Reggie Jackson and Pink Floyd
Reggie Jackson and Pink Floyd
And Buddy Guy and Bob Gibson
[A crow looks contentedly over its realm, which happens to be the city of Paris, from a vantage point atop Montmartre.]
The indescribable satisfaction of settling into bed at night after a long and hard day in which one has the sense, however delusional, that one has accomplished something that will stand, glowing within with the energy produced by that success, half-desirous of fighting fatigue to stay up to work longer, but so exhausted that the body immediately overrules the spirit and a warm fog of sleep descends as a blessing, blotting out all care and replacing it with dreams of childhood innocence and love unconquerable.
Baseball as I want always to remember it from my youth.
One of the game’s greats, Reggie Jackson, showing how the game was played back then.
Yankees v. Indians, 1981. They were division rivals back then, have no idea whether that’s still true now, as they’ve mixed the divisions and conferences up so thoroughly over the years as to ruin almost all the important rivalries of the time when I paid attention.
(And yes, I am well aware the team in Cleveland has caved to political pressure from activists and changed its name. They were the Indians then, and they will always be the Indians in my heart.)
In an earlier at-bat, Indians’ pitcher John Denny throws inside to get Reggie off the plate and knocks him down, then strikes him out. Reggie is not at all pleased at having lost this encounter. Jackson yells at Denny for throwing inside, but teammates separate them.
(Elsewhere on YouTube there is wonderful video of Jackson talking with maybe the best right-handed pitcher ever Bob Gibson about the intricacies of how the inside portion of the plate is mercilessly fought over by pitcher and hitter, with pitchers throwing hard inside to frighten hitters back in the batter’s box and hitters making the careful calculation between personal safety and ownership of the plate. If the pitcher’s scare tactic works, he has a portion of the outside part of the plate to work with that the repositioned hitter cannot comfortably reach. Two highly learned baseball philosophers brilliantly discussing their craft).
During a later appearance at the plate, Reggie gets his revenge, crushing a hanging Denny curveball far into the seats in right field, then flipping the bat magisterially and lovingly watching the ball go over the fence from near home plate. He also cockily doffs his cap to the crowd as he completes the circuit around the bases. He knows exactly what effect this has on Denny, who realizes he has been disrespected and cannot refuse a response, so he apparently yells something at Jackson as he crosses the plate. This gives Reggie the excuse to go out to the mound and settle the matter with fisticuffs, or at least a stranglehold at the bottom of a scrum. The benches clear, and when the dust has all returned to the infield ground, Jackson, the “triumphant gladiator” in the announcer’s witty phrase, is carried off by two teammates giddily applauding himself.
Sorry, soccer, elegant as you are (and oh, but you are)
, this will always be the beautiful game for me.Ran into this today looking for more Bonnie Raitt on YouTube. The brilliant Buddy Guy
(with the single most impressive stage outfit in the history of live music, ready to go if a blizzard hits the inside of the venue!), Junior Wells, and A.C. Reed join her in a ‘74 PBS special.Yes, believe it or not, young folks, PBS used to do stuff like this, way back before they determined that every single thing said on the station had to be in the form of a lament for the worst of all possible worlds that is America.
Junior Wells’ line: “We’re gonna do a little thing for ya that I think you might like. If you don’t like it, act like ya like it anyway!”
Doesn’t get any better than that, ladies and gentlemen. If the joy of this music doesn’t reach you, get thee to a hospital immediately!
Message below received a few weeks ago from ISSEP, demonstrating how a proper institution of higher education deals with criminality.
Two low level thieves walked into the ISSEP and tried to make off with personal property of administrative staff, and students and staff chased them down and forced them to return the items. Well done!
Une tentative de vol dans nos locaux empêchée par les étudiants de l’ISSEP !
Ce matin, deux individus capuchés se sont introduits dans les locaux de l’ISSEP. Ils en ont profité pour voler des affaires appartenant au personnel administratif. Leur larcin commis, ils ont rapidement pris la fuite.
Pas assez rapidement cependant puisque des étudiants de l’ISSEP et une employée les ont immédiatement poursuivi et rattrapé. (voir la vidéo) Grâce à leur solidarité, ils ont obligé les voleurs à restituer les affaires dérobées et à présenter des excuses.
Dans une France qui sombre de plus en plus dans l’insécurité comme en témoigne les derniers chiffres du ministère de l’Intérieur, les étudiants et le personnel de l’ISSEP ont réagi d’une manière exemplaire. La direction est particulièrement fière de leur attitude.
I have friends who are serenely confident that the students will save us from the Woke revolution.
I cannot follow them in that faith. I have seen too much of how eager so many of these young people are to go along to get along, and how many of them avidly take up the pseudo-religion because they come to college in a spiritual void created by the victories these past decades and longer of that worldview and so it becomes their faith, and the attachment to it of these kids is frequently distressingly ferocious.
And yet…
Last Wednesday, I watched several young women in one of my classes, a group of evidently close friends who daily sit together, conscientious students who, unlike some of their classmates, always do the reading and who are self-evidently eager to learn, whom I have never one time seen with their faces stuck in their laptops looking at God knows what in the middle of a class discussion (the plague of higher education today), who are in their seats on time every day, who are as pleasant and cheerful as any young people I’ve ever known, I watched them all come into class with ashes on their foreheads and take their seats and I was overwhelmed with joy to see them thus and to think on what they represent.
The faithful youth, those of our young people who have yet managed to avoid the hateful ressentiment that is fast becoming our mode of business in higher education, and who have dedicated themselves to the traditions of their families and their communities and their churches and who therefore stand a reasonable chance of resisting the dreadful totalitarian groupthink that I write about so frequently here.
My wife was telling me the other day, for the 18,639th time or so, that I should focus more on the positive at work than I do. (She is, thank God, indefatigable in her mission to try to make me a happier person than I naturally am, however limited the results of all her work for these years we’ve been together have been).
So let me just reflect fondly on the image of these young students sitting cheerfully in my class on that day and project that into the future.
May there be many more like them to come for Bucknell and for every other college and university in this country. We are surely going to need them.
Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon LP is 50 years old tomorrow.
I was in the 1st grade when it came out. I was not yet listening to much rock music, although the stories I have heard are that my father, a musician, tried leaving guitars in my room all through my early childhood to see if I’d be tempted.
I believe I’m something of an outlier on the place of this LP in rock history. I see it as the beginning of the end of interesting music from this band.
Early on, they were straight-on psychedelia with the on-the-way-to-insane lyrics of their on-the-way-to-insane lead singer Syd Barrett. (Barrett had some kind of mental breakdown around the time they were recording their second studio LP and was never able to live an independent life afterward). I like a few of the Syd era songs, but overall this was not something that much moved me.
Once Barrett left and was replaced by Dave Gilmour, a proper guitar player who, unlike Syd, could actually play the instrument beyond just raking out basic chords, the band recorded several albums that I listened to heavily in college and still consider important statements. Meddle especially strikes me as a high point in progressive rock/art rock/whatever we are calling what they were doing then.
In college, I also encountered the film Live at Pompeii that they made as they were recording Dark Side. It is a document of what the band were doing at what I consider their apex.
The premise of the film is they just flew all their equipment to Pompeii, which was famously decimated in 79 AD by an eruption of Mount Vesuvius, and staged a version of their live show in the Roman amphitheater there, for an audience of no one beyond themselves and the film crew. Perhaps the spirits of the Greco-Roman gods were occupying some of the seats, unseen by us.
The version of “Echoes” they do in the film is a pristine summary of their meaning as a band to me in my youth. That long entry shot, closing in on drummer Nick Mason as the song slowly breathes itself into life, and the gossamer harmony vocals of Rick Wright and Gilmour with those alternating close-ups of their faces, this represents a creative moment in the history of rock music that I treasure.
Just about all my college friends who were rock fans thought Dark Side and The Wall were the best Floyd albums. Some of them probably thought they were the only ones they’d made. As I said, that was not my view.
But on such an anniversary, I can’t just say that.
There is one song on that album I have always loved.
I heard it a lot on FM radio in the days when I was first getting interested in rock music. I thought and still think it’s hard to do much more emotively than Gilmour does with this perfect solo in the first 32 bars. Nothing technically difficult but melodically memorable lines that give me shivers every time.
The lyrics also spoke powerfully to the young person I was then, the narrative of wasting time and regretting it later when it’s too late. The fact that it’s a commonplace sentiment doesn’t make it any less profound. It could be a statement of my life still today—periodically recalling the urgency and vowing to change, and yet never changing, and continuing to waste time even knowing already how this all ends. I don’t know that rock music ever needs to get any more philosophical than this.
The lyric was written by Roger Waters, whose thoughts have often lingered near the dark side (and who has believed his whole adult life in a politics that can be best described in my view as “angry teenager”), and I gather from what I know of his thoughts on religion that it would be likely he intended the last lines as a criticism of those people “falling to their knees” at the sound of “the tolling of the iron bell” in the rural English church.
I’m not centrally interested in what he meant by it, though. The lines he wrote starting with “Home, home again…” and ending with the “softly spoken magic spells” have always spoken something else to me, a wistful nostalgia for that world and a burning desire to find one’s way back to it from the alienating modern pressure to fill one’s life with the endless, soulless hustle expressed in the earlier part of the song.
Maybe Waters meant that, or at least the possibility of that, too?
“Home, home again
I like to be here when I can
When I come home cold and tired
It's good to warm my bones beside the fire
Far away, across the field
The tolling of the iron bell
Calls the faithful to their knees
To hear the softly spoken magic spells.”
Better quality video but inferior commentary on the same Thierry Henry goal:
Buddy Guy has one of the most hilarious “first time I met Jimi Hendrix” stories ever, in conversation with B.B. King (“Get outta my damn way, who the hell is Jimi Hendrix?!…then he plugged it up and went to work on it and I said “Well, maybe I should know you then!”):