Barry Alpert wrote:
> Just made available on-line: John Cage performs "Water Walk" on a late
> fifties tv show I remember watching, though not this installment. Wish I
> had--missing it probably set back the development of my aesthetic. I did
> catch a reading by Jack Kerouac to Steve Allen's piano on Allen's late
> night tv show perhaps two years later, though Cage was to prove much more
> useful to me. There's a particularly memorable spoken formulation here,
> the diction of which I don't remember encountering elsewhere in Cage's
> oeuvre, "I prefer laughter to tears." Barry Alpert
>
> http://blog.wired.com/tableofmalcontents/2007/05/its_okay_to_lau.html
>
I'm fascinated as much for the Fifties TV images as with Cage and his
music. Putting John Cage on I've Got A Secret is on its surface
insane. I don't know if Cage was consciously involved in a put-on, was
publicity hunting, or whether the producers thought it was somehow funny
to Show Off The Freak...but that last would have made Cage a victim and
a real dunce. Perhaps--huzzah!--everyone took it seriously and I'm
underestimating the depth of spirit in the Fifties.
The audience laughing should not have struck me as odd. How often and
where in the late '50s did anyone hear this kind of music? The
above-mentioned Steve Allen was often ahead of the pack but...was that
really Garry Moore???...I think of as a mainstream game show host,
albeit he had a gorgeous speaking voice and precise diction that I'd
totally forgotten, and was far more refined than some of the jerks who
came afterwards. To stretch the metaphor past its limits, comparing
Moore to (say) Bob Barker or the celebrity hookers on American Idiot is
like comparing Thomas Cranmer to Jerry (Burn In Hell as we speak)
Falwell. In any event, the snickering probably is no more nor less than
an admission of ignorance in the face of the unknown: big news. The
audience was being challenged to expand its definition of music,
probably in much the same way Charlie Parker followed by Ayler and
Coleman forced listeners to redefine the nature and possibilities of
jazz. Some might get it, many would not, but who said this was an election?
What I find refreshing is that the show itself (one of the producers was
Alan Sherman, "Hello Mudder"!) seemed to treat Cage with dignity and
respect, and that there was no sense of a trying to put him on. How far
we have traveled since the 1950s. Most of it has been regression to the
bear pit via so-called Reality TV.
Allen himself is worth more than a few words. I was introduced to Lenny
Bruce's work because Steve Allen probably was the first television host
to break the taboo against controversial figures on shows sponsored by
cigarette and detergent companies. True, Bruce had to tone down his
act--he used the words "homosexuals" and "prostitutes" on the show I
saw, but I had to hear the famous bits like "The Palladium," "Religions
Incorporated," and "Father Flotsky's Triumph" to get Bruce's full
flavor. Still, the idea that a prime-time TV show would give airtime to
a man already considered controversial speaks well for Steve Allen who,
(not?) coincidentally, was among the funniest men I ever saw on the tube.
Ken
--
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Ken Wolman rainermaria.typepad.com
"It takes a big man to cry. It takes a really big man to
laugh at that man."
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