Books – Gregg Fedchak

Stuckness is a Worthy Goal

Written by Gregg Fedchak on January 21, 2026. Posted in Books.

Americans seemingly fall out of the womb with a desire to optimize.

We can never just be. We feel compelled to do. And to not just do, but to improve. And what we need to improve is some product. Even if the product isn’t a mousetrap or a juicy slice of software. Even if the product is ourselves.

This is so obvious that it feels obscene for me to even mention it.

We get MFA degrees if we want to write “creatively”. We get tutors if we want to learn how to play the piano. We hire “experts” to tell us how to landscape our gardens, coaches to train us, beauty “consultants” to advise us as to how to best dabble in alchemy and mythology, and so on.

Keep two things in mind: 1) Most of this shit is a scam on the part of overeducated narcissists to extract money from us with an easy career, and to make them feel more important to themselves than they really are and, more importantly, they know this in the depth of their souls; and 2) It’s all about that money. Nothing else.

Most people are lost and mono-dimensional.

LOST IN PERFECTION: Impacts of Optimisation on Culture and Society is a blend of sociology and psychology, and is an academic series of essays on how our manic drivenness affects the air we breathe culturally.

I can’t possibly do justice to how we got this way, so I’ll just list a list: the protestant work ethic, science, capitalism, neoliberalism, engineering, protestant asceticism, envy, mimesis (copying others), the miasma of advertising, Frederick Winslow Taylor (the efficiency expert of the 1920’s who virtually measured worker sweat to determine optimal levels of productivity), the internet, social media, self-tracking by devices, self-branding, product branding (brand “stories”), aesthetic medical procedures, the death of meaning/the death of religion/the death of God/the irrelevance of philosophy, and on and on.

Cut to the bare bone, protestantism made it possible to “get to heaven” by how productive you are. And by how much money you have.

So we have to be productive. We have to do. We have to optimize. We have to succeed, we have to achieve, we have to step on the other guys’ heads as we scramble up the ladder to the Almighty.

Even though God is gone, we still have the mindset of scrambling and of existential perfection, molded by commercial forces to suit their own purposes. We can’t rest. We can’t sit still. We must never get stuck in our lives. To be stuck means someone else may take the last available seat in heaven.

Apparently heaven has a limited seating capacity.

The problem is that this way of living, and without any faith to boot, is inhumane, not fit for us, not fit for human life.

We are not those one-dimensional creatures who need an expert hand or academic credentials, even if all the forces on earth try to beat us down. We are creative even in our seeming stuckness.

But we run away from our inherent creativity because too many money-grubbing half-humans make it seem too difficult to grasp the bigger picture without their help.

LOST IN PERFECTION is a big enough book that I may revisit it.

I read a book a few years ago by a guy named Ogilvy – a business consultant in San Francisco, I think – entitled something like LIVING WITHOUT A GOAL. It was about how scandalous it seems to live free and easy without deep planning, without rationalizing our selves, without engineering outcomes.

You’re already in heaven. You just don’t know it because nobody wants you to know it.

Ticky-Tacky Little Boxes

Written by Gregg Fedchak on December 22, 2025. Posted in Books.

I grew up in what political activist and sanctimonious Quaker Malvina Reynolds called ticky-tacky little boxes. So I figured I needed to read Edward Berenson’s “PERFECT COMMUNITIES: Levitt, Levittown, and the Dream of White Suburbia.” Edward, too, grew up ticky-tackily.

My childhood homes might have been the sort built by Bill Levitt after World War II (and by my father, who was a contractor about that time), but they were decidedly NOT in a typical beehive suburb. They were in small towns or in the countryside. One was a Cape Cod, one a ranch house.

And they weren’t tacky because they weren’t in a beehive formation. I hope.

But is this tacky?:

Well, it’s not tacky if you were a veteran coming home from World War II or the Korean “conflict” and desperately needed a place to live and raise a family in a high-value situation.

Developer Bill Levitt jumped into the gap and mass-produced on-the-spot communities – cities, really – at low cost. He did it throughout the northeast and Maryland and eventually beyond. The houses were (mostly!) sturdy and well-built, and most residents loved them.

Most importantly, they could afford them. They were a good deal.

bill levitt poses with full page newspaper advertisements for levittown — ***Bill Levitt, financially blessed in 1964***

But Berenson points out the fly in the soup, if that’s the expression. Levitt wouldn’t sell to Blacks.

A large part of “PERFECT COMMUNITIES” is about the racism of the postwar suburbs. They were uniformly inhospitable or unavailable to Blacks.

Levitt was a racist without being a racist but was a racist. Maybe. As laws and courts changed things, he begrudgingly opened up his communities.

But he was certainly not in the vanguard of the Civil Rights movement. He did what his overwhelmingly white veteran customers wanted, and kept his developments segregated.

This had the knock-on effect of making him more money. And what developer isn’t in the business to make money? They certainly aren’t in it to build critically-acclaimed domestic architecture. They build to a price point.

So should Levitt have pushed the racial integration boundaries? Yes. But dragging his feet was reality.

Levitt died penniless, a charity case patient in a hospital that he had years earlier helped to fund. He sold out to ITT, the master conglomerate merger hound of its day, in a very bad business decision. He loved his yacht – the third biggest private yacht in the world at the time – and his very non-Levittown estate. He loved drinking and partying and buying his wife jewelry.

So, in the end, no amount of money was enough for Bill Levitt anyway.

He would have had something more valuable at the end of his life if he had fought the times and built for all. And he would be even more fondly remembered today, even by songwriters.

pexels vikram upadhyay 1093402497 21638172

The Fabulous Phonograph

Written by Gregg Fedchak on November 19, 2025. Posted in Books, Music.

You can’t kill music in your home, although many have tried to beat it to death.

Roland Gelatt’s epic THE FABULOUS PHONOGRAPH 1877-1977 ends its story in 1977 because that’s when this now-rare book was published in its second edition.

It’s a shame that it ends when it does because 1977 is about when digital music and MTV and eventually streaming started, and before long, vinyl made a startling comeback. Now, in 2025, there are even signs that CD’s are making their own comeback.

And, of course, tubes have long been “back” among the most serious – or most deranged – audiophiles.

Why tubes now? Because like vinyl, they sound better than sterile 1’s and 0’s.

stax srm t8000 3 copy — ***new production vacuum tubes from a STAX electrostatic headphone amp***

But believe me, the history of home audio is already dense enough without adding its most recent, and volatile, years.

sr 0057mkii a2f3cbeb 0560 4700 88ff fc25a1d43245 1024x1024@2x copy.jpg — *STAX L500 electrostatic headphone, basic design late 1970’s to current*, Japan

You would only read this book if you were a nut, provided you could source it from interlibrary loan or a used book store. Because it is suffocatingly, if entertainingly, detailed.

I am so sick of tracing the path from gramophone to Edison cylinder to shellac to Nazi German magnetic tape and tape recorders to zonophones to record players to stereo to headphones to cassettes (also making a mild comeback today!). I am sick of following the massive and ridiculous trade wars and obscure dead artists and the fall and the rise and the even more advanced fall of recorded classical music.

This is a reference book, a textbook, and very much the sort of excellent writing we had before about 1990, scholarly yet accessible to almost-normal people.

There have been many calls to revise THE FABULOUS PHONOGRAPH, but I think it’s too late. Nobody writes this well now. The two styles of writing would mix like water and oil. Or like digital and analog.

But I did learn about Nipper, the little dog in the painting and ad logo, HIS MASTER’S VOICE.

Why was the dog named “Nipper”? Because he was a nasty little S.O.B. who would nip at the heels of household visitors.

His burial site was under a mulberry tree in Kingston-On-Thames, and it was honored with a plaque in 1949. A plaque on a bank that replaced the mulberry now honors Nipper, the little bastard.

And so the record goes round and round . . .

pexels samfollsf 34159730 — ***Nipper***

Hero or War Criminal?

Written by Gregg Fedchak on September 26, 2025. Posted in Books.

General Curtis LeMay once said something to the effect that if the United States lost the war with Japan, he’d be tried as a war criminal for his introduction of the aerial firebombing of Japanese cities. That level of critical awareness informed his every waking moment and yet never paralyzed him with doubt or hesitation.

LEMAY by Warren Kozak and BLACK SNOW by James Scott are very comprehensive biographies of a man who ran the Army Air Corps and the United States Air Force, in part, for the better part of World War II and the Cold War. He even ran for Vice President in 1968.

And despite helping to win the war in Europe, the war in Asia, and, eventually, the Cold War – he lived to see the Berlin Wall come down – he’s mostly forgotten today.

Perhaps he’s most remembered for being the living, breathing person the two generals in the Stanley Kubrick movie “Dr. Strangelove” were modeled after. Perhaps he’s most remembered for his role on the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Kennedy Administration and its 1962 October Missile Crisis, when he led the hawk side favoring a confrontation with the Soviet Union that could have resulted in a nuclear World War III.

Or, famously, he’s remembered for his saying that we should bomb North Vietnam “back to the stone age”. Or that the best way to conduct a war is to kill enough of the enemy so that eventually they stop fighting.

Or, simply, he’s remembered for overseeing the first use of nuclear weapons, at Hiroshima and then Nagasaki.

Or, even more simply, he’s remembered for killing enough – so, so many – Germans and Japanese, including civilians of course, that we won the war. That they, the enemy, quit fighting.

That’s a lot of “remembered fors” for a guy who is mostly forgotten.

file written by adobe photoshop? 4.0 — ***Tokyo, 1945, after LeMay switched from precision bombing to area incendiary bombing***

I don’t want to compare LeMay to Germany’s Himmler, but there’s a strange symmetry between Himmler taking the initiative in killing Jews en masse in the Holocaust when he noticed that nobody was complaining about it, and Curtis LeMay’s noticing that his ammo dump on Guam was filling with mostly incendiary-type bombs that burned entire cities at a time when the approved bombing style, the precision bombing of industrial and military targets, was failing badly.

Implicitly, the Army Air Corps and the Pentagon was saying to LeMay, go ahead. If you have the guts.

He had the guts. Clearly the Pentagon didn’t.

Everybody breathes a sigh of relief when somebody but them takes the initiative, for better or worse.

All of this was eclipsed by LeMay’s strange decision to run, after retiring from the military, with segregationist third party presidential candidate George Wallace in 1968. LeMay was no racist, as proven by his track record in service, but the odd move nevertheless darkened the rest of his life.

Tone deaf, but a genius, somebody you want on your side in a war – “just imagine him in the enemy’s uniform!” somebody famously said – and the epitome of the winning ideal, how do you defend a Curtis LeMay?

You defend him by preferring to have won.

curtis lemay (usaf) — ***prime Curtis LeMay portrait***

Coffee With Hitler

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

I’m writing this on a day when the word “appeasement” will be bandied about in terms of Trump and Putin and the Ukraine. By coincidence I just finished reading Charles Spicer’s COFFEE WITH HITLER about the informal diplomats who tried to “civilize” the Nazis by befriending them before World War II.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain has gone down in history as being the biggest appeaser ever. He went to Munich at a critical moment, met Hitler, and sold out the West.

Entire books have been written about this. I don’t think it’s necessary to go into detail here, other than to say that Chamberlain thought he had good reasons to eat Nazi bullshit. But the truth is, he didn’t, not really, and was a fool. Millions died because of his appeasement – “giving in in an almost erotic way” is what political appeasement means.

Who is to say that Donald Trump isn’t almost sexually titilliated by Vladimir Putin, today’s war criminal?

But well before Chamberlain, there were informal British diplomatic maneuvers to befriend the Nazi regime, to form bonds of understanding between the German people and the British, and to “civilize” the German elite into the ways of the British Empire and the West in general. To “have coffee” with them is to “have tea” with them is to “shoot grouse” with them is to “have sticky sweet buns” with them. And concerts. And many long talks and walks, in England and Germany both.

This book is great, because it’s kind of a new topic on an overwritten war – about the unsung heroes and boobs who misstepped, misinterpreted, failed to take notes, lost their notes, fed their notes to their dogs, hid their notes, overstepped boundaries, did things they shouldn’t and should have, and so on.

And they have been, until now, a mostly forgotten crew, because formal, state-appointed diplomats and spies get all the publicity and history books. Yet in this case, some of the figures had more inside info than British formal agents had. And more social insight. They read German public opinion better. Sometimes.

Yet history has seen them mostly as appeasers of the Nazis, as idealistic folks run amuck, as idealists often are.

I’d give you names here, but I guarantee you wouldn’t know any of them. As it became clear that their efforts and info would not civilize anybody, and as war loomed, many of these figures – corporate leaders, independently wealthy artists, landed gentry, scholars – bounced into a vehement anti-German mode.

By then, what little the greater British public knew about their prior activities had stuck. They were roundly thought to be Nazi sympathizers even after they were hit by reality. Most faded from view, hid quietly in the countryside, worked at small projects.

It felt safest to downplay their past, no matter how well-intentioned. And most had been well-intentioned.

adolf hitler, 20. april 1945.jpg (2) — ***last known photo of Hitler, just outside his bunker***

World War II popped up seemingly overnight, although it certainly didn’t. The signs were there a decade earlier. Some tried to prevent it by befriending the other side, some – the formal state diplomats – by ignoring the signs and the info from the informal eyes and ears, some by freezing in place and hoping for the best.

And some, like Chamberlain, didn’t ignore the signs. He was simply naive.

A fool on a hill?

inf3 46 neville chamberlain artist wooding

Kennedys and Buckleys: Admirable or . . . Nuts?

Written by Gregg Fedchak on July 29, 2025. Posted in Books.

This is turning out to be a summer of WASPS, reading about rich clans that act like American nobility that are not Protestant but Catholic.

William F. Buckley, conservative, pops in his memoir, OVERDRIVE, about one “ordinary” week in his life in the early 1980’s. Goldwater and Reagan kingmaker and friend of George Bush the First, he was at the height of his influence. In this book he makes sure we know it. He also takes every possible opportunity to tell the story of his entire life, such as his stint as an undercover CIA agent in the early 1950’s.

william f. buckley, jr. 1985 (3x4 cropped) — ***William F. Buckley in his prime***

He could come off as fatheaded with this kind of book format, but he doesn’t. Instead he charmed me. He makes it natural that I’m sitting here thinking about scraping the rotten grass off the underside of my lawn mower deck, and he, at a similar time in life, was sailing the Atlantic.

A totally different book is Buckley’s younger brother Reid’s SPEAKING IN PUBLIC: Buckley’s Techniques for Winning Arguments and Getting Your Point Across.

Published by Bill Buckley’s NATIONAL REVIEW Books, Reid is equally charming, no matter how little you intend to speak in public, or even show up at your local grocery store.

Forget politics here. Even if you can’t stand the Buckley family and its politics, books like these make you like the Buckleys and admire their politics.

These guys were natural. They belonged in charge. They belonged in charge of public speaking schools, in charge of political movements, in charge of sailing and skiing and debating and running oil companies.

So did the Kennedys, on the other side of the political aisle.

Same thing: like the Buckleys, the Kennedys were Roman Catholic WASPS. The masses admired the Kennedy royalty the same way they admired and still admire the Buckley royalty.

Why?

Two reasons: both families were conservative in a very American sense, and both came from the same grubby roots as the rest of us.

Americans are basically conservative politically and always have been. You may have noticed that in recent decades.

JFK was a hawk and was hesitant when it came to civil rights. So were most Americans, sadly. American conservatism is a matter of degree only, and that Donald Trump has been elected twice shows how deep it runs in us.

As far as grubby goes, there was a Texas cowboy sheriff in the Buckley family as late as 1900, and a cooper – a barrel-maker – among the Kennedys in the mid-19th century.

This fits in nicely with my grandfather A working in the Lehigh Valley railyards and my grandfather B changing tires at a gas station, my father laying linoleum, and, for that matter, me moving books with a hod for one miserable summer.

The American story now is one of how the Kennedys and the Buckleys and the rest of us moved up and out thanks to ambition, luck, hard work, education, and an urge to run things. In fact, our social problem now is that there are too many Buckleys and Kennedys and people like us and everybody wants and demands more attention and admiration.

The big question: are families that are this driven – overdriven, indeed – admirable or crazy? Is it good or bad that America winds us all up and expects us to start our own Kennedyesque empires?

Common sense tells us that there is too much education and too few opportunities, and, soon, artificial intelligence will be all over the place sopping up all the love.

If we’re all little entitled Buckleys, who is left to admire anything?

William F. Buckley Wasn’t Gay. Neither Was Ronald Reagan.

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

Although Reagan was concerned about being perceived as gay.

That this is what I took from reading Sam Tanenhaus’ 1,000 page biography of BUCKLEY: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America.

Google’s artificial intelligence flatly states,

” . . . there’s no credible evidence or indication that William F. Buckley Jr. was gay. While some individuals have made accusations, such as those made by Gore Vidal in a libel suit, they are unsubstantiated and widely considered to be personal attacks rather than factual claims, according to Wikipedia. Buckley was married to Patricia Buckley, with whom he had a son, Christopher Buckley.”

We know for sure that Buckley had sex at least once, and with his wife Pat, who gave birth to bestselling novelist Christopher Buckley. (Although Chris was not bestselling right out of the incubator.). This is pending a DNA test, I suppose.

c44909 16 — ***Reagan/Buckley. Quite a ticket.***

Reagan was concerned about being seen as gay because some of his movie roles had been a tad . . . effeminate.

To pull sex out of a subject biography for whom sex was not a primary concern is . . . concerning. It’s not Tanenhaus’ fault. He brings the subject up a reasonable number of times because Buckley was dogged by rumors of gayness.

Is it because people were envious of his WASPishness (despite being Catholic)? Because of his youthful good looks? Because they were liberals looking to besmirch Mr. Conservative? Because he and his wife were good friends of Truman Capote and other gays? Because conservative gays admired him and fantasized about him and “wished and hoped”? Because Buckley’s NATIONAL REVIEW magazine had gay staffers?

This I also took from the massive book: Buckley was in perpetual motion.

He wrote three newspaper columns a week for most of his life. He traveled constantly as a public speaker (my wife and I heard him speak at Hamilton College in Clinton, NY). He edited, ran, and wrote for NATIONAL REVIEW. He advised presidents and politicians. He ran for mayor of New York.

He raised money for all kinds of concerns, both political and charitable. He was part-owner of TV and radio stations. He recorded a TV program, Firing Line, for much of his life. He was a businessman. His family had oil interests. He wrote endless books and novels; as a novelist, he, too, was a bestseller.

He sailed. He played classical piano. He flew (badly – that hobby ended when he crashed his plane on a college campus).

But his industriousness was manically driven. The reader can’t help to feel like a lazy bastard in comparison.

Tanenhaus wonders if all that energy wasn’t spent out of a tragic fear of boredom and a desire to keep introspection at bay. Maybe about repressed gayness, maybe about an endless sense of (white, male) entitlement?

Jarringly, the book comes to a near stop with the election of Reagan in 1980. Buckley lived for another productive 30 years, but you’d never know it from this 1,000 page book.

Considering that it examines in length Young Buckley’s every bowel movement in prep school, why the early crap out?

I’m guessing Tanenhaus made way for Christopher Buckley’s excellent, earlier book on his father, which covered the later years affectionately and well.

Or perhaps he was just tired. The bio took him 25 years to write, and as you read, you get a sense that Tanenhaus is slowly grinding to a stop.

You’ll have to want to know a lot about mid-to-late 20th Century politics and public affairs to get into this book. But Tanenhaus is a great writer. He should be. He was editor of THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW.

And he knows how to spice it up in regular measured doses.

national review magazine founder william f. buckley jr. is seen in an undated handout photo — ***William F. Buckley***

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.