A classic! The 2000 Coen Brothers film about channeling the general sentiment of exasperation. The movie is about a Depression-era Odyssey retelling that’s set in Mississippi, with George Clooney, John Turturro, and Tim Blake Nelson as escaped convicts on a rambling road trip. The Homeric parallels are playful but genuine with the Cyclops, the Sirens, and Tiresias (the blind prophet) all making appearances in transformed form. And the soundtrack, is arguably as important as the script. “Man of Constant Sorrow” became a genuine hit off the back of it with its combination of Gospel, Bluegrass and good old hillbilly country music. My friend Peter (rest his soul) was so taken by the production and the music that he wrote the one movie script that he had in his soul and actually paid to produce it into a film that you can still see to this day on late night BET network or some such platforms. Peter was a tall, lanky New York born and bred Jewish banker with a distinct non-conformist predisposition and enjoyed off-beat comedy and generally weird things. How strange it seemed that the one movie in his soul was an all-black, Gospel-singing mash-up of what I call Sister Act meets Cain & Abel. It was the story of two black orphaned brothers who were separated at birth with one adopted by a God-fearing southern country couple and the other by an upscale L.A. couple that were inclined towards Hip-Hop. The later becomes a rap star and the former a member of his local church choir. The rapper gets into trouble and finds his way to his long lost brother’s house to hide out from the mob and in the process gets deeply into Gospel music (with a Hip-Hop edge). The movie is called Preaching to the Choir (2005).
What brings these obscure remembrances to mind is a little piece I saw from Scott Galloway, that L.A.-born NYU professor who lives in London now and produces a trove of influencer material via podcasts and newsletters. Galloway is my hero on many levels because he is a schooled economist with a non-conformist bent that reminds me of my old pal Peter. Being a business school professor is also something I relate to and I strangely feel that he and I are kindred spirits in our way of looking at the world with a weird slant of being worldly, liberal and yet rooted in business and economics. The only difference is that Galloway has been highly successful at making it all work for him in a profoundly profitable way while I dabble at the fringes with things like this blog story and random thoughts that find their way into a handful of hearts and minds. Galloway’s opening comment this morning was that New Jersey Transit has just announced that it will charge $150 for a round-trip train ticket between Manhattan and MetLife Stadium during the World Cup soccer matches this summer. That seems like a pretty random factoid for a Monday morning opener, but it immediately invoked all sorts of memories in me that I felt the need to capture and share.
To begin with there is the whole inflationary storyline. We are living that every day with the Iran War moving into the next post-60-day questionably Constitutional territory. The stories abound about how Trump and Netanyahu’s war is wrecking havoc on the economy of the world in ways that COVID and Ukraine only dented it. The biggest universal outcome so far seems to be inflation and all the conversation that accompanies that as to who the winners and losers are from this conflict…there are always winners and losers to every conflict, right? $150 for a bus ride of 8 miles (there’s another great movie reference to Eminem’s classic 8 Mile movie about the dividing line between urban and suburban Detroit) must seem excessive even to the soccer-loving immigrants of New York that will be desperate to go yell “Goallllll!!!!!”
Then there’s the whole big global event memory that just got activated because the 2028 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles (XXXIV) are already on the prowl for ticket sales. My daughter Carolyn (an Olympics fan and marathon runner) has been in cahoots with Kim, who is wired into her nephews and their rugby-loving gang, all of whom have their sights set on paying exorbitant amounts of money for tickets to the Olympic events spread out across Southern California two years from now…and that is before figuring out how in hell they are going to get around the L.A. Basin to actually get to the venues. I’m guessing that inflation being what it is and L.A. being what it is and the Olympics being what it is…even though the FIFA World Cup passion may well exceed Olympic passion…$150 for a bus ride may seem like a bargain by 2028.
Then there are the two reasons why MetLife Stadium jangles my memory cells. The first is that in 2013 when we were starting the positioning and financing of the New York Wheel, MetLife Stadium was the gold standard in venue naming rights, having gotten MetLife to pony up some $30 million per year for 20 years for the rights to that brand placement. A big part of the Wheel’s financing strategy rested on getting a similar naming rights deal and the concept was compelling enough with an example like MetLife Stadium that I was able to obtain the first of two mega financings ($520 million on the first go) on the strength of that. My old pal David (rest his soul too) banged that drum with every likely sponsor and we had a major insurance company-any from New York actually sign a letter of intent for a similar megadeal. I still remember where I was and how I felt when I got the call from that insurer saying that they were pulling out of the deal because of a change in marketing strategy. Big bummer, to say the least.
The other MetLife remembrance had more to do with getting from MetLife Stadium back into Manhattan from the last World Cup event held there in 1994. I don’t know what the bus ticket cost back then, but I do recall sitting in a 54th Street bistro waiting for my half-brother, Andre Marin (oddly enough, a big time Mexican soccer announcer for Televisa Azteca….Goallllll!!!!!), who was announcing the game, to get back into town for dinner. It was the first and only time I ever met the man, who bore my father’s name, but who never actually met our mutual father. I was 40 and he war 22. He died (rest his soul, too) a few years ago of stomach cancer.
What a weird and wonderful set of memories Scott Galloway inadvertently invoked in me this morning with his little bus ticket story intended to wow us with its sticker shock. I have another half brother that I have since discovered, who lives 20 miles north of here. He is younger than me, but not as young as Andre was. I guess where that leaves me in the corners of my mind is to wonder, oh, brother, where art thou? How strange that I say that when next month I return to Ithaca for what may be my final reunion…and my final nod to Homer while I am at it.