Books - Gregg Fedchak

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Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Fun

Written by Gregg Fedchak on September 15, 2026. Posted in Books, Misc, Satire/Humor/Fiction.

I’m sorry, but too much is perfect.

The 1963 Stanley Kramer movie, It’s A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD World, is too much. It’s perfect.

It’s too long – 3.3 hours in its restored form. The cast is way too big. The story is way too silly. The title is too long. (It started the trend toward obscenely long movie titles like A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, etc. Okay, those started out as Broadway hits first.).

Too many cars were junked. Too many stars were exhausted and injured. It was too hyped, even by today’s standards. The widescreen format made people sick by making any seat in the house a front row seat. Ethel Merman screams too much. Jonathan Winters had just been released from various mental institutions. Spencer Tracy was between way too many binges and was way too fragile.

The movie has always gotten good but mixed reviews. There is always a person out there who says, “Why is the pilot drinking an Old Fashioned instead of flying the Cessna? I don’t get it.”

These people are impervious to slapstick or silly comedy, just because they are. They’re the ones who design spreadsheets for fun. They’re the ones who say, “Why is Moe so hostile?”

its a mad, mad, mad, mad world trailer4 — ***Edie Adams, Sid Caesar, Jonathan*** ***Winters, Ethel Merman, Milton Berle, Mickey Rooney, Buddy Hackett***

The story is about greed. A bunch of strangers gathers at Jimmy Durante’s crash site. Jimmy’s character’s last words indicate a fortune buried under a “W” formation of palm trees nearby.

Then the race is on, as everybody tries to beat everybody else to the fortune, if they can find it.

81qgpcqsspl. sl1057 .jpg — ***the soundtrack, still available after 63 years***

The chase calls for nearly 4 hours of mostly slapstick comedy. Breathless slapstick. Loud slapstick. 85 stars in the cast, counting cameo appearances like Jack Benny, Jerry Lewis, and The Three Stooges.

The movie went over budget. The shooting schedule fell hopelessly behind. Cutting and editing was brutal; the movie could well have gone over 7 hours long. When an attempt was made to find cut material in the early 2000’s, bulldozing a Pennsylvania landfill where the footage had been dumped 40 years earlier was considered.

In all, a good time was had.

its a mad mad mad mad world premiered 60 years ago today in v0 0r4nwmuqnxyb1.jpg copy — ***Dick Shawn and Barrie Chase having a MAD good time***

Well, not all had a good time.

The biggest gripe was that Stanley Kramer ran cast and crew the way the Edmund Fitzgerald had been overdriven on the Great Lakes.

Gripe number one had to be the heat for the early desert scenes. And the mountain that 40-50-60-70 year old actors had to run up and down repeatedly in that desert heat. And the dangerous explosions and flying and automotive stunts all the cast were subjected to. At some point, Jonathan Winters was duct taped to a chair and forgotten. They found him hours later, after he’d nearly chewed himself free.

An Ethel Merman shot at Winters with her loaded handbag caught Winters in the mouth. Merman cried a sincere apology. Winters joked, “Don’t worry about it. I’ll get you in your room tonight.”

its a mad mad mad mad world premiered 60 years ago today in v0 12p9wtgtnxyb1.jpg copy — ***Sid Caesar and Milton Berle, worse for wear***

Barrie Chase, the dancer in the photo above Caesar and Berle, is the sole cast member alive today. She’s 92 or 93, spry and sharp.

“I padded my bra,” she told author of the book COMEDY IS A GRIM BUSINESS, James Curtis. She was considered the greatest female dancer of the 1950’s and ’60’s and had just come off a series of award-winning TV specials with Fred Astaire. “I usually don’t do that. When I walked on set, a crewman said, ‘Look at those knockers’. I nearly pulled the pads out and threw them at him.”

I wish they’d found a role for Jerry Colonna, who was mentioned for the cast early on.

The Cuban Missile Crisis put a damper on the shooting in 1962. And the assassination of JFK in 1963 definitely took a big bite out of box office returns.

I first saw MAD on TV when I was recovering from food poisoning in 1973 or 1974. It helped.

How could it not? Phil Silvers, Terry-Thomas, Dorothy Provine, Jim Backus, Buster Keaton, Don Knotts, The Three Stooges.

Laughter, the best medicine.

Is the Best Model a Nymphomaniac?

Written by Gregg Fedchak on September 8, 2026. Posted in Art, Books.

BOREDOM, which is sometimes called THE BLANK CANVAS or THE EMPTY CANVAS, is a 1960 novel by the Italian Alberto Moravia.

BOREDOM is almost plotless. It is, appropriately, about how sterile, alienated modernity – bored, in other words – is also oddly obsessive and wildly driven.

Driven for what reasons? To avoid boredom at all costs by being self-defeating. We demand unsatisfaction in daily life to distract ourselves from how banal it is.

Fix toast. Scrape off burned layer. Apply butter. Dessicate burned toast in microwave in order to melt rock solid butter and in the process produce Toast Jerky. Lose crown chewing it.

Rinse and repeat all day long. Dirty socks. Broken vacuum cleaner belt. Mower leaves clumps all over lawn. Internet down again. We subscribe to the Orioles at great personal cost and watch every inning, including rain delay filler, even though they always lose. We eat crackers in bed in order to not sleep soundly because of the bed of crackers.

Wouldn’t a romance with a sex machine solve that boredom?

pexels olga rusakova 80196812 9656198 — ***awaiting a blank canvas. and a blank slate model or two.***

Moravia was nominated 26 times for the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was PEN International’s president from 1959 until 1962. He edited and owned literary magazines, wrote nonfiction as well as fiction, and lived a good, long, productive life. He died at about 82 in 1990.

He is almost forgotten today.

71dqzg+l3el. sl1500 .jpg — ***BOREDOM,*** the novel

Artists having affairs – or just plain sex – with their models is a hackneyed subject of many movies, novels, and short stories.

Sometimes, in older works such as this one, the artist entices a model into his studio for purposes of sex. Sometimes the model is a poor waif in search of income, any income. Sometimes the model dreams of marrying a successful or not-so-successful artist and living a glamourous or at least intellectual life.

The artist back then is inevitably a man. The model is a woman, a young woman. The plot possibilities are fertile and as endless as romance and intrigue permit.

But BOREDOM is almost plotless. The story, as such, is about how boring constant and obsessive sex-in-search-of-possessing-the-partner can be.

Which is not to say that BOREDOM is boring. It’s an intense, existential show-and-tell of how sterile 20th century life can be.

moravia & morante — ***author Alberto Moravia, about 1947***

True love or even just good sex demands a reciprocal exchange between partners in terms of intimacy, of what we call “sharing” ourselves.

Dino, the rich 35 year old who lives like a poor person on purpose because he simply dislikes money or dealing with it, doesn’t need a model because he’s an abstract artist who doesn’t even paint at the moment. But he catches the eye of a nearby artist’s model, Cecilia, and before long, *bang* we have a story.

But Cecilia is a blank slate. A nymphomaniac who picks up other sex partners. An automaton. A sex machine.

She represents, for Moravia and eventually for his artist character Dino, the modern masses. The insensate masses. The typical Italian or American or whatever of 1960. The indiscriminate consumer of movies, art, television who can’t even remember what they streamed last night.

In other words, Cecilia is a musician’s, or artist’s, or writer’s worst nightmare. Somebody who consumes your deepest, real, creative self without giving anything back. Except maybe hot yet cold sex. Or money. Or something else meaningless in the end.

“Cecilia isn’t fond of anybody,” her mother cries, when the 17 year old girl doesn’t visit her dying father in the hospital.

As a rich guy, we assume – as does Dino – that he could have any man or woman he wants as a lover or life partner.

pexels amine kubranur cakiroglu 689611212 38120320 — ***an Italian villa like the one Dino’s mother – and Dino himself – own***

But he can’t possess Cecilia because she’s coreless. She’s the final product of late capitalism. Any new car is interchangeable with any other new car. Any skirt can be shucked off for any other skirt, on a whim.

Any lover can be fun, just like any other. Any penis is as good as any other.

She can’t remember what food she just ate. “I don’t look at my food when I eat it,” she says.

She eats up people.

Dino eventually resorts to driving Cecilia to his family estate. A monied party is going on. But Cecilia is not impressed, even though this is the first time she knew Dino came from money.

A car dealer once lamented to me that customers today are no longer “Ford men”, or “a Mopar family”, and so on, but indiscriminately wander from brand to brand. It was more fun back in the old days when you couldn’t pry a Chevy out of an old man’s hands.

We no longer love anything. We no longer acknowledge reality. Or money even. Or others.

We consume them.

This is a problem for everybody. But it is even worse for artists of all kinds, artists who by definition strive to possess an audience. Or at least a curator, or an editor, or a gallery owner.

Alberto Moravia is almost forgotten today. He knew that he would be in 1960.

pexels ann h 45017 4503357 — ***an empty canvas***

“Like Dragging Your Eyeballs Across Asphalt”

Written by Gregg Fedchak on August 31, 2026. Posted in Books.

So says a reviewer on Goodreads of Anselm Jappe’s THE SELF-DEVOURING SOCIETY: Capitalism, Narcissism, and Self-Destruction.

The book’s cover is of a monster eating its own limbs, a metaphor for capitalism.

Jappe is a French social theorist and professor who believes capitalism forms mutants who can only interact with the world by consuming it in an out-of-control way. We are narcissists who live by and for consuming, feel that we are totally entitled to consuming whatever we want, and can only interact with others in consumer/seller relationships.

This, in Jappe’s telling, results in anger, rage, depression, exhaustion, and endless competition. It also ends in global warming, climate change, resource depletion, racism, sexism, and endless frustration.

We’re never satisfied. We always want more.

pexels gorazd nikoloski 241208117 12310709 — ***never enough books***

To reach this conclusion, Jappe draws upon . . . everybody.

Marx. Freud. Lasch, Adorno. Fromm. Horkheimer. Marcuse. Debord. Marxists. Socialists. Even some middle-of-the-roaders.

pexels nicobecker 5477568 — ***Marx. Turning green with envy of those who have the most stuff and die with it.***

Until the end, the book is a typical, if especially eyeball-grinding, screed from the elite French tenured classes who struggle mightily to secure enough grants and taxpayer funding to shore up what’s left of the Frankfurt School of Marxist social critics since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

It’s a tough life.

And by the way, as with Christopher Lasch’s works on narcissism, Jappe’s use of Freud as a theoretical boat anchor is like using worn-out snow tires for your foundation. Soft, squishy, offensive.

Jappe narcissistically draws attention to himself with the last couple of chapters, where he blames school shootings on capitalism. If you don’t get enough stuff to get enough attention you randomly shoot people in order to get Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame.

And, so, we need a revolution. To prevent violence.

We need to make capitalism illegal.

To do this will necessarily require vast amounts of systemic upheaval and, well, violence. On a massive scale. To prevent future Columbines.

And to prevent climate change, a climate change that is our new best hope for faculty lounges running a planet where we all have tenure while eating bugs and earth.

As someone else said, Jappe is either a genius. Or else he’s unhinged.

Dreams of utopia usually are the latter.

neuberger motors, 1137 broadway, hewlett, n. y

The Simple Death of the Packard Motor Car Company

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

James Ward makes the death of Packard excruciatingly complicated, but it doesn’t need to be.

To be fair, automotive historians, at least serious ones like Ward, have to go into the weeds.

But, really, Packard died in 1958 because its cars were ugly and unreliable and had terrible build quality. More than one story involves the factory – and some owners – having to use crowbars to get doors open. Consider that the Packard was considered a luxury car, and you see the problem.

1953 packard balboa x in red and white, front right — ***1953 Packard Balboa. Never reached actual production.***

There were many other factors: the Ford and Chevy price wars of the early 1950’s, the inherent limitations of smaller car makers, few (and lazy) dealerships, a resurgent Cadillac, the wrong merger partner (Studebaker), a lying merger partner (Studebaker) and a failure on Packard’s part to do due diligence when it came to Studebaker’s finances, aging plants, new plants that were too expensive and small, a lack of a dedicated body plant, vanishing military contracts after the Korean War ended, an overreliance on military contracts, labor costs, militant unions, personal enmity between Packard’s head and AMC’s head which made a more suitable merger impossible, a luxury reputation ruined by years of making the downscaled Clipper model, and on and on.

1955 packard patrician touring sedan — ***1955 Packard Patrician***

Ward is nice to James Nance, Packard’s eccentric chief. But, really, he was a mess, and other automotive historians nail him for being an ex-appliance (Hotpoint) salesman rather than luxury car material. He spent years pulling quality out of Packards to save money at the same time that wealthy blue-blooded old money customers had other and better choices. In time, Lincoln and even Chrysler Imperial got their acts together and at higher quality.

Nance tried to do too much too quickly and crammed half-baked tech into his aging auto bodies: homemade automatic transmissions, pushbutton auto transmission controls, torsion bar suspensions, V8’s, and so on. This stuff all failed, as it was done as Packard hurriedly tried to do it all in the tiny Detroit Connor plant. It was so new and unfamiliar to workers, and it was like building a submarine in your bathtub. With a crowbar as your only tool.

It all ended when Studebaker began making Packards as glorified Studebakers. They hung cheap Packard ornamentation on Studebaker bodies in a half-assed attempt to keep the nameplant active. They looked even worse than the last real Packards. The plug was pulled in 1958 and the Packard name was dropped from Studebaker-Packard in 1962.

American Motors Corporation, AMC, proved that smaller manufacturers could survive and even at times prosper. And contrary to popular opinion, AMC never did go bankrupt. In 1988 they got a good deal out of Chrysler and were bought out.

AMC found a niche – smaller cars like the various Ramblers, which every schoolteacher I ever had in the 1960’s seemed to drive – and would have paired brilliantly with a luxury marque such as Packard. But AMC’s head George Romney (later Michigan governor and 1968 Presidential candidate, and Mitt Romney’s father) and Packard’s Nance both wanted to lead a Studebaker-Packard-AMC (an AMC which itself was a clever merger between Hudson and Nash) combine. So it was no deal.

Ironically, AMC’s future Vice President of Design Dick Teague was in charge of the last true Packard styling. Below is Teague’s proposed 1957 redesign, a car that was never made.

It was tentatively named the “Predictor”. You decide if it ever had a chance:

packard predictor, snm, 2011 — ***Dick Teague’s proposed 1957 Packard Predictor***

pexels jonathan valdes 286676880 30284551

Classical Foreplay vs. Pop Premature Ejaculation

Written by Gregg Fedchak on August 6, 2026. Posted in Books, Music.

And you thought music was just music.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, Freud may or may not have said. But music is often sex.

martin van maele francion 15 — ***We’re done with foreplay, put down the damn lute.***

Music is sex in a gently sublimated form. It’s intellectualized and disguised and sometimes rubbed the wrong way, but all forms of music almost always lead to some kind of climax or resolution.

Even a simple little ditty is a diddly.

Conductor Herbert von Karajan, he of Nazi Party fame and controversy, felt all kinds of things about the stringed armies he led and the music they produced. His best biographer, Richard Osborne, mentions in passing that von Karajan thought that music was sexual, and, beyond a doubt, sensual in nature, not just mere high-class entertainment.

herbert von karajan 1963 — ***Herbert von Karajan, in motion.***

American philosopher Allan Bloom, in his magisterial bestseller THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, is even more explicit about sex and music.

” . . . rock music has one appeal only,” Bloom says, “a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire – not love, not eros, but sexual desire undeveloped and untutored.”

How to reach mature love and, indeed, even eros, a refined, elite, patient foreplay?

Bloom prescribes classical music.

internationales management gespräch allan bloom (3x4 cropped) — ***Allan Bloom, 1989.***

Why classical? Because it demands patience, work, time, and trouble. Because it forces listeners to listen attentively or else to fall asleep and fart loudly in a large concert hall. Because classical music tends to really, really build to a climax.

That building, that complex admixture of boredom and excitement, is just like sexual foreplay. Long, fun foreplay, once you have the patience to master and enjoy it.

Herbert von Karajan loved conducting Ravel’s BOLERO because, as Bloom says, it’s the “one piece of classical music that is commonly known and liked (by young people).” But von Karajan didn’t make a steady diet of BOLERO. He didn’t program it everywhere at every time. And Ravel himself disowned and mocked his composition as too simplistic and commercial. Sort of a long pop song.

But von Karajan knew its simple power. The power of seduction.

When a young Roy Orbison, future pop and rock star, was struggling to break out as a power songwriter, unhelped by his looks at a time when looks were becoming all that mattered in pop culture (not talent or ability), his record producer handed him an LP. It was of Ravel’s BOLERO. It may have even been a von Karajan recording.

“Make all your music sound like this,” Orbison’s producer told him. No fool, Roy took the advice.

He promptly started pooping out hit after hit. His songs build magnificently toward climaxes.

The only problem is that they climax after only 2 or 3 or 4 minutes. Usually while you were in the back seat of your father’s ’61 Ford. Hardly conducive to mature, satisfying love.

“In short,” Allan Bloom says of his students who were untutored in the ways of true love, “life is made into a non-stop (by quickie pop music) commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy.”

Orbison, who was one of the few rock stars who could have been an opera singer had he so chosen, presumably was happy with his fate. So was Elvis with his hips, the commercially pliable Beatles, and so on.

Today we swim in an overheated pool of come-come-come quickly-quickly-quickly at the speed of light, and not just because of our music choices.

I sense that Bloom is correct. Real eros takes time and patience.

Is it too farfetched to believe that dropping classical music appreciation classes in public schools has made us limp lovers?

Kitsch Is For Morons. Sorry.

Written by Gregg Fedchak on July 11, 2026. Posted in Art, Books, Music, Photography.

We are prone to saying “to each his own”.

Sorry. Some things are always stupid, shallow, and indicative of people stuck at age 7. If you favor the tasteless, you’re tasteless.

That is, sadly, most of us.

True culture takes a beating every time a new, more naive class enters the marketplace. It used to be that going to college creamed your brain enough that you knew that pink bathrooms and inspirational bumper stickers were somehow what they really are, which is bad. And indicative of really bad taste that made you a moron.

pexels wr heustis 310270240 14602844 — ***graphic cancer***

Tomas Kulka, in his Penn State Press book, says that kitsch is any art, music, architecture, or literature – think adult Harry Potter enthusiasts – that emits big emotions (puppies, children, barns, sunsets, waterfalls), easily identifiable subjects (like the prior list), and DOES NOT ENRICH the viewer on any level.

What does this do for you?

pexels boxfreelance 30552630 — ***This Is Not Art***

What does this say about you?

pexels wwarby 19613731 — ***This says you’re a tasteless moron. And that if it’s in your house, maybe you drink too much.***

Kitsch can be old women and men trying to suspend the aging process by applying Scott’s Turf Builder. It can be those metal civic buildings built solely at the lowest possible cost. It can be the color pink. It is anything superficial and easy. Way too easy.

Leave out irony, though. Irony can be high art. Sticking a tasteless plastic pink flamingo out front can be high art if done to confuse your neighbors or chase away gophers. Sticking a pink flamingo out front, if done by Andy Warhol, is an artistic statement of high calibre.

Leave out Susan Sontag’s and Walter Benjamin’s photography. (By the way, if you don’t know these people, you haven’t been to college, you have been to a glorified trade school.) Photography can be high art, just not as most people use it, which is to record every banal daily event, every ingestion, every defecation.

And film can be camp. Campy. The mid-’70’s TV series Kolchak: The Night Stalker, was seen by the masses as a straight horror show. Martin Mull’s Fernwood 2Nite/America 2Nite was seen by some as a “real” talk show. Actually, Kolchak was campy (Monster of the Week!”) and Mull – a great artist, btw – castrated Johnny Carson in broad daylight.

If you want to grow up before you die, buy and read, even if it gives you a cerebral vascular accident, a Philosophy 101 textbook. Or the Bible. Or Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King.

It may hurt. That means it’s worthwhile.

This isn’t worthwhile:

pexels misra denizer 2150450936 31143469 — ***Not worthwhile. Bolstered in its worthlessness by its pinkness. And in its futility.***

People now don’t go to college to be schooled in the liberal arts. They go to college to get trained in highly specialized, inane careers. Those careers are stifling.

Thus stifled, those careerists need to recover with trips to Spain, political activism, music from their childhoods, being waited upon like kings and queens in restaurants where the workers get by with the help of marijuana and spitting in the soup, getting massages, binge watching TV, whatever.

And they say, “To each their own!” in defense of their wasted lives. They get away with it because we’ve all been trained since birth that we’re entitled, ENTITLED, to do, have, be, AND LIKE whatever we want. And that our tastes and educational level is on par with Leonard Bernstein.

We’ve been told this lie by the men and women of capitalism who hope to sell us something on the back of their keeping us little narcissistic boys and girls who have to be told by “experts” to stay in our rooms and, as Martin Mull sang in one of his songs, “think the things we thought when we were three.”

Fuck it, most people are a lethal threat to those who aspire to making real meaning. And to having real happiness.

Those who aspire to greatness are part of a remnant. A small and shrinking population of serious people doing and thinking serious things. For the sake of a deep, deep, orgasmic enjoyment.

And having more fun in doing so than any kitsch-dweller can imagine!

pexels peterdanthy 32481980 — ***Losers***

Politics Is A Useful Useless Escape From An Inner Void

Written by Gregg Fedchak on June 29, 2026. Posted in Books.

A sad, internal emptiness fuels most cases of individual political enthusiasm. To belong to a tribe, to take part in a war between alleged good and alleged evil, to be stimulated by outrage, to harden perseverative obsessive repetitive loops in the brain, to have an all-consuming addiction that dulls reality, to have a socially acceptable license to hate, to claim moral superiority, to rationalize envy, to virtue signal, to organize all aspects of life, all make politics a life-saver.

Just not in the way we normally think. Neither “side” solves actual problems. Either side can slowly become evil.

But political involvement saves a person from the problem of how to live as an uncreative soul who presses their nose against the windows of perceived enemies.

THE CULTURAL MARXISM CONSPIRACY by A.J.A. Woods by the Marxist and far-left Verso Press is a tightly researched, not-so-tightly argued book that lays out how the cultural right discovered that the Frankfurt School of philosophy and sociology could handily be used as a baseball bat against the cultural left. Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and crew helped Paul Weyrich and William Lind explain how external enemies – these obscure Frankfurt School social critics who were critical of the West – transformed the family-friendly Western Civilization of the 1950’s and turned it into a nightmare of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll by 1970.

CULTURAL MARXISM shows how asinine both sides are. Politics is a high level schoolground fight, a hockey fight, a lot of gritted teeth. So is this book. It’s a book for committed leftists who have a certain set of ideas burned into their brain, wants them reinforced by rebar, and who will fight and argue for them just like a Nazi soldier will fight until death.

Nothing is more boring, useless, and ultimately dangerous than a firmly committed ideologue of any flavor.

pexels ivan s 9643243 — ***feel better now that you’ve made your little sign? how cute! how effective!***

The Frankfurt School did not cause the 1960’s. The political right is wrong about that. Woods takes it down handily. The problem is, Adorno and Horkheimer and crew are used as paper tigers to fuel yet another North Korean partisan rant yak-yak-yak for the heavily committed nut cases.

The right has their own rants. We don’t want or need rants of any kind.

You may have noticed that boring and repetitive and enraging political posts of all kinds – over and over and over again – on social media have alienated the vast center of politics. They turn off. They watch porn instead, or play video games, or are obsessed with sports and this new thing called FIFA, whatever that is. We no longer listen. That gets us to extremes of socialism or fascism faster than anything.

So why do people do it?

Emptiness. Political activism of any kind is a consumer product. I am what I buy. Until either the next product comes along, or until death breaks the addiction.

Politics was designed to be a compromise. A happy compromise.

Politics, at its best, is people with different ideas sitting around a table – or in a hot tub, or whatever – coming up with compromised solutions to solve complex problems. You know, like solar panels surrounding a nuclear power plant in the same field. Or raising taxes to pay off debt rather than not raising taxes and adding new programs.

But oh, no. Activists have to define what’s left of their lives by extreme positions, and they rationalize that by saying that the “other side” started it.

Madness.

The Attack of the Breasts

Written by Gregg Fedchak on June 20, 2026. Posted in Books.

Are the fathers of the Frankfurt School of intellectuals profoundly intelligent and important, or self-important upper-middle class trust fund babies all bloated with turgid and meaningless self-masturbatory road sand for brains?

ADORNO & BENJAMIN: The Complete Correspondence 1928 -1940 proves both are true.

It’s best to start in 1969, after Theordor Adorno called the cops on German student protesters during one of his classes. Shortly thereafter, female students protested Adorno’s protest of the protests by storming his podium, showering him with roses, and then exposing their breasts to him, claiming if Adorno kept teaching then capitalism would never be reformed.

Adorno ran home in shock. He died a few months later of a heart attack.

Aside from not understanding how being showered with bare breasts could be an attack, I have trouble getting the logic here. But people smarter than me tell me that although he spent his life criticizing all aspects of capitalism from a Marxist standpoint, the call to the police and a failure on his part to provide actionable ways to implement leftist reforms were reason to pummel him with breasts.

The letter book from the 1930’s ends when Walter Benjamin, he of massive procrastination, killed himself when he was denied – or at least thought he was being denied – safe passage from France to Spain to Portugal.

walter benjamin vers 1928 — ***Walter Benjamin***

The correspondence was a tussle back and forth between two extremely difficult and abstruse personalities, Adorno the Fathead and Walter the Mystical. It was also an intellectual exchange of epic proportions, or else a complete waste of time between two borderline pathologies.

I read it mainly to suss out the historical conditions flying in the background: the fall of the nominally democratic German Weimar Republic, the unleashing of hordes of intellectual refugees upon first France and then England and the United States, and how the allegedly intellectual astute artists and writers and thinkers and musicians felt about it.

The problem is that these were Marxist Light critical theorists. They were mainly of upper-middle class origins. They had money, they had trust funds, and they were more bourgeois and in love with stasis and orderly lives than they were chaos, disorder, war, and, God forbid, revolution.

Thus, they bitched their whole lives about inane capitalist fetishes such as pop music, advertisements, and astrology, but were never ever interested in “solving” these “problems” “for the masses”.

A cute internet myth is the one which claims that Adorno was the real composer of the early Beatles’ songs. Adorno’s “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” and “All Your Lovin'” were done to parody the stupidity of capitalism and its lightweight amusements for imbeciles.

It certainly fits – making money off kids with water on the brain is certainly what capitalism does. But if Adorno was the talent behind the Beatles, it would have made him a hell of a lot more effective in real life than he ever was. And made his estate a hell of a lot richer.

So I recommend ADORNO & BENJAMIN for a sideways glance at the intellectual atmosphere of a very disturbing decade, but good luck trying to figure out their philosophies, because it was designed to be abstruse, on purpose, to keep everybody but these daydreamers out of their private code.

The women who bared their breasts had the right idea. Shock this fathead out of his useless daze by primal means.

It was the thing he was least able to cope with: something real, something right in front of him, something he didn’t have time to overthink and theorize about.

Adorno’s basic impotence in the face of breasts is not too surprising. He and his wife Gretel, who mothered him, loved the kitschy American TV program “Daktari”. He loved Clarence the One-Eyed Lion. He collected stuffed animals and placed them around his work desks.

By 1969, his students had him well figured out. No revolutionary, him.

484002580 961771666142498 9036095043833098322 n — ***“Daktari” as work?***

When All the Men Wore Hats

Written by Gregg Fedchak on June 14, 2026. Posted in Books.

I’m trying to figure out Susan Cheever.

I haven’t read her fiction, but I’ve read some of her nonfiction, as you can see from my bookshelf below:

She clearly can write. She clearly can think. She has clearly pondered deeply her relationship with her famous father, John Cheever.

But there’s something about her writing and thinking that makes me uncomfortable. It’s an underlying tone. A tone of envy? Regret? Denial? Rage? Sadness? Depression? Longing?

susan cheever 5736916517 — ***Susan Cheever***

Imagine having a famous father. A famous father – or mother – of any kind. A race car driver. A movie star. The best local mason or truck driver. It’s an extra load on the psyche of any child.

Then imagine having a famous father as bizarrely complicated as John Cheever, the novelist, short story writer, journal writer, and famous letter writer.

But then add to that the fact that John Cheever was an alcoholic, a closeted gay, bisexual, bad with money, poor most of his life, and always deep in various sexual affairs and you have a real stew. Especially when, like Susan, you were (mostly) in the dark about the sexual aspects until he died. His life was so complex yet somehow amusing in a droll way that it even showed up as an element in a “Seinfeld” TV episode.

“WHEN ALL THE MEN WORE HATS: Susan Cheever on the Stories of John Cheever” is Susan’s attempt to discuss her father with a focus on his actual work, and how the actual work reflected the actual and hidden life stories that were percolating just below the surface of what appeared to be a money-poor version of an upper class – or at least an intellectual – life. And there’s another confounding thing: this intellectual literary genius never even graduated from high school.

It’s a slightly disjointed work. It’s repetitive. It’s sometimes hard to follow when she jumps from fiction to nonfiction.

John Cheever’s greatest story might be “The Swimmer”, which was made into a Burt Lancaster movie and is now a famous cult classic. It’s about an upper class, preppie, old money guy who decides to swim home by way of all his neighbors’ swimming pools on a bright, warm, sunny day in some place like Westchester County.

As the movie goes along, we learn more about Neddy, Lancaster’s character. Most of it not good.

The day starts out jolly. As pool follows pool, and neighbor follows neighbor, it gets darker and colder outside, and we learn that Neddy might have career problems, affairs, marital difficulties, money trouble, and, biggest of all, mental health and alcohol issues.

The day ends with Neddy shivering in a pile of dead late autumn leaves at the front door of his home, which is now as dead and dark and shuttered and abandoned as an old ship wreck. His family is gone, his wife and his four beautiful daughters are gone, his door and life are locked.

Neddy has lost reality. He has had a full mental breakdown.

I think this style of writing is called “magical realism”. It can’t happen in real life, only in a mentally disturbed parallel universe. Even though the story is a masterpiece and is perfect, “The New Yorker” was hesitant to publish it, because it was too unhinged. His editor Bill Maxwell said something to the effect that “it can’t go from summer to autumn in one afternoon”.

John Cheever could convincingly make life go from summer to autumn in one afternoon.

This is what Susan Cheever still has to deal with.

the swimmer poster — ***“The Swimmer”***

pexels maria fernanda perez 1038050 5055063

Do What You Want

Written by Gregg Fedchak on May 30, 2026. Posted in Books.

I have a good habit of not doing what I don’t want to do. Novelist and short story writer Richard Yates was the same way. Only he crucified the USA and took it down in the process of being free.

602548b6c53536001cefde4b — ***Richard Yates on his beloved Mazda, toward the end***

Yates had emphysema, epilepsy, bouts of mental illness, was an alcoholic, and smoked 5 packs of cigarettes a day. He died in 1992 at the age of 66 during a routine minor procedure. Like hard-living jazzeteer Chet Baker, one wonders how he lived that well that long. If Yates had been a vegetarian jogger, he probably would have been gone of an embolism at 40.

With his habits, what could you do for a living? Why, of course, like everybody else today, he taught. Creative writing. Beats a cubicle at Social Services, right?

He didn’t make much money as a writer until he died. His best novel, REVOLUTIONARY ROAD, was made into a good movie after his death, and people found their way back to the book. It was nominated for the National Book Award in 1961. It went up against J. D. Salinger’s FRANNY AND ZOOEY and the winner, Walker Percy’s THE MOVIEGOER, both tremendous books.

Often described as a sociological novel – ugh – it blisteringly attacked consumerism, class, family life, children, the suburbs, and the inane kind of lives and work that Americans settle for.

pexels yuncaba 15647070 — ***typical Americans***

I didn’t understand the novel the first time I read it. When I re-read it again a few days ago, I couldn’t put it down. Perhaps Facebook has trained me in the finer art of discerning what’s wrong with most people. Yates had it figured out before vacuum tubes had disappeared.

His suburb dwellers settle for jobs that they don’t like, commutes that they hate, families that they don’t want, busywork that keeps all this shit buried, mindless business in general, drinking, smoking, oversleeping, undersleeping, fucking neighbors, and avoiding at all costs their creative selves, the latter because being creative in a flowlike sense threatens a loss of control which Americans absolutely can not stand.

pexels pixabay 164558 — ***a holding pen***

Americans do this because they do what’s expected of them. Conformity. We may seem more lively today than in Yates’ era, but it’s superficial: tats, blue hair, carrying guns, whatever, it’s just a whacko attention-getting device or bloated lips or burned skin – even politicians show off their Nazi skull and crossbones tats today and the most “progressive” among us dismiss it as nothing.

All of this is in the name of conformity. Doing what’s expected us us. Being a rebel in the way of our various fragmented tribes online. We have nothing else. Yates thought our culture beneath contempt.

Read REVOLUTIONARY ROAD for a revolution in the way you see, think, and feel.

But you won’t, because it might make you feel bad. Americans who live depleted lives avoid feeling even worse than they already do at all cost. Although they might watch the movie version to see Kate Winslet’s tits. (Is she nude in it? She must be.)

But despite reading it being mandatory if you’re a rare brave individual, realize that it’s NOT just a shit-list of America’s sociological faults.

It’s a soap opera.

It’s mainly one family’s story of accidental procreation, homemade abortion, plans of escape, dreary work and housework, wives who mow lawns, suburban busybodies (one character reminds me of – was it Mrs. Kravitz?? – a character on “Bewitched”), schmoozing, being polite to people you hate in order to get along, humoring children.

And it will change you in ways you need but do not want.