The Three Muses was a classy shop where Ezra Rubin sold books and records and Rae Rubin showed local pottery and sculpture and had a little gallery. It was a natural hangout for what we deemed ourselves, quite correctly: an unusually cultured bunch of fourteen-year-olds. Ezra and Rae not only, with shopkeepers’ acumen, welcomed our daily visits, although they sometimes turned The Three Muses into a rather more boisterous establishment than they would have wished, but they took it upon themselves to educate us.
Ezra played the role of teacher, mentor, since books and music interested us. The visual arts did not; there, our appreciation remained rudimentary. We knew enough to judge for ourselves whether a painting was good or not, but not enough to explain why. After The Old Man and the Sea appeared in Life we argued for weeks about whether it was a masterpiece or a self-parody written for booze money; we could debate about whose Fifth was better, Toscanini’s or Furtwangler’s; but we could not have told you what the difference was between a Rembrandt and a Hals.
The Three Muses was equipped with a couple of soundproof listening rooms where prospective buyers could preview records before buying them. When we loitered in, after school or on lazy afternoons on week-ends or during vacations, Ezra often would have a new record for us to listen to – the Pathétique by this enfant terrible, Leonard Bernstein, or Ella Fitzgerald singing Gershwin, or a performance, recorded in Moscow (!) of Khachaturian’s Violin Concerto with a Russian orchestra and a Russian violinist who not only was Jewish, with the first name of David, but who ingeniously had found a classy way of spicing up his fiddling with the timbres of Eastern European schmaltz, or Stan Kenton’s futuristic New Concepts of Artistry in Rhythm, which I, for one, was prejudiced against before I heard it (my prejudice was soon confirmed) because of its absurd title.
Ezra would lead us into one of the listening booths, one or two of us – two was the limit set by a polite sign on the door – cue up the record, drop a wise word, “listen for the canon in ‘Invention for Guitar and Trumpet’”, and leave us alone. We felt no obligation to buy what he had chosen for us, although we often did. If not, Ezra would slide the disk back into is slipcase – LP’s were not yet encased in cellophane – and put it back in place in its rack.
The Rubins were one of Poughkeepsie’s leading Jewish families, a status conferred by the happy combination of a fairly numerous generation backed up by a healthy family business. But Ezra and Rae Rubin were not part of that social circle. It was not that they were shunned – not at all. My mother would spend an hour or more at The Three Muses as Rae helped her choose a vase for the front hall table or a picture to hang behind the piano; my father would drop by to see if Ezra had a book he wanted which was not on The Book of the Month Club list. But when the Rubins and the Reiflers and the Rosens and the Simons played cards or golf, had parties, or went out to French restaurants, Ezra and Rae were not included.
My parents frowned on gossip. If they did indulge in gossip in our presence, they did so in a patois of French and Latin. When, one night at the dinner table, in a supposedly casual conversation they mentioned that Ezra and Rae had been and perhaps still were “card-carrying party members,” it clearly was meant for my ears. Now, presumably, I would assume the attitude of the rest of the community: They were a nice, intelligent couple, with a shop that made Poughkeepsie a bit less provincial and a bit more urbane, but still...
The effect on me of this new information was to cast a cloud over my visits to The Three Muses. For a while I felt an embarrassing inhibition when confronted with Ezra’s enthusiasms. That soon changed, though. Now that my attention was focused on what was being said about Ezra and Rae and how it was being said, I came to realize that the cloud that had been cast over Ezra and Rae was not a dark, ominous one, but a glowing one, a hallowed one, not unlike a halo.
My mother was what today would be called a moderate Democrat and my father a moderate Republican – their votes often cancelled each other out, for Truman and Dewy, for example. But they shared the same bottom line, and it was the same bottom line that was Ezra and Rae’s bottom line, best summed up as a chicken in every pot. On paper, communism might seem like a good way to achieve that, but all you had to do was look around at all the different kinds of people there were in Poughkeepsie, much less the world, to see that it could never work. Even the Bolsheviks had realized that, right off the bat.
Ezra and Rae were not regarded as subversives or Russian plants or conspirators, they were seen as the doughty upholders of a lost cause, as devotees of an unrealistic ideal, as anchorites of a Utopian Good. As soon as this became clear, my relationship with Ezra returned to normal. Now, added to my gratitude to him for treating me as an intelligent adult, was the cocky satisfaction of taking part in a ménage which my parents held in arm’s length awe.
At that time, the Red Menace had not yet been put in perspective and the poison of McCarthyism was reaching into almost every aspect of life. The Three Muses was a hermitage, a sanctuary, where the steadfast emblems of civilization – books, music, art – were offered as absolution from the sin of fretting about the televised antics of a bunch of boors and bigots. Ezra and Rae were the sophisticated, gracious, intelligent keepers of this temple, revered but – and this was their sacrifice – taboo.
I can recall only one time when Ezra pressed subversive material on me.
The modern jazz that Ezra introduced us to – Dave Brubeck, Stan Getz, Lee Konitz – was radical and disruptive (come to think of it, it was known as “progressive” jazz), but it wasn’t subversive. Serious critics in serious periodicals felt perfectly at ease promoting it. One day, though, Ezra took a 10-inch album out from behind the counter and I could tell from the glint in his eye and a touch of wickedness in his smile, that he was inviting me to mischief. “Let me know what you think,” he said, grinning, as he left me in the listening booth with Slim Gaillard.
“We would like to play a very solid number, very groovy, titled ‘The Groove Juice Special’ (heh heh).” With that parenthetical chuckle, Gaillard exploded the carapace of portentous seriousness that had surrounded the culture I had been so assiduously accumulating. Not only did Slim Gaillard subvert music – Gaillard’s “Opera in Vout (Groove Juice Symphony)” had four movements entitled “Introduzione - Pianissimo (Softly, Most Softly)”, “Recitativo E Finale (Of Much Scat)”, “Andante Contabile In Modo De Blues (C-Jam?)” and “Presto Con Stomp (With A Floy Floy)” – he subverted language.
One could argue that Gertrude Stein and Ogden Nash were also subverters of language, but the liberties they took were, ultimately, homages to literature (in Stein’s case) and to literary wit (in Nash’s case). Just as the depredations of Dali and Magritte and the insurgencies of Stravinsky and Schoenberg relied on there being an intrinsic value in what they were mocking or rebelling against, and it was not until Warhol and Cage that the essences of art and of music were questioned, so – at least in my purview – it was not until Slim Gaillard that language’s hierarchy of subject matter and its structure, based on words’ meanings, were revealed as not so sacrosanct.
Cement Mixer! Put-ti, Put-ti
Cement Mixer! Put-ti, Put-ti
Cement Mixer! Put-ti, Put-ti
A puddle o'vooty, puddle o'gooty, puddle o'scooty
Cement Mixer! Put-ti, Put-ti
Cement Mixer! Put-ti, Put-ti
Cement Mixer! Put-ti, Put-ti
A puddle o'veet! concrete
First you get some gravel, pour it in the vout
To mix a mess o' mortar you add cement and water
See the mellow roony come out, slurp, slurp, slurp
Cement Mixer! Put-ti, Put-ti
Cement Mixer! Put-ti, Put-ti
Cement Mixer! Put-ti, Put-ti
Who wants a bucket of cement?
Ezra played the role of teacher, mentor, since books and music interested us. The visual arts did not; there, our appreciation remained rudimentary. We knew enough to judge for ourselves whether a painting was good or not, but not enough to explain why. After The Old Man and the Sea appeared in Life we argued for weeks about whether it was a masterpiece or a self-parody written for booze money; we could debate about whose Fifth was better, Toscanini’s or Furtwangler’s; but we could not have told you what the difference was between a Rembrandt and a Hals.
The Three Muses was equipped with a couple of soundproof listening rooms where prospective buyers could preview records before buying them. When we loitered in, after school or on lazy afternoons on week-ends or during vacations, Ezra often would have a new record for us to listen to – the Pathétique by this enfant terrible, Leonard Bernstein, or Ella Fitzgerald singing Gershwin, or a performance, recorded in Moscow (!) of Khachaturian’s Violin Concerto with a Russian orchestra and a Russian violinist who not only was Jewish, with the first name of David, but who ingeniously had found a classy way of spicing up his fiddling with the timbres of Eastern European schmaltz, or Stan Kenton’s futuristic New Concepts of Artistry in Rhythm, which I, for one, was prejudiced against before I heard it (my prejudice was soon confirmed) because of its absurd title.
Ezra would lead us into one of the listening booths, one or two of us – two was the limit set by a polite sign on the door – cue up the record, drop a wise word, “listen for the canon in ‘Invention for Guitar and Trumpet’”, and leave us alone. We felt no obligation to buy what he had chosen for us, although we often did. If not, Ezra would slide the disk back into is slipcase – LP’s were not yet encased in cellophane – and put it back in place in its rack.
The Rubins were one of Poughkeepsie’s leading Jewish families, a status conferred by the happy combination of a fairly numerous generation backed up by a healthy family business. But Ezra and Rae Rubin were not part of that social circle. It was not that they were shunned – not at all. My mother would spend an hour or more at The Three Muses as Rae helped her choose a vase for the front hall table or a picture to hang behind the piano; my father would drop by to see if Ezra had a book he wanted which was not on The Book of the Month Club list. But when the Rubins and the Reiflers and the Rosens and the Simons played cards or golf, had parties, or went out to French restaurants, Ezra and Rae were not included.
My parents frowned on gossip. If they did indulge in gossip in our presence, they did so in a patois of French and Latin. When, one night at the dinner table, in a supposedly casual conversation they mentioned that Ezra and Rae had been and perhaps still were “card-carrying party members,” it clearly was meant for my ears. Now, presumably, I would assume the attitude of the rest of the community: They were a nice, intelligent couple, with a shop that made Poughkeepsie a bit less provincial and a bit more urbane, but still...
The effect on me of this new information was to cast a cloud over my visits to The Three Muses. For a while I felt an embarrassing inhibition when confronted with Ezra’s enthusiasms. That soon changed, though. Now that my attention was focused on what was being said about Ezra and Rae and how it was being said, I came to realize that the cloud that had been cast over Ezra and Rae was not a dark, ominous one, but a glowing one, a hallowed one, not unlike a halo.
My mother was what today would be called a moderate Democrat and my father a moderate Republican – their votes often cancelled each other out, for Truman and Dewy, for example. But they shared the same bottom line, and it was the same bottom line that was Ezra and Rae’s bottom line, best summed up as a chicken in every pot. On paper, communism might seem like a good way to achieve that, but all you had to do was look around at all the different kinds of people there were in Poughkeepsie, much less the world, to see that it could never work. Even the Bolsheviks had realized that, right off the bat.
Ezra and Rae were not regarded as subversives or Russian plants or conspirators, they were seen as the doughty upholders of a lost cause, as devotees of an unrealistic ideal, as anchorites of a Utopian Good. As soon as this became clear, my relationship with Ezra returned to normal. Now, added to my gratitude to him for treating me as an intelligent adult, was the cocky satisfaction of taking part in a ménage which my parents held in arm’s length awe.
At that time, the Red Menace had not yet been put in perspective and the poison of McCarthyism was reaching into almost every aspect of life. The Three Muses was a hermitage, a sanctuary, where the steadfast emblems of civilization – books, music, art – were offered as absolution from the sin of fretting about the televised antics of a bunch of boors and bigots. Ezra and Rae were the sophisticated, gracious, intelligent keepers of this temple, revered but – and this was their sacrifice – taboo.
I can recall only one time when Ezra pressed subversive material on me.
The modern jazz that Ezra introduced us to – Dave Brubeck, Stan Getz, Lee Konitz – was radical and disruptive (come to think of it, it was known as “progressive” jazz), but it wasn’t subversive. Serious critics in serious periodicals felt perfectly at ease promoting it. One day, though, Ezra took a 10-inch album out from behind the counter and I could tell from the glint in his eye and a touch of wickedness in his smile, that he was inviting me to mischief. “Let me know what you think,” he said, grinning, as he left me in the listening booth with Slim Gaillard.
“We would like to play a very solid number, very groovy, titled ‘The Groove Juice Special’ (heh heh).” With that parenthetical chuckle, Gaillard exploded the carapace of portentous seriousness that had surrounded the culture I had been so assiduously accumulating. Not only did Slim Gaillard subvert music – Gaillard’s “Opera in Vout (Groove Juice Symphony)” had four movements entitled “Introduzione - Pianissimo (Softly, Most Softly)”, “Recitativo E Finale (Of Much Scat)”, “Andante Contabile In Modo De Blues (C-Jam?)” and “Presto Con Stomp (With A Floy Floy)” – he subverted language.
One could argue that Gertrude Stein and Ogden Nash were also subverters of language, but the liberties they took were, ultimately, homages to literature (in Stein’s case) and to literary wit (in Nash’s case). Just as the depredations of Dali and Magritte and the insurgencies of Stravinsky and Schoenberg relied on there being an intrinsic value in what they were mocking or rebelling against, and it was not until Warhol and Cage that the essences of art and of music were questioned, so – at least in my purview – it was not until Slim Gaillard that language’s hierarchy of subject matter and its structure, based on words’ meanings, were revealed as not so sacrosanct.
Cement Mixer! Put-ti, Put-ti
Cement Mixer! Put-ti, Put-ti
Cement Mixer! Put-ti, Put-ti
A puddle o'vooty, puddle o'gooty, puddle o'scooty
Cement Mixer! Put-ti, Put-ti
Cement Mixer! Put-ti, Put-ti
Cement Mixer! Put-ti, Put-ti
A puddle o'veet! concrete
First you get some gravel, pour it in the vout
To mix a mess o' mortar you add cement and water
See the mellow roony come out, slurp, slurp, slurp
Cement Mixer! Put-ti, Put-ti
Cement Mixer! Put-ti, Put-ti
Cement Mixer! Put-ti, Put-ti
Who wants a bucket of cement?