Cameron Crowe is a convention is some ways, a puzzle in others.

He is one of the journalists, now directors, who is particularly good at treating contemporary culture both as observer and participant.

He’s a puzzle because he seems to have an invisble centre of gravity. How for instance did he managed to cover the counter culture of the 60s without tipping into it. How did he, at 15 no less, manage to keep the company of rock stars on the road without beginning to see his profession and his paper (Rolling Stone) as the corruptions the age now scorned.

He did the same same thing with the movie Say Anything (1989). Here he was reporting Seattle culture (before it was official). This too was a counter culture that treated Hollywood as a corruption, the very thing alternative values were designed to encourage us to repudiate.

So the mystery is this: how did he get close enough to capture without getting close enough to repudiate the media (rock journalism and hollywood movies) he was capturing with.

Is it something to do with being a Californian…so persuaded that popular culture is it that you persevere with it even in the face of values that reject it?