) and more accidents and even murder (John Lennon, Marvin Gaye). But now they’re starting to go from … well, from the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. From little more than old age. 

Of course, Chuck Berry died four years ago, Little Richard last year — and Johnny Cash nearly twenty years ago, believe it or not. But — and I don’t think I’m making a false distinction here — they were artists who made their names before the emergence of Youth Culture. Indeed, by the time the Stones and the Beatles and Dylan and The Who came around, their stars were on the wane. Chuck Berry and Little Richard are associated with the “rock and roll” of the Fifties, not the ROCK of the Sixties and Seventies — the music that defined almost everything in its time, the sun around which the rest of culture revolved. The sun that seemed permanent, that couldn’t possibly burn out. 

But Paul is 79, Ringo 81, Dylan 80. Eric Clapton is 76, Jimmy Page 77. Mick is 78, Keith 77. Pete Townshend 76, Roger Daltrey 77. In the next decade we are likely to lose almost all of those people, and an Era will have passed. It’s strange, for me anyway, to contemplate. 

So rest in peace, Charlie. You were one of the great ones. Others will be joining you soon enough. 

If we do not now have evidence that Mikel Arteta is incapable of managing this side, then what would constitute evidence? One shudders to imagine. 

Me to my wife: Hey babe, I have good news and bad news. 

Teri: Give me the good news first. 

Me: The senior vice president of communications for the National Religious Broadcasters went on TV to encourage Christians to get vaccinated! 

Her: Fantastic! But what's the bad news?  

Me: Well... 

As I write, all of the ICU beds in McLennan County, where I live, are occupied. The vast majority have covid. Of those who have covid, 93% are unvaccinated. The beat goes on. And on. And on.

David French:

A conservative doctor recently told me that after January 6th he “unplugged.” He stopped watching cable news. He stopped listening to talk radio. And lest he be tempted to engage in political arguments online, he deleted social media apps from his phone. He described the change as wholly positive for his life. He was happier, and his blood pressure was lower.

I had two immediate thoughts. Good for him. Bad for us. Here’s a good man who has good things to say who simply decided, “It’s not worth it.” No, not because anyone could cancel him. (He has a thriving independent practice). But because speaking his mind carried with it an unacceptable emotional cost.

As my friend Russell Moore put it in a recent newsletter, “What then ends up happening is a kind of self-cancel culture as the emotionally and spiritually healthiest people mute themselves in order to go about their lives and not deal with the pressure from those for whom these arguments are their lives.”

I hear what David and Russell are saying here, but I think there is an important unacknowledged assumption in their comments: that these emotionally and spiritually healthy people would bring their health to social media — that they would somehow change Twitter, say, without themselves being changed in the process. But as I said a few years ago, “I left Twitter because I watched people who spent a lot of time on Twitter get stupider and stupider, and it finally occurred to me that I was probably getting stupider too. And after some reflection I decided that I couldn’t afford to get any stupider.” And I could have noted not just Twitter users’ increase in stupidity over time but also their corresponding decrease in charity.

I think when we decide whether or not to invest time on a social media platform, we need to ask Michael Sacasas’s questions about technology, some of which are:

1. What sort of person will the use of this technology make of me?
2. What habits will the use of this technology instill?
3. How will the use of this technology affect my experience of time?
4. How will the use of this technology affect my experience of place?
5. How will the use of this technology affect how I relate to other people?
6. How will the use of this technology affect how I relate to the world around me?
7. What practices will the use of this technology cultivate?
8. What practices will the use of this technology displace?
9. What will the use of this technology encourage me to notice?
10. What will the use of this technology encourage me to ignore?

When we use technologies, those technologies change us, for the better or worse — or, sometimes, both at once. And often they change us because the people who make them want us to be a particular kind of person — the kind of person they can monetize. The kind of person on whom they can be parasitic, for their own financial benefit. Once more with feeling: social media companies need engagement, and hatred creates engagement like nothing else, so the regular Two Minutes Hate on Twitter and the incessant “hate raids” on Twitch are, for those companies, features rather than bugs. I’m sure that if they saw an easy way to get engagement solely from peace, love, and understanding, they’d intervene, but if hate gets engagement, and we can sell ads against engagement? — Then bring on the hate!

You think you can resist those technological affordances, simply decline to become the kind of person the social media companies want you to be? Maybe you can. But the Greeks called that kind of confidence hubris, and understood that what follows hubris is Nemesis.

We have countless ways to communicate with one another that do not involve the big social media companies. Let’s use them!

Or 0.07% of those vaccinated.

This is so depressing, bc it reflects that we can’t cover any sort of public health numbers responsibly. It’s not just crime that gets fearmongered. It’s everything. Which means it’s an even more intractable problem.

https://t.co/HRHViAwXFG

— John Pfaff (@JohnFPfaff)

July 30, 2021

Now I’m wondering how many people read this and think, Yeah, but seven percent is a lot! In short, we still need the School for Scale. Also instruction in decimal points.

The issue of Oliver Burkeman’s newsletter The Imperfectionist reminded me of something he wrote several years ago that it’s always useful to remember: Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time.

The phrase “long march through the institutions” is often attributed to Antonio Gramsci, but in fact it was coined in the 1960s, by a German Communist named Rudi Dutschke. But the misattribution is understandable, because it’s a very Gramscian point.

When Gramsci coined the term hegemony, he did not mean mere “domination,” which is how the term is often used today. When poorly informed people talk about “American hegemony” they mean American military power; when more knowledgeable people use that phrase, they mean it in a Gramscian sense: A military/political power that is immeasurably strengthened by cultural dominance. Hegemony arises from the control of forces far greater than those of the state. “In the West,” wrote Gramsci, “there was a proper relation between state and civil society, and when the state trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The state was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks.”

Gramsci’s purpose in thus describing the situation was to explain that a frontal military attack on the existing order by revolutionary forces was unlikely to succeed because of the strength of the structures of civil society. A direct attack, a “war of movement,” could only be successful if it were preceded by a patient remaking of civil society, a “war of position.” Thus the need for what Dutschke called a “long march through the institutions.”

You sometimes hear Dutschke’s phrase from conservative commentators frustrated by the success of the left in making just such a march through American civil society, through the media and the arts and the universities. They are correct that this has happened, but they rarely draw the appropriate conclusions from it. Instead of imitating the patience and persistence of the leftist marchers, they long for a strongman, a Trump or an Orban, to relieve them of the responsibility for reshaping civil society. If reshaping those institutions seems hard, then why not dream of someone powerful enough to blow them up and start over? Dreams of an omnicompetent strongman are the natural refuge of people too lazy and feckless to begin, much less complete, a long march.

Proud, brave, honorable by its lights, courteous, personally generous, loyal, swift to act, often too swift, but signally effective, sometimes terrible, in its action — such was the South at its best. And such at its best it remains today, despite the great falling away in some of its virtues. Violence, intolerance, aversion and suspicion toward new ideas, an incapacity for analysis, an inclination to act from feeling rather than from thought, an exaggerated individualism and too narrow concept of social responsibility, attachment to fictions and false values, above all too great attachment to racial values and a tendency to justify cruelty and injustice in the name of those values, sentimentality and a lack of realism — these have been its characteristic vices in the past. And, despite changes for the better, they remain its characteristic vices today. 

— W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (1941) 

Adam Roberts:

I’m wondering if we could theorise Twitter itself as a huge, sprawling and continually refashioning sequence of aphorisms. And, as a regular user I know that, more often than you might think, a tweet does hit the sweet spot that Lockwood captures so well in her Part 1: a tweet that is funny, or clever, or thought-provoking, or poignardesque. But most of Twitter, the vast majority, is drivel. Chaff. Irritable gestures, smugnesses, narcissisms, randomness, phatic fumbles of the finger on the iPhone typepad. But still all aphorisms. The form of the website mandates that. Which gives us a huge unspooling aphoristic megatext that is neither pedagogically worthwhile, metaphysically tantalising nor even deconstructivistically labyrinthine. That is, rather, just banal. Banal on an epic scale. A huge ongoing drama in which the aphorism has become the main vehicle for the radical, collective banalism of life today. Perhaps the reason ‘we’ (for certain metrics of ‘we’) are so addicted to Twitter is precisely because it satisfies our yearning for an aphorism of banality rather than an aphorism of profundity; an aphorism that closes down rather than discloses, that glues us together in our shared pettiness.

I think what Adam is trying to say is that Twitter is the natural habitat of the banalphorism.

George MacDonald, “The Voice of Job”:

In the confusion of Job’s thoughts — how could they be other than confused, in the presence of the awful contradiction of two such facts staring each other in the face, that God was just, yet punishing a righteous man as if he were wicked? — while he was not yet able to generate, or to receive the thought, that approving love itself might be inflicting or allowing the torture — that such suffering as his was granted only to a righteous man, that he might be made perfect — I can well imagine that at times, as the one moment he doubted God’s righteousness, and the next cried aloud, ‘Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him,’ there must in the chaos have mingled some element of doubt as to the existence of God. Let not such doubt be supposed a yet further stage in unbelief. To deny the existence of God may, paradoxical as the statement will at first seem to some, involve less unbelief than the smallest yielding to doubt of his goodness. I say yielding; for a man may be haunted with doubts, and only grow thereby in faith. Doubts are the messengers of the Living One to rouse the honest. They are the first knock at our door of things that are not yet, but have to be, understood; and theirs in general is the inhospitable reception of angels that do not come in their own likeness. Doubt must precede every deeper assurance; for uncertainties are what we first see when we look into a region hitherto unknown, unexplored, unannexed. In all Job’s begging and longing to see God, then, may well be supposed to mingle the mighty desire to be assured of God’s being. To acknowledge is not to be sure of God.

Our social science may make us very wise or clever as regards the means for any objectives we might choose. It admits being unable to help us in discriminating between legitimate and illegitimate, between just and unjust, objectives. Such a science is instrumental and nothing but instrumental: it is born to be the handmaid of any powers or any interests that be. What Machiavelli did apparently, our social science would actually do if it did not prefer — only God knows why — generous liberalism to consistency: namely, to give advice with equal competence and alacrity to tyrants as well as to free peoples. According to our social science, we can be or become wise in all matters of secondary importance, but we have to be resigned to utter ignorance in the most important respect: we cannot have any knowledge regarding the ultimate principles of our choices, i.e., regarding their soundness or unsoundness; our ultimate principles have no other support than our arbitrary and hence blind preferences. We are then in the position of beings who are sane and sober when engaged in trivial business and who gamble like madmen when confronted with serious issues — retail sanity and wholesale madness. 

— Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (1953)

Since 2009, I’ve been keeping my bookmarks online in service called Pinboard. It’s a service that displays your bookmarks — with tags and text excerpts, both very important for me — in a simple and readable form. Obviously I wouldn’t have used it for so long if I didn’t like it, but two things have consistently bothered me. One is that it has never had a responsive design: though some gestures in that direction have been made recently, if you want to look at your bookmarks in a mobile device your best option is to manually add the letter “m” and a period before the URL. The other says more about me than about Pinboard: I bookmark too many pages. Way too many pages. The result has been that I forget almost everything that I have there, including the things that I really want to remember. Yes, search is available, but when faced with a wilderness of bookmarks it can be difficult, for me anyway, even to understand what to search for.

Nevertheless, when, a few months ago, the owner of Pinboard asked longtime users to make a contribution to the ongoing maintenance of the site, I agreed to do so. After all, I had paid once, twelve years ago, and had been using the site ever since. It seemed a reasonable request. But then, very soon afterward, I started having problems with the site and wrote to ask for assistance. Those emails have not been answered. I have to say, it’s just a little bit annoying to have tech support fall silent right after you give the company money, but this is the world we live in. Still, despite my stoic resignation, it struck me that this was an opportunity for me to rethink my bookmarking practices. After all, as Manton Reece reminds us, “The only web site that you can trust to last and have your interests at heart is the web site with your name on it.” Pinboard is on the open web but it could still disappear today and I would have no recourse.

So here’s my plan: I will bookmark-with-excerpts less often, but when it happens it’ll happen here on blog.ayjay.org, where I already have a tagging system in place. After all, I am equally interested in what I say and what others say on any given topic; and comparing my thoughts with theirs is a useful exercise.

A new semester starts today, so I won’t be doing as much blogging blogging as I did over the summer. But this site may be even more active, just in a quotey sort of way. Caveat lector.

Finally: I’ll still be doing my weekly newsletter — a new issue went out this morning.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“560”] lithograph from “High Street” (1938)[/caption]

[caption id=“attachment_40577” align=“aligncenter” width=“600”] Dangerous Work at Low Tide (1940) © The Estate of Eric Ravilious. Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York - DACS, London[/caption]

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“1418”] Duty Boat (1940); © The Estate of Eric Ravilious. Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York – DACS, London[/caption]