This week we listen to Larry A. Fader’s 120’00”: A Conversation with John Cage, with art by John Cage, and a foreword by Tenzin Robert Thurman, which was published in 2012 in Toronto by Nine Point Publishing. This marvelous conversation between Fader and Cage, centered on and around the subject of Zen Buddhism, appeared transcribed in both a trade paperback and in a limited hardback edition, the latter with a CD containing 90 brief tracks that can be shuffled upon playback. We’ll listen to them as they were originally laid out on the CD, which is to say, continuously, thereby capturing their conversation as if in real time.

On Nov. 29, 1964, Merce Cunningham had the following to say in his diary about his visit to see Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki with John Cage and David Vaughan:
On the 29th, JC, DV and I made our altogether luminous trip to visit Dr. Suzuki in Kamakura. After a good deal of shuffling in the station, we found the proper train. Dr. Suzuki’s house was on top of a hill in an old monastery (?) through a grove of trees. JC had warned me I wouldn’t like the journey up the steps, but I did. It was not raucous Japan, but the one out of the scene cut from The Brig, only real, actual + alive, and I looked forward to seeing that man’s smile again. I was not cheated. What is he? 90-95? The face smiles like a babe, there is an energy and agility (when he was concerned about the stove not heating properly), and the times he dozed, it was like another way of paying attention. We ended the day by visiting the Great Buddha at sunset, there were few around, the scene was quiet and splendid, but the statue is so large as to be beyond one’s touching it, or it bending to you. The day had been a glowing, burning-bright point of high life, the night brought the pallor of collapse.

"All Things Cage" is a weekly program featuring conversations between Laura Kuhn, Director of the John Cage Trust, and Cage experts and enthusiasts from around the world. If you’d like to propose a guest or a topic for a future program, write directly to Laura at lkuhn@johncage.org. She’d love to hear from you.

The late Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Kenneth Silverman once described his Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage (Knopf, 2012) as the hardest book he’d ever written. This was because, as he put it, pick up any rock and there’s John Cage! Indeed, Cage was not only a world-renowned composer, numbering among his compositions the still notoriously tacet 4’33”, but a ground-breaking poet, a philosopher, a chess master who studied with Marcel Duchamp, a macrobiotic chef, a devotee of Zen Buddhism, a prolific visual artist, and an avid and pioneering mycologist. He was also life partner to the celebrated American choreographer, Merce Cunningham, for nearly half a century, and thus well known in the world of modern dance.

No wonder, then, that nearly everyone who encounters the man or his life’s work has something interesting to say about John Cage!