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Even though I probably should be, I'm still not very interested in classical music, but Alex Ross always manages to make reading about it extremely interesting. His piece on John Cage in the Oct. 4 New Yorker (behind the wall) draws all kinds of connections, positioning Cage as an innovator in the music world similar to what was going on in visual arts and explaining that this is why he's always been accepted more readily by the latter crowd than the former. He also has an eye for the interesting detail, like this one:

By the end of the fifties, however, Cage's financial situation had improved, though not because of his music. After moving to Stony Point, he began collecting mushrooms during walks in the woods. Within a few year, he had mastered the mushroom literature and co-founded the New York Mycological Society. He supplied mushrooms to various élite restaurant, including the Four Seasons. In 1959, while working at the R.A.I. Studio of Musical Phonology, a pioneering electronic-music studio, in Milan, he was invited on a game show called "Lascia o Raddopia?"--a "Twenty One"-style program in which contestants were asked questions on a subject of their choice. Each week, Cage answered, with deadly accuracy, increasingly obscure questions about mushrooms. On his final appearance, he was asked to list "the twenty-four kinds of white-spore mushrooms listed in Atkinson." . . . Cage named them all, in alphabetical order, and won eight thousand dollars.

This is the same issue I'd skipped ahead to already to mention Denby's piece on Fincher, and I'd forgotten I'd dog-eared a page to remember a particular passage that annoyed me even more than the rest of it:

Sympathy for the devil has always been a productive mood for an artist, and particularly for Fincher; he could probably make a thrilling version of Milton's "Paradise Lost," with Satan reigning heroically in Hell.

By "thrilling," do you mean "blasphemous and wrong"? Never mind that Alex Proyas seems poised to beat him to the punch. It's not a good thing when Satan says, "better to reign in hell than serve in heaven," and he's not a hero, unless you think pride isn't a sin.