Posted 5:39 PM by Gene

AHTSJournal greets us with two irritating links. In the first Mark Swed says "no one dared call [John Cage] the greatest composer of his time." Or as he must put it:

More typical was what the British critic Andrew Porter spelled out in the lead paragraph of his Cage obituary in the Observer: “He said a lot silly things, and wrote a lot of silly music. But everyone was fond of him.” Even those who praised Cage’s music were forced to assume a defensive tone.

But you, Mark, dared to call Karl-HEINTZ "9-11" StockHAUsen a great composer, and from our experience great composers can make for rotten mu-SIC cri-TICKS, especially when it comes to AH-pe-RAHS.

In the second we learn Hellywood has a new fad, the end of the world (haven't I talked enough about that biz today?), and the Journals smartly quote from one of the market-research guys who writes the movees:

Roger Smith, an executive editor at the research firm Global Media Intelligence and a former film executive who oversaw “Terminator 2,” calls this competition “the film version of the Cuban Missile Crisis—we have to get the edge of extinction each time [SIC].”

With luck, THE CONSPIRACY WILL cross the edge this time.

One other thing: that first link deals with the death of the choreographer Merce Cunningham. We had vaguely heard of him, and have no idea why he was important. (A show of our ignorance: we thought Cunningham was a woman.) How many people scratched their heads over that name? Thus has the chasm between the high arts and the people become uncrossable, and it may not be the people's fault.