David Geffen Listens to Tosca In His $54 Million Manhattan Penthouse.

David Geffen listens to Tosca in his $54 million Manhattan penthouse.

Well, no – he doesn't.

I mean – maybe he does. How would I know? Have you seen the photographs of that $54 million Manhattan penthouse? Can you imagine listening to Free Man In Paris in that $54 million Manhattan penthouse? Does anybody but my aging Boomer cohorts listen to Joni Mitchell anymore?

I mean, Joni Mitchell = Major Cultural Referent: Check.

But what cultural referents survive ten years anymore, let alone 40?

What life is there for any art beyond the immediate moment when it succeeds or fails, if you can't commodify it into an investment?

David Geffen knew a lot about the commodification process.

You may disapprove of commodification. But, you see, commodification is the only way art survives…

###

PBS airs an extraordinary series called American Masters, which consists of biographical documentaries mostly about artists, writers and musicians. I've watched three so far – Woody Allen, Gore Vidal and David Geffen.

Woody Allen is not particularly interesting for his cinematic body of work, but is interesting for his career arc, his utilitarian and evidently joyless approach to directing, and his financing mechanisms. That most fascinating last is unfortunately not delved into in nearly as much detail as I would have liked since the director of the documentary seemed mostly interested in justifying Allen's relationship with Soon Yi. I understand that as a legitimate choice: After he's dead, nobody will care about Woody Allen movies, but he will live on in pop culture history as the man who complicated Mia Farrow's Thanksgiving.

I've had a crush on Gore Vidal for most of my adult life. Sadly, the crush went unrequited, and now he's dead. Besides being one of the most elegant writers of English prose ever born, Gore Vidal had some awfully interesting theories about history. Sadly, I think he too will be mostly forgotten within five to ten years.

I'm not sure that anybody will remember David Geffen either, but that's okay – David Geffen was never about tagging the universe with his own signature line of spray paints. David Geffen is a businessman, not an artist, which makes his inclusion as a subject in this series somewhat mystifying at first glance.

But here's the thing about David Geffen: Unlike most businessmen, he realized early on that influence is way more important than power.

That's the secret behind the whole networking cliché, of course.

But Geffen got it about 30 years before networking became a buzzword.

Geffen didn't flaunt his power. Instead, he wielded power on behalf of influence. He rather methodically went about generating influence until he was in a position to shift the zeitgeist.

Zeitgeist is one of those $500 words that are actually quite useful. If you think of all of human culture as a huge coral reef – my favorite metaphor right now – then the zeitgeist is those unusually shaped and colored corals that jut out from the skeletal mass of billions of tiny dead things.

I think a lot about the zeitgeist these days.

The woman whose birthday party I attended last weekend is 20 years younger than me. She'd put together a 6 hour loop of her favorite music videos that ran in the background throughout the entire party, and in between bantering way too loudly, I watched those videos the way you always watch stuff when you're stoned – with complete intellectual absorption. Some of them were really cool, and I am now a huge Lady Gaga fan! But those endless forelocked, mascaraed boy bands from the 80s. I mean: UGH.

"Oh, yeah," said the Birthday Girl. "Crowded House. Belle and Sebastian. They were my favorites. I was so in love with them."

I'm so-o-o glad she said that when she said that because I was just about to make an overly loud comment about talentless hacks.

I can guarantee you that Crowded House and Belle and Sebastian are not and never were part of the zeitgeist.

Some of the artists Geffen worked with, though… Geffen just had – maybe still has, I dunno, though he seems to have moved out of the pop culture kingmaker bizz – an uncanny sense of what makes pop culture glitter deep in the recesses of the human psyche.

###

Here's something you probably don't know about David Geffen: He's entirely responsible for the Presidency of Barrack Obama.

Seriously.

In fact, that's probably his biggest contribution to the zeitgeist.

If David Geffen hadn't very publicly and humiliatingly withdrawn his support from Hillary Clinton at the beginning of 2008, she would have been the 44th President of the United States. Not a doubt in my mind.

###

I listened to Tosca last night. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, exactly the way the hairs on the back of my neck stood up the first time I heard Laura Nyro's Eli's Coming. She was a David Geffen discovery who for one reason or another, he just couldn't spin into gold. Yes, yes, brilliant singer/songwriter. But we're talking about the structure of that coral reef here, not precious metals sunken under 20 feet of ocean bottom mud.

I wanted to reach through across that fourth wall and tell him, Psst – David! You'd really like Puccini!!!

But, uh, you know. It's only 25 miles from Long Gisland to a $54 million Manhattan penthouse but it's a distance that cannot be negotiated.