Welcome to The World is Teeming

If you are reading this post, you are one of the first, welcome.

The intent of this blog is to share the plethora of amazing things in this world, from art and design to natural phenomena and people. These things in short are what makes my world go round. I hope I inspire you readers to check back in again from time to time and share your thoughts.

"The world is teeming; anything can happen." John Cage (Silence: Lectures and Writings).

John Cage: Every Day is A Good Day

That's right, the title of this blog came from the John Cage quote above. The brilliance of John Cage cannot be understood in a solitary blog post, the man was a genius. But, I will do my best to at least explain my enthusiasm for a man who helped to shape my artist practice and general enthusiasm for life.

I was first introduced to the work of John Cage in a music appreciation class in college. We listened to a recording of 4' 33". For those of you unfamiliar with this work,  John Cage, around 1948, sat down at a piano with a full orchestra and continued to sit in silence for four minutes and 33 seconds. Silence of course not really being silence, but a performance of sound; people shuffling in their chairs, breathing, coughing, sniffing, etc. This composition has been performed many times since and as you can imagine it varies every time. And variation, or "chance operations" is a truly Cagean passion. Much like his pal Marcel Duchamp, Cage took the artist's hand out of the work and let the mark making, or in the previous case, the music making, happen through chance.

One great example of his work with chance operations is the work he did at Crown Point Press in San Francisco. In this visual work he used chance operations using the I Ching, and a variety of inks, and mark making to create many works that were created by these chance equations. The results are amazingly beautiful and fascinating, abstract expressionism from a somewhat anonymous source.

And the amazing things he accomplished in his life go on and on....It's amazing to me how amazing people find other amazing people and the amazing things that they participate in.  Black Mountain College, Buckminster Fuller, Merce Cunningham, Happenings.... I really feel like I might be doing the man a disservice by posting such a brief bit of information here. But, let it be understood that we all would be better off in this world if we learned a little from Mr. John Cage.