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Great coverage, and I agree completely. How absurd, especially at a university, for someone to try to dictate what you can and can't fear, and to pass fear off as "hate". (Who even has the right to tell you what you can and can't hate?) And what on earth were the protestors arrested for and why do their rights not appear to matter to this man John King?

If I were a student, I'd be looking at my relationship with "the university" as a contractual agreement. They advertised classes, I accepted their offer and paid the fees and have a right to be there. I'd be asking John King where/how these vague, alleged "civic duties" involving my thoughts/feelings supposedly arise.

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Eric, would you be able to please add the video of you confronting John King to this or the program page? I would love to see that.

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It's here...I'll move it up too

https://www.facebook.com/efc1964/videos/1669863617161160/

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Thank you.. but I think you blocked me on Fb? I can't access the video there.

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I'll post it in the next day or so.

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Got the rest done Interesting about the last 60 seconds before.... letting go. I do have to disagree with you about one thing. Perhaps it was a preemptive disclaimer on your part, re how self-relationship does not remove the search for a special partner, only cools the pressure. We start with a self relationship, then engage in such searches. And more often than not, we end up with a self relationship, because a huge percentage of special relationships end in disappointment if not worse.

Reproduction is pretty much the only thing that you cannot obtain from a self relationship. And that's not necessarily what many people seek when they search for that special someone. Maybe we're better off with men donating their product to a sperm bank and women choosing from such a bank, either impregnation or via lab fertilization. LOL. Self-centered sexuality in the context of a relationship IMHO will likely lead to the partners concluding they're better off alone, unless they really are determined to so a family thing.

Revisiting my comments about the Dylan covers by Cat Power and Odetta. On second thought, i felt Cat Power was maybe trying too hard to be Dylan rather than herself, i preferred Odetta's delivery.

Sinead O'Connor's voice is indeed special. Will be missed big time.

Merry Clayton and The Times They Are A-Changing. GREAT version. BTW, the first Beatles US tour in February '64 (i so remember their first TV appearance, on Ed Sullivan, 2/9/64)is not when they met Dylan, didn't happen till that August.

Roches Clothes Line Saga. Really humorous take on Ode to Billy Joe. I remember when that tune was all over the radio. I and others had the impression that what the narrator and Billy were throwing off was a dead baby, aborted or miscarried. ????

Nico, I'll Keep It With Mine. What a fine lady, great singer. "All Tomorrow's Parties"!!!

Mavis Staples Serve Somebody. I don't know, man, i have problems with the idea, sort of preempts any genuine human autonomy.

Thanks.

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Your editorial is very significant in its consideration of the deranging and time warping FX of the digital environment.

15 years ago or so, before this synthetic environment really gripped our attention as it does now, someone wise pointed out to me that the human world itself is a distraction box , that is, to the degree that we gaze exclusively upon it. I’ve long noticed that folks who are surrounded by it, are effectively immersed in it, struggle with the indeterminacy offered by an open ended vista, rain on their hair, dirt between their toes. It must be something about the human ego requiring predictability and a consolidation of its centrality, even in its collective forms (what we call culture, but extending to politics and the news). In reality none of that is predictable either but our tacit agreement that it is somehow controllable by someone somewhere, if not by ourselves as individual agents, seduces us into this bizarre investment in the strictly human world. It’s not a dead end, but it is limited. I propose that the Digital, as you frame it, while offering apparently endless vistas, really only entraps us ever deeper into this simulation of phantasms, forms and formulations. Fortunately, most people I think do recognize this limitation, but lack the wherewithal of how to sidestep it. That only by sidestepping it, at least in small doses, offers us eventually the power to see through the illusion, while still agreeing to dwell within it, with its attendant misunderstandings and pitfalls. This is an important lesson that those of us who have straddled the worlds ( human, digital, pre-digital, non-human, transcendent) can offer to those who can’t see out of it…..“There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.” But still a joke worth telling

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Quite a program. SUNY Central organizing a system-wide crackdown and then denying it Like Janet Napolitano in November 2011 when she was SEc of Homeland Security and president of the University of California system, denying the Obama admin coordinated crackdowns on the many Occupy events across the US.

Fabulous interview with Grant Ashley, the departing editor of the SUNY Buffalo paper. Another person from that generation who gives me hope.

Powerful Dylan covers so far (i'm at the end of the Ashley interview), Cat Power's cover of "Stuck inside....Memphis Blues Again" is a WOW, likewise Odetta's cover of Long Ago,Far Away, done long ago indeed, 1965. I was thinking today of Blonde On Blonde, what i still consider Bob's best album, and how the material was breaking out in May 1966, end of my freshman year in college. !!!

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Thanks, Eric, i celebrated Bob's birthday, in style. :-)

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Thank you for the Bob stuff----great vibes.

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