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(01/26/05 12:00pm)
With classes between noon and 2 p.m. rescheduled for Wednesday, students of a myriad of races, creeds and nationalities took seats in the Music Building Concert Hall last Monday afternoon to partake in the College's celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
The program featured a keynote address by Randal Pinkett, president and CEO of BCT Partners, a technology and policy consulting firm based out of Newark. Pinkett's remarks focused on the contemporary nature of King's vision: "The illusion of full inclusions," Pinkett said, "and the power of personal choice."
"One cannot help but be astounded by the progress we have made in such a short period of time," Pinkett said, "Right? But is what we see full inclusion, or is what we see an illusion?"
While Pinkett was quick to recognize the significant strides toward equality the African-American community has made since Lyndon Johnson pushed his Civil Rights Act through Congress in 1964, he put more emphasis on the work that is yet to be done.
"I know what I see," Pinkett said. "I see high-ranking minority officials in the government - Condoleeza Rice, Alberto Gonzalez. I see minorities generating and maintaining wealth," he said, citing rapper Jay-Z, who recently became part-owner of the New Jersey Nets. "I see people of color breaking the glass ceiling as CEOs of major corporations. We have made progress, but we can't forget that our work isn't done."
"In fact," Pinkett said, "our progress has been abysmally slow. In some areas we are further from full inclusion today than we were in the 1960s."
Pinkett cited statistics regarding the integration of the public school system. While Brown v. Board of Education ended institutionalized segregation in American schools, he noted that in 2000, 72 percent of African-American students attended predominantly minority schools.
He noted that New Jersey ranks sixth in the states with the lowest percentage of white students attending predominantly minority schools. "Northern states are even more segregated than southern states," Pinkett said.
Segregation, Pinkett said, has also increased in regard to where people choose to live. He said white people tend not to move into neighborhoods where the African-American community exceeds 20 percent of the population. "Scholars believe this happened in the 1970s and 1980s as whites moved into the suburbs," he said.
"We made the decision not to integrate with one another, to socialize together, to worship together," Pinkett said.
To emphasize this point, Pinkett spoke of King's life as a normal man - his youth spent in Atlanta, Ga., where he enrolled at Morehouse College before attending seminary in Chester, Pa. By 1954, King was back in his native south, preaching at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala.
A year later, as Rosa Parks refused to vacate a bus seat reserved for white passengers, the African-American community in Montgomery turned to King for support. "Where did they go in the midst of this outrage?" Pinkett asked. "The community spiritual center, the churches and the 26-year-old Dr. Martin Luther King."
Just as King was an ordinary man, he made ordinary decisions to close the racial gap in America, according to Pinkett. "Not everyone makes these choices not to interact with people who are different from them," he said.
Similarly, Pinkett said these same choices now lay in the lap of this generation. "I believe we need more space," he said. "Literal space ... figurative space ... transcendent space - a vision for the future, expanding our thinking beyond our current environment, Dr. King's dream."
"We must ask the hard questions about whether we are willing to be at the front lines or should we have our children at the front lines," Pinkett said.
"(Pinkett's speech) was inspiring," Tamaria Green, freshman sociology major, said. "It makes you aware we're not done. We go here, we know the percentages (of minority students on campus), we've accomplished something but we've still got a ways to go."
"It was an intriguing message that we have made progress, but we're still at a standstill," Charda Tabb, freshman communications major, said. "It was very motivational."
(01/26/05 12:00pm)
By 10 a.m. Saturday morning, snow had begun falling on the greater Trenton region. In the course of the next 24 hours, between 13 and 16 inches of snow blanketed the College campus as two separate storms, the first significant ones of the season, pummeled the area.
The storms prompted acting governor Richard Codey to declare a state of emergency from 8 p.m. Saturday night to 8 a.m. Sunday morning. This gave police the authority to close roads to all non-emergency traffic.
As the storm bore down, local residents and College students alike flocked to Shop-Rite on Olden Avenue to stock up on supplies. Lines stretched far there and at Hollywood Video as people prepared to hunker down for the day.
Many students, however, opted not to risk the trip off-campus. "We both stayed in," Sabrina Sichel, junior Spanish major, said, referring to herself and friend Bethany Blundell, junior sociology major. "We refused to leave the building."
"I watched 'Pretty in Pink' and 'The Face on the Milk Carton' on TV," Blundell said, laughing. "(My roommate) and I got so bored we decided to rearrange our room."
The snow forced the postponement of all activities on campus for the weekend, as well as the closure of the Roscoe West Library on Saturday afternoon into Sunday. All dining facilities save for Eickhoff Dining Hall were closed as well.
As the worst of the storm died down on Saturday night, some students took the opportunity to go out and play in the snow. "Frolicking ensued that night," Lindsay Korwin, sophomore music major, said. "We played snow football and went snowboarding on the hill by the new chapel."
As the snow levels mounted, the office of Grounds and Landscape Maintenance Services went to work plowing roads and pathways throughout campus.
"We were here from Saturday at noontime until late evening (Sunday)," Dan Blauth, project specialist for the office of Grounds and Landscape Maintenance Services, said, noting that the plows had run almost continuously for a day. According to Blauth, the office employs eight plows for the job of clearing snow.
"I think it went well," he said. "Of the 26 hours we were here, we worked for 23. If we don't keep up with the storm, we're finished, and with the amount of snow we had, I think we did very well."
Although roads and parking lots on campus were mostly cleared by Monday morning, many off-campus roads were still slick, students said. "I just had to go down Pennington (Road) and it wasn't good," Ryan Patrick, freshman computer science major, said.
"I was nearly killed several times on the way to school," Tom Simons, junior finance major, said. "It was a near-death experience."
The condition of the roads prompted the closure of many area public schools. The College, however, was a notable exception.
"Of course I think they should've closed school," Wexler said. "But I'm kind of biased."
Matt Golden, assistant director for public information in the office of College and Community Relations, said the decision to stay open was made because snow ceased Sunday morning.
"We felt there was sufficient time for the roadways to be cleared, and the campus roadways are clear so students can have a safe commute to school," he said.
Golden said most of the New Jersey state colleges were open Monday as well.
(12/08/04 12:00pm)
The task of recording a follow-up to Interpol's debut album, 2002's "Turn on the Bright Lights," must have been daunting to the young band. Their premiere was very close to a masterpiece.
Coming out of New York University in 1998, the band had gained some local notoriety, appearing frequently in Brownie's and the Mercury Lounge. By 2001, they had put together an EP and were playing shows in the UK. By the next year, Matador had signed them and released a single. Their first album quickly followed suit.
Deriving their sound from such seminal alternative acts as Joy Division, Interpol makes its music simply and powerfully, with staccato guitars and thrusting quarter-note drums. Their first album renders droning sonic landscapes with layer after layer after layer of guitar, each adding some refrain, building a roaring wave of sound.
However, what really sets this band apart is the droning vocals of frontman Paul Banks. He talk/sings his way through his songs with amazingly dispassionate passion, crooning with soulful tonelessness - a kind of possessed chanting.
Tying these elements together, the band creates a truly evocative and refreshing, albeit angsty, debut. But the simple arrangements and structures beg the question: how far can they go before it gets old, a rehashing of tired themes and methods?
In the case of their second album, "Antics," released earlier this fall, this seems to be the question Interpol is asking itself.
While the band has certainly retained its signature sound with songs as well-rendered as those from their first album, we hear, on this sophomore effort, a band trying to expand.
This is apparent from the very first note of "Antics," which is not an ambient echo of guitar, as one would expect from Interpol, but rather the hum of an organ. It evokes not the angst that made "Turn on the Bright Lights" such a standout, but rather a certain ho-hum rock and roll. It brings to mind the refrain of Dire Straits' "Walk of Life," a heightened presence of keyboard.
However, many of the songs seem to have been merely picked up off the cutting room floor, rejects from their first album. Some of them simply do not posses the raw power of their predecessors. For instance, the album's opening and closing tracks, "Next Exit" and "A Time To Be So Small" respectively, both play out rather aimlessly. Of course, this is not a dead set rule.
Many are songs that build. Where they begin does not typically dictate where they go. Take the song "Public Pervert," for example - it is a rather listless verse followed by an explosive chorus.
And some, still, are simply standout rockers, such as "Evil" and "Slow Hands." They reek of the anger and doom and gloom of "Turn on the Bright Lights," the sinister fire and brimstone sound that made that album so infectious, with biting repetitions of simple guitar licks that roil with Banks' colorless vocals.
It seems that Interpol is at something of an impasse. While their songs remain ultimately catchy, much of their identity relies on the simplicity of their sound, strung out guitars over guitars, plodding with rhythmic intensity. This does not leave the band much room to expand. So they give us exactly what we should expect: a band up to its old "Antics."
(12/08/04 12:00pm)
Students of the First Year Seminar class "From Brown to Black Feminisms" taught by Gloria Dickinson, associate professor and chair of the African American studies department, were treated to a visit by New Jersey's Secretary of State Regena L. Thomas on Monday.
Students in Dickinson's seminar were required to read Helen Jackson Lee's 1968 book "Nigger in the Window," an autobiography chronicling her experience as the first African-American woman in New Jersey's civil service.
Thomas was brought in to give her reaction to Lee's book, as well as to discuss her own experiences as an African-American woman in New Jersey politics. She brought a lighthearted and energetic, yet deadly serious take on the subject.
"I know you all didn't read the book," she said, met with laughter from the freshmen, residents of Travers Hall floors 9 and 10. "I'll admit, I didn't read all of it either."
In responding to the book, Thomas remarked, "I'm going to start off by saying very little has changed." She provided one caveat, however, saying she wasn't sure whether this sentiment simply stemmed from her sympathy for the African-American movement.
A native of Clinton, Ky., Thomas said she grew up in a world that was divided along lines of black and white. "Coming from the South, you don't have a grasp of (diversity) - it's either black or white, so I was filled with a kind of arrogance. Except it wasn't arrogance, it was ignorance."
She described coming north, where she was faced with Irish and Italian communities. "And I didn't understand them," she said.
Thomas was appointed to her position by former Gov. James E. McGreevey in 2002. "I was appointed to a position I never had a desire to have," she said. "When the governor called and asked me, I laughed at him." Until being appointed, she had never lived in New Jersey.
Nonetheless, Thomas, whose political background includes having worked for John Corzine's 2000 Senate campaign, Robert Torricelli's 1996 Senate campaign and McGreevey's gubernatorial campaign in 1997, heeded the call. In addition, she spent 12 years working the Rev. Jesse Jackson's National Rainbow Campaign during his two bids for the presidency in 1984 and 1988.
In taking her position in New Jersey, she was charged with the promotion and enrichment of the state's arts, history and culture.
One project she took on was a reenactment of Harriet Tubman's journey on the Underground Railroad from southern New Jersey, which at the time lay below the Mason-Dixon line, to New York. As part of the reenactment, Thomas walked 180 miles from Gloucester County in South Jersey to New York. "I could not walk 180 miles if Harriet Tubman had not done it first."
"Harriet Tubman was trying to free herself," she said. "She wasn't trying to make some big statement about slavery."
Similarly, Thomas said she was not trying to make "some big statement" about her own race. "I'm just trying to be the best that I can be," she said. "I owe my white friends, those who stepped beyond their comfort levels and accepted me as an African-American woman. I owe them for the space they shared in their life."
"I've earned my right to be here," she added. "People have died for my right to be here. I'm not going to explain it you anymore."
Dickinson's seminar is just one in a series of seminars offered to freshmen this year as part of the College's recognition of the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision, which ended racial segregation in public schools.
"New Jersey being the most diverse state, according to the Census Bureau," Thomas said, "we all have to learn to live together. It's not an issue of color, but of culture."
As Thomson left the room, all Dickinson had left to say was, "We have the most unique secretary of state."
(11/04/04 12:00pm)
By 4 p.m. or so, Election Day, I was starting to feel uneasy. The highway toward Pennsylvania, and my voting district in Yardley, was crowded and there were ribbons of gray cloud in the sky - the air was steely.
I had, until that point, managed to divorce myself from the grave realities of Nov. 2, the consequences that hung in the balance, but by the time I crossed the state line, the whole thing was beginning to wear at me - apparently I had good reason.
The polls at Afton Elementary were packed, lines trailed out the doors and cars were parked in the grass. Campaign workers lined the pathway, thrusting pamphlets at people - some last ditch-effort to sway whoever may have been left undecided.
That seems impossible to me.
Standing in the blue checked voting booth, I pulled the lever for President last. I pulled it several times, up and down, in what could, I suppose, have been considered either an attempt to cast my vote more than once, or just making sure I'd pulled it all the way. I'm not entirely sure myself.
It felt strange, the whole thing being over with just the pull of a red switch and the mechanical thrusting open of a curtain. I walked to my car. There was nothing more I could do now except tool once more around the parking lot, scream "The President is a megalomaniac!" at the line of people, and then hit the road. It was due to be a long night.
Politics was everywhere that afternoon, I saw every lawn sign, every sticker on every jacket, honked at the people waving Kerry placards on Main Street in Yardley, sneered at every Bush/Cheney sign - I simply do not understand the impetus for supporting this administration; it seems to rely, much like his own guiding religious convictions, on blind faith.
We see him grinning and shrugging at audiences, chuckling and gesturing like an imp - this Boy Prince. He defines his own reality, spinning webs of rhetoric and lies, losing himself in them, bringing the American people with him. He makes us fear ghosts; he makes us feel idiotically secure standing behind his rich cowboy swagger.
His denial of fact, of reality, was apparent from the earliest days of his administration. With an election so close in 2000, Bush himself losing the popular vote, having the Presidency handed to him by the Supreme Court, and now almost as equally tight in 2004, one would think he would realize the deep division in this nation - that this would temper his leadership, but no. We have seen nothing but a hard line emanating from the White House.
And now we are left with him.
It's frightening to imagine the consequences of four more years of Bush and his cronies, completely let loose, completely unchecked by the body politics, not accountable to any future voters.
Several appointments to the Supreme Court seem inevitable - I point to Chief Justice Rhenquist's recent diagnosis with thyroid cancer. Bush appointees could very easily and very drastically alter the basic moral stance of the nation - abortion rights being the chief casualty to George W. Bush's much vaunted, prettily worded 'culture of life.'
Meanwhile, the quest to spread patented Bush-brand Freedom will continue unabated. We will continue to see the Middle East crushed under the boot heels of marching Democracy, our allies snubbed in favor of a phantom new world order as dictated by the President - a blind and foolish country, smashing and grabbing its way through the world.
Fine, America. If you want him, this fascist megalomaniac, picking and choosing the facts he chooses to look at, taking his orders from God, spitting on one half of America, jerking off the other half, you can have him - you deserve him.
(11/04/04 12:00pm)
What should we expect from a memoir penned by Bob Dylan? What kind of self-portrait can we expect from a man who writes "What did I owe the rest of the world? Nothing. Not a damn thing. The press? I figured you lie to it."
What we get from this man, who has gone to such great lengths to remain something of an enigma, however, is the story of his life expressed with uncharacteristic frankness.
The book, "Chronicles: Volume One," the first part of Dylan's three-volume autobiography, gives him the opportunity to confront the ghost of his old fame, the deified Dylan he has struggled against since being heralded as the visionary and prophet of youth movement in the mid-1960s.
"Whatever the counterculture was," Dylan writes of his seclusion after suffering a motorcycle accident in 1966, "I'd seen enough of it. I was sick of the way my lyrics had been extrapolated, their meanings subverted into polemics and that I had been anointed as the Big Bubba of Rebellion, High Priest of Protest, the Czar of Dissent, the Duke of Disobedience, Leader of the Freeloaders, Kaiser of Apostasy, Archbishop of Anarchy, the Big Cheese. What the hell are we talking about? Horribly titled any way you want to look at it."
What Dylan sought, instead, was a life outside of the public realm, in which to cast off his fame, put aside what others saw as his responsibility to the counterculture and to provide for his family.
"I had a wife and children whom I loved more than anything else in the world," he writes. "I was trying to provide for them, keep out of trouble, but the big bugs in the press kept promoting me as the mouthpiece, spokesman or even conscience of a generation. That was funny. All I'd ever done was sing songs that were dead straight and expressed powerful new realities. I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of."
Dylan does, indeed, seem to invoke almost archaic origins, taking less from the burgeoning hipster scene of Greenwich Village that he found himself immersed in after leaving his Minnesota hometown behind in the early days of the 1960s. He speaks of feeling as much of an affinity with Ricky Nelson, the original teen idol and country musician from the days of "Ozzie and Harriet," as he did with Woody Guthrie, taking as much from the music of Harry Belafonte as he did from seminal folk artists such as Dave Van Ronk.
Casting off his role as the voice of a generation, Dylan speaks of existing "in a parallel universe ... with more archaic principles and values; one where actions and virtues were old style ... I felt right at home in this mythical realm made up not with individuals so much as archetypes, vividly drawn archetypes of humanity, metaphysical in shape, each rugged soul filled with natural knowing and inner wisdom. Each demanding a degree of respect."
Dylan put aside chronology when writing the memoir, opting instead to meander from point to point in his life, exposing each with grace and honesty, and without losing the narrative thread of his story. He speaks as candidly about his struggle in the late '80s to redefine himself as a musician in an era that had clearly moved on from Dylan's heyday in the '60s as he does about his first cautious years in downtown New York, moving from club to club and meeting faces and learning whatever he could about his art.
While there is much in the book that he does not explore, fans can rest easy that, with two volumes still to come, the man who is Bob Dylan will have much more to say.
(10/20/04 12:00pm)
I find it difficult to grasp the fact that, like any other day, Nov. 2 will come and go and that this vicious campaign for the presidency will actually end. It seems as if we have been living with it forever, watching it, breathing quick and biting our nails. It seems strange that we will have to deal with the realities of a conclusion.
A mere 13 days remain until Nov. 2 and the end of the excruciating race. Polls put the two candidates, incumbent George W. Bush and his opponent, Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry, in a statistical deadheat. Barring some truly shattering revelation in the next two weeks we should similarly cruise into Election Day - with no predictable outcome, prepared for a long night of vote counting.
The candidates were given their final chance to speak directly to the American public in last Wednesday's debate, the third of the three matchups between the candidates - it is said that Kerry won all three handily. While I would hesitate to use such words as 'win' or 'lose,' I will say Kerry remained unmistakably composed throughout all three while, at best, the president's performance was uneven.
The first debate, hosted by the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Fla. and focused on matters of foreign policy, found the president stammering and scowling, pressed up against the ropes by the master debater Kerry.
National security was supposed to be the president's dominating issue and, roaring out of the late-August Republican National Convention in New York City, the first debate was supposed to be the last nail in the senator's coffin. It was not. Kerry quickly had the president on the defensive, calling him out on his startlingly one-dimensional view of the war on terror. "The president just said something extraordinarily revealing and frankly very important in this debate," Kerry said. "In answer to your question about Iraq and sending people into Iraq, he just said, 'The enemy attacked us.' Saddam Hussein didn't attack us. Osama bin Laden attacked us. Al Qaeda attacked us."
The second debate, a town hall affair held at Washington University in St. Louis, saw a revitalized Bush spitting fire at his opponent, cutting off moderator Charles Gibson after Kerry accused the administration of going alone into Iraq. "You tell Tony Blair we're going alone," Bush said. "Tell Tony Blair we're going alone. Tell Silvio Berlusconi we're going alone.
Tell Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland we're going alone. There are 30 countries there. It denigrates an alliance to say we're going alone, to discount their sacrifices. You cannot lead an alliance if you say, you know, you're going alone."
Later, the president scoffed - raising his boyish brow at Gibson, "Need some wood?" - at Kerry's assertion that Bush had received $84 in tax credit from a timber company. However, he seemed to have forgotten that he does, in fact, own part interest in a limited-liability company that grows trees for commercial sales. Bush was all bombast. Kerry was a wall.
Kerry came into the third debate, held at Arizona State University in Tempe, Ariz., secure in his ability to stand up against his opponent. Domestic policy, the Senator's strong suit, was to be the order of the night and Kerry made his confidence clear from the outset, addressing the president directly before fielding his first question from moderator Bob Schieffer. "Mr. President, I'm glad to be here with you again to share similarities and differences with the American people."
The third debate presented, perhaps, Bush's most solid performance. He matched wits with Kerry, held onto his composure, though still could not best the Senator. The debate brought the president's biggest gaffe as well as some of his most stirring oratory.
The former came as he responded to a Kerry assertion with his syrupy southern smarm, "Gosh, I just don't think I ever said I'm not worried about Osama bin Laden. It's kind of one of those exaggerations."
As a matter of fact, it was not an exaggeration - in a March 2002 press conference, the president is quoted as saying, "Well, as I say, we haven't heard much from him. And I wouldn't necessarily say he's at the center of any command structure. And, again, I don't know where he is ... I truly am not that concerned about him."
Bush's strongest moment came when describing the role of his faith in policymaking decisions. "My faith is ... very personal ..." he said, "but when I make decisions, I stand on principle and the principles are derived from who I am ... I believe that God wants everybody to be free. That's what I believe. And that's been a part of my foreign policy. In Afghanistan, I believe that the freedom there is a gift from the Almighty. And I can't tell you how encouraged I am to see freedom on the march."
However, the notion of freedom sprouting from the blood spilled by a foreign army seems like a mixed metaphor, typical of the president's explicitly militarized view of the world. He speaks of "armies of compassion," without thought, not seeming to understand the terror implicit in such a contradiction of terms.
With the last debate come and gone, the campaign has turned into a ground war as both camps try to find those incredibly elusive undecided voters. There seem to be very few of those now, concentrated in a handful of states now being blitzed by the candidates - Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, as well as our own beloved New Jersey - a chess match of enormous stakes, growing more and more vicious with each passing day.
The President visited New Jersey on Monday, invoking the ghosts of Sept. 11, lashing out bitterly at Senator Kerry.
The Bush team seems only able to trot out old stereotypes and labels, such nasty expressions as "Massachusetts Liberal" to send the chills up the spines of whatever independent voters still remain in these precious final days. They hope to see a nation galvanized by phantoms and specters.
Kerry denounced the ease of such tactics during the debates, arguing that the problems this nation faces are ones that cannot be looked at in the stark terms the Bush people try to cast them in - war on terror, axis of evil, big government, no mistakes, with us or against us - but, instead, are infinitely more nuanced.
Such pleas for decency and substance will undoubtedly be ignored, not only by the Republicans, but also by the Democrats, in these last days. We seem destined to wallow in mud.
So for now? We sit on our hands and wait. I, for one, can barely take it anymore - I eat the polls, I devour the day's sound bytes. I want it to be over, but it still seems too immensely distant. I can't imagine coming to terms with the reality of it until that very day, driving to the polls among the clutter of fallen leaves, sealing myself in the voting booth, watching the returns trickle in all night, pacing and neurotic. You might expect me to live in almost feverish fear that those chants I hear on TV so often - four more years, four more years! - will become reality, but I don't; the severe truth of the election seems too unreal for such nightmarish fits of dementia. I have accepted the quiet wait.
(09/22/04 12:00pm)
Rain had delayed the Dead's performance by an hour or so, and by the time we had reached the What Stage, around 9:30, the group was just beginning their set.
"Tennessee Jed" was the first song and the audience, swirled by narcotics and alcohol, belted along. "Tennessee, Tennesse, there ain't no place I'd rather be." Indeed.
We sat on a plastic tarp, relatively safe from the spongy ground beneath us as the Dead played covers of Pink Floyd's "Shine on You Crazy Diamond," and The Band's "The Weight." Of course they also played Grateful Dead standards such as "St. Stephen" and "Box of Rain."
We left halfway through, however, drawn by the buzz of Robert Randolph and the Family Band.
Robert Randolph is a local musician, born in Irvington. "We were close to Newark and Orange," Randolph said, "so things got really bad. I'm talking about murder and crime and drugs. As a child, when you're around all these things, you somehow become a part of it because you're curious. And I became a part of it too."
However, Randolph turned his energies towards music, becoming a master of the pedal-steel guitar. He began playing at church, where his father was a deacon and his mother a minister, and his passion for the instrument grew.
Now he sat before us, rocking violently in a chair, wailing on the poor instrument sitting in his lap, producing raw sound as his band clamored along with him. Randolph commanded the stage, connected with the crowd, brought friends up to play with the band. We sloshed around, stamping our feet in ankle-deep water before the stage as Randolph hopped with his screaming guitar, teasing riffs from "Beverly Hills Cop." This was truly the essence of live music, a sickening, unadulterated barrage of sound - a most heavenly cacophony.
"Playing with soul is the only way I can play," he said. The two hours we spent there felt like five minutes - we were stunned into silence; we wanted more.
We awoke the next morning with the sun in our eyes and a clear blue sky overhead. This was to be our last day at Bonnaroo. Trey Anastasio, Phish's front man, was due to close the festival. Afterwards, we would drive straight through to New Jersey.
We dismantled our tent. Feeling no need to salvage it for future use, we threw all our garbage into it and attached the corners to the crossbars, creating a kind of garbage pod - it resembled a mutated larvae, freakish in size. We dragged it, to the amusement of everyone who beheld us, to the trash, and then set out once more for Centeroo.
We went to see Cracker with Camper Van Beethoven first, on Zack's request, hoping only to hear "Pictures of Matchstick Men," one of the rockingest songs to feature a violin solo, a sort-of-hit from Camper Van Beethoven's 1989 album "Key Lime Pie," released just a year before the band would break up.
Two years later, the band's front man, David Lowery, had signed a new contract forming the band Cracker. Fourteen years later, we were standing in front of them in Tennessee as they performed what turned out to be a very solid set.
From there we went to get a taste of moe., who was performing at What Stage. We hovered near the back, collapsed on the caked earth. When they were done, we wriggled our way towards the stage to get a good close look at the next performer: the former leader of the Talking Heads, David Byrne.
Byrne was a class act, a tall wiry man in a black jumpsuit, singing opera songs in between his performances of Talking Heads classics. His solo material was as charged as his old band's songs, he performed them all with a subdued grace that the music industry rarely finds in its former stars.
Among the old songs, we were treated to "I Zimbra," "And She Was," "Once in a Lifetime," that perennial Talking Heads favorite. He closed with a fiery performance of "Life During Wartime," that had us hopping around in the sand and shouting along to the delight of those around us.
As Byrne left the stage the clouds began to collect again. More rain. We ran out of What Stage towards Which Stage where Medeski, Martin and Wood, the jam-jazz favorite, had already started their set. The mud was horrendous in the highly trafficked areas and we'd long ago abandoned our shoes in favor of slipping and sliding through the mire, running full out with no fear of falling face first into the wet earth.
We stood in a brown puddle up to our knees listening to John Medeski pull sound like taffy out of his organ. The clouds were now over us completely - the rain was coming. We could feel it and so could the band.
Randolph was invited up to play with them, and they only got a minute or so into their jam when the skies exploded in a flash of lightning and water.
"We've gotta go now," Medeski said into the microphone as roadies swarmed the stage, trying frantically to cover up the instruments, "Sorry."
We returned to the car in the pouring rain - with our tent now gone we had no shelter and labored to construct a canopy with one of our big brown tarps, slamming it in the trunk and huddling underneath it, shivering and wet.
Our neighbors invited us into their tent, seeing our plight, and we sat drinking with them, waiting for the storm to pass.
Trey started late, due to the weather, and we arrived in the midst of his first set, conducting the Nashville Chamber Orchestra in classical versions of Phish standards. The crowd did not seem pleased by this odd diversion, hearing strings pluck out the usually electrified riffs of "Guyute."
The second set featured Trey with his solo band, a big horn section blasting along with him as he hopped up and down, slack-jawed, playing his guitar as the crowd erupted with joy. This is what they'd come for; this was the perfect way to bring Bonnaroo to a close, with a flurry of glow sticks launched into the Tennessee night sky, with fireworks going off as the set came to a furious close.
We walked slowly back to our car after the set, unsure of how to feel, of what to do. The first cars were starting to leave, starting the slow trip back to wherever it was they'd come from. Ninety-thousand people disbursed in every direction, to everywhere in the country.
We joined them. As we headed east towards Knoxville on Interstate 24, back towards Virginia with Zack at the wheel, the driver's side window came off its hinges and collapsed into the door. We could not get it up again, so we took shifts driving with rain and wind blasting us in the face. We were filled up by it, as much as it agonized us.
We had to accept it. We had to endure.
(09/15/04 12:00pm)
After 21 years, Phish has broken up. They brought their career to an end close to where it began, Coventry, Vt., on Aug. 14 and 15. An odyssey brought us there for the second night.
By the time we arrived on Sunday night at the Newport State Airport, where the festival was held, the worst of the rain had ended.
The rains had been so bad that the band's Web site, phish.com, encouraged ticket holders to stay away from the campsite until Saturday morning, the 14th, the first day of the festival. We proceeded nonetheless, underestimating the ferocity of the weather.
Stopped at a gas station about a quarter of the way up the eastern edge of Vermont at 6 a.m. Friday morning, floods were all over the local papers. Alex Ruthrauff, one of my longtime road companions, said, sticking out his hand, "I'll be able to handle it."
Twenty-four hours later, the weather had, in fact become much worse. After driving another two hours north from the gas station, we found the line of traffic, idling along, eating up the breakdown lane and the right lane along Interstate 91.
We tried to eat up time while listening to the radio station being broadcast out of Coventry, WMOO, telling us to be patient, they were letting cars in as fast as possible.
Thursday and Friday brought three more inches of rain to Coventry. "We soon realized that we had two big problems," John Paluska, Phish's manager, said in a statement released on the band's Web site on Aug. 23. "The first was that we weren't bringing in cars at a fast enough rate. The second was that it was almost irrelevant how fast they were coming in because we had lost so much parkable terrain."
The 600 acres of land had become a muddy mire and by 4 a.m. Saturday morning, as determined fans, ourselves included, slept collapsed across their steering wheels, the decision was made that no more cars could be safely brought onto the site. That morning we awoke to an announcement over WMOO telling us to go home. We listened in silent disbelief as the traffic began to disburse north - we went with it.
The farther we drove, the more cars we saw ditched along the side of the road, the more people we saw gathering up what they could and setting out on foot. Before too long the Vermont State Police was turning us around, sending us south again. When we asked if they were letting walkers into the site, we were met by stern words.
"We're not supposed to talk to you," the Statey said, "my boss told me to shut up."
So we were spit south. Utterly wired and knowing the police were closing off the highways, I sped up to 115.
What now? Tens of thousands of disenfranchised Phish fans had just been turned loose on the Northeast Kingdom. We needed to get our bearings.
Twenty minutes later we were stopped outside Nick's Gas 'n' Go in Lyndonville, asking where we could set up our grill and figure out a plan of action.
This is how we found Don's fairground. It sat across a river and up a hill above this picturesque town with white steeples standing against the mountains.
Don was an old man wearing suspenders, a baseball cap emblazoned with the stars and stripes, riding around in a golf cart converted to resemble the cab of an 18-wheeler. He charged us $5 to camp there.
Don's fairground was luxurious by the standards we had become accustomed to. The ground was dry, the grass was thick. There was a grandstand with indoor plumbing, even a shower.
At least 50 other cars trickled after us. We met our new neighbors, sharing our suffering stories, drinks, drugs and rides.
Night fell. WMOO was broadcasting Phish's sets and all the cars in the field rolled down their windows, turned up their radios. The townies came too, a big group of husbands and wives wandering around the field, accepting the beer the fans offered, laughing and telling local jokes in thick, syrupy accents. We laughed along with them, but didn't really know why. We could feel their joy; they were enjoying this impromptu celebration as much as we were.
This was the biggest thing the Northeast Kingdom had ever seen, they told me, and they wanted to be a part of it. "You've all been through so much," one of the wives said, giving me a jug of Trout River beer (the local brew) in return for a cigarette. "We just want to make sure you have a good time," she said. We did.
The next morning, we were given free coffee and bagels by the proprietor of a caf? in town; he accepted donations in return. We gave him what little change we could scrounge up.
An hour later we were speeding, 70 miles an hour, up and down dirt roads. A man had arrived who'd offered to lead us, some 15 cars, in a big dusty caravan to another farm that he promised was a 20-minute walk away from the airport. Perhaps we would see Phish after all.
Our new home was a monstrous big field atop a luscious green mountain, we ran and threw our Frisbee as far as we could. We were nomads, our whole fairground community picking up and moving with the wind. All we needed was the ground beneath our feet and we would survive.
We ate lunch and packed our backpacks full of blankets, beer and garbage bags. From what we heard, the airport was a swamp. We were prepared for any hardships and set out on foot.
The 20-minute walk we'd been promised had turned into four miles. The bastard had lied to us. The State Police stood at the dirt crossroad, only letting cars with Vermont tags go up the road towards Coventry. Local boys ferried the Phish fans up the road in the backs of their pickups for $5 a head, but we had no money.
We stuck out our thumbs anyway and a red truck pulled over ahead of us.
"We've got no money," we said, "but we'll give you five beers." He accepted and we climbed into the bed, took off.
We crouched on top of a hillock in the venue field at Coventry some hours later - the catharsis of our pilgrimage. Yes, there was mud - lots of it, cars buried in it, fans caked with it; its putrid stench hung over everything. We did not care. We'd made it.
The first set was fun and playful, the band played with a looseness it had lacked in recent tours, since after the band came back from its two-year hiatus.
"In 21 years ... I've never, ever been nervous going on stage before a Phish concert ... Tonight, I'm a little nervous," Trey ?nastasio, the group's front man said after 'Weekapaug Groove.'
The first set showed they had no reason to be - they tore through Phish standards, brought out their mothers to do a dance they dubbed the "Sexy Bump," shared the stories behind the songs (for instance, "Wolfman's Brother," is a reference to the band's drummer, Jon Fishman).
The second set began with "Down With Disease" and a swarm of glow sticks. I had never seen so many in my life, hundreds of thousands of neon bars flying indiscriminately through the air towards the band. This is not an uncommon ritual at the Phish show, and the band seemed to know this was the last time they would see it.
Phish wept. As the set continued, Paige McConnel, the keyboardist, cried trying to sing the beautiful "Wading in the Velvet Sea." His voice was choked, shaking at the emotional culmination of 21 years worth of music. He pushed the microphone away from his face, too wracked with tears to continue - we knew how he felt. Trey sang the song instead.
After coming out of a botched rendition of "Glide," a track off their second album "A Picture of Nectar," Trey leveled with the audience. "It's emotional, so we're have some emotional ups and downs here," he said, "I'm sure you are too."
He continued, speaking from his heart, letting tears flow down his face, about the band's beginnings. "We had so many ideas," Trey said, "we were going to do this thing and ... break down that rule. When I think back on it now I think of how little I knew about music. And about friendship. To always have these three people there with you..." he trailed off, too taken by emotion.
The rest of the band spoke as well, thanking the crowd, 70,000 strong, most of whom had abandoned their cars, thousands of them parked in neat rows along the interstate, camped at farms across the countryside, and taken to the street. "All the people that walked in here," Fishman said, "it's the greatest compliment that we could have."
As the band's moment came to a close Trey came back to the microphone, "It's now time to blow off some fucking steam."
A twenty minute version of 'Split Open and Melt' ensued, a soaring, epic jam that showed exactly what this band was capable of.
Phish ended their 21-year-long career, after fireworks exploded at the close of their third set, with an unreleased song, "The Curtain With." Trey sang: "As he saw his life run away from him, thousands ran along, chanting words from a song, 'Please me, have no regrets." After this, silence.
We hitched a ride back from a nice Vermont family, free of charge. As we rode back down the dirt road towards the farm I was struck. Even through all of this, the traffic, the denial, the hitchhiking, the dirt and mud and lack of sleep, there was no better way to say goodbye to this band.
We had come to know the rolling hillsides of northern Vermont, the locals and the lore, the great green pastures, the place from which Phish had been born.
We had become a part of it.
Driving in my car in the days after we returned, I listened to the albums over and over again. The music is stunning. I never realized how much I loved this band, their constant presence, until they were gone.
(04/07/04 12:00pm)
Introduced as "the poet-laureate of the world," Bob Dylan came to the stage, a small 62-year-old man, clad entirely in black, with a cowboy hat perched on top of his head. At his concert at the Tower Theater in Upper Darby, P.A., last Monday, he seemed to be completely unaware of the eruption that came from the crowd.
Dylan went straight to his piano, pressed against the left side of the stage (he has been almost exclusively playing piano on this tour) without a word. Who was this man who stood before us?
My colleague, Josh Nedelman, stammered in responding to the question, "God . he's just a song and dance man," he said. "He's a grizzled old song and dance man."
It's strange the way Dylan's songs become tied up in your life, how a simple lyric can so perfectly relate to you, can pierce darkness and twist up your insides. I remember the first time it happened to me. It was 1999 and the song was "She Belongs to Me," a track off the 1965 album "Bringing It All Back Home" - "She's a hypnotist collector, you are a walking antique."
We were heading down Interstate-95 towards Philadelphia, almost late for our date with Dylan, listening to "Visions of Johanna," a track from the 1966 album "Blonde on Blonde." Zack Linowitz, another colleague of mine, pitched forward from the back seat, sticking his head between Josh and I. "I love this line!" he said, pointing towards the stereo, singing along, "Mona Lisa must've had the highway blues, you can tell by the way she smiles."
Everybody has one, that Dylan line that becomes you. You could hear people crying out at them all night as he played; the boy two rows ahead of us threw up his hands, drunk, as Dylan sang "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright." "Goodbye is too good a word, babe, so I'll just say fare thee well," seemed to be the drunk boy's line.
Poet-laureate of the world indeed. But the songs sounded different now. There was a new rough edge to such songs as "To Be Alone With You" and "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight"; they became rollicking country stomps that rolled behind Dylan's gruff voice. It has weathered over the years; there's no point in denying it.
Bob Dylan sounds weary. He has accepted his weariness. I first saw it when he and his band performed "Things Have Changed" at the 2002 Academy Awards, for which he took home the Oscar. He strummed his guitar that night, leering darkly into the camera, a tired troubadour strutting around in his new cynicism. "I used to care, but things have changed," he sang.
"This man has carried the weight of the world for four decades," Zack said over the phone Saturday afternoon. I'd called him, sitting outside my residence hall, torturing myself for a way to describe who Bob Dylan has become. "For four decades people have looked to him to be the voice," Zack said. He is weary, but he will keep going. He seems to have accepted it like preordained fate.
His drive is still there; his last two releases were his strongest in nearly 25 years. "Time Out of Mind," (1997) an album of dirty, seething blues, took home the Grammy for Album of the Year. "Love and Theft" (2001) was constructed around many of the same roots, but with more of a rockabilly irreverence, an album of jaunty country tunes, swinging percussion, and with Dylan bridging seamlessly the poles of dirty old soothsayer, Tyresius, and the sly southern gentleman.
His harshness gave new edges to familiar songs. "Highway 61 Revisited," off the 1966 album of the same name, turned into a blistering, acidic song, pure fucking rock and roll helped along by Dylan's backing musicians, two guitarists, Larry Campbell and Freddy Koella, who traded off on vicious solos, Tony Garnier, the bassist, and George Recile on drums. "All Along the Watchtower," a gem from the 1967 album "John Wesley Harding," pulling away from its acoustic roots, blossoming in fire.
It was a standard show from the old god, in this 16th year of what has been dubbed the Never-Ending Tour, 16 songs coming in at just under two hours. The only time he spoke was to introduce the band.
Bob Dylan rolls on in the same way he has since he first galvanized the folk world in the early 60s, since he picked up an electric guitar in 1965, a move Rolling Stone recently hailed as the most influential moment in the history of rock and roll, since his motorcycle accident in 1966, the seclusion and the trio of country albums that followed, since his orchestrated attempt to shed his fan base with 1970s Self Portrait, since his second coming in 1975 with the beautiful Blood on the Tracks, since he found religion as a born again Christian until he renounced it with the 1983 album Infidels, since being popularly passed off as a has-been, since rising again in the late 90s as the last troubadour, an unwitting prophet, struggling as much as the rest of us to understand who he is. There can only be one answer to that question, simple but difficult to grasp: he is Bob Dylan.
(04/07/04 12:00pm)
Standing alone before an enormous crowd at New York's Philharmonic Hall October 31, 1964, 23-year-old Bob Dylan said, "Don't let that scare you," false-starting on "If You Gotta Go, Go Now (Or Else You Gotta Stay All Night)." The concert is now available to the public for the first time as the sixth volume of his Bootleg Series.
Bob Dylan was in rare form when he took the stage at Lincoln Center that night. "It's just Halloween," he tuned his guitar, laughing boyishly. "I've got my Bob Dylan mask on." The audience burst into applause. "I'm masquerading." The trumpeted hero of the folk movement in transition, Dylan had first made a name for himself as a literate, political musician, king of the protest song and heir apparent to Woody Guthrie in 1962 when his first album was released.
His reputation had only grown since then. Three new albums had proven him to be a versatile songwriter, as well-known for "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," a story pulled from the newspapers about a kitchen maid killed by a wealthy Baltimore socialite, as he was for the deeply personal love songs that populated such albums as 1963's "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan."
The very fact that Dylan, the new hero of the hipsters and beatniks in Greenwich Village, performed that night at the posh new Philharmonic Hall (now Avery Fisher Hall) all the way up to 65th Street, served as a testament to his immense popularity.
However, at the same time that Dylan reigned from downtown Manhattan, the Beatles invaded and Dylan was listening. His folk roots were already expanding. The three new songs he played that night, "Mr. Tambourine Man," "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" and "Gates of Eden," which would appear on his 1965 album "Bringing It All Back Home," were bizarre lyrical jaunts, a move away from the potent political and social songs for which he was known.
"This is called 'It's Alright, Ma, It's Life and Life Only,'" Dylan said of the new piece at the concert. After laughter greeted him, he laughs right back, "Yes, it's a very funny song."
The following year, a new Dylan would be born, with his classic folk songs being stabbed out by ragged edges of electricity, a move no one saw coming and for which no one was prepared.
This recording presents a confident, affable Bob Dylan. For such a small man standing alone, his presence is immensely powerful. His voice rings out like some proud bell, giving excellent performances of such early classics as "The Times They Are A-Changin" and "Who Killed Davey Moore?," another of his songs pulled straight from the newspapers about a boxer killed in the ring by his opponent. "This was taken out of the newspapers," Dylan said. "Nothing has been changed . except the words."
Between the strong performances he joked with the audience, impish, laughing unselfconsciously as he switched harmonicas and retuned his guitar. He seemed entirely comfortable with his audience, singing "I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)" playfully, after forgetting the words.
"Hey," he called to the crowd, "Does anyone know the first verse of this song?" Some wonderful New York voices yelled it back and Dylan picked the song up again, laughing. "This is the same song . same song, only started now."
Another folk icon of the time, Joan Baez, joined Dylan onstage for four songs at the end of the second half, performing a wonderful, harmonious version of "Mama, You Been On My Mind" (Baez substituted, adorably, 'Daddy'). Their voices blended richly.
Dylan closed the show with the irreverent "All I Really Want To Do," he crooned, high pitched, "All I really want to do, is baby be friends with you," as if directly to the audience. They truly did seem to be friends that night. He leveled with the people, laying before them everything that he had come to be before turning towards rock and roll.
(02/04/04 12:00pm)
In a prepared statement read during the open public forum at last week's meeting of the Student Government Association (SGA), the first general body meeting of the semester, Vanessa DeJesus, president of the senior class council, voiced her disappointment with the College for what she sees as its meager recognition of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.
The College, unlike many others across the country, opts to hold classes on the holiday, setting aside a few hours for programs honoring the civil rights leader the following Wednesday.
"I don't know how we can accept this," DeJesus said. "A couple of hours, or even a day, is not enough to commemorate what this man means to so many people in this country."
Her statement was greeted with a standing ovation.
"I don't think it's too late to address this issue," Christina Puglia, SGA executive president, added, noting that SGA must annually approve the College's academic schedule.
A resolution tabled at the end of last semester, which addresses removing recognition status from inactive student organizations at the College, was brought to a vote and passed unanimously.
Four organizations, the Ayn Rand Society, Educational Theater for Children, Management Information Systems Society and the Polish Club, had been given inactive status as of November 13, 2003, according to a document provided by SGA.
A fifth group, the College Democrats, which had, until the end of the fall semester, been labeled inactive, revived itself and was removed from the list.
The resolution, which removed "all student organization privileges for these organizations," as of the beginning of the Spring 2004 semester, also sets a precedent for how SGA will deal with future inactive groups.
"In the future, the process of removing recognition status from inactive organizations will be set forth by a formal resolution to be presented to the entire Student Government Association for review and approval, consecutively, (during) last two regular SGA meetings of the fall and spring semesters of the academic year," the resolution said.
A resolution addressing student concerns with the allocation of rooms for student activities by Auxiliary Services was introduced.
Mike Cilia, vice president of administration and finance, discussed the motive behind the legislation in brief.
"When rooms are meted out in an efficient matter, organizations suffer; their budgets suffer," Cilia said.
A resolution to amend SGA's election bylaws was introduced as well.
"There are paragraphs of bylaws that just didn't make sense or were unnecessary," Puglia said.
"We took out the things we didn't need, cleaned it up, made it more professional," she added.
The changes would include the creation of an election committee, consisting of two graduating seniors chosen by the alternate student trustees to help with campaigns.
They would also allow candidates to place advertisements on WTSR, the College's radio station, and in The Signal.
If passed, the changes would go into effect for the next SGA elections.
(09/23/03 12:00pm)
The current crop of 21-year-olds in America have been exposed to an estimated 23 million marketing messages in their lifetime, according to an article by Michael Weiss in the Sept. 2003 issue of American Demographics. That's 3,000 messages per day. This isn't surprising when one considers that this increasingly important demographic spends about $187 billion a year on consumer goods.
These are facts that marketing firms know very well, as they work harder and harder to tailor advertisements to today's youth, a generation that has grown up desensitized to the constant blather of sales pitches. However, as companies create new, slick ways of convincing American youth to buy their products, students should be aware of the effects of excessive advertising on their lives.
"America is not homogenous, and there are marketing strategies for dealing with that fact," Dave Prensky, dean of the College's school of business, said. "This is called segmentation. You look at the way Americans are different - their age, their income, how people act, differences in taste - and to try to figure out who will want to buy a certain product."
According to Prensky, segmentation began to take hold in the 1950s, as television became a more prominent fixture in American homes. However, media has diversified incredibly since then, and we've seen a handful of television stations balloon into hundreds. We've seen the advent of the Internet. "We can target people more finely now," Prensky said. "We have cable stations for different kinds of people, it's an easier and more efficient way to reach markets, a very narrow segment of the population can be reached."
But, does this diversification create a system where television stations care less about catering to viewers and, instead, care more about catering to advertisers? One interesting recent case is the rise of Spike TV, the self-proclaimed, "first network for men." It has become a haven for Budweiser and Ford Truck commercials - products whose ads are heavily geared towards men.
These are questions that many in the marketing world have been postulating on in recent years. "Did marketing cause these narrow niches, or is it the other way around?" Prensky said. "This is the mirror controversy: critics say marketers are trying to separate people and make them buy products they don't need."
"I think that marketers do try to identify and satisfy distinct consumer segments without thinking about the effects of such strategies on society-at-large, but that's not the same as trying to fragment society by creating wedges to drive people apart," Prensky added.
Marketers are hard at work at this while the rest of the world is consuming. Today, it seems that marketing surrounds the world so much that no one really pays attention to its presence. It sinks into the human mind in a number of subliminal ways. It's in movies: that conveniently placed can of Coke or Snickers bar sitting on the table in the background shot, or James Bond using a Norelco electric razor, driving a slick new BMW. It's even in music, as some companies will go so far as to pay rappers to mention their products in their lyrics.
"Last April, on one of the Billboard charts, the top 20 songs mentioned brand names no fewer than 47 times," Weiss said in his article.
"Even if you don't think it affects you, it really does. Subliminally, it affects you," Brian Vanadia, freshman criminology and justice major, said.
"You can't ignore it, it's everywhere," Lisa Camposano, junior Spanish elementary education major, said, as she sat in the Rat, sipping from a cup stamped with the Bud Lite logo. "You can't get away from it, no matter where you go."
(09/23/03 12:00pm)
We're all from New Jersey here, and Bruce Springsteen is our native son. We grew up with his pure bred rock anthems, from the punch out of
"Born to Run" to the swells of his most recent release, "The Rising." Springsteen is part of our heritage. But his 1982 release "Nebraska" signaled a departure from the typical brassy, energetic rock we've come to expect from the Boss.
Instead of sweeping electric guitars and horns, we are met with subdued acoustic sounds and harmonicas. The songs on this album were basically left in their original demo format, an appropriate approach considering their content. They are dark, brooding, yet earnest songs about hard times and desperate people, such as the title track, a first-person account of 19-year-old Charles Starkweather's killing spree. Starkweather killed 10 people, including a two-year-old girl, from 1957 to 1958.
Starkweather was a desperate man, desperate to marry his girlfriend, 14-year-old Caril Ann Fugate, desperate for money and desperate for escape from Nebraska.
After his arrest in 1958, he bragged about the murders, claiming that they were all committed in defense of Caril, his accomplice. He was sentenced to death.
This story sets the tone for the album, reckless people justifying their misdeeds, "They wanted to know why I did what I did, well, sir, I guess there's just a meanness in this world," Springsteen sings.
This theme is followed up in '"Highway Patrolman," a story about the deep bond of brotherhood. The story is about a state police officer, Joe Roberts, his brother Franky, who follows a somewhat looser lifestyle, and the conflict that results when Franky gets in trouble with the law. "Well, if it was any other man, I'd put him straight away, but when it's your brother, sometimes you look the other way." One night, after a nasty roadhouse brawl, as one boy lies bleeding from his head, Joe chases Frank towards the Canadian boarder before letting him get away.
The album yielded one hit, the plaintive "Atlantic City," a song leaden with a deep sense of foreboding.
"This song was about the early-'80s gold rush when gambling hit south Jersey," Springsteen wrote in 1995. It's a story about the weight of debt, and the hope that still clings even in dark times.
"Everything dies, baby, that's a fact, but maybe everything that dies someday comes back," Springsteen croons, with the aid of an acoustic guitar, a mandolin and a harmonica to back his rusty sounding voice. "Down here it's just winners and losers and don't get caught on the wrong side of that line."
This quiet desperation and the need to escape, reaches a head in one of my favorite tracks on the album, the haunting '"State Trooper." It's a bare song with only Springsteen singing with an echoed lull, and a muted guitar that spits out a simple blues structure. It is a song that pleads and begs, "Maybe you got a kid, maybe you got a pretty wife, the only thing that I got's been botherin' me my whole life. Mr. State Trooper, please don't stop me." He breaks out, his voice cracking in tinny cries of near reverie as he sings of his late-night drive on the Turnpike.
However, as the album goes on, we find seeds of hope among the malaise. It comes in the form of songs such as '"Reason to Believe," the album's closing track. It follows the same skeletal format as the rest of the album, with faded vocals and a strong acoustic presence. The song spins out several haunting and terrible scenes before concluding, "Still at the end of every hard earned day, people find some reason to believe."
Springsteen strives to show us on this album that life, even though it may be quiet and desperate at times, does go on. Though it isn't the material one typically expects from New Jersey's golden son, it is a beautiful, poignant departure - one certainly worth exploring.
(09/23/03 12:00pm)
Hanging on the office door of Alvin Figueroa, associate professor of modern languages, is a sticker that reads in bold letters, "Drama Queen." And, yes, it would be very easy to expect a life of drama for Figueroa, an openly gay Quaker. Attending classes at New Brunswick Theological Seminary, where he studies liberation theology, Figueroa said, he feels comfortable with his spirituality.
Liberation theology focuses on studying the gospel from the point of view of the poor and the oppressed, "those who have been marginalized by power," Figueroa said. "The gospel is a narrative that sides with them, not with the oppressor. How would a gay or lesbian approach the Bible? How would you read your oppression through the book?"
Though Figueroa comes from a different spiritual background than most of his fellow students at the seminary, he said it has not been a source of uneasiness for him.
"I feel very comfortable there, it's very progressive and there's a lot of very inclusive dialogue," Figueroa said. "As long as the faculty can accept sexual diversity, then I'm comfortable. It's not the same with the student body, necessarily, but that's one of the reasons I'm there - debate."
Figueroa was born in Puetro Rico and raised Roman Catholic, receiving most of his education from Jesuits.
"I was actually in school to become a priest, but then I fell in love with a man," Figueroa said, laughing before continuing. "I broke up with Catholicism in 1977, then started going to different places, different churches. I felt it was all a little bit of the same thing."
After a long search, Figueroa found Quakerism, which he said is an excellent place to allow his spirituality to flourish. "It's a place where I don't have to explain that it's possible to be a Christian and be gay," Figueroa said. "Sexuality is not an issue for Quakerism. I'm not going to be judged for who I love."
Quakerism was founded by George Fox in 1652 as a radical branch of Protestantism that rejected many of the practices of the Church of England. The idea was to take spirituality out of the hands of priests and ministers and give it directly to the people for internalized reflection and communion with God. "The Quaker belief is that life itself is sacramental; communion is reducing life to a ritual," Figueroa said.
"Quakers were liberation theologists from the start, I believe," Figueroa said. "They broke from the traditions of religious oppression and opened theology to a personal interpretation."
Quaker services, called meetings for worship, do not center around a sermon or one chief figure. It is meditative and calls on all participants to share their thoughts with the congregation. It is a deeply personal faith that encourages open-mindedness and understanding.
Some Quaker meetings across the country have even started accepting and performing same-gender marriages. Pacific Yearly Meeting, of which Figueroa is a member, was one of the first to do so.
"It's hard to get a meeting to agree to do something like that," Figueroa said, but he hopes everyone will try to understand each other. "You have the truth with you," Figueroa said. "Let's all look for the truth together."
(09/16/03 12:00pm)
An article appearing in the summer 2003 issue of TCNJ Magazine, which is produced by the office of Alumni Affairs at the College, has raised the eyebrows of some alumni, according to editor Bruce VanDusen.
The article, entitled "The Jeremiads of John Ashcroft," by Gary Woodward, professor of communication studies, was first delivered as a longer academic paper to a conference of the Eastern Communications Association in Washington D.C.
Later, VanDusen contacted Woodward and asked him to shorten the paper and tailor it for an alumni audience.
The article criticizes Ashcroft and the value system that drives his policy decisions.
"In significant ways, Ashcroft reveals himself to be a throwback to an earlier era of inner-directed men and anti-modernists," Woodward wrote in the article. "He celebrates the orthodoxies of his faith for what he wishes them to be: timeless virtues that must triumph against the modernist preference for inclusion and accommodation."
"The article has, apparently, been of interest to a large number of people," VanDusen said.
"It's very clear (that) it touched a lot of nerves," he added, as both VanDusen and the office of Alumni Affairs have received several letters and phone calls.
"I'm in possession of at least one letter from a person who was unhappy with the article," Matt Manfra, director of alumni affairs, said.
"People seem to have been unsure why an article like this would appear in a college magazine," he added.
However, both Manfra and VanDusen were quick to defend the article's publication.
"We need to show folks what's going on in the world," Manfra said.
"There should be a place in the magazine for opinions to be heard, but it needs to be shown as an opinion, like a disclaimer that these views do not necessarily represent the views of the College and its administration," he added.
According to VanDusen, all of the magazine's articles are designed to show the publication is concerned with issues of public interest.
VanDunsen added that TCNJ Magazine aims to do this in order to keep with the mission of the College.
"It's a sign of maturity of the institution and of the magazine to run pieces that are political assessments," Woodward said.
According to VanDunsen, TCNJ Magazine hopes to initiate campuswide debate about serious issues of the day.
VanDunsen added that the College's publication provides a medium to do just this.
"If some alumni feel it inappropriate for their magazine to deal with such real life and genuine things, then I'm sorry about that," VanDunsen said.
"I am personally disappointed there are not more of these types of discussions going on on our campus," VanDusen added.
"A lot of alumni magazines run stories that are very middle-of-the-road so as not to offend anyone," Woodward said. "Surely it's appropriate for a school to look at the important issues of the day."
"I don't even think the article was that controversial," Manfra said. "But we're in the academic world, so we're used to this kind of thing. Construction update articles always get a big thumbs-up, though."
(09/09/03 12:00pm)
In past years, student organizations at the College have had their yearbook photos taken standing against the brick exterior of the Brower Student Center.
This year, however, The Seal, the College's yearbook, is giving groups the opportunity to provide their own pictures.
According to Diane Yee, Seal editor-in-chief, the way the pictures were previously taken "doesn't really show the campus community anything about the group."
Yee added that the new option will allow the pictures to "be more characteristic of the organizations."
The Seal sent notes to all groups on campus several weeks ago, informing them of the change and giving them instructions on how to submit their pictures.
Pictures must be placed in the Seal's mailbox in the Campus Life office located on the second floor of the Student Center by Nov. 15.
Tony Marchetti, Seal advisor, said that if groups do not opt to have their own pictures taken they will still have the opportunity to have their pictures taken for free by a Seal photographer.
As in the past, sign-ups for these picture dates will appear in an upcoming issue of The Signal.
Merin Studios of Philadelphia willl take senior pictures for The Seal this year, according to Marchetti.
Prices for the portraits run from $153 to $183, depending on picture size and quantity, according to information provided by Merin.
Students will also have to pay a sitting fee that covers the cost of the yearbook and shipping charges after the yearbook is printed.
According to Marchetti, the fee for 2004 has yet to be set, but the average cost for college yearbooks usually hovers around $70.
"The cost of the College's yearbook has been, and will likely remain, well below average," Marchetti added.
This is only Marchetti's second year with the Seal.
From 1987 until 2002, Kenneth Kaplowitz, associate professor of art, advised the yearbook.
"It's a full time job, it never really ends," Kaplowitz said. "You're finishing one and already you're starting the next one."
Work on this year's Seal has already begun, but the finished product will not be available until the summer so that commencement can be included.
"It's a drawback," Yee said, "but you get graduation in there. I'd rather have no signatures so I can see myself in my cap and gown at commencement."
(09/09/03 12:00pm)
As a result of the network problems the College has experienced in recent weeks, a miscommunication developed that caused some students to receive tickets for "lack of a valid decal" on Aug. 26.
The miscommunication between Parking Services and Campus Police occurred because of a system error, Ray Nesci, professional services specialist for Campus Police, said.
Computer worms and viruses, such as the Blaster worm, which have plagued computer networks across the country as well as at the College, caused a disruption in the system that controls access to the parking lots on campus.
Nesci said the College had to raise all the gates in all gated lots so that the appropriate personnel would have access. Some unauthorized vehicles also parked in the unguarded lots across campus.
In addition to network problems, there were unexpected delays in students receiving their parking decals.
"I woke up early to get my decal on Aug. 25, and I went and stood in line for 20 minutes," Dave Nicotera, sophomore early childhood education major, said. "They didn't have it, and they made me sign a list and write down my phone number."
"One would think that meant they were going to call me," Nicotera said. "But one would be wrong."
One student who received a ticket was Dan Dougherty, sophomore communication studies major.
"I parked in the Forcina deck; the Centennial staff told us it was OK to park there, since ticketing wasn't supposed to start until the next week," Dougherty said.
"So I parked my car on Sunday, overnight, and got my decal on Monday, and when I came back to move it, I had a ticket," he said.
Dana Thorgensen, sophomore secondary Spanish education major, was ticketed for parking in Lot 12, a faculty lot, on Aug. 25.
"We talked to a Community Advisor (CA) that parked there as well, and he attempted to clear it up," Thorgensen said.
In total, approximately 150 people were issued tickets that day, mostly in faculty/staff lots, according to Campus Police.
"On move in day, we told people they could park in the deck," Phil Furia, sophomore political science major and a CA in Centennial, said.
Campus Police was notified of the problem the same day the ticketing occurred, and stopped issuing tickets for lacking a valid decal, unauthorized parking in a faculty/staff lot and unauthorized parking in a resident/student lot, according to Nesci.
"There is a rule that you cannot park in a faculty/staff lot without a decal. That rule is in effect 365 days a year. It can't really be relaxed," Kathleen Ragan, director of Student Financial Services, which Parking services is a part of, said.
However, due to the problems encountered with the computer network and students' inability to get their decals on time, "it was determined that those tickets issued would be voided," Nesci said.
"Campus Police and Parking Services worked together to address the problem in the best way possible, and blame does not lie with any office," Nesci said.
A campus-wide e-mail was distributed on Aug. 29, informing students of the situation.
Ticketing for lack of a valid decal was pushed back until Friday, Sept. 5 for all students, and Monday, Sept. 15 for all faculty and staff.
However, ticketing for all other parking violations is in effect at all times, according to an e-mail, sent from the office of Administrative and Environmental Services.
(04/29/03 12:00pm)
The Board of Trustees held a public meeting in the Brower Student Center, where President R. Barbara Gitenstein and Barbara Wineberg, College treasurer, presented the fiscal year 2004 budget plan.
The board was supposed to decide possible tuition changes for the coming academic year. However, since Gov. James E. McGreevey's proposed budget cuts are still in limbo, members felt it was not the appropriate time to discuss tuition.
"It's better to delay tuition hearings for now because it's important to have the most accurate information possible," Gitenstein said.
A closed tuition hearing will be held by the Board on June 13, with a public meeting to discuss and vote on changes on June 30, at a time and location to be announced.
While the state does not have to vote on the budget until July 1, Gitenstein said the College would have a better sense of how the assembly may vote than it does now.
For the time being, however, Gitenstein only directed attention to tuition changes at other state institutions facing similar crises. Public colleges in Connecticut, New York and Ohio have all been forced to raise tuition rates as result of a cut in funding.
"For reasons that can be well understood, she's playing her cards very close to her chest by deferring the question of tuition to other states," Dan Crofts, president of the faculty senate, said. "There is still hope, though, that her lobbying efforts could make the cuts not as deep." Gitenstein, however, was equally guarded in discussing these efforts.
"People are extremely sympathetic to our problems, but we are not seen as the neediest cause," Gitenstein said. "There are many serious needs in this state, so I have not suggested areas that could face cuts instead of higher education."
"For the time being," Gitenstein added, "we will assume that the governor's budget is what we will have to go by. It's the safest thing we can do."
Bearing this in mind, Wineberg presented the current numbers to the Board, projecting a $9.6 million shortfall for next year.
This includes money that will be used to honor the Outstanding Student Recruitment Program (OSRP) scholars.
"We felt we needed to honor the scholarship, as we've been sending out literature about it and advertising it heavily for over a year," Wineberg said.
According to Wineberg's figures, state support for the College has sunk below 40 percent.
"I'm worried about pushing these areas too hard for savings," Gitenstein said.
"But, in developing our shortterm budget, we must not forget our longterm mission," Gitenstein said. "We are in the midst of a very exciting academic transformation, and we must allocate proper resources for this to be the kind of quality change we all think it will be."
(04/08/03 12:00pm)
Change seems to be a difficult thing to initiate around here. It's rare that a big change is made at the College without backlash against it. From the 1996 name-change to the construction of new buildings on campus, there always seems to be people ready to defend the principle of leaving things as they are, if only for convenience's sake.
In this case, the issue at hand is the academic transformation, which many say is a poor decision for the College.
Under this system, which is taking affect in the Fall 2003 semester, thecourse credit system will be discontinued and will be replaced with a course unit system. The standard courseload for students will be four classes per semester instead of the current five.
These changes were made based on a theory that students learn more from work outside class than they do during actual class time.
Faculty, under the new system, are expected to provide students with a more in-depth look at material. This allows departments across campus to become sharper and more focused in their presentation of ideas.
Other changes will accompany this, for instance the creation of new, specified rhetoric classes. Students will have options of picking rhetoric classes that focus in one particular area of study.
Among the several pilot classes created were Lenin to Lennon, an examination of social influence in Europe in the 20th century, and Rhetoric of War. These classes, while providing the same information as the current Rhetoric I, and Rhetoric II courses, will be more engaging, as students choose the topic most interesting to them.
The academic transformation was designed bearing in mind the affect it would have for all students, despite claims that it will negatively affect some. While there may be a handful of ill effects, it's important for the College to make this change.
We, as students, shouldn't settle for status quo when there may be a better, more efficient way of operating. Nor should we think this was a decision that was made with haste.
Possibilities for a change of this magnitude have been under review by both the Board of Trustees and the Faculty Senate since at least 1998.
Many different populations have had input in guiding the way this change is handled, including the student body, via the Student Government Association, our on-campus representatives to the administration.
The College has spent more than five years examining how to restructure its academics. It's difficult to imagine that, after all that time and effort, they would make a seriously detrimental decision.
The only drawbacks could apear because of faculty members unwilling to find new ways to challenge students, an integral part of the new system.
As an institution, we should always strive to be the best we can, and sometimes, in reaching this goal, we need to make fundamental changes.
While, yes, we are taking a risk, I think it's a worthy experiment.
Besides, if it's that bad, we can always switch it back.