The Little Booklet
Since we've been talking about John Cage, I was reminded of a salon I hosted in a community house—"The Grange"—in which I lived in the early 90s here in Seattle. Specifically, it was November 1991; a number of us had recently moved to a house in the Mt. Baker neighborhood, then still a little ragged and out of the way. (Now, completely trendy and unaffordable to any of us. I think Rich and Kate paid under $140 or 150k for the five-bedroom house. Through the disturbing magic of Redfin, I can see that its current value is $1.2 million.)
Back to the story: to instigate the conversation, I collected numerous texts from things I was reading at the time (e.g. Cage), cut them up and—somewhat randomly—created a musical score with them. After a trip to Kinko's to make a box of 11x17" copies, I folded up the document, wrote in the addresses, added stamps, and sent along "the little booklet" to various friends around the city, maybe even outside it too!
Among the attendees: Marjorie Richards, Sheila Brown, maybe Jude Gervais, possibly Joe Hastings, certainly a few others. I believe some of my housemates roamed in and out: Rich, Kate, Caroline, Steve. The response I recall was a lot of awkward silences—and not exactly in Cage-ian spirit. We did feel engaged enough to have a Salon II (a discrete topic was requested, I would supply "Infinity" with possibly more conversation-killing citations like the Menger sponge) and Salon III (please, a more focused topic... thus "Work" which also sourced the texts from the attendees (Marjorie submitted "Behold," a poem by David Lee... this was our most lively conversation, duh...).
Meanwhile, the little booklet has remained a document of my state of mind at the time: amidst devastating experiences with homeless and mentally ill people (with whom I worked), I also was trying to shed (through amplification?!) my collegiate experience, while finding a new voice in the generative arts of music and writing.
The booklet immediately got filed away, while its influences, its imprint (not unlike my own Wite-Out-painted fingerprints) remained, percolating all these years. Eventually, circumstances—the music of chance?—landed me smack dab in the very same text. Maybe a good time to send out the score again through the ether... to you, and you?
... or, downloadable as a PDF document. Et voilà!