Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage

8. HPSCHD

8 · HPSCHD 1965–1969 Politics: Fuller, McLuhan, Brown “THE POWERS-THAT-BE have become more and more repellant,” Cage told a French interviewer in 1966. “Look at us in Vietnam. It is indefensible.” His bitterness arose not only from American bombing of North Vietnam but also from bloody national and international news that shook America throughout the middle and late 1960s. Race riots broke out in Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Boston; Israel attacked Egypt, Syria, and Jordan; gunmen killed Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis and Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles; Protestants and Catholics fought each other in Northern Ireland. The tumult seemed to take some new form every day everywhere, and touched Cage from many directions. He felt in New York City “an atmosphere of violence, danger.” New Yorkers witnessed the assassination of Malcolm X in Harlem; an antiwar march to the U.N. by an estimated half-million protestors; violent student demonstrations against military research at Columbia University; rioting during a police raid on a Greenwich Village gay bar, the Stonewall Inn. Cage’s associates Judith Malina and Julian Beck moved their Living Theatre to Europe. As he planned a Southern tour a friend warned him “don’t get lynched.” Cage decided that painters, musicians, and drama producers having successfully opened people’s eyes and ears, art’s work was done. “We must turn our attention now I think to other things,” he said, “and those things are social.” His own turn was sweeping. Since his prizewinning high school oration at the Hollywood Bowl forty years ago, calling on American capitalists to “cleanse our hands of golddust ,” he had shown little interest in and rarely commented on current events. And he had little faith now, he said, in “parading with posters and so forth or adding your name to an advertisement in ‘The New York Times.’ ” Nor did he value black militancy or psychedelic opting-out: “tell the Blacks power’s not a good word (nor when used with Flower). It’s precisely power that’s not needed.” He thought it vital not merely to criticize, protest, or drop out but to suggest solutions : “I shall not attack the evil but rather promote what seems to me to be what I call affirmative.” Cage began seeking possible solutions to the ongoing crises, and making his thoughts public. He kept other activities alive at the same time. Although preoccupied with social and political problems, he managed during the same years to publish a collection showing the notational styles of more than 250 composers; to learn chess from his new friend Marcel Duchamp; and to venture musically into computers , using them to generate more than two hundred microtonal tapes for a multimedia jamboree. In seeking ways out of the current turmoil, Cage felt himself moving “in strange places,” he said, “in need of all sorts of information.” He began reading around in works by economists, sociologists, historians—Thorstein Veblen’s The Engineers and the Price System, C. Wright Mills’ The Power Elite, Robert Theobald’s Free Men and Free Markets, and Men Against the State by the anarchist James Martin, a Stony Point neighbor. Most of his thinking about social change, however , was informed by two intellectual/spiritual guides of the ’60s counterculture who became his close personal friends: Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) and Marshall McLuhan (1911–80). Cage had met Fuller in 1948 at Black Mountain College, where they and Cunningham breakfasted every morning under the trees. He HPSCHD · 21 1 21 2 · BEGIN AGAIN had lost touch with Fuller six or seven years but sent him a letter in the fall of 1963, after reading his recently published Ideas and Integrities . “[T]hat it was the cause of your writing me,” Fuller replied, “makes me very glad that I wrote it.” Since Fuller’s failure in 1948 to erect a geodesic dome at Black Mountain, many of the structures had successfully gone up around the world—examples of strong, lightweight , inexpensive housing that could be mass-produced, easily transported, and put in place already built. They had drawn worldwide attention. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev wanted Fuller to come to his country to teach Russian engineers. Fuller’s globular face and thick glasses appeared on the cover of Time magazine, rendered as a geodesic dome. His tetrahedron features towered above a model of his aerodynamic three-wheeled Dymaxion car, twenty feet long but capable of getting thirty...