Ephemera Part 1
1. John Cage
John Cage’s junk mail is strewn across the table. The “Sawchestra,” an ensemble of musicians who specialize in the musical saw, played a concert in the East Village on January 23, 1992. The Archives Department has decided to purchase the personal papers of the legendary avant-garde composer. When you are famous and you die, there is often a bidding war for the archival rights to your papers. All those little notes you scribbled down, all the letters and photographs—they become holy relics. The New York Public Library acquired Cage’s manuscripts. The University bought the correspondence and ephemera.
To me, ephemera means junk mail. It sits on the table now, hundreds of advertisements and flyers for cultural events in New York City that the illustrious John Cage simply had to attend. It should be noted that John Cage, at the time of the Sawchestra concert, was suffering from arthritis, sciatica, arteriosclerosis, and the aftereffects of a stroke. Instead of worrying about death, he produced five operas and 40 pieces known as Number Pieces. In other words, he didn’t have time or energy to watch the goddamn Sawchestra. And yet, here I am, making sure that the Sawchestra’s January 1992 performance and the University of Utah’s Jazz Festival from December 1991 are archived for all time, just because they happened to send a postcard to John Cage.
The people writing these invitations often sign their notes by hand, as if a personal touch was going to rid Cage of his arthritis and whisk him to California to watch an obscure electronic music event. I am sorting these flyers and postcards by date. Cage had apparently signed onto every mailing list for arts and culture in the entire country. Either that or Cage’s address had somehow circulated around avant-garde artist circles and each one independently decided that on the off chance John Cage liked their shit, they should send him their event information anyway. And so, a flood of ballet performances, string quartets, Lincoln Center flyers, art installations, anything that could be considered “art” in the early 1990s is sitting on my desk. John Cage could not have attended all of these. I scarcely know why he even bothered to read them.
A flyer for a Russian pianist sits on the table with a set of photographs enclosed. The photographs are of unknown origin. There is a couple standing beneath a tree in a lawn chair. There are some landscapes. These people either knew John Cage or really wanted to know John Cage. It seems that Cage had little time for them because they are in the junk mail pile with me, the student employee part-time archivist. I think about some of the text messages I’ve sent to my friends who have gone on to become prominent and successful. If those texts are ever parsed, I will be in the junk mail pile of their lives forever. As long as they were assholes, that is comforting.
There is a constant battle in archival science between keeping the original intended organizational structure of an archive and organizing it so it’s understandable. I tend to swing to the “makes sense” side of the line. If you needed to preserve a room for generations, would you leave the mess and preserve the general disarray? No, you’d clean it first and then sort through what is historically valuable. And yet, the overarching philosophy of archival science is to stick with the original order, no matter how flawed that may be. Except, apparently, when dealing with John Cage’s junk mail and assorted advertisements from the 1991-1992 concert scene. Then the student employee can just order it however he sees fit. If a card looks awful like it was from 1992, it was from 1992. No questions asked. I am not making history in the Archives Department, but I am deciding it. I am deciding its course, deciding a small bit of how it shall be remembered and analyzed into the future.
But I’m not kidding anybody. No one who submits a detailed request form for access to John Cage’s archives is ever going to look through this part of the Ephemera. Cage died of a stroke in August 1992. He didn’t even read most of these requests. The rest of his mail, which I was not allowed to handle, had notes and interesting details. This junk mail pile was clearly just thrown into a box and kept for later, just in case he or his partner Merce Cunningham was ever able to go watch any of these. Merce probably opened most of these letters, not wanting to waste whatever mental fortitude Cage needed to open the latest program from the New York Philharmonic. I don’t want to go all Sgt. Pepper here, but sometimes all I hope for is to have someone to save me the trouble of checking my fucking emails while I’m lying in bed with severe knee pains and skin cancer, trying to write down the last of my creative ideas before I die. I’d like to not have to check my email or, even worse, sort through my physical mail.
Merce, a legendary avant-garde dancer and a considerable artistic force in his own right, probably didn’t intend to have me sorting through John Cage’s final bits of mail. You know Merce was a Gold Star significant other because he still decided to collect all of this junk mail and consign it to some box to be saved for the generations to honor John’s memory, even if he by all rights should’ve thrown all of this away. Why he didn’t throw away the Sawchestra advertisement, the flyers from podunk universities offering regurgitated non-tonal electro-ambient compositions, the memories of a man who had tragically died of a stroke while making Merce tea, doubtlessly causing some psychological trauma that I cannot fathom, I will never understand. Some of this mail was sent after Cage died, inviting him to events as late as 1993. My desk is John Cage’s zombie letter office, full of people inviting John Cage to concerts in the hope that Hades would grant John Cage sick leave just so he could sit in their concert hall one time. Hades denied the request, possibly because this advertisement was featuring a study of Mozart and the planets, which is just a codeword for listening to a live performance of the “Jupiter” Symphony for the umpteenth time. Hades has given John Cage a recording and told him not to bother coming back from the dead for it, as it would be a waste of his time.
