The Long Shadow of John Cage

ONE hundred years ago today, a child was born in Los Angeles who would go on to... well, what exactly was Cage's impact anyway? I've been trying to figure that out since I studied experimental music at Wesleyan two decades ago.

Whatever it is, part of what interests me about Cage is how his influence -- ideas like indeterminacy, his reworking of certain Asian ideas including the Tao, prepared instruments that extended the innovations of Henry Cowell -- reached outside classical or experimental music. He even inspired, albeit briefly, the Beatles.

In this story, from Sunday's LA Times, I speak to a wide range of artists, including Stephin Merritt of Magnetic Fields and Mac from Superchunk, about the composer's long reach.

Here's what performance artist Rachel Rosenthal, who knew Cage a bit in New York in the '50s, told me about him:

His presence was peculiar – unlike anyone else’s. He was always either smiling and laughing – or extremely serious. Nothing in between.

Remembering Artist Mike Kelley

THIS ended up being one of the toughest stories I've written in a long time, emotionally or otherwise. The assignment to track down friends and associates of Mike Kelley, the longtime Los AngelesaArtist who -- it's thought -- killed himself at his South Pasadena home a few weeks ago -- almost broke me. People close to someone who's died are always tender; after a suspected suicide, it's even more difficult for an outsider to get a rounded sense of a subject.


It's difficult simply to say what Kelley's art looked like: Did he do installations? Paint? Was his work rumpled and messy, or were his lines clean? Was he about sculpture, or film? We could probably say that Kelley's work was as far as possible from the serene, sensual, and pop products of the '60s generation -- Ruscha, Irwin, and so on -- but beyond that, it's hard to define what he did visually: Kelley's work was more idea-driven, and wide ranging in terms of form, than almost anyone I can think of. 


My piece, "Losing Faith," from the April Los Angeles magazine, is HERE. I knew Kelley entirely through his work, but I got the picture of an extremely magnetic, intellectually rigorous and deeply funny character. (Some of this comes across in the art; some of it doesn't.) Here is a link to some Kelley on PBS's Art21. (He's of course best known in indie circles for the cover of Sonic Youth's Dirty.)

His old friend, poet Amy Gerstler, was important in giving me a sense of the artist as a young man. “I wouldn’t say I saw it coming,” she said of his death. “I was completely shocked and horrified. But he had a lot of pain in him. From childhood. We were lucky we had him for so long.”


Filmmaker John Waters, who collects Kelley’s work and knew him as a funny guy who didn’t suffer fools, was startled as well.  “To me his work always satirized depression,” Waters told me. “All that stuff about recovered memory, building his childhood home to travel around… I thought it was something he had when he was younger, that he was commenting on it. I always thought that his humor would save him.”


Photo courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art

Kurt Andersen vs. Art Center

THE writer, public radio host (of the eclectic culture show "studio 360") and SPY magazine co-founder kurt andersen has been at pasadena's art center college of design over the last few months. his title -- this gives him the appropriate degree of embarrassment -- is "visionary in residence." (art center is a very cool design school, in a stunning hillside/modernist setting, that has experienced some turmoil recently.)

HERE is my piece on andersen and his time in socal in sunday's LAT. i found him about as i expected -- smart, cool, somewhat midwestern. in high school and early college i was a spy fanatic so was a kick to meet one of the guys behind it.

also really enjoyed his piece "the end of excess: is this crisis good for america?" this is a long, thoughtful and somewhat speculative cover story of the kind american magazines almost never run: it makes absolutely clear that we can no longer dismiss time magazine, where it appeared, as mere middlebrow fluff. (as the whole culture has sunk, middlebrow has become increasingly valuable.)

his piece takes as its premise that the '80s -- with its worship of unregulated capitalism, material pleasures, celebrity and so on -- never ended, until last fall. he asks, what was that long weekend about and what comes next?

Photo credit: kurtandersen.com