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.

WALKING IN SILENCE

You know, the older I get, the more and more I love John Cage; his music, his philosophy, his Zen attitude.  Also, judging by the photographs, he smiled and laughed more than any serious artist I’ve ever seen.

If you go to youtube you can see him performing “Water Walk” on the tv game show “I’ve Got a Secret,” which does in fact have moments of vague insult and agony, but Cage holds up very well, as in fact you’d expect him to, and when the tv host asks him to explain that title “Water Walk”, he says “because it contains water and because I walk during the performance.”

Elsewhere on youtube, and in other places too, you can find him reciting a text sometimes known as “At the Middle” and sometimes as part of “Lecture on Nothing” and it is certainly included in “Silence.” In any case, below is not precisely that text: I have “appropriated” it for my own dubious pedestrian ends, replacing his word “talk” with my word “walk.”  I hope and trust Mr. Cage would not have objected.  My typographical layout is considerably more orthodox than his usually was.

Here we are now at the beginning of the fourth large part of this walk.  More and more I have the feeling that we are getting nowhere.  Slowly, as the walk goes on, we are getting nowhere and that is a pleasure.  It is not irritating to be where one is.  It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else. 

Here we are now a little bit after the beginning of the fourth large part of this walk.  More and more we have the feeling that I am getting nowhere.  Slowly, as the walk goes on, slowly, we have the feeling we are getting nowhere.  That is a pleasure which will continue.  If we are irritated it is not a pleasure. 

Originally we were nowhere; and now, again, we are having the pleasure of being slowly nowhere.