theater of static — part i
I am falling in love with static; that terrible hiss and pop on the radio one hears in-between stations. If you examine the lives so many people who have, through sheer force of ego and alcohol alone, given us so much art that resembles static in shape and sound, it is a wonder why more of us don't simply hit the bottle, sniff glue, get high off those fat magic markers and write down whatever it is we are experiencing at the moment.
After all, it is not so much whether you have talent or an ear and eye for beauty or even (as in my case) the ability to string two notes together to make anything resembling harmony — no, the key is simply to put your work forward as how it is suppose to be and let others eat it up. It is not so much the 1960s idea of Theater of Pain, rather it is Theater of Static; this is a white noise age, after all; one that lives by the creed "everything must mean something," which, when you get down to it roughly translates as: "who are you to judge that this isn't brilliant?"
So let us not judge. Let us just put things forth as the way they should be. Here I am following in the footsteps of John Cage, one of my favorite functional alcoholics. For those that the name doesn't ring a bell Cage's greatest achievement was his 1952 composition 4′33″. Simply put, it was an entire performance where not a single note was played. "Although 4′33″ in fact consists of the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed, it is frequently erroneously perceived as four minutes, thirty three seconds of silence."
Silence, static, they are simply the opposite of each other. The point here is not whether we should or should not champion Cage and Cage's performances; it happened, it's over and now it is part of history (end of discussion). No, the point is that because of what Cage did, tuning the radio into endless silence as it were, that frees us now from having to spend years and years developing that classical base that allowed performers in the past to experiment from. Why bother? After all, this is how it is suppose to be; if it sounds or looks disjointed or boring or even hideous the problem lies with the viewer and listener, not with the composition and composer.
Perhaps our new creed can be: if it can't be done in twenty minutes why bother? … after all, who are we to say that is not brilliant?