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I'm Stephen Metcalf, and this is the Slate Culture Gab Fest I Weep for the Future Edition.

This is also the daily podcast from slate.com for Wednesday, August 12th, 2009.

On today's program, we're going to talk about John Hughes, rest in peace, the great poet of American puberty, why going to see the Rolling Stones live still sucks, and cultural tourism, new trend or foolhardy oxymoron. Joining me today are Slate's culture editor, John Swansberg. Hello, John. Good to be here. Great to have you. Nice to see you again. And our film critic, Dana Stevens, good to have you back. Dana, I have to plunge in right away with you. John Hughes, it seems to me no fine line had ever been drawn between genius and total dreck until there was America and then America founded Hollywood in turn. But that is sort of the great American pop culture fine line.

Someone like John Hughes comes along and he makes, I think he himself directs eight movies in the course of about 10 years.

So he's completely synonymous with the 1980s and more so with the genre that he practically invented.

I mean, the way that Woody Allen took something that was already there, which was the romantic comedy, but really made it completely

Woody Allen's with Annie Hall. In the same way, I think John Hughes, over a period of three

or four years, working with this cast of ensemble of young actors, most notably Molly Ringwald,

made the high school movie the high school movie, right? And it's impossible to think of this genre without thinking of John Hughes, without thinking of 16

candles, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and then in between those two was the Breakfast Club.

You came down very firmly in your eulogy for Hughes, who we should say died at, I believe he was

59 or 60 last week of a heart attack.

You came down very firmly in the camp that regards Hughes as a kind of auteur and a genius.

And I just wanted to hear you talk about how you felt when you heard that he had passed away

and how you approached writing about him, writing an obit for someone who could be regarded as a giant of American cinema

or as a kind of pop phenomenon worthy of nostalgia, but a little more. What do you, how do you feel about that? Yeah, I guess now that you say it, I guess I did fall firmly in that camp. I wasn't really aware of falling in a camp when I was, when I was writing about him, but, but I was actually quite surprised to find that, you know, not just personally. I mean, in fact, for once I did not, I don't think, use the personal pronoun in my obit for John Hughes. I was trying to take a more sort of, you know, objective view of this very narrow, but very sort of important little moment that he represents. And yeah, it seems like there was sort of a division of schools. I mean, there's no question that that moment is framed very, very

narrowly, right? And that it also ended and sort of gave way to an entire career of Drek

...