My son Ben and I saw Neil Young here in Philly at the Spectrum last Friday night. Wilco, warming up, was terrific. Jeff Tweedy astounds, is downright experimental with lightning-fast register and genre shifts. But Young: he was really young. "Heart of Gold," "Old Man," etc., but also some raw new political (economic) anthems, such songs seeming to us rusty even though weeks or even days since written and scored. My former student and former Writers House regular and staffer Nate Chinen reviews Young in concert at Madison Square Garden in today's New York Times, page 1 of the Arts section.More about Nate: here's a link to Nate-only entries in the NYT Arts blog.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
