Listen Up Philip

That was depressing.

Sometimes I don’t know who I am anymore. You live long enough and the dreams you had fade into darkness, replaced by life, and then you realize you’re just living, you’ve got no idea where you’re going, time is running out of the hourglass and you want to hold back the sand, you want time to think, you want to revisit every relationship, every choice, you want to figure it all out. But then you realize it’s impossible.

But it’s not impossible for Philip and Ike, they want to be great writers.

I hadn’t even heard of this film until yesterday, when I was reading the movie blurbs in the “New Yorker” whilst waiting for the microwave to heat up some soup. It was my kind of movie. I’ve got a good track record with this kind of thing. When a movie or a book review resonates, when I feel it’s in my wheelhouse, I dive in. And what gets me going most is relationships.

They’re an enigma.

Philip has a relationship with Elizabeth Moss. I no longer watch “Mad Men,” I find it equivalent to watching paint dry. But I did give it a season plus and I never found the appeal of Ms. Moss. But in this film she shines. She’s both alive and insecure. That’s what mama never told me, how everybody is screwed up, how everybody feels lonely, how everybody has more questions than answers. When Philip abandons her after she’s been a supportive girlfriend she’s completely flummoxed. No conversation appeals. She’s surrounded by people all day, but feels so alone. And she just can’t stop thinking about him. She even reads his old college stories.

Truth. We rarely see it in art. We rarely talk about it. Because it’s just too painful. We’re all trying to connect and after numerous failures some just give up. You know them, over fifty and single, burned too many times, their optimism is gone. They don’t want to be fixed up, they fantasize about someone perfect, but they’re unwilling to compromise.

Philip is unwilling to compromise. He sacrifices for his art. But in the process can you sacrifice your whole life?

Ike did.

Television is the art form of choice. But even TV doesn’t go this deep. Because it doesn’t get ratings. People don’t want to be reminded of loneliness and pain, they’re glad they’ve emerged from it, that it’s in their past.

And it’s in my past. Psychotherapy taught me how not to be the person Philip is. Getting angry, speaking his mind, alienating those he truly wants to be close to. The reward of life is being close to others. But too many can’t get out of their own way.

I live in California. Which is sunny in weather and disposition. People are optimistic. If you’re not smiling, no one has time for you, no one wants to hear your pain. Everything not new and shiny is eventually replaced. We’ve got no time for losers. It’s very different from the east coast, where the dilapidated buildings stand and you wander in bad weather just wishing you could escape, mentally even more than physically.

So the story is Jason Schwartzman is Philip Lewis Friedman, who’s just finished his second novel and believes authenticity is key. He refuses to go on a book tour, he refuses to pose with props. But does his authenticity leave him not only out of the game, but out of life?

Elizabeth Moss is a successful photographer who adores Philip even though he wants nothing to do with her friends who can’t understand why she is with him.

Jonathan Pryce is a lonely old superstar writer who can’t write anymore so he adopts Philip, to have someone to talk to.

And Josephine de la Baume is a professor at the college where Philip gets a temporary teaching gig who conspires against him, forces Philip into existential loneliness, because she’s pissed he got his job without paying his dues.

That’s real life.

Real life is not Kardashians flaunting their wealth.

Real life is not Taylor Swift dating every famous man she comes in contact with.

Real life is not Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of the Ivy dropouts moving to Silicon Valley and revolutionizing the world.

Real life is fraught with choices and challenges, more losses than victories, it’s all angst and loneliness with a few exquisite moments amidst the despair and the desire.

“Listen Up Philip” captures this.

P.S. I watched it On Demand on Time Warner Cable. It’s already left the Los Angeles theatres. I wish everything went to multi-format same day release. Going to the multiplex can be such a hassle.

P.P.S. I don’t recommend this movie. If what I’ve written resonates and you want to see it, if you want to explore the dark side of life, go for it, but you’re on your own.

P.P.P.S. The film is not great, but it captures a mood, a feeling, the mystery of life, and for that I have to applaud it. It both resonated and creeped me out.

P.P.P.P.S. I don’t know how a movie like this gets made, who finances it. We live in a world where everybody wants to state their truth, but we’ve got no time to listen, certainly not to that which is not considered a blockbuster. This is the anti-comic book movie. But we live in a comic book world, where the President is hated and the contrarians conspire to thwart him. If only life and entertainment went deeper, if only art could capture the reality of living on this planet, if only people could handle the truth.

THE LABEL

Used to be you wanted to work at the label, Warner Brothers/Sony/EMI, et al.

Now you want to work at Google, Amazon, Apple or Facebook.

INITIAL GIG/RETAIL

It was nearly impossible to get a job at the record store. You had to know someone and know so much.

Now you want to work at the Apple Store, which is a tough gig to get, and you must be familiar with so much.

STEREO

You saved to get the best reproduction system you could afford, upgrading your stereo along the way.

Now you want the best mobile handset you can afford. They might look cheap, being subsidized by the carrier, but a good handset retails for $600-800, and unlike with stereo there is no haggling/discount.

LINEUP

You used to line up to buy concert tickets.

Now you line up to buy gadgets, most famously at the Apple Store.

GOAL

You used to want to be a musical star.

Now you want to be a tech star.

And in both cases, the goal was similar, to sell out. Every app developer wants a deep pocket to buy them out, oftentimes quickly, the same way acts wanted a record deal. As for getting screwed by the label… In tech you’re screwed by the intermediary, the venture capitalist, who squeezes your share down.

INFO

You used to subscribe to “Crawdaddy,” “Fusion,” “Rolling Stone” and “Zoo World.” Information was limited.

Today you surf sites endlessly ferreting out the truth, and you can talk back and be heard.

FADS

Musical one hit wonders abounded. They were big for a moment and then faded into memory.

Today it’s sites rather than records. We remember AOL and Friendster and MySpace and Turntable.fm.

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE FOR ME LATELY

You were only as good as your last album, if you didn’t continue to deliver your career faded away.

Google and Amazon and Apple and Facebook continue to develop. If you stand still you’re toast.

INVENTORY

Your favorite record might not be in stock and prices were different at every store.

Everything online is always in stock and the price is almost rock bottom identical everywhere.

But hit hardware can be hard to find, the same way hit albums were hard to find.

SUCCESS

Was about riches and sex.

In tech it’s about riches, but everyone knows rich people exude their own attractiveness and find it easier to get laid.

SOUVENIR

Was an autograph.

Now it’s a photograph.

ACCOUNTING

Seamless and understandable in tech, it’s part of the bedrock.

Unfathomable and inequitable in music, to this day.

PROFESSIONAL

Lawyers in music, venture capitalists in tech.

PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE

From vinyl to 8-track to cassette to CD to MP3 to stream in music. You had to pay for the same thing over and over again.

Moore’s Law has us replacing our gadgets constantly in tech. If you’re broke, you cannot play.

BIG SHOW

The Stones at the arena. Tickets were expensive and hard to get.

Now it’s Tim Cook and his cronies in Cupertino, we all tune in for free from home, if you miss it you can stream it later.

But in music today, the money’s all in the show, in tech it’s all in the hardware and software.

BREAKING ACTS/APPS

Radio was king.

Today word of mouth is king.

COOL

The acts.

Now it’s the gadgets. The acts are to be made fun of. The true heroes are the smarties in the tech world, who innovate constantly and continue to dazzle us. Their goal is to disrupt and profit. The acts’ goal is to be the same and profit, and that’s much less interesting. Furthermore, in music packaging is paramount, in tech there’s almost no packaging left. All software is downloadable and instantly available.

FREE

In tech so much is free, whether it be the apps on your computer or the websites you visit. Techies realize a user can be monetized in many ways, and to charge too soon is detrimental.

In music everybody’s a street hustler who demands to get paid at every stop along the way. This short term thinking has held the business back. The key is to get everybody in the ecosystem and then upsell them, the same way iPod users bought Macs then iPhones and iPads.

ENTREPRENEURS

The barrier to entry is so low. Anybody can be a musician or a techie. But to be successful you have to be talented and smart and have a team. All three are hard to achieve.

It wasn’t about Napster.

Otherwise when the music industry succeeded in shutting the service down CD sales would have burgeoned and happiness would have reigned.

The customers just went elsewhere. An endless game of Whac-A-Mole ensued. Suddenly there was KaZaA. And eventually BitTorrent and the Pirate Bay. Turns out consumers didn’t want Napster, they wanted free music.

But on Spotify and YouTube music is not free.

And this is a very good thing.

Spotify is the end of the line. The first time the music business has been ahead of the consumer. It’s a net made to catch those swimming towards the future. That’s how you play it in the Internet sphere. You get ahead of the consumer, you deliver what people can’t even conceive of, never mind don’t even know they want. And you do this by having a service that is so good, it solves all their problems.

Like Google.

Remember when search did not yield desired results? There was chaos in the sphere. Everybody used a different engine. The concept of a site where you got exactly what you wanted, on the first hit, never mind the first page, was unfathomable. At first, to those in the know, it seemed too simple, they liked employing quotation marks on HotBot. But over a few years, Google gained traction and has continued to be improved such that no other site can make headway.

The same thing will happen in music.

And if you require Spotify to pull back, if you cripple Spotify, consumers will just go elsewhere. They already went to YouTube as a result of the major labels’ refusal to license Spotify in time. Trying to turn Spotify into a cash cow prematurely will just force consumers to YouTube and P2P.

I don’t care if it’s Spotify. Or Apple/Beats. Or Deezer. One service will dominate, because that’s the history of the Internet, one Google, one Amazon. But if you get rid of Spotify’s free tier you’ve got Rhapsody. And in over a decade, Rhapsody has failed to penetrate public consciousness, never mind make significant money. Turning Spotify into Rhapsody is like making U2 record nursery rhymes. Mmm….maybe that’s a good idea.

As for the winner of this derby making tons of money via sale or IPO, that’s the American way. No one is stopping you from making a hit record and establishing a career that rains down coin. You’ve just got to be smart and innovative and convince those buying you’re worthy, which Spotify has done.

As for the consumer, there’s still space left on the landing strip. Most consumers don’t know that Spotify syncs playlists like you own them, there is no bandwidth cost. If your device has power, you can play. It might be years more until people figure this out.

But they will.

But when will the music industry accept that the landscape has changed. That albums have broken apart and people believe they have a right to hear whatever they want whenever they want?

And when will artists realize getting paid forever is better than getting paid once?

And when will everybody learn that it’s not about intermediaries, but the end consumer. Otherwise iTunes sales would keep going up instead of down.

And never forget that iTunes was approved, reluctantly, as a response to P2P.

Spotify is the best response to P2P we’ve got.

And in today’s musical sphere your challenge is to create appealing music and then market it to those who care. Taylor Swift has done this better than anyone. She built a brand name, worked with the best collaborator in the business, Max Martin, and then utilized all the online tools to get her message out, selling a million albums in a week. But if you think this feat can be replicated, you’ve never heard of “In Rainbows.” One and done. Million selling physical albums are a thing of the past.

We rent television.

We rent software, I didn’t buy Microsoft Office, I signed up for Office 365.

Why can’t people in the industry wrap their heads around renting music?

“The Art of Asking”

You should read it. Even if you’ve got no idea who Amanda Palmer is, even if you’ve never listened to her music, or dislike it.

Because Amanda Palmer is Internet Famous.

That’s right, while everybody’s been decrying the online world, with Taylor Swift agitating against Spotify this very week, Amanda Palmer decided to embrace it, believing a relationship with her fans is what it’s all about, and the new digital mechanisms enable this.

Educated art chick. The music business used to be full of them. Not high school cheerleaders or wannabe famous TV singers, but alienated women who thought for themselves and decided to blaze their own path, to will their own popularity.

Like Madonna.

Only Madonna broke in the eighties, when we were all glued to MTV. Amanda Palmer broke in the twenty first century, when the systems were blown to smithereens, in an era that is still defined by turmoil.

Amanda Palmer is the poster girl for dipping not only your toe, but your whole damn body, because you never know what will happen.

Like a TED talk with 9 million views and counting.

And now this book with Hachette.

She started as a musician, she ended up as a cultural icon. The first player to raise a million on Kickstarter for her album, the first player to be criticized for not paying pickup musicians at a gig, Amanda’s a trailblazer, only in this case she had no idea where she was going.

They call that art.

Having gone to Wesleyan, Amanda knows how to write. There you have it, some rules are immutable. The educated upper middle class dominates in America and if you think you can beat the system, you’re lucky or delusional.

Because the first rule of book writing is the result must be readable. An axiom that is broken constantly by people with a good story who think they can type it into a best seller.

And the second rule of all art is it must be entertaining. If people don’t want to partake, it’s a failed effort.

And Amanda’s book is such. It’s the story of a dream and how living it she got to a destination unforeseen.

But it is not a self-help book. Its advice is near worthless. At first you start to embrace her concept of asking, and then as you read on you realize YOU’RE NOT HER!

That’s right, Amanda Palmer is sui generis and she’s got no problem asking anybody for anything. And there’s nothing wrong with that, but she’s not you or me. In other words, just because you asked, don’t expect to be famous.

But really, this is the story of Amanda’s relationship with her fans. How she nurtured it to the point where it not only kept her alive, it engendered new opportunities.

And if you’re into performance art, if you’re into niche acts, you’ll revel. If you want to be a world famous player, you’ll find no instruction here.

In other words, being Amanda Palmer is very different from being Taylor Swift. Swift too plays up the relationship with her fans, but Swift is everybody’s, Amanda’s fans believe she’s theirs.

There’s the story of the Dresden Dolls, from a dream of stardom to a deal with a label that neither understands them nor so much of the moving Internet world.

And then the delineation of her relationship with her fans. Never mind her relationship with her husband and mentor.

You see, Amanda Palmer has written the first book to depict what it’s like inside the maelstrom. The fans who will keep you alive and the haters who just won’t let you go, tweeting and Facebooking all the while. Amanda Palmer is the most famous musician to have done it the newfangled way. And unless you plan to be Taylor Swift, you should read “The Art of Asking” to see how it’s done.

If you like to couch surf, if you like to have sex, if you like free food, if you like to hear people’s stories, niche stardom is for you! If you want to have a rich and famous lifestyle, not so much. Amanda has leveraged her Internet fame to such a status, but she was the progenitor, you cannot walk in her footsteps.

In other words, if you love lugging your gear, the high of performing, getting drunk while talking to fans…Amanda’s been there, her book is illuminating. If you want a manual for world domination, this is not it.

But that’s musical world domination. If you want to know what it’s like to be a world famous public figure in the Internet age, “The Art of Asking” is a doozy.

Sure, the book has competing themes, the asking and the history, with her qualms about accepting her husband’s money intertwined.

But the staggering point comes near the end, when she goes for a massage and the wannabe musician/masseuse asks to speak to her first…because she’s been a vitriolic hater of Amanda online, she didn’t feel comfortable kneading the star whilst keeping this quiet.

I would say that “Art of Asking” is not going to be a best seller, but the truth is except for a few hits, book sales are anemic, and someone with a fan base like Amanda’s can run her book up the list.

That’s the power of music, that’s the power of a fan base, nurtured online.

This is not a book for the ages. But if you want a snapshot of what is going on now, if you want the anti-Spotify Must Die screed, if you want to know what it’s like to keep on keepin’ on in this new world, you should read this. Because it nails the experience more than anything else I’ve read on the subject.

If you’ve got a modicum of fame the Internet is a swirling snake pit that will embrace you and horrify you all on the same day. Make you feel like a million bucks and contemplating suicide all on the same afternoon. You need to know what it’s like.

Caveat: I know Amanda Palmer. I will be interviewing her in Los Angeles on her book tour on November 22nd. This is an imperfect book. But I was struck so much by the experiences she delineates and her reactions to them that I couldn’t help but tell you about it. Winners might not care. Losers might be jealous. But the truth is Amanda Palmer is a star, in a movie of her own making. And it’s working.