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It may be embodying it again, in a surprising post-postmodern reaching for authenticity. Thomas Edison’s phonograph, in which sound waves were etched onto the surface of a rotating cylinder, was invented in 1877. The first records made from polyvinyl chloride (PVC) rather than shellac were manufactured in the late 1930s, but PVC only became standard in the post-war plastics surplus that also enabled the washing-up bowl and the hula hoop. The first LP was pressed in 1948. An entire classical symphony could now be contained on a single disc. ( The symphony is the unit of cultural value that the recording industry uses when it wants to boast about innovation: the compact disc’s seventy-nine-minute length was chosen as being sufficient for Beethoven’s Ninth.) Virtue may be an even better option, says Flusfeder. A life lived with honesty and integrity will at least be consistent, whether we are suffering adversity or enjoying good fortune. As the Renaissance poet Petrarch put it: “Many times whom fortune has made bond, virtue has made free.” They were able to do this because they could afford to light their rooms after dark, which was the start of a domestic leisure economy.” Professor Richardson also points out that there were many attempts to quash entertainment by those in power. “James I tried to legislate on some of these issues around entertainment, as did others before him,” she explains. “There’s an extensive outraged moral literature about people who play games and gamble in alehouses, but doing it at home was much more respectable!” It is fair to say that parlour games reached their zenith during the Victorian period.
In 1951, my father and mother, recently married, emigrated to the US, sponsored by his aunt Ruth, who was already in Brooklyn. In New York City, he believed, it didn’t matter how foreign you were: if you were smart and worked hard, you could get on in life. He continued to work in plastics factories. At some point, in the late 1950s or early 1960s, he got a job in a small manufacturing plant in Elizabeth, New Jersey, called Lened. Joe Flusfeder didn’t like life in London. He was poor and he was made to feel ‘like a dirty foreigner’. He had a flair for working with machines and was offered a place at the University of Nottingham to study engineering, but couldn’t afford to take it up. Claiming experience with plastics moulding equipment, he was given a job in a spectacle-frames factory where he learned the job by doing it. Then he worked in a factory that manufactured plastic clasps for handbags. Sometimes he slept on the factory floor. Generally, he lived in rooms in east and north-east London, often sharing them with other Jewish Poles displaced by the war.
I liked Pepe. He had made a dangerous crossing to leave Castro’s Cuba and even though I disapproved of this, in a boy-Marxist kind of way, I forgave him. The last time I saw him was when I was sixteen and he took me drinking, the giddy rush of afternoon Heinekens, and everything he said, other than on political matters, seemed to me to be apt and wise. My father, Joe,was born in Warsaw, reaching the USA by way of England, Iraq, Palestine, Monte Cassino, and a forced-labour camp in Siberia; and my mother, Trudy, was from the East End of London. Except he wasn’t. I’d circled around for a quarter of an hour or so before returning to the office. The pianist Glenn Gould gave up performing live that year, preferring the technology of the recording studio. In 1966 he wrote: ‘Whether we recognize it or not, the long-player record has come to embody the very reality of music.’ This works well enough in day-to-day life, but, writes Flusfeder, the extension of this very human way of thinking to economics often fails when it turns out that past results are an imperfect guide to future performance.
Thrilling, intelligent and wilfully unique, with the bonus ball of being unexpectedly moving, David Flusfeder’s thirteen investigations are the result of a lifetime of original thinking. I loved it” - James Runcie, author of The Great Passion Instead, our brains make reasonable assumptions and update them if necessary. Along the way, we develop habits, and the impression that we live in a deterministic world in which what happened yesterday is a reliable guide for our actions today. I got over my guilt that I hadn’t made it to Elizabeth, that I’d allowed poor planning and the New York Marathon and telephone data usage and James Turrell to deflect me from it. Joe Flusfeder wouldn’t have minded. He was not a sentimental man. He never declared any feelings or curiosity or interest in Elizabeth, or Berkeley Heights, where he had, as they used to say, begun to ‘raise a family’. He had been in Elizabeth solely because of work, because Lenny Palermo and the unknown Ed had happened to set up a factory there. He chose, when he could afford to, to live in Manhattan. Elizabeth and Fort Lee and Berkeley Heights and Fresh Meadows, like London, like Monte Cassino or Siberia or Warsaw, were unavoidable steps on his way. There was to be an exhibition. There were lots of pictures like his, apparently – of waiters, pastry cooks, valets, bellboys.’In 2006, 900,000 records were sold in the USA. There was a slight rise to a million the following year; and then something happened. Every couple of years or so, the figure would double, so that by 2015, nearly twelve million records were sold, a rise of just under three million over 2014.
On this, statistician David Spiegelhalter, who studies the public perception of risk, puts it bluntly. Probability doesn’t exist outside the mind, he says: “It is not an objective aspect of the world. It’s a way to operationalise a belief.” At best, he says, it provides us with a map to help us navigate outcomes that are immeasurable and ultimately unknowable. I’ve written about my father before and each time I’ve thought I was done with it. He was the idol and enemy of my youth, the smartest and toughest man I’ve ever known, and I fought against him harder than I’ve fought anybody.Like many of my father’s decisions, his decision to get out of the recording business in 1982 was a shrewd one. In 1975, record sales in the USA had totalled approximately 460 million dollars. By 1978, that had gone up to around 500 million dollars, of which about two-thirds was made up of album sales and the other third of singles. But by 1982, vinyl was on the way out. Cassettes became more popular than records in 1985. CDs took over in 1989. By the 1990s vinyl records had become twentieth-century curios, a niche market kept alive by ageing audiophiles and a few purists’ genres like Detroit techno.
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