My son Walter’s spring soccer season ended today – under the rain.  It’s as if we never left London.  Now I understand how prescient these kids were to name themselves the “Aqua Dominators” at the beginning of their blue-shirted season. The good news is that Walter, age 9, really learned how to play the “beautiful game” during his seven plus years in the UK.  He does not quite yet bend it like Beckham, but neither does he sport any manly tattoos. 

Passing the ball must be like underarm hair, something that boys must await puberty to master; however, there are glimpses of glory.  The diving header (or as his English godfather Ed calls it, “ ‘it me on me noggin mate”); the deft weaving through three defenders to score; or the diving penalty defense in goal.  It's great to watch your son score the goals you had planned to score yourself but somehow never did. It is also gratifying to watch teammates grow through the season and come to know their foibles (“Oh no, not another pass across your own goal mouth”) and their triumphs.

Some of the fathers do get a bit carried away.  Pacing the sidelines like frustrated Alex Fergusons (we Barcelona fans like our Fergusons to be frustrated), barking out useless commands to their children (“center the ball,” “look for the open man”), or loudly overruling the hapless referee.  The best invention in youth soccer is the “silent week” the team played earlier in the season.  In those matches, no noise is permitted from the sidelines, including from the coaches.  The idea is to let the kids organize themselves and learn, in effect, to coach themselves on the field.  Not only did the team play well on its own, but the parents (yes, there are some moms) also learned that a marionette’s string does not invisibly connect their larynxes to their sons’ feet.

Some of the better kids are off to soccer camp for the summer.  Walter has his own version –a daily regime of  full field, one-on-one, against his dad.  Judging by the spring season, this may be the year that son starts to beat dad in one sport after another.

A couple of weeks ago some old friends and I headed out to the Meadowlands Izod Center to hear The Dead.  Not exactly The Grateful Dead of old, as Jerry Garcia can never be replaced, but a reformed and worthy sequel.  Rather than seek some pale American Idol simulcra of Jerry, the remaining original members of the band were smart enough to reinvent themselves.  So this year they are touring with excellent musicians, including Branford Marsalis, who do not try to ape Jerry, but instead take the sound into new places.  

The Dead were always a great concert band – their rollicking jazz-like improvisations and modulations turned each concert into a different experience.  For these musicians, the goal of a concert was never to reproduce the exact sound of their latest studio album; rather, each show was a unique jam session which might very well feature some songs that had also been released, but never in the same way.  The ultimate “been there, done that.”

Along the way on that proverbial long strange trip, I believe that The Grateful Dead discovered the new economic model for the music industry 40 years ago.  We are all familiar with the sad story of how music industry bosses sought to hold back the zero-cost reproduction capabilities of digital media by locking-up the music, first, in vinyl records, then, in cassettes and eight track tapes, and finally, in CDs.  When young folks everywhere joined a mass revolt against copyright and just downloaded MP3s, the music industry sued them and then ultimately capitulated into the waiting arms of Apple’s Steve Jobs.

What the Dead figured out a long time ago is that artists should give away recorded music, and make their money from touring, building brand and merchandising.  Most of the band’s 5000+ live shows are available for download or at least stream on the internet (see www.archive.org/details/GratefulDead  or www.deaddisc.com/GDFD_Dicks_Picks.htm). Rather than suing fans to prohibit bootleg recordings, the Dead allowed its devotees to set up microphones at their concerts and also provided high quality tapes of every show right off the mixing board.  

Thus, the recordings themselves become viral advertisements for the group and build brand and demand for concert tickets and merchandise which are harder to copy.  Now the downside of this model is that the band cannot just sit back and count royalties from the sale of its recorded music and deign to do a concert tour every other year to promote its latest album.  Instead, the musicians need to embrace touring and playing as their primary mission.  The music company also becomes more of a brand management and promotion company, with likely reduced economics. However, this is not far from where the music industry seems headed itself, with concepts like the “360 contract” which seeks a cut of non-recorded income.

As for me, I was just there to enjoy the show and muse upon content monetization models.  Oh, and yes, I bought Mariana and Walter some really cool tie-dyed tee shirts.

Having just watched the tender movie, Marley and Me, about the irrepressible blond Labrador, I realized that our dog Luna is the only one of our “children” who has not figured prominently in this blog.  Luna does not get taken to the museum or on ski trips; she does not have a weekly soccer practice (although she sometimes cheers on Walter from the sidelines), but for a little while longer she remains the largest of our three kids.

At around 80 pounds, Luna is not even large for an English Bullmastiff; however, what she gives up in weight she more than makes up for in determination and affection.  I am perhaps the only member of the family with the strength to restrain her, even on leash, if she detects a moldy but choice piece of bread lying close by in the gutter.  Luna is an eating machine.

Her puppy years passed easily enough with only the occasional TV remote control or pair of high fashion sunglasses as teething aid.  But full grown, her hunger knows no bounds.  The cost of just keeping the “Brown Beast,” as my mother rather reverently calls her, in dog chow rivals New York City private school tuition.  Add to this the occasional trip to the “Vet to the Stars” and the seeds of financial ruin are sown.  The other members of the family may keep themselves healthy on the regular Thomson Reuters health plan, but Luna gets the very best veterinary medicine can provide.

Most of the time, Luna just lies around the house, and in this, she is hardly distinguishable from her human siblings.  When we got our first Bullmastiff, friends said we were nuts to try to keep such a large dog in a small New York City apartment.  Well, since then, the apartment has gotten a little larger, but the more important point is that even such a large dog as Luna actually takes up reasonably little space compared to the typical Park Avenue lap dog.  These small yapping terrors fly about an apartment at warp speed, leaping from couch to table top to kitchen counter.  As such, they remind me of fast moving electrons darting along their orbital shells.  Per my canine adaptation of the well-accepted uncertainty principle of quantum physics, you can never quite determine the precise location of these electron-sized dogs at any given time – although their ceaseless barking does provide an approximate clue.  Luna on the other hand poses no such quantum mechanical challenge.  Whereever she chooses to sit (and I would not argue the point), she takes up a fair amount of space, but that’s it – she wont move again until feeding time.

Luna is also a quiet dog.  She can happily sleep through the worst thunderstorm or display of Grucci fireworks, but on the rare occasion she does bark or growl, we all pay attention.  She is a good guard dog, and can appear quite menacing at full gallop, but this potential ferociousness is undermined by her habit of always carrying a soft plush toy in her mouth to eagerly greet the Son of Sam or whichever intruder is nigh.  I did think once of buying her a soft toy shaped like a gun, but I thought better of it.

Certainly among the nicest qualities of dogs is that they are always happy to see you; don’t care whether you are rich or poor, or whether you have had a good day or bad day at work or school.  All they ask for is a little love and affection ….and, of course, about 100 pounds of dog food per month.

With Bernie Madoff locked-up in the Manhattan Correctional Center, better known to New Yorkers as ‘the Tombs”  (a fitting place for him to enter prison life, never to return),  I thought I would share one of the odder thoughts (or mental hyperlinks) I have had.   

Although the victims of this enormous fraud deserve our help and sympathy, at its core what made Bernie’s scam so powerful was the seductive offer it extended to investors to let them into the inner circle, a private club or sanctum sanctorum to which few are ever admitted.  This reminds me in an odd way of the allure of the luxury goods market: “Madam, we could not possibly sell you a fabled Birkin bag; the waiting list is years long.”  Followed, some weeks or months later by the helpful call of a sympathetic store manager who reports that one such extremely expensive handbag happens to have surfaced at a sister store which might be available if the shopper could act fast. 

Now, before I receive petabytes of hate mail, let me say that the criminal acts of an evil man can and should in no way be equated with the perfectly legal marketing tactics of the high-end luxury market.  However, one of the most seductive elements of the Madoff crimes was the irony that at the same time that Bernie was brushing off would-be investors with a “it’s probably not for you,” he was apparently paying outsize selling commissions to feeder funds to take in ever larger new flows of cash. 

I suppose we should not be surprised at this warped parallel.  Madoff would not have been so successful over a very long period had he not understood how to tap into one of the deeper insecurities of the human character.  Namely, the strong desire most of us harbor to be included, to feel on the inside of a very good thing, to get the present denied to others. 

Perhaps Groucho had it right again:  Don’t try too hard to be a member of any club that would have you.