Meghan Daum on John Hughes: He Made Weird Normal

Meghan Daum eulogized John Hughes, the director who made several seminal 1980's movies about teenagers, including "The Breakfast Club" and "Sixteen Candles." She thinks a big part of his appeal was that he made it safe and somehow cool to be a little different, a little weird, a tad eccentric. And, of course, he talked about sex. But his movies were also about romance:

So what was Hughes' secret? Is it merely that his films offer an appealing timeout from the "Porky's"- and "American Pie"-style raciness that has since become the norm? In part, but I would venture yet another theory about their staying power and their innocence. Not only do Hughes' movies imply that teens can care as much about romance as about sex, they remind us of a time when you could be odd and be mostly left alone to deal with it. No extreme interventions or psychiatric diagnoses.

If the brooding, solitary Andie played by Ringwald in "Pretty in Pink" were in high school in 2009, it's hard to imagine she wouldn't be a candidate for anti-depression therapy. Likewise, if "The Breakfast Club," which is about five teens serving time in Saturday detention, took place in a post-Prozac, post-Columbine America, Ally Sheedy's mostly mute, kleptomaniac misfit would have undoubtedly been medicated, and Anthony Michael Hall's character would have received a lot more than detention for bringing a flare gun to school. As for Ferris Bueller, the kid obviously needed Ritalin.

Finding yourself, coming of age, figuring out who you are - eternal themes of art. But here's the thing about eternal and universal themes of the human experience: they need to be rediscovered and reworked for every generation, which thinks that it is discovering these ideas on their own. And then they go to college and realize that, no, other people have done this before. But they - and we - then have our versions of these journeys. And there ain't nothing that can take those away from us. Thanks, Mr. Hughes, and I hope your eternal day off is a good one.

LA Times does something right

The LA Times has done something innovative and kind of cool! Whoa! One of their Op-Ed columnists is a woman named Patt Morrison, who is sort of the LA version of Gail Collins of the NY Times, but a little spunkier. She has had a column on the Op-Ed page for a couple of years. Today the Times introduced a new feature - Morrison will be interviewing a different person each week, with the interview on the Op-Ed page. The first interview is with everyone's favorite Chick. Laura Chick, that is, formerly LA City Controller, now going to Sacramento to audit the state of California's $48 billion from the stimulus.

Great move by the LA Times, and a great way to start. This is a wonderful way to create unique content - leverage one of their best assets, a woman who knows LA like the back of her hand. She's already received one of the highest honors a Los Angeleno can get - she has a hot dog named after her at Pink's, the legendary hot dog stand. This is even more remarkable given that she is a vegetarian (it's a vegetarian hot dog). Even better is starting with Laura Chick, who worked wonders as the LA City Controller. She's currently one of my heroines. One of the most inspiring civil servants I have ever seen. That's not damning with faint praise - she has worked very hard, and very smart, to try and make LA government work better. It was a very good call on Arnold's part to appoint her. She has voodoo dolls in her office. An auditor with voodoo dolls (they're all anonymous) - you gotta love that.

To make room for the interviews, which look like they will be taking up most of the page, the Times is moving Meghan Daum to Thursdays. Another good call. She's one of my favorite columnists in the LA Times, and I've been a little bummed that she is on Saturdays, because that's the day of the week with the fewest newspaper readers. It made a certain amount of sense to publish her on Saturdays, since she is sort of a lifestyle columnist, but it's good to see her being published during the week.

The LA Times did something right, and cool, and innovative. Can I get an Amen!

Justifying The Oscars

Meghan Daum does not like the Oscars. She is also well aware that, in Los Angeles, this is not a popular topic. I can understand how she feels. I'm a big Lakers fan, but I can't stand the Dodgers, for which I am occasionally vilified in this town. However, my belief that the Dodgers are pathetic losers is usually justified when they fail miserably, which is a regular occurrence.

I like Meghan Daum, I even once went to a reading so I could hear her, and I even bought her book for her to autograph.

But I completely disagree with her about the Oscars, because she's totally wrong. She's obviously entitled to her opinion. But I have to disagree.

How many people genuinely care? Sure, they say they care. They enter the pools and watch the pre-event entertainment news shows and claim to have an opinion about one actor's performance versus another's. But do they really care, or do they just think they're supposed to care? Is watching the Oscars the best use of a Sunday evening, or is it an adult version of attending a high school pep rally for a football game, even if you neither fully understand the game nor give a hoot about the final score?

The answer is that they pretend to care because they really want to pretend, and sometimes they really do care. People make decisions, they identify with particular movies, they argue, they invest ego in their choices, and they make bets. Why? Partially because it's fun, but also partially because sometimes these choices do mean something to us. Some people think Steven Spielberg was shafted when Saving Private Ryan lost Best Picture to Shakespeare In Love, and will argue about it to this day. If you're a WWII veteran or are close to one, Saving Private Ryan may have been a deeply meaningful movie, while Shakespeare In Love was a romantic trifle. Lots of people were seriously disappointed that Crash won Best Picture. Some people think it was a crime when Pulp Fiction lost Best Picture to Forrest Gump. I still have no idea why Gosford Park won Best Original Screenplay.

But there's also a very LA-specific reason why people care about the Oscars. And by LA-specific, I mean entertainment-industry specific. Film, like most of the arts in this society, is constantly torn between art and commerce. Different people are involved in this business for different reasons. Some people want to make lots of money; some people believe in themselves as artists. There is an uneasy tension between the two that pervades the industry.

Except on Oscar night. On this night, it's all about art. Movies that made next to nothing compete with movies that made fortunes, and every one has an equal chance. Slumdog Millionaire violates all the rules for mainstream commercial success in Hollywood. It has no stars, the director isn't famous, and it takes place in a country most of us have never been to. And yet it is the front-runner for Best Picture, and it's practically minting money.

The Oscars are also about acceptance and reward of artistic excellence in an industry that has far more rejection than either acceptance or acknowledgement of great artistic ability.

Consider an average actress. Let's say she auditions once a week, and gets 2 gigs a year. That means that she is rejected about 50 times, and accepted twice. And one of those acceptances might be for a theater gig that pays next to nothing or a role in a student film that takes three days and pays nothing. Imagine going to 50 job interviews a year, and doing that for years. The same is true of most other professionals in this business. Writers collect rejection slips; producers work on projects for years that go nowhere. Shakespeare In Love was in development for 10 years. There are currently almost 1,400 movies on the Hollywood Stock Exchange. Many of those won't get made, and, of those that do, a fair amount will go straight to DVD. Of those that get released, a fair number will fail.

So for one night, art trumps commerce, and we all get to dream that maybe, someday, we will feel permanently accepted and acknowledged. It's fantasy, sure, but, then again, isn't escapism one of the reasons why movies exist in the first place?

Next year, Ms. Daum, I'm inviting you to my Oscar party.

Obamamania!

There are so many great articles about Obama all over the place that it's impossible to keep track of them, and impossible to read more than a handful.

But here are some of the ones that I liked.

From London, the FT has an article about the history of the White House.

In the LA Times, Meghan Daum writes about the poet who will read a poem at the Inaugural, Elizabeth Alexander. I'm looking forward to that.

Also in the LA Times, Obama is in the house - literally. Many people are putting pictures of Obama in their house. Once upon a time, it was JFK or Martin Luther King, Jr. Now it's Obama.

Barack Obama himself observed Martin Luther King, Jr. day as a day of service. Boy does that take me back. I was part of a "day of service" a couple of days before Clinton's Inaugural. A bunch of people decided to try and renovate a historic old theater in Northeast Washington, the Atlas Theater. I was involved with a group called Public Allies. It was a great day - 400 people showed up to paint and clean. I was supposed to find out what the local community wanted from this place. I walked around the neighborhood with an older African American man named Robert Jackson (I'll never forget him). He explained to me what the neighborhood needed, but I never had a chance to communicate to the other people involved. It was just too crazy of a day. Three US Senators showed - media was there by the truckload. Cypress Hill did a concert in the street.

But at the end of the day, it was boarded up, and everybody went home, to see what tomorrow would bring. Plans were a little unclear.

I went back the next day. I was the only one. I spent the day talking to a homeless guy, and he ended up trusting me. But nothing happened there for months.

That was 16 years ago. It was symbolic of the best and worst of the Clinton administration; a lot of excitement, but not a lot of focus. But the best part was that experiences like that trained a lot of energetic young liberals who are now in a position to take advantage of the lessons they learned. For example, later that year Public Allies opened up an office in Chicago, and hired, as the Executive Director, a woman named Michelle Obama.

She was recommended for the job by a member of the board of Public Allies - her husband.

So now we have come full circle - the enthusiasm of that day did not, in fact, dissipate with the lack of follow through the next day. There was follow-up. It took a while. But wow, what results.

I didn't start out this post planning to write about that day so long ago. But I hope I can be excused for getting carried away.

Meghan Daum: Obama on Facebook

Meghan Daum has a very funny column in The LA Times about Barack Obama and all of his friends on Facebook.

My favorite:

- Barack has 83 friends in common with Bernard Madoff.
- Rahm Emanuel has 820 friends in common with Bernard Madoff.
- Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton have 2,894 friends in common with Bernard Madoff.

This is also good:

December 5:
- ♥ Barack is now listed as "in a relationship" with The U.S. Auto Industry.

But wait! On December 11, we find out that:

- ♥ Barack has changed his relationship status to The U.S. Auto Industry to "it's complicated."

Which reminds me, I have to see if Meghan Daum will be my friend on Facebook . . .

Gen X Pundit of the Month

Meghan Daum, who writes a column for the LA Times Op-Ed page on Saturdays, is one of my favorite newspaper columnists. Today I am bestowing upon her the title of "Gen X Pundit of the Month" (which I just made up), because she finally said what many people have been thinking for a long time. This week, she wrote a piece for the Sunday Opinion section of the LA Times, about a topic that I have been thinking about for oh so many years - the overwhelming cultural dominance of Baby Boomers, and their everlasting nostalgia for their youth in the '60's. The online title says it all:

The millstone of boomer milestones

I like the Beatles. I once saw the Rolling Stones in concert, and I can understand why some people would pay $500 for a ticket to see them live (I saw them for free) - they really are amazing. I like a lot of classic rock. But dear God will these people ever shut up. In the Books section the same day, just a few pages away, is a review of "Girls Like Us," which has the subtitle "Carole King, Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon -- and the Journey of a Generation." I like all three of those women. But are the stories of three women who recorded most of their songs 30+ years ago really the story of a generation? Why are these people addicted to generalizing about themselves?

I particularly identified with this:

Boomer-era classic rock is not just music but a life force.

As a member of Generation X, I should know -- I've been strong-armed into an appreciation of '60s and '70s pop culture my whole life.

It has taken me a long time to be able to appreciate my own culture, as opposed to that of the 60's. Back in 1993, I started a group called Generation X (and I actually owned the trademark, with my partner, for about three months). It was a non-profit that was supposed to unite all of the young (at the time) activists mobilizing in Washington, DC, at the start of the Clinton administration. It didn't work, I think in part because the idea of a nonprofit mobilizing the "voices of a generation" was very much a 60's idea - and this was the 90's. So we were trying to find a way to be different from Baby Boomers, but using a very Boomer idea - start a nonprofit! Set up an office and start making grand pronouncements!

As I read her piece, I think I finally hit on a strategy for containing Boomer nostalgia: point out its rather severe limitations, which are confined to mostly two areas of life: rock and roll, and politics. We can all tune in to the legacy of classic rock by turning on the right kind of radio station (at least one in every city), or maybe just shopping in a department store. And, of course, there's the whole anti-war thing, as well as civil rights and feminism. Good stuff all around.

But where the Boomers really didn't get much done, and where, in retrospect, Gen X really rocked it, are movies and technology. Name a great rock band from the 1960's. Name a great Beatles album. Not hard, right?

Now name an Oscar winner for Best Picture.

A little harder, no? There were some great movies made in the 1960's - The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, In the Heat of the Night. But did you know that the Best Picture winner for 1968 was Oliver!? In 1969 it was a countercultural film, Midnight Cowboy, but in 1970, it was Patton. Honestly, I've never seen any of those last three, and I'm not sure I ever will. The Best Picture for 1965 was The Sound of Music. A good movie, to be sure, but not exactly countercultural.

The difference between the revolutionary impact and lasting resonance of the music from the 60's, as opposed to the rather less dramatic impact of the movies from that era, can easily be explained by the difference in cost in producing them. It doesn't take much to write a song and record it; making a movie is somewhat more difficult and expensive.

And technology? The great technical achievement of the 1960's - the space program - took place completely within the government and the military.

Generation X, on the other hand, saw the debut of MTV on August 1, 1980 - a great fusion of art and technology. Boomers may dismiss MTV as superficial eye candy, but some videos are small masterpieces of filmmaking, like Madonna's Vogue, George Michael's Freedom, or Billy Idol's Cradle of Love. Back in the 1980's, I was one of those intellectuals who looked down on pop culture fluff like MTV. But now I realize music videos are an art form, and should be appreciated as such - Boomer judgments be damned.

Our youth also saw the launch of the PC, the Mac, Windows, and a bazillion software programs. We also were the first people to play video games. And then there's the Internet.

One of the great Boomer songwriters, Neil Young, tells us that it is better to burn out than to fade away. Of course, there's an entire generation ahead of us that will refuse, until their dying days, to do neither. But that's OK. I know many great people who are Baby Boomers, like many of my aunts and uncles. Really good people. Boomers gave us the The Doors and a tradition of protesting. But we have U2, REM, the Go-Go's, 10,000 Maniacs, Prince, the Dead Kennedys, Public Enemy, Garth Brooks, and Duran Duran. They gave us James Bond; we have Indiana Jones, Luke Skywalker, Neo and Morpheus, the Blues Brothers, Harry Potter, and the X-Men.

And we have Barack Obama.

Fortunately for them, we're willing to share.

Meghan Daum on Obama art

A couple of weeks ago, Meghan Daum in the LA Times wondered about some postmodern concerns she has about some Obama posters. Specifically, the ones created by Shephard Fairey (he's the guy who made all those Andre the Giant stickers you used to see everywhere and wonder just what the heck they meant) drive her around the bend, or, as she puts it, "into an existential tailspin." Having been through more than a few of those myself, I can empathize. She compares the posters to various forms of agitprop and propaganda, and is a little worried about the effect that these posters might have on the campaign. I'm guessing she read a little too much Jacques Derrida somewhere along the way. It took me a bit of thinking to see where she is coming from, but I can visualize a vague connection between these posters and some kind of old-fashioned attempt to propel the masses forward.

But I diverge from her when it comes to impact on the campaign. First, I think she's reading a bit too much of her own perspective into these, and I don't think most people are as familiar with ironic commentary in visual media as she is. But I'm also not worried about it because I think the association that she makes is entirely stylistic, and, lacking a clear, specific reference in the content, I think the link between this poster and, say, the famous poster of Che Guevara is too obscure to be meaningful. If Obama were raising his fist, or maybe wearing a beret with a red star, then, yes, I would be worried. As for this, I just think it's a cool poster. Partially because I have one, and I don't want anyone to think I'm a Marxist. Been there, done that. Threw away the posters.

LATimes.com still sucks

I read the dead-tree edition of the LA Times every morning, because I live in LA. I moved here in 2000, and I think the LA Times has actually gotten much better since I've moved here. They've revamped the Op-Ed section a couple of times, and I think they now have a very good selection of columnists. They don't have any stars on par with the NY Times, but they do have a wider range, and they do have columnists like Meghan Daum, who has a talent for writing about highly topical subjects in a way that others don't.

And they have Dan Neil, who is the only automotive critic to win a Pulitzer. He's not just a great car writer - he's one of my favorite writers in the country, in any medium. Several years ago, he wrote a review of a Ducati motorcycle (the LA Times now has a columnist, Susan Carpenter, who only covers motorcycles, which I think is quite cool. She's also a good writer). It was a great piece of journalism, and included the line that the bike "runs on damned souls and is lubricated with the fat of unbaptized children," which is a very clever way of saying that it is hell on wheels.

I once impressed a woman with that review (which I found on another Website, NOT on LATimes.com). I tried to find it today on LATimes.com and couldn't. So, although I constantly link to LATimes.com for recent news articles, as far as I am concerned, until I can find that article with one or two searches, LATimes.com still sucks.

The contadictions of Kumbaya

First of all, a milestone to note. This is my 100th post! OK, back to the blogging.

Meghan Daum, one of my favorite dead-tree-media columnists and easily the best reason to read the LA Times on Saturdays, has a great column about the word "kumbaya." I have such positive associations with that word. Pine trees, campfires, toasting marshmallows. But alas! Now it is being used to paint people as a little too touchy-feely. So it has kept its old meaning, but also morphed into something strangely other:

"The term allows its users to have their coolness cake and eat it too. To invoke "Kumbaya" is to display one's countercultural credentials while simultaneously letting it be known how stupid and irrelevant those credentials are in today's world. Like those loathsome shibboleths "think outside the box" and "let's take a blue sky approach," which combine self-help jargon with corporate doublespeak, "Kumbaya" manages to be completely earnest and completely disingenuous at the same time."

It is a strange symbol of how fast language is evolving and how different parts of our culture reference each other. Everyone understands what "kumbaya" means, even people who didn't have post-60's campfire experiences. And I don't think the cooption is actually working all that well. It doesn't matter how many times I hear it used as a term of condescension. I don't care if it refers to how airheaded hippies were. I can still reach back and associate it with my own experiences. Which is a solid defense against being emotionally manipulated.