Honolulu Lite
The sound
of silence
has its price
If you've OD'd on serious political news and commentary over the past several days and are looking for a little peace and quiet, you've come to the right place. Let's enjoy a few moments of silence. Just sit back and let your eyes scan a letterless landscape and your ears hear absolutely nothing. Ready. Here goes: (
| .)Wasn't that nice? Kind of relaxing to enjoy silence every once in a while. The trouble is, I could be sued for providing you with those several lines of silence. Especially if I told you that I am providing that silence in honor of a dead avant-garde composer named John Cage.
Cage, it turns out, actually copyrighted silence. Cage wrote a piece called "4'33"," a wildly obscure melody in three parts, one of which consisted of 4-1/2 minutes of silence. That's where the "avant-garde" description comes in. If Cage had just filled that four minutes in with regular old musical notes, he wouldn't be considered avant-garde, just run-of-the-mill-garde and probably not very well paid run-of-the-mill-garde at that.
Personally, I think he was just being annoying and lazy. But when it comes to artists, annoying and lazy translates to brilliant and rambunctious.
I ONCE LEFT three-fourths of a column empty. I was trying to demonstrate the concept of the "uku pau" system of writing in a brilliant and rambunctious way. Uku pau is the system in which, when you are done with your work, you stop working. The garbage men used to do it. They would finish an entire shift of picking up rubbish in a couple of hours. Then they were pau for the day.
When I demonstrated the concept by leaving most of my column blank one day (I wrote as much as I had to say and then I was pau), the editors went nuts. They wanted to fill the empty space with something. I said, no, that was my space, even if it was empty. It was a brilliant and rambunctious statement. They said it was stupid and annoying and I was just being lazy.
It's not easy being an artist.
That's what musician Mike Batt found out. According to a wire story, Batt included on his recent CD a piece called "A Minute's Silence." He gave Cage partial credit for the idea.
Cage's heirs protested that Batt's silence was plagiarized from Cage's silence. (If that sounds stupid to you, try typing it.) But the really stupid thing is that the heirs won their lawsuit and Batt had to pay Cage's relatives an undisclosed amount of money for stealing silence.
So I'm sticking my neck out giving you the few lines of silence at the top of this column. But I think I'm OK legally because my silence is actually a parody of Cage's silence. Convincing the editors to leave those lines blank is another matter.
Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com