This is very bracing stuff.

I can’t write much now, but I wanted to echo your thoughts about finding an point of entry into art, whether that art is music or film or literature. It’s something I think about all the time as I make films. As I learn just how films get made (so much of it is just about taking care of people so they’re comfortable enough to apply a very specific set of skills), I see more clearly why so many screenplays hew to the “formula,” and why so many of my favorite films use genre as a point of departure (starting with one set of expectations and negotiating a new set).

Anyway, I’ll write more soon. Again, this is excellent: your page is now officially required reading, right there with Ebert’s journal.

I find that inconsistency is one of the most refreshing qualities of an artist and of human beings in general, but, of course, I can be completely infuriated by this very thing at times. HOW one is inconsistent is definitely worth consideration. Cage’s inconsistency certainly seems to have a very consistent underlying focus. One could say that he used extreme rigor (chance operations) to create situations where what is usually ignored is emphasized. I think Sondheim does something similar using the computer. Often the writing feels uninhabited, but then, when you least expect it…

Like you, my interests change over time, but I do return to things and re-contextualize them. In fact, when are we ever as artists NOT doing just that? (Can’t step in the same river twice?)

So I look forward to your silliness, Adam. Cage did say he preferred laughter to tears.

I’m suddenly getting a hankering to watch “Female Trouble.”

I’m not sure I agree that he tried “removing as much of himself from the work as he could,” though. Cage was well-known to exert a lot of control over his works…. One of the many fascinating contradictions in his art. (As he himself said: “You won’t find me consistent.”)

“The other thing that’s interesting about Cage is that from what I can tell, a lot of people who idolize him are unfamiliar with much of his actual music, have listened to an extremely small amount of it, and can’t stomach most of the post-1960 compositions for very long when they do listen.”

This is true in my experience. I find that a lot of people approach him more conceptually than anything. (Which is, to be fair, the risk his more conceptual work takes.) Personally, I find my fondness for it comes and goes, as with anything else. On some days I adore it; other days I want to listen to anything but. But 4’33″ is astonishing and a revelation and I perform it as often as I can…and still not often enough…

And I’m glad you like my poem. (I hate it!)

As for Alan Sondheim’s work, I’ve heard of it, and him, but haven’t experienced any of it. I have to confess that I have a personal bias against heavily computer-based work. This is my own failing and COMPLETELY unfair of me, of course!

Many decades ago, in the late 1990s, when I worked as a technical writer at Lucent, I was more interested in those kinds of things, and even dabbled in them myself. But ever since then, I’ve let my hair grow long, and become a shepherd (a cat-herd, actually), and now I mostly sit under trees strumming a lute and reciting Odes.

Again, it’s totally unfair of me, but my brain chemistry has changed such that now when I hear the words “hypertext” and “code” and “computer-generated,” I reach for my running shoes. But I have nothing whatsoever against anyone working in those areas, and who knows—perhaps someday I’ll regain my interest for them.

(I swore I would never get involved in blogs and yet I seem to be doing that.)

I envy you your trip to Shanghai! Translation is often so revealing… I was supposed to go to China once but I couldn’t find a boat slow enough…

Many cheers,
Adam