Steve Earle - yes, the great Steve Earle - stopped in at the Writers House two nights ago. He met with a group of about 50 people in the living room during a reception and then went into the Arts Cafe where Mingo Reynolds introduced and Anthony DeCurtis moderated a conversation - during which Earle played three of his songs and talked about them and lots else. We've caught the whole wonderful event as a downloadable mp3 audio and as a streaming video. And here are photos of the evening taken by John Carroll. The program is funded by a generous grant from Mitch and Margot Blutt. Previous singer-songwriters have been Rosanne Cash and Suzanne Vega. If you have ideas for next year, send 'em along.
Friday, March 06, 2009
Steve Earle
Steve Earle - yes, the great Steve Earle - stopped in at the Writers House two nights ago. He met with a group of about 50 people in the living room during a reception and then went into the Arts Cafe where Mingo Reynolds introduced and Anthony DeCurtis moderated a conversation - during which Earle played three of his songs and talked about them and lots else. We've caught the whole wonderful event as a downloadable mp3 audio and as a streaming video. And here are photos of the evening taken by John Carroll. The program is funded by a generous grant from Mitch and Margot Blutt. Previous singer-songwriters have been Rosanne Cash and Suzanne Vega. If you have ideas for next year, send 'em along.
"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 
