Books – Gregg Fedchak

JFK: Manly and Sexy and Highly Defective

Written by Gregg Fedchak on May 13, 2025. Posted in Books.

“JFK AND THE MASCULINE MYSTIQUE: Sex and Power on the New Frontier” is author Steven Watts attempt to place President John F. Kennedy in the age of male rejuvenation of the 1950’s and early 1960’s.

It’s important to realize that we were lied to about almost everything about Kennedy.

We were told and shown that he was a good family man, but the truth is that he was not just a womanizer but an obsessive one. He was said and shown to be athletic and nimble and graceful, but was secretly sickly, beset by ulcers and a bad back and Irritable Bowel Syndrome and Addisons Disease. If he had gained a second term, it’s likely he would have been our second wheelchair-bound president.

We were also told that he was a scholar and a historian and a bibliophile and highly cultured. But he had to have White House social secretary Letitia Baldrige signal him when to clap at classical music concerts. He also fell asleep at those concerts.

The one thing we weren’t lied to about was his hero status during World War II.

lt. john f. kennedy aboard the pt 109 jfkpof 132 012 p0113 (restored)

PR was mighty and JFK was a figure men could rally around as a masculine ideal, fit for a time when the American male was getting paunchy, lazy, bureaucratic, lethargic, and physically unfit. JFK latched onto manly men and manly men latched onto JFK the politician, all to their advantage, at least briefly.

Who were these latchers-on?

Try actor Kirk Douglas.

Douglas was a big Kennedy supporter and his movie SPARTACUS in 1959 showed the male ideal. A poor man from a poor family, Douglas raised himself up and got himself accepted at St. Lawrence University. In real life he was a testosterone-oozer, as most JFK acolytes were.

olympus digital camera — ***Kirk Douglas, 1939 SLU graduation photo***

Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and the rest of The Rat Pack fit into the 1960 image of the chain-smoking, heavy-drinking, womanizing ideal. Sinatra even had a helipad constructed for JFK at his Palm Springs home that he personally destroyed in a (manly, of course) rage when JFK couldn’t visit because a mobster had slept in Frank’s home previously.

dean martin, judy garland and frank sinatra in 1962 — ***Dean Martin, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra*****. Judy is the one in the middle.**

And don’t forget Hugh Hefner.

Hef invented 1950’s masculinity. He made porn mainstream. He also linked naked woman to consumerism – television, audio systems, golf clubs, cigarettes, fine wine and dining, modern architecture, jazz, automobiles, whatever could be advertised and sold. Perhaps because he came from a stolid Protestant background and was more thoughtful and intellectual than a lot of JFK’s other malemates, he comes off as a balanced observer of his times.

Oddly, Dean Martin comes off as both intelligent and wise. (The drinking swinger bit was a ruse. Mostly.) It was Martin who tried to warn Sinatra off mob connections, and Martin who advised all the Rat Packers – except Peter Lawford, who was JFK’s brother-in-law – to back off from politicians and politics.

A fictional character, Ian Fleming’s James Bond, also embodies JFK’s mindset.

goldfinger uk cinema poster — ***JFK would have enjoyed Pussy Galore***

In fact, the disastrous Bay of Pigs Cuban invasion incident was likely inspired by JFK’s admiration of both Fleming and Fleming’s Bond.

Fleming was a British intelligence officer, and JFK wanted “his” CIA to be as creative with sabotage and coup attempts as Bond would be. Jack Lord, who plays a CIA agent in an early Bond movie, even looks like JFK.

JFK fantasized about LBJ attempting a coup, and considered writing a Bondesque novel about that scenario after his presidency. Yikes.

So I suppose that the harebrained (or, rather, hairbrained?) CIA notion of getting itching powder into Fidel Castro’s beard, or the one about supplying the dictator with exploding cigars, was a product of Fleming-think in the world of Kennedy.

So women were showing up in the workforce during World War II. They failed to leave it. The burgeoning suburbs produced fat, nicotine-saturated bureaucratic gray flannel suited organization men who were alcoholic and working on their second coronaries.

Hollywood and the newspapers and TV and the American imagination itself thereby produced a would-be corrective to the situation by embracing wildly alpha males.

It didn’t work for long. We got our very first television president.

But not our last.

bill clinton and donald trump at the u.s. open in 2000, flushing meadows–corona park — **Playmate, Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Melania Trump. Thank you, JFK.**

David Lynch, Dreaming

Written by Gregg Fedchak on April 26, 2025. Posted in Art, Books, Music.

I worked with a woman whose family would pack a lunch and go to the local insane asylum Sunday afternoons after church. It was entertainment for them.

Viewing a Lynchian project is like visiting that asylum.

david lynch cannes 2017 — **David Lynch**

Lynch died of emphysema and a heart attack in January, after being forced to evacuate his compound during a California forest fire. He left behind a rich and disturbing body of work that either makes sense or doesn’t make sense.

eraserhead — ***Jack Nance in Lynch’s first “real” movie, “ERASERHEAD”***

He directed the 1980’s DUNE, THE ELEPHANT MAN, BLUE VELVET, and then TV: TWIN PEAKS made him a household name.

PEAKS was probably his most coherent work because he had surprisingly little to do with it. It almost made sense: a murder mystery. This sensibleness made him back off from it. That, and his relative lack of control over the project. ABC was not TWIN PEAKS-friendly.

ROOM TO DREAM by Lynch and biographer Kristine McKenna is an unusual book. He and McKenna alternate authorship in an unexpectedly-yet-expectedly vertiginous way. Because Lynch can’t do anything normally.

There are two other problems with the book. One is its oddly promotional tone.

Everybody finds Lynch charming. Friendly. A genius. A great director. A great painter. A great writer. Hard-working. Busy. A busy little beaver, always creating. And a great musician, too, by the end of his life.

Yet where are the non-adoring actors who disappeared from his life over time? Did they think he was a swell peach, a genius of a peach, too?

The second problem is that we learn nothing about Lynch that we didn’t learn before.

Why was he such a heavy smoker? Why was he a chain-marry-er? Why so many love affairs? Why was he so obsessive? Was he autistic? What in hell were his relationships with his children (by many different wives) like? Why was he taken in by the meditation industry? Was he a babe, an innocent, or a true believer? Why were his “products” purposely abstract, and bizarre, and surreal, and, well, plot-less?

Could he not think linearly? Or did he not want to?

Were his dreams insane?

And why did he avoid commercial success after Mel Brooks’ – yes, it was Mel Brooks’ project! – THE ELEPHANT MAN?

Man, this guy needs an objective biography from a bare-knuckles brawler of a biographer.

Then again, maybe he’s too obscure a figure for that treatment.

A slight clue to what is going on might be the painter Edward Hopper, Lynch’s favorite artist.

Hopper was a specialist of atmosphere, of scene-setting, of feeling, of emotion. Maybe all Lynch wanted to do was make you smell the pine-tingling aroma of the Pacific Northwest, or an old factory’s rusting pipes, or an actress’s sweat as she masturbates on-camera, as Naomi Watts did in his MULHOLLAND DRIVE?

In the late 20-teens TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN (Twin Peaks 3rd Season, Showtime) there’s an episode where a scene is set in a small-town radio station’s outer office. The room, the office, and the characters are from a Hopper painting. It’s a great homage to Hopper from a fan.

Is scene-setting enough for a movie or a TV show, though?

Here’s a movie theater usher in another Hopper, pondering the same question:

newyork movie edward hopper 1939 — ***Edward Hopper, “New York Movie” (1939)***

free photo of the tesla model s is shown in this image

Burning Tesla

Written by Gregg Fedchak on March 27, 2025. Posted in Books.

The story of Tesla is ludicrous, says author and auto industry journalist Edward Niedermeyer.

In his 2019 book LUDICROUS: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors, you can boil the story down to three things:

Elon Musk is distracted.
Elon Musk is a hype machine who is an expert salesman and promiser.
Tesla gets innovation and concept right, but can’t be bothered with building reliable cars.

free photo of tesla cybertruck with dog and crate in nature — **the Cybertruck**

I have a friend who calculated that it would take 3 extra days to drive from the Rocky Mountains to upstate New York in his Tesla than it would in his trusty pickup truck, so he hopped in the V8 behemoth and drove it cross country. This is not just because of charging times, but because of the routes he’d have to take to find chargers.

This is an Elon problem: never would Musk admit in public that Teslas would slow you down and inconvenience you.

The gullible public and eager, greedy investors are always ready to buy anything Musk promises and says. Hence a few profitable quarters and a massive stock valuation. Which have kept Tesla going despite failed self-driving, messy Cybertruck problems, and models long overdue for updates or replacement.

Musk was distracted from properly running his auto and other empires well before his current political involvement. He clearly is a genius. He clearly is enthusiastic. He seems to actually believe the things he promises. It’s just that he has too much on his plate.

Finally, the act of building cars is a grinding, low margin, difficult, boring sort of thing, the kind of thing geniuses naturally shy away from because they can hire people who can do Julia Child’s “dog’s work” for them.

Except in Musk’s case, he either hired fellow geniuses for whom the mere manufacture of complex consumer goods was as boring as it was for him, or else he frustrated the efforts of competent manufacturing engineers by his overpromising of unready features or unbuildable tech or style.

LUDICROUS is from 2019, so Musk’s DOGE involvement is missing, as is the current Tesla stock volatility and the acts of violence against Teslas on the street and at dealerships. But otherwise, the book is surprisingly good background reading for today’s headlines.

Meanwhile, the car beatings and burnings shall continue until nobody’s morale is improved.

71g3dcobuxl. sl1500 — ***Tesla is LUDICROUS***

Whiskey, Cigarettes,Sex, and Perfection

Written by Gregg Fedchak on March 25, 2025. Posted in Books, Music.

The life of a classical music musician is in some ways wilder than the life of a rock star.

The anxiety is heightened by the fact that rock musicians can thrive on a lot of musical and personal mistakes. Mistakes can get classical musicians canned.

Which is why the late cellist Janos Starker lived long enough, despite his taste for drink and smoke, to write a memoir of his nearly 90 years. He was close to perfect musically. And, it seems, as a man, despite his genuine humbleness.

Starker believed that consistency – steady, non-showy quality – is the greatest attribute both of great musicians and of himself. Not, actually, perfection. But . . . perfection is what he came close to with that philosophy.

He spent the 1950’s as the principal cellist for conductor Fritz Reiner’s Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

conversation with jános starker — ***Janos Starker***

Reiner ran his orchestra as a private fiefdom. He could hire and fire at will. By all accounts, Starker was one of the few who never had to worry about that. He was, like Reiner, consistently good. As in NO mistakes good. And he was a solid, as Reiner himself was. Two workmanlike colleagues, all of one mind, all business.

So it was quite a scene when Starker made one big, loud boo-boo at one of the last Chicago rehearsals before he left for teaching and solo stardom.

The entire orchestra laughed at the boo-boo, since it was a fact that for 9 years Starker had made none, even in mere rehearsals.

Reiner threw his baton on the floor and screamed.

“Am I not allowed to make one mistake after 9 years?” Starker plaintively asked.

No, no you are not allowed to make mistakes in any serious musical situation. Which probably explains why the classical music world is so loopy and why you need so many whiskeys and cigarettes.

Patti Niemi wrote about her own severe performance anxiety in her memoir, STICKING IT OUT: FROM JUILLIARD TO THE ORCHESTRA PIT.

I got nervous reading the thing, probably because I was on the spot a number of times as a trumpet player in band, stage band, and orchestra as a kid. There was one moment when I had to “start” a piece for an Area All-State orchestra with a rather difficult high note.

I had botched it several times in rehearsal. At the concert, a French horn player turned to me and said, “You’d better hit it.”

And she meant it, too.

I did hit it. The conductor winked at me and smiled. But I realized then and there that music performance was not a lifestyle for me.

Niemi’s book is brilliant in the way it makes true panic come alive. Her case was made infinitely worse by her being a woman in what was a traditionally male position. And by the difficulty all percussionists have with finding a safe place to rehearse. After all, you need to be something like 2 miles away from all but the most amenable people to “stick it” for hours on end.

And finally sex.

Whereas Starker is discreet about sex in the pits – as discreet as his magnificent playing – the whole point of Blair Tindall’s MOZART IN THE JUNGLE: SEX, DRUGS, AND CLASSICAL MUSIC is such “misbehavior”. The only time Starker mentions sex, it’s when he says that Reiner sat him in the dead middle of the orchestra, such that Reiner blocked his view of the pretty ladies in the audience that Starker had a penchant for eyeballing during his rests.

MOZART proves that while sex and drugs may be a side benefit for rock, pop, country, and jazz artists, it’s more of an escape valve from the kind of tension and stress that Niemi writes about.

MOZART IN THE JUNGLE is a tad sad, even disturbing. It makes one yearn for a life as an accountant, or a night janitor. Apparently classical musicians don’t make love so much as toss themselves randomly at passersby.

Starker’s book even contains some of his short fiction, and his adventures with rare and costly cello models. His book is a great read, and he’s a down-to-earth fellow with insights up, down, and sideways on the musical history of the entire 20th century, well into our current one.

Niemi reads like a horror story, in a good way, if you’ve ever had any experience making music in front of live human beings. It may also make you feel better about giving it all up, although things work out for her in the end.

Tindall?

Tindall is like looking at a three alarm fire. Fun, but only at a distance.

The Hardy Boys and the Mystery of Who Invented Television

Written by Gregg Fedchak on February 10, 2025. Posted in Books.

Did a 15 year old boy on a family farm invent TV, or did a nasty old big corporation?

Okay, so Philo Farnsworth was older than 15 when he came up with the first functioning electrical television broadcasting system, but he started when 15.

Earlier, actually. He shared it with his high school science teacher at 15. According to the patents, he’s the one who did it.

philo farnsworth 1924 — ***Philo T. Farnsworth***

RCA, led by David Sarnoff, wanted the world to believe that RCA invented the first successful system, and displayed it at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. Sarnoff, actually, wanted the world to believe that David Sarnoff was the magician behind the new technology, but that’s for another text, a psychology one.

davidsarnoff 1922 — ***David Sarnoff of RCA/NBC***

THE LAST LONE INVENTOR: A Tale of Genius, Deceit, and the Birth of Television by Evan I. Schwartz (HarperCollins 2002) reads like a Hardy Boys novel, full of intrigue with villains, heroes, and plenty of questions. And that’s okay for this subject, which is littered with figures large and small who have bits and pieces of claims to have invented TV or parts thereof.

version 1.0.0 — ***THE LAST LONE INVENTOR by Evan I. Schwartz***

Here’s the mess: there were competing broadcasting systems, one mechanical (with a spinning disk inside each TV!), another electrical (which won, thank God). Germany, Russia and the later Soviet Union, and England all had lone and corporate inventors working on early TV. Italy had Marconi, the elegant (and sexy, and rich) wireless telegraph inventor fiddling with TV.

Everybody dragged their heels in the development process. Farnsworth dragged because of lack of money and facilities and because of personal problems. RCA/NBC dragged because it had a cash cow in radio during the otherwise desperate Great Depresssion decade. They also dragged because they were trying to run out the clock on Farnsworth’s successful patents, while wearing him down on legal costs and court challenges.

And, of course, Hitler wanted attention and caused the world to shut down luxury and leisure industries so that it could annihilate Germany.

Finally, Farnsworth had a perverse way of shooting himself in the forehead from time to time.

He took up smoking to cure himself of alcoholism. He wasted a golden opportunity to testify before a Congressional committee about RCA’s goon tactics. He refused numerous business deals for his tech that would have made him wealthy for life, deals that you or I would have made in a flash.

But no, Farnsworth wanted to be Farnsworth. He won in the end. Against the greatest of companies and the greatest of odds.

Sort of . . .

Did An Enema Technique Create Critical Theory?

Written by Gregg Fedchak on January 18, 2025. Posted in Books.

Our internal and external environments affect how we think. They can be inspirational. They can create epiphanies. If we’re lucky, they can create our life paths.

sommer, giorgio (1834 1914) n. 1167 napoli panorama (2) — ***Vesuvius ejaculating***

In “NAPLES 1925: Adorno, Benjamin, and the Summer That Made Critical Theory” (Yale/Margellos World Republic of Letters, 2024), author Martin Mittelmeier, with wonderful help from translator Shelley Frisch, proposes that the environs of Naples, Italy inspired the beginnings of Critical Theory.

What is Critical Theory?

Known more commonly in the United States as The Frankfurt School, Critical Theory is a school of philosophy? sociology? Marxism? that actually had a building in Frankfurt, Germany, which proves it was a school. It even looks like a school building:

German philosophers liked to unwind and drink in Italy, and eventually some of them found their way as far south as Naples, near the always-entertaining Mt. Vesuvius. The practical locals, the pre-industrial setting, the ruins, the porous volcanic rocks, skulls and burial caves, and colorful architects like Gilbert Clavel, who bragged about his enema as, “a Vesuvian eruption ensued, which then turned my behind into a riflescope,” all added to the atmosphere.

Clavell, according to Mittelmeier, inspired Adorno’s concept of “blasting”. “Porosity” came from the lava rocks ejected, some would say ejaculated, upon the mountainsides. “Constellations” came from . . . I’m not sure where.

walter benjamin vers 1928 — ***Walter Benjamin, gazing uneasily upon the future***

Critical Theory is an offshoot, or a sideshoot, or a bastard child of Marxism. As soon as Marxists realized that the working classes were not going to rise up and butcher industrialists, Marxism mutated into a gentle nudging of institutions leftward, a process we see and live in today. It lost, but it won. Sort of, since the working classes are now voting for populists.

Critical theorizing is fundamentally a critique of capitalism and all its failings. It aims for a utopia on earth, but even Adorno thought, “Can’t be done.”

It would like, ideally, for each of us to gain the self-consciousness to assess our lives and then to live more consciously, and better. We might approach that utopia by sharing wealth, working less, needing less, wanting much less, striving less.

It is a critique of the Enlightenment, the historical era that gave us rationalism.

And it’s also hypocritical, in that anyone who can parse it today is running away from a bourgeois life with generally well-to-do bourgeois parents. If your parents can get you into Yale, you could study Critical Theory. If they taught it. Which no university really does, as a whole.

NAPLES 1925 is a beautifully written and even better translated (from the German) book. Mittelmeier has a clever and rather plausible notion of the roots of the philosophy being bred in Italy.

The fact that we live the consequences of a philosophy that nobody can explain or read is horrifying.

Think about that the next time you sit down to your Captain Crunch in sunny Happyville.

scoria macro digon3 — ***porous ejecta so beloved by philosophers***

When Classical Music Was Everywhere

Written by Gregg Fedchak on January 13, 2025. Posted in Books.

I know it seems hard to believe, but there was a time when classical music was as available and as free as country or pop.

That time was in the early days of radio. In the 1920’s until 1950, broadcast networks such as CBS or NBC provided classical music, as did local stations. And there were a bunch of reasons why they did.

When radio was a novelty, there was a civilized war, but a war nonetheless, over what the nature of radio would be.

Would it be commercial, with advertisements? Would it be ad-free and government-run, like the BBC in Great Britain and sort of like the CBC in Canada?

Business and government and activists and all sorts of interests fought it out, and eventually a hybrid model prevailed. Radio in the United States would be mostly commercial.

But there was a catch: the government let it be known that the networks and local stations would need to be responsible for the education and welfare of their listening audiences.

This meant classical music, because it was the most easily pinned-down facet of civic responsibility. Covering political events, news, and producing educational programs such as lectures followed.

There was a missionary element in this. Fans of classical music truly believed that providing a steady diet of it to the guy milking a cow in his barn at 4 am would make the guy, and by extension America, a better and more civilized place.

The classical music industry – and there was and is one – also hoped to capitalize, money-wise, as radio made the music more commercial. That even happened, at least until the Beatles showed up and sunk the ship.

Finally, and most importantly, the roughly 1.5% of the American population that obsesses over classical music feared their type of listening would disappear under the brunt of commercial ding-dong yahoo music forms. They just hoped classical would survive.

Well, it has. Barely. And not on the networks or on your local station. Even your local National Public Radio station has replaced classical music with news, politics, chat, folk stuff, world music, and so on.

Under pressure from government, the major broadcasters gave us 30 or so years of highbrow music. Until like the internet, everything was taken over by noise to rehabilitate a population too weary of work to think or sit patiently in their “free” time.

I have a love/hate relationship with classical music. I like some periods of it, dislike others, prefer some conductors or orchestras, and demand great sound quality because shrill strings drive me insane.

I got a full dose of music education on the top floor of my grammar school, the Page School in Athens, PA, in the early 1960’s. My generation may have been the last to be blessed with this.

I remember Copland, I remember Grofe, I remember the Grand Canyon Suite and the thunderstorm in it and the clip-clop of the donkey heading down into the pit. I remember Bernstein and I remember the guy who preceded him in New York – his name begins with “k”, was it Andre Kostelanitz?? – and so on. Pretty spotty.

pageschool copy — ***The Page School, Athens, PA. Music class top right classroom. I think.***

But I clearly remember that classical music was for the smart kids. It was for the elite. It was drilled into me.

Smart? Classical. Spud? Bobby Vinton. The Beach Boys.

Elitist? Sure. Hard to change oil to, hard to whistle to, hard to stay awake during? Sure. But some of it is mighty fine eatin’.

If you want to know all about how radio used to sound, and believe me, it didn’t sound the way it has during our lifetimes, grab the book RADIO’S CIVIC AMBITION by David Goodman, Oxford University Press: