Click on each title to go to a blog page with audio tracks.
MORNING
Oh what a beautiful morning, oh what a beautiful day, I’ve got a wonderful feeling, everything’s going my way. That was the song I had just composed in a dreamed and which I proudly premiered to my mother when she came to get me out of bed. I may even have been in a crib and she would have had to lift me out, since this was still in the stucco Spanish bungalow from which we moved in my third year. My little room looked out onto the front lawn, on which I was never to step foot since it was just a steep grassy slope down to a rocky precipice ten feet or so above the street, the name of which was Haight Avenue Extension.
It was cruel that everyone else, except for the Luftreichs, who lived across from us, even everyone in stories, lived on a street, a lane, an avenue, a road, or even a way, but never on an extension. And the names of their streets, if not downright jolly, like Cherry Street, were comfortingly evocative, like Collegeview Avenue, or practical, like Main Street or, at worse, meaningless, like Forbus Street. I not only lived on what, for all I knew, was the only extension that was also an address in the entire world, but one which was named after one of the worst things there could be, and it made no difference that I had been told as soon as, probably before, I could grasp the concept, that our street was spelled differently and named after a person. So much the worse for him.
After I had sung my little composition, “How clever of my beamish boy!” is not what my mother said. With the precise honesty which came naturally to her and my father because it was a necessary concomitant of their elevated self-esteem, she told me that I had not made up the song, as I had assumed, but that it often could be heard on the radio. It was not long, an hour or two, before what had been the beautiful morning to a beautiful day became a morning of dismay when, thanks to a disc jockey on WKIP, my mother’s assertion was confirmed. It was my first inkling of the existence of the subconscious, or at least of one particular subconscious, and a cheating one at that.
~~~~~~~
MORNING
Oh what a beautiful morning, oh what a beautiful day, I’ve got a wonderful feeling, everything’s going my way. That was the song I had just composed in a dreamed and which I proudly premiered to my mother when she came to get me out of bed. I may even have been in a crib and she would have had to lift me out, since this was still in the stucco Spanish bungalow from which we moved in my third year. My little room looked out onto the front lawn, on which I was never to step foot since it was just a steep grassy slope down to a rocky precipice ten feet or so above the street, the name of which was Haight Avenue Extension.
It was cruel that everyone else, except for the Luftreichs, who lived across from us, even everyone in stories, lived on a street, a lane, an avenue, a road, or even a way, but never on an extension. And the names of their streets, if not downright jolly, like Cherry Street, were comfortingly evocative, like Collegeview Avenue, or practical, like Main Street or, at worse, meaningless, like Forbus Street. I not only lived on what, for all I knew, was the only extension that was also an address in the entire world, but one which was named after one of the worst things there could be, and it made no difference that I had been told as soon as, probably before, I could grasp the concept, that our street was spelled differently and named after a person. So much the worse for him.
After I had sung my little composition, “How clever of my beamish boy!” is not what my mother said. With the precise honesty which came naturally to her and my father because it was a necessary concomitant of their elevated self-esteem, she told me that I had not made up the song, as I had assumed, but that it often could be heard on the radio. It was not long, an hour or two, before what had been the beautiful morning to a beautiful day became a morning of dismay when, thanks to a disc jockey on WKIP, my mother’s assertion was confirmed. It was my first inkling of the existence of the subconscious, or at least of one particular subconscious, and a cheating one at that.
~~~~~~~
DOATS
Unhappily (I suppose), I have not achieved that pitch of notoriety at which I might be asked by an interviewer from The Paris Review when did I first know I was going to be a writer, a question which, as if not marred enough already by its high-toned banality also carries the stigma of ambiguity, since “to know” drags along behind it a clamorous troop of ill-sorted and sometimes antithetical meanings. Infrequently, perhaps only once, one early Spring afternoon in nineteen-seventy-something, I “knew” with a precision which no lexicographer, much less a pale, crew-cut intern for The Paris Review with a ring through her tongue, could have fathomed, the meaning of “to know,” although I could not have told you afterward what it was.
Thanks to that ambiguity, I am free to assign the honor of that primal moment to any one of a number of different occasions: reading the final paragraph of Stuart Little and not believing at first that I had come to the end of the book and thus exultantly realizing that the writer of a story can do anything he wants; or, as my Uncle Ben read Treasure Island to me when I had the measles, finding myself indentifying with a boy much more heroic than myself; or coming to believe -- this would be much later, of course, and turn out to be unfounded – that writers were guaranteed exciting sex lives. But the first inkling I had of the potentiality of literature was not only before I could make sense of the printed symbols that I knew somehow stood for the words that people spoke, but before it even dawned on me that their intelligibility was based on any sort of order.
The revelation that it is the linear arrangement of words that refine their definitions into meaning, and that this arrangement is flexible, was the most useful lesson I learned from my father’s youngest brothers, Uncle Aaron and Uncle Norman.
Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey
A kiddley divey too, wouldn’t you?
The song, Mairzy Doats, already was caught up in my toddler synapses, thanks to its seemingly endless repetition on the seemingly ubiquitous radio, when Uncle Aaron and Uncle Norman sat me down and explained it to me. It took a while, but suddenly – of course! Mares eat oats. Does eat oats. Little lambs eat ivy. A kid will eat ivy too. These four simple sentences were shutters which my uncles flung open to reveal a new landscape – the one we, you and I, inhabit at this moment.
This was a new world – not just a daydream world in which everything one knew, up to that point, was available for arrangement in any way one wished, nor the remembered world in which, for example, my mother admonished me not to eat the clover leaves on the lawn (which I had found to have a pleasant sour taste) because dogs may have wee-weed on them, nor the anticipated world, in which my father would soon come home and divert all the attention from me to him, nor the mythological world where, for example, you knew about the witch before Hansel and Gretel did, nor those flat, colorless, strange worlds in the folio of American drawings, the only book of artworks to be found in the Spanish bungalow on Haight Avenue Extension (probably it had been a gift), of which nothing could be known but what was there before one’s eyes. My uncles’ decipherment of Mairzy Doats opened up to me the verbal universe, a universe of infinite possibilities, in which one could dictate a unique reality by the manner in which one chose to proceed through it. Of course, as my uncles patiently explained, you first had to know what a mare was and what a doe was.
~~~~~~~
Unhappily (I suppose), I have not achieved that pitch of notoriety at which I might be asked by an interviewer from The Paris Review when did I first know I was going to be a writer, a question which, as if not marred enough already by its high-toned banality also carries the stigma of ambiguity, since “to know” drags along behind it a clamorous troop of ill-sorted and sometimes antithetical meanings. Infrequently, perhaps only once, one early Spring afternoon in nineteen-seventy-something, I “knew” with a precision which no lexicographer, much less a pale, crew-cut intern for The Paris Review with a ring through her tongue, could have fathomed, the meaning of “to know,” although I could not have told you afterward what it was.
Thanks to that ambiguity, I am free to assign the honor of that primal moment to any one of a number of different occasions: reading the final paragraph of Stuart Little and not believing at first that I had come to the end of the book and thus exultantly realizing that the writer of a story can do anything he wants; or, as my Uncle Ben read Treasure Island to me when I had the measles, finding myself indentifying with a boy much more heroic than myself; or coming to believe -- this would be much later, of course, and turn out to be unfounded – that writers were guaranteed exciting sex lives. But the first inkling I had of the potentiality of literature was not only before I could make sense of the printed symbols that I knew somehow stood for the words that people spoke, but before it even dawned on me that their intelligibility was based on any sort of order.
The revelation that it is the linear arrangement of words that refine their definitions into meaning, and that this arrangement is flexible, was the most useful lesson I learned from my father’s youngest brothers, Uncle Aaron and Uncle Norman.
Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey
A kiddley divey too, wouldn’t you?
The song, Mairzy Doats, already was caught up in my toddler synapses, thanks to its seemingly endless repetition on the seemingly ubiquitous radio, when Uncle Aaron and Uncle Norman sat me down and explained it to me. It took a while, but suddenly – of course! Mares eat oats. Does eat oats. Little lambs eat ivy. A kid will eat ivy too. These four simple sentences were shutters which my uncles flung open to reveal a new landscape – the one we, you and I, inhabit at this moment.
This was a new world – not just a daydream world in which everything one knew, up to that point, was available for arrangement in any way one wished, nor the remembered world in which, for example, my mother admonished me not to eat the clover leaves on the lawn (which I had found to have a pleasant sour taste) because dogs may have wee-weed on them, nor the anticipated world, in which my father would soon come home and divert all the attention from me to him, nor the mythological world where, for example, you knew about the witch before Hansel and Gretel did, nor those flat, colorless, strange worlds in the folio of American drawings, the only book of artworks to be found in the Spanish bungalow on Haight Avenue Extension (probably it had been a gift), of which nothing could be known but what was there before one’s eyes. My uncles’ decipherment of Mairzy Doats opened up to me the verbal universe, a universe of infinite possibilities, in which one could dictate a unique reality by the manner in which one chose to proceed through it. Of course, as my uncles patiently explained, you first had to know what a mare was and what a doe was.
~~~~~~~
DIALECTIC
I very early learned to take disillusionment in stride. By the time the luxurious indolence posited by Row Row Row your Boat was displaced, one day in kindergarten, by the frantic excitement of singing the song as a round, and the premise of life-as-a-dream was dashed in a clamor of “rows” and “gentlys” and “streams,” forcing the mind to focus on words as sounds, sans meaning, I already was resigned to having to endure what promised to be a never-ending series of shattered certainties.
On a Hegelian level, every negation is meant to have its corresponding new and happy actuality. Most of the time, I had a hard time discovering what that was. Not so, however, with the canonic antithesis to the lovely barcarolle of the solitary oarsman. The overturning of the appealing individualism of row your boat merrily, life is but a dream, by the rigid totalitarianism of the canon form was more than compensated for by the pleasure of participating in a cooperative effort to create something beautiful, something merrily beautiful. The deeper meaning of the song may have been lost, but knowing what my duty was (not to begin singing until the children over there had sung “stream” and the children over there had sung “boat” and not to get mixed up) gave a surprising new Aristotelian slant to existence.
There was one problem with Row Row Row your Boat sung as a round: despite its admirable formal structure, it lacked a satisfying dénouement. Either a finis was arbitrarily imposed by gestures from our teacher who, since after all we were only five-year-olds, was never able to coordinate us into a coda that was not ragged and disorderly, or our singing simply petered out as the more easily diverted lost interest.
Here was the other side of dialectic, a hint of the chaos that lay in wait if a synthesis were to fail. It was a fascinating refinement of the dichotomy of form and content that I had discovered in Mairzy Doats.
~~~~~~~
COMMOSHIEIGHNOO
Our family attended Vassar Temple – so named, with the assimilative fervor of its Reformed Jewish founders, after its location on Vassar Street. In the same assimilative mood, its weekly religious instruction for children was called Sunday School.
A Sunday School teacher or the rabbi surely must have passed on to us, as a matter of interest, if not as an element of faith, the literal meaning of the words of the sprightly hymn, Ein Kelohainu. But unlike the happy picture-book animal world that could be discovered in the cubist text of Mairzy Dotes, the revealed mysteries of Ein Kelohainu had no connection to the world I knew or wished for and – to use a favorite phrase of exasperation of my mother’s – went in one ear and out the other.
What Ein Kelohainu lacked in interest and wit compared with Mairzy Dotes, it gained in conviviality. The exuberance allowed – encouraged, in fact – in belting it out was a relatively exciting experience in the diurnal round of middle-class Jewish eight-year-olds in Poughkeepsie in the post-war Forties. Not only did hallooing Ein Kelohainu erase, momentarily, the wary anxiety I usually felt among a group of peers I did not know all that well (my friends’ parents all were Conservative Jews, and thus were members of Temple Beth- El) but, because its language was so peculiar, it was like going crazy in costume.
There was a catch, though. The lunacy broke down and reality glared through when we reached one particular phrase: ch’moshienu. These six syllables marred the mindlessness and gleefulness of the Ein Kelohainu experience because in them I heard the word “commotion.”
“Commotion” was another of my mother’s expressions of exasperation. She was aware that a certain degree of high spirits was a sign of pediatric mental health – an ongoing concern of hers, beset, as she was, with two seemingly deliberately moody children. She used “commotion” to describe a level of physical activity and/or vocalization that was not enough to be forbidden, but was enough to get on her nerves. “That’s enough commotion for now!” she would cry – or something to that effect.
It was so typical of life – even then I knew it – that in the midst of a warbling Dionysian fellowship a twinge of self-consciousness was sure to intrude.
~~~~~~~
OCEAN
Excluding Mother Goose rhymes and such melodic strands of our cultural DNA as The Farmer in the Dell and Row, Row Row Your Boat, whose “life is but a dream” became my introduction to the wisdom of the East (although I did not know it at the time), and Oh What a Beautiful Morning, which somehow sprang from my toddler unconsciousness without ever being learnt, this was the first real song I was taught to sing:
My Bonnie lies over the ocean,
My Bonnie lies over the sea,
My Bonnie lies over the ocean,
Oh, bring back my Bonnie to me.
Bring back, bring back,
Bring back my Bonnie to me, to me.
Bring back, bring back,
Oh, bring back my Bonnie to me,
It was a real song in the sense that none of the other children I knew sang it and in the sense that it was my first sophisticated song. It was apparent to me, as it was not, yet, for The Farmer in the Dell and Row, Row, Row Your Boat, that there was something subversive about My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean.
My first hint may have been the undisguised glee with which Uncle Norman and Uncle Aaron taught it to me and drilled me in it until I had the confidence to stand up in a room of adults and sing it. My suspicions were confirmed when my uncles taught me an addendum.
My Bonnie leaned over the gas tank.
She lit up a match for to see.
My Bonnie lies over the ocean,
Oh, bring back my Bonnie to me,
Realizing that the adults – with the exception of my mother, who was not quite sure of its propriety – preferred my uncles’ addendum was a learning experience.
I had assumed their addendum was of their own invention, but it turns out that it was simply the Poughkeepsie Variant or Hudson Valley Variant or Northeast Corridor Variant of a burlesque devised long ago by some anonymous card. An early example:
My Bonnie leaned over the gas tank,
The height of its contents to see;
I lighted a match to assist her,
Oh, bring back my Bonnie to me,
My uncle’s version is superior to any of the others. It is the only one which achieves its goal – to deride the sentimentalism of the original – by artfully turning the last couplet of the first stanza into a refrain, and a deliciously gory double-entendre.
At some point, my uncles explained to me what the effect would be of lighting a match while examining a gas tank, and I realized that they’d made the story of poor Bonnie into slapstick. I had not yet been in a movie theater, but I was familiar with the genre from birthday parties. The climax of any birthday party, if the parents were at all up-to-date, was watching the birthday child’s father’s hilarious attempts to operate a Rube Goldberg device known as an 8mm movie projector.
Usually the machine eventually would yield to torturous prodding and mild persiflage and cast a few snagless minutes of the merry mayhem of Felix the Cat, Tom and Jerry or Charlie Chaplin – until the film broke or, even more fun, caught fire – onto a knobby silvery screen which had been erected – with almost as much amusing adult aggravation as accompanied the operation of the projector – at the end of a table cluttered with plates of melting ice cream and gobs of yellow and blue or pink cake.
The great thing about slapstick was that it was humor that could be enjoyed equally by children and adults. In that way, it was the opposite of My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean; there was nothing subtle about slapstick. I did not try to analyze why misrule – the flaunting of both civil, moral and physical laws – could unite a group of children and a group of adults in a common sense of pleasure like nothing else could, but the fact that this was the case was another learning experience.
~~~~~~~
OCEAN
Excluding Mother Goose rhymes and such melodic strands of our cultural DNA as The Farmer in the Dell and Row, Row Row Your Boat, whose “life is but a dream” became my introduction to the wisdom of the East (although I did not know it at the time), and Oh What a Beautiful Morning, which somehow sprang from my toddler unconsciousness without ever being learnt, this was the first real song I was taught to sing:
My Bonnie lies over the ocean,
My Bonnie lies over the sea,
My Bonnie lies over the ocean,
Oh, bring back my Bonnie to me.
Bring back, bring back,
Bring back my Bonnie to me, to me.
Bring back, bring back,
Oh, bring back my Bonnie to me,
It was a real song in the sense that none of the other children I knew sang it and in the sense that it was my first sophisticated song. It was apparent to me, as it was not, yet, for The Farmer in the Dell and Row, Row, Row Your Boat, that there was something subversive about My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean.
My first hint may have been the undisguised glee with which Uncle Norman and Uncle Aaron taught it to me and drilled me in it until I had the confidence to stand up in a room of adults and sing it. My suspicions were confirmed when my uncles taught me an addendum.
My Bonnie leaned over the gas tank.
She lit up a match for to see.
My Bonnie lies over the ocean,
Oh, bring back my Bonnie to me,
Realizing that the adults – with the exception of my mother, who was not quite sure of its propriety – preferred my uncles’ addendum was a learning experience.
I had assumed their addendum was of their own invention, but it turns out that it was simply the Poughkeepsie Variant or Hudson Valley Variant or Northeast Corridor Variant of a burlesque devised long ago by some anonymous card. An early example:
My Bonnie leaned over the gas tank,
The height of its contents to see;
I lighted a match to assist her,
Oh, bring back my Bonnie to me,
My uncle’s version is superior to any of the others. It is the only one which achieves its goal – to deride the sentimentalism of the original – by artfully turning the last couplet of the first stanza into a refrain, and a deliciously gory double-entendre.
At some point, my uncles explained to me what the effect would be of lighting a match while examining a gas tank, and I realized that they’d made the story of poor Bonnie into slapstick. I had not yet been in a movie theater, but I was familiar with the genre from birthday parties. The climax of any birthday party, if the parents were at all up-to-date, was watching the birthday child’s father’s hilarious attempts to operate a Rube Goldberg device known as an 8mm movie projector.
Usually the machine eventually would yield to torturous prodding and mild persiflage and cast a few snagless minutes of the merry mayhem of Felix the Cat, Tom and Jerry or Charlie Chaplin – until the film broke or, even more fun, caught fire – onto a knobby silvery screen which had been erected – with almost as much amusing adult aggravation as accompanied the operation of the projector – at the end of a table cluttered with plates of melting ice cream and gobs of yellow and blue or pink cake.
The great thing about slapstick was that it was humor that could be enjoyed equally by children and adults. In that way, it was the opposite of My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean; there was nothing subtle about slapstick. I did not try to analyze why misrule – the flaunting of both civil, moral and physical laws – could unite a group of children and a group of adults in a common sense of pleasure like nothing else could, but the fact that this was the case was another learning experience.
~~~~~~~
CHOO-CHOO
From the very start, I regarded music as a pleasure, like food and stories and pissing, and not just another one of those things that were simply there: ordinary events, like the alternation between day and night, ordinary objects, like plates and spoons, ordinary sounds, which were called noise, and rules.
As I grew older I came to appreciate the melancholy beauty of everyday phenomena that, like music, took place during the passage of time: the alternation of day and night, the passing of the seasons, the aging of a favorite article of clothing, and noises, such as the ticking of a clock, tires clicking along a highway’s slabs, the songs of birds and frogs. I even learned to find pleasure in ordinary things, like plates and spoons.
To this day, however, I am unable to appreciate music that sounds to me like deliberate noise. Although there is a niche in my interior zendo for John Cage, the sage, with a few exceptions, I just cannot take pleasure in the amorphous and arrhythmic noise of his and his followers’ indeterminate compositions – nor in the atonal music of the Second Viennese School. I just don’t get it. I simply take it as a matter of faith that it can give pleasure – to other people.
As for rules: by the time Uncle Aaron and Uncle Norman performed Chattanooga Choo-Choo at the top of the stairs to Grandma’s, I already had changed my mind about rules and today maintain what I regard as an exquisite little personal collection of rules. Just one, for example: Do not wear a corduroy shirt if you are wearing curduroy pants.
One day, when I was about eleven, in one of my extended ruminations as I rode my bicycle aimlessly through the quiet streets of the Eighth Ward, I had a long, hard think about rules and their variety. There were arbitrary rules, many of them silly and mean, like not putting your elbows on the table, sensible rules, like traffic lights, and inevitable rules, as in arithmetic. But there was also another class of rules, neither arbitrary, sensible or inevitable, but fitting and pleasurable rules. They could be artfully stretched, as E. B. White did at the end of Stuart Little, but not without tact and delicacy. They were the kind of rules which made the difference between music and noise.
I was taking piano lessons at the time and had been clumsily practicing Czerny’s boring exercises. When I tried to play them, they came out as noise, but when my piano teacher, Mrs. Schwartz, played them, even though they still were boring, they sounded like music. It occurred to me that the rules that governed a work of art could be a source of pleasure in themselves, outside of the content of the work. I would not have expressed it like that at eleven, of course but, for example, it enhanced my fascination with the four bare-breasted mahogany mermaids whose upturned tails supported the marble coffee-table in front of my grandmother’s purple velvet sofa.
My grandmother lived in the upstairs half of a two-family house, and when I was seven, eight, nine years old I spent many happy hours – a cliché, perhaps, but accurate – playing casino with her in the sun porch above Worrall Avenue, the afternoon sun filtering through the bamboo shades onto the green leatherette card table. Time may have tinted rose my memories of those hours with my grandmother, given my impression – and it couldn’t be true, could it? –that it even had been fun getting my arm stuck in the electric wringer of her washing machine.
It was there, at the top of Grandma’s stairs, that the form-content dialectic was deliciously reconciled by my uncles Aaron and Norman with their all singing! all dancing! Chattanooga Choo-Choo.
Capering and warbling in unison, in the striped sleeveless sweater over white shirt which was collegiate de rigueur – it was what was worn under raccoon coats – Norman, still in high school, and Aaron, a Freshman at Cornell, waved their neat little trilbies, which had just reached the apex of fashion – in those days, interestingly enough, that was the point at which a mature style was emulated by the young, instead of vice-versa – collapsed their knees in the most hilarious way and became robot-like pistons with every “choo-choo.” It was just like what people in movies did.
I was then and remain now grateful for the privilege and honor to have been, although just a little boy, chosen as the sole audience for my uncles’ magnificent synthesis of exuberant passion (content), and studied virtuosity (form).
~~~~~~~
PECK
“I love you, a bushel and a peck, a bushel and a peck and I love you all to heck,” I sang aloud one afternoon while engaged in one of my favorite pastimes, stepping on ants. This sport’s prime venue, literally my stomping ground, was the flagstone terrace above the sunken driveway, where every morning the milkman came to the kitchen door, recycling (although he had no idea that is what he was doing) the Emmadine Milk bottles, which were oddly shaped, with a bulbous mouth into which could be inserted a small right-angle spoon (provided by Emmadine) to block the milk below so the cream could be pored off, and occasionally the egg man, a gruff, grizzled, disheveled rural Jew, whose dissimilarity to the two types of Jew I was familiar with, the clean, well-scrubbed one who played golf, wore natty clothes and spoke like Jack Benny and the older aspiring middle-class Eastern European one whose English was not so good, tantalized me with the possibility that there might exist a not utterly uncongenial way of being an adult.
What drew me to the song, A Bushel and a Peck, was its wit – the rhyming of “peck” with “heck” was the cat’s pajamas to a five-year-old – but it was its simplicity, the ease with which it could be reiterated, that rocketed it to first place in my hit parade. As for its sentiment, like many, many songs – far too many, it seemed to me – it revolved around a particular grown-up word that eluded decipherment. I wish I could say that it all became clear as my mother suddenly stepped out the back door and I found myself singing it to her, but “I love you, too, my darling boy” is not what she said. Instead, looking off into the distance, absorbed in the problem of how best to deal with what was in store for her, now that she had a son who sang silly songs to himself, she remarked, “That’s nice.” After she returned inside, I resorted to another of my favorite activities, fetching stones from the garden and throwing them over the ramparts of the terrace, while imagining the destruction they were wreaking on the ants on the driveway twenty-feet below.
~~~~~~~
BOLERO
My parents were intelligent, educated, reflective, but not very interested in the arts. They subscribed to The Book of the Month Club, but I don’t think they read the novels it sent them. They just ended up on the bookshelves. (I may have been the only one in the family ever to remove a book from the bookshelves.) As for music and painting, they were cultured enough to recognize the high points of the canon (as it was then) – Beethoven’s 5th, Claire de Lune, The Last Supper, Picasso’s Blue Period – but as far as I know, they never went to museums and seldom attended concerts.
While my friends’ families owned fairly extensive record collections – the Goldbergs owned dozens of Broadway show albums, for example (it still was the 78rpm era, mind you) – we didn’t have very many records. We probably would not even have had a phonograph, but since phonographs were among the products distributed by Electra Supply Co., we had to have one, a top-of-the-line model, and a few records to go with it. Among them was a performance of Ravel’s Bolero, conducted by Arthur Fiedler. It filled three sides of two twelve-inch records. (On the fourth side was Falla’s Fire Dance.)
I first heard Ravel’s Bolero when I was six. It drove me crazy, almost literally. I was fascinated by it, but it was a tormenting fascination, painful and pleasurable at the same time. I wanted to listen to the Bolero again and again, yet it clapped my brain into an excruciating, inescapable – disagreeable, to say the least. Fortunately for my mental health, the phonograph was considered too complicated a device for me to be allowed to operate it on my own.
Evidently, I was not such an outlier when it came to my reaction to Bolero.
From today’s Wikipedia:
The premiere was acclaimed by a shouting, stamping, cheering audience in the midst of which a woman was heard screaming: “Au fou, au fou!” (“The madman! The madman!”). When Ravel was told of this, he reportedly replied: “That lady… she understood.”
When I was seven, I contracted a severe case of measles. I must have been on death’s door – kids occasionally do die of measles – because when my fever was at its worst I was moved to my parents’ room, to my mother’s side of the bed. At night she slept beside me; my father took the chaise lounge. Dr. Rosenberg, usually pretty sanguine, must have conveyed to them that the threat of my measles was dire, otherwise they never would have disrupted the cherished and guarded intimacy of their bedroom life. (My sister and I always had to knock before entering. Often we were turned away and often the door was locked.)
At height of my fever I became delirious. My delirium consisted of hearing in my mind’s ear Ravel’s Bolero, the same agitated melody, again and again, louder and louder, more and more insistent, a torture I could not escape, sending me spiralling down into a clamorous infinity. Accompanying this auditory hallucination was an image, a landscape – not hallucinatory like the music, but a backdrop to it. As Bolero swelled and thundered, three Mexicans on donkeys slowly plodded across a high rickety wooden bridge spanning a deep, steep-cliffed canyon. (I knew they were Mexicans because they wore sombreros and serapes and rode donkeys.)
(This exotic vision was a composite of scenes from cowboy movies and comic books, and from my own secret life as a dashing shooter of bad guys and a rescuer, usually while still on horseback, of pretty girls. This Superman-like transformation was accomplished by buckling on my most precious and talismanic possession: a pair of fringed white leather holsters hanging from a wide white leather belt, in which nested a pair of exquisite long-barreled cap pistols with pearl handles.)
On they plodded, the three Mexicans, hunched over their drooping-headed mounts, never progressing beyond the center of the bridge. Watching how deliberately, stoically, they withstood the surging, maniacal melody, I saw that, unlike the heroism of Gene Autry or Roy Rogers, here was a heroism that was within my capabilities. Here was a kind of courage I could call on to defend myself against such terrors of life as Ravel’s Bolero.
~~~~~~~
CLOCK
My Golden Age began when I learned that there were words for my abstract ideas – allowing me to think about them more methodically, teaching me that other people had the same ideas, and giving me a way to communicate them. It ended when puberty reared its head.
I had three close friends, all classmates at Governor George Clinton School, Hank, Eddie and Mikey, although I always felt that Mikey was Hank and Eddie’s friend more than mine. Sometimes William, wry, but shy, would join us, my friend more than Hank and Eddie’s. We met after school to play card games and board games and word games and finally chess. (I learned to play chess from Rabbi Winters, when I went to his house for Bar Mitzvah lessons. Needless to say, while I was okay at chess, I fumbled through my Bar Mitzvah.)
On week-ends three or four of us took bicycle excursions, to the miniature golf course beyond the railway overpass, just past the field where carnivals set up once or twice a year and where I once saw an encampment of gypsies, or to Vassar College, where we enjoyed making pests of ourselves (not that we were delinquents; we knew that three loud, bantering, waggish 10-year olds touring the groves of academe for an hour on their bikes was bothersome enough), or to the old cider mill at the top of the really steep hill on Cedar Avenue which Hank and Mikey could manage to pump their way up but which defeated Eddie and I, both of us overweight, who had to walk our bikes for the last hundred yards, with its musty museum of oddities – the most important and prominent of which was a rearing two-headed calf – with its room-temperature cider on the cusp of fermentation and sugary, dust-infused cookies, and with its old guest book opened to a page signed by Vassar student Edna St. Vincent Millay.
If we gathered at my house, we would sprawl around my bedroom and have metaphysical conversations about whether time was the fourth dimension or if anything exists outside our individual observation of it, etc., or play kriegspiel (blind chess, which requires three chessboards, two chess sets and a referee who sits on the bed and keeps track of the moves of the two players, out of sight of each other on the floor on either side of the bed), or fool around with my tape recorder.
An electrical engineer friend of my father’s had given me a professional Ampex reel-to-reel machine. It was about eighteen-by-sixteen-by-sixteen, weighed a ton, and spewed an ozone exhaust that hung in the room for hours after my friends had left. I even had a tape splicer – a small metal guide with a diagonal slit – and a box of razor blades and special splicing tape. The tape frequently broke. What there was no gadget for was untwisting the tape after the reel had fallen to the floor and, defying the laws of gravity, balance and entropy, rolled across the room, wobbling on its narrow axis, trailing its shiny quarter-inch wide ribbon of caramel-colored film behind it. I once tied a pencil to the end of it and dropped it out the window hoping it would just spin its way straight.
We would write and record radio plays which, we thought, were the height of wit, and experiment with sound effects, but we never used the tape recorder for music. Music was reserved for Eddie’s house, where we lay on the floor in the Greenbergs’ living-room and listened to records. The Greenbergs collected classical music, things like Mendelssohn’s Scherzo from Mid-Summer Night’s Dream conducted by Toscanini and Prokofiev’s March for Three Oranges conducted by Stokowski. When the Greenbergs installed one of those new 33⅓ rpm turntables, one of their first acquisitions was an LP of the Rachmaninoff Second Piano Concerto with Horowitz and Koussevitzky.
Mikey’s parents had a shelf of 78’s, brought with them when they fled the Nazis – classical music and schmaltzy cabaret songs which they listened to on special occasions with great solemnity. Hank’s parents liked to show off their collection of Broadway show albums. For my parents, though, listening to records was too passive a pastime.
Everyone had a piano in their living-room, but the Greenbergs’ seemed to be the only one intended for other purposes than for practicing piano lessons, and there was always sheet music scattered around the piano end of the room. At one point, a book of barbershop quartet arrangements appeared. We chose the easiest, “My Grandfather’s Clock,” Hank taking the melody, Mikey and Eddie, in close harmony above and below, while I sang bass. We practiced until we knew we were good enough not to be made fun of by our peers and patronized by adults. The plan had been to move on to a more difficult song once we had mastered “My Grandfather’s Clock”, but that song was so satisfying in itself that we never did and, besides, the Langers, William’s family, as avant-garde as ever, had just acquired a wonderful new board game called Scrabble.
If you were to ask me to sing “My Grandfather’s Clock” today, I would sing you the bass line. If you asked me to sing the main melody, I probably could, but I would have to think about it for a moment.
CLOCK
My Golden Age began when I learned that there were words for my abstract ideas – allowing me to think about them more methodically, teaching me that other people had the same ideas, and giving me a way to communicate them. It ended when puberty reared its head.
I had three close friends, all classmates at Governor George Clinton School, Hank, Eddie and Mikey, although I always felt that Mikey was Hank and Eddie’s friend more than mine. Sometimes William, wry, but shy, would join us, my friend more than Hank and Eddie’s. We met after school to play card games and board games and word games and finally chess. (I learned to play chess from Rabbi Winters, when I went to his house for Bar Mitzvah lessons. Needless to say, while I was okay at chess, I fumbled through my Bar Mitzvah.)
On week-ends three or four of us took bicycle excursions, to the miniature golf course beyond the railway overpass, just past the field where carnivals set up once or twice a year and where I once saw an encampment of gypsies, or to Vassar College, where we enjoyed making pests of ourselves (not that we were delinquents; we knew that three loud, bantering, waggish 10-year olds touring the groves of academe for an hour on their bikes was bothersome enough), or to the old cider mill at the top of the really steep hill on Cedar Avenue which Hank and Mikey could manage to pump their way up but which defeated Eddie and I, both of us overweight, who had to walk our bikes for the last hundred yards, with its musty museum of oddities – the most important and prominent of which was a rearing two-headed calf – with its room-temperature cider on the cusp of fermentation and sugary, dust-infused cookies, and with its old guest book opened to a page signed by Vassar student Edna St. Vincent Millay.
If we gathered at my house, we would sprawl around my bedroom and have metaphysical conversations about whether time was the fourth dimension or if anything exists outside our individual observation of it, etc., or play kriegspiel (blind chess, which requires three chessboards, two chess sets and a referee who sits on the bed and keeps track of the moves of the two players, out of sight of each other on the floor on either side of the bed), or fool around with my tape recorder.
An electrical engineer friend of my father’s had given me a professional Ampex reel-to-reel machine. It was about eighteen-by-sixteen-by-sixteen, weighed a ton, and spewed an ozone exhaust that hung in the room for hours after my friends had left. I even had a tape splicer – a small metal guide with a diagonal slit – and a box of razor blades and special splicing tape. The tape frequently broke. What there was no gadget for was untwisting the tape after the reel had fallen to the floor and, defying the laws of gravity, balance and entropy, rolled across the room, wobbling on its narrow axis, trailing its shiny quarter-inch wide ribbon of caramel-colored film behind it. I once tied a pencil to the end of it and dropped it out the window hoping it would just spin its way straight.
We would write and record radio plays which, we thought, were the height of wit, and experiment with sound effects, but we never used the tape recorder for music. Music was reserved for Eddie’s house, where we lay on the floor in the Greenbergs’ living-room and listened to records. The Greenbergs collected classical music, things like Mendelssohn’s Scherzo from Mid-Summer Night’s Dream conducted by Toscanini and Prokofiev’s March for Three Oranges conducted by Stokowski. When the Greenbergs installed one of those new 33⅓ rpm turntables, one of their first acquisitions was an LP of the Rachmaninoff Second Piano Concerto with Horowitz and Koussevitzky.
Mikey’s parents had a shelf of 78’s, brought with them when they fled the Nazis – classical music and schmaltzy cabaret songs which they listened to on special occasions with great solemnity. Hank’s parents liked to show off their collection of Broadway show albums. For my parents, though, listening to records was too passive a pastime.
Everyone had a piano in their living-room, but the Greenbergs’ seemed to be the only one intended for other purposes than for practicing piano lessons, and there was always sheet music scattered around the piano end of the room. At one point, a book of barbershop quartet arrangements appeared. We chose the easiest, “My Grandfather’s Clock,” Hank taking the melody, Mikey and Eddie, in close harmony above and below, while I sang bass. We practiced until we knew we were good enough not to be made fun of by our peers and patronized by adults. The plan had been to move on to a more difficult song once we had mastered “My Grandfather’s Clock”, but that song was so satisfying in itself that we never did and, besides, the Langers, William’s family, as avant-garde as ever, had just acquired a wonderful new board game called Scrabble.
If you were to ask me to sing “My Grandfather’s Clock” today, I would sing you the bass line. If you asked me to sing the main melody, I probably could, but I would have to think about it for a moment.
~~~~~~~
RADIO
The same audio engineer friend of my father’s who gave me my Ampex tape recorder also gave me a Zenith Transoceanic radio, which I kept at the edge of my bedside table, next to my pillow. In the morning I listened to The Breakfast Club with Jack Benny; before dinner, variously Amos ‘n’ Andy, Lum and Abner, Abbott and Costello, Ozzie and Harriet and The Great Gildersleeve, which was my favorite, perhaps because I identified the pompous, loveable water commissioner with the pompous, loveable Major Hoople who warmed my 10ish-year-old cockles daily in a one-panel cartoon in the Poughkeepsie Journal. But at night things got serious. Before going to sleep, I would listen to (these are the ones I can remember) Suspense, Inner Sanctum, The Thin Man, Boston Blackie, Counterspy, Dragnet, FBI in Peace and War and Gang Busters.
Then, around eleven o’clock, the radio world changed. The syndicated dramas finished; most local stations closed down for the night. Along the uncrowded airwaves, which anyway were stronger at night than in the day, came AM stations from as far as 1,000 miles away, from Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Buffalo, and Canada – Ottawa and New Brunswick – and, with the strongest and clearest signal of all, Wheeling, West Virginia.
The Zenith received short wave but, once the novelty wore off, the only things I could ever find on short wave that I wanted to listen to were classical music and BBC quiz programs. The most common short wave fare was one side of an extremely tedious ham radio conversation (“I know what you mean” [prolonged static] “Yeah” [prolonged static] “Yeah, I went up there the other day” [prolonged static] “That’s what I thought” [prolonged static]), or someone reading a never ending list of numbers, or news and weather in a foreign language, or one of the Soviet satellites’ English language services, whose enticement as forbidden fruit soon wore off thanks to its deadeningly boring content. When I did find some classical music or an interesting BBC program, it invariably would fade out and I’d have to get up on an elbow and fiddle with the tuning knob.
WWVA from Wheeling seemed to be a one-program station, but that one program was a humdinger: Grand Ole Opry. I didn’t realize it back then what great music I was listening to, since I disdained all kinds of popular music. (I have no idea where I picked that up that attitude. Perhaps I was emulating my father, who became subtly patronizing – so subtly that only my mother and I could detect it – when he was prevailed on by the Goldbergs or the Rosens or the Mannings to listen to the latest Broadway show or the new Guy Lombardo album.) Even though I could be riveted by a banjo or fiddle solo on Grand Ole Opry, I regarded bluegrass and country music as a whole as beneath me. I was an ignorant snob then, instead of the informed snob I am today.
It was not the music that kept me tuned in to the Grand Ole Opry, it was its foreignness. Foreign language stations were just marathons of gobble-de-gook with occasional half-recognizable words. Wheeling, West Virginia, was as foreign as Paris, except they spoke English. The jaunty twang of the announcer and the musicians, who seemed to love to talk as much as play music, and the hillbilly jokes, gave me the thrill of listening to aliens while understanding everything they were saying.
Nothing on the CBC led me to understand Canadians like the Grand Ole Opry let me understand West Virginians. The CBC’s classical music was introduced by announcers with the same plummy American accents I could hear when my father took me for lunch or an ice cream soda in one of the luncheonettes near the courthouse, where lawyers and lawyers’ secretaries would go.
A local station, WKIP, went through spates of trying to schedule an hour of classical music in the evening, but the CBC’s classical music program was far more sophisticated, with symphonies by Sibelius, piano sonatas by Prokofiev, concerti grossi by Corelli, 18th century wind quintets, etc. (Thankfully, the CBC then was not yet required to broadcast 50% Canadian content.)
One night, the CBC outdid itself in sophistication by playing a long, fascinating, outlandish piece of music, the most wonderfully eccentric and unusual sounds I had ever heard. I had no idea even what instrument I was listening to, although it was clear that it was plucked. The music itself was incredibly intricate and, unlike the classical music I listened to, playful and intimate, conversational.
I missed its introduction and could not make heads or tails of what the announcer said when it was over, and for years I wondered what it was that I had heard until, in the early ‘60’s, someone played me a Ravi Shankar record. I finally discovered the beauties of bluegrass a few years later, when I briefly mistook a bluegrass banjo solo for part of a raga gat.
~~~~~~~
WEOK
When I was twelve years old my father bought me a radio station. To put it another way: My father would not have bought WEOK in 1949 if he had not thought it was a good investment, but a radio station was not the kind of thing my father usually got involved in. He probably would have passed, when the opportunity arose, if he had not been worried about his goofy, balloon-shaped son who did not seem to possess even the iota of ambition needed for it to dawn on him, as it eventually would dawn on any normal insufferable lay about with a family business awaiting him, that he is damn lucky, and whose most marked idiosyncrasy was, late at night, when he should have been asleep, at a volume so low that he thought no one else could hear, he would listen to the radio.
After my father became a part-owner of WEOK, on Saturday or Sunday afternoon we often dropped in at the studio, the second floor, fitted out in sleek high-tech, of a small office building next to the newspaper, the Poughkeepsie New Yorker, from which WEOK rented roof space for its aerial. It was a perfectly normal and natural father-son week-end excursion. Before WEOK, we had been at a loss for them. My father hoped that on one of these visits something would catch and I would take more of an interest in WEOK than simply congratulating myself that I was standing at the very inner-sanctum from where Harold Henning, the station manager, behind the soundproof glass, read the Saturday Rhinebeck and Red Hook News Roundup.
It was my father whose curiosity and intellect was aroused by WEOK, and he soon learned enough to talk to Henning about frequency interference, Nielsen, and ten second spots. The furthest my own mild interest went was to fantasize having a radio program with Hank Levin and Eddie Horowitz on which we would tell jokes and play Stan Kenton, Leadbelly and Spike Jones.
It was a fantasy that sputtered briefly to life in 1954, when Hank Levin and I were offered a fifteen minute radio show on WKIP. Hank was a hustler and somehow had cornered the manager of WKIP – at a wedding, or in the College Hill Golf Course Clubhouse, or on Bring Your Son to Rotary Day – and sold him on the show.
WKIP was looking for an opening into the teen-age market. The Sam and Hank Show (I can’t remember what it really was called) was meant to be a high school gossip show, interspersed with music. How out of touch the generations had become, even back then, can be measured by the fact that the grown-ups who ran WKIP thought that Hank and I in any meaningful way resembled Poughkeepsie’s average teen-ager, or could represent him or her in any way. For our first show, our “gossip” was a precis, by Hank, of the life of one of his Jewish heroes, Harry Houdini. (Mickey Mantle, Oscar Hammerstein and “Slapsie” Maxie Rosenbloom were others.) My contribution was to cue up the next record and introduce it in a tone as self-assured, urbane and casual as possible – a hair-raising endeavor.
Hank didn’t care what records I played, as long as one of them was “Bali Hai”. He recently had seen South Pacific with his parents. After I got “Bali Hai” out of the way, as a sop to the hoi-polloi, I played “Hernando’s Hideaway” which, in my opinion, rose above the usual pap one heard on the radio. I ended our quarter-hour with Tom Lehrer’s Fight Fiercely, Harvard. Few people had heard of Tom Lehrer then; I had to bring my own record.
As we came out of the sound booth, the station manager was standing at the door. He could not hide his distress, although I think he tried to. He told us not to come back next week; or ever.
~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~
FESTIVAL
Slam-bang in the middle of it all I knew I was lucky to be living in The Sixties – especially lucky to be a 29-year-old pothead with an $800 monthly remittance, living out in the country with a wife and a two-year-old who sometimes were taken for gypsies, with a rock-and-roll band hanging out in the barn, with an exponentially increasing population of cats, with Samuel Beckett pastiches queuing up in my brain, and with a propensity (unrealizable, practically speaking) for Zen Buddhism. Nevertheless, I didn’t fully participate in The Sixties. I was still too much of a snob. I smoked dope every day, but disdained psychedelia like The Incredible String Band and Peter Max and strobe lights. I wore my hair short; I dressed as I dressed in high school (and as I do today); and I was (as I still am) very particular about music.
The first music I learned to hear, after a decade of listening – first to classical music, than jazz – were anthropologists’ field recordings played on tape reels in a second floor office above Fourth Street, where I had a job blacking in tiny rectangles on computer cards for Alan Lomax’s Cantometrics project. It was not until I had immersed myself in those field recordings and was building a collection of Folkways LP’s and other ethnic music, that I suddenly figured out what differentiated rock and roll from the tawdry popular music I had been avoiding, when I could, for twenty-odd years: ethnic roots. If I couldn’t hear roots in a rock-and-roll track, it didn’t make the cut, as far as I was concerned. Usually the roots were Southern black roots, but not always. Behind The Four Seasons I heard the strident harmonies of Balkan polyphony; in Joe Cocker I heard the hoarse incantations of Central Asia; in Canned Heat’s “On the Road Again” I heard the lovely treble solo of an Ituri Forest pygmy. At first I deigned to listen to Bob Dylan because I heard the Childe ballads there. Then, with Blonde on Blonde, I had to admit there was a genius in our midst.
Most of the rock-and-roll I heard on the radio I thought of as either childish – the Beatles, for example – or self-indulgent – Jimi Hendrix, for example. Generally, I didn’t dislike it to the point where I would turn it off or change the station, but there were exceptions. The modulations of The Mamas and the Papas and The Fourth Dimension for example, were just too corny; also, whenever a rhythm-and-blues singer came out with a soppy ballad – Otis Redding, “The Dock of the Bay;” Aretha Franklin “Natural Woman” – I felt betrayed. (It’s a strain of Orientalism that I still suffer from, in which, for example, I regard Louis Armstrong as a sell-out.)
My benchmark for rock-and-roll was, and still is, The Rolling Stones. Nevertheless, even though I considered most rock-and-roll only mediocre music, I felt an allegiance to rock that didn’t have anything to do with music – just as I feel patriotic when I hear the National Anthem. (Hendrix’s synthesis of the two, even today, can bring tears to my eyes. Even though I had resigned myself to living in a world where throngs of unmusical people considered music to be at the center of their lives, I was shocked when I heard someone equate Hendrix’s “Star-Spangled Banner” with flag-burning.)
The band that hung out in Salt Point was The Burning Bush – at their best, in my opinion, when they were rocking out Junior Walker covers. Joe Virgilio, whose honking alto sax sometimes rose to Coltrane-like peaks, was living in the apartment in our barn. Phil Paratore, lead guitar, parked his bus, and his wife and baby, in our driveway when The Bush was gigging at Spinelli’s or The Belly Butt-Inn (my gorge still rises at the name). Adrian Guillery, who sometimes sat in, inspiring the others into a juke joint down-and-dirty, was the bluesman-who-came-to-dinner, who slept on the couch in our living-room and haunted our domesticity until one evening he ate an entire box of Freihoffer’s chocolate chip cookies that I had bought for Ellen, before she had had even one, provoking indignation to well up through my habitual mellowness and I told him he had to leave. When Phil discovered Fresh Cream, they all regarded it as some sort of breakthrough and insisted on playing it over and over again. To me, Cream sounded tiresome and bland.
While I considered Eric Clapton just another soulless guitar virtuoso, I was thrilled when the huge graffiti CLAPTON IS GOD appeared on a concrete railroad overpass outside of Poughkeepsie. (How was it done? Did someone suspend themselves from the rail bed? or totter on a step-ladder on the roof of a bus or the cab of a pickup?) In The Eighties, when “The Sixties” had atrophied into only a shiny meme for hucksters, the graffiti was still there: CLAPTON IS GOD. It had become the poignant symbol of yet another Utopia blasted to bits by reality, like the Confederate flag I’d seen drooping over a shoddy souvenir stand on Route 1 north of Fort Lauderdale (this was before politics had turned it into a symbol of racism instead of the emblem for an imaginary ante-bellum South constructed by a clutch of Jewish refugee romancers in Hollywood), and the stencil of a hammer and sickle fading on the side of a Monoprix in a dingy suburb of Grenoble.
The same double-standard (in which I could disdain Eric Clapton the musician, but still be exhilarated by the graffiti CLAPTON IS GOD) informed my attitude about the Woodstock Festival. It was the defining event of a noble and magical era, an era in which, for the first time and the last, I felt myself at home; but I am glad I didn’t go. We had tickets. They’d been pinned to the bulletin board in the kitchen for months. Our plan was to throw the kid in the car and drive over for the day. Then the traffic jam became national news.
Instead, I decided to hitchhike to nowhere.
In the busy, noisy, swarming life we lead in the Victorian house above Salt Point Turnpike there was no opportunity for quiet meditation or the contemplation of some paradoxical koan. Hitching to nowhere was my Zen retreat. Ellen would drive me over to the Taconic Parkway in the morning and I would put my thumb up in the northbound lane (to the south was suburbia). I went wherever my rides took me. Then, sometime in the afternoon, north of Schenectady or west of Pittsfield or in the Catskill foothills, I would cross the road and start hitching home. It was an efficient one-day karma cleanser.
One reason I decided to hitch to nowhere during the Woodstock Festival was that I figured that my counterculture compatriots would be headed in the other direction. I wanted adventure, not the same old same old. When I was hitching to nowhere, if a VW bus or a merrily daubed jalopy with flower stickers came along, I would put down my thumb and look as if I were waiting for a friend. Half the time the hippies stopped anyway to see if I needed a lift. Sometimes, if they were very stoned, they’d want to linger and chat. Once, without a word being spoken, I was handed an open bag of Fritos. (Along with everything else, The Sixties was The Generous Generation.)
Among the people whom I did take rides with, I remember a farmer in a station wagon, with a Marine Corps crewcut and a grim, disapproving wife, a young guy who looked like he came out of my father’s high school yearbook, in a blue suit about two sizes too large, with cartons of gumballs on his back seat, whose job was to top up all the gumball machines between Peekskill and Albany, and a burly, bearded mountain man in a flannel shirt, driving a flatbed truck, hand-lettered “Ron’s Used Cars,” hauling a wrecked Cadillac to Utica, where he was going to exchange it for a working Ford Falcon.
Early in the morning of August 17, 1969, Ellen dropped me at the Salt Point Turnpike overpass. I walked down to the end of the northbound exit and put my thumb out. After about ten minutes, an aquamarine Mercury Cougar pulled up. My ride was a hood from Queens, with pomaded hair and a face as smooth and shiny as plastic. He was listening to WABC, which was just beginning to fade out. “Fuck,” he said. He leaned over and tried to fine-tune the radio, then gave up. “What can I listen to up here?” he said. I found an Albany rock station in the 1500 range where the local stations gathered, and he settled back in his seat. He was on his way to Saratoga, he said, to stay with a cousin and go to the races.
After we had passed the third state trooper lurking under an overpass in less than thirty miles, he said, “Fuck! What’s with all the cops?”
I’d been wondering the same thing. Then the penny dropped. “It must be this music festival in Woodstock,” I said.
“Fuck,” he said, slowing to below the speed limit. “That’s why I took this fucking road instead of the Thruway.”
Finally, on the Interstate 90 spur from the Massachusetts Turnpike, we were pulled over at the Route 9 exit. The trooper leaned his big red face and his big grey hat into the open window. He sniffed at the air in the car for a moment, then asked, “Where you going?” The driver said he was going to Schenectady to visit an aunt and uncle.
It was clear to the trooper that the driver and I didn’t match. “What about him? You got an aunt and uncle in Schenectady too?” he asked me.
“I don’t know him. He’s a hitchhiker,” said the driver.
“Is that right?” He assumed a menacing stare. “Well, this is the end of the ride, fella. You can get out of the car right now.”
As the Cougar primly drove away, I waited while the trooper, seven feet tall, including his hat, in a uniform of gun-metal grey army blanket material and a creaking leather Sam Browne belt and holster, eyed my driver’s license.
“Where you headed?” he asked.
Hitching to nowhere was too difficult to explain, so I told him I was going to Syracuse to visit a friend at the university. (It was a journey I actually had taken, many years earlier.)
“No you’re not,” he said.
It was clear that he couldn’t figure me out: thirty years old, with the know-it-all attitude of a professor, plus a driver’s license, dressed like a Communist folk singer, with an address in the sticks just a couple of counties away. “You’re going up there,” he said, motioning toward the Route 9 embankment, “back to Salt Point. And if I catch you hitching in any other direction, or on the Thruway or the Taconic, you’ll spend your week-end in jail waiting to see a judge.”
As I was about to start off, he noticed the flat bulge in my denim jacket pocket. “What’s that?”
It was Alan Watts’ The Way of Zen. He took the book over to the hood of his car and began opening it to random pages. He seemed to study them briefly before moving on to the next. When he handed it back, he shook his head at me and clicked his tongue pityingly.
Route 9 then, as now, was not a deserted road. It runs parallel to the Taconic, which is closed to trucks. The trucks use Route 9 and it’s also the Main Street for local north-south traffic in the corridor between Connecticut and the Hudson. My first lift was with a guy who worked at a hospital in Albany and was on his way home to Valatie. Then I was picked up by a pale middle-aged man in a new Renault – so new that it still smelt new – who didn’t say a word or even cast a glance at me, whom I would have tagged as a traveling salesman, with his single wave combed neatly back from his forehead and his polyester pants, but instead of a matching jacket, he had on a pink cardigan.
He let me off at a grocery store where I used the payphone to call Ellen to tell her I might not be home until late, and bought a bag of potato chips. I no sooner put out my thumb again than I was picked up by a farmer who’d been in the grocery store. He dropped me a couple of miles down the road.
I assumed the stance I considered the best combination of moderately eager, soberly patient and potentially grateful for that stretch of Route 9 and again stuck my thumb out. Five hours later, I still hadn’t been given a ride. I don’t know whether it simply was bad luck or if the televised enormity of the Woodstock pilgrimage, which included plenty of unsavory looking hitchhikers, was spooking drivers even here, 100 miles away. Then it was rush hour, with everyone heading for home, bumper to bumper – never good for hitchhiking. Then dusk fell.
I hadn’t stayed in one place, but had walked a mile or two from one good spot – a straightaway where drivers could see me from far enough away for Christian charity to overcome their instinctive reluctance – to another. As it grew darker, and chillier, I just kept walking, hoping now to find a diner, another grocery store, or at least a pay phone somewhere. I had finished the potato chips and, earlier, had used the outdoor water tap at a gas station (that was still when you couldn’t buy anything at a gas station but gas and oil), cupping my hands under it to drink.
I was hungry and thirsty – and elated. This was an adventure.
I gave up trying to thumb a ride when all I could see were blinding headlights whizzing toward me, and just kept trudging south. Finally I came to a Chrysler dealership – closed, of course. I methodically tried the doors of one car after another in its used car lot until I found one that was unlocked. I lay down on the back seat, covered myself with my jacket, and slept.
As soon as I put my thumb out the next morning, I was given a lift by a guy in a pickup who could see that I’d just come out to the road after sleeping in the rough – although not as rough as he probably imagined. He dropped me at a diner. I had a breakfast of bacon and eggs, called the railway station in Hudson, called Ellen and told her what train I would be on, then called a taxi whose card was tucked behind the telephone.
~~~~~~~
MELANCHOLY
My father was a romantic. That should have created a bond between us since I was a romantic myself for quite a while, although living for more years than my father I have outgrown it, but there was so much miscommunication between us, a tentativeness on his part and resistance on mine, that it was an affinity that remained unrecognized. Anyway, it was the romantics who kept shooting each other in duels.
My father was handsome. Handsomeness was at the core of his physical presence: carefully trimmed curly ginger hair over an aristocratic forehead, blue eyes, fair skin, a smile waiting in the wings of thin expressive lips, he used to be mistaken for Rudy Valee. Danny Kaye reminded me of my father and, later, Gerard Philippe. The seeming rarity of his physical type added to his mystique, so it was both nightmarish and liberating during an afternoon assembly in Governor George Clinton School, in which we were being entertained by a male chorus called the Germania Singers from the Germania Club, one of many ethnic fraternities in town, but one which, for obvious reasons, then kept a low profile, to realize that every other Germania Club chorister resembled my father.
In the evening after a hard day’s work, when other men would have been simply tired, my father became languid, which I suppose could be defined as romantically tired, and sometimes sat down at the piano, leaning over the keyboard in a meditative swoon, playing the first bars of the Moonlight Sonata over and over again. Like just about every Jewish boy of his generation, he had taken violin lessons, and had once been called a prodigy by a distant relative who knew that this would be her only visit. His old violin, not old for a violin, but old in the sense that it belonged to my father’s past and not his present, like the Moonlight Sonata and the nine slim, grey volumes of Edna St. Vincent Millay that huddled among the shiny Book-of-the-Month Club editions which filled our bookshelves, was kept behind the coats in one of our front hall closets. Occasionally he would take it out of its battered black case, sit down on the arm of one of the easy chairs and, with a cheerful melancholy, or melancholy cheerfulness, touched by the same winning theatricality with which he doodled at the Moonlight Sonata, dreamily bend his head over the strings and tenderly, if ineptly, tune it. This would be followed by a nervous, truncated performance of a few bars of Dvorak’s Humoresque, after which the violin would be put back in its case and hidden behind the coats.
~~~~~~~
HANON
The first piano teacher I was sent to dropped me after six weeks because I didn’t practice.
I knew that if I practiced, eventually I would play the piano better, but that meant nothing to me. I wanted to play better now. My mother was beautiful and intelligent, my father was handsome and charming, and they didn’t have to practice. I couldn’t imagine that Milton Berle or Maury Amsterdam had to practice to be funny, and I assumed that the first time someone put the score of Grieg’s Piano Concerto in front of José Iturbi he immediately knew how to bang his way down through that pretentious opening, hitting all the right keys, and then swan through the rest like a maestro. I couldn’t even do that with a simple melody written by Mozart when he was six years old.
My next piano teacher was Ginny Schwartz.
In one particular, Ginny Schwartz was the most startling, exotic person I knew: even though her name was Schwartz, she wasn’t Jewish. Proof of this fact, which had all the weirdness of something out of Ripley’s “Believe it or Not,” was that Mr. Schwartz was the pastor of the Lutheran Church. Otherwise, Ginny Schwartz was a florid, brassy imposter, who maintained a high level of cheerful exuberance, which sometimes shaded into manic hysteria, to keep her customers – that is, her pupils’ parents – reassured.
Ginny Schwartz was able to teach us some basics – fingering, sharps and flats (up or down to the next black key), the three-in-one mystery of triplets, the difference between ppp and fff – but nothing beyond them. She sent us home with Hanon’s exercises, hoping (beyond hope) that they would make up for her pedagogic deficiencies.
I liked the Hanon, which made them frustrating. It seemed to me that once I knew what the pattern of an exercise was, I should have been able to play it, up and down the keyboard, without having to keep peering at the notes, every one, and even then hitting the wrong key or two keys at once, or tangling up my fingers. And, forget about maintaining a regular beat – even a very slow one: I didn’t even try. I never reached the point where if I saw a G#, I played a G#; I had to pause to think G#. In my hidden inner world, I was so gloriously nimble that after I had discerned the pattern of a Hanon exercise I could see how to make it even more interesting, and funny, as well; in the unhidden world, I was an inveterate klutz. I couldn’t even catch a softball, much less prance my fingers through Hanon.
Ginny Schwartz’ only contribution to my attempts to master Hanon was to bang a rhythm on the piano top with the flat of her hand, while I tried to keep up. A true piano teacher would have played the Hanon to show how it should be done, but that was beyond Ginny Schwartz’ capabilities.
Someone’s parents once complained that their child, after years of piano lessons, did not even know what a key signature was, so Ginny Schwartz had a group session where she played us a series of chords and scales, announcing what keys they were in. That was the best she could do. She knew little more about music than we did. When she did assign us pieces that she, too, could play – minuets by Mozart and Bach, Offenbach’s Barcarolle, and the ne plus ultra of her teaching repertoire, which she had gotten down pat, Beethoven’s Für Elise – none had more than three sharps or three flats. Beyond that, for Ginny Schwartz, all was chaos.
What I most enjoyed about piano lessons was sitting at the Schwartz’ dining table, while waiting for my fifteen minute lesson, making lists of composers from A to Z, one for each letter. (We were allowed to skip “X” – Iannis Xenakis not yet having veered from architecture into music – but, completist that I was, I always wrote “Xavier”, thinking that someone of that name must have put some notes on paper sometime.) Ginny Schwartz was stricter about our making our lists of composers than about anything that happened at the upright in her living room – as well she might be, with the anxiety of leaving two or three unsupervised pre-teens in her dining room.
It’s a game I still play, sometimes, when I can’t get to sleep.
~~~~~~~
DOO-DAH
Zippidy-doo-dah, zippidy-ay,
My, oh, my, what a wonderful day.
Plenty of sunshine comin’ my way,
Zippidy-doo-dah, zippidy-ay.
For weeks and weeks after I saw The Song of the South, I would break out into “Zippidy-Doo-Dah” on my way back from school. As soon relaxed in the comfort of my home territory by crossing Holmes Street, if I took the Academy Street or the Carroll Street route, or by turning the corner onto Livingston Street, if I took the South Hamilton Street route, with “Zippidy-Doo-Dah” on my lips I would rejoin the pink and blue birds and the cheery chipmunks and harmless bees and the trio of singing movie kids, who had first welcomed me into Uncle Remus’ paradise at a Saturday matinee. It was a paradise, not only because it was a world of peace and love, but because it was presided over by a role model I could aspire to emulate. Uncle Remus, a sloppily dressed day-dreamer, was the antithesis of my father – except for one trait: they were both charming.
My rollicking “Zippidy-Doo-Dah” was not only an ode to joy, but a hymn of thanksgiving for, as in any homecoming journey worth its salt, there were perils to pass. And a choice to make: which route today? which peril?
The Academy Street route, the one I used the most, and the South Hamilton Street route, a long-way-round, offered perils which were intermittent and usually could be avoided by crossing the street: the McGilvery’s large, loud dog, Thor, whose bark, I had discovered, was not worse than his bite, since the latter once left holes in my corduroys and purple tooth marks on my calf, and Georgie Rutherford, who seemed to be home a lot, considering that he was supposed to be going to some fancy private school in Connecticut, who would come crashing out of his house to give me a black eye because I was trespassing on Rutherford property which, he insisted, included the sidewalk.
The Carroll Street route was the shortest route – straight from school to home, but its peril was neither intermittent nor avertible by crossing the street. And it was a peril to the soul, not the body.
Unlike Academy Street and South Hamilton Street, Carroll Street was not a comfortable street to walk home on. It started off just fine, with the genteel grounds of an Episcopalian Church, but quickly grew disheartening as modest single family homes were replaced by two-family homes, then houses by apartments, complete with fire-escapes, then, at the corner of Franklin Street, clapboard siding by brick until finally, just before Holmes Street, there were tenements with garbage cans out front. Sitting on the stoops there was always a group of boys from parochial school, in white long-sleeved shirts, who would chant in cadence with my shuffling steps as I made my miserable way past,
Fatty, fatty, two-by-four,
Couldn’t get through the bathroom door
So he did it on the floor.
If I hurried, the chant would become louder and raucous; if I dawdled, my suffering was prolonged. I seem to recall that once or twice I walked so slowly that my tormentors became bored and ceased their taunts, but maybe that's just a personal urban myth.
Even though the Carroll Street route was the most direct, I never would have chosen it instead of taking my chances with Thor or Georgie Rutherford if, beyond the gauntlet of shame, the Adriance Property had not beckoned. Once I crossed Holmes Street and unlatched a wire gate I was in my personal territory – more mine even than was my own backyard. I was the only boy in the neighborhood who was allowed on the Adriance Property.
The Adriances had abandoned the huge Victorian shambles which stood on a rise at the center of the property, to move into a stucco bungalow (bungalow in the commodious Anglo-colonial sense) two doors down. There were only four houses on that side of Livingston between Academy and South Hamilton: the old Adriance house; a large white house which belonged to Vassar Temple, where its rabbi lived; the Adriances’ new abode; and, on the South Hamilton Street corner, a mysterious – in the sense that I never found out who lived in it – brick cottage hidden behind a heavy wall of shrubbery.
Vassar Temple’s purchase of the house on Livingston Street had been spurred by my father, who enjoyed teasing the neighborhood’s indigenous gentry. He loved a challenge, and ruffling their cordial anti-Semitism was an amusing one. Despite their generations of training, the cordiality of the patrician Eighth Ward indigenes was no match for my father’s. He was invincible. It was during the potlatch of graceful gestures that accompanied the negotiations over the rabbi’s house that the Adriances had granted permission for me to roam their Property.
I became a fearless hero as I strolled past the sign that read No Trespassing ~ Violators will be Prosecuted and wandered under the old maples and oaks seeking adventure. Often this was a magical encounter with the presiding deity, the caretaker, who was not at all an Uncle Remus, but a busy, ingenious Yankee who was always doing something, mowing, pruning, digging, tying and untying, building and taking apart, and fixing the moving parts of things. He would have been a role model as unreachable as my father if he had not patiently taught me how to do some of the things he did. For example, it was my job, as I stood by and listened to him explain the hows and the whys (the whys usually having to do with the weather) of what he was doing, to roll his cigarettes.
Finally, when the shadows became so long and dense that they lost their association with particular trees, I would make my way through another wire gate and across Livingston Street and sneak into our house through the garage, knowing I could make my way up to my room, still humming “Zippidy-Doo-Dah”, without having to face my mother’s crushing inquisitiveness about what I had done at school that day. By that hour she would be in the kitchen preparing one of her dozen specialties adapted from Gourmet to suit my father’s palate and, incidentally, increase the avoirdupois that so excited the boys from St. Mary's.
~~~~~~~
DANCING
I am too fond of the sentimental. Fortunately, I have developed a pretty effective defense. It’s not exactly a filter; in fact, it’s the opposite of a filter. Only the big things get through.
Pretty effective, but not totally.
For example, as a rule, I’m immune to tearjerkers, but every once in a while I lose it at the movies (pace Pauline Kael). My eyes watered once or twice while watching Almodovar’s Talk to Her, as they did at the closing scene of von Trier’s Melancholia. (And I felt like walking out of his first big movie, Breaking the Waves, whose blend of pretentiousness and exploitation was making me morally nauseous).
As a prepubescent, and well into adolescence, I wallowed shamelessly in manufactured sentimentality whenever I encountered it in books and movies. (Not on television, though. Television, which we watched in a little den – a card room, pre-TV – between the kitchen and the living room, never completely absorbed me. I remained attuned to what else was happening in the house.)
The aesthetic experience for me then consisted of bursts of feeling. My critical approach to art was quantitative. The more bursts of feeling – of any sort – the better the book or movie. Art was dramatic expression. I didn’t see anything else in it but that. It didn’t occur to me, for example, when I discovered Dostoevsky and began to binge-read the four big books, that Dostoevsky had ideas. I couldn’t ignore them when it came to The Possessed, but they just seemed to get in the way of the plot. My favorite book, although I would not have admitted it to anyone, was Winesburg, Ohio.
I had felt the anguish of unhappy endings before, but when, at fourteen, by chance I chose Victory as my first Conrad novel, I could tell right off that, unlike other unhappy endings I had had to deal with, nothing – no heroic sacrifice, no brave steadfastness, no lovers’ troth - was going to mitigate the awfulness of the one that was approaching.
Most dramas that lead up to a sentimental denouement make clear from the beginning exactly what is coming. Victory is no different. Triangulating three sensitively humanized archetypes and skillfully particularizing the archetypical relationships between them, Conrad telegraphs the precise sentimental structure of his tragedy. To protect myself from an unhappy ending that threatened to be unbearably painful, I began to read Victory rhetorically, instead of literally. Unable to deal with sad, doomed Axel Heyst as an imaginary character, I pulled back from identifying with him, and began to view him simply as an element of the story. When at last fate, failure and villainy cruelly finished off virtue, sincerity and innocence, I found myself moved, but without suffering distress. I felt I had accomplished something. It felt like a victory.
Music didn’t get to me then in the same way that books and movies did. Music was too abstract to resonate with my sentimentality, which depended on dramatic bathos. Even the sentimental words of sentimental songs – and 95% of the music I heard was sentimental songs – lost whatever sentimental power they might have had as prose or poetry by their role, as I saw it, as adjuncts to melody. And, compared to the dramatic heights to which books and movies took me, the feelings inspired by melody seemed insipid.
At Camp Mah-kee-nac, at the final campfire of the summer, after the toasted marshmallows, Uncle Don’s scary story, and a little speech by Uncle Joe, Mah-kee-nac’s owner, we would all sing Now is the Hour (“...when we must say goodbye”), the mournfulness with which it was rendered bemused me.
I liked Mah-kee-nac all right, just as sometimes I liked school, and unconditionally loved vacations at my grandfather’s farm or a Saturday afternoon’s sleigh riding down the hill behind Mrs. Reed’s house. Yes, I might feel sad when these things were over, but the despondency displayed by everyone – campers, counselors, the nurse, even Uncle Joe, and Aunt Fran from the office – as they intoned that lugubrious song at the final campfire struck me as histrionic, as phony as the whiney I-love-you’s of a zillion songs.
Then, at one farewell campfire during an especially funereal rendition of Now is the Hour, I glanced at Lenny Zamore, our cabin’s sly, potty-mouthed boor, who slept in the bunk next to mine and who one night had whispered to me the actual facts of life, the mechanics of sexual intercourse, which I immediately dismissed as just another of Zamore’s dirty-minded spiels. He was crying. I was dumbfounded.
It took an emotional blockbuster – César Franck’s Symphony in D Minor, programmed by whoever at WKIP had landed the easy classical music hour slot that evening – to break through my resistance to the sentimental pleasures of music.
I was catholic in my lack of sensitivity to music and listened to all sorts on the radio when I couldn’t get a mystery or comedy or quiz show to come in clearly. I would listen to classical music sometimes but, unlike the other music I listened to, I had no clue as to what it was about. There were no words (intelligible words, anyway), and not even a catchy title (just “Symphony in This” or “Concerto for That”) to give a hint about what was on the composer’s mind.
I was able to distinguish the classical style from romantic and modern music (although I couldn’t have identified them as such). Music of the 18th century and earlier sounded like a sedate, tinkly version of the instrumental bluegrass (which I also would not have been able to identify) I heard on Grand Ole Opry late at night, when the local stations shut down and WWWV (“from Wheeling, West Virginia!” as the announcer never tired of proclaiming) found its way to my bedside radio.
The rest of classical music seemed to be exactly the same sort of music played in cowboy movies as the hero and his sidekick galloped across the prairie pursued by outlaws or a misguided posse, or as they snuck up on the cabin where the schoolmarm was being held hostage, or as a band of stoical equestrian redskins suddenly appeared, as if out of nowhere, on the crest of a high ridge. It was the same sort of music: composed by men schooled in the European classical tradition – of two minds, probably, about the strange fate that had landed them in Hollywood – who, to accompany the melodramas to which they had been assigned, drew on the most flagrant and grandiose elements of that tradition, like Franck’s Symphony in D Minor.
Today, I can laugh – jeer, really – at the way that Franck pulls out all the stops in his symphony (literally pulls out the stops, since the symphony features an organ), but it was just the thing to captivate and enrapture a tone-deaf (“tone” in its broadest sense) thirteen-year-old.
I was stunned, I was carried away, I was uplifted; I began to dance. I flung myself around my bedroom, as the bloated and sententious music flung itself from agony to exultation, leaping from one bed to another, assuming all the postures assumed by heroes of the screen – not just in their brave, triumphant and patriotic moments, but in their despairing, humiliated and lovesick ones, as well.
After that, in the evenings, when everyone else was still downstairs, I would worry the dial looking for the right music, then dance to it, exhilarated, liberated.
Until one day my mother, casually, as if out of the blue, asked me if I ever thought of taking ballet lessons. A cold shard of shame penetrated my heart, my stomach, my groin. She had been peeping through my bedroom door. I had no doubt. She had done it before, when I was younger.
That was the end of my dancing.
It was probably about that time that my parents added to their concerns that I was not the normal boy they had imagined they would produce together, the worry that I might be a fairy.
~~~~~~~
PERCY
For a long time I had assumed that it was a trio of eleven- or twelve-year-olds who disrupted the Percy Grainger concert. After all, that is how they behave. Now, after a few turns on Google, I find that the concert was in 1953. It was a trio of fourteen- or fifteen-year olds, who should have known better, who should have known by then how to be sophisticatedly and quietly amused, instead of chokingly and wobblingly amused. I know for a fact that one of the three had already read three Dostoevsky novels, although he had not yet read The Possessed. That might have made all the difference. If he’d had read The Possessed, he might have felt compassion for a frail old man with a huge ego having a difficult time in a public place.
On the Steinway, Grainger had mounted a device for scrolling the music, obviating the necessity for turning pages or being hovered over by a page-turner. The pages (of, in this case, the solo part of the Grieg Piano Concerto) had been separated, scotch-taped end-to-end, and placed on rollers. Grainger scrolled the pages up to the music stand by pumping a foot pedal.
We could have appreciated it as a clever and practical, if eccentric, invention; instead we saw it as a Rube Goldberg contraption and Grainger, with his aged-elf appearance and bristling electric white hair, as its mad inventor. That does not explain – much less excuse – the peer hysteria which gripped us and the failure to control our delight, which ruined the concert, a historic Poughkeepsie occasion, for those sitting near us and, far more reprehensible, for Grainger himself.
Our piano teacher, Ginny Schwarz, had bought tickets early, to scalp to our parents, so we were seated third-row center, fifteen feet or so from the soloist. I am mortified to say that our glee at having what had portended to be a stupefying evening – the Grieg Piano Concerto, of all things, how boring! – enlivened by our vision of a mad scientist and his machine so unnerved Grainger that he fluffed the famous introduction of nineteen pounded chords. We had popped up in a ceremony of taste and decorum, like imps sent by Dionysus, and instead of devoting whatever dwindling powers remained to him once again to honor the friend and mentor of his youth with a glorious rendition of his signature work, Grainger had to use them to keep the performance from descending into chaos.
Mea culpa.
~~~
SNOBS
We were snobs. Playful snobs.
Sometimes, as we kicked our heels in that green room of summers-to-come, too old for camp but still too young to drive, we would find ourselves, three or four of us, baking in the sun at Baird State Park’s big swimming pool, while one or more of our mothers played eighteen holes on the Park’s golf course.
If the pool wasn’t crowded, we would take over a corner of the deep end, throw a quarter into the water, wait for it to land on the bottom, then race to see who could retrieve it. Usually it was crowded. Then we would sit and talk on one of the benches against the chain link fence that bounded the long sides of the pool. Being in the presence of a throng of half-naked hoi-polloi added a snide edge to our sophomoric banter.
Once in a while, from loudspeakers, one at the snack bar at one end of the pool and one outside the locker-room and showers at the other end, an authoritative voice would erupt: No food outside the green line! or Break it up, there! or The pool will close in fifteen minutes, and occasionally, a name, Gloria Modena, please come to the office. You have a phone call.
One day, under the spell of “Prufrock”, which I had just read for the first time, in a flash of inspiration I went through the locker rooms to a payphone outside and called the pool. The loudspeaker person answered, sans Olympian resonance. I asked for “J. Alfred Prufrock.” In a moment, the stentorian voice wafted over the crowd: J. Alfred Prufrock, please come to the office. You have a phone call. Then, once more, after a minute or two: J. Alfred Prufrock, you have a phone call.
“Not here,” I was told. I made sure to sound disappointed.
We were the only ones who got the joke, which we played just about every time we went to Baird.
Playful snobs, but still snobs.
Our snobbishness grew particularly ripe when we were inexplicably invited to Gordon Campbell’s house for lunch one Saturday – myself, Paul Eisenberg, Lauren Havener, William Langer, Deborah Lazar, and Mikey Stern.
The Campbell’s were genteel anti-Semites. Gordon had outed them, inadvertently, when one day he had drawn me aside to explain, out of the blue, as if from a guilty conscience, that the reason the Poughkeepsie Tennis Club did not accept Jewish members was that Jews were so smart that they would take it over. It was probably the best explanation his parents could come up with, when he had asked, unable to tell him what was closer to the truth, that the Poughkeepsie Tennis Club’s anti-Semitism, just like their own, was an old custom whose origins were lost in the mists of time.
For lunch, in an enclosed porch which the Campbell’s referred to as a conservatory, we were served chicken salad sandwiches on mayonnaise-slathered triangles of Wonder bread, the crusts removed, and macaroni salad, with a bottle of Hellman’s on the table, just in case more mayonnaise was required. We twinkled our eyes at each other across the table. The lunch perfectly fit our Wasp stereotype.
Afterward, we were invited into the living room. Mrs. Campbell said, “Gordon, why don’t you play something for your friends?”
The room, which otherwise was filled with exactly the cushiony chintz furniture we would have expected, was dominated by a Steinway Grand. Gordon sat down at it, mused for a moment (as if Wasps could muse!), tipped back his head of Viking-blond hair, his hands hovering before him then, bowing reverently over the keyboard, he launched into Chopin’s Polonaise in A-Flat Major. It was a magnificent performance, flawless (as far as we could tell) and passionate. We were astounded and spellbound. We would not have believed that anyone our age, much less someone from Poughkeepsie, much less Gordon Campbell, could perform Chopin like a Horowitz or a Rubinstein. I don’t know who Gordon’s piano teacher was, but it certainly was not Ginny Schwartz.
Gordon never became part of our group, if that was the Campbell’s aim, instead of showing us up for the snobs we were, which how we contritely saw it, but from then on, we treated Gordon with serious respect. Thanks to him, our political and social sophistication began to catch up with our precocious cultural sophistication.
~~~
SANCTUARY
A Matter of Art 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 large, uncluttered space where the afternoon light streamed in through the shopfront windows. It was a natural hangout for an unusually cultured bunch of fourteen-year-olds, which is how we thought of ourselves, quite correctly. Ezra and Rae not only, with shopkeepers’ acumen, welcomed our daily visits, even though they sometimes turned A Matter of Art into a more boisterous establishment than they envisioned, but took it upon themselves to educate us.
Ezra was our teacher, since books and music interested us, while the visual arts, of which we had only a rudimentary appreciation, did not. 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.
A Matter of Art was equipped with a couple of soundproof listening rooms where customers could preview records before buying them. When we loitered in, after school or on lazy week-ends, Ezra often would have a new record ready 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 tasteful way to spice up his fiddling with 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’”, then leave us alone. We felt no obligation to buy what he had chosen for us, and more often than not, we didn’t. What we did feel obliged to do was give our reasons for rejecting a record, leading to yet another interesting conversation with Ezra, as he slid the disk back into is slipcase – LP’s were not yet encased in cellophane – and put it back in its rack.
Although 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 – Ezra Rubin and Rae were not part of that circle. It was not that they were shunned – not at all. My mother would spend an hour or more at A Matter of Art 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 Wallachs and the Simons played cards or golf, had parties, or went out to French restaurants, Ezra and Rae were not included.
On the rare occasions when my parents indulged in gossip in front of my sister and myself, 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 that I knew, presumably I would assume the attitude of the rest of the community: a nice, intelligent couple, with a wonderful shop that was a credit to Poughkeepsie, but still...
For a time, these allegations cast a cloud over my visits to A Matter of Art and I felt embarrassingly inhibited in my responses to Ezra’s enthusiasms. Not for long, though. Now that I was paying attention to the attitude of my parents and my friends’ parents toward Ezra and Rae, I came to realize that the cloud over them was not a dark, ominous one, but a glowing 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. My parents’ view on communism was that, on paper, it might seem like a good idea, but all you had to do was look around you, 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 seen as subversives or Russian plants or conspirators, but as the doughty upholders of a lost cause, Quixotes of an impractical ideal, anchorites of an unattainable Utopia. 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 at arm’s length in awe.
At that time, the Red Menace had not yet been put in perspective and the poison of McCarthyism was reaching into almost every corner of life. A Matter of Art was a hermitage, a sanctuary, where 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 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 respected newspapers 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 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, exercises in literary wit. 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 core values 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 definition-based structure were revealed as not all that 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?
~~~
DETRITUS
I was one of a small gang of pre-teen eggheads – what now are known as nerds – who spent much of our free time bicycling around Poughkeepsie – not randomly, but with particular destinations in mind: the miniature golf out past the Smith Street railroad bridge, the Hudson Dayline Dock, Vassar College and, in the summer, the Spratt Park Pool.
Sometimes on our way from one place to another we would stop at Al Mizrayan’s Novelty Shop on Main Street to scoff at its false fangs and wigs and ogre and gorilla masks, practical jokes like hand buzzers, sneezing powder and hot pepper to sprinkle on someone’s food, scientific novelties like gyroscopes, kaleidoscopes and periscopes, magic tricks, decks of cards, some of which were labelled “marked,” dice in their own little cloth bags and boxes of poker chips. Behind the counter, under a display of whoopee cushions arranged according to size, Al Mizrayan stood and watched us, conflicted about whether he wanted us to leave or to stay, because occasionally we would buy something.
At the top of the long Cedar Avenue hill, up the last hundred yards of which Eddie Horowitz and I, the fat ones, had to walk our bikes, was our favorite destination, Kimlin’s Cider Mill. The Cider Mill was a red clapboard lodge, low-ceilinged, airless and smelling like a barrel of apples someone had left in the garage and forgotten about. The dust motes were so heavy that it didn’t take a shaft of sunlight streaming through one of the narrow windows to see them in the gloom. Everything was tinted sepia with cider residue. The muffled sound of tawdry radio music (Teresa Brewer, Frankie Lane, Eddie Fisher) seeped up from beneath the squeaky floorboards. On a table near the front door there was an old guest book, open to a page with Edna St. Vincent Millay’s signature.
(Millay meant more to me than she did to the others. The only poetry on my parents’ bookshelves were eight slim grey volumes of Millay – the original Harper edition. On the inside front board of each was scrawled a date (from before my parents had met) and my father’s signature thick with youthful, reckless diagonals. Just listing their titles– A Few Figs from Thistles, Wines from These Grapes, The Buck in the Snow – is a madeleine, and I can recollect myself alone in the living room, in that melancholy hour between the end of whatever had been occupying my day and dinner, kneeling beside the bookshelves and deciphering one of the sonnets in Fatal Interview, hearing not the voice of the Vassar charmer, but the voice of my father, his secret voice, the one which, from time to time, broke through his conversation in a flash of wise and sentimental irony.)
The Kimlins’ other curios were more substantial. Pride of place was given to a marvel, a stuffed two-headed calf, then there were a stuffed horse, stuffed birds (exotic and indigenous), stuffed varmints (raccoons, ‘possums, squirrels, chipmunks), the mounted head of an eight-point buck, a mounted swordfish, antique cooking pots and kitchen utensils, an American flag with forty-five stars, china plates and cups and steins commemorating forgotten political campaigns and public celebrations of fifty years before – the launching of a steamship, the christening of a dam – mechanical piggy banks, swords, buggy whips, wagon wheels, and four huge horseshoes which, an index card in a small metal frame informed us, once were worn by the world’s largest horse, Supreme Queen, which had weighed two tons and stood twelve feet high.
With this dream-like detritus of the past lowering at us through the gloom, with Mrs. Kimlin, specter-like, appearing and disappearing behind her counter, the dusty taste of the cookies and cider making it seem like the cookies had been baked and the cider pressed before we were born, and the radio so faint that it felt like the real world was light years away, the Cider Mill was the closest thing to an adventure like the ones that boys in books had that we could get.
~~~
CAMPUS
Vassar College was always there.
As a toddler I was a Vassar laboratory subject, studied and experimented on – and cared for – by Vassar girls. The laboratory was the nursery school run by Vassar’s Child Studies Department. When we sang “Row Row Row Your Boat” it often was into a tape recorder and girls were taking notes.
When I was in the bicycle gang, we could spend an entire afternoon wheeling slowly around the Vassar Campus accosting the girls who ambled by, with their books and cigarettes, with the latest witticism from our collective eleven-year-old minds. “Excuse me. Could you please tell us where Dean Martin’s office is?” Pregnant pause. “It’s right next to Jerry Lewis’s office!” hooting, then quickly pedaling away.
At no other stop on our bicycling odysseys could we, with impunity, behave like brats. Certainly not, for example, at the Dayline Dock at the bottom of Main Street, where poor people and Italians gathered around the Dayline Dock Snack Bar for hot dogs, popcorn, popsicles and soda and where colored boys dove off the piers for coins tossed by passengers leaning over the rails of a departing boat. Brats were not allowed on lower Main Street, only good kids, like us, and bad kids. The bad kids policed the dock and would charge, snarling, at the slightest hint of brattiness.
Wherever we went, the Dayline Dock, the Cider Mill, miniature golf, we had show some degree of respect for the other people around. If not, there could be consequences. But not at Vassar, with the Vassar Girls. Even if there was the odd girl who, instead of giggling at us, or smiling at us like an indulgent aunt, or ignoring us, or scowling, would burst out in anger with “Brats!” there still were no consequences.
When I was in high school, and we had cars, the Vassar campus became, at night, a steamy preserve for sex – from heavy petting on a concrete bench within the hedge that squared the Shakespeare Gardens, in which grew every flower Shakespeare mentioned, to coitus beneath the huge oak in the dark dell along the stream that meandered down from Vassar Lake and disappeared into a culvert behind the chapel.
With its Gothic Revival architecture set in a vast, pampered park, its romantic associations (Millay, primarily), its aura of sophistication, its security – if we were discovered in flagrante delicto, it would not be by our parents or teachers or anyone who knew us – and an atmosphere permeated with the emanations hormonal and histrionic of four hundred pubescent girls, the Vassar campus was our Midsummer Night’s Dream woods.
Although not exactly vestal virgins, the Vassar girls radiated a mystique which not only rendered them unapproachable, but rendered the idea of approaching them unthinkable. Besides, I wouldn’t have known how to begin to pick up a Vassar girl. (Although, come to think of it, we had no problems chatting them up when we were boys on bicycles only a couple of years earlier.) There always were stories about so-and-so, another boy in our class or the class before us, who’d done it and had had sex with her too, so there was always the hope that it might happen naturally, all by itself, without one having to undergo the peril of saying or doing something mortifyingly jejune.
~~~
FIXIT
From time to time, I would follow a pair or more of Vassar girls around Arlington, where the girls shopped. (Even though stalking was still something only Natty Bumpo did, following only one Vassar girl would have crossed a line into a world of obsession and danger I was not ready for.) Casually and, I assumed (probably incorrectly) surreptitiously, I trailed them to the drugstore perhaps, loitering outside, window shopping, until they emerged to go to the candy shop then the cleaners then one of the clothing stores.
That is how I discovered Manny and Iona Brozen’s The Fixit Shop.
I’d known The Fixit Shop was there and that it sold records, but I was loyal to Ezra and Rae Rubin and A Matter of Art. Also, The Fixit Shop had a tawdry name and looked tawdry – a grimy store front with placards in the windows for college concerts from the year before – and I kept avoided tawdry, especially when it came to music.
As I browsed the bins in The Fixit Shop for the first time, pointedly ignoring the two Vassar girls I had followed in, I found that the music there was not tawdry, not at all. The Fixit Shop had much more music than A Matter of Art did, bins and bins full of albums I’d never seen and artists I’d never heard of: mostly classical and jazz, but also a large international section with Greek music, Caribbean music, Italian music, even German music, plus the obligatory bin – Ezra Rubin had one too – of left wing folk music, Leadbelly, the Carter Family, the Weavers. I knew that I had graduated into a higher realm of record buying from that of A Matter of Art when I found an LP that had been made in Russia, with the notes on the back in Russian as well as English of David Oistrakh playing the Khachaturian Violin Concerto.
Manny Brozen looked exactly like Rembrandt in his self-portrait of 1660. I have no idea why I was familiar enough with the picture to make the comparison, but I saw the resemblance as soon as I walked in. Manny looked so much like Rembrandt that, no matter how often I visited The Fixit Shop, it never failed to strike me as a marvel. After a while, I realized that the Brozens were sick and tired of my remarking on it.
Although my allegiance shifted from A Matter of Art to The Fixit Shop as my record store of choice, Manny Brozen certainly did not replace Ezra Rubin as a cultural mentor. In fact, if anything, the relationship was reversed. I soon discovered I knew more about the music that Manny was selling than he did.
I did my best to enlighten him – about how Dave Brubeck broke the Western rhythmic mold in “Take Five”, about the riots in Paris after the first performance of The Rite of Spring, about how Tom Lehrer was great, but it really wasn’t music – but Manny wasn’t interested.
Manny enjoyed the record business – as much as a grumpy cuss like he was allowed himself to enjoy anything – but not because of the music. It was the records, the albums, that captivated him, the solid twelve-by-twelve or ten-by-ten squares of cardboard, available by the multitude, each with an artful cover, some quite striking, and each of which – thanks to the miracle of capitalism – contained a black (usually) vinyl disk that had intrinsic value and could be sold.
Manny’s impulse to fill The Fixit Shop with as large a variety of records as possible was more akin to that of a stamp collector than a music lover. He knew that the music inside the record cover determined whether it would sell sooner rather than later, and he read the music reviews in The New York Times and The Herald Tribune and had a subscription to Billboard to determine, with varying degrees of success, what the Vassar girls would be looking for each week, but what he loved to do was pore over catalogs from odd labels and small importers. How could he not order an album of Swedish jazz with a Klee painting on the cover or Balkan bagpipe music that pictured an old man in a fur cap blowing into a bloated sheep carcass?
Iona Brozen was the bright, bustling, over-attentive wife that grumpy old men often have. Her outgoing, busybody, “helpful” retailing instincts jarred with the cluttered, highbrow atmosphere.
A pair of Sophomores, French majors, enraptured with Un Voyage à Cythère and looking for some music to go with it: “Debussy, you think?” “What about La Mer?”
“La Mer is very popular,” piped up Iona, hovering nearby.
The girls hurried out. Popular was anathema.
I realize now how class-conscious I was then. I wouldn’t have used the word, but class was the reason that the Rubins, for all their political baggage, were still in my parents’ social circle, while the Brozens were not. How could they be, with the way they looked – Manny, unshaven, in plaid flannel shirts, Iona, with a perm, wearing voluminous flower-print peasant skirts – their “Brooklyn” accents and their topics of conversation? Iona liked to describe in detail the funny things their cat got up to. In my parents’ circle, pets might be mentioned fondly, but only in passing. It would have been infra-dig of my parents entertain their guests with lengthy monographs on how smart our beloved dog, Chuck, had been.
Although I was conscious of the difference in class or perhaps because I was, I felt comfortable with the Brozens, more comfortable in some ways than I did at home. For example, I could suggest to Manny what records he should stock, or even recommend, for example, that the blues section should be here and the Gregorian Chant bin there (not that Manny would follow my advice), but I would not have had the guts to suggest anything, anything at all, to my father about running his business.
~~~
FATE
I had no great revelation, after which I automatically would question anything in which I detected at least a whiff of the theoretical. I became a skeptic gradually. As time went by, more and more things that other people took for granted lost the ring of truth.
I especially became increasingly wary of categories. Not just the easily debunked categories which are formed by the manipulation of a bunch of selected qualities – things like group identifiers (Jewish, WASP, intellectual, extrovert), categories of taste (kitsch, sophisticated, low-brow), or aesthetic cubbyholing (modern, romantic, impressionistic) – but the big categories, like good and evil, innocence and guilt, consciousness and the unconscious.
“The leaves are beautiful,” says one of the girls. We are sitting on the back porch of the Havener family’s summer cottage on the shores of Wappinger Creek.
I look at the scrubby thicket on the other side of the stream and see thousands, hundreds of thousands, of bits of vegetation, each with its unique shape and its unique shade of green or, occasionally, of yellow, red or brown. Those also lay here and there on the small bit of lawn between the porch and the creek.
“What are “leaves?” I ask.
The question does not take anyone by surprise. I simply had started a round of another mind game.
“A leaf is the photosynthesizing component of vegetation,” says William.
I point to the blades of grass in the lawn. “So those are also leaves?”
“A leaf is a photosynthesizing component which grows from a stem, not directly from the ground,” says Micky Rudnick.
I think “Leaves of Grass,” but decide not to show off.
Lauren Havener can’t resist. “Leaves of Grass,” she says.
The rest of us groan.
I point to a tall dandelion near the porch. “Those green things then, that are growing are directly from the ground. They’re not dandelion leaves? ”
“‘Leaves’ is a general term,” says Mikey Stern.
“Exactly,” I say.
“Everything is in the mind, it’s all a matter of perception,” says William. That is the equivalent of saying “uncle.” I have triumphed without even having to bring in the dead, post-photosynthezition, leaves on the lawn, which I have been holding in reserve.
“But what’s beautiful?” says Tommy Oman.
Again, everyone groans. We’re bored with that game.
My tendency to concentrate on the uniqueness of things and disregard their collectivity lead to strenuous and sometimes fraught discussions with Tommy Oman, who felt he had to defend the honor of science against my depredations. Tommy was smarter than I and knew much more about math and science than I, so I relished his frustration when, despite his intelligence and knowledgeability, he had no answer when I held that there was no way to scientifically predict an event based on previous events, because no two events are identical. All he could do was sputter at my deliberate and confident stupidity.
This conflict once flared on the floor of a penthouse overlooking the Hudson, on Riverside Drive in New York City. I was a Freshman at Columbia, Tom (Tommy no more), a year behind me, had come down from Poughkeepsie to spend the weekend with his cousin, Michael, and Michael’s wife, Ruth.
Michael and Ruth were not only ultra-intelligent, ultra-cultured, ultra-sophisticated, but so remarkably affluent (remarkable for a young couple related to the gemütlich, proletarian Omans of Poughkeepsie) that they owned a country house in Connecticut as well as being able to afford the rent for a Riverside Drive penthouse.
Michael had taken it upon himself to refine the musical taste of us rubes from Poughkeepsie, for whom the pinnacle of Beethoven’s art was his orchestral works, by immersing us in the piano sonatas, interpreted by Schnabel, Backhaus, Gulda, Badura-Skoda, and played through Bozak speakers that must have cost more than $100 each. (Michael may have decided, correctly, that we weren’t ready for the quartets.)
Tom and I sat on the carpet, imbibing high culture and Pimm’s Cup (it is difficult now to reconcile Michael and Ruth’s urbane sophistication with their predilection for Pimm’s Cup). High culture, that day, consisted of Michael’s ruminations on an Edvard Munch show he had just seen at the Modern. (We had not yet entered the age of acronyms; the dreadful “MOMA” was still in the future.)
We began to discuss the degree to which art is autobiographical. Michael mentioned Dostoevsky's The Gambler. That Dostoevsky had a gambling problem was news to me - and I had thought myself a Dostoevsky aficionado. I nodded knowingly and speculated that the etiology of Dostoevsky's obsession may have been a desire to relive the euphoria he must have felt at his last minute reprieve from the firing squad. (That much I did know.)
Michael reminded us that plenty of people who had not faced a firing squad were obsessed with gambling. He characterized the excitement of gambling as a leap into the unknown.
"It’s not, if you know the probabilities," said Tom. "If you know the probabilities, gambling is just a math problem.”
I pointed out that in a game of cards you can figure out probabilities from what cards have been played and what cards are left, but in Dostoevsky's game, roulette, while you can figure out your odds of winning, you can never predict where the ball is going to land, no matter how often the wheel is spun.
"Well, at least you know that if it was 23 the last time, there is less chance of it being 23 again, instead of some other number." said Tom.
"No," I said, "There is more chance of it being 23 than some other number."
Tom scoffed. We had had this conversation many times before. I was happy, though, to see Michael, for all his sophistication, register a tic of surprise.
"Whatever circumstances existed to make the ball drop into the 23 slot will still exist when the wheel is spun the next time," I explained.
"Probably," said Tom.
"Fair enough," I said. "Probably."
I had won a point, but this was not a game. Tom and I were deeply invested in this question. To be melodramatic about it, how we were to lead the rest of our lives depended on it.
Michael still looked puzzled.
I continued. "The tabletop may not be absolutely horizontal; it probably slopes a teeny bit in one direction or another. The ridges separating the grooves can't all be exactly the same height; some must be a little higher, some a little lower. The ball can't be a perfect sphere. These are small details, but they must have influenced the outcome, which was the ball stopping on 23. They'll still exist when the wheel is spun again.”
"But the real world is all we have. All natural laws, all science is based on the real world - even the laws of gravity." Tom could not keep from sounding a little plaintive.
"Not the science of mathematics, not logic," I pressed. “They are not based on the real world; they are based on the ideal, Platonic world. It's illogical to say that in the ideal world – if the wheel lay on the absolute horizontal, if its parts were cut with absolute precision, if the ball were a perfect sphere, if it were all made of a material harder than diamonds – there is less chance that a number will repeat itself than that some other particular number will win. The chances are equal. With every roll, the chances always equal."
"No,” said Tom. “According to the law of probabilities, every other number has a better chance of winning than 23 has."
"Then the law of probabilities is an ass," I said.
We were at our usual impasse. Each of us thought the other was being purposively dense. In truth, we had arrived at an antimony where – like arguments over the existence of God, mind-body dualism, whether or not the Good was relative, and free will vs. predestination – any further discussion became a game. It usually devolved into a game of semantics, but this time Tom said, "Let's roll a die and see who’s right.”
Michael produced a felt-lined leather cup and five large Bakelite dice which, he volunteered, he'd bought from the bartender of a taberna in a village in Andalucía.
We removed four of the dice and, pencil and paper at hand, began to toss the remaining one.
According to the laws of probability, that is, according to Tom, there was less chance that a number would be repeated than that one of the other five numbers would appear. According to my theory that every event is a discrete occurrence, there was the same chance – one in six – of a number repeating itself as there was of another number appearing. That was in a perfect world. According to my theory that every event is unique, in the real world, in which there was a hand-made Spanish leather dice cup and a presumably often-tumbled Bakelite die, one face of the die was more likely to turn up than any of the other five faces.
Our game did not keep Michael from that afternoon’s project of comparing Backhaus’ performance of Opus 10, No. 3, with Gulda’s. The rhythmic muffled beat of the die rolling out of the felt-lined cup onto the carpet accompanied their playing like the drumroll from a distant marching army.
I cannot remember which of us was ahead when it was time for us all walk over to the Empire Szechuan on Broadway for dinner.
Michael and Ruth, who were habitués, ordered off-menu, of course.
~~~
DÉCLASSÉ
The Brozens were déclassé, but that’s not a word anyone would have used in that time and place.
Well... my father might have. He loved languages, especially Latin, as a root language for the kind of words he preferred – “abbreviated” rather than “shortened,” “fatigued” than “tired,” “extraordinary” rather “strange” – and French, for its nuance and its silky sound. He enjoyed using words that had been lifted directly from the French, like soupçon, au fait, blasé, carte blanche. I may have inherited from him a peculiar little brain nodule that keeps on the alert for a chance to use the word “nuance.”
I first encountered “déclassé” in a book. (I have no idea what book.) I didn’t look it up. We don’t look up most unfamiliar words we encounter. Since they are made up of familiar components, we sort of know what they mean. When we see or hear them again, we adjust and refine our definitions of them, based on the new contexts in which they appear.
“Déclassé” was a literary word, and remained a literary word, as opposed to a colloquial one, even when it had its moment as the word du jour at the West End Bar, or its fling as a Greenwich Village synonym for “tacky.” In conversation, “déclassé,” might be used to describe a fictional or historical person, but as an adjective modifying present circumstances, it usually referred to something, not someone. A tie could be déclassé, a party could be déclassé, an idea could be déclassé, but referring to a contemporary as “déclassé” would be as meaningless as saying that someone was kind to their servants. There were no servants, there were no classes.
Still, if you had asked me if I thought the Brozens were déclassé, after a little thought I would realize that yes, they were, even though I had never thought about them as such. If you had asked me if I, myself, was déclassé, I would have scoffed. The word did not apply, since class meant nothing to me.
I was, of course – I am – déclassé.
This was first pointed out to me one winter evening in the early 1990’s, as I prepared to shut Rhinebeck Records for the day. Yes, I had become Manny Brozen. That is, I had become a curmudgeonly record store owner (although a somewhat more charming one than Manny Brozen, which was not hard to do).
Even though it wasn’t yet five o’clock, night already had fallen and the windows above the CD bins were large, gloomy black rectangles. My last customer had left half an hour ago and I didn’t expect anyone else to come in. As the cash register was spitting out its paper ribbon with the daily tally, a short, balding man in a camel’s hair coat and highly polished brown shoes strode through the door. He glanced around the shop, took a pointed look at me, then marched down to the alcove where I kept my stock of cassettes, He stood in front of the cassettes, which were crammed into wire shelves hung from pegboard, his back to me, as if he were browsing. After a few minutes, he spoke. “You don’t know who I am, do you?” he said.
“Sorry, I don’t,” I said.
He said his name. It meant nothing to me. I can’t remember now what it was and, in fact, had forgotten it by the time I got home and told the story to my wife.
“I’m friends with so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so,” he said. One or two of the surnames were vaguely familiar; they were names I might have heard mentioned by my parents. “You insulted me,” he continued, “when I was kind enough to invite you to an exclusive gathering.”
He was crazy, I decided. Crazies did make their way into the shop.
“I even told you there were going to be beautiful women there,” he said.
It all came back to me; I was surprised that it did.
Over forty years earlier, when I was at college, I had been summoned to the phone at the end of the corridor on the tenth floor of Livingstone Hall. (No one had their own phone.) On the line was someone with an unpleasant and whiny voice, who introduced himself as “friends with so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so” (surnames I associated with my parents’ generation). One of them had given him my name and he was inviting me to a party, that evening, on Park Avenue.
I didn’t know this guy, I didn’t like the sound of him, I had no interest in going to a party, especially on Park Avenue; I had my own life, my own plans, my own friends. When I declined, he pressed me. “There are going to be some beautiful women there,” he said. I must have laughed when he said that. I decided he was some sort of pimp manqué, the sort of disreputable society hanger-on you’d find in a French or Russian novel. “No, thanks,” I said, or something like that, and hung up.
I didn’t tell my visitor in the record store that I remembered him, I just kept shaking my head and looking blankly at him. He grew more and more angry, and stomped toward the door. Just before exiting, he turned toward me and sneered, “Déclassé!”
~~~
SINATRA
I don’t understand what is so wonderful about Frank Sinatra. I must be the only person in the world who does not think that he was, if not the greatest, one of the great male vocalists of our time.
In the 1990’s I was in a line of work – managing a classical CD store, if you must know – in which I read about a hundred classical CD reviews a month. Every once in a while, a reviewer would let his hair down and drop in a short paean to a non-classical musician – a jazz player, an Indian musician, a rock star, a standards singer. (There was nothing daring about this, since everyone knew that Arthur Rubinstein had said that Art Tatum was the greatest living pianist and that “if Art Tatum took up classical music seriously, I’d quit my job the next day.”) Almost inevitably the jazz musician mentioned would be Ornette Coleman, the Indian musician, anyone but Ravi Shankar, the rock star, Bob Dylan, and the standards singer, Frank Sinatra.
I’m okay with Coleman; Ravi Shankar was too much of a show-off for me too (what about Ali Akbar Kahn or the Dagar Brothers?); Dylan is the Emperor, the Pope – not just one of the Kings of Rock and Roll; but Sinatra? I don’t get it. Serious critics praise his nuance, his sensitive embellishments, his sophisticated treatment of the lyrics, his tone, they even refer to him as “the voice of the century.” To me, Sinatra has all the subtlety and charm of a honking bird. Perhaps I suffer from an aural deficiency, a deformed cochlea – an extremely rare condition (obviously) that makes Frank Sinatra sound to the sufferer like Gladstone Duck and, thanks to a sympathetic neurological pathology, makes Sinatra seem to behave like Gladstone Duck, too.
Applying Occam’s razor to the problem, I have deduced the least complicated, therefore the most likely, reason that I took against Frank Sinatra: he reminded me of Matt Jordan.
Matt Jordan was Poughkeepsie High School’s Frank Sinatra wannabe, but I was such a snob that the more public adulation a celebrity had – and with Sinatra, it amounted to a sort of hysteria – the less I paid attention (I’m still like that, come to think of it), so I thought that Matt Jordan was just being himself, Matt Jordan – annoying, pushy, comically vain, achingly oblivious to mockery, superficial, childish, and a competent musician (meaning, he got all the notes right). I did not realize that Matt Jordan was imitating the way Sinatra talked, the way Sinatra walked, the way Sinatra sang, and played the trumpet like Sinatra would have played the trumpet if he had played the trumpet, kissing it, caressing it, like a microphone that he was trying to get to go to bed with him.
Matt’s ambitions grew from a trumpet solo at a Freshman talent show to the Matt Jordan Quartet to the Matt Jordan Big Band, the Matt Jordan All Star Jazz Band and the Matt Jordan Sinatra Tribute Band. Just a few years ago, I saw that Matt’s jazz band was performing at a municipal event down by the river.
When the Frank Sinatra phenomenon did make its way into my consciousness, sometime in the 1970’s, all I could think of was Matt Jordan. Which makes this into a science fiction story, like one of those tales in which a time traveler goes back to effect the past, but naturally effects the future as well, so the present that the time traveler returns to is changed, slightly off kilter. In your world, Frank Sinatra is unique; if you are from my neck of the woods and are familiar with Matt Jordan, Matt is just a Sinatra impersonator. In my world, Matt Jordan is the original, and Frank Sinatra just a pale imitation.
~~~
VANITY
My sense of hearing suffered three grave traumas. The second and third occurred when I took my daughter to see The B-52’s and The Ramones. The first seems more accidental but, like the second and third, it was retribution for a cardinal sin. In the case of The B-52’s and especially The Ramones, the sin was sloth. I should have brought ear plugs with me, at least to The Ramones, having already lived through the aural torture of The B-52’s. In the matter of the galvanized pipe, the first trauma, the sin was vanity.
During the summer of 1956, I made city deliveries for Electra, my dad’s electrical supply company. Every other afternoon I would tool around Poughkeepsie in Electra’s large white panel van: first perhaps down under the Route Nine overpass to Sedgwick Machine, a brick box with a thick tower of brick in one corner, which was not a smokestack housing, but a shaft for testing Sedgwick brand dumb-waiters, then along the eerie rubble road beside the railroad tracks to another riverside hulk, this one with a classic industrial revolution matte black smokestack tapering primly up its hundred feet, on which descended, in white, the letters D E L A V A L, a company headquartered in Sweden which manufactured centrifugal cream separators for dairy farms, then back under Route Nine and up the hill to Vassar Hospital, with its insatiable appetite for six-foot fluorescent tubes, then east to Vassar College via Main Street, where Perlmutter’s Furniture and the French Pastry had run out of lightbulbs; from Vassar College, out Route 55 to Page Lumber, which sat amidst cornfields at the limit of my territory, just this side of the boundary between the Town of Hopewell Junction and the Town of Poughkeepsie, then whizzing back on 55 into the industrial North Side: Standard Gage, Schatz Federal Ball Bearings, Effron’s Scrap Yard, Bryce Welding, the County Jail, Kem Cards, Tri-Support (women’s girdles), then back to Electra. I loved it.
I loved it on two counts. First of all, I loved lists and charts and puzzles and games. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, after lunch, Otto Rexhouse would hand me a delivery schedule with eight, ten, twenty haphazardly ordered addresses. I would work out the most efficient route, then load the truck, last delivery in first, first delivery in last: small, amazingly heavy cartons containing fluorescent fixture ballasts, large cartons of lightbulbs so light they felt like they could float away, rolls of cable, eight-foot lengths of steel pipe, cartons of toggle switches, junction boxes, face plates, connectors, fuses, breakers and, most troublesome, fragile six foot fluorescent tubes cushioned by flimsy, open-ended corrugation.
The game I devised for myself was to make the city delivery run in as little time as possible. If the list was a short one, with familiar addresses, I could do it in under two hours. Or it could take me four hours, having been sent on a complicated detour because of road work, or waiting at a receiving dock for the Roberts-Boice driver to unload what seemed like a thousand cartons of paper towels and toilet paper, or getting lost looking for a construction site in a maze of subdivision roads so new they didn’t have signs yet or trying to find a new customer on a street I’d never heard of.
New addresses were the fillip that made the game interesting. If they were in parts of Poughkeepsie I didn’t know, I had to ask the guys. An ad hoc committee would be formed and what the best route was would be argued out. Whoever prevailed would give me verbal directions and hand me a scrap of paper on which had been drawn some lines. (There was no map of the City of Poughkeepsie in the warehouse and it never occurred to me or anyone to buy one.) It was easy to get lost looking for the grocery store on the corner after I pass the Polish Center on Dorsey Lane, then go one more block and turn left (a dissent was expressed: “No, not one more block. He should turn at the grocery”), then right at the T, and keep going, there’s a cornfield on my right, until I see a faded sign for either Weber’s Orchard or Wagner’s Orchard; a mile or two after that, there’ll be the yellow mailbox for Click-O Zipper.
Naturally, the more I played the game, the better I got. Soon, I could make twelve or fifteen stops and still be back in an hour and a half. One day, Otto Rexroth took me aside. He kindly explained that the rapidity with which I was completing city deliveries was making the guys who usually did them look bad. “Sometimes the guys like to stop for a cup of coffee, you know?” Otto said.
Aha! There was another way to do things. The fact that Otto felt he safely could impart this information to me, even though I was the boss’s son, was a sign that I had been accepted as a full-fledged member of the warehouse crew. I had no problem sacrificing my obsessive-compulsive game for the greater good. Without the warehouse guys’ support, my Electra persona would not have risen within just a few weeks from a fetch-and-carrier to warehouseman to counter guy to city delivery driver.
I invented a new game: the deliveries had to be made in the same order they were listed on the schedule. That kept me tacking back and forth across Poughkeepsie for hours. I also allowed myself a fifteen-minute time-out after every five deliveries, when I would drop in at The Three Arts or Sam Kramer’s record shop, or lean against one of the big old maples on the Vassar campus to smoke a cigarette and read The Charterhouse of Parma, which I carried with me for just such occasions.
One of the rules of the new game was that at least one leg of my route should take me through the Vassar campus, even if the college was not on the list. I never dated one, I hardly ever spoke to them, yet the Vassar Girls were a source of a deep, satisfying pleasure: the pleasure of imagining what they were thinking as I drove by nonchalantly, at the campus speed limit of ten-miles-per-hour, a handsome, tee-shirted, carefree young vehicle wrangler, leaning a casual elbow out the window, hair tossing poetically in the ten-mile-per-hour breeze, and with deep, intelligent eyes that ordinarily you never saw in a guy driving a truck, except in the movies.
One afternoon, I had shouldered an eight-foot length of one-and-a-half-inch galvanized pipe up the steps to the receiving platform and was cradling it in my arms on my way to the pallet where I was stacking them, when I noticed a pair of Vassar Girls strolling by. Girls seldom made their way down into the trough where the utility buildings were hidden away. I wondered if they had noticed me, then tripped over my feet. The pipe rolled out of my arms and slammed down flat on the raised concrete platform. It was the loudest noise I have ever heard. My ears rang painfully for a week and my long descent into partial deafness commenced.
Vanity. I paid the price.
~~~
WIT
I enjoy the company of egotists, if they are witty. Blowhards whom others find obnoxious – acerbic, snide, nasty, even cruel – delight me. Persons whom others see as narcissistic put-down artists, if they are intelligent and entertaining, I see as comedian-philosophers in the tradition of Diogenes. Just such a one – at least, when I knew him – was the composer, Charles Wuorinen.
Unhappily, I can’t remember a single one of the thousand witty things I heard Charles say.
Actually, I can’t remember anything anyone said back then, verbatim. If I use quotation marks, it means I am confident I am conveying the gist and tenor of something that was said, not the exact words. I can’t rise to that criterion when it comes to Wuorinen’s repartee. I am not witty enough to convey the subtleties of the gist and the appropriateness of the tenor of one of Wuorinen’s wisecracks.
I met Charles Wuorinen in a “Health Education” course required of all Freshmen at Columbia College. It was a sex education course, actually. I already had mastered the basics, or thought I had, just as most of the fifty other Freshmen sitting around me had, or thought they had. While the professor – one of the assistant mathematics professors had drawn the short straw that semester – educated us about the actuarial data for venereal disease and such physiological details as the fact that vaginas and penises come in different sizes, while trying to keep a straight face, we pointedly fidgeted and rolled our eyes, like a bunch of Einsteins in a class on addition.
On the first day of Health Education, I heard someone sitting behind me sum up, in a few words, its absurdity. I turned around. There was Charles Wuorinen – dressed like a grown-up, in a dark suit and tie, with a grown-up supercilious smile swimming beneath his high, pale, grown-up forehead.
What was it he said? Let me try. “A refund, please. I bought tickets for Aeschylus, not Ionesco.” Sorry, that is the best I could do. Wuorinen would have scoffed at it, and improved on it. In fact, that kind of exchange became the basis of our relationship. I would say something I thought was clever, and Wuorinen would scoff at it and improve on it. I became Wuorinen’s straight man (pun sort of intended and sort of not) and, for a year or so, his sidekick.
Wuorinen lived with his parents on Morningside Heights, but spent most of his free time in Greenwich Village, in an apartment on Christopher St. where, besides a piano, there was a large drafting board on which he would compose his music.
Most of the time David Johnson was there too. Johnson, from California, was as rugged and handsome as a Hollywood cowboy, but forever petulant, not like a child, but petulant like a drunk throwing out nasty remarks from a table in a dark corner of a saloon. Johnson also used the drafting board to compose on, and I was never sure whose apartment it was, Wuorinen’s or Johnson’s.
Charles and David probably were more than close friends, but the possibility that they were a couple never entered my mind. My bravado in Health Education notwithstanding, I was still a naïf, who assumed that homosexuality was a discernable trait, one that marked its practitioners as denizens of Fairyland. I was aware, for example, that Benjamin Stein, who occupied the apartment below Wuorinen’s, was queer. (“Gay” had not yet been purloined from its neat place in English usage). Benjamin was a flamboyant Village queen. He was the first I had encountered, so he seemed to me as much of a witty original (less wit; more originality) as Wuorinen.
Sometimes Wuorinen, sitting at the piano, would play works in progress, singing the orchestral parts in a countertenor more raucous than sweet. Never having heard the term “countertenor,” I thought Wuorinen was singing in falsetto – until Alfred Deller broke into the classical radio stations’ playlists and his albums began to appear in the Early Music bins of record stores.
One day, on my way back from Sam Goody’s with my first Deller record – Purcell’s Come Ye Sons of Art – as I crossed the campus I bumped into Charles. After making his de rigueur snide remarks about Deller, Purcell, and early music and English music in general, with the exception of the towering John Dowland, whose songs no one knew how to sing, Charles came up with me to my room in Livingstone Hall. There, sitting cross-legged on the floor, he warbled along with the music – Come, come, ye sons of art, come, come away-ay-ay-ay – merrily integrating the innocence of Purcell’s birthday serenade for the Queen of England with the naughty decadence of New York in the ‘50’s. (How innocent that naughty decadence seems now.)
While the rest of us artistic types at Columbia College had just begun to sniff around the edges of the real world, Wuorinen was fully immersed in the New York music scene. He was its youthful prodigy.
The Columbia Music Department, due either to good judgment or the necessity it felt to distinguish itself from the herd, had rejected the influence of atonalism, which had most academic music in its cold, ugly grip. What form this rejection of serialism should take split the Columbia composers into two camps: a progressive one, led by Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky, which was experimenting with electronic music, and a conservative one, inspired by Bartok’s poetic pursuit of new tonalities (instead of non-tonality). Wuorinen was in the latter camp.
The unhappiness of Bartok’s New York years, responsibility for which rested in large part on the disregard paid to him by the Columbia Music Department in whose charge the distinguished refugee had been placed, swelled Bartok’s aura of neglected genius. There was never a hint of Wuorinen’s usual deprecatory irony when Bartok was mentioned.
However, very little of the music I heard, when I tagged along with Wuorinen to Carl Fischer Hall, to new music concerts put together by John Cage and the pianist, David Tudor, could be described as Bartokian. It was either what I thought of then in my ignorance and, because of a lacuna in my musical taste that persists today, I still think of as plinkity-plunk, or conceptual works which I then ascribed to a gleeful nihilistic Dadaism, but I now know drew on profound metaphysical paradoxes of the East. Whatever. While I found the concerts loads of fun, putting me plump in the middle of an avant garde New York scene at the side of a friend who was on first name terms with everyone in it, I cannot remember hearing a single piece of music there that I enjoyed just for itself.
One evening, Charles and I and David Johnson took seats in the first row of the balcony, where we could look down on the luminaries below, grinning at Wuorinen’s acerbic running commentary.
Suddenly, Johnson whispered, “There he is.”
“Ah,” is all that Wuorinen could find to say. My friends were clearly star-struck.
“Who?” I asked.
“Morton Feldman,” they whispered reverently.
I had never heard of Morton Feldman, but if you had asked me to come up with a name for the bulky, swarthy man in the crumpled dark suit shambling down the aisle, “Morton Feldman” is exactly the name I would have come up with and, if we had been anywhere else, I would have tagged him – based on my acquaintance with similar types back in Poughkeepsie – as a lawyer with a dingy office across the street from a courthouse and clients too poor to pay their attorney’s bills, or perhaps as the owner of a women’s underwear factory.
Soon Wuorinen’s music was being performed around the city and being reviewed in The New York Times. He sluffed off his bohemianism and, partly because I was finding his egotism less entertaining than before and partly because he was finding me too jejune and provincial for the company he now frequented, we stopped hanging out together.
When, in the early 1970’s, I came across an album with a Wuorinen piece on it, I purchased it, of course. What I had heard fifteen years earlier, as Wuorinen, at the piano on Christopher St., played and warbled, were Bartokian motifs, refined by Wuorinen’s own peculiar insouciance. What I heard on the record I’d bought was plinkity-plunk.
Unfortunately, Wuorinen had become an all-or-nothing serialist. That is exactly the same “unfortunately” I would use to describe the influence on Stravinsky of the serialist Svengali, Robert Craft.
Wuorinen’s wit also declined. It is not impossible to remain an enfant terrible as one ages – take Jean Cocteau, for example – but it is difficult. If, as he matures, the enfant terrible begins to take himself and his world more seriously, he becomes simply terrible.
[I spent 1971 in London, and missed the hullabaloo described below. I heard about it later, but only in vague terms. What follows is the result of current internet research.]
The same year that Wuorinen won the Pulitzer Prize for Music, he was refused tenure at Columbia. It was an academic scandal of the highest order that reached not only the Arts Section of The New York Times, but the pages of middle-brow magazines like The Atlantic.
The Times published an op-ed piece by Wuorinen, complaining about his treatment at Columbia. This prompted a lengthy rejoinder by a member of the music department (“Mr. Wuorinen's arrogance, ruthlessness, and contempt for anything outside his bailiwick increasingly irritated his colleagues”) and a raft of anti-Wuorinen letters. The Times printed a dozen of these, and Wuorinen’s response. Also lengthy, it begins, “Often when you overturn a stone, you cause the little creatures crawling beneath it to scurry around furiously in indignation and alarm."
~~~
MASTERPIECE
Most artists have a self-defeating streak. The self-defeating artist is a cliché: Van Gogh, Verlaine, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Of course, we know who they were, so they weren’t really all that self-defeating. Artists we’ve never heard of were much better at sabotaging their careers than they were. Van Gogh’s alienation of Gauguin was a classic self-defeating gesture. But if Van Gogh had been as self-defeating as some artists I’ve known, he would have made sure to alienate his brother, Theo, too.
David Johnson, the composer friend of Charles Wuorinen, was the most dedicated and most thorough practitioner of artistic self-defeat of anyone I’ve come across. His acts of self-sabotage were works of art in themselves: a muttered nasty word, carefully chosen and well-timed, that would ruin a party; a bitter diatribe in response to a friendly gesture (not friendly enough was often its nub) by someone in a position to help him with his career. Johnson’s alienation of Henry Brant was a classic of performance art.
Brant, who was then a pretty big deal among academic composers, had somehow been cajoled by Wuorinen to visit Christopher St. to take a look at David’s work.
I was there. (I can’t remember whether I’d been specially invited or if I had just happened to drop by.) As we waited for Brant, Wuorinen and Johnson were in a state of nervous tension – an unusual frame of mind for them. David kept growling that Brant wouldn’t come; Charles insisted he would, but clearly was worried he wouldn’t.
Brant was late, but eventually footsteps on the stairs signaled his arrival. By the time he knocked on the door Charles was in jovial, companionable mode (also uncharacteristic) and David was grinning demonically, which was the most amiable facial expression he was capable of.
Brant carried a leather portfolio, with a music manuscript which he had been working on in the train down from Bennington. Admiring that, of course, was the first item on the agenda.
Wuorinen, in an imitation of Uriah Heep that tottered on the cusp of lampoon, which redeemed him somewhat in my eyes, made ready the drawing board. He knelt (that gesture, in itself, was atypical) more than once, to adjust its height to Brant’s short stature. He moved aside a portfolio of David’s music, some dip pens fitted with music-writing nibs, and a bottle of india ink. He angled the goose-neck lamp to fall just so.
Slowly, fussily, Brant laid his manuscript out. Wuorinen and Johnson drew near, their heads already bobbing in delighted affirmation. David murmured something about the lamp, He raised his arm to reposition it and, in doing so, knocked over the ink bottle. The ink ran down the drawing board and over and into the pages of Brant’s music.
Wuorinen rushed into the bathroom and came out with a roll of toilet paper, with which he tried to blot up the ink. All David could do was shrug his shoulders at Brant, his grin more demonic than ever. Brant, furious, gathered up his music which, still damp with ink, no doubt ruined the leather portfolio it had come in, and stormed out the door.
Most of David’s self-defeating act were conscious and pointed. This one, possibly because Charles had arranged the Brant visitation, was, or appeared to be, accidental. Nevertheless, it was a tour-de-force of self-defeatism.
Slapstick as that event was, and as uncomfortably anti-social most of David Johnson’s self-defeating behavior was, he also was responsible for a coup of self-sabotage which was so marvelous that even now, thinking about it, I have to smile and shake my head in wonderment.
Somehow – either through Wuorinen’s influence or some remarkable confluence of connections – the renowned violist, Walter Trampler, commissioned David to write a concerto for him.
David was no longer living at Christopher St., but was sub-letting a basement apartment further west, on Bank St. I bumped into him one night at The White Horse, where he was enthusiastically describing, to all in earshot, the large flying South American cockroaches which, he claimed, the couple he was sub-letting from kept as pets. I was dubious, so he invited me to come around the corner to see for myself.
Yes, there they were – three large bugs, easily two inches across, roosting on some gauze curtains on a small window looking out onto the sidewalk. I didn’t see them fly, although I knew they could if they wanted to. I still was dubious about their status as household pets.
The etymological tour finished, David sat down at the piano to play me the melody he had written for the opening theme of the viola concerto for Trampler. “It’s lovely,” David said, “it’s perfect for him. It’s the viola concerto that Mozart never wrote.”
This is the melody I heard. You can see it and hear it here. You have to imagine it played sweetly. This robotic kerthumpery is the best I could do.
(That’s the alto clef. Middle-C is the middle line.
This melody – measures 1-6 – has stuck with me for sixty years. Measures 7 and 8 only approximate what David played. The repeat and measure 9 are just my attempt to complete it.)
It was – it is – lovely. It could have been composed by Mozart. (In fact, for years, I suspected David of plagiarizing it, and kept expecting to come across the melody in some obscure Mozart piece.) Trampler, of course, hated it and cancelled the commission.
That melody – so lovely, yet so unacceptable – was a masterpiece of self-defeatism – deep, subtle, complex, exquisite – surely one of the greatest acts of self-sabotage that the art world has ever known or, rather, that the art world would never know about.
~~~
ESPIONAGE
The Kukhnya Zimy was a Russian restaurant we went to sometimes, on West 92nd Street. While it was a good hike from Columbia, it was near the Thalia Theater, where we would flick-out to the latest film by Bergman or Kurosawa or Fellini or De Sica or Bresson or Satyajit Ray. The Thalia was upper-west-side dingy. It’s lobby, instead of being the backdrop for a snack counter, was an art gallery. It showed only one artist, an Eastern European with a name over-burdened by consonants. He painted semi-abstract cityscapes in expressive vertical strokes. If only the colors had not been so muddy.
It was at the Thalia that I first saw L’Avventura, with its accompanying revelation (a revelation to me, at least) that film is more like music than literature. I began to wonder if a story could be structured musically instead of arranged as literature. That is, instead of being led on a guided tour, through a unique and arresting fictional reality, the reader would be danced through it. Then Grove Press published a translation of Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy, which did exactly that.
The Kukhnya Zimy was a small, brightly lit, square store front, with a floor composed entirely of small, white, hexagonal tiles, which I have only seen elsewhere on the floors of men’s rooms. It was owned by a grey-haired emigre couple who were chef and hostess. She was not a babushka, but a slim, nervous woman who, in true Russian fashion, sometimes was jolly and welcoming and sometimes surly. He would occasionally emerge from the kitchen, a tall, imposing man, with a military bearing that made the white apron he wore look like a costume he was trying on for a party he would decide was beneath his dignity to attend.
In one corner of the Kukhnya Zimy was a jukebox – an old fashioned one, that played 78 rpm’s. The records were of Russian music and the hand-lettered tabs slotted beside the selection buttons were in Cyrillic. Sometimes for a lark we would put in a nickel and press a button at random. A singer, with orchestra, or the Red Army Chorus, would belt out a mournful song with all the requisite lachrymose Russian inflections.
One evening, after a film at the Thalia, George Freiberg and I went for some pierogi at the Kukhnya Zimy. Despite its antiseptic decor, dining at the Kukhnya Zimy came with the potent double frisson of stepping over the threshold into the Russian novels that we loved (years later, as an intern at Mt. Sinai Hospital, George was single-handedly responsible for the introduction and proliferation in the inner-cities of the 1970’s of the name “Natasha,” enthusiastically suggesting it to the distracted teen-age mothers at a loss for what to call the creature George had just delivered) and of consorting with the enemy. That evening George and I began to flippantly speculate that the Kukhnya Zimy, which never seemed to have enough customers to stay in business, was really a front for the NKVD.
I opined facetiously that the incongruous jukebox was there as a means for conveying secret messages. I no sooner had suggested this detail of our hypothetical NKVD operation and had begun to chortle over it, when the door opened and a large man in a black slouch hat and a black raincoat strode in. He went straight to the jukebox, put in a nickel, pressed a button, listened to the record for ten or fifteen seconds, then turned on his heel and strode out.
It was one of those isolated, infrequent, preposterous events that do not belong in the string of continuous, contiguous instances that weave the pattern of reality. There is no way to think about them, or speak about them, without the rest unravelling.
FAVORITE
I have a favorite CD. Doesn’t everyone?
It took me a few years to choose which one it would be. It was an important decision. After all, it would be at the heart of how I defined myself.
A coolly poetic intellectual, with a trickster streak, for whom the lyrics of “Paint It Black” are an exquisite imagist lament, combining the mellifluence of the French fin de siècle with powerful Anglo-Saxon iambs?
A stealth Buddhist, tirelessly, staunchly making his way through the jungle of the material world, the liana of emotional ties, the dense underbrush of things, confident that attainment is possible since he’s seen it done by John Coltrane playing “My Favorite Things”, twice, in 1966, at the Village Vanguard and the Village Theater, and by Charlotte Novitz, in 1958, in her walk-up above a tavern at the bottom of Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, dancing in silence before a canvas, flicking her brush like an agile, cheerful fencer who knows she always wins, and sometime in the early ‘60’s, by Teddy McNeil plaintively singing “Wild Mountain Thyme” in a corner of a noisy party in an apartment overlooking West End Avenue, and who still can hear it done, whenever he wants, by fifteen or twenty people all at once – Madeline Grey, and a small pick-up orchestra conducted by Elie Cohen – in a 1930 recording of eleven of Canteloube’s Chants d'Auvergne?
An unabashed sentimentalist, a votary Stendhal, in the Order of Fabrizio del Dongo, who enjoys the prison in which he is confined since it allows him, from time to time, to delight in something – for example, the plaintive, cultivated performance of Satie on instruments such as viols, rebecs and crumhorns by a Japanese early music ensemble called Danceries, which has crystallized in his mind into the highest expression of beauty?
The latest and likely the last avatar for a complex, individual nature, fundamentally unchanged over seventy years: a provincially cosmopolitan old codger, whose amiable stoicism is always being undermined by loss and chagrin, but who finds an occasional respite from the confusion of life in art, most reliably in the adagios of two Haydn piano sonatas played by Ivo Pogorelich?
Eventually I chose (as my favorite CD, in case you’ve forgotten) the Pogorelich Haydn, and the persona that goes with it.
As a rule, I won’t travel more than half an hour just to go to a concert, but in 2006 a Pogorelich recital was scheduled at the Metropolitan Museum. I certainly did not want to miss seeing this master – of Haydn adagios, at least – for the first time.
The Met’s medium-sized auditorium (700 seats) was full. The audience was enthusiastic; that was clear from the prolonged applause when Pororelich came on stage, tux-attired, poised, but still with the slightly absent-minded shambling air of an artiste – a perfectly respectable self-presentation for a renowned pianist in his first New York concert in ten years. Following an appropriately gracious bow, Pogorelich sat down to play Beethoven’s Op.111.
I am quite sure that Pogorelich played every note that Beethoven had written, but he played them very, very slowly, paying absolutely no attention to Beethoven’s timing. There was no perceptible beat and, therefore, no melody. Pogorelich played each note or chord as if it was a musical statement in and of itself that had no connection with the notes before and after it.
Soon there were disgruntled murmurs in the audience. People began to walk out. I was intrigued by the fact that these people’s sense of musical propriety could keep them from being present at what probably was the most unusual performance of Beethoven they would ever hear. Perhaps they left because they could not stand the pain of watching what surely – or so I thought – was the annihilation of a career.
After the sonata, during intermission, I ran into Cynthia, my sister, in the lobby. Cynthia had little interest in music, especially classical music, and was just there to accompany a friend. Her social antennae were super-sensitive, however, so she was aware that she was not the only one who was bewildered. When she asked me what I thought of the performance, I told her that it was like listening to Coltrane play “My Favorite Things,” when the original composition mutates into unrecognizability in the ardor of a performance.
It was a glib, pompous, false analogy. Coltrane took Richard Rodgers’ banal song and wove it into an elaborate and riveting forty-five minute expressionist tapestry. Pogorelich had taken Beethoven’s message to mankind and torn it into little pieces.
Was he mad? Did he have Alzheimer’s? Was he experimenting with some avant-garde deconstructive performance technique? Was he being deliberately, slyly, malicious? And – what seemed just as odd as his performance – did his agent, his intimates, know he was going to come out and play that way?