Mike Bongiorno
Lascia o Raddoppia

The chronicles tell of a penniless John Cage wandering around Milan recording things. Unreachable things like Fontana Mix, probably. Guest of Berio and his soprano partner, you can be John Cage, but after three days you're met with coughs and universal non-verbal communications along the lines of: "When are you going back home?"
The problem was that John Cage didn't have a penny to face the transcontinental flight, and it seems that Berio, the soprano, and Umberto Eco encouraged him to participate in Lascia o raddoppia.
It is said that Cathy Berberian (the soprano) was patching up her modest dress just before going on air.

Newspapers of the time reported Cage as "the American of mushrooms" because he answered about mushrooms. The Rai archive hasn't preserved even a single copy of those episodes: they must have taken those tapes and recorded over them with L'Eredità.

Decades of enduring Luigi Nono and the pseudo-proletarian tale about the heritage of historical memory, and they take a unique document and place it next to two unused dot matrix printers, and away it goes, towards oblivion, indifference, the undifferentiated, you know.

Cage loved to perform during the episodes, to the bewilderment and amusement of the audience and especially Mike, who bid farewell to the American artist like this.

A struggle between two great extreme titans. I don't feel like discussing Mike as an esthete of musicological gnoseology, yet at Superflash, when he introduced the singers, he knew how to set up the album plug with the charisma of a salesman capable of making you believe Califano's best of was the album of the century: "Think, dear listeners, that our Franco has recorded, indeed, a long-playing, a disc, containing all his most famous and beloved songs."

His voice and non-verbal communication, with the collaboration of some Masonic author, made you want to buy Califano's record, even if it was just to eat it.

The only one to understand that Cage was making history even on Lascia o Raddoppia was Giacinto Scelsi, who turned on the television for the first and perhaps only times in his life to watch him on Rai. He was enthusiastic about the choice. Well, to call Giacinto Scelsi enthusiastic, who wrote drones with his elbow propped on the piano key in the middle of depression, might be an exaggeration. Let's say he appreciated it.

I don't even entertain the reductio ad italicum capra capra, because in the States, much more attentive on the historical memory front, they preserved Cage's guest appearance on the most popular show of those years there: "I've got a secret"; and the scenario is more or less the same: giggles, hilarity and jokes, while Cage plays the flowerpot in the bathtub. The fact is that for John Cage, those laughs were an integral part of the work, as much as those "shhhh" from the pseudo-experts crowding more cultured audiences.

This might be enough, without delving too much into generative processes, experimentalism, avant-garde, to explain the greatness of Cage, his way of going beyond malicious self-pity, the one that generates classism. Unfortunately, there were rumors about some of his non-conforming sexual tendencies, and therefore, the academies preferred not to consider him for a Nobel Peace Prize. Nono, who showed a great love for classism, said he preferred Mina and Rita Pavone over him.

I believe a man capable of setting through art, a form of dialogue able to overcome dualisms and divisions, feuds and struggles, would deserve the Nobel and much more.
I think Cage's thought has dissolved, has never been truly realized, and we have returned to divisions between good and bad, cultured and stupid, useful and useless, and other hodgepodges of stuff. We've returned to the five steps of rhetoric, to discourse as an indispensable element of the human being. People who know and people who don't know crap. Maybe it happens that when you don't grasp the meaning of an avant-garde, you go back like in a board game. And here we are, in full Romanticism, with egoistically romantic aesthetic parameters. "I like": the distinctive trait of our era. The era of likes. Cage tried another path, and deep down, his smile is etched in memory while Mike teases him a bit, generating a series of likes, fathers of Facebook, televoting, improvised opinionism, and lurking populist consensus. Even when our paths seem uphill, but we believe in what we want to communicate, we learn to meet the whistles and jeers that life will reserve for us with the calmest of smiles.