Art, culture, and generational boundaries

And there’s Neil Gaiman, born in late 1960. I interviewed him recently, and asked him whether he considers himself a geek, and how he responded sounded to me a lot like what I consider a geek to be -- culturally and creatively connected to the world, intellectually interested in a wide variety of subjects -- but not a lot like Generation X. (I remember him mentioning something about approaching the new punk-rock movement as an adult in the mid 1970s, which doesn’t sound like an Xer thing, but it’s not in the transcribed interview I posted -- I had some trouble with my tape recorder and had to rely on another intereviewer at the roundtable for the transcription, and I’m really kicking myself now for being such a mechanic dork with the damn recorder...)

So, here’s two creative and connected types, both born within months of each other in 1960, and neither sounds like an Xer -- they sound like Boomers. And then there’s George Clooney, born only six months after Gaiman, in May 1961, who talks like an Xer. I met him recently at a press event for his new film Good Night, and Good Luck. -- which I’m ready to call one of the harbingers of the new golden age of Gen X Hollywood I’ve been talking about -- and I listened to him talk about growing up in a newsroom, a rugrat under the feet of his journalist father and his coworkers... and boy, isn’t that kind of benign neglect and early introduction to the adult world prototypical of Xer childhoods. Clooney is also very snarky and derisive of his own superfame: he wasn’t actually planning to be in the film (he plays Murrow’s equally legendary CBS producer, Fred Friendly), which he cowrote (with Grant Heslov) and directed, but, as he said, "It’s a black-and-white $7 million film starring David Strathairn -- they [the Hollywood money guys] made sure I was gonna be in it somewhere." But you have to imagine that said with a self-deprecating shrug, as if to say, Hey, look, if it takes trading on the sexiest-man-alive thing to get the damn movie made, that’s fine. Clooney, like all pragmatic Xers, does what needs to be done to finish the job. (And like many Xers, famous or not, Clooney is very funny and doesn’t take himself too seriously, but under all that exterior charm is something sorta sad and melancholy. I was in the same room as George freakin' Clooney, whom I find immensely attractive, not just physically but intellectually, and I didn’t go weak in the knees or swoon or get tongue-tied -- my first and dominant reaction was, as incomprehensibly different as my life and experience are from his, a strange feeling of kinship, like I really understood what he was coming from creatively and philosophically.)

Maybe there’s some cultural factor at work: Clooney is American, born in the Midwest, while Gaiman and Bono are, respectively, English and Irish. But it’s something I’m going to be keeping an eye on, this possible Boom-Xer border between 1960 and 1961.