History Lessons

I can't decide which I enjoyed more, the dead musician or the dead artist.

Garnett's provided the fueling up required for the next six hours with a farmer's salad and coconut cake with my gang of four.

From there we headed west to University of Richmond for the first of two John Cage Centennial Concerts.

Arriving as the lights were dimmed, we found seats in the fourth row and almost at once I heard someone hiss, "Karen!"

It was one of my favorite sculptors saying hello, so we touched fingers a la Michelangelo and turned our eyes forward.

A half a dozen members of Gamelan Raga Kusuma doing music Cage had written for artist Marcel Duchamp and a film of swirling images and some of the films Cage had scored for other artists friends got things started.

Next came a dining room scene with four people seated and making music with silverware and hands.

Then there was modern dance accompanied by a "prepared"  piano, which we had to guess meant a piano with something laying across the strings, given the sound.

Cage's most important work according to him was 4:33, a piece in which the pianist comes out to play and doesn't.

The piece is about the ambient sound of the room, the audience, whatever and not everyone gets it.

Personally, I was thrilled to experience it after having only read about it and I can only imagine how shocking it must have seemed when first played in 1952.

We got more dancing accompanied by another pianist banging on the wooden part of the piano and a singer chanting.

Members of eighth blackbird came out and played tin cans, piano and playback and we finished with a pianist actually playing piano while imagery of Cage's drawings and paintings rolled by the screen.

It was an awesome sampler of Cage's body of work and a fitting tribute on the occasion of his centennial.

Seconds after the performance ended, the lights came up and immediately a Dixieland band started wailing from the balcony.

It was the signal that the Musicircus, another Cage creation, had begun.

Cage's rules were one venue, 100 musicians, one hour, free and open to the public.

"You won't hear a thing, you'll hear everything" Cage famously said about the event and it's a perfect description.

I go every year to see who's playing and to savor the cacophony of so many musicians playing different music so closely together.

I've been to the musicircus many times, first when it was at the old Chop Suey and since then at the Visual Arts Center.

This year's move to UR was intriguing because of the myriad possibilities for where musicians could play.

Exiting the room, we began stumbling over and into musicians in every nook and cranny.

No BS's Lance Koehler was paired with Josh Small at the bottom of a staircase.

I found Scott Burton playing guitar and Reggie Pace turning knobs and holding a mic in a hallway upstairs.

During one of my trips downstairs, I came upon Scott Clark drumming and Jason Scott on sax tucked into the stairwell.

Pianist Joanne King was plinkling away at a toy piano near a door.

Sax players David Hood, Marcus Tenney and John Lilley held court in another hallway.

There was even a bluegrass duo on the freight elevator, possibly the coolest location of all.

I spent the full hour roaming Booker Hall and listening to music fade and come into earshot, sometimes finding that groups had morphed since I'd seen them fifteen minutes earlier.

There really is nothing like the musicircus for a truly original hour of music and we should all bow down to drummer Brian Jones who organizes the event for Richmond every year.

Just one more example of what an amazing scene we have here.

When that was over, I ditched the rest of my gang and drove to Carytown to meet a friend for the French Film Festival.

The last thing I expected was so many other people willing to wait in a block-long line in 30-degree weather to see a film about the painter Renoir at 10:10 on a school night.

Fortunately the wait was less than a quarter of an hour and since I ran into the man-about-town and discussed the Latin Ballet, I had good company while I shivered.

Inside where it was warm, I found my girlfriend and after securing popcorn, we climbed over people to score two seats front and center.

Asking me about my earlier plans, she observed, "Where do you get the energy?"

If I knew the answer to that, I'd bottle it and sell it and give up my life of abject poverty.

How could I resist a film set in the sun-soaked French Riviera with azure-blue water and a beautiful young model who re-energizes the 70+ painter at a time when he was still grieving for his recently dead wife?

Not this art history geek.

But it wasn't just the senior Renoir's story because his son Jean came home from WW I wounded and looking to recover only to meet his father's muse and fall in love.

Since she wants to act and he's interested in movie-making, it's a match made in heaven.

At least until he decides to re-enlist and his brothers-in-arms tell him film-making is a bad idea for a Frenchman, getting a lot of chuckles from the audience.

But even if there hadn't been the story of two creative men, one at the beginning and one at the end of his creative life, the film was the best kind of eye candy.

Shimmering waterfalls, picnics in tall grass, food so sensual it was almost obscene and always the young girl's translucent skin as she posed for the painter through endless sunny days.

It was a beautiful way to end the evening and a fitting start to the next three days of French film we have in store.

I'd heard a thing. I'd heard everything. I'd seen art. I'd seen love.

It seemed like enough for one night..