Books – Gregg Fedchak

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.

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.

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: