Neil Young makes me cry in the noble, touching, way genius creates art that erupts into an intellectual and emotional explosion of the senses in a single moment of blinding understanding. When you’ve experienced a Neil Young song in that manner you don’t look at other musicians the same way because not only can they never inspire you they cannot even inspire their own spirit.
Continue reading → The Neil Young Primer: Why Genius Never Fades
We all know what a traditional Spammer looks and smells like. They overload your blog with links to diet pills and fat creams and breast enhancers and penis extenders. You can smell their nastiness permeating across the universe.
Growing up in Nebraska can be a lonely and hard thing. Earth and sky are elements made for crushing. Each Nebraska horizon beyond the urban core presents only two images you learn early to avoid and they are both found on the visceral level where trembling and genetics meet blood creating the canvas of dreams and the kindling of hope: Bunches of blue sky crouch and stretch above just out of reach, teasing you over and around in what you imagine the ocean must look and feel like; maturity comes in dry pieces you kick and hold in your hand as dust while down beneath your boots rusty slivers of infertile earth scatter telling of dreams ending in sharp shards and hope dead and undone by a landscape that forgives nothing but rain.
The task of living is can be difficult as the world in which we spin becomes smaller, time speeds up, and the distance between people and cultures shrink. Now, more than ever, we need to find ways to achieve common ground beyond ideology and narrow value sets.
Rutgers-Newark has one of the most diverse student body populations of any university in the world. In fact, Rutgers-Newark won awards in the past for several years in a row for having the most diverse student body in the nation. The great thing about teaching at Rutgers-Newark is that everyone is a minority.
No one can claim majority rule by culture or ethnicity or regional flavor. That kind of “minority rule” can teach great lessons that cross color lines and cultural obstacles unlike any other place I have previously experienced. One precious thing we are losing in current university experiences is the loss of individuality in favor of the requirement to be politically correct to the point where the world becomes grey and differences and dissent are discouraged so no one will be offended.
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