The First Meeting of the Satie Society

本片由约翰·凯奇导演约翰·凯奇主演，于未知美国上映！

Certainly one of the most influential figures in the music of the 20th century, Cage was active in practically all forms of art, including literature. While excerpts of Cage reading his poetry appear in basically every documentary on the man, this very rare private recording is the only audiovisual document of a complete lecture by Cage I ever came across. It is unavailable on the web (not to speak of a commercial release) in any form, to the best of my knowledge. This is an unedited video recording of a lecture that Cage held around 1987. The exact time and place of this performance is unknown, so I might be off by one or two years. The only thing that is sure is that Cage is reading a text he introduces as "The First Meeting of the Satie Society". That piece was briefly available on a 2 LP-set by Edition Michael Frauenlob Bauer in the 1990s, which is now one of the most sought after Cage recordings. But don't confuse it with what Cage does here. "The First Meeting of the Satie Society" in its full form is a multi-layered work involving drawings, performances of Satie's music, some original musical works by Cage, and readings. This performance by Cage naturally only involves reading, and as he explains at the beginning of this lecture, what we hear is only one part of a collection of texts Cage created as imaginary presents to Satie. This text is a 'Writing Through' Thoreau's "Essay on the Duty of Civil Disobedience" in the form of mesostics, a poetic form created by Cage which is similar to the classical acrostic, only that the 'keyword' (in this case the name of ERIK SATIE) appears in the middle of the lines rather than at the beginning. The complex systems of rules that Cage set for himself in creating this text of mesostics results in a fragmentation of Thoreau's original text, making it a work of 'meaningless', or perhaps 'multiply meaningful' poetry, or, after all, a piece of music.