What is the weekend for, if not to fritter away the hours reading newspaper articles like the one in the Sunday NY Times on the dire straits that many young city bachelors find themselves in, now that they can't afford to pay $5K a month rent for the pad of their dreams.
There was the guy who, because he can no longer afford "costly leather sofas":
...fills kiddie pools with piles of pillows for guests to snuggle in on his monthly movie nights.
And the recently divorced 36 year old, living off royalties from an earlier music career, and downsized, apartment-wise, from the loft where:
...two walls were devoted to shelves showcasing his vast sneaker collection.
But my favorite downsized bachelor was the one who pays $750 a month:
...for a five-story ramshackle building in Brooklyn Heights that is packed to the rafters with antiques.
The Collier Brothers ambience is enhanced by the falling plaster, the lack of kitchen, and the lack of heat.
David Friedlander, however, was not so interesting because of where and how he lives, but what he does for a living. He:
...produces Lucid NYC, a series of parties with intellectual content
And if there's one thing I love, it's a party with intellectual content.
Lucid's motto says that it's "creating a more enlightened world one party at a time." And they have a truly swell tagline: "like buying banality offsets."
The parties, I take it, involve brief presentations by intellectual content providers, followed by mingling and hanging out chatting.
Hey, I was completely and utterly ready to make complete and utter fun of the concept of paying to hang out with design agitators, roboticists, and vertical farmers.
And they I thought, why not?
In the party photo gallery, people appear to be enjoying themselves over wine and banality offsets.
Maybe Friedlander's on to something here.
In a world where so much is virtual and so much is shouting, why not start a salon, where someone with interesting ideas can talk about them. And you have more of an opportunity to speak directly with them than you would if they were lecturing at the 96th Street Y or wherever it is that design agitators, roboticists, and vertical farmers might do their thing.
Why not get people to step toe out of their anti-content cocoons, where anything longer than a tweet is too impossibly involved for today's go-go texter to absorb? Why not run a party that offers something more than networking, self-aggrandizement, and one-ups-manship? (Not that ex-Wall Steeters are the target market for Lucid.)
Unfortunately, Firedlander's probably not on to something that will earn him much of a living in the near future, so he may be hunkering down for a while in that antiques-crammed fire-hazard in Brooklyn Heights. (At least he's in a nice neighborhood. Hope they turn some heat on for him at some point.)
Lucid is hiring, by the way, but - and this is the unfortunate part - they can't afford to pay anyone right now. (I love their cheesy stock-art photo of "employees". Very funny. It reminds me of the unintentionally hilarious pic that an occasional client of mine used on their "Management Bios" page. The management team of the firm, as was somewhat clear from their names, were a) all male; b) all Russian. (Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin, Mikhail Gorbachev...) I had to ask him to explain who the young Asian woman, or the Latino-looking male might be...)
If you’d like to attend an event, present or have something to contribute to the website, contact David at dfriedlander@lucidnyc.com.
Meanwhile, I sense a blog post on vertical farming coming on...
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