Site Presented By
Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
The former Spy writer and well-paid bastard hates baby boomers (their legacy: the male ponytail) with all his funny guts.
Jul 13, 2001 | Joe Queenan is a well-paid bastard. For the better part of 20 years, he has made a living being mean in the pages of GQ, Movieline, Spy, the New York Times and countless other publications. He's a self-proclaimed "full time son of a bitch" who has "never deviated from [his] chosen career as a sneering churl," and his specialty has been ripping on movie stars and the banalities of American culture. As a cultural critic, Queenan has taken potshots at nearly every trend that has come down the pike. What his criticism sometimes lacks in substance, he makes up for with smartass bile. And when it comes to tearing apart celebrities, he is merciless.
In a 1994 review of an Oscar Levant biography, Queenan noted that Candice Bergen (who had been pursuing a career in photojournalism at the time) was the last person to see the brilliant pianist and composer alive. Queenan suggested that Levant might have died sooner had he seen Bergen act.
An article about blind characters in film looked on the bright side of losing one's vision, because, "the blind get to go through life without ever seeing Shelley Winters."
One Op-Ed piece found Queenan wishing that the movie "Mr. Holland's Opus" had ended the same way as "Braveheart," with Richard Dreyfuss getting his entrails ripped out while a cast of thousands cheered.
The film "Blame It on Rio," Queenan wrote, "contains rabies jokes and Valerie Harper."
A hallmark of Queenan's work has been his willingness to become personally immersed in the subjects he writes about. He once sat in a limousine and asked a hooker to accompany him to important business dinners, like Richard Gere in "Pretty Woman," and has jumped into the Atlantic Ocean during winter to see how long Leonardo DiCaprio could have survived in "Titanic." Most memorably, he has twice spent the day living the life of a famous actor in his "Hugh Grant for a Day" and "Mickey Rourke for a Day," articles. In the latter, an unshaven, unshowered Queenan hangs out in bars during the morning, lights matches off of strangers' clothing and rolls sleeping vagrants for cigarette money.
Queenan extended this technique further in his book "Red Lobster, White Trash and the Blue Lagoon," where he consumed the collected works of Billy Joel and Neil Diamond and took in matinees of "Cats" and "Starlight Express," all the while watching Patrick Swayze movies and eating at restaurants like the Olive Garden. It was an all-encompassing effort to experience the worst of American culture. After several months of this journey, Queenan discovered "Scheissenbedaurn" (German, literally translated to "shit regret"), a concept expressing the disappointment one feels when exposed to things that are not as bad as originally suspected.
Most recently, Queenan decided to take a look at something close to home: his own generation, the baby boomers. In "Balsamic Dreams: A Short but Self-Important History of the Baby Boom Generation," Queenan examines the people who went to Woodstock, protested the Vietnam war and claim to have run Nixon out of office. The results are not pretty.
In spite of the boomers' early promise, Queenan believes they simply quit. He says they're taking early retirements and selling out their values to become a venal, self-obsessed group whose legacies will be "quality time," the male ponytail and a belief that Iron Butterfly was indeed a great rock band. The beginning of this downfall, Queenan contends, can be pinpointed to April 21, 1971, the date Carole King's "Tapestry" album was released. On that cataclysmic day, he writes, boomers succumbed to three themes that would define their mind-set: genteel lameness ("You've Got a Friend"), communal nostalgia for the extremely recent past ("So Far Away") and incessant and incorrigible self-repackaging ("Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow").
At a coffee shop in Chicago, Queenan recently took on his critics, his generation and the best and worst that American culture has to offer. For Queenan, it was just another day at the office.
What can we blame baby boomers for? What did they do to our culture?
They created Andrew Lloyd Webber. Andrew Lloyd Webber destroyed Broadway. Just destroyed it. It used to be that a show was 14 or 15 great songs. His idea was these operettas where you repeated one bad song endlessly and everything went into the staging and presentation and it was horrible.
Baby boomers have horrible taste in theater and they have appalling taste when they delve into classical music. They always get suckered into buying the crap. Like they buy Andrea Bocelli records.
They just fall for packaging all the time. When I was a kid, paperback books were cheap and they looked really bad. All books looked bad then. Now all books look great. Every book, you want to buy it. It's the packaging.
That's what baby boomers are good at. They are extremely good at furnishing. They know how to redecorate. They know how to package things. It's all they want to talk about. But life is different from lifestyle.
