Podcasts about Abernethy

The M.A. in Biblical Exegesis at Wheaton has been running for about a quarter of a century and it recently broadened its mission to enroll remote learners. Prof. Abernethy explains this transition, along with the program's resolute commitment to the acquisition and use of the original languages. Dr. Andrew Abernethy, a frequent contributor to this podcast, is Professor of Old Testament, Assistant Dean of Biblical and Theological Studies in the Litfin Divinity School, and Program Director of the M.A. in Biblical Exegesisat Wheaton Graduate School. He is currently President of the Institute of Biblical Literature.  Check out related programs at Wheaton College: B.A. in Classical Languages (Greek, Latin, Hebrew): https://bit.ly/4jwANK8  M.A. in Biblical Exegesis: https://bit.ly/4cYI6Ic 

Send us a textOn this week of Serious Privacy, Paul Breitbarth, Ralph O'Brien of Reinbo Consulting, and Dr. K Royal connect with Darren Abernethy of Greenberg Traurig to discuss all things #cookies and #trackers.Please subscribe in your favorite podcast app - sharing is caring!  Powered by TrustArcSeamlessly manage your privacy program, assess risks, and stay up to date on laws across the globe.With TrustArc's Privacy Studio and Governance Suite, you can automate cookie compliance, streamline data subject rights, and centralize your privacy tasks—all while reducing compliance costs. Visit TrustArc.com/serious-privacy.If you have comments or questions, find us on LinkedIn and Instagram @seriousprivacy, and on BlueSky under @seriousprivacy.eu, @europaulb.seriousprivacy.eu, @heartofprivacy.bsky.app and @igrobrien.seriousprivacy.eu, and email podcast@seriousprivacy.eu. Rate and Review us! From Season 6, our episodes are edited by Fey O'Brien. Our intro and exit music is Channel Intro 24 by Sascha Ende, licensed under CC BY 4.0. with the voiceover by Tim Foley.

Mándanos un mensajeTemas ClaveErrores Comunes en el CalentamientoCalentamientos demasiado largos o ineficaces.El uso inadecuado del cardio pre-entrenamiento.Estiramientos estáticos y su impacto negativo.Calentamientos con pesos demasiado ligeros.Escucha a la CienciaResumen de estudios clave que analizan la relación entre el calentamiento y el rendimiento.Desglose del impacto del calentamiento bien ejecutado en el rendimiento atlético.Protocolo de Calentamiento EficienteMovilización articular.Activación muscular específica.Uso de pesos progresivos.Adaptaciones Según ActividadCalentamiento para fuerza, resistencia, y deportes de agilidad.Diferencias en el calentamiento para diferentes edades y sexos.Estratégias de Calentamiento ExpressCómo optimizar el calentamiento en sólo 3 minutos cuando el tiempo es limitado.Referencias BibliográficasCalentamiento y rendimiento: Fradkin et al. (2010), McGowan et al. (2015). EnlaceCardio y reservas de energía: Wilson et al. (2012), Leveritt & Abernethy (1999). EnlaceEstiramientos estáticos: Behm et al. (2016), Kay & Blazevich (2012). EnlaceMovilidad articular: Levangie & Norkin (2011), Beardsley & Skarabot (2015). EnlacePotenciación post-activación: Seitz & Haff (2016), Wilson et al. (2013). EnlaceCalentamiento según la actividad:Corredores: Ingham et al. (2013), Wittekind & Beneke (2009). EnlaceHIIT: Towlson et al. (2013), Romaratezabala et al. (2018). EnlaceAgilidad: Pojskić et al. (2015), Zois et al. (2011). EnlaceMomento del día: Chtourou & Souissi (2012), Taylor et al. (2011). EnlaceAdultos mayores: Woods et al. (2007), Warm UP et al. (2018). EnlaceDiferencias por sexo: Gagnon & Kenny (2012), Ansdell et al. (2019). EnlaceCalentamiento exprés: Jeffreys (2007), McMillian et al. (2006). EnlaceSupport the showInstagram: andieillanesPágina web: andieillanes.com.mx

Gary Dickson speaks with Jay Hagerman of Abernethy & Hagerman Laww. Visit their website at www.a-h.law. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Could the Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) project be heading toward a financial disaster? Bob Ortblad raises concerns about hidden geotechnical risks and questionable cost estimates, arguing that the Columbia River bridge design may not be viable. He also suggests an alternative immersed tunnel that could be safer and more cost-effective. Read more at https://www.clarkcountytoday.com/opinion/letter-ibrs-billion-dollar-risk-another-abernethy-bridge-financial-disaster/ #InterstateBridgeReplacement #IBR #ColumbiaRiverBridge #BridgeConstruction #SeismicRisk #TransportationFunding #PublicInfrastructure #Vancouver #ClarkCountyWa #WashingtonState #LocalNews

00:00 34. Дженинз (Jenyns) 13:41 35. Галлер (Haller) 17:23 36. Кокки (Cocchi) 24:06 37. Руссо (Rousseau) 44:05 38. Линней (Linne) 50:28 39. Бюффон (Buffon) 1:00:58 40. Хоксуэрт (Hawkesworth) 1:06:27 41. Пэли (Paley) 1:25:50 42. Прессавен (Pressavin) 1:33:44 43. Бернарден де Сен-Пиерр (Bernardin de St. Pierre) 1:46:13 44. Франклин, Говард, Сведенборг, Веслей и Гиббон (Franklin, Howard, Swedenborg, Wesley, Gibbon) 1:56:48 45. Купер (Cowper) 2:04:11 46. Освальд (Oswald) 2:25:37 47. Шиллер (Shiller) 2:31:09 48. Бентам (Bentham) 2:40:40 49. Синклер (Sinclair) 2:45:56 50. Гуфеланд (Hufeland) 2:50:26 51. Ритсон (Ritson) 3:16:20 52. Никольсон (Nicolson) 3:45:53 53. Абернети (Abernethy) 3:56:31 54. Ламбе (Laambe) 4:29:05 55. Ньютон (Newton) 4:42:12 56. Глейзе (Gleizes) 5:25:30 57. Шелли (Shelley) 6:37:37 58. Байрон (Byron) 6:47:59 59. Филлипс (Phillips) 7:21:24 60. Ламартин (Lamartine) ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀

In this special episode of Permission to Speak Freely, host Tisha is joined by Retired LCDR Alana Abernethy, YNCS Ashley Williams, and LCDR Joi Dillard-Houston for a powerful discussion on women's health in the military. Despite its importance, women's health remains a taboo topic, often leading to misinformation, dismissal, and a lack of support. The panel dives into why education on women's health is lacking, sharing personal struggles with uterine fibroids, miscarriages, and dismissive healthcare experiences. They discuss how generational silence around reproductive health has left many women unprepared and unheard, especially in the military. The episode also explores the challenges of navigating motherhood while serving, advocating for yourself and fellow Sailors, and how male and female leaders can do better. The conversation shifts to holistic approaches, touching on The Period Repair Manual, The Moon Cycle, and the impact of coming off hormonal birth control. Alana shares details about her initiative, Women's Wellness for the Waterfront, providing resources for women seeking to control their health.    

Dr. Andrew Abernethy, a Hebrew and Old Testament specialist at Wheaton College, joins David Capes on the Stone Chapel Podcast to talk about his recent book, "Savoring Scripture: A Six Step Guide to Studying the Bible." As a scholar, Andy often writes books and articles for people inside the academy. In this book, he takes insights he's gained on how to help laypeople read the Bible more effectively as a means of savoring God and his Word. "The Stone Chapel Podcast" is part of the ChurchLeaders Podcast Network. For a transcript of this episode click here: https://churchleaders.com/podcast-episode/stone-chapel-savoring-scripture-andrew-abernethy To listen to previous episodes of “The Stone Chapel Podcast” click here. This podcast is about 20 minutes in length.

The struggle with impurity and fornication in our day is so fierce - as well as accepted and embraced by most of the secular culture - that those seeking purity of heart not only have to engage in the ascetic life deeply but also have to embrace a living martyrdom.  The fathers understood how powerful our natural desires can be; in particular our sensuality. They also understood the devil‘s machinations and the relentless nature of temptations that also come to us  from our own imagination and memory. What is captured for us in the writings of this hypothesis is the necessity of engaging in the spiritual battle. We must of course cling to the grace of God and engage in constant prayer. Yet knowing the devil‘s actions, we must embrace many different remedies; such as doing violence to the self and depriving ourselves of the things that the culture freely embraces.   What we heard tonight from multiple writers is the need to remember our own mortality. What we behold as beautiful and covet with the eyes quickly turns to dust. With salvation in the balance, the devil can often tempt us to give ourselves over to satisfying a passion “just once” - as if that would resolve our need. We have to understand that desire does not work in that fashion. The more that it is fed the more its longings increase.  If we could only understand this in light of our desire for God! The more that we desire him in love, the more that we pursue him through prayer, the greater our longing becomes. Soon our attachment to lesser things begins to diminish and we are freer to pursue the Beloved.  Finally, we are encouraged to look to the heroes of our faith; in particular those who wage war against this particular passion or who made the ultimate sacrifice to protect their purity. In them, we see those whose hearts belong to the Lord and to Him alone. May God give us the grace to imitate them. --- Text of chat during the group: 00:03:25 Tracey Fredman: I apologize if I'm in and out this evening. I'm on call for work and may need to in/out. 00:13:39 Anthony: Well, some of the women were looking for a female take on 6th commandment concerns...here is a lead... 00:13:56 Bob Cihak: P. 202, top of page 00:24:32 Lee Graham: Brother Sun and Sister Moon 00:24:46 Nypaver Clan: Reacted to "Brother Sun and Sist..." with

Co-hosts Susan Friedland and Horse Illustrated Editor in Chief Holly Caccamise talk to Jean Abernethy, the illustrator behind Fergus the Horse. Next, they chat with Kristine Dvonch, executive director of Horses' Haven in Howell, Mich., about three of their adoptable horses traveling to Equine Affaire Massachusetts this month. For special subscription rates on Horse Illustrated and Young Rider magazines just for podcast listeners, click here.

The Electricity Authority said market options were available to big power users during the winter price spike that some blamed for their closure. The closures prompted the EA – the regulator – to investigate the options available to big power users, and it found hedges available tended to be lower than the overlapping average ASX price at the time. Last month, a number of Kiwi businesses, including Pan Pac, Winstone Pulp and Oji were forced to close, citing surging electricity costs. ERANZ chief executive Bridget Abernethy says the prices were higher than usual - but the companies had alternative options to bring their costs down. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

HRT (or MHT) isn't natural territory for The Happy Menopause podcast, but as it's the theme for this year's World Menopause Day, I thought it would be remiss of me not to cover it.HRT has become a pretty contentious issue in recent years, with a lot of people being very entrenched in the strongly for or strongly against position. And amongst all that there are quite a lot of self-styled experts, who are anything but expert in the matter! I've been concerned to see the impact this has had on women in midlife, who've often become confused, fearful or distressed about the lack of clarity and some of the disturbing messages about the risks if you do take it or the risks if you don't take it. As with all things, there is nuance here, so for this episode I've reached out to the excellent Kathy Abernethy whose menopause credentials are beyond question. She's a trained nurse and BMS menopause specialist who's been working as a clinician in the menopause arena since the 90s. Kathy is a hugely respected figure and has helped thousands of women over the years with her evidence-based advice and clinical support. She came on the show in Season 2 to talk about solutions for vaginal dryness, and I was delighted to welcome her back to shine a light on HRT, provide clarity and bust some of the many myths that are out there. We explore 12 key questions and myths about HRT. We look whether you can be too old or too young; how your medical history affects things; whether you're just putting off the inevitable; what happens if you don't take it; and more. Tune in for the inside track and a balanced, evidence-based view of this complex subject from someone who's a genuine expert. If you're interested in the diet and lifestyle side of menopause management, check out my other World Menopause Day special on 10 Foods to Focus on for the Menopause. And if you want ongoing support every month, you really should consider joining The Happy Menopause Club for bonus episodes, articles, Q&As and videos at thehappymenopause.com.If you've enjoyed the podcast, make sure you subscribe so you don't miss the next episode and please give it a 5-star rating and a short review on Apple podcasts, or whichever platform you listen on, I'd be so grateful. And do tell your friends and family about it too. It really does make a huge difference to the visibility of the podcast, so that more women can find the show. After all, every woman deserves to have a happy menopause. Check out the full Show Notes for this episode on my website www.well-well-well.co.uk/podcast, where you'll find all the relevant links and references for each guest.For ad-free listening, bonus episodes, plus a whole load of exclusive advice around menopause, join The Happy Menopause Club for just £6 per month. Learn how to build your own menopause diet to manage your symptoms with my latest book The Happy Menopause: Smart Nutrition to Help You Flourish.

Iain Abernethy is a karate expert who focuses on applying techniques and principles from kata. We talked about our training, how it changed as we got older, and much more.  The Bonus Episode in which Iain answers questions from my Patrons is here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/113858813/ The show notes mentioned are here: https://wimsblog.com/148 Support the podcast and get instant access to dozens of bonus episodes and HUNDREDS of exclusive videos: https://www.patreon.com/wimdemeere New book/video email notification list: http://www.wimdemeere.com/notification/ My blog: http://www.wimsblog.com/ Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/WimDemeerePage/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/wimdemeere Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wimdemeere/ Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/YouAreNotAres Merch: https://wim-demeere-merch.creator-spring.com

It's been 5 years since we met Justin Abernethy of Abernethy Guitars, and he's been very busy making top-shelf instruments. It seems like more and more we're seeing Justin's guitars in the hands of brilliant musicians. And there's a reason for that. Like the Sonic Baroness baritone we enjoyed while catching up with Justin. Enjoy! Like the show? Follow us at these fine establishments: Patreon || https://www.patreon.com/thehighgain Instagram || @thehighgain Web || https://www.thehighgain.com

In the early twentieth century, very few ospreys were breeding in Scotland. They had been persecuted for decades and their eggs stolen by collectors. In 1954, a pair successfully raised two chicks near Loch Garten which gave conservationists hope that they could return to Scotland as nesting birds. Operation Osprey was launched to protect them from those intent on raiding their nests, with volunteers watching the nest at Abernethy twenty four hours a day. It proved a difficult journey but seventy years on, there are now numerous nesting ospreys in the UK. Jess Tomes from RSPB Scotland talks about the effort involved in the operation and wildlife ecologist Roy Dennis recalls the role he played in the 1960s.

Summary Join us in welcoming Alana Abernethy to the Harder Not Smarter Podcast. Alana is a former Naval Officer, Owner of Evergreen Women's Holistic Care, Co-Auther of the Black Veteran Entrepreneur, and Journalist through her company Evergreen Media. Today, we'll be discussing her transition out of the military and some of the challenges she faced on the mental health front. Alana also shares her experience with the Vocational Rehabilitation and Employment (VR&E) program and how it helped her reach her goal of opening up her own holistic care practice. She'll dive into her journey into entrepreneurship and how she developed her passion for holistic health, where she now focuses on personalized care to help women feel safe and secure in their bodies. The theme of this episode is self-care--and the importance of taking the time to prioritize ourselves amongst the hustle and pressures of everyday life. Vibe: Feel Good Show Links Get 1-month of FREE access to the ⁠Vet Collective Community⁠ by using discount code: NLT1UQTI Join us here: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.collective.vet⁠⁠⁠ Sign up for our Weekly Newsletter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.collective.vet⁠⁠⁠ Follow us on LinkedIn: ⁠ ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/company/harder-not-smarter/⁠ Episodes also available on Spotify, Apple, and Amazon Music. https://linktr.ee/harder_not_smarter Alana's Links https://linktr.ee/alanaabernethy Chapters 00:00 Transitioning Out of the Military 05:10 The Importance of Taking Time for Yourself 07:50 Embracing Entrepreneurship 12:55 The Vocational Rehabilitation and Employment (VR&E) Program 34:26 Personalized Care in Holistic Health 37:29 The Importance of Health 43:46 Authenticity and Balance 47:14 Surrounding Yourself with Positive Energy 50:55 Creating a Safe Place Within 57:47 Taking Ownership and Building a Business Sound Bites "It was hard. Let me just say it was it was hard, but more so the emotional side and the mental side of things." "Take some time for yourself. Make sure that you're equipped because the Navy will do everything they can to keep working you." "Life is different on the other side. And it takes a different mindset. It takes a different approach." "I need this to be individualized to me." "Health nutrition, fitness is one of the things, it's like cheaping out on tires and brakes." Sound Bites "It was hard. Let me just say it was it was hard, but more so the emotional side and the mental side of things." "Take some time for yourself. Make sure that you're equipped because the Navy will do everything they can to keep working you." "Life is different on the other side. And it takes a different mindset. It takes a different approach." "I need this to be individualized to me." "Guys will swing up and down." "Health nutrition, fitness is one of the things, it's like cheaping out on tires and brakes." Takeaways The transition out of the military can be challenging, both mentally and emotionally. It is important to take the time to reflect on your goals and feelings during this process. Entrepreneurship offers the freedom and flexibility that many veterans desire. It allows individuals to pursue their passions and create their own path. Holistic health focuses on addressing both the mind and body for overall wellness. It is important to prioritize self-care and understand the foundations of health, such as sleep, nutrition, and stress management. Seeking support from professionals, such as holistic health practitioners, can provide guidance and personalized care to help individuals achieve their wellness goals. Personalized care is crucial in holistic health, taking into account factors such as gender, hormonal issues, and genetic predispositions. Health is everything, and it is important to prioritize self-care and well-being. Society should shift its focus from money and titles to freedom and health.

With the proliferation of comprehensive U.S. state privacy laws in recent years, there's been an understandable focus by privacy professionals on this growing patchwork. But privacy litigation is also on the rise and the plaintiff's bar has explored some novel theories, particularly around the use of onlin tracking technologies. Greenberg Traurig Shareholder Darren Abernethy advises clients in the ad tech, data privacy and cybersecurity space and is familiar with these recent litigation trends involving theories related to pen registers, chatbots, session replay, Meta pixels, software development kits and the Video Privacy Protection Act. Here's what he had to say about these growing litigation trends.

In this episode, Regina gets to know Jean Abernethy. Jean is the creator of the world's most popular equine cartoon horse, Fergus (Equus-hilarious). As shared in the Western Horseman (February 2016), “For more than 20 years, the blaze-faced bay has made audiences laugh at his equine perspective on everything from horse flies to flying lead changes. Everybody sees their own horses' antics in him.” Regina and Jean talk about Fergus, but they also talk about Jean—her start as an artist, the various interests she's pursued, and the future of her beloved Fergus. One thing is certain: with her shelves filled with awards and accolades, Jean and her Fergus will continue to be recognized and enjoyed worldwide! Thank you, Jean, for bringing relatable humor to the lives of equestrians everywhere! Listen in to learn more: (02:28 - 03:24) Connecting Through Fergus Comics and Horses (06:52 - 07:58) Special Bond With Horse Named Justin (10:02 - 11:33) Illustrating Monty Roberts' How-to Book (12:43 - 14:13) Cartooning as a Communication Tool (19:38 - 20:55) Campfire Comic Inspiration & Content Creation (27:18 - 28:22) New Book Launch With Fergus Links: https://www.fergusthehorse.com/ https://jeanabernethy.com/ https://jeanabernethy.com/images/WHreview.jpg

Brian Abernethy, founder of Utopaya, is an expert in helping SaaS leaders navigate the complicated process of adding payments monetization to their product offerings and business strategies. With a long history in the payments industry, Brian has worked with hundreds of early-stage SaaS leaders and their investors to optimize their payments strategies. In this expert podcast interview, Brian explains the basics of payments monetization for practical SaaS founders, answering questions like these: When should SaaS companies consider monetizing payments and when is it not a good fit? What are the first steps to adding a profitable payments offering to your SaaS product? What's happening in the payments industry to make it easier or harder for SaaS companies? How do investors value payments offerings in a SaaS business? What are the biggest misconceptions and mistakes that SaaS companies make when get started with payments? How can SaaS businesses lower their payments bills for the credit card customer they take from their customers? Quote from Brian Abernethy, principal at Utopaya “Most software companies are looking to include some type of fintech offering. Payments is typically the first one of those. These software companies want to own not only the bigger portion of revenue, of course, but also mprove the customer experience. “Recent consolidation in the fintech and payments industry has created new options for SaaS companies to monetize payments. The big payments providers are now much bigger and have moved upmarket, creating a gap. Many new payments players are designed for smaller SaaS companies, with purpose-built platforms, APIs, and more support for integrated software solutions. “There are more compelling solutions for SaaS companies to launch truly white-labeled, profitable, and easier-to-implement payments solutions. Also, the market data show that it does positively change the customer experience, so these smaller payment companies are winning share at a fast clip.“ Links Brian Abernethy on LinkedIn Utopaya on LinkedIn Utopaya website The Practical Founders Podcast Tune into the Practical Founders Podcast for weekly in-depth interviews with founders who have built valuable software companies without big funding. Subscribe to the Practical Founders Podcast using your favorite podcast app. Get the weekly Practical Founders newsletter and podcast updates at practicalfounders.com. 

Welcome to my latest Best Bit, part of my series to celebrate half a million downloads for The Happy Menopause podcast, and the chance for you to catch up on some of the brilliant episodes you may have missed. This edition focuses on vaginal dryness, which is rather the Cinderella of the menopause. In recent years, we've become more confident about discussing our menopause – some women will mention their hot flushes without turning a hair, and the common mental health symptoms  such as anxiety and mood swings have also started to come out of the closet, which is a great thing, but we're still not quite ready to be open about the vaginal symptoms. So for this extract, I zoom back to Season 2 Episode 15 where we shine a light on this tricky issue, because it can be a huge problem for many women through the menopause and beyond. To help us, I've turned to one of the most clinically experienced menopause specialists in the UK. Kathy Abernethy, who's been a leading light in the field of women's health and the menopause for over 30 years. From her early years as a sister on a gynae ward, through her time as Chair of the British Menopause Society and now as the leader of a multidisciplinary NHS menopause clinic and director of menopause services at Peppy health, a digital health company, Kathy has consistently championed women's health and transformed the lives of hundreds of women with her clinical advice and support. There really is no better person to give us the lowdown on how to manage vaginal dryness, so tune in to hear her expert advice on moisturisers, lubricants, vaginal oestrogen and how to manage UTIs. To hear the full episode, check out Season 2 Episode 15, where there's even more practical advice for you. If you're a fan of The Happy Menopause, please tell your friends and family, and do give it a 5-star rating and a short review on Apple podcasts, or whichever platform you listen on. It makes a huge difference to the algorithms which influence the visibility of the podcast, so that more women can find the show. Because every woman deserves to have a happy menopause. Check out the full Show Notes for this episode on my website www.well-well-well.co.uk/podcast, where you'll find all the relevant links and references for my guest. Learn how to build your own menopause diet to manage your symptoms with my latest book The Happy Menopause: Smart Nutrition to Help You Flourish.

In this episode, Aaron is joined by Chad Abernethy CEO of Abernethy Contracting. Abernethy is a Dirt World staple in their home state of North Carolina doing everything from utilities and site prep to concrete and asphalt paving.  Chad being the CEO gives personal insight into what it means to be a leader in the industry and balance the want and need to be in the field versus behind the scenes. He shared the lessons learned and the success he's had buying back the family business and leading the company into the future. Chad has a great message for all leaders in the industry so if you are hungry to learn how to lead this episode is for you! If you have any questions or feedback, email the Dirt Talk crew at dirttalk@buildwitt.com. Stay Dirty!

We continued with St. John's summary of discernment and its particular fruit in the spiritual life. However, it does not read like a summary. Each saying opens us up to a divine reality and a participation in the life of Christ that comes to us by grace and the ascetic life. One cannot help but be captivated by the beauty of what St. John describes. It becomes evident that what we are being drawn into is the very beauty of Christ and that of the kingdom. Grace has the capacity to transform even the darkest of things within us and to illuminate the mind and the heart to see clearly what has eternal value. With the reading of each saying one begins to experience a holy desire growing within the heart. Thanks be to God! --- Text of chat during the group: 00:06:34 FrDavid Abernethy: page 217 page 14   00:25:57 Anthony: He says this while I'm making dinner....   00:31:19 David: Despair is suffering without meaning- Victor Frankl   00:49:34 Eric Ewanco: Reacted to "Κλίμαξ αγίου Ιωάννου.LadderClimatuspdf" with ❤️   00:49:43 Eric Ewanco: Reacted to "TheLadderofDivineAscent.pdf" with

Alexis Abernethy cautions us against getting caught up in cycles of hate and encourages us to move toward faithful and communal love for others. Alexis Abernethy is professor of psychology and Fuller's chief academic officer. Recorded at Fuller's All-Seminary Chapel on April 17, 2024.  

Brenda J and Karen W interview Tammy Abernethy and Linda Rinzel. Tammy is the CEO of Hope Women's Centers and Linda is the Center Manager of the Apache Junction location. They discuss how the vision began and how much they have expanded in the last 40 years. They talk about all of their free programs and how they are going to be able to expand their reach to the entire state. All of their resources are free so please feel share this amazing resource with any friend or family member in need! There is always hope! https://hopewomenscenter.org info@hopewomenscenter.org https://www.instagram.com/hopewomenscenter/ https://www.facebook.com/hopewomenscenterphoenix https://www.facebook.com/HopeWomensCenterApacheJunction https://hangingontohope.org

Discernment, as we have said, is the fruit of humility. Having removed the impediment of pride and having purified the heart of the passions, one comes to comprehend the things of the kingdom and the will of God. St. John gives us one example after another of how discernment helps us to perceive the things that lead us to God and that teach us to embrace that which endures.   As one progresses in the spiritual life, however, discernment is not simply the ability to know God‘s will, but rather also the ability to fulfill it in the way that God desires. In this, a soul can begin to trust in the action of the Spirit within the mind and heart. Therefore, although spiritual guides may be lacking one is not abandoned by God. Rather, God makes all things work for the good of those who love him.   In fact, the more one lays side ones will and turns to God in prayer and fasting, the more one lets go of the need to be driven by creativity, productivity, and one's own intentions as a whole. The deeper the communion becomes with God, the more one finds joy in being drawn along whatever path He desires. --- Text of chat during the group: 00:08:12 FrDavid Abernethy: page 204 number 105   00:46:02 Rebecca Thérèse: I think Teresa preferred the priest to be learned rather than just intelligent because she thought that even holy priests could be misled. A learned priest wuld be better able to communicate the infallible teaching of the Church, in her view.   00:50:33 Michael Hinckley: Re: lack of elders… we miss not having enough monks & nuns available in communities.   01:00:37 Susanna Joy: This is so similar to a practice I learned from muslim friends, where one fasts and prays 3 days begore taking decision, that God may clarify what action one should take...The fast is called istakharra...means the right path. :)   01:03:21 Susanna Joy: It is so good to rest in God's wisdom before taking action.   01:06:32 Michael Hinckley: Modernity and technology have much to blame since many things can be created ex nihilo. Tempts thinking “ye shall be like Gods"   01:10:48 Anthony: Yes   01:10:50 Rachel: Id love to see that   01:11:38 David: I volunteered for catechism but was surprised there was no assignment with a spiritual director and it seemed to become more of a quasi entraining push by those who were the directors by the parish. The focus was keeping the kids coming back and making faith "fun". It seemed so different from my experience here an in Spain.   01:13:42 Susanna Joy: https://youtu.be/LOcCXt1n-fI?si=EGIJbH3UquEgdU0C   01:13:43 Michael Hinckley: Replying to "I volunteered for ca..."   Precisely the problem.   01:14:40 Susanna Joy: Here is a beautiful song for you all. "Who puts his trust in God most Just"   01:14:41 Anthony: Pierogi making brings my parish together   01:14:58 Michael Hinckley: TLM communities also see the young coming b/c of lack of “fun” things   01:15:08 Ambrose Little: I'm not “young” and feel more or less that way.   01:15:25 Adam Paige: You're young at heart, Ambrose !   01:15:31 Ambrose Little: Reacted to "You're young at hear..." with

Jacob sits down with Dr. Amy Abernethy, whose health tech career spans from clinician and researcher to CMO at Flatiron Health to Principal Deputy Commissioner and Chief Innovation Officer at the FDA to CMO and President of Product Development at Verily to co-founder of her own non-profit to accelerate evidence generation. They discuss the current and future states of real-world evidence, how clinical research can improve, the adoption of GenAI in healthcare, Verily's growth story, her new venture, and more. (0:00) intro(0:40) real-world evidence(13:48) the future of control arms in clinical trials(22:16) startup ideas(25:04) generative AI in healthcare(27:18) regulating AI(35:09) the evolution of Verily(38:26) what is next for Amy?(42:59) over-hyped/under-hyped(43:37) one policy change to improve healthcare in the U.S. Out-Of-Pocket: https://www.outofpocket.health/

In St. John's discussion of discernment, he reveals to us the beauty of a human being transformed by the grace of God and living in communion with Christ by removing every impediment within the heart and by constantly crying out to him in prayer. At the very center of this reality is the “eye of the soul”. It is extremely beautiful, St. John explains, and next to the angels it surpasses all things. The angels constantly gaze upon God and the purified eye of the soul, the nous, allows us to contemplate the beauty of God‘s love. There is also a freedom that comes to the soul through this purification. Our capacity to discern spiritual realities enables us to engage in the warfare with the demons more diligently and to avoid the pitfalls that are set for us. Furthermore, it allows us to understand that there is no such thing as a small sin. If neglected, it can consume the entire person. Likewise, there is no part of our life that we are to take for granted. The eye of the soul allows us to see that each moment is an opportunity for us to respond to God and to others with love; an opportunity embraced or lost. Thus, it is a very high view of the human person that is set before us; a view that allows us to understand the radical communion that exists between each of us and to see our destiny in Christ. Beautiful indeed!   ---   Text of chat during the group:   00:29:50 sprou: virtue beyond our ability?   00:50:31 Nypaver Clan: “Familiarity breeds contempt.” My Mom used to say this if we spent too much time with friends.   00:50:54 Vanessa: Replying to "“Familiarity breeds ..."   My mom used to say that too lol   00:52:59 Anthony: St Paul, 1 Cor 7 (?) Talks about spouses separating for a bit.   00:53:38 Marypaz Mencos: I've been listening to your podcasts for a year, this is the first time I'm able to be in real time with y'all. It's so good to put faces to all of your voices.  God bless you Father, this podcasts have been a blessing to my spiritual life.   00:54:08 Vanessa: Reacted to "I've been listening ..." with ❤️   00:55:16 Amale Obeid: Replying to "St Paul, 1 Cor 7 (?)..."   “Let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.” Gibran Khalil Gibran (Lebanese poet)   00:56:14 Susan M: Reacted to "I've been listening ..." with ❤️   01:05:40 Vanessa: Enjoying this very much tonight.   01:07:43 Sr Barbara Jean Mihalchick: Yet St. Basil came back from the desert saying the complete Gospel calls us to include service of others in one's authentic spiritual life...   01:13:27 Sr Barbara Jean Mihalchick: Sacrificial intercessory prayer for others is also service of the Body of Christ   01:13:52 Amale Obeid: Reacted to "Sacrificial interces..." with ❤️   01:18:37 Anthony: That kind of sounds superstitious, like an augury.   01:19:27 Anthony: Morning offering....yes. but there's repentance to a bad start and a possible bad end to a good start.   01:26:08 Maureen Cunningham: Thank you Father from Maureen & Kenneth   01:26:11 Arthur Danzi: That was wonderful. Thank you, Father!   01:26:14 Louise: Thanks, Fr. Abernethy!   01:26:18 Rebecca Thérèse: Thank you

What a blessing it is to read slowly. It allows insights to unfold before our minds and imaginations that we often would not be attentive to due to our typical need to rush. Hurry, most often, comes from the evil one who seeks to undermine our peace. It is lingering over the thoughts of the fathers on idleness that we begin to understand that what they are talking about is not simply avoiding laziness and sloth. They are revealing to us that keeping our focus upon God in mind and body, that is with the whole self, we grow in our capacity to love God and others.  Virtue forms within the soul from engaging in our tasks with love and humility. Our willingness to take up that which is simple and perhaps menial in the eyes of the world and to do so with love is what is seen by God. Pushing a broom, if done with love, draws us to the very heart of God. Whereas imbalance in our labor, whether it is driving ourselves harshly or laziness, makes us lose sight of the glory of God in all things. May we listen well as we sit at the feet of the fathers, so that we might live our lives and engage in our work with minds and hearts fixed on God. --- Text of chat during the group: 00:41:21 Rachel: I think it important to be clear that panic attacks when endured with patience, can be meritorious. Putting ones trust in God when flooded with waves of panic. The peace of Christ is a gift of God and I wonder, little by little one will find the peace of Christ within the storm. Patience, will teach one to see. Trust in God, He will reveal Himself in these moments   00:41:56 Steve Yu: Reacted to "I think it important…" with

Extraordinary and beautiful! We are currently reading Step 26 from The Ladder on discernment. As St. John begins to unpack things for us, that is, what discernment allows us to perceive about our intentions, our dispositions, how virtue and vice often get mixed together, why prayers sometimes go unanswered, and why demons often will cease their attack for a period of time - - St John also shows us the beauty and the mystery of the human person in relationship to God and as created by God.  God‘s loving care for us, when seen with the clarity of the fathers' wisdom and experience is enough to make one weep for joy. And this joy fosters a desire for God that, if inflamed, can not only purify us of the passions but transform us in such a fashion that we are drawn into the life of the very Holy Trinity. May God grant us this desire! --- Text of chat during the group: 00:09:49 Carol Roper: St. Anne's?   00:31:05 Cindy Moran: I remember a few times the night before a huge exam I slept w the school book under my pillow LOL   00:43:18 maureencunningham: What is the time frame , if one thinks of this as a long journey or one could be discourage   00:48:24 Kate : There are some spiritual writings that take the form of a colloquy…Fr. Gaston Courtois, for example.  How does this fit with the dark knowing of faith, that you mentioned?  The writers seem to have such a tangible intimacy with Our Lord.   00:56:29 Susanna Joy: When the Lord Speaks to Your Heart: Daily Devotions (English and French Edition) https://a.co/d/4ZRzjVi   00:56:46 Vanessa: Replying to "When the Lord Speaks..."   Thank you:)   00:57:02 Susanna Joy: Divine Intimacy https://a.co/d/2WqoJ5e   00:57:43 Susanna Joy: The links are Amazon links to the books mentioned   01:00:46 Cindy Moran: Are the other 4 kinds of dispassion in this chapter?   01:01:18 Jacqulyn: An excerpt from Pauline Books... https://paulinestore.com/media/productattach/1/7/172412-compressed.pdf   01:02:05 Susanna Joy: Reacted to An excerpt from Paul... with "

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After listening to a multitude of stories from the Evergetinos about responding to insults from others, the only response that one seems to be able to offer is a sigh; not a sigh expressing disbelief but rather wonder. This is the love and the grace that God offers to us at every single moment of our life. A synergy exists between our will (as simple as uttering a “yes” within our hearts to God), and the outpouring of His grace and compassion. Suddenly the unthinkable comes into view through our faith. We see, through experience, the Godly love that is not only offered to us but within us.  One of the things that we often say to ourselves when we sin or when we respond to another who is wounded us is: “I'm only human!”  However, these are not just fanciful stories in the Evergetinos but rather signs of what God is capable of doing within the human heart and what he has made us by his grace. Through humbling ourselves, acknowledging the poverty of our sin, we are lifted up to love and show compassion to others as we have received from the Lord.  The Desert Fathers are living icons of the gospel. They reveal to us this love, not primarily through their writings but rather through their lives. We in turn come to understand this not through reading but rather through experience. May God in his mercy draw us into his love and allow us to see him face-to-face!   ---   Text of chat during the group:   00:10:43 FrDavid Abernethy: page 37 number 4   00:44:10 Nypaver Clan: Screwtape Letters   00:44:49 Lee Graham: Sounds like CS Lewis's “Screw Tape Letters”   00:54:03 Louise: How about psychopaths, praying for those damaging psychopaths? They seem pseudo-humans, that is, humans only in form but not in soul. They seem to be a window of the devils. I cannot pray for them. Am I wrong?   00:57:06 Rachel: When we sin, are we even being ehat it truly menas to be human? Even the "small" sins?   00:57:55 Sharon Fisher: So we pray that the Holy Spirit reaches them? That may be all I can muster in some cases. Is it enough?   00:58:31 Rachel: That is a beautiful prayer.   00:59:28 Lee Graham: Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me.   01:00:05 Lori Hatala: Reacted to "Let there be peace o..." with ❤️   01:00:39 Vanessa: Reacted to "Let there be peace o..." with ❤️   01:01:57 Rachel: Imagine a masterpiece that has been defaced. Yet, by grace, God can restore His image in the sinner.   01:02:30 Sharon Fisher: Reacted to "Let there be peace o..." with ❤️   01:03:38 Tracey Fredman: Jesus asks people in the gospels - he asked Solomon in a dream - and I believe he asks us, "What do you want me to do for you?" We can ask for grace to be able to pray for those who difficult for us to pray for.   01:04:19 Sharon Fisher: Reacted to "Jesus asks people in..." with ❤️   01:04:24 Vanessa: Reacted to "Jesus asks people in..." with ❤️   01:06:56 Adam Paige: Reacted to "Let there be peace o…" with ❤️   01:07:20 Adam Paige: Reacted to "Imagine a masterpiec…" with ☦️   01:07:31 Rachel: Wow.  How beautiful.   01:08:50 Amale Obeid: How do you overcome the fear of needing to work for money to survive when you're otherwise completely ready to sell everything and follow God and devote your life day in and day out to Him? To honoring him, praising him, praying, reading about him, etc… It has become hard to live in both worlds.   01:15:24 Rachel: I wish I could go! God bless you all   01:15:37 Steve Yu: Replying to "I wish I could go! G…" Same here!   01:16:23 Andrew Adams: Thank you Father!   01:16:24 Louise: Thanks, Fr. Abernethy!   01:16:27 Lorraine Green: Thank you very much!   01:16:28 Sharon Fisher: And with your spirit!   01:16:29 Suzanne: God bless everyone!   01:16:30 Adam Paige: Thank you Father !   01:16:38 Lee Graham: Brilliant, thank you!!  

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Brenton is 34 and is a lead driver for Abernethy contracting, hauling heavy loads. He drives a 2018 Kenworth W900 glider, 6ts cat 18 speed. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/fifth-wheel-mafia/support

“We have so many demands before us, we feel that we cannot stop. There is too much to do, and we're not stopping. … Know that if you follow the rhythm of this world, you'll likely be overworking and stressed out, if not traumatized,  so I actually get more done following the rhythm of my body and paying attention to it. Rhythms of deep work and deep rest. This is how I want to lead. For me to survive and then actually thrive in this kind of environment, I need to have a different rhythm.” — Alexis Abernethy, Fuller School of PsychologyComing from decades of research, clinical work, and practice in the field, Dr. Alexis Abernethy cuts through theory and ideals, addressing the complex realities of life: loss, trauma, systemic racism, the grinding and wearing away from the stresses of everyday life, and the pressure to lead in the face of unsolvable suffering and need.Alexis keeps spiritual health real and accessible, addressing research-backed principles on sleep, concentration, irritation, relationships, and burnout.Absolutely essential to spiritual health and thriving in our chaotic and frenetic days, Alexis describes rhythms that we can internalize before we get to those soft symptoms or signs of stress.This is a rich and robust conversation about self care at the deepest and most impactful levels in our physical, mental, and spiritual lives—tending to the complexity of our humanity and addressing the deep, pervasive practices that engage us and intertwine us with others and with the sacred, so that we can find and stay aligned with our purpose.In this conversation, we discuss:Her research and therapeutic work with traumatized pastors after Hurricane Katrina, emphasizing the necessity of self-care for the caregivers.How to identify the symptoms of burnout and how to respond.The Christian practice of Sabbath rest, worship, and singing, which Alexis personally experiences as a source of healing and restoration.Show Notes“Rhythms of deep work and deep rest. This is how I want to lead.”Alexis Abernethy's research and expertiseHow leaders can heal and thrive, taking care of themselves and leading their communitities, even amidst traumatic circumstances and the threat of burnoutCaring for pastors and local leaders in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Louisiana“It's just this complete devastation. That picture is seared in my mind, and then you go in other communities, and you don't see that same kind of devastation.”“Frankly, a deep anger just really was rising in me. righteous indignation at that injustice.”“This is an interaction of an uncontrollable hurricane and man's decision making.”Dealing with and holding all the anger that rises up as we develop a care and recovery process for healing after traumaHow to help the helpers? How to care for leaders who care for others?Surviving to Thriving, Resilience, and Cultivating RelationshipsPastors' Empowerment Program“What happens in the body?”Trauma's effects: physically, psychologically, emotionally, interpersonally—”how it affects how you engage in the world and how some people over-engage”Emotion regulationTheology of SabbathThe symptoms and root causes of burnoutThe Body Keeps the ScoreRestorative and restful sleepIrritabilityAttention and awareness: “Whose really in control here?”“First, know that if you follow the rhythm of this world, you'll likely be overworking and stressed out, if not traumatized, okay? But definitely overworking and stressed out, because that's the rhythm of our world.”Take a personal inventory for the purposes of making small adjustments that prioritize the balance of work and rest.How efficiency follows restHow to reorder the rhythms of lifeAlexis's response to the murder of George Floyd in 2020—feeling traumatized“I actually needed the world to be much smaller around me. I had to retreat. I had to withdraw because I didn't have what it took to be my more typical empathic self.”Phil Allen's film, Open WoundsIntellectualizing (as opposed to emotional presence) as a response to traumaThe pressure to have it all together and know what to doPermission as leaders and caregivers—in order to be present, we need to be absent.Microdoses of rhythm and restTheological insights and Sabbath principlesHow to implement Sabbath principles“Deep work. Deep rest.”“How's that unboundaried life working for you?”Exercise: What is your relationship to time?What is your theology of time?“God is in charge of time.”The image of GodComparing time and tithing: God's provision and principles of discipline and trustHow to deal with burnout in professional life and leadershipCompare and contrast where you've been with where you're goingEmotional exhaustionAttending to various domains: the physical, the emotional, the spiritual, the intellectual, the relational…“There are mindfulness that we can use words that are totally comfortable with anyone's tradition or background.”The difficulty of sharing about burnout, and the shame or fear that prevents connection with others about what you're experiencingLanguishing and depression sometimes requires an override in order to seek professional help and talk about difficult emotions that come from burnout.Prayer, scripture, and a brief emotional expression to God: “Jesus!” “Lord, have mercy!”The healing practice of singing together“Music was my first language.”“Sometimes I feel like a motherless child … a long way from home”“The power of music transcends religious experiences.”Psychological research on corporate worship experiences.“You're seeking a common note … It's communal not only that we're singing together, but we're singing toward a purpose … glorifying God.”“Bind us together, Lord, bind us together in love.”What does thriving mean to you?Thriving means walking toward discovering and experiencing the calling that God has for my life. It doesn't mean I'm always in it. It's walking toward it. The discovery is really rich. You know, you think of calling as a destination. It's not. It evolves. It evolves.”“I don't thrive by myself. There's no way I can thrive by myself. I do it in community.”Pam's Key TakeawaysCatastrophes don't hit us all the same. We all weather life storms in different ways. It's when we find healing and restoration in community that we can integrate personal, relational, and political thriving.Limitations can be our friends. Irritation, lack of concentration, fatigue are all signposts to the need for self care.Burnout is complex, often involves a shift in our context, making our environment or job not a good fit for who we are.To quote Bessel van der Kolk, our bodies keep the score. Burnout and psychological stress are often manifested with psychosomatic symptoms.We need to be aware of our relationship to time and how our trust and faith come into play when it comes to rest.I need more microdoses of rest and perhaps macrodoses of sleep.We thrive when our vocation lines up with our work. but we need to address our culture's workaholism by talking more about strategies for rest that contribute to spiritual health.About Alexis AbernethyAlexis Abernathy is a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology in the Fuller School of Psychology, where for over 25 years she has served as Chaplain to the Faculty, Chief of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and her current role as Chief Academic Officer at Fuller Theological Seminary.  She graduated from Howard University with a BS in psychology. She received her MA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Her primary research interest is the intersection between spirituality and health and her Spirituality and Health Lab includes three research teams: Experience of Spirituality and Health-Related Outcomes; Spirituality, Cancer, and Health Disparities; and Spirituality, Culture, and Eating Disturbance. She is author of many journal articles in psychology of religion, as well as Worship That Changes Lives: Multidisciplinary and Congregational Perspectives on Spiritual Transformation (2008).  For more information, visit her faculty profile. About the Thrive CenterLearn more at thethrivecenter.org.Follow us on Instagram @thrivecenterFollow us on X @thrivecenterFollow us on LinkedIn @thethrivecenterAbout Dr. Pam KingDr. Pam King is Executive Director the Thrive Center and is Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy. Follow her @drpamking.About With & ForHost: Pam KingSenior Director and Producer: Jill WestbrookOperations Manager: Lauren KimSocial Media Graphic Designer: Wren JuergensenConsulting Producer: Evan RosaSpecial thanks to the team at Fuller Studio and the Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy.

We began this evening with page one of the second volume of The Evergetinos. In many ways, we pick up where we left off in the first volume with humility. However, we are given very explicit examples of those who are a model of the virtue. Perhaps it would be better said that they present us with an other-worldly manifestation of the virtue - the Holy Fool.  Such individuals, so driven by the love for Christ, have set aside so completely self-esteem and reputation that their presence reveals the poverty,  inadequacy or complete lack of this holy virtue in others; especially those who deem themselves to be religious.  To hear the stories of their lives almost knocks the wind out of the reader. The very presence of their sanctity brings down upon them the scorn and the abuse of others. They embody Christ's teaching, “You will be hated by all because of my name.” They are hated because they embodied the humility of Christ, who counted reputation as nothing, emptied himself and became a servant, obedient unto death.  It is hard to be in the presence of such individuals. Their hidden sanctity will still speak to the souls of those in their midst and provoke a reaction. The demons who guide and direct our thoughts will seek to make us mock and ridicule them and blind us to their true goodness. Thus, they provide us with a cautionary tale – that in our lesser moments we are capable of mocking the Lord in others, when we hold them in contempt. We are not so far from committing such unholy violence in our hearts, when we lose sight of the dignity of those around us. --- Text of chat during the group: 00:04:02 Leilani Nemeroff: Thank you!  I am driving right now.   00:11:45 Suzanne: Can hear a pin drop!   00:12:55 Adam Paige: Reacted to "Can hear a pin drop!" with

Tonight we read the final hypotheses of the First Volume of the Evergetinos. From beginning to end the volume and its teachings are as challenging as they are beautiful.  The focus this evening was on our attachment to the things of this world; whether those things be the praise of men or material objects and clothing. As always the fathers present us with the gospel in an unvarnished fashion. Their ability to touch upon the most subtle aspects of the passions and temptations is extraordinary. Even when we let go of material attachments we can cling to a kind of spiritual raiment. It takes a great deal of time and grace to break loose of the fetters that hold us; our desire for the pleasures of this world, both great and small.  Even the monk can hold on to certain implements or clothing when there is no need for them other than the satisfaction that they offer in the possessing of them. Frugality and modesty in dress should be virtues that we love and cultivate. In a culture where there is an abundance of everything on demand. Our sharing in this has become habitual and it can be overwhelmingly difficult to overcome. What we see in the fathers is the constant reminder to adorn the soul. We are to store up treasure for ourselves in heaven.  It is  the poor that we have received that become our greatest advocates before the throne of God. --- Text of chat during the group: 00:19:50 FrDavid Abernethy: page 414   00:36:13 Anthony Rago: The Island had a scene regarding the abbot having a coat of which he was too fond. He was eventually glad to be freed of that attachment by the "crazy" monk.   00:37:07 Suzanne: Over the course of my life, I have pretty much ruined every single thing I've ever put my hand to, because I simply cannot act except in order to draw praise from my performance. I'm aware of it, ashamed of it, but cannot put this passion to death. I don't think I've ever employed a talent or ability with a pure intention.   00:37:52 Michael Hinckley: reminds me of the story of Alexander Magnus, once offered a cup of water in a time of dryness poured it out saying too much for one, not enough for many.   00:47:16 Anthony Rago: Replying to "Over the course of m..."     Perhaps "ruined" is ...   00:49:32 Suzanne: Replying to "Over the course of m..."   True, thank you.   00:50:09 Maureen Cunningham: Maybe they were not attached to anything in this world. And had no need for natural things . Only for the heavenly   00:50:51 Anthony Rago: Reacted to True, thank you. with "❤️"   00:51:37 Michael Hinckley: Replying to "Over the course of m..."   @Suzanne when we give thanks to others it is also an act of charity. Fr is right magnanimity is a gift we are given to excel, in an orderly fashion   00:51:40 Suzanne: Replying to "Over the course of m..."   Father has a good nous. He actually hit the nail on the head.

Episode 169 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Piece of My Heart" and the short, tragic life of Janis Joplin. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode available, on "Spinning Wheel" by Blood, Sweat & Tears. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources There are two Mixcloud mixes this time. As there are so many songs by Big Brother and the Holding Company and Janis Joplin excerpted, and Mixcloud won't allow more than four songs by the same artist in any mix, I've had to post the songs not in quite the same order in which they appear in the podcast. But the mixes are here — one, two . For information on Janis Joplin I used three biographies -- Scars of Sweet Paradise by Alice Echols, Janis: Her Life and Music by Holly George-Warren, and Buried Alive by Myra Friedman. I also referred to the chapter '“Being Good Isn't Always Easy": Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin, Dusty Springfield, and the Color of Soul' in Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination by Jack Hamilton. Some information on Bessie Smith came from Bessie Smith by Jackie Kay, a book I can't really recommend given the lack of fact-checking, and Bessie by Chris Albertson. I also referred to Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday by Angela Y. Davis And the best place to start with Joplin's music is this five-CD box, which contains both Big Brother and the Holding Company albums she was involved in, plus her two studio albums and bonus tracks. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, this episode contains discussion of drug addiction and overdose, alcoholism, mental illness, domestic abuse, child abandonment, and racism. If those subjects are likely to cause you upset, you may want to check the transcript or skip this one rather than listen. Also, a subject I should probably say a little more about in this intro because I know I have inadvertently caused upset to at least one listener with this in the past. When it comes to Janis Joplin, it is *impossible* to talk about her without discussing her issues with her weight and self-image. The way I write often involves me paraphrasing the opinions of the people I'm writing about, in a mode known as close third person, and sometimes that means it can look like I am stating those opinions as my own, and sometimes things I say in that mode which *I* think are obviously meant in context to be critiques of those attitudes can appear to others to be replicating them. At least once, I have seriously upset a fat listener when talking about issues related to weight in this manner. I'm going to try to be more careful here, but just in case, I'm going to say before I begin that I think fatphobia is a pernicious form of bigotry, as bad as any other form of bigotry. I'm fat myself and well aware of how systemic discrimination affects fat people. I also think more generally that the pressure put on women to look a particular way is pernicious and disgusting in ways I can't even begin to verbalise, and causes untold harm. If *ANYTHING* I say in this episode comes across as sounding otherwise, that's because I haven't expressed myself clearly enough. Like all people, Janis Joplin had negative characteristics, and at times I'm going to say things that are critical of those. But when it comes to anything to do with her weight or her appearance, if *anything* I say sounds critical of her, rather than of a society that makes women feel awful for their appearance, it isn't meant to. Anyway, on with the show. On January the nineteenth, 1943, Seth Joplin typed up a letter to his wife Dorothy, which read “I wish to tender my congratulations on the anniversary of your successful completion of your production quota for the nine months ending January 19, 1943. I realize that you passed through a period of inflation such as you had never before known—yet, in spite of this, you met your goal by your supreme effort during the early hours of January 19, a good three weeks ahead of schedule.” As you can probably tell from that message, the Joplin family were a strange mixture of ultraconformism and eccentricity, and those two opposing forces would dominate the personality of their firstborn daughter for the whole of her life.  Seth Joplin was a respected engineer at Texaco, where he worked for forty years, but he had actually dropped out of engineering school before completing his degree. His favourite pastime when he wasn't at work was to read -- he was a voracious reader -- and to listen to classical music, which would often move him to tears, but he had also taught himself to make bathtub gin during prohibition, and smoked cannabis. Dorothy, meanwhile, had had the possibility of a singing career before deciding to settle down and become a housewife, and was known for having a particularly beautiful soprano voice. Both were, by all accounts, fiercely intelligent people, but they were also as committed as anyone to the ideals of the middle-class family even as they chafed against its restrictions. Like her mother, young Janis had a beautiful soprano voice, and she became a soloist in her church choir, but after the age of six, she was not encouraged to sing much. Dorothy had had a thyroid operation which destroyed her singing voice, and the family got rid of their piano soon after (different sources say that this was either because Dorothy found her daughter's singing painful now that she couldn't sing herself, or because Seth was upset that his wife could no longer sing. Either seems plausible.) Janis was pushed to be a high-achiever -- she was given a library card as soon as she could write her name, and encouraged to use it, and she was soon advanced in school, skipping a couple of grades. She was also by all accounts a fiercely talented painter, and her parents paid for art lessons. From everything one reads about her pre-teen years, she was a child prodigy who was loved by everyone and who was clearly going to be a success of some kind. Things started to change when she reached her teenage years. Partly, this was just her getting into rock and roll music, which her father thought a fad -- though even there, she differed from her peers. She loved Elvis, but when she heard "Hound Dog", she loved it so much that she tracked down a copy of Big Mama Thornton's original, and told her friends she preferred that: [Excerpt: Big Mama Thornton, "Hound Dog"] Despite this, she was still also an exemplary student and overachiever. But by the time she turned fourteen, things started to go very wrong for her. Partly this was just down to her relationship with her father changing -- she adored him, but he became more distant from his daughters as they grew into women. But also, puberty had an almost wholly negative effect on her, at least by the standards of that time and place. She put on weight (which, again, I do not think is a negative thing, but she did, and so did everyone around her), she got a bad case of acne which didn't ever really go away, and she also didn't develop breasts particularly quickly -- which, given that she was a couple of years younger than the other people in the same classes at school, meant she stood out even more. In the mid-sixties, a doctor apparently diagnosed her as having a "hormone imbalance" -- something that got to her as a possible explanation for why she was, to quote from a letter she wrote then, "not really a woman or enough of one or something." She wondered if "maybe something as simple as a pill could have helped out or even changed that part of me I call ME and has been so messed up.” I'm not a doctor and even if I were, diagnosing historical figures is an unethical thing to do, but certainly the acne, weight gain, and mental health problems she had are all consistent with PCOS, the most common endocrine disorder among women, and it seems likely given what the doctor told her that this was the cause. But at the time all she knew was that she was different, and that in the eyes of her fellow students she had gone from being pretty to being ugly. She seems to have been a very trusting, naive, person who was often the brunt of jokes but who desperately needed to be accepted, and it became clear that her appearance wasn't going to let her fit into the conformist society she was being brought up in, while her high intelligence, low impulse control, and curiosity meant she couldn't even fade into the background. This left her one other option, and she decided that she would deliberately try to look and act as different from everyone else as possible. That way, it would be a conscious choice on her part to reject the standards of her fellow pupils, rather than her being rejected by them. She started to admire rebels. She became a big fan of Jerry Lee Lewis, whose music combined the country music she'd grown up hearing in Texas, the R&B she liked now, and the rebellious nature she was trying to cultivate: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On"] When Lewis' career was derailed by his marriage to his teenage cousin, Joplin wrote an angry letter to Time magazine complaining that they had mistreated him in their coverage. But as with so many people of her generation, her love of rock and roll music led her first to the blues and then to folk, and she soon found herself listening to Odetta: [Excerpt: Odetta, "Muleskinner Blues"] One of her first experiences of realising she could gain acceptance from her peers by singing was when she was hanging out with the small group of Bohemian teenagers she was friendly with, and sang an Odetta song, mimicking her voice exactly. But young Janis Joplin was listening to an eclectic range of folk music, and could mimic more than just Odetta. For all that her later vocal style was hugely influenced by Odetta and by other Black singers like Big Mama Thornton and Etta James, her friends in her late teens and early twenties remember her as a vocal chameleon with an achingly pure soprano, who would more often than Odetta be imitating the great Appalachian traditional folk singer Jean Ritchie: [Excerpt: Jean Ritchie, "Lord Randall"] She was, in short, trying her best to become a Beatnik, despite not having any experience of that subculture other than what she read in books -- though she *did* read about them in books, devouring things like Kerouac's On The Road. She came into conflict with her mother, who didn't understand what was happening to her daughter, and who tried to get family counselling to understand what was going on. Her father, who seemed to relate more to Janis, but who was more quietly eccentric, put an end to that, but Janis would still for the rest of her life talk about how her mother had taken her to doctors who thought she was going to end up "either in jail or an insane asylum" to use her words. From this point on, and for the rest of her life, she was torn between a need for approval from her family and her peers, and a knowledge that no matter what she did she couldn't fit in with normal societal expectations. In high school she was a member of the Future Nurses of America, the Future Teachers of America, the Art Club, and Slide Rule Club, but she also had a reputation as a wild girl, and as sexually active (even though by all accounts at this point she was far less so than most of the so-called "good girls" – but her later activity was in part because she felt that if she was going to have that reputation anyway she might as well earn it). She also was known to express radical opinions, like that segregation was wrong, an opinion that the other students in her segregated Texan school didn't even think was wrong, but possibly some sort of sign of mental illness. Her final High School yearbook didn't contain a single other student's signature. And her initial choice of university, Lamar State College of Technology, was not much better. In the next town over, and attended by many of the same students, it had much the same attitudes as the school she'd left. Almost the only long-term effect her initial attendance at university had on her was a negative one -- she found there was another student at the college who was better at painting. Deciding that if she wasn't going to be the best at something she didn't want to do it at all, she more or less gave up on painting at that point. But there was one positive. One of the lecturers at Lamar was Francis Edward "Ab" Abernethy, who would in the early seventies go on to become the Secretary and Editor of the Texas Folklore Society, and was also a passionate folk musician, playing double bass in string bands. Abernethy had a great collection of blues 78s. and it was through this collection that Janis first discovered classic blues, and in particular Bessie Smith: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "Black Mountain Blues"] A couple of episodes ago, we had a long look at the history of the music that now gets called "the blues" -- the music that's based around guitars, and generally involves a solo male vocalist, usually Black during its classic period. At the time that music was being made though it wouldn't have been thought of as "the blues" with no modifiers by most people who were aware of it. At the start, even the songs they were playing weren't thought of as blues by the male vocalist/guitarists who played them -- they called the songs they played "reels". The music released by people like Blind Lemon Jefferson, Son House, Robert Johnson, Kokomo Arnold and so on was thought of as blues music, and people would understand and agree with a phrase like "Lonnie Johnson is a blues singer", but it wasn't the first thing people thought of when they talked about "the blues". Until relatively late -- probably some time in the 1960s -- if you wanted to talk about blues music made by Black men with guitars and only that music, you talked about "country blues". If you thought about "the blues", with no qualifiers, you thought about a rather different style of music, one that white record collectors started later to refer to as "classic blues" to differentiate it from what they were now calling "the blues". Nowadays of course if you say "classic blues", most people will think you mean Muddy Waters or John Lee Hooker, people who were contemporary at the time those white record collectors were coming up with their labels, and so that style of music gets referred to as "vaudeville blues", or as "classic female blues": [Excerpt: Mamie Smith, "Crazy Blues"] What we just heard was the first big blues hit performed by a Black person, from 1920, and as we discussed in the episode on "Crossroads" that revolutionised the whole record industry when it came out. The song was performed by Mamie Smith, a vaudeville performer, and was originally titled "Harlem Blues" by its writer, Perry Bradford, before he changed the title to "Crazy Blues" to get it to a wider audience. Bradford was an important figure in the vaudeville scene, though other than being the credited writer of "Keep A-Knockin'" he's little known these days. He was a Black musician and grew up playing in minstrel shows (the history of minstrelsy is a topic for another day, but it's more complicated than the simple image of blackface that we are aware of today -- though as with many "more complicated than that" things it is, also the simple image of blackface we're aware of). He was the person who persuaded OKeh records that there would be a market for music made by Black people that sounded Black (though as we're going to see in this episode, what "sounding Black" means is a rather loaded question). "Crazy Blues" was the result, and it was a massive hit, even though it was marketed specifically towards Black listeners: [Excerpt: Mamie Smith, "Crazy Blues"] The big stars of the early years of recorded blues were all making records in the shadow of "Crazy Blues", and in the case of its very biggest stars, they were working very much in the same mould. The two most important blues stars of the twenties both got their start in vaudeville, and were both women. Ma Rainey, like Mamie Smith, first performed in minstrel shows, but where Mamie Smith's early records had her largely backed by white musicians, Rainey was largely backed by Black musicians, including on several tracks Louis Armstrong: [Excerpt: Ma Rainey, "See See Rider"] Rainey's band was initially led by Thomas Dorsey, one of the most important men in American music, who we've talked about before in several episodes, including the last one. He was possibly the single most important figure in two different genres -- hokum music, when he, under the name "Georgia Tom" recorded "It's Tight Like That" with Tampa Red: [Excerpt: Tampa Red and Georgia Tom, "It's Tight Like That"] And of course gospel music, which to all intents and purposes he invented, and much of whose repertoire he wrote: [Excerpt: Mahalia Jackson, "Take My Hand, Precious Lord"] When Dorsey left Rainey's band, as we discussed right back in episode five, he was replaced by a female pianist, Lil Henderson. The blues was a woman's genre. And Ma Rainey was, by preference, a woman's woman, though she was married to a man: [Excerpt: Ma Rainey, "Prove it on Me"] So was the biggest star of the classic blues era, who was originally mentored by Rainey. Bessie Smith, like Rainey, was a queer woman who had relationships with men but was far more interested in other women.  There were stories that Bessie Smith actually got her start in the business by being kidnapped by Ma Rainey, and forced into performing on the same bills as her in the vaudeville show she was touring in, and that Rainey taught Smith to sing blues in the process. In truth, Rainey mentored Smith more in stagecraft and the ways of the road than in singing, and neither woman was only a blues singer, though both had huge success with their blues records.  Indeed, since Rainey was already in the show, Smith was initially hired as a dancer rather than a singer, and she also worked as a male impersonator. But Smith soon branched out on her own -- from the beginning she was obviously a star. The great jazz clarinettist Sidney Bechet later said of her "She had this trouble in her, this thing that would not let her rest sometimes, a meanness that came and took her over. But what she had was alive … Bessie, she just wouldn't let herself be; it seemed she couldn't let herself be." Bessie Smith was signed by Columbia Records in 1923, as part of the rush to find and record as many Black women blues singers as possible. Her first recording session produced "Downhearted Blues", which became, depending on which sources you read, either the biggest-selling blues record since "Crazy Blues" or the biggest-selling blues record ever, full stop, selling three quarters of a million copies in the six months after its release: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "Downhearted Blues"] Smith didn't make royalties off record sales, only making a flat fee, but she became the most popular Black performer of the 1920s. Columbia signed her to an exclusive contract, and she became so rich that she would literally travel between gigs on her own private train. She lived an extravagant life in every way, giving lavishly to her friends and family, but also drinking extraordinary amounts of liquor, having regular affairs, and also often physically or verbally attacking those around her. By all accounts she was not a comfortable person to be around, and she seemed to be trying to fit an entire lifetime into every moment. From 1923 through 1929 she had a string of massive hits. She recorded material in a variety of styles, including the dirty blues: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "Empty Bed Blues] And with accompanists like Louis Armstrong: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith with Louis Armstrong, "Cold in Hand Blues"] But the music for which she became best known, and which sold the best, was when she sang about being mistreated by men, as on one of her biggest hits, "'Tain't Nobody's Biz-Ness if I Do" -- and a warning here, I'm going to play a clip of the song, which treats domestic violence in a way that may be upsetting: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "'Tain't Nobody's Biz-Ness if I Do"] That kind of material can often seem horrifying to today's listeners -- and quite correctly so, as domestic violence is a horrifying thing -- and it sounds entirely too excusing of the man beating her up for anyone to find it comfortable listening. But the Black feminist scholar Angela Davis has made a convincing case that while these records, and others by Smith's contemporaries, can't reasonably be considered to be feminist, they *are* at the very least more progressive than they now seem, in that they were, even if excusing it, pointing to a real problem which was otherwise left unspoken. And that kind of domestic violence and abuse *was* a real problem, including in Smith's own life. By all accounts she was terrified of her husband, Jack Gee, who would frequently attack her because of her affairs with other people, mostly women. But she was still devastated when he left her for a younger woman, not only because he had left her, but also because he kidnapped their adopted son and had him put into a care home, falsely claiming she had abused him. Not only that, but before Jack left her closest friend had been Jack's niece Ruby and after the split she never saw Ruby again -- though after her death Ruby tried to have a blues career as "Ruby Smith", taking her aunt's surname and recording a few tracks with Sammy Price, the piano player who worked with Sister Rosetta Tharpe: [Excerpt: Ruby Smith with Sammy Price, "Make Me Love You"] The same month, May 1929, that Gee left her, Smith recorded what was to become her last big hit, and most well-known song, "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out": [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out"] And that could have been the theme for the rest of her life. A few months after that record came out, the Depression hit, pretty much killing the market for blues records. She carried on recording until 1931, but the records weren't selling any more. And at the same time, the talkies came in in the film industry, which along with the Depression ended up devastating the vaudeville audience. Her earnings were still higher than most, but only a quarter of what they had been a year or two earlier. She had one last recording session in 1933, produced by John Hammond for OKeh Records, where she showed that her style had developed over the years -- it was now incorporating the newer swing style, and featured future swing stars Benny Goodman and Jack Teagarden in the backing band: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "Gimme a Pigfoot"] Hammond was not hugely impressed with the recordings, preferring her earlier records, and they would be the last she would ever make. She continued as a successful, though no longer record-breaking, live act until 1937, when she and her common-law husband, Lionel Hampton's uncle Richard Morgan, were in a car crash. Morgan escaped, but Smith died of her injuries and was buried on October the fourth 1937. Ten thousand people came to her funeral, but she was buried in an unmarked grave -- she was still legally married to Gee, even though they'd been separated for eight years, and while he supposedly later became rich from songwriting royalties from some of her songs (most of her songs were written by other people, but she wrote a few herself) he refused to pay for a headstone for her. Indeed on more than one occasion he embezzled money that had been raised by other people to provide a headstone. Bessie Smith soon became Joplin's favourite singer of all time, and she started trying to copy her vocals. But other than discovering Smith's music, Joplin seems to have had as terrible a time at university as at school, and soon dropped out and moved back in with her parents. She went to business school for a short while, where she learned some secretarial skills, and then she moved west, going to LA where two of her aunts lived, to see if she could thrive better in a big West Coast city than she did in small-town Texas. Soon she moved from LA to Venice Beach, and from there had a brief sojourn in San Francisco, where she tried to live out her beatnik fantasies at a time when the beatnik culture was starting to fall apart. She did, while she was there, start smoking cannabis, though she never got a taste for that drug, and took Benzedrine and started drinking much more heavily than she had before. She soon lost her job, moved back to Texas, and re-enrolled at the same college she'd been at before. But now she'd had a taste of real Bohemian life -- she'd been singing at coffee houses, and having affairs with both men and women -- and soon she decided to transfer to the University of Texas at Austin. At this point, Austin was very far from the cultural centre it has become in recent decades, and it was still a straitlaced Texan town, but it was far less so than Port Arthur, and she soon found herself in a folk group, the Waller Creek Boys. Janis would play autoharp and sing, sometimes Bessie Smith covers, but also the more commercial country and folk music that was popular at the time, like "Silver Threads and Golden Needles", a song that had originally been recorded by Wanda Jackson but at that time was a big hit for Dusty Springfield's group The Springfields: [Excerpt: The Waller Creek Boys, "Silver Threads and Golden Needles"] But even there, Joplin didn't fit in comfortably. The venue where the folk jams were taking place was a segregated venue, as everywhere around Austin was. And she was enough of a misfit that the campus newspaper did an article on her headlined "She Dares to Be Different!", which read in part "She goes barefooted when she feels like it, wears Levi's to class because they're more comfortable, and carries her Autoharp with her everywhere she goes so that in case she gets the urge to break out into song it will be handy." There was a small group of wannabe-Beatniks, including Chet Helms, who we've mentioned previously in the Grateful Dead episode, Gilbert Shelton, who went on to be a pioneer of alternative comics and create the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, and Shelton's partner in Rip-Off Press, Dave Moriarty, but for the most part the atmosphere in Austin was only slightly better for Janis than it had been in Port Arthur. The final straw for her came when in an annual charity fundraiser joke competition to find the ugliest man on campus, someone nominated her for the "award". She'd had enough of Texas. She wanted to go back to California. She and Chet Helms, who had dropped out of the university earlier and who, like her, had already spent some time on the West Coast, decided to hitch-hike together to San Francisco. Before leaving, she made a recording for her ex-girlfriend Julie Paul, a country and western musician, of a song she'd written herself. It's recorded in what many say was Janis' natural voice -- a voice she deliberately altered in performance in later years because, she would tell people, she didn't think there was room for her singing like that in an industry that already had Joan Baez and Judy Collins. In her early years she would alternate between singing like this and doing her imitations of Black women, but the character of Janis Joplin who would become famous never sang like this. It may well be the most honest thing that she ever recorded, and the most revealing of who she really was: [Excerpt: Janis Joplin, "So Sad to Be Alone"] Joplin and Helms made it to San Francisco, and she started performing at open-mic nights and folk clubs around the Bay Area, singing in her Bessie Smith and Odetta imitation voice, and sometimes making a great deal of money by sounding different from the wispier-voiced women who were the norm at those venues. The two friends parted ways, and she started performing with two other folk musicians, Larry Hanks and Roger Perkins, and she insisted that they would play at least one Bessie Smith song at every performance: [Excerpt: Janis Joplin, Larry Hanks, and Roger Perkins, "Black Mountain Blues (live in San Francisco)"] Often the trio would be joined by Billy Roberts, who at that time had just started performing the song that would make his name, "Hey Joe", and Joplin was soon part of the folk scene in the Bay Area, and admired by Dino Valenti, David Crosby, and Jerry Garcia among others. She also sang a lot with Jorma Kaukonnen, and recordings of the two of them together have circulated for years: [Excerpt: Janis Joplin and Jorma Kaukonnen, "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out"] Through 1963, 1964, and early 1965 Joplin ping-ponged from coast to coast, spending time in the Bay Area, then Greenwich Village, dropping in on her parents then back to the Bay Area, and she started taking vast quantities of methamphetamine. Even before moving to San Francisco she had been an occasional user of amphetamines – at the time they were regularly prescribed to students as study aids during exam periods, and she had also been taking them to try to lose some of the weight she always hated. But while she was living in San Francisco she became dependent on the drug. At one point her father was worried enough about her health to visit her in San Francisco, where she managed to fool him that she was more or less OK. But she looked to him for reassurance that things would get better for her, and he couldn't give it to her. He told her about a concept that he called the "Saturday night swindle", the idea that you work all week so you can go out and have fun on Saturday in the hope that that will make up for everything else, but that it never does. She had occasional misses with what would have been lucky breaks -- at one point she was in a motorcycle accident just as record labels were interested in signing her, and by the time she got out of the hospital the chance had gone. She became engaged to another speed freak, one who claimed to be an engineer and from a well-off background, but she was becoming severely ill from what was by now a dangerous amphetamine habit, and in May 1965 she decided to move back in with her parents, get clean, and have a normal life. Her new fiance was going to do the same, and they were going to have the conformist life her parents had always wanted, and which she had always wanted to want. Surely with a husband who loved her she could find a way to fit in and just be normal. She kicked the addiction, and wrote her fiance long letters describing everything about her family and the new normal life they were going to have together, and they show her painfully trying to be optimistic about the future, like one where she described her family to him: "My mother—Dorothy—worries so and loves her children dearly. Republican and Methodist, very sincere, speaks in clichés which she really means and is very good to people. (She thinks you have a lovely voice and is terribly prepared to like you.) My father—richer than when I knew him and kind of embarrassed about it—very well read—history his passion—quiet and very excited to have me home because I'm bright and we can talk (about antimatter yet—that impressed him)! I keep telling him how smart you are and how proud I am of you.…" She went back to Lamar, her mother started sewing her a wedding dress, and for much of the year she believed her fiance was going to be her knight in shining armour. But as it happened, the fiance in question was described by everyone else who knew him as a compulsive liar and con man, who persuaded her father to give him money for supposed medical tests before the wedding, but in reality was apparently married to someone else and having a baby with a third woman. After the engagement was broken off, she started performing again around the coffeehouses in Austin and Houston, and she started to realise the possibilities of rock music for her kind of performance. The missing clue came from a group from Austin who she became very friendly with, the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, and the way their lead singer Roky Erickson would wail and yell: [Excerpt: The 13th Floor Elevators, "You're Gonna Miss Me (live)"] If, as now seemed inevitable, Janis was going to make a living as a performer, maybe she should start singing rock music, because it seemed like there was money in it. There was even some talk of her singing with the Elevators. But then an old friend came to Austin from San Francisco with word from Chet Helms. A blues band had formed, and were looking for a singer, and they remembered her from the coffee houses. Would she like to go back to San Francisco and sing with them? In the time she'd been away, Helms had become hugely prominent in the San Francisco music scene, which had changed radically. A band from the area called the Charlatans had been playing a fake-Victorian saloon called the Red Dog in nearby Nevada, and had become massive with the people who a few years earlier had been beatniks: [Excerpt: The Charlatans, "32-20"] When their residency at the Red Dog had finished, several of the crowd who had been regulars there had become a collective of sorts called the Family Dog, and Helms had become their unofficial leader. And there's actually a lot packed into that choice of name. As we'll see in a few future episodes, a lot of West Coast hippies eventually started calling their collectives and communes families. This started as a way to get round bureaucracy -- if a helpful welfare officer put down that the unrelated people living in a house together were a family, suddenly they could get food stamps. As with many things, of course, the label then affected how people thought about themselves, and one thing that's very notable about the San Francisco scene hippies in particular is that they are some of the first people to make a big deal about what we now  call "found family" or "family of choice". But it's also notable how often the hippie found families took their model from the only families these largely middle-class dropouts had ever known, and structured themselves around men going out and doing the work -- selling dope or panhandling or being rock musicians or shoplifting -- with the women staying at home doing the housework. The Family Dog started promoting shows, with the intention of turning San Francisco into "the American Liverpool", and soon Helms was rivalled only by Bill Graham as the major promoter of rock shows in the Bay Area. And now he wanted Janis to come back and join this new band. But Janis was worried. She was clean now. She drank far too much, but she wasn't doing any other drugs. She couldn't go back to San Francisco and risk getting back on methamphetamine. She needn't worry about that, she was told, nobody in San Francisco did speed any more, they were all on LSD -- a drug she hated and so wasn't in any danger from. Reassured, she made the trip back to San Francisco, to join Big Brother and the Holding Company. Big Brother and the Holding Company were the epitome of San Francisco acid rock at the time. They were the house band at the Avalon Ballroom, which Helms ran, and their first ever gig had been at the Trips Festival, which we talked about briefly in the Grateful Dead episode. They were known for being more imaginative than competent -- lead guitarist James Gurley was often described as playing parts that were influenced by John Cage, but was equally often, and equally accurately, described as not actually being able to keep his guitar in tune because he was too stoned. But they were drawing massive crowds with their instrumental freak-out rock music. Helms thought they needed a singer, and he had remembered Joplin, who a few of the group had seen playing the coffee houses. He decided she would be perfect for them, though Joplin wasn't so sure. She thought it was worth a shot, but as she wrote to her parents before meeting the group "Supposed to rehearse w/ the band this afternoon, after that I guess I'll know whether I want to stay & do that for awhile. Right now my position is ambivalent—I'm glad I came, nice to see the city, a few friends, but I'm not at all sold on the idea of becoming the poor man's Cher.” In that letter she also wrote "I'm awfully sorry to be such a disappointment to you. I understand your fears at my coming here & must admit I share them, but I really do think there's an awfully good chance I won't blow it this time." The band she met up with consisted of lead guitarist James Gurley, bass player Peter Albin, rhythm player Sam Andrew, and drummer David Getz.  To start with, Peter Albin sang lead on most songs, with Joplin adding yelps and screams modelled on those of Roky Erickson, but in her first gig with the band she bowled everyone over with her lead vocal on the traditional spiritual "Down on Me", which would remain a staple of their live act, as in this live recording from 1968: [Excerpt: Big Brother and the Holding Company, "Down on Me (Live 1968)"] After that first gig in June 1966, it was obvious that Joplin was going to be a star, and was going to be the group's main lead vocalist. She had developed a whole new stage persona a million miles away from her folk performances. As Chet Helms said “Suddenly this person who would stand upright with her fists clenched was all over the stage. Roky Erickson had modeled himself after the screaming style of Little Richard, and Janis's initial stage presence came from Roky, and ultimately Little Richard. It was a very different Janis.” Joplin would always claim to journalists that her stage persona was just her being herself and natural, but she worked hard on every aspect of her performance, and far from the untrained emotional outpouring she always suggested, her vocal performances were carefully calculated pastiches of her influences -- mostly Bessie Smith, but also Big Mama Thornton, Odetta, Etta James, Tina Turner, and Otis Redding. That's not to say that those performances weren't an authentic expression of part of herself -- they absolutely were. But the ethos that dominated San Francisco in the mid-sixties prized self-expression over technical craft, and so Joplin had to portray herself as a freak of nature who just had to let all her emotions out, a wild woman, rather than someone who carefully worked out every nuance of her performances. Joplin actually got the chance to meet one of her idols when she discovered that Willie Mae Thornton was now living and regularly performing in the Bay Area. She and some of her bandmates saw Big Mama play a small jazz club, where she performed a song she wouldn't release on a record for another two years: [Excerpt: Big Mama Thornton, "Ball 'n' Chain"] Janis loved the song and scribbled down the lyrics, then went backstage to ask Big Mama if Big Brother could cover the song. She gave them her blessing, but told them "don't" -- and here she used a word I can't use with a clean rating -- "it up". The group all moved in together, communally, with their partners -- those who had them. Janis was currently single, having dumped her most recent boyfriend after discovering him shooting speed, as she was still determined to stay clean. But she was rapidly discovering that the claim that San Franciscans no longer used much speed had perhaps not been entirely true, as for example Sam Andrew's girlfriend went by the nickname Speedfreak Rita. For now, Janis was still largely clean, but she did start drinking more. Partly this was because of a brief fling with Pigpen from the Grateful Dead, who lived nearby. Janis liked Pigpen as someone else on the scene who didn't much like psychedelics or cannabis -- she didn't like drugs that made her think more, but only drugs that made her able to *stop* thinking (her love of amphetamines doesn't seem to fit this pattern, but a small percentage of people have a different reaction to amphetamine-type stimulants, perhaps she was one of those). Pigpen was a big drinker of Southern Comfort -- so much so that it would kill him within a few years -- and Janis started joining him. Her relationship with Pigpen didn't last long, but the two would remain close, and she would often join the Grateful Dead on stage over the years to duet with him on "Turn On Your Lovelight": [Excerpt: Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead, "Turn on Your Lovelight"] But within two months of joining the band, Janis nearly left. Paul Rothchild of Elektra Records came to see the group live, and was impressed by their singer, but not by the rest of the band. This was something that would happen again and again over the group's career. The group were all imaginative and creative -- they worked together on their arrangements and their long instrumental jams and often brought in very good ideas -- but they were not the most disciplined or technically skilled of musicians, even when you factored in their heavy drug use, and often lacked the skill to pull off their better ideas. They were hugely popular among the crowds at the Avalon Ballroom, who were on the group's chemical wavelength, but Rothchild was not impressed -- as he was, in general, unimpressed with psychedelic freakouts. He was already of the belief in summer 1966 that the fashion for extended experimental freak-outs would soon come to an end and that there would be a pendulum swing back towards more structured and melodic music. As we saw in the episode on The Band, he would be proved right in a little over a year, but being ahead of the curve he wanted to put together a supergroup that would be able to ride that coming wave, a group that would play old-fashioned blues. He'd got together Stefan Grossman, Steve Mann, and Taj Mahal, and he wanted Joplin to be the female vocalist for the group, dueting with Mahal. She attended one rehearsal, and the new group sounded great. Elektra Records offered to sign them, pay their rent while they rehearsed, and have a major promotional campaign for their first release. Joplin was very, very, tempted, and brought the subject up to her bandmates in Big Brother. They were devastated. They were a family! You don't leave your family! She was meant to be with them forever! They eventually got her to agree to put off the decision at least until after a residency they'd been booked for in Chicago, and she decided to give them the chance, writing to her parents "I decided to stay w/the group but still like to think about the other thing. Trying to figure out which is musically more marketable because my being good isn't enough, I've got to be in a good vehicle.” The trip to Chicago was a disaster. They found that the people of Chicago weren't hugely interested in seeing a bunch of white Californians play the blues, and that the Midwest didn't have the same Bohemian crowds that the coastal cities they were used to had, and so their freak-outs didn't go down well either. After two weeks of their four-week residency, the club owner stopped paying them because they were so unpopular, and they had no money to get home. And then they were approached by Bob Shad. (For those who know the film Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, the Bob Shad in that film is named after this one -- Judd Apatow, the film's director, is Shad's grandson) This Shad was a record producer, who had worked with people like Big Bill Broonzy, Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington, and Billy Eckstine over an eighteen-year career, and had recently set up a new label, Mainstream Records. He wanted to sign Big Brother and the Holding Company. They needed money and... well, it was a record contract! It was a contract that took half their publishing, paid them a five percent royalty on sales, and gave them no advance, but it was still a contract, and they'd get union scale for the first session. In that first session in Chicago, they recorded four songs, and strangely only one, "Down on Me", had a solo Janis vocal. Of the other three songs, Sam Andrew and Janis dueted on Sam's song "Call on Me", Albin sang lead on the group composition "Blindman", and Gurley and Janis sang a cover of "All Is Loneliness", a song originally by the avant-garde street musician Moondog: [Excerpt: Big Brother and the Holding Company, "All is Loneliness"] The group weren't happy with the four songs they recorded -- they had to keep the songs to the length of a single, and the engineers made sure that the needles never went into the red, so their guitars sounded far more polite and less distorted than they were used to. Janis was fascinated by the overdubbing process, though, especially double-tracking, which she'd never tried before but which she turned out to be remarkably good at. And they were now signed to a contract, which meant that Janis wouldn't be leaving the group to go solo any time soon. The family were going to stay together. But on the group's return to San Francisco, Janis started doing speed again, encouraged by the people around the group, particularly Gurley's wife. By the time the group's first single, "Blindman" backed with "All is Loneliness", came out, she was an addict again. That initial single did nothing, but the group were fast becoming one of the most popular in the Bay Area, and almost entirely down to Janis' vocals and on-stage persona. Bob Shad had already decided in the initial session that while various band members had taken lead, Janis was the one who should be focused on as the star, and when they drove to LA for their second recording session it was songs with Janis leads that they focused on. At that second session, in which they recorded ten tracks in two days, the group recorded a mix of material including one of Janis' own songs, the blues track "Women is Losers", and a version of the old folk song "the Cuckoo Bird" rearranged by Albin. Again they had to keep the arrangements to two and a half minutes a track, with no extended soloing and a pop arrangement style, and the results sound a lot more like the other San Francisco bands, notably Jefferson Airplane, than like the version of the band that shows itself in their live performances: [Excerpt: Big Brother and the Holding Company, "Coo Coo"] After returning to San Francisco after the sessions, Janis went to see Otis Redding at the Fillmore, turning up several hours before the show started on all three nights to make sure she could be right at the front. One of the other audience members later recalled “It was more fascinating for me, almost, to watch Janis watching Otis, because you could tell that she wasn't just listening to him, she was studying something. There was some kind of educational thing going on there. I was jumping around like the little hippie girl I was, thinking This is so great! and it just stopped me in my tracks—because all of a sudden Janis drew you very deeply into what the performance was all about. Watching her watch Otis Redding was an education in itself.” Joplin would, for the rest of her life, always say that Otis Redding was her all-time favourite singer, and would say “I started singing rhythmically, and now I'm learning from Otis Redding to push a song instead of just sliding over it.” [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "I Can't Turn You Loose (live)"] At the start of 1967, the group moved out of the rural house they'd been sharing and into separate apartments around Haight-Ashbury, and they brought the new year in by playing a free show organised by the Hell's Angels, the violent motorcycle gang who at the time were very close with the proto-hippies in the Bay Area. Janis in particular always got on well with the Angels, whose drugs of choice, like hers, were speed and alcohol more than cannabis and psychedelics. Janis also started what would be the longest on-again off-again relationship she would ever have, with a woman named Peggy Caserta. Caserta had a primary partner, but that if anything added to her appeal for Joplin -- Caserta's partner Kimmie had previously been in a relationship with Joan Baez, and Joplin, who had an intense insecurity that made her jealous of any other female singer who had any success, saw this as in some way a validation both of her sexuality and, transitively, of her talent. If she was dating Baez's ex's lover, that in some way put her on a par with Baez, and when she told friends about Peggy, Janis would always slip that fact in. Joplin and Caserta would see each other off and on for the rest of Joplin's life, but they were never in a monogamous relationship, and Joplin had many other lovers over the years. The next of these was Country Joe McDonald of Country Joe and the Fish, who were just in the process of recording their first album Electric Music for the Mind and Body, when McDonald and Joplin first got together: [Excerpt: Country Joe and the Fish, "Grace"] McDonald would later reminisce about lying with Joplin, listening to one of the first underground FM radio stations, KMPX, and them playing a Fish track and a Big Brother track back to back. Big Brother's second single, the other two songs recorded in the Chicago session, had been released in early 1967, and the B-side, "Down on Me", was getting a bit of airplay in San Francisco and made the local charts, though it did nothing outside the Bay Area: [Excerpt: Big Brother and the Holding Company, "Down on Me"] Janis was unhappy with the record, though, writing to her parents and saying, “Our new record is out. We seem to be pretty dissatisfied w/it. I think we're going to try & get out of the record contract if we can. We don't feel that they know how to promote or engineer a record & every time we recorded for them, they get all our songs, which means we can't do them for another record company. But then if our new record does something, we'd change our mind. But somehow, I don't think it's going to." The band apparently saw a lawyer to see if they could get out of the contract with Mainstream, but they were told it was airtight. They were tied to Bob Shad no matter what for the next five years. Janis and McDonald didn't stay together for long -- they clashed about his politics and her greater fame -- but after they split, she asked him to write a song for her before they became too distant, and he obliged and recorded it on the Fish's next album: [Excerpt: Country Joe and the Fish, "Janis"] The group were becoming so popular by late spring 1967 that when Richard Lester, the director of the Beatles' films among many other classics, came to San Francisco to film Petulia, his follow-up to How I Won The War, he chose them, along with the Grateful Dead, to appear in performance segments in the film. But it would be another filmmaker that would change the course of the group's career irrevocably: [Excerpt: Scott McKenzie, "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)"] When Big Brother and the Holding Company played the Monterey Pop Festival, nobody had any great expectations. They were second on the bill on the Saturday, the day that had been put aside for the San Francisco acts, and they were playing in the early afternoon, after a largely unimpressive night before. They had a reputation among the San Francisco crowd, of course, but they weren't even as big as the Grateful Dead, Moby Grape or Country Joe and the Fish, let alone Jefferson Airplane. Monterey launched four careers to new heights, but three of the superstars it made -- Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, and the Who -- already had successful careers. Hendrix and the Who had had hits in the UK but not yet broken the US market, while Redding was massively popular with Black people but hadn't yet crossed over to a white audience. Big Brother and the Holding Company, on the other hand, were so unimportant that D.A. Pennebaker didn't even film their set -- their manager at the time had not wanted to sign over the rights to film their performance, something that several of the other acts had also refused -- and nobody had been bothered enough to make an issue of it. Pennebaker just took some crowd shots and didn't bother filming the band. The main thing he caught was Cass Elliot's open-mouthed astonishment at Big Brother's performance -- or rather at Janis Joplin's performance. The members of the group would later complain, not entirely inaccurately, that in the reviews of their performance at Monterey, Joplin's left nipple (the outline of which was apparently visible through her shirt, at least to the male reviewers who took an inordinate interest in such things) got more attention than her four bandmates combined. As Pennebaker later said “She came out and sang, and my hair stood on end. We were told we weren't allowed to shoot it, but I knew if we didn't have Janis in the film, the film would be a wash. Afterward, I said to Albert Grossman, ‘Talk to her manager or break his leg or whatever you have to do, because we've got to have her in this film. I can't imagine this film without this woman who I just saw perform.” Grossman had a talk with the organisers of the festival, Lou Adler and John Phillips, and they offered Big Brother a second spot, the next day, if they would allow their performance to be used in the film. The group agreed, after much discussion between Janis and Grossman, and against the wishes of their manager: [Excerpt: Big Brother and the Holding Company, "Ball and Chain (live at Monterey)"] They were now on Albert Grossman's radar. Or at least, Janis Joplin was. Joplin had always been more of a careerist than the other members of the group. They were in music to have a good time and to avoid working a straight job, and while some of them were more accomplished musicians than their later reputations would suggest -- Sam Andrew, in particular, was a skilled player and serious student of music -- they were fundamentally content with playing the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore and making five hundred dollars or so a week between them. Very good money for 1967, but nothing else. Joplin, on the other hand, was someone who absolutely craved success. She wanted to prove to her family that she wasn't a failure and that her eccentricity shouldn't stop them being proud of her; she was always, even at the depths of her addictions, fiscally prudent and concerned about her finances; and she had a deep craving for love. Everyone who talks about her talks about how she had an aching need at all times for approval, connection, and validation, which she got on stage more than she got anywhere else. The bigger the audience, the more they must love her. She'd made all her decisions thus far based on how to balance making music that she loved with commercial success, and this would continue to be the pattern for her in future. And so when journalists started to want to talk to her, even though up to that point Albin, who did most of the on-stage announcements, and Gurley, the lead guitarist, had considered themselves joint leaders of the band, she was eager. And she was also eager to get rid of their manager, who continued the awkward streak that had prevented their first performance at the Monterey Pop Festival from being filmed. The group had the chance to play the Hollywood Bowl -- Bill Graham was putting on a "San Francisco Sound" showcase there, featuring Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, and got their verbal agreement to play, but after Graham had the posters printed up, their manager refused to sign the contracts unless they were given more time on stage. The next day after that, they played Monterey again -- this time the Monterey Jazz Festival. A very different crowd to the Pop Festival still fell for Janis' performance -- and once again, the film being made of the event didn't include Big Brother's set because of their manager. While all this was going on, the group's recordings from the previous year were rushed out by Mainstream Records as an album, to poor reviews which complained it was nothing like the group's set at Monterey: [Excerpt: Big Brother and the Holding Company, "Bye Bye Baby"] They were going to need to get out of that contract and sign with somewhere better -- Clive Davis at Columbia Records was already encouraging them to sign with him -- but to do that, they needed a better manager. They needed Albert Grossman. Grossman was one of the best negotiators in the business at that point, but he was also someone who had a genuine love for the music his clients made.  And he had good taste -- he managed Odetta, who Janis idolised as a singer, and Bob Dylan, who she'd been a fan of since his first album came out. He was going to be the perfect manager for the group. But he had one condition though. His first wife had been a heroin addict, and he'd just been dealing with Mike Bloomfield's heroin habit. He had one absolutely ironclad rule, a dealbreaker that would stop him signing them -- they didn't use heroin, did they? Both Gurley and Joplin had used heroin on occasion -- Joplin had only just started, introduced to the drug by Gurley -- but they were only dabblers. They could give it up any time they wanted, right? Of course they could. They told him, in perfect sincerity, that the band didn't use heroin and it wouldn't be a problem. But other than that, Grossman was extremely flexible. He explained to the group at their first meeting that he took a higher percentage than other managers, but that he would also make them more money than other managers -- if money was what they wanted. He told them that they needed to figure out where they wanted their career to be, and what they were willing to do to get there -- would they be happy just playing the same kind of venues they were now, maybe for a little more money, or did they want to be as big as Dylan or Peter, Paul, and Mary? He could get them to whatever level they wanted, and he was happy with working with clients at every level, what did they actually want? The group were agreed -- they wanted to be rich. They decided to test him. They were making twenty-five thousand dollars a year between them at that time, so they got ridiculously ambitious. They told him they wanted to make a *lot* of money. Indeed, they wanted a clause in their contract saying the contract would be void if in the first year they didn't make... thinking of a ridiculous amount, they came up with seventy-five thousand dollars. Grossman's response was to shrug and say "Make it a hundred thousand." The group were now famous and mixing with superstars -- Peter Tork of the Monkees had become a close friend of Janis', and when they played a residency in LA they were invited to John and Michelle Phillips' house to see a rough cut of Monterey Pop. But the group, other than Janis, were horrified -- the film barely showed the other band members at all, just Janis. Dave Getz said later "We assumed we'd appear in the movie as a band, but seeing it was a shock. It was all Janis. They saw her as a superstar in the making. I realized that though we were finally going to be making money and go to another level, it also meant our little family was being separated—there was Janis, and there was the band.” [Excerpt: Big Brother and the Holding Company, "Bye Bye Baby"] If the group were going to make that hundred thousand dollars a year, they couldn't remain on Mainstream Records, but Bob Shad was not about to give up his rights to what could potentially be the biggest group in America without a fight. But luckily for the group, Clive Davis at Columbia had seen their Monterey performance, and he was also trying to pivot the label towards the new rock music. He was basically willing to do anything to get them. Eventually Columbia agreed to pay Shad two hundred thousand dollars for the group's contract -- Davis and Grossman negotiated so half that was an advance on the group's future earnings, but the other half was just an expense for the label. On top of that the group got an advance payment of fifty thousand dollars for their first album for Columbia, making a total investment by Columbia of a quarter of a million dollars -- in return for which they got to sign the band, and got the rights to the material they'd recorded for Mainstream, though Shad would get a two percent royalty on their first two albums for Columbia. Janis was intimidated by signing for Columbia, because that had been Aretha Franklin's label before she signed to Atlantic, and she regarded Franklin as the greatest performer in music at that time.  Which may have had something to do with the choice of a new song the group added to their setlist in early 1968 -- one which was a current hit for Aretha's sister Erma: [Excerpt: Erma Franklin, "Piece of My Heart"] We talked a little in the last episode about the song "Piece of My Heart" itself, though mostly from the perspective of its performer, Erma Franklin. But the song was, as we mentioned, co-written by Bert Berns. He's someone we've talked about a little bit in previous episodes, notably the ones on "Here Comes the Night" and "Twist and Shout", but those were a couple of years ago, and he's about to become a major figure in the next episode, so we might as well take a moment here to remind listeners (or tell those who haven't heard those episodes) of the basics and explain where "Piece of My Heart" comes in Berns' work as a whole. Bert Berns was a latecomer to the music industry, not getting properly started until he was thirty-one, after trying a variety of other occupations. But when he did get started, he wasted no time making his mark -- he knew he had no time to waste. He had a weak heart and knew the likelihood was he was going to die young. He started an association with Wand records as a songwriter and performer, writing songs for some of Phil Spector's pre-fame recordings, and he also started producing records for Atlantic, where for a long while he was almost the equal of Jerry Wexler or Leiber and Stoller in terms of number of massive hits created. His records with Solomon Burke were the records that first got the R&B genre renamed soul (previously the word "soul" mostly referred to a kind of R&Bish jazz, rather than a kind of gospel-ish R&B). He'd also been one of the few American music industry professionals to work with British bands before the Beatles made it big in the USA, after he became alerted to the Beatles' success with his song "Twist and Shout", which he'd co-written with Phil Medley, and which had been a hit in a version Berns produced for the Isley Brothers: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Twist and Shout"] That song shows the two elements that existed in nearly every single Bert Berns song or production. The first is the Afro-Caribbean rhythm, a feel he picked up during a stint in Cuba in his twenties. Other people in the Atlantic records team were also partial to those rhythms -- Leiber and Stoller loved what they called the baion rhythm -- but Berns more than anyone else made it his signature. He also very specifically loved the song "La Bamba", especially Ritchie Valens' version of it: [Excerpt: Ritchie Valens, "La Bamba"] He basically seemed to think that was the greatest record ever made, and he certainly loved that three-chord trick I-IV-V-IV chord sequence -- almost but not quite the same as the "Louie Louie" one.  He used it in nearly every song he wrote from that point on -- usually using a bassline that went something like this: [plays I-IV-V-IV bassline] He used it in "Twist and Shout" of course: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Twist and Shout"] He used it in "Hang on Sloopy": [Excerpt: The McCoys, "Hang on Sloopy"] He *could* get more harmonically sophisticated on occasion, but the vast majority of Berns' songs show the power of simplicity. They're usually based around three chords, and often they're actually only two chords, like "I Want Candy": [Excerpt: The Strangeloves, "I Want Candy"] Or the chorus to "Here Comes the Night" by Them, which is two chords for most of it and only introduces a third right at the end: [Excerpt: Them, "Here Comes the Night"] And even in that song you can hear the "Twist and Shout"/"La Bamba" feel, even if it's not exactly the same chords. Berns' whole career was essentially a way of wringing *every last possible drop* out of all the implications of Ritchie Valens' record. And so even when he did a more harmonically complex song, like "Piece of My Heart", which actually has some minor chords in the bridge, the "La Bamba" chord sequence is used in both the verse: [Excerpt: Erma Franklin, "Piece of My Heart"] And the chorus: [Excerpt: Erma Franklin, "Piece of My Heart"] Berns co-wrote “Piece of My Heart” with Jerry Ragavoy. Berns and Ragavoy had also written "Cry Baby" for Garnet Mimms, which was another Joplin favourite: [Excerpt: Garnet Mimms, "Cry Baby"] And Ragavoy, with other collaborators

Tables are turned in this week's podcast as guest Kim Abernethy, CCO of PC Alliance, interviews Griffin Jones about the origins of Inside Reproductive Health and his journey as a fertility entrepreneur. Throughout the interview Griffin talks about: How he built IRH without any outside funding (And if you should do the same) The “Rising Stars” in the fertility field (And who he believes will be the big winners) The complications of nailing product-market fit (And how doctor's expect us to provide value) What advice he would give to fertility entrepreneurs looking to make a name for themselves.

“An arrogant man yearns for authority; he cannot, or rather, does not wish to perish utterly.“ In many ways, this one saying sums up our reflection this evening. When pride takes hold of an individual soul, one begins to move further and further away from God. Rather than “perish utterly” - that is, die to self and sin - one drives God from the mind and heart. The capacity to love diminishes, the desire to humiliate others increases, and, finally, our perception of reality is distorted beyond measure. It is for this reason that Saint John entitles this step “On Mad Pride“.  The more that we turn away from He who is the Way, the Truth and the Life, the more that we turn away from He who is Meaning, the more we lose touch with reality. We become like the one who fell from heaven, the father of lies. We are drawn into the same darkness and inability to see not only the truth about our souls but also to see the depths of God's love and compassion. --- Text of chat during the group: 00:02:44 FrDavid Abernethy: page 170 para number 2   00:15:21 TFredman: Have you heard from Ren? How is she doing?   00:16:21 Lee Graham: You will be greatly missed next week, you will be in my prayers.   00:43:33 David Swiderski: John mentions Gluttony is the prince of passions but also places Pride as a key passion are they both keys of all the passions? Is one more principal.   01:05:04 Louise: Therefore, how to understand one's desire to become competent, as competent as can be, to do things right?   01:14:05 Louise: So to become competent for Christ, to serve Christ in this world.   01:16:27 Victor: Thanks!   01:18:02 Cindy Moran: Thank you Father...will be praying...   01:18:13 Louise: Thanks, Fr. Abernethy!   01:18:13 Jeff O.: Thank you!!   01:18:18 Rebecca Thérèse: Thank you

One of the prophets writes: “the human heart is a treacherous thing, who can endure it!“ We begin to see the truth of this statement or more accurately the truth that is behind it. The spiritual battle that we engage in with our passions and our thoughts is often dogged by a kind of diabolical intrigue. The devil is relentless and unresting. He can manipulate us in such a way that he makes us desire to put ourselves forward, to put ourselves into the light; convincing us that to do so will draw people to greater faith.    The evil one acts with a kind of patience; he will begin to work on us slowly. He begins by making us enamored with our own natural gifts and abilities. In this way he makes us unfaithful in small things; we attribute natural gifts to ourselves rather than simply being grateful for the things of God has given to us. Such infidelity grows over the course of time as well as the complexity of the evil one's manipulation. He can begin to work on us from multiple angles, if you will. He can place scripture in our mind to do battle with the temptation of one demon, but then make us feel proud of our ability to do so.    Therefore, St. John tells us that we must begin the road to freedom from vainglory by remaining silent about ourselves and our accomplishments. We must learn to love to be dishonored. To be a Christian in this world is to be mocked and held in contempt. We must set aside our tendency to wear a mask that makes us more acceptable in the eyes of the world. We may put on the appearance of virtue yet always within the limits of what our world finds acceptable. --- Text of chat during the group: 00:24:24 susan: seeing yourself as a debtor is truth   00:24:35 Rachel: John 4"34   00:30:18 Art: I recently heard in a homily: The Gospel teaches us not to be like the Pharisee who says, ‘thank you God that I'm not like the Publican'.  But we must be careful that in our heart of hearts we're not also saying, “Thank you God, I'm not like that Pharisee.” Vainglory can strike from any side.   00:31:02 Rachel: Reacted to "I recently heard i..." with ❤️   00:31:42 Eric Ewanco: One method of evangelization is to share from our own experience instead of preaching what one should and should not do, since no one can argue with our experience and it's a more non-threatening way to share   00:31:59 Eric Ewanco: How would we evangelize with what you said in mind?   00:44:58 Ambrose Little, OP: The text here (#34) specifically speaks of displaying virtues. It's akin to Christ's exhortation to not be showy when fasting, or not be showy when giving—do not let the right hand know what the left is doing. I don't see it speaking against witnessing what God has done for us.   00:47:39 Lawrence Martone: Regarding self-revelation, there's the point that the focus should be on God and not ourselves, when it is expressed.   00:50:00 sharonfisher: Purity in motivations.   00:51:46 Anthony: There might be another vainglory....to magnify to yourself evil mental motions and temptations and fixate on What have I done? This is also pharisaical.   00:53:51 Lawrence Martone: “Our real business is to allow God to shed His light through us, and since the light belongs to Him, He will know where to focus it and to what extent.  Our endeavor should be to make ourselves transparent so as not to eclipse His brilliance.”                                                                            Erasmo Leiva-Merikais on Matthew 5:14 ff.     It seems to me that humility, as was mentioned earlier in Step 22, is essential to this endeavor of making ourselves transparent.   01:05:17 Cindy Moran: How does what John tells us apply to being a fool for Christ...   01:07:09 Cindy Moran: You just answered me.   01:07:11 David Swiderski: The Island is a movie from 2006 that demonstrates a fool for christ   01:07:25 Rachel: I wonder if this movement towards simplifying is somewhere where we have to be led by our Lord. Since it is an abyss we cant know how to navigate our way through. We can ' think" we know what kinds of dishonor we can profit by but it seems we have to wait to be led by only seeking God's will and what He reveals to us   01:10:33 Maureen Cunningham: ThankYou   01:10:35 Lorraine Green: Thank you Father!   01:10:48 Eric Ewanco: One year anniversary of your appointment!   01:11:21 sharonfisher: And with your spirit!   01:11:22 Rachel: Thank you   01:11:24 Louise: Thank you!   01:11:25 Jeff O.: Thank you!   01:11:29 Cindy Moran: Thank you Father!!   01:11:32 Rebecca Thérèse: Thank you

With stunning clarity, St. John Climacus begins to show us the subtlety of vainglory; how easily it draws us to focus upon the self in one fashion or another. It suggests thoughts that elevate us in our own eyes and diminishes others in our judgment.  Through vainglory we begin the movement of placing ourselves in the position of God; placing the self at the center of the spiritual life. The battle becomes ever so fierce and dangerous because at this point the focus of the demons' attention is on our virtues. The demons make them the object of our attention. In doing so they turn us away from God who is the beginning and end of all things.  And with the self firmly planted at the center, we are easily driven to rage and wrath towards anyone who gets in our way.  In the end, St John will show us how this gives birth to pride and how it draws us into the very darkness of hell itself. --- Text of chat during the group: 00:31:16 Lawrence Martone: Fr. Abernethy,   Perhaps the opposite of this vice of vainglory and seeking prestige is the beautiful story about St. John Vianney who added his own signature to a letter of protest to the bishop from leading clerics and parishioners against his (Fr. Vianney's) way of being a pastor.   00:38:42 Fr Marty, ND, 480-292-3381: St. John Chrysostom and St. Gregory the Theologian, also, fled the priesthood, but eventually offered the Church an extraordinary legacy. Vainglory, would you say, attacks or tries to undermine our authentic vocations?   00:52:05 Anthony: Living the spiritual life is not the same as conversations in a "salon" or on a college campus.   00:52:06 Ren Witter:

Self-esteem . . . how the meaning of that has changed over the generations. And when it becomes abstracted from our relationship with God, when our self-identity, purpose, and meaning becomes unmoored from He who created us, self-esteem can become the most grotesque of the vices. It will not only diminish our virtues, but destroy them completely.  When the sweat and the toil of the spiritual life is turned back on the self or when ascetical practices become ends in themselves, they lose all value. Christ himself warns us about this in the Gospel. “If you fast in order that others see that you are fasting, then you have your reward.“ In other words, we have our payment in full. We see ourselves, and others see us as self-disciplined, but that is as far as the labor takes us.  In this sense we become the most pitiable of all men, because we are acting as if there is no resurrection. If the things we do in this world, including religious things, are done for ourselves and to build up our own egos then they will eventually turn to dust. The love that has been revealed to us is self-emptying.  In our day to hold fast to such an understanding can only seem absurd for in no way does it fit with the wisdom of the world. Only by keeping our eyes fixed upon God and fixed upon Jesus Christ and him crucified do we let go of the illusion not only of being the self-made man, but the self-made Christian. Religious people are not in capable of having their own delusions. In fact, the delusion of being religious can be the greatest among them and the most difficult to overcome. It is only when the cross is firmly rooted in the mind and the heart and when we have allowed ourselves to be humbled by it do we then become free; free, not for ourselves or to serve ourselves, but free to love others and God.  --- Text of chat during the group: 00:05:12 FrDavid Abernethy: page 165 beginning Step 22 on Vainglory   00:29:13 Anthony: Should we be looking at our works this way? I had thoughtbit was a heresy to believe that any thing we do, even every good thing, is infected with sin.   00:39:14 David Swiderski: Are the references to Fulton Sheen from Treasure in Clay?   00:39:44 Louise: Can we say that vain glory is present as soon as we identify with something, anything?   00:40:55 Louise: What inner attitude could counter vain glory? Maybe vulnerability, fortitude, and yet a complete dependency on God.   00:43:49 Fr Marty, ND, 480-292-3381: I suffer the vainglory of fantasizing about meeting with someone or doing something in the future that will bring someone   00:44:07 Fr Marty, ND, 480-292-3381: someone's conversion and blessing.   00:55:09 Anthony: That was a very uncomfortable movie.   00:59:44 Ashley Kaschl: Father, you posted something this week by Evely that has really stuck with me, “…whereas you were trying to use even your first move of confidence towards God in order not to entrust yourself truly to Him, but to try to make him enter into your plans, like a pawn, like a pawn on your chess board. It is only when you accepted to be a pawn in his hand and in his plan, that you liberated your hope and his action."    I think this relates to paragraphs 6 and 11 because, in the same way, the believing idolater or the flatterer uses God, and manipulates every good, as a means to their own end, for their own glory. I'm reminded of St. John Paul II saying, to a friend who asked him why God would let him suffer an assassination attempt and being shot that, “there is nothing better than to be a tool in the hand of God.” I think the vainglorious seeks control and betrays God for human honor or a perception of strength, and would rather put on airs than be changed internally, than to be docile to the will of God.   01:05:17 Maureen Cunningham: What the difference between Praise and Flattery   01:14:32 Kate: When one looks back and sees how much one has done not for God but for self, it can be very painful realization.  Yet what is so amazing is that God in His Providence was still very much at work during those times even when we were not seeking first His Kingdom.   01:14:37 David Swiderski: There is a tradition in my family with my grandfather, father and I try. When someone thanks them they say - don't thank me, thank God I am able.   01:14:53 Ashley Kaschl: Reacted to "When one looks back …" with ❤️   01:15:10 sue and mark: Reacted to "When one looks back ..." with ❤️   01:15:14 Ashley Kaschl: Reacted to "There is a tradition…" with ❤️   01:15:32 sue and mark: Reacted to "There is a tradition..." with ❤️   01:16:17 David Swiderski: It seems to help to realize nothing is inherent in you but flows from God.   01:19:24 Maureen Cunningham: Blessing thank you   01:19:30 Cindy Moran: Thank you Father   01:19:31 sharonfisher: And with your spirit. Thanks!   01:19:32 David Swiderski: Thank you father!   01:19:34 Ambrose Little, OP: Gracias!   01:19:37 sue and mark: Thank you FR. Abernethy   01:19:39 Rebecca Thérèse: Thank you

Anxiety, it has been said, is ubiquitous. We all experience it and in its many manifestations. On a purely psychological level, one can never get to the heart or source of this feeling and its accompanying isolation. Often we find ourselves desperate to free ourselves from its grip. Therefore, we either immerse ourselves in the things of this world and maintain the illusion of security or we become paralyzed by it completely.  The desert fathers including St. John Climacus, however, remind us that through the incarnation everything about what it is to be a human being has been assumed and embraced by our Lord, including this experience that often plagues our existence. Christ is the source of all healing and in and through our immersion in His life through the sacraments and prayer we begin to enter into the peace of the kingdom. We are commanded in the Scriptures not to have any anxiety at all. However, this is not simply a command but a promise of grace and strength. If we hold on to our faith in the Lord, if we truly hope in his promises, then all anxiety and fear will flee.  To call upon the name of Jesus is to flog our enemies; meaning not only the temptations that come to us from the demons, but the fears that they would insert into our minds and hearts.  To mourn over one's sin, to acknowledge the brevity of our life, is the set aside all illusion and false security. It leads us to cling to Christ who is life and love. So often we too like the disciples are foolish and slow of heart to believe. Yet in Christ even the most improbable of things becomes possible - that in the soul dedicated to God fear and cowardice disappears. --- Text of chat during the group: 00:08:02 FrDavid Abernethy: page 163 Step 21   00:19:55 LauraLeigh: In #2, is he saying that this "old soul" should know better than to give in to cowardice?   00:23:10 Eric Ewanco: Fear is a lack of trust in God   00:23:13 Louise: Fear arises when we read a situation as a threat, while boldness arises when we read a situation as a challenge. With Christ, maybe we should see  all situations as challenges which we can face with Him.   00:24:09 Cindy Moran: Pray for me I lost my wallet today Yes I am anxious.   00:25:22 Rebecca Thérèse: I'll pray for you Cindy   00:25:26 LauraLeigh: Reacted to "I'll pray for you Ci..." with

Freedom! We often associate this word with our own rights in this world or our capacity to do as we will and go where we want. A kind of promise is put out to us - life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  Yet the image of freedom that is put before us by the saints and by Saint John in particular is attached to our willingness to be “detached” from the things of the world. God created all things good but in our sin our tendency is to idolize them. We seek our identity and happiness in the things of this world and we work ourselves to the point of exhaustion to protect these things as well as ourselves from others. We do not want to lose what we have or what we have earned.  Yet we very quickly learn that this is no real happiness. In fact, it is the root of all evils. The deeper that root becomes, the greater our desire for the things of this world grows. It begins to produce the fruit of hatred, thefts, envy, separations, enmities, storms, remembrance of wrong, hardheartedness, and murderers. Therefore, what we hold up as having so much value for ourselves, and what seems to promise us freedom and safety eventually becomes our prison or the shackles that bind us. It is only in having tasted the things above that one begins to find joy, freedom from care, and the loss of anxiety. If we obtain this virtue, John tells us, we run the race with the swiftness of athletes of old - that is, stripped and unimpeded.  --- Text of chat during the group: 00:11:00 Rebecca Thérèse: Yes happy birthday!   00:11:34 Adam Paige: Reacted to "Yes happy birthday!" with

AI is not just a sci-fi concept anymore; it's being woven into the fabric of healthcare, revolutionizing everything from research to patient care. It has the potential to create more streamlined and efficient processes. The challenge now is how we adapt and regulate this ever-evolving technology, while ensuring safety and trust.Amy Abernethy, former Principal Deputy Commissioner at the FDA and now the President of Product Development and Chief Medical Officer at Verily Life Sciences, joins Vijay Pande, founding partner of a16z Bio + Health, to discuss.

U.S. Army Command Sgt. Maj. Robert Abernethy is the Senior Enlisted Leader for U.S. European Command. In this episode CSM Abernethy talks about his career in Special Forces, valuable take-aways from working at the highest levels, and advice to those in the force to remain ready and vigilant.All that and more on this episode of SOFcast!