I come from good people (reposted)

This is a post from November 21, 2012. Went to the beach today and could not write, so I leave you with it. Hope you enjoy it.

There’s an old saying—a wise man knows his father, but no man knows his mother.

Is it true?

Can’t say. I’ve spent a lot of time on Franny, lately—in fact, I can claim I wrote the book on her. Did I get it right?

Highly sanitized, is Eric’s take, and he’s right of course. There are significant omissions, a couple of slants not explored, and one chapter—I now come clean—entirely made up. I needed something funny, so I imagined a silly conversation between Franny and me about John Cage’s 4’33” (of silence).

Here’s the scary thing—now it feels that it actually happened.

Well, Jack wouldn’t have approved. Like Eric, he would have written the story straight and got the facts right and spelled people’s names right (I flubbed on Franzmann) and made the deadline and done it all over again the next day.

Or would he?

‘Cause he got pretty wrapped up in some causes. The police chief—Weatherly—who got embroiled in some issue, had to resign, moved to Texas and became a drunk. His wife shot him, one day, and was tried and given parole. Came back to town only once, sat in the green sofa, talked.

Hard woman.

“You’re the only person I’m gonna see in this town,” she said to Jack on leaving.

He was a big guy, and big on fairness. He hated the bastards getting away with things. Made him crazy when good people got stepped on.

Which is why he pushed for the equal right housing amendment in the early 60’s. And never saw a contradiction with the State Journal’s strong Republican stance and its support of the amendment.

Couldn’t understand why the Cap Times was silent on the issue.

So by chance, Eric came across a Taliaferro, and I wrote about it. Sent it up to Hesselberg—an old colleague of Jack’s, and fine writer. He came back immediately with this—a letter written by Odell Taliaferro after Jack’s death.

NEWHOUSE FOUGHT FOR RACIAL EQUALITY

   Now is the time when friends are moved to extol the virtues of John Newhouse and to soft-pedal any shortcomings of which they are aware, but we assure you this is not the case with us. We have been singing the praises of John for about 40 years - and we are aware of no shortcomings.

    He wrote profusely of the modern dance abilities of our daughter, Joan Taliaferro Hartshorne and we feel that his news stories and pictures were very influential in enabling her to acquire a position with the Jose Limon Dance Troupe. We offer this fact, not as a virtue, but as an example of effective reporting (though, to us, it was a virtue).

    Once we moved into a segregated neighborhood (it was all white - until we arrived) and the prospective neighbors divided themselves into three groups:

    1. A small number gave a party to welcome us.

    2. A large group paid no attention.

    3. A small group threatened to burn our house down the first night!

    When John heard of this, he came in person to the neighborhood and we visited all the nearby houses. In a calm manner he explained, there was nothing to fear. We have lived there for 30 years - and no one has ever been treated better by their neighbors.

    John was a great man to have on your side.

Well, Jack was a good guy to have on your side. And when he wasn’t?

That same Norwegian-Lutheran backbone that led a black guy into a racist’s home and stared him down could get a little twisted—usually on sexual issues.

“I’m not voting for the Equal Rights Amendment (remember that!?) because it’s for homosexuals and ALL OF MY KIDS ARE NORMAL!”

Words converted to a slap.

In the end, he came around. Many people did. And many people made that change because of a phenomenon occurring in the plague years of the AIDS crisis.

The gay and lesbian choruses.

Virtually every major city had one. San Francisco, of course, had or has a famous one. Toured nationally, recorded. And once, did a heart-breaking rendition of the last act of Poulenc’s opera “Dialogs of the Carmelites.” The opera ends as the nuns, singing their prayers, are taken off to the guillotine, heard offstage. The sight of gay men, many of them HIV positive, reenacting the scene?

And I—not knowing whether the virus was flowing in my own blood?

Catharsis, in a way.

Yes, I will face it. Yes, it may come. Yes, I won’t back down.

Which is why I said to him, today, at the beach, “well, how did I do? Turn out OK? You proud of me?”

We plunged, the water was warm, and surprisingly clear for this time of year. Did the retrot back home. Then he reminded me of this….   

Cage recaged?

It’s been a day when all my rituals got shuffled, if not dropped. I woke up late, the morning went untrotted, the students never got their assignment, and there was seemingly nothing to write about. In a funk, I turned to a TED Talk on music by the contemporary composer Mark Applebaum.

And Applebaum is an engaging guy—bright, witty, funny. And his music is just as idiosyncratic as he is. He started out by playing a bit of Beethoven and then asking the question—is it music?

He then began to talk about his compositions, among which is the Concerto for Florist and Orchestra (nope—you’re gonna have to look it up yourself). And then he went on to demonstrate a new instrument he had invented: it had, among other things, all the combs he could find in the house, what looked like the ball from a toilet tank, and a coiled metal door stopper).

Right—so that was interesting. Now then, what about the music?

Well, it’s something that used to be called avant-garde and might now be called devant-garde. By which I mean that there was a time, in those days of the sixties, when blindfolded artists were flinging paint at canvases for a set period of time, letting it all dry, and then shipping it off to be displayed at museums, where people would stand about and pontificate. Or, painters would paint a canvas one solid color; there’s a whole room full of such art in the MoMA.

“Are we going to try to take this seriously?” I asked Johnny, who was standing next to me.

“Nah,” he said, and we both headed for the next hall.

Well, we all got busy doing other things, and somehow all that experimental zaniness faded away. So I was quite prepared, in fact very cheerfully prepared, to dismiss Applebaum as another gimmick, another in a long line of guys doing essentially the same thing.

Wrong. I ended liking the piece below, entitled “Aphasia,” which was inspired by seeing two deaf mutes having a heated conversation—a discussion full of affect but with no sound. And it’s clear—the guy must have worked long hours both to compose it and then to memorize it.

So what’s it all about? It’s a metaphor for the “expressive paralysis” that comes on in that dreaded moment when it’s a battle between the empty page of music and the composer—and the empty page is winning. Here’s what Applebaum said about it….

"Kids love it. So do people who need a break from conventional modes of expression."

Aha!—that’s why I liked it!

In this, however, not all people join me. Has anyone else noticed—the people who comment on YouTube videos have to be the most churlish in the universe? So I was unsurprised to run into this: Typical liberal arts bullshit. Trying to be edgy but comes off looking like something Tim and Eric created.

Tim? Eric? Who are they?

Well that was interesting, so what about the piece, Echololia? And what, by the way, was echololia? Echolalia I knew, as any old psychiatric nurse would—schizophrenics occasionally repeat the last three or four words of a sentence; kids do too, at a certain stage of development. The difference? Kids grow out of it.

The piece, at any rate, is a sequence of sounds that we wouldn’t necessarily consider music—drills, hammers, the screech of duct tape. Curiously, the only sound from a standard musical comes at the very end of the piece—and no, I won’t spoil it. So how would it sound?

Applebaum scores again! And here the churl that inevitably taps out his frustration in YouTube scoffs—John Cage did it all years ago.

Well that seemed like something I had to check out, and yes, as you can see below, Cage did much the same thing years ago.



Speaking of Cage, I didn’t know that he had been Merce Cunningham’s romantic partner for years—a fact of absolutely no significance. Just a drop of trivia dripping into the blog—sorry!

Well, that got me thinking—there is indeed nothing new under the sun. And I’m sure that Applebaum knows of Harry Partch, especially since they are (was, in the case of Partch) both Californians.

Partch was a definite loose screw—at one point he was a hobo, at another point he was at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And yes, he too invented his own instruments—he described himself as “a philosophic music-man seduced into carpentry".

He did more—he decided to throw out the traditional scale and created, well…let Wikipedia describe it….

Inspired by Sensations of Tone, Hermann von Helmholtz's book on acoustics and the perception of sound, Partch based his music strictly on just intonation. He tuned his instruments using the overtone series, and extended it past the twelfth partial. This allowed for a larger number of smaller, unequal intervals than found in the Western classical music tradition's twelve-tone equal temperament. Partch's tuning is often classed as microtonality, as it allowed for intervals smaller than 100 cents, though Partch did not conceive his tuning in such a context.[28] Instead, he saw it as a return to pre-Classical Western musical roots, in particular to the music of the ancient Greeks. By taking the principles he found in Helmholtz's book, he expanded his tuning system until it allowed for a division of the octave into 43 tones based on ratios of small integers.

Confused? Join the club—I had several semesters of music theory, and I can barely wade through the paragraph myself.

So yes, Applebaum had people who had trod down the path he’s now treading—so what? Haven’t we all? And yes, I’ll go along, at the moment, with his answer to the question of the Beethoven? Is it music?

His response?

It’s the wrong question—it should be, “Is it interesting?”

Yes—to both Beethoven and Applebaum.

4'33" Revisited

Well, it’s confession time. Most of my blook, Life, Death and Iguanas, is true. Adjusted, perhaps, filtered necessarily through my eyes and viewpoint, but true. If I didn’t tell you the whole story, well, sorry. No author does….

I did, I think, completely invent one chapter. And I say “I think” because, after reading the chapter numerous times, it now seems real to me. I needed something light, something funny. Comic relief after a chapter in which my brother John had forced the fact that I was suicidal out of me.

And there were, in fact, many light moments. The thirteen-lined squirrel—or whatever it was, and however we punctuated the beast—did exist. I did greet Franny one morning by saying, “good morning, Mother, how’s the dying going?” (And I can still hear Johnny yelping, “Jesus, Marc!”)

And yes, I do remember having a silly conversation on the porch. But what in God’s name were we talking about?

I settled on John Cage’s 4'33"—a piece which, technically, can’t be played. Rather it’s done, performed, or possibly just rendered. Written in 1952, Cage wrote a composition in which not one note is played—the piece consists entirely of the ambient sounds: the creaking of the chairs, the clearing of the throats, the whirl of air conditioner vents or heating units.

But what do I know; maybe it can be played. For, in fact, I have just viewed the clip below. And either the pianist is a wonderful actor, or he truly believes that he’s doing something. (Love the way he opens and closes the piano lid to indicate the movements…)

Well, the pianist appears to be taking it all seriously. Cage did too. Here’s Wikipedia:

In a 1982 interview, and on numerous other occasions, Cage stated that 4′33″ was, in his opinion, his most important work.

Wikipedia goes on to say:

4′33″ is an example of automaticism. (Author’s note—I’m happy to observe the red squiggle the computer has just put on the word “automaticism.” So it’s not just me!) Since the Romantic Era composers have been striving to produce music that could be separated from any social connections, transcending the boundaries of time and space. In automaticism, composers wish to completely remove both the composers and the artist from the process of creation. This is motivated by the belief that what we think of as "self-expression" is really just an infusion of the art with the social standards that we have been subjected to since birth. Therefore, the only way to achieve truth is to remove the artist from the process of creation. Cage achieves that by employing chance (e.g. use of the I Ching, or tossing coins) to make compositional decisions. In 4′33″, neither artist nor composer has any impact on the piece, so that Cage has no way of controlling what ambient sounds will be heard by the audience.[9]

Well, that’s interesting. I wonder, as a writer, if I could buffalo a significant percent of the intelligentsia into believing that a blank computer screen was my most important work. Or maybe, in fact, I should establish myself as major in every medium. For 100 bucks, I could frame a blank canvas, thus catapulting me to fame in the visual arts. An empty pedestal, or perhaps one with a chunk of untouched marble. Move over, Michelangelo! An empty stage, or perhaps one where ladies in pink tutus amble about. I’ve just blasted past Balanchine!

Well, I wrote the chapter pretty much in that vein. And it was funny, I think. It worked. And at one point, I stuck these words in my dead mother’s mouth: “If I sit for four minutes and whatever it is in silence—and I frequently do, you know—have I infringed on copyright?”

Well, we have our answer.

Quite possibly.

I know this now because I ran into a great blog: classicalconvert.com. And there, in a post entitled “The Stupidest Music Lawsuit Ever—Infringing on Cage’s 4’33”” I got the full dope on a settlement made by Mike Batt with Peters Edition, the publisher of Cage’s work.

Batt, apparently, does popular music; he’s got a band called The Planets (which, come to think of, the Estate of Gustav Holst might want to sniff into). And they did a crossover album, which soared to number one in the UK classical charts. One of the pieces on the album was called “One Minute Silence (after Cage)”

I don’t have to tell you, do I?

What I do think is funny is that, as part of the legal proceeding, they did back-to-back performances of both pieces, in order to note similarities and differences.

Well, Peters admitted that they didn’t have much of a case. But Batt settled out of court, wrote a six-figure check out of respect for Cage to the John Cage Trust.

Note to Peters—don’t even think it. Don’t have that kind of money….

I come from good people

There’s an old saying—a wise man knows his father, but no man knows his mother.

Is it true?

Can’t say. I’ve spent a lot of time on Franny, lately—in fact, I can claim I wrote the book on her. Did I get it right?

Highly sanitized, is Eric’s take, and he’s right of course. There are significant omissions, a couple of slants not explored, and one chapter—I now come clean—entirely made up. I needed something funny, so I imagined a silly conversation between Franny and me about John Cage’s 4’33” (of silence).

Here’s the scary thing—now it feels that it actually happened.

Well, Jack wouldn’t have approved. Like Eric, he would have written the story straight and got the facts right and spelled people’s names right (I flubbed on Franzmann) and made the deadline and done it all over again the next day.

Or would he?

‘Cause he got pretty wrapped up in some causes. The police chief—Weatherly—who got embroiled in some issue, had to resign, moved to Texas and became a drunk. His wife shot him, one day, and was tried and given parole. Came back to town only once, sat in the green sofa, talked.

Hard woman.

“You’re the only person I’m gonna see in this town,” she said to Jack on leaving.

He was a big guy, and big on fairness. He hated the bastards getting away with things. Made him crazy when good people got stepped on.

Which is why he pushed for the equal right housing amendment in the early 60’s. And never saw a contradiction with the State Journal’s strong Republican stance and its support of the amendment.

Couldn’t understand why the Cap Times was silent on the issue.

So by chance, Eric came across a Taliaferro, and I wrote about it. Sent it up to Hesselberg—an old colleague of Jack’s, and fine writer. He came back immediately with this—a letter written by Odell Taliaferro after Jack’s death.

NEWHOUSE FOUGHT FOR RACIAL EQUALITY

   Now is the time when friends are moved to extol the virtues of John Newhouse and to soft-pedal any shortcomings of which they are aware, but we assure you this is not the case with us. We have been singing the praises of John for about 40 years - and we are aware of no shortcomings.

    He wrote profusely of the modern dance abilities of our daughter, Joan Taliaferro Hartshorne and we feel that his news stories and pictures were very influential in enabling her to acquire a position with the Jose Limon Dance Troupe. We offer this fact, not as a virtue, but as an example of effective reporting (though, to us, it was a virtue).

    Once we moved into a segregated neighborhood (it was all white - until we arrived) and the prospective neighbors divided themselves into three groups:

    1. A small number gave a party to welcome us.

    2. A large group paid no attention.

    3. A small group threatened to burn our house down the first night!

    When John heard of this, he came in person to the neighborhood and we visited all the nearby houses. In a calm manner he explained, there was nothing to fear. We have lived there for 30 years - and no one has ever been treated better by their neighbors.

    John was a great man to have on your side.

Well, Jack was a good guy to have on your side. And when he wasn’t?

That same Norwegian-Lutheran backbone that led a black guy into a racist’s home and stared him down could get a little twisted—usually on sexual issues.

“I’m not voting for the Equal Rights Amendment (remember that!?) because it’s for homosexuals and ALL OF MY KIDS ARE NORMAL!”

Words converted to a slap.

In the end, he came around. Many people did. And many people made that change because of a phenomenon occurring in the plague years of the AIDS crisis.

The gay and lesbian choruses.

Virtually every major city had one. San Francisco, of course, had or has a famous one. Toured nationally, recorded. And once, did a heart-breaking rendition of the last act of Poulenc’s opera “Dialogs of the Carmelites.” The opera ends as the nuns, singing their prayers, are taken off to the guillotine, heard offstage. The sight of gay men, many of them HIV positive, reenacting the scene?

And I—not knowing whether the virus was flowing in my own blood?

Catharsis, in a way.

Yes, I will face it. Yes, it may come. Yes, I won’t back down.

Which is why I said to him, today, at the beach, “well, how did I do? Turn out OK? You proud of me?”

We plunged, the water was warm, and surprisingly clear for this time of year. Did the retrot back home. Then he reminded me of this….