The Last Word

Amen.

well, Mr Cert, I can identify with being sick – with a flu in my case.

But have you thought that the police breaking down a door might have something to do with a stick of wood taking its revenge?? We all have to be as careful as me in not upsetting people, animals AND things.

The bucket sounds a bit odd..not sure what to comment on there.

But otherwise it sounds like building up to a flaked-out holiday for you. Let your mind go like Cage’s 4’33, and you’ll get through Yuletide.

and for a long time I thought you were a woman btw (with reference to another thread of yours). That is a compliment. Most men are pretty brutish. You and I belong to the sensitive end of the spectrum, mild and inoffensive.

@a certain sadness wrote:

Thanks for the compliment but i feel next year i would like to become more brutish,big,butch and brazen. It all sounds very tiring though.

When you are crazy you learn to keep quiet.

No, it’s good..take it from the model of normal sanity – me!!!

it’s not a compliment..personality is provisional and beyond our control..’I am a book I neither wrote nor read’

Why did you laugh at the audience who applauded Cage’s 4’33??

If I were there I would have applauded…

the whole point of 4’33 is to be in the actual audience, following each movement. Watchng it from the outside, and watching it from 60 years later, is to see only the humour.

It’s too important for that. It was part of a turning point in American culture which was to affect large numbers of people through The Doors and the Velvet Underground (John Cale was a student of Cage’s).

When scoffers said that anybody could have written 4’33, they were wrong. Cage rightly responded that nobody else had done, and that answer summed it up – it could only be written in 1952, only in Black Mountain, can only be heard properly live in 1952.

Nobody’s trying to control your laughter or your liking for music – well, I’m not (can’t say the same for everybody, some people can be pretty totalitarian when it comes to music and laughter, as to debate).

Actually, I’m not a fan of the piece (honest), or of Cage’s direction afterwards. I do like his Music for a Toy Piano, but again not a big fan.

I was talking of the music as a piece of cultural history, as you must be aware, given your awareness that the audience were as much the composer as Cage. And art as a blank canvas had more than a little to do with it, though I think Rauschenberg would have denied that his all-white paintings which inspired 4’33 were blank??