Many of u would have known by now that one of my favourite actors is John Cusack. Just came across this amusing interview between him and Playboy magazine in which he talked about "celebrity porn", which I thought was a very interesting way of describing tabloids (Playboy included. Must have had that evil smirk underneath while he was talking. Mwahaha....)

Naughty naughty naughty... what else were u expecting from this post???

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Playboy: Is this what you have described as celebrity porn?

Cusack: Yes. And sometimes I feel as if all media are porn--political porn, celebrity porn, whatever. [As he sits down to interview with freaking Playboy, am I the only one to note the irony here? Anyway, back to the interview, no more editorial comments. Promise.]

Playboy: Why is it porn?

Cusack: The salaciousness, plus the format: obsessive and addictive. The repetition, the voyeurism. It's warped, and it warps your perspective on the world. For example, I've been out with girls who are on the covers of magazines.

Playboy: Such as?

Cusack: (Smiling, shaking his head) I've dated them--some very beautiful women. When I saw their pictures in the magazines, I remember thinking, God I want to be the guy who gets to sleep with her--and I was the guy who was sleeping with her. I still felt that I wanted to be the guy sleeping with the girl whose picture was on the magazine, and I was. The function of the whole industry is to create envy. "Buy our magazine because here's the VIP circle you ain't never getting in, man." Even if you get in, you aren't in, because it's an illusion. I was in and I still wasn't in.

Playboy: Is it because the women don't really look like they do on the magazine covers?

Cusack: Yes, and it's not that they aren't gorgeous. But they're not airbrushed in real life. They look like, well, people. They have irregularities in their skin. It's why all these celebrities who've got the Rolls-Royces and the mansions crack up when the illusion is exhausted. There's nothing there. The intention of the photographs is to create this unreachable icon. Being human is, by definition, a fall from grace. This culture of these illusions--peak sex, the It girl, the It guy--comes at you like a tidal wave. No one is immune. People mistake actors for real life, and they want people to live up to them.

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Now I'm pretty sure he was playing himself in High Fidelity...

And since I'm on the topic of High Fidelity, just wanna share one of my favourite quotes from the movie, which I think is very ironic and very true:

Rob Gordon: What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?