CAGE VERSUS CAGE

 

Here is a Zen parable as retold by John Cage in Indeterminacy.  It’s not specifically about 

walking, but it definitely involves walking.

 

*

In this version it looks like she could have got across without any help, doesn't it?

John Cage is also responsible for the profoundly wonderful piece Water Walk, in which he walks around the stage (or in the most famous version, see below, a TV studio), and creates watery noises using a bathtub, kettle, watering can, pressure cooker and so on.

 

The best thing is that he’s wearing a suit and tie. I think more avant-gardists should try that.

*

John Cage alas was not related to Nicolas Cage, though I've heard him say in an interview that John was part of the inspiration when he chose the name Cage as a pseudonym.

I can’t swear that Nic Cage is much of a walker but obviously acting always involves doing a bit of walking now and then:

 

Nor can I confirm that he’s carried women across rivers but it wouldn’t surprise me. However floating around the internet I did find an image depicting Nic performing a sort of Water Walk. 

SUNDAY MUDDY SUNDAY

I was going to say, ‘Before we finish with John Cage ..’ but I think I’m never really going to be finished with John Cage, so there’s this.  We were walking in the mud yesterday, following the footpath along the south side of the River Stour, right across the water from the Cattawade Nature Reserve, which has no public access, which I think is very cool.  It wasn’t meant to be an expedition, just a Sunday afternoon walk, and that’s what it was until we hit the mud.

 

         I mean, I knew it had been raining, I knew that the footpaths in these parts had muddy patches here and there, but I wasn’t expecting the full Glastonbury–Woodstock-Somme experience.  And as a matter of fact it was actually far worse than it looks in these pictures.

 

         It was hard work, walking through this stuff, but after a while, as Billy Shakespeare almost said, ‘I was in mud, stepp’d in so far that should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o'er.’

Thinking of Shakespeare helped a bit, and also thinking that John Cage had written a book on the subject, with Lois Long, one of his collaborators on The Mushroom Book. This one was The Mud Book.  I’ve never seen a copy 'in the flesh,' but apparently it looks like this: 

 To be honest, I wasn't really in the mood for making 'pies and cakes.'

THE MUSHROOM WALK

Having recently had a birthday, I decided to spoil myself, and so I bought a copy of John Cage: A Mycological Foray: Variations on Mushrooms.

 

It’s a two volume boxed set, one of them a kind of scrapbook about Cage and his mushroom interests, with photographs of him, often walking in the woods collecting fungi, also pictures of some of the mushroom-related things he collected.  Also the text of Mushrooms et Varitiones, which is frankly very hard work.

 

The other ‘volume’ is a reproduction of The Mushroom Book, a legendary limited edition that he did in the early 70s with Lois Long, illustrator, and Alexander H. Smith, botanist.  It’s not so much a book as a set of unbound lithographs, with some more abstruse Cage texts.

 

Together they make a fine thing, and I do fear spilling coffee or red wine or even mushroom ketchup over them.  Cage had his own mushroom ketchup recipe: you probably knew that.

 

Of course, I was not surprised to find that Cage was a walker, especially in the woods, especially looking for mushrooms, but one thing I didn’t know was that he suffered from arthiritis.  I feel his pain, as well as my own.  That was why he adopted a Macrobiotic diet to help cure it.   It probably worked as well as anything else does. (Don't get me started).

 

There’s also a partial transcript of a 1983 interview Cage did on Canadian radio, in which the interviewer is trying to get him to talk about 'sacred' mushrooms.  He didn’t have much time for that.  He said, ‘I don’t think in those terms.  Nothing is more sacred than any other thing.  We should wash our dishes and brush our teeth and forget about one thing being sacred and another thing not.

         ‘I don’t have a favorite mushroom – I just like the one I have.”

         This guy was GOOD!!

 

 As for me, I continue to walk, often with a more or less painful arthritic knee, and lately as I walk, I look at mushrooms, photograph them, and then when I get home, using a couple of books and an online source or two, with much hesitation and head scratching, I try to identify them.

 

The one above, I believe, is Exidia glandulosa (though it could be Exidia plana), black jelly fungus, sometimes declared to be edible, but you wouldn’t, would you?

 

Of course I wouldn’t need to do all this research if John Cage was walking with me.  And you know sometimes, in a sense, he is.

THE SAME OLD NOT THE SAME OLD

I recently came across a quotation, which may be familiar to everybody else but it’s new to me, from John Burroughs’ Signs and Seasons: ‘The place to observe nature is where you are; the walk to take today is the walk you took yesterday. You will not find just the same things: both the observed and the observer have changed.’

This seems to be the equivalent of saying you can’t walk on the same water twice, and I absolutely agree with that.

Above is a path, perhaps a gennell, perhaps a snickett, depending on which bit of England you come from, and I walk down it pretty much every day.  As far as I can tell it doesn’t have a name. 

I always see a few pigeons perching on the fences beside the path, and sometimes I see a skulking cat or two, and sometimes I see evidence that a cat got among the pigeons. Nature, don’t you love it?  I suppose I’d feel better if the cats actually ate the pigeons as opposed to just killing them, but cats, I know, don't care about my feelings,

On the path I encounter  people once in a while and words are occasionally exchanged but mostly we don’t make eye contact and keep silent, which seems to suit everybody.  

The other day I was walking up the slope and a young couple were walking behind me and arguing, and I heard him say, 'So it’s ok for you to talk to me like that but I can’t talk to you like that, is that right?’

And the girl said, ‘I wasn’t talking to you like anything.’  
This seemed a moment of transcendent Zen.

Sometimes there are big mushrooms growing in the grass alongside the path:

And sometimes there are fungi that are not just big but monstrous (that ruler’s  15 inches long).  

I wish I had the wisdom to know whether or not they’re edible, which may be just another way of saying I wish I was John Cage.

CAGE WALKING (YOU KNOW, AS OPPOSED TO CAGE FIGHTING)

And another thing I did on my ‘holidays’ – I walked over to John Cage’s childhood home in Moss Avenue, Eagle Rock, in northwest LA.  This may be Cage junior in the garden at that house, but don’t put money on it (I mean it's definitely John Cage, but it may not be the Eagle Rock house.

Cage’s dad, also named John Cage, built the house from scratch, which may seem surprising at first, but given that he was an inventor and built his own submarine, less so.  A guy who can build his own submarine can probably build his own house. 

I went with my psychogeographic pal Anthony Miller – that’s him about to trespass and transgress, while also showing his bald spot.  

There was nobody home as far as we could tell, despite multiple cars in the driveway including this white, left hand drive Morris Minor.  How many of those were sold in America?  That's not an entirely rhetorical question.

Then we pottered around the neighbourhood, saw euphorbias springing up adjacent to the sidewalk, 

a wayside mini-library,

some very trim trees,

and some stuffed monkeys tied to other trees:

Later, rereading Cage’s Indeterminacy, which strikes me as one of the truly great twentieth century texts, I rediscovered a couple of pieces that involve walking; this one:

That’s a bit rough, even for my robust sensibilities, but this one, I really, really like:

Actually the idea that John Cage might be walking along Hollywood Boulevard, or anywhere else, with 'nothing much to do' is the real surprise.

WALKING UNCAGED

There are many days when I wish that John Cage was still with us, for his compositions and his philosophy, and on a day like today, his mycological skills.

         Cage was a mushroom hunter, an activity that requires a fair bit of walking, and he wrote in a somewhat ironic piece published as “Music Lover’s Field Companion,” “I have spent many pleasant hours in the woods conducting performances of my silent piece, transcriptions, that is, for an audience of myself, since they were much longer than the popular length which I have had published.” 

He even taught a class in mushroom identification at the New School in New York which involved taking the class, on foraging expeditions, walking through the woods, but (the school decreed) only those woods accessible on public transport. 

Cage has been on my mind because recently as I’ve walked around LA (a city which has scarcely seen a trickle of rain for the last several months), I keep seeing mushrooms and fungi growing in very unexpected places.  Such as here on somebody’s lawn in Larchmont:

I suppose in this case the lawn has been watered perhaps overwatered through this long dry spell, and so perfect mushroom conditions have been created.

I suppose this must apply in the case below too, in Sawtelle, though this isn’t somebody’s garden but one of those little strips of grass between the road and the sidewalk. I didn’t notice a sprinkler system but I guess there must be one.  And in fact that mushroom was even bigger than it looks in the photo.

And today, on my way to the dentist, I saw this (there were a couple of other very small, less impressive specimens nearby):

Since they’re growing out of a tree I don’t suppose they rely on watering, and the patch of ground the tree did look very dry, though that’s not to say it doesn’t get watered from time to time.  I wish John Cage, or someone, had been there to identify the fungus.  My best guess, from doing a reverse image search, is that it might be a Rhizina undulata, but I wouldn't want to put money on it.

Did you know that in 1959 Cage won $10,000 on an Italian quiz show Lascia o Raddoppia (Double or Nothing) by giving the 24 names of the white-spored Agaricus as described in Atkinson’s Studies of American Fungi.”  Not just that, he listed them in alphabetical order,” which makes him a bit of a show- off, but when you’ve got the knowledge, why not flaunt it?  He used the prize money to buy a piano and a Volkswagen bus Merce Cunningham's dance company.  It wasn’t the sixties, but it was close.  In 1969 Cunningham produced a dance piece titled Walkaround Time.

          Want to see an ancient picture of the Hollywood Walker, somewhere in Scotland, posing with an Amanita muscaria (and his ex-wife)?  Of course you do.

THE XMAS WALKER

One of the things about walking in my neighbourhood immediately after Christmas is that you see more walkers than usual.  I suspect part of it may be that people have relatives staying with them and don’t know what else to do with them.  Some no doubt think it’s a good for the soul to take a walk at least once a year.  Maybe the odd one has got a new puppy for Christmas and is swiftly realizing what a terrible responsibility that is.

However, my unscientific observation is that this year there were far fewer walkers than usual.  And a man who had acquired a new camera lens for Christmas pretty much had the streets to himself, which was fine but just a little surprising.

Of course Christmas decorations persist for a while after Christmas  – not sure if that Santa is breaking into that upstairs window or breaking out:

And just because a Santa is small that doesn’t mean he isn’t security conscious:

 This presiding demon stays in place whatever the season:

But the spirit of good cheer is not universal.  This sign appears on the door of the last house before you get to one of the entrances to Griffith Park, and you can understand the guy’s sentiments whatever the time of year:

And you can never quite escape the John Cage influence, nor would I want to.  Whereas he had mycological expeditions that involved walking deep into the woods, I found these beauties by the side of the road, just a few hundred yards from my own front door. 

I took a couple home, tried to identify them, couldn’t altogether, though I suspected they might be the evocatively named Funeral Bells, and even if they weren’t, and even though I’m generally all in favor of Cagean chance operations, I really didn’t want to take a chance on these.  I left them where they were.  Next day walking the same route I saw they were half eaten, though not sure by what – possibly one of the new, though unseen, puppies.

But I think the best thing seen while walking over the holidays was this electronic keyboard left out for the garbage men.  And I wonder what the story was there.  Had Santa brought a brand new one, or had the owner made a resolution, 2016 will be a year without electronic keyboards?