I was watching Five Easy Pieces, a wonderful early Jack Nicholson classic, which personally speaks to me in volumes for its theme and especially its outcome (I hesitate to call it a conclusion.)
Best know for its famous 'chicken salad sandwich' routine, it is a far more profound and subtle film than many realize, with a superb Nicholson performance, though clearly it has been overshadowed by the greatness around it: Easy Rider before; Chinatown, The Passenger (my favorite Nicholson by one of my very favorite directors) and One Flew Over, coming after.
A fundamental theme of the film is sound, especially music.
At minute 19 of the film, Nicholas and friend are stuck in traffic on the highway on the way to work in the morning. As tensions mount in the stopped traffic, horns begin to sound, first one, then another.
In frustration, Jack gets out of the car, yelling, then jumps onto the back of a flatbed truck ahead of them. In the back of the truck is an old, upright piano, on which he proceeds to energetically play Chopin, out of tune, to the cacophonic accompaniment of the chorus of car horns with their deliberately dissonant chords.
(Later in the film, car horn chords return to punctuate the scene at ferry, though there they serve to interfere with Jack's attempts to communicate. There are many such niceties in the sound design of the film.)
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The scene reminded me immediately of the John Cage and using found sound: his compositions Imaginary Landscapes and HPSCHD both lept to mind.
Cage was at the top of my mind as I had just seen a recent post about a YouTube clip of Mr. Cage on the old television game show I've Got a Secret.
By the way, here is the original at the great and wonderous WFMU which I listened for years while living in New York City.
It brought back two memories, the show itself, which I will admit I am old enough to have seen the first time in my wee childhood.
And the influence of Cage in my life.
In my high school years, Cage's books Silence and A Year From Monday were revolutionary to me as I began my study of Modern Music, or organized sound, as Varese would call it, or "the production of sound" as Cage says in the video. Finding LPs on the wonderful Nonesuch label in local stores around San Diego was an undertaking in and of itself in those days for a fourteen year old kid.
My ears were opened.
I met John Cage once, years later, fleetingly in a crowd, after a concert at Symphony Space sometime in the 80s in New York when I was a poor graduate student. He had a magical quality I have seen only once or twice in others in my life: true humility, I suppose it appears on the outside to be, but I saw it only and always in those who had broken through to a great understanding that they lived each day. I've seen it in a couple of Buddhist monks. My teacher William Diver had it, too. So did John Cage.
I suppose in a strange way, Cage was my first Zen teacher, though I did not know it at the time. Years later I realized this while sitting sesshin on a cold morning, listening to the sound of shovels on a gravel road.
Long after names like Baker Roshi have become just a bump in a chanted lineage list of American Zen, tales of crazy-wise Cage Roshi will live on in koans.
What better teacher can there be than the one we only recognize after we have already been taught ?
When some hear of The Way, they practice it diligently;
When others hear of it, they think of it half-heartedly.
When still others hear of it, they laugh out loud.
If they didn't laugh out loud, it wouldn't be The Way.
