Due Respect
“Everyone except me is just so STUPID.”
I like finding out that people or institutions don’t suck as much as I’d thought. It happened three years ago, during the writing of the TWoP book; I had a contemptuous entry all ready to go about Jamie “The Heights Of Ray Pruit” Walters, but when I found out he’d quit the biz to become an L.A. firefighter, I was strangely proud of the guy. I like to be right — but the world has enough sucky people in it, and really it’s better to be wrong.
I didn’t expect to be wrong about Don Henley, though. I’ve never cared for the man; I like the Eagles, and I absolutely can’t argue with “The Boys of Summer,” an all-time-great song of the ’80s that seems likely to stand the test of time. Dude played the drums while singing lead; I have to give it up for that. But Henley has, in his public life, often seemed like that humorless, denim-vest-wearing, “back in the sixties, we cared about things” Laurel Canyon liberal who sincerely believes he’s the only one who’s noticed that Iraq is not working out, because even though he’s famous he takes the time to read the newspaper and make salad dressing from scratch or whatever the hell.
Maybe he is in fact that guy, but I have reason to believe that behind the pill-ish façade also lurks a guy I can hang with, based on a Rolling Stone piece on the Eagles from the late seventies. Right after he finishes bitching about fans sending him “corrected” lyrics which they’d actually read wrong — which is petty, but in a way I find eminently relatable — Henley takes an all-in-one-breath sidebar on his life as a working superstar:
Music is a lot of hard work, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve been doing this for seventeen years now and I’ve worked in dumps and in Louisiana bars where I saw a guy get stabbed and I played “Gloria” thirteen times for some goddamn fraternity at the University of Texas and I’ve played clubs in the goddamn Valley and in Northridge and I’ve been criticized and maligned and misunderstood and this is a twenty-four-hour-a-day job, ya know. This is not something you leave at the office. This is something I take around with me all the time. Every minute I’m awake, even when I’m asleep, I’m worried about the next album and what’s going to be written on it and how it’s going to do and how it’s going to be accepted and how my peers are going to react and how we’re going to make it better than the last one and how the record company is on our case about hurry-up-we-didn’t-get-an-album-from-you-in-1978-and-it’s-not-going-to-look-good-on-our-stock-report-and-what-about-the-profit-sharing-plan. Shit like that. I get a little self-righteous sometimes about the whole thing.
At that point in the article, I went back, read that part again, put the article down for a minute, stared at the coffee table, and said, “…Huh.” You can read it as whining, what he’s doing there — “oh boo hoo, the life of a rock star on the road is so hard, let me dry my tears with a fistful of money” — and what he’s describing is standard dues-paying for a musician, the kind that doesn’t even come to anything for the vast majority of gigging bands. But I liked Henley by the end of it: at least he admits that he gets self-righteous, and also, sometimes, this is exactly what it is to write for a living, whatever genre you write in. You don’t really get to leave it; it leaves you, when it’s ready, and sometimes, when it leaves, it doesn’t take a cinematic farewell, just limps off to the curb and keels over there and it’s like, why didn’t I go to business school, and the knowledge that you really don’t get to feel all that sorry for yourself over it because some people have real problems just makes you feel more sorry for yourself. It’s unusual to see it nailed that firmly, not to mention that it’s Henley doing the hammering.
And even if you still think Don’s a d-bag, you have to admire the rhetorical devices he employs. The author of the article, Charles M. Young, may have goosed it a bit, but the use of detail, the spare punctuation, the order in which the details come — it’s good structure. It paints a picture; I can envision that frat party and everyone present perfectly.
The whole article is fascinating. I’ve ripped RS but good in the past (and bagged on Henley in the process, if I recall correctly), and Young can go overboard with the imagery; his description of Glenn Frey’s laugh is not fresh enough to be that pleased with itself. But his rendering of the recording process as witnessed by a civilian is evocative and economical, and he gets great quotations, from Frey (“I hate this song! I hate this album! God help me! I’m bumming!” — been there, dude) and band manager Irving Azoff (“I’m tired and I’m rich and I can do what I want. I’m going home to sleep”). Young spent some months with the band, I think, on tour and elsewhere, but he doesn’t name-check the fact — you can tell from the texture of the writing that his narrative authority is earned. The magazine used to know how to do these stories; the current cover story on the Eagles isn’t half bad, either, but Young’s is exceptional.
Another personage I’ve developed a recent and somewhat reluctant regard for: Barbara Walters. I watched her Oprah appearance — I don’t know why; I seldom watch that show, and while I don’t not care for Barbara Walters, I don’t care much about her, either — and it fell short of my expectations, dish-wise, as most Oprah guest shots tend to do. But I’ve always thought of Walters as…you know. Barbara Walters. Soft-focus lavender blouses; parody of herself; unserious. “Baba Wawa.” I’d forgotten how much ground she broke back in the day for women on TV and in the news, but the excerpt from her book in Vanity Fair put it into perspective — and I have to say, she’s kind of awesome. She had to put up with a lot of shit over the years; never mind all the drama on The View, or “Baba Wawa,” which, after an initial period of having no sense of humor about it, she came to find funny and flattering.
Walters also had to deal with Harry Reasoner, among myriad others, acting like an unprofessional sexist dickhead. As in, he timed her segments with a stopwatch to make sure they didn’t run longer than his did, and then chided her if they did — on the air. In front of millions of people. Way to keep it pro, Harry. She’s getting vilified in the TV columns for having the gall to make a million dollars at ABC, even “Uncle” Walter Cronkite is ripping on her, and she’s sitting there on the anchor desk every night like, “Does anyone else see this? This is bullshit, right? …Hello?” Man, that must have sucked. And as the pioneer, she couldn’t even call anyone up to commiserate about it, at a time in history when a lot of people would have just to told her to pack it in and start a family instead (which she had already done, and she was supporting her parents and challenged sister). Nightmare. But she didn’t let them run her off, and she didn’t get bitter. And she’s still Baba Wawa. I can’t say I’ll make more of an effort to seek out her product in the future; The View gives me hives. But I like knowing she’s actually a tough lady.
Alas, the same issue of VF revealed that one guy is still exactly the butthole I’d suspected. No, not Billy Ray Cyrus. No, not James Frey, who still seems to need some revisions on his self-image (and shame on Evgenia Peretz for boot-licking his new novel, which every review I’ve read has categorized as an indulgent mess — the profile’s worth reading, though). No, I mean John Cusack, the subject of this month’s Proust Questionnaire. In Cusack’s defense, the PQ is designed to elicit abstract pomposities; the best any answerer can hope to do is drop a few gauzy-sounding remarks about family and Martha’s Vineyard and try not to embarrass himself by taking the thing too seriously.
Mission not accomplished here, to a ghastly degree. I’ve never drunk the Lloyd Dobler Kool-Aid, but even those who have would have to admit that Cusack has not enjoyed good press re: his interpersonal skills; he’s (allegedly) a terrible tipper, rude to service-folk, curt to fans, and prone to leaving fecal comments for the costume department. He’s also come to see himself as a political pundit, with an occasional column on HuffPo and a war satire that he wrote and produced premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival, and this is part of the same problem, to wit: the reserve of public goodwill that he enjoys derives chiefly from Say Anything, a film that despite a generation’s regard for it is minor, and almost 20 years old. Cusack has made genuinely execrable films since (Con Air, Must Love Dogs, Serendipshitty), and even if he hadn’t, it’s no call to treat people like crap, or to prate on about war profiteers as though only you see the truth in current events.
You’ll have to read it for yourself; I can’t do it justice without reproducing the entire thing. When Cusack’s not giving a smug lecture, he’s supplying a nonsensical answer that probably seemed like Warholian opacity to him but comes off more as contempt for the question, or name-dropping Bob Dylan and Salinger for the three 15-year-olds who read VF and would consider that profound, or taking a not-all-that-fringe position on Jesus by way of a Flannery O’Connor quote…it’s a tour de force of autodidact affectation, all the more remarkable because it contains a reverent reference to shamans, something you don’t often hear from a man old enough to rent a car.
The trait he deplores most in others? “The inability to think for themselves. Or the need to define one’s core in five-minute sound bites.” Riiiiight. Because admiring Hunter S. Thompson is courageously contrarian — and if you think the Proust Questions are so beneath you, just decline to participate instead of openly disdaining the exercise, far less subtly than you think you did. Cusack mentions elsewhere that he would like to “try not to be famous for at least a week or two as an adult,” and I would strongly recommend that for him too, if only because most 41-year-olds who have to live in the world don’t still believe snottiness is an effective form of protest.
Tags: books feminism movies music news politix publishing
So…if Sharon Stone is right (and it would be a first if she were) about karma, we’re agreed that Cusack is due a truckload of suppurating pustules?
Yeah, Cusack is a tool. He used to frequent this tobacco shop I worked at in college. He was everyone’s least favorite customer. He’d always expect to be waited on immediately, no matter the line. He’d snap his fingers, act very put out when we expected him to actually pay for his tasteless American Spirits, and make up racist nicknames for the non-white staff members.
And my ex went to high school with him in Evanston. Same class. He seconds the opinion that he was a total jerk, even then.
Where ARE you Cara??? ;-)
My subscription to the Henley-as-jerk idea stems from (a) the stories about him in Rock Stars Do the Dumbest Things (especially with prostitutes, apparently) and (b) a memory of him supporting a Colorado anti-gay law in the early 1990s. But I will love “The Boys of Summer” until the day I die, and so I am most comforted to hear evidence to the contrary.
Princess Leah Said “Cusack lost me long before this. . .during the 911 televised tribute and benefit…”
YES! Oh holy hell for almost 7 years I have thought I was the only one who saw that.
Ironically I was an extra on “Better Off Dead” and at that time found Cusack to be one of the more personable stars in terms of his behavior towards us.. and on a movie set extras are the very bottom. He actually hung out with us in our holding area and played cards between scenes. Unheard of. So he wasn’t born a douche rocket, he became one. Pity.
I wish someone could tell me why I always watch Serendipshitty (thanks Sars) when it’s on cable, despite the fact that the plot and lead characters are total garbage.
Just weighing in with more of the: huh! Actually never knew about Cusack’s reputation as douche. And yet, despite having loved (Grosse Point Blank) or liked well enough (though to be honest I’d forgotten he was *in* Being John Malkovich, and while I know I watched High Fidelity, it didn’t stick in my brain) a handful of his movies… I find myself curiously unaffected by it. I too am just a skoosh too old to have been caught up by Say Anything (indeed, I’ve still never seen it), so my love for him in films was always tempered. I liked seeing him on screen — but you know, it’s not like the characters he played were paragons or anything. They all had this sketchy quality to them that, for me, was leavened by his charisma/appeal. Hmm.
It does make it weird that here he is, decades out from his last serious run of relevance or popularity, but he’s still coasting on the pretention.
Really glad to hear that Joan is cool, though. Because her, I LOVE.
Was a fan of “Say Anything” but never fully understood the Lloyd Dobler swoon. He’s an unmotivated slacker, directionless, not particularly bright, reeks of “ageism”, completely obsessive, and a freeloader(Can I come to Europe with you?).
But he’s holding up a radio! Playing a cheesy Peter Gabriel song! Nice movie moment, but in real life? Most would barf and call their friends and say, “Should I get a restraining order? Lloyd’s really freaking me out!”
I can’t tell you how happy I am to have found this. Even as a frizzy haired, glasses and braces wearing, when-on-when-will-I-ever-have-a-boyfriend 7th grader, I hated Lloyd Dobler. That “I gave her my heart, she gave me a pen” bullshit still makes me want to jam a pencil as far into my ear as it will go. That girl was brilliant. She had a scholarship. She was finally getting away from her crappy father and miserable town, and she was bringing along this drip who was going to do nothing but hang on her all.the.time. How is that romantic? Jesus, I hate that guy. I have no idea of Cusack is a douche or not–in most movies I find him to be kind of a non-entity, and I’ve never met him–but Lloyd has left me with enough ill-will that I’ll believe it.
EW gave “War Inc.” (the movie Cusack was deigning to promote with the PQ) a D. Well played, horse’s ass.
Ok, so the whole “I remain unbowed” nonsense tells you that he takes himself a bit too seriously, but Sars, answer me this, if you would, in regards to the name-dropping–how does one respond to “name your favorite authors” without name dropping, or is it just unacceptable to include J.D. Salinger among them?
I’m a child of the 80s, so I’m too young to have Eagles fan-cred, but I love the Eagles and especially LOVE Don Henley. His raspy voice makes me swoon, and *well-written* lyrics are so sexy. Do you hear me, every songwriter in the Top 40? Maybe I am old after all.
Joan was on the Adam Corolla’s radio show a week or two ago (I can’t remember what she was plugging but she always seems such a delight) and the proof of his jack-assery lies in how his sister tastefully danced around questions about his new film and new-found adoration of political punditry. She kept saying that he was a, ”hard worker” and ”passionate about his beliefs” without ever really committing to complimenting him or embracing his behavior. Again, she’s a total delight to listen to and he is lucky to have such a diplomatic mouth-piece speaking on his behalf.
@SoCalSun: Name-dropping isn’t about the names themselves. It’s about wanting to impress your audience with who you know or what you know about them. It’s the difference between just saying you like Dylan and Salinger, and making a point of saying you’ve been doing a lot of reading lately and Dylan and Salinger “inspire” you as symbols of your own profundity.
In fairness, Cusack did have a number of other writers on his list…but one of the others was Hunter S. Thompson. Thompson is actually deeply underrated *as a writer* because of all the lifestyle stuff he was tied up with, but to group Thompson and Dylan and Salinger in among your favorites is adolescent.
Before you leave an offended comment about how you’ve got two kids and a philology PhD and you still love Dylan thankyouverymuch: this isn’t about Dylan. This is about Cusack reading up on war, and going back to a lot of Vietnam-era cultural output, and having his mind blown by Dylan’s insights and thinking he’s the only one who Really Gets What Dylan Is Doing, even though the song is called “Masters Of War” and is hardly what you could call subtle. I mean, we all did that, but most of us were 17 at the time. (I’ve always been more of a “Nashville Skyline” girl, myself.)
I don’t want to come off like I think autodidacts are all assholes, either, or that a liberal-arts education is the be-all; they aren’t, and it isn’t. Cusack is trying to learn some things so that he can change some things and he has to be given credit for that. What I object to isn’t the effort, or the names he drops per se, although I think Salinger is a medium talent and a wider reading list might point that up for Cusack. It’s the implication that he’s the only one with a brain, the only one paying attention, because he read “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail” last week and listened to “Talking Bear Mountain Blues” a few times.
Again, we all did that. But then we turned 20. When you’re really the smartest one in the room, you don’t spend all your time talking about it.
I heard someone (probably David Duchovny) refer to one [nice, socially presentable] person as another [skidmarkish] individual’s “human credential”, meaning that the nice person’s association with the butthole served as proof of the latter’s innate worth. Joan is apparently John’s human credential. Eh, everybody needs a cause to support, I guess.
@ Kris:
Racist nicknames? Really? Oh my.
@Sars:
Hey, thanks for the reply. I didn’t mean to be sharp, just curious and succinct. For the record, I’m not offended, I do have 2 kids, I never really got Dylan, and I dropped out mid-master’s because I’m an unrepentant slacker. And lazy.
On the other hand, if you were to ask me who my favorite authors were, I’d probably name Hunter S. among them; I’m not sure that makes me an adolescent name-dropper. Although, while I was in college, I once met William F. Buckley and asked him about Dr. Thomp–oops, I dropped something.
@SoCal: Please, don’t worry about it. Clarifying why those particular names, grouped together, made me roll my eyes was worth doing.
…Where IS Cara? We need to hear that story, and point and laugh.
I have never seen Say Anything (before my time), and I have always hated John Cusack. He just always–no matter what role he’s playing–seems to have the smarmy asshole expression on his face, and I kind of want to smack him.
Chiming in to offer Cara cookies if she comes back and tells the story!
Forgive me, fans, but I hated “Say Anything” from the first time I saw at (at the world’s longest, most boring, most underfed slumber party ever, when I was probably about 15 years old or so). Lloyd Dobler struck me as a loser, if a sweet-natured one. He was going to get dumped as soon as the g/f finally realized that sweet he might be, but able to provide himself with a life – not so much. The only John Cusack movies I’ve ever been able to stand are “Better Off Dead,” and “Runaway Jury.”
As for the VF bit:
If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
Take myself less seriously. And I would try not to be famous for at least a week or two as an adult.
At least he KNOWS he’s an ass.
.. and while I’m ranting a bit, when I was (much) younger, I read “The Idiot” because I read that Josh Hartnett loved it, I read Kerouac’s “On the Road” because some actor liked it (possibly still Hartnett), “The Name of the Rose” because Christian Slater was in it (please don’t ask), “Everything’s Illuminated” because Liev Schrieber raved about it (and later made it into a movie).
I hated them all.
I’m well past being impressed by what actors claim to read or claim are their influences (and I don’t say that meaning I’m so far above that… it just took me a while to realize I needed to read what I wanted to because I wanted to, not because I thought some dumbass I’ll never meet was hot or smart or whatever).
Not impressed by the references, Johnny.
Until ten minutes ago I had no idea that John Cusack was ill-perceived. It’s surprising. I can’t help but feel that people aren’t giving his movies a fair shake. For instance, I thought “High Fidelity” was a very good movie on par with the book. Was he high and mighty, or whatever, about it? I didn’t think so. If he’s offered a part, he’s going to play it however he, the director, and to some extent, the writer(s) want him to play it. Perhaps he is sought after on the grounds of playing that kind of character, which is not an unreasonable assumption. But all of this is beside the point: Why should we judge his movies based on his personal qualities? You don’t have to like the man to say that he is a good actor. That goes for anyone. Then again, I am a complete retard, so the value of my opinion is questionable at best.
Also, pundit? What the heck was he thinking?!
@Jaybird: Yep, that was David Duchovny, and those two people were, respectively, Scully and Mulder, I believe. The “human credential” thing is a sweet sentiment that I’ve always liked. Speaking of douches, Duchovny has definitely had his moments, but I don’t get that “dickishness straining at the leash” vibe from him anymore that I once did. So that’s nice.
As for John Cusack, I have NEVER EVER gotten it. I’m the exact right age for Lloyd Dobler, and I was dragged to that movie as a teenager, but I never saw the appeal. And I’ve heard nothing but negative stories about him. So, no conflict here. I did like High Fidelity, though, but not anywhere near as much as About a Boy.