Netflix – For Your Consideration

I’m numb. I drove home with the radio off. I just want to bask in the experience, the greatness, of two men still at the top of their game in the flesh.

It was the sensibility, the quickness, the jokes. We were eavesdropping on two men talking about their history and their craft. It was not only an insight into who they were, but how they made it.

They moved to L.A.

Dave felt it was the only way to get on television. To appear at the Comedy Store and get scouted for “The Tonight Show.”

Jerry was king of the comedy roost in New York, but when he got to L.A., Mitzi wanted nothing to do with him. He would not give the details, since Ms. Shore so recently passed, but he asked for a meeting and she told him face to face…

Why he wasn’t getting any slots.

But Jerry always knew he was gonna make it. You can feel his confidence.

And you can feel his strangeness. He doesn’t need you and me, and that allows him to be himself. Which endears us to him ever more closely. He’s famous for his standup, his TV show, but in conversation…you realize this is who Jerry truly is, and it’s fascinating and inspirational.

My dad was funny. Oftentimes in a lame way. But he looked for the humor in life. That was the highest calling in my house, to make a joke.

Actually, Dave told one. About golf. He was reluctant.

The golfer was on the eighteenth tee with a cumulative score of 160 already. He took out his 7 iron and told his caddie if he didn’t hit the green, he was gonna drown himself in the pond.

His caddie told him he didn’t think he could keep his head down that long.

HILARIOUS!

If you know golf, almost no one in attendance did. But Dave chuckled to himself.

But Jerry’s all about the audience, that’s how he judges what works, by the laughs, he’s always in search of laughs. He’s been doing this routine about raisins. About Sun-Maid and Raisinets. How eighty years later, Sun-Maid is finally covering their product with chocolate. He’s ruminating on how this happened, did a Sun-Maid employee go to the movies and have an a-ha moment?

But forgetting the routine itself, Jerry was trying it out in a club in New York and there were crickets, no response, he thought it was only funny to himself, he was about to abandon it, and then minutes later, in a lull, there was a voice from the back of the club…MORE RAISINETS!

Then he knew he was on to something, he decided the routine was gig-worthy.

And speaking of worthiness, if Jerry and Larry agreed something was funny, they included it, they figured if it made it past their two filters…

That’s what comedians are, filters, of life.

Jerry started riffing on products and commercials and I realized…

Only comedians do this job. Everybody else is hawking stuff, and we’re sitting home alone saying HUH?

The comedian says “huh.”

But Jerry wouldn’t comment on Michelle Wolf’s Correspondents Dinner routine, at least not the substance of it. But he appreciated her preparation and her willingness to hang it out there with no regrets.

And Dave loved that she didn’t apologize.

That’s Jerry in a nutshell. He doesn’t want to offend on a big level, he’d rather offend on a minor one. Dave was uttering platitudes and Jerry continued to call him on them. It was so refreshing. Jerry wouldn’t let anything slide. And when he grins and laughs everything is forgiven, you know it’s all in service of the joke.

As for Dave…

He was built wrong, his sensibility is off. He sees things in a skewed way. And rather than point them out, he just utters a crack or a judgment and you break up, hysterically.

Actually, that’s one thing Jerry said that I loved, that comedians are JUDGMENTAL!

In a world where everybody’s afraid of offending someone, giving people the benefit of the doubt, to get along, WHY?

And Jerry refused to talk about his children, not because of privacy concerns but because everybody does it and it’s boring, he’s sick of hearing about stars’ children.

And Dave said he learned you’re not supposed to be your kid’s best friend, but their father. But he did say Harry was his favorite person.

And Jerry said on stage, doing his act, was the only place he felt comfortable. Dave agreed. These are ill-adjusted people, even though Jerry refuses to admit it. Then again, the greats are sui generis, they’ve got little self-knowledge, they can only be themselves.

Jerry talked about growing up as an outsider in his own family.

They both talked about being the first people in their families to graduate from college.

And Jerry asked Dave about his love of skiing, how he was willing to do it alone, without Harry. And Dave went into a whole riff about conversations on the lift, whether they were high-speed or fixed grip, how if it’s the latter you’ve got all day to share ideas and become friends.

And I don’t expect you to get that, but it’s about the narrow passions we all have.

And unlike SNL, Jerry and Dave end up being universal without trying to be. It’s that aforementioned sensibility, of walking through life and laughing at it. SNL is trying to find reference points in the culture, Jerry and Dave realize PEOPLE are the reference points.

And when the lights went down and they were only twenty feet away I got that excitement you do at the concert, you know, when your favorite band is taking the stage.

But in this case, the show was unrehearsed. And this was superstars hanging it all out.

Like the mantra of “Seinfeld,” there was no hugging.

But there was plenty of learning.

Why I came to Los Angeles. Who I am.

I yearned to be who I once was, an oddball with my own language. My ex-shrink shrunk it out of me, said no one could understand me. But I think they did.

And conformity is all the rage, yet we lionize those who are true to themselves.

In a world where everything is canned, at our fingertips, where it’s an effort to leave the house, fight the traffic, to be there tonight was a peak experience, a thrill.

So this is part of Netflix’s campaign for Emmy nominations. There’s weeks of events, a little museum/event space filled with dioramas from their shows. You’d be stunned how many hits there are.

And Ted Sarandos did the introduction.

And it’s unclear whether this conversation will ever see the flat screen.

And it’s not that I need to tell you I was there, it’s just that I need to tell you how I feel.

Less alone. Encouraged. Inspired to test limits.

Inspired to be myself.

After Sony blows out half of its investment.

This is what’s wrong with the record companies, this is what’s wrong with AMERICA! The short-term thinking.

Stockholders in Spotify all agree, its value is going up. Of course it’s the stock market, no one can predict the future. But trading is thin, because investors believe there’s such a big runway for the music streaming service.

The record companies…

They took their short term profits so they could report them on their quarterly calls and claim victory. HUH?

Look at Warner Music.

No, look at Universal Music, which may be spun off from Vivendi soon. Valuation of the company is put around the same number as Spotify, in the mid twenty BILLIONS!

But Time Warner sold Warner Music for a $2.6 billion fifteen years ago. Dumb call, made by Richard Parsons’s team which is long gone. It’s nearly impossible to get this rate of return on investment, but no one in corporate America is a builder other than the founder, they’re all custodians, looking to make their bonuses, playing to Wall Street.

Except for Jeff Bezos.

Excoriated for spending and lack of profits last decade, now Amazon is so successful critics are agitating for its breakup under antitrust laws.

Would an independent label still run by its founder blow out its Spotify holdings just after the company went public?

OF COURSE NOT!

Unless the proprietor wanted to buy something, because where else are you gonna park these funds and get as big a return?

The music business agitates against the hedge funds, the VCs, and then behaves in the same damn way. The stewards of the labels aren’t thinking about tomorrow, just today. Isn’t that how we got into this mess, the execs fighting to pull the business back to the past when the only thing that has saved it is Spotify and other streaming services, i.e. going into the future?!!

As for sharing proceeds with artists…

Give me a break.

At these royalty rates it’s like putting pennies in the cups of beggars. Assuming they account accurately, which they’ve never been able to do previously.

Rather they’ll just take the money off the table, give it to executives, and cry poor soon enough.

They could take these winnings and invest in their future. Try to break acts that don’t fit the mold, revitalize the business, but they won’t do that either.

Which is why all revolution comes from the outside, when you’ve got something, you want to protect it, people are greedy, they’re afraid of losing, whereas when you’ve got nothing, you’re willing to risk it all.

It’s about branding.

The F in FYF stood for a four letter word, the festival was anti, for those out of the mainstream, the overlooked who gather together to hear bands that speak to them, and possibly no one else. Whereas Janet Jackson is purely mainstream, she speaks primarily to people who don’t want to get into the asphalt and grime of L.A.’s Exposition Park, a site baking in the sun made for those who need to go.

Kinda like Bonnaroo. It was a jam band festival. And for a while there, it successfully stretched its limits, but then it went too far and cratered, it still may not be savable, how many people want to camp out in the heat of Tennessee in June?

Only a few festivals are bigger than the acts. In America, it’s Coachella in the desert and Lollapalooza in Chicago. The former succeeds because its the first major festival of the year, the site delivers its own satisfaction and no matter who they book as headliners, you can always go to the Sahara Tent and dance your ass off. As for Lollapalooza…you can stay in a hotel, walk to the site, it’s positively civilized in a nation that keeps going more upscale, that’s the conundrum, with income inequality rampant, people are still lining up to pay beaucoup bucks for shows.

Of course there are more than Coachella and Lollapalooza, the most obvious being JazzFest, but just like you’ve got the Sahara Tent at Coachella, at JazzFest you always get the local color, the church choirs, the New Orleans stars, the headliners are just the cherry on top.

But not at FYF Fest.

A festival must be a brand, it must stand for something, not just…we show up to overpay and be mistreated so we can say we were there. A festival is about the attendees, it’s about the culture, the lineup is not enough if you want to sustain.

But if there’s no culture, you’re lineup dependent.

Turns out few were at home saying they NEEDED to go to FYF Fest. The lineups had been expanded and mainstreamed so much that the core audience was abandoned. Turned out plenty of people wanted to see Frank Ocean and Missy Elliott, but these same people did not need to go to FYF itself.

There’s been a lot of talk about the FYF’s cancellation being a judgment on its female-centric lineup.

We already covered Ms. Jackson, does her audience really want to stand in the heat downtown to see her?

As for Florence + the Machine… She caters to intellectuals, thinkers, not the skate-punk people who put FYF on the map.

And St. Vincent has been everywhere and the Breeders reunion is a non-event, the kind of regrouping that plays to few on a side stage at Coachella, you can’t depend upon them to bring in attendees, they’re spice at best, and their fans are fifty, like the band, who’ve got no interest in going to FYF.

As for the undercard, acts like Lucy Dacus, who ever went to a festival for the undercard? Especially when you can see these acts up close and personal in a club.

So this is a misfire. Turns out Sean Carlson was the soul of FYF, and when he was removed, no one was tending the flame, no one was there from the beginning.

That’s the story of modern culture, we keep hearing about the power of corporations, but these corporations are run by people, and they make all the difference, can you say Steve Jobs, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos?

So what we’ve learned is all the prognosticators were wrong. The business will survive the death of the classic rock acts. There are more stadium shows than there have been in decades, there is demand. But it’s not blind demand, people have favorites, and if you want to have a festival that sustains, play to people’s souls, who they are, who they want to hang out with. A festival is just not a show, a festival is an experience. And this experience is just not food and toilets, pleasantries. Rather it’s the vibe. Kinda like at Electric Forest, most people are not interested, but if you ARE!

New festivals must be nurtured, they must mean something, they must be curated. EDC is nothing without Pasquale Rotella. It’s lifers like him, progenitors of the scene who’ve got their fingers on the pulse, who are builders of these edifices. Just booking a bunch of acts and putting them in a park is not enough.

It was a badge of honor to see a band on its first tour.

I can regale you with stories of Elvis Costello at the Whisky, Oasis at the Roxy, back when you started small and grew, when music drove the culture and record companies signed you based on the music more than the commercial potential and slowly brought the audience to you. But today most of those clubs are dead. They were supported by the record companies, with comp tickets and tabs. Now you make it online and sometimes play arenas on your first tour. Furthermore, you’re a star today and gone tomorrow and the oldsters persist. It’s as if dinosaurs were still roaming the earth, along with human beings.

Jamie told us she could get us in. We’d been once before, for a birthday party. I was eager to go again, we said yes. Jake heard about our invitation and wanted to be included, so he and Robyn came too. To an abode with no signage for a meal with no price.

In other words, the experience was PRICELESS!

My parents were gourmets, they even had a club back in the sixties, where once a quarter they’d go to a friend’s house and have a potluck from a different country. My dad was all about lifestyle. We didn’t live in the best neighborhood, we didn’t upgrade when he made it, we stayed in the same split-level, but when it came to food and entertainment, there was no limit.

Except for wine. My dad owned a liquor store. It killed him to overpay for wine in a restaurant, so he didn’t. But if you wanted the lobster, you ordered it, but you had to finish. That’s right, I grew up in one of those houses where we heard about starving children in Europe, Asia was never mentioned, we had to scrape our plates clean, I still do, it’s a hard habit to break. As for throwing food out…I still can’t do it, not unless it’s smelly and nearly crawling with bugs. Especially with inflation, you can see five or ten bucks evaporating, I must eat it.

And when we traveled my dad always looked for the best restaurants.

And when I was in law school my girlfriend and I combed them all, the ones we couldn’t afford we had my parents take us to. But that was a long time ago, before there were so many restaurants you could not eat at them all, before you couldn’t get in unless you were connected.

That’s the world we live in, you’ve got to know somebody. I was just watching “The Florida Project” and the motel resident has a connection for waffles at the breakfast place. If you know nobody, you cannot get ahead. We live in a nation of currency, and not all of it is cash.

That’s one of the modern paradigms that overwhelms me, the plethora of choices. I like to be comprehensive, I like to know everything about a given field. But today that’s impossible, I want to know everything about a subject so I can judge it expertly, but today very few are experts. Or they’re experts in one field only.

So Wolvesmouth is a pop-up restaurant. I read about it in the “New Yorker” years before I went. It changed locations. You had to be in the know to go. And I didn’t. Until two summers ago.

And here’s where I’d like to tell you about the menus, tell the history of the place, but I don’t think I can do it adequately. I’ve heard it in detail twice, but I haven’t digested it. I like to ask multiple people the same questions over and over again to gain a feeling, to reach a conclusion. But what I’ve learned is there are different menus at Wolvesmouth, with a different number of courses.

Last night we had eight.

So, there are twenty people you don’t know, other than the group you came with. And to tell you the truth, Felice and I were the oldest people there, by decades. You see it’s a millennial thing, a young Gen-X’er thing. Where it’s about experiences more than acquisitions. Where you’ll blow high dough on an evanescent item that you’ll remember, but cannot grasp.

And there was the gay couple from the eastside. And the young marrieds from the South Bay. And everyone brought their own beverages, which were ultimately shared, and in between courses, you conversed.

You can feel lonely and isolated in today’s world. Think you know everything. And then you go somewhere and bump into new people and get excited. They’re different, yet similar. It’s stimulating. They’ve had the same experiences with a twist. The woman across the table spontaneously said she and her husband were in couples therapy. Is it that you’re freer with strangers, I don’t know, but I dig it.

So the first course was…

Oh, I’m not gonna delineate it, I’ll post a pic of the menu to Twitter for you to check out. It’s just that it had a short rib encased in a blood red sauce and potato-filled pasta which were akin to ravioli, and cabbage-beet horseradish and it was all topped with an onion ring.

And we dug in.

There’s no bread and there’s no waiting.

Usually, I fill up on the appetizers, but with food portioned out, this does not happen. Furthermore, they start right away, dinner was set for 6:30, we arrived fifteen minutes early, shortly after the appointed hour the first course arrived.

And I learned that Greg decided to get into the music business when he saw U2 at Dodger Stadium. The guy next to him was elbowing him but then when “One” was played he put his arm around Greg’s shoulder.

Jake’s dad loved the ponies, they followed him from Toronto to the track in Florida, where Jake went to two different schools in one year.

Jamie and Greg went on a cruise with her father and stepmother. She likes to soak up all the culture, Greg needs time off to rest, just like me and Felice!

And over food and wine you learn stuff about people you never knew, you become closer, I suggested we all go on a cruise together, but I doubt that will happen, enchanted moments engender promises that go unfulfilled.

I didn’t shoot any pictures, of food anyway. I don’t post on Facebook.

Furthermore, I’m not a forensic eater. I just enjoyed the taste, I’m not even sure I can remember what I ate, but I loved the mini-churro.

So I don’t want to boast, I don’t want to make you feel envious. That’s the scourge of modern society, the social network posts depicting a fabulous life that is oftentimes untrue.

But for a couple of hours last night it wasn’t.

So if you want to go you’ve got to network, find out how to get on the list. Damned if I know.

And you pay what you want, but if it’s not significant…then you’re just a schnorrer.

And I’d say the food was great.

But the people were even better.

P.S. Wolvesmouth has been going on for years, but only in this location for less. I suggest you start watching the linked video at 8:17 to get an idea:

Cooking with Violence and Beauty

P.P.S. The proprietor, the chef, Craig Thornton, comes from nothing. Seems all of the artistic breakthroughs come from the financially-challenged. They’ve got few preconceptions and are not worried about failing, they’re already at the bottom.

P.P.P.S. Craig wanders the room, you can talk to him, he’s not kvelling, he’s more internalized, but he’s approachable. In the modern world that’s what it’s all about, being accessible.

P.P.P.P.S. Success is not necessarily reaching everybody and getting rich. You get to define your own success. And there’s a reaction to the billionairedom of America, people who are establishing careers on their own terms, isn’t it funny that they are the ones we are drawn to most.

Last night’s menu:

Wolvesmouth menu-Saturday 5/5/18 pic.twitter.com/aFU8sRI4Et

— Bob Lefsetz (@Lefsetz) May 6, 2018