“The geeks all want to be rock stars and the rock stars all want to be geeks.”

And they all meet at the Soho House.

If you want to pose, if you want to be seen, save your money, your membership is worthless.

But if you’re a thirtysomething and networking is your thing, this is the place!

He said he’d come to me. And as I was picking out restaurants I realized that the Sunday brunch crowd could make it difficult to get a reservation, to walk right in without a wait, so I asked him, “Are you still a member of Soho House?”

Soho House… I first went in New York. Where nobody was playing pool and the emphasis was on the food. Then they opened in West Hollywood and the mad dash for membership had my eyes rolling into the back of my head. House in the hills? Check. Sleek sports car? Check. Membership to Soho House? Check. Walk in and you see so many wannabes you think Soho House should pay you to come in!

But this person I was meeting doesn’t live in L.A. Soho House is his office away from home.

And it turned out all of his brethren were in attendance.

First was the private jet broker.

We tend to think of the private jet as a perk. But to my friend, it’s business. First and foremost, it addresses the number one problem of the entrepreneur…time. They’re not making any more of it. If you can shave an hour here and an hour there, it more than pays the freight. Furthermore, it’s a great gift to hand out on a whim. That’s where you can get a ton of business done. Up in the air in a tiny tube for a few hours. Offer someone a free flight and not only does their perception of you change, you’ve got their complete attention.

Then there was the possible to hire. A demure woman who barely said a word.

But when I quizzed her, she’d gone to Cambridge, spoke Arabic and had lived and taught in Kenya.

Just like Justin Bieber, right?

Yes, that’s what you’ve got in music. Ignorant wannabes. Who try to make it on bluster and pluck. And when you’ve got nothing to back it up, you’re nothing more than Snooki. A momentary item, a passing phase, a trivia question. Whereas those truly shaping the world are smart. And nimble. And wealthy.

But they work hard for the money.

Zuckerberg’s name came up. How he might go home for dinner, but then he’ll come back and code. Not only on Friday night, but Sunday too. You see it’s a calling. As soon as you put money first, you’re time-stamped, you’re heading straight towards your expiration.

That’s what these techies do. Work. Almost around the clock. The dream they’re chasing isn’t accumulation of toys, ultimately repossessed after they’re exhibited on “Cribs,” but a lasting impression on the culture, they truly want to change the world. Once upon a time musicians wanted to do this. When the best and brightest played music and everybody wasn’t bitching that there was no money left and how can we get what the bankers have got? Yes, greedy acts ripping off their constituents. Class warfare. Whereas tech, successful tech, is more about being equitable. Sure, money is in the equation, although often you pay with your data as opposed to cash.

But you pay for Hipstamatic.

Lucas Buick was having lunch with Nic Adler in the booth behind us. After Nic departed, Lucas sat down with us.

What Lucas, what none of today’s techies did, was boast.

That’s the musical way. Lead with your mouth, your story, leave the essence for last. Because usually there is no essence. Anybody telling you how great they are probably isn’t. If you’re not comfortable with where you’re at, who you are, you’re gonna have a rough go of it. We’re looking for people who are comfortable in their skin, who are willing to live by their wits.

That’s what struck me about so many of these young entrepreneurs, and they certainly were young, the willingness to pivot, to abandon ship, to do anything but what depression-era parents would want them to.

In my era, you went to college. Careers were important. You invested your time in the company. But the company oftentimes disappeared, your investment was for naught. Today’s successful kids don’t worry about building a resume so much as building their own company, a product, something that embodies their hopes and dreams.

So Lucas Buick takes one art course in high school and decides to go to art school. He can’t get into a good one, because he’s got no portfolio. He ends up at a college in Duluth, which he quits, because he’s already taught himself Photoshop. Thereafter he attends another school for a while, works as a designer and then starts an agency with a buddy where they promptly have success but get stiffed by companies as big as “Tribune” and as small as the tech companies that went bust before anybody ever heard of them.

So then they decided to go into business for themselves. Lucas and his partner created Hipstamatic.

And I had to drag all this out of Lucas. Unlike in entertainment, he wasn’t looking down his nose at me, wondering if I was worth the conversation. Then again, he was all of thirty.

And Lucas is eager to solve the riddle of mobile advertising. And rather than reveal his thoughts, I’ll let you wait and experience them, but the point is he’s thinking ahead whereas in music everybody wants to get on a realty TV show even though their track record of making stars is abysmal and one hasn’t been built since the beginning of the paradigm.

Are you looking towards tomorrow or today?

Are you trying to get on Top Forty radio or thinking about a career, where you’ll be when the old game craters?

Intelligence.

That’s what these techies have in spades.

Have a meal with those in the music sphere and your eyes will roll back into your aforementioned head. They don’t stop selling, pushing themselves upon you, when the whole world has gone to pull. Can you create something I need, that I want, that I’m going to search to find?

Sit with the techies and they can hold two opposing thoughts in their brains at one time. They can reason. They can plot.

Whereas in music it’s still about who you know and braggadocio.

Not that who you know isn’t important in tech. It’s just that the relationship is only the beginning, not the end.

Hipstamatic

Soho House West Hollywood

I’m watching the Jeff Lynne documentary, I recorded it from Palladia. And I’d like to recommend it, but it’s kind of like the rock bios, Keith Richards does a good one and then everybody jumps on the bandwagon and there are too many, most are not good enough and you end up ignoring all of them. Now that video is so cheap, you can make a film about anybody in hi-def with decent production values so we get to see our heroes but there’s no critical analysis employed. If you were under the age of twenty and you watched this documentary you’d think Jeff Lynne was the biggest and most skilled star of the seventies and however talented Jeff might be, that is untrue. Furthermore, they skated almost completely over the Move and Roy Wood, which is really the only reason I tuned in, I wanted to know more about this legendary madman/recluse.

But there was a moment early on, when they played Jeff’s first single with the Idle Race…

Everybody comes from somewhere. And an explication of Jeff’s journey from Birmingham to here, Los Angeles, would be interesting, but they dropped the needle on the 45 and…

You’ve got to know, turntables did not become the rage until the very late sixties, in some cases the seventies. Audiophiles might have an AR or a Thorens, eventually the hoi polloi purchased Garrards and Duals, but before that…we had record players.

The tonearms were about as sleek as a Dodge. Heavy, they were rarely automatic and you frequently taped a dime, penny or even a quarter on top to ensure they did not skip.

But what brought me back watching this documentary was the little arm, the little piece of plastic on the side… It was the lever you used to flip the needle from 33 to 45. And when you thought the music was getting a bit distorted, a bit scratchy, you’d go to your local electronics shop, which was just like an auto parts store but dustier, with more crap lying around, and you’d hold the needle in front of the guy behind the counter and he’d go back and retrieve a new one, which was encased in a tiny plastic jewel box, sitting on a piece of foam rubber.

Sometimes he had to look it up in a book. He’d translate it into a generic brand, the most popular was Pfanstiehl.

And you’d go back home, pop it in, and listen once again through your all-in-one unit with the single speaker.

This was how everybody did it. It was a routine as familiar as dialing a rotary phone. And it’s been lost to the sands of time.

It’s one thing to look at pictures of stuff that happened long before you were born. It’s quite another to be jolted into a past you were extremely familiar with that has completely disappeared.

The image in the doc warmed my heart more than the music. This was the last stop, where the rubber met the road, after you’d paid your money and bought your record, this is where you heard it.

And everything was not at your fingertips. You built a collection slowly. You did not want to buy a dud.

And when you dropped the needle on your favorite record, you were in heaven.

What I’m talking about

Pfanstiehl

Who you marry is the most important decision you’ll make in life.

I’d be lying if I said I was a David Brooks fan. It’s not because he signed off from my newsletter, it’s because he’s a conservative. And that sticks in my craw.

Paul Krugman, Brooks’s counterpart on the Opinion page of the “New York Times,” boils it down to this… Democrats believe in a social welfare state, Republicans do not. The government is imperfect, but I like it in between myself and corporations, I like the water and the environment to be safe. There are those moments in foreign countries when you wonder…

Like there’s this chairlift in Portillo. It goes virtually straight up and there’s a tower at the bottom and one at the top and nothing in between and I’m not good with heights to begin with and just as my anxiety starts to subside I realize I’m in CHILE! Are there tramway regulations? Could the cable snap while I’m on it? Could it jump the track?

Kind of like in the Caribbean. Where I found myself panicking as the current took me further asea as I was snorkeling. In the U.S., the proprietor of the snorkeling service would be so scared of liability he’d be looking out for me, scanning the water for people in trouble. Whereas these guys could be back in the boat, smoking cigarettes, telling jokes… Which is exactly what they were up to. When I finally got back and hauled myself aboard they weren’t even paying attention. So I’m not worried when the man from the government says he’s there and he’s planning to help me. The same way I’ve got no sympathy for the small businessman complaining ASCAP and BMI are charging him for music, something they’re allowed to do under the law. These establishments are profiting from the tunes. Why should they get a free ride? Shouldn’t the creators be compensated?

And now I’m so far off point you may not even remember where I started, but what really turned me off on Brooks was his comment that this election was all about the viability of the twentieth century welfare state. Romney wanted to reform it, Obama and the Democrats didn’t care about rising costs. If you think this election is solely about that, you’ve lost my attention. How about the nomination of Supreme Court justices? How about a woman’s right to choose?

And Krugman tore Brooks a new one over the foregoing distillation.

And Brooks flew to Spain to see Springsteen… Which I thought was pretty frivolous, and sort of weird, considering their respective viewpoints, but when Jim Guerinot testified about Brooks’s most recent book despite attending the latest Obama fundraiser I wondered if I’d dismissed him too soon. And that’s when I found his podcast with Alec Baldwin in my iTunes library.

You’ve got to like the guy. He admits he’s a nerd, makes fun of his alma mater, and says he’s a liberal on social issues. He can make fun of himself, which too many right wingers cannot. And he explains his conservatism, by saying that despite good intentions, one cannot predict human behavior, government oftentimes gets it wrong. But what fascinated me most were his thoughts on marriage.

Now let me be clear. Brooks was not pontificating, not getting up on his high horse and letting us all know the truth. He did his best to beg off, but since Alec had just gotten remarried, Brooks quoted a blog post he’d found…

“Brag about your spouse and let them overhear you.”

What did Pete Townshend sing, “I am an animal”? We all are. We all want to feel loved and safe. We want to feel respected. Contrary to conventional wisdom, many things should not be left unsaid. So if you want to keep your relationship going, do the above. It works wonders.

And the next words of wisdom were…

“Sometimes you’ve just got to go to bed.”

I can be the worst offender here. Wanting to stay up all night, digging down deep to uncover the truth. But so many times you wake up the next morning and…it all just doesn’t matter that much.
But after he was through quoting from this mysterious blog, that’s when Brooks made the comment I began with. That who you marry is the most important decision of your life.

“…so I go to colleges and I tell kids if you have a great career and a crappy marriage, you will be miserable. If you have a crappy career and a great marriage, you’ll be happy. So every course you take in college should be about who to marry. So like you should take literature courses, theater courses, science courses. Think hard about this one. They look at me like I’m crazy. But that is absolutely true. So if you want to know what correlates to happiness, money correlates a little but when you hit a certain point, it stops. Age correlates to happiness so people in their 20s are happy and then they go through a shallow, U-shaped curve and the nadir of happiness for the average person is age 47. And that’s called having teenage children. And then the peak happiness is the first 10 years after retirement. But the people who are happy, marriage is equal to double your income; having a good marriage produces the same happiness gain as doubling your income.”

I wish someone had taught me this.

We think we should marry for sexual attraction, or wealth, or compatibility. We’ve got our values all wrong.

First and foremost, does that person show up? Can you count on them? To do the right thing, not only with you but as your representative out in the world?

Fantastic sex won’t mean much if your spouse can’t balance his or her checkbook. If he or she constantly overdraws, incurring thousands of dollars in bank fees every year, never mind angering local merchants and friends.

A great conversation is wonderful, but if your spouse never calls to say he or she is late, never practices common courtesy, you’ll be tearing your hair out.

And if you just got that big promotion at work, had a thrilling victory and your significant other just doesn’t care, you’re going to be very unhappy.

You learn all the foregoing as you age.

If you’re lucky, you make no mistakes. But this is extremely rare, based on the divorce rate, never mind the unhappy couples who stay together.

And speaking of staying together… That’s another trait you want to look for in a spouse, perseverance. Breakups are never mutual. Anybody who tells you otherwise is lying. And it’s one thing if it’s just a fling, but if you’re married, if you got up in front of God and country and said “I do.” you hope your spouse is gonna give it much more than the old college try. You hope the commitment is such that not only will they not step out, but they’ll hang in there through the bad times to get to the good.

And unlike so much of today’s pop music, Brooks’s wisdom stuck with me. I just wanted to pass it on to you.

David Brooks on “Here’s The Thing”

Transcript

They changed their mission.

I was a loyal “Time” subscriber. I remember the “Is God Dead” issue sitting on my mother’s coffee table. And like a loyal son, when I went to college I stuck with “Time”…and subscribed for years thereafter, until I discovered “Newsweek” at my doctor’s office. Visit after visit I’d read snippets until I realized the “Washington Post” magazine was better. Not only did I subscribe to “Newsweek” for decades, I bought other people subscriptions on a regular basis. I thought the magazine was just that good.

And then they changed format.

I’m not saying the magazine got bigger or smaller, I’m not talking dimensions, I’m talking content. “Newsweek” befit its moniker. It was a review of everything that happened the previous week. So, if you were too busy to pay attention to some skirmish overseas, if you wanted to know the essence of a story and not every detail, “Newsweek” was a godsend. Everything you needed to know about a subject on a couple of pages. I could argue strongly you didn’t even need to get the newspaper, only “Newsweek.” And then, frightened by the burgeoning Internet, “Newsweek” remodeled, turned itself into a compendium of opinion, believing that news was at everybody’s fingertips, instantly, online. “Newsweek”‘s asset was curation, and they threw that out the window.

And the reason I mention this, because I know most of my audience just doesn’t care, is the exact same rule applies with bands. Don’t do a 180, don’t change your sound, be loyal to your fanbase.

When the Beach Boys went disco, I knew they were done. How desperate can you be? And they were… There was another album, but even fans didn’t buy it, the band had subjugated our loyalty to potential, a ton of people who ultimately did not care. Oh, the band got a ton of press for this move…because the press is dumb, but the people who really cared? They were turned off. Hell, listen to “Here Comes The Night” off 1979’s “L.A. (Light Album)”…you’ll laugh hysterically.

Now the Stones got away with their one big disco hit, “Miss You,” then again, they had blues roots and the track was great. As for Rod Stewart, he had a monster with “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy,” but it turned him into what he is today, a laughable sot who was once credible whose hard core fans refuse to even admit they once liked him. Then again, one can argue that by following trends Stewart maintained a career… You can do this if you’re artistically bankrupt, if all you’re interested in is money. If you’re lucky. I mean who listens to those “Songbook” albums today… DRECK!

Just because electronic music is flourishing, that does not mean you should jump on the bandwagon. You can like it, listen to it at home, that does not mean it has to become part of your act. As for the Top Forty trendmongers, have you noticed none of them have a career, that they’re hit dependent, that without airplay their ticket sales crash? And ticket sales are where the money is today.

In other words, “Newsweek” threw out all its good will overnight. I let my thirty year old subscription lapse. And when I was not satiated by “The Week,” which is too fact-based without enough good writing, I resubscribed to the new, Tina Brown “Newsweek.”

Horrible.

Hell, Tina invented “Vanity Fair” but Graydon Carter does a better job with the formula. As for “The New Yorker”…she demonstrated that change was necessary, but David Remnick is presiding over a “New Yorker” that’s better than it’s been in decades. As for “Talk”…nobody read it.

You see Tina Brown is an overhyped superstar.

Kind of like Barry Diller.

Barry did the impossible, he created a fourth TV network, but since that time he’s gotten reams of press for cobbling together a ragtag bunch of companies which he’s raped to get rich. If you think Barry knows the digital score, you probably expect Wayne Fontana to top today’s hit parade. But once again, the press is dumb. They print the legend, they don’t care about the story.

But Tina Brown and Barry Diller are chasing dreams.

“The New York Review Of Books” isn’t doing so. Annual rates are sky high, nearly a hundred bucks, and subscribers stick with the magazine, because they want what it provides, endless commentary from a left wing perspective. It doesn’t matter to the “The New York Review Of Books” that most people don’t care. But those who do do!

Create a loyal fan base. Be true to yourself and them.

Most magazines may be digital in the future, but “Newsweek”‘s print demise is entirely self-inflicted, the magazine would have had a run of years in print if they didn’t mess with the formula.

In other words, if you’re an ancient act and your audience wants CDs, that’s what you give them. Know your customer.

Then again, if you’re playing to a trendy or younger base, you do something different.

Everybody wants to be the story, everybody wants to be in the news. But did you ever notice when “Forbes” prints its annual list of the richest Americans you’ve never heard of most of them?

That’s right, they don’t equate wealth with publicity.

And you shouldn’t either.

“Here Comes The Night”- Spotify