In appropriately random fashion, yesterday at the Sala Borsa Library in Bologna, I came across a DVD I had never heard of it before entitled John Cage From Zero. It contains four films by Frank Scheffer and Andrew Culver.
The first is 19 Questions, “a chance determined interview” in which we are quickly made aware how important numbers, chance and time were to Cage. He allows a precise number of seconds to each topic , for example 42 seconds on chess, 24 seconds on death and 48 seconds on mathematics. Although it is billed as an interview, we see and hear only a relaxed Cage speaking directly to camera with a stop watch in his hand.
He would have failed miserably if he were a contestant on the BBC radio show Just A Minute as he hesitates a lot, deviates occasionally and sometimes repeats himself.
The pauses in particular are often prolonged – his 26 seconds on Postmodernism is as follows (the dots indicate the pauses): “Postmodernism obviously comes after modernism ………………………… I wonder what the difference is ……………… perhaps it has something to do with refection”
His three seconds on Zen Buddhism is just five words – “The structure of the mind”.
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