on me
Wyatt Mason on Jon Fosse's Septology:
The practice of prayer, the practice of painting, the products of prose: all buoy us as we live and as those we love die — as those whom Asle has loved will. Like all members of our species have before him, Asle leaves his own inscrutable lines on the world, “the innermost picture inside me,” he says, “that all the pictures I’ve tried to paint are attempting to look like, this innermost picture, that’s a kind of soul and a kind of body in one, yes, that’s my spirit, what I call spirit.” And with Asle, in this remarkable novel, we pray:
and I hold the brown wooden cross between my thumb and my finger and then I say, again and again, inside myself, as I breathe in deeply Lord and as I breathe out slowly Jesus and as I breathe in deeply Christ and as I breathe out slowly Have mercy and as I breathe in deeply On me.
I’m gonna have to read this absolutely enormous one-sentenced book, dammit.
Across the Borderline
- 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
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.”
and so it begins
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.
hubris
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 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 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 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:
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!
- What sort of person will the use of this technology make of me?
- What habits will the use of this technology instill?
- How will the use of this technology affect my experience of time?
- How will the use of this technology affect my experience of place?
- How will the use of this technology affect how I relate to other people?
- How will the use of this technology affect how I relate to the world around me?
- What practices will the use of this technology cultivate?
- What practices will the use of this technology displace?
- What will the use of this technology encourage me to notice?
- What will the use of this technology encourage me to ignore?
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.
— John Pfaff (@JohnFPfaff)
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.