Last May, while eyeing the bookstore goodies, I became mesmerized by the words: JEFF TWEEDY, DRUGS, DOUGLAS COUPLAND (introduced the masses to the concept of Generation X ( coincidental, I was reading X Saves the World: How Generation X Got the Shaft But Can Still Keep Everything from Sucking)...
Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs, a pop analysis piece written by Chuck Klosterman discusses pop culture phenomenons like:
* Reality TV
* MILF webcam porn at-home cottage industries
* Pam Anderson
* Cheezy comedy-love movie scenarios that never really happen
* Zack & Slater & Kelly
* Metallica cover bands
* The Sims phenomenon
But he does it in an intelligent way that makes you laugh, not hating "what we've become" or pop culture's players. His theories never leave your perspective once implanted. You'll observe these times in a whole new way. No creepiness or depressiveness. He leaves you with what Oprah (my best friend) calls an "ah-ha" moment.
I've also read Chuck Klosterman IV, A Decade of Curious People & Dangerous Ideas, made up of 3 sections:
* Things that are True: More Pop culture and more Jeff (sigh). I was tempted to skip the sports pieces (not interested) but they're actually highly entertaining and insightful. He maps out the weirdness of celebrity.
* Things that Might be True: He poses hypothetical questions (no clue where or how he crafted these) that have nothing to do with the stories they precede. If you think (until your brain hurts) about the questions and stories' relatedness, they actually have everything to do with each other. Coincidentally, I read the reality TV/George Bush and how humans enjoy seeing each other "go down" piece on election day this year (Obama v. McCain).
* Something that isn't True at All: Yeah, yeah, Chuck, you know you're addicted to angel dust. I actually thought this was a true story. But it's only 85% true. This section foreshadows Chuck's talent with fiction.
I OPT FOR THE HOVERCRAFT.
He's written other books (Killing Yourself to Live, Fargo Rock City) but I look forward to his latest, Downtown Owl, which couldn't possibly measure up to the mind blowing PCP he's delivered to my brain already. It's probably more intriguing than imaginable. It's tough to describe writing that's so honest (it hurts), so hilarious, so intelligently advanced, so readable and simply written, so entertaining, so.... relevant to our times.... And not sound like a false copywriter trying to sell recession proof Amway products. Hell, just describing his art form and its importance and appeal... makes my writing nothing, boring. Or starstruck.
Chuck disregards the disgusting social grace's we all fear of breaking. He speaks the truth, in a sarcastic satirical, "duh" sort of way, disregarding editors and family members. One thing Chuck was born to accomplish in his lifetime was critiquing Gun's n' Rose's latest album, Chinese Democracy:
C.K:
"Does Chinese Democracy accomplish its goal? After all this time and all that money, will this album truly bring democracy to China?
I don't know. I just don't know."
"On the caustic rocker "Slash and Burned," Rose lashes out at his former band-mates now in Velvet Revolver with staggering specificity: "Your singer has cocaine eyes and a skeletons trance / We'll see if RCA recoups their advance." Rose has also retained his pathological distaste for the media, lyrically attacking the editors of Vanity Fair, MTV personality Sway, numerous teenage bloggers, and the city hall reporter for the Cincinnati Enquirer (who, curiously, has never written about pop music)."
"Obviously, the sexy albatross hanging around Rose's wiry jugular is simple modernity: Could he create an album that would sound contemporary -- and competitive."
"This is the kind of gutter-glam boogie ballad that makes "November Rain" seem like a bucket of burro vomit warming in the afternoon sun. Chinese Democracy is simultaneously propulsive and ponderous, and there are some electrifying guitar arpeggios on both "Silk Worm" and "Thursday Morning Strip Club"
Chinese Democracy is not the greatest rock album ever made."
Audiofile: Music Blog, Music Articles - Salon.com
"If we lived in a futuristic dystopia where the state forced the totality of its populace to watch 'American Idol' every week after constitutionally decreeing that this program would serve as the sole arbitrator for creative integrity, then, yes, voting for Sanjaya would be 'subversive.' As things currently stand, I would classify purposefully voting for a television personality you don't like as 'astonishingly idiotic.' It is difficult to understand why people would direct effort toward negatively impacting a TV show they could just as easily not watch, especially since their efforts will (clearly) have the exact opposite effect on the very program they (allegedly) despise."
Chuck Klosterman salutes R Kelly's hip-hopera Trapped In The Closet | Music | The Guardian
"When he was a 27-year-old millionaire, Kelly married a 15-year-old girl (the now deceased pop starlet Aaliyah). I can't comprehend why someone would do that, just as I can't understand why someone would (allegedly) urinate on a teenager before releasing an album titled Chocolate Factory."
This is not my fault.
If anything, I have grossly oversimplified the details of the narrative."
"It almost seems pointless to try and explain the purpose and meaning of Kelly's Trapped In The Closet, his 22-chapter hyper-melodramatic hip-hopera that is mostly a series of short phone calls, revelatory cliffhangers, and confused men who like to point guns at each other. Describing TITC to anyone whose hasn't seen it themselves is virtually impossible, simply because there's no other art to compare it with (it falls somewhere between a parody of musical theatre, a soap opera from the late 1970s, and a BET version of The Red Shoe Diaries). Discussing it with sincere TITC fanatics isn't much easier, because (a) the story has more characters than Dune, and (b) nobody seems to know what they're supposed to be figuring out. Even its creator pleads ignorance."
Chuck's SO Cool.... Reviewers Review His Reviews:
Chuck Klosterman reviews Chinese Democracy | The A.V. Club
"There is no one in the world more qualified to review the exhaustingly anticipated new Guns N' Roses album than he is.
Reviewing Chinese Democracy is not like reviewing music. It's more like reviewing a unicorn."
And NOW, Downtown Owl!!!!!!
"Book Review: Downtown Owl by Chuck Klosterman"
"In these closing moments, Klosterman shows off his full mastery of the narrative. He brings all of his plots to a slam-bang conclusion almost simultaneously. And he adds a sweet ironic twist at the end that imparts a piquant flavor to the whole endeavor. Capping a book this good with an ending that lives up to everything that went before is no small feat. For my part, I give both thumbs up to Downtown Owl. Let’s hope Chuck Klosterman’s debut novel is the first of many.
In his first novel, he does for Owl, North Dakota, what Godzilla did to Tokyo, albeit over the course of 275 pages."
Another book review:
DOWNTOWN OWL by Chuck Klosterman | LIT MOB
"Diagnosing Chuck Klosterman | Salon Books"
"Downtown Owl" follows a cast of likable but doomed characters over the course of nine months in 1984 in the fictional town of Owl, N.D. Their stories unfold with sympathy and a careful eye for the rich peculiarities of small-town American life. "They had been drinking for seven hours," he writes. "Ted was trying to drive off his buzz." It is, at times, laugh-out-loud funny, but it is also poignant and sad. In one of the novel's best set pieces, a widower named Horace recalls the death of his wife, Alma, wracked by a hyper-rare sleep disorder that sent her into a state of hallucinatory psychosis and desperation. "That night, Alma screamed at the television. She thought it was a panda bear."
"Julia, a high school English teacher and secret stoner, muses to herself in the depths of a mellow buzz that the world can be split into two kinds of people: "People who said, 'This joint is cashed,' and people who always said, 'Well, let me try.' Julia placed herself to be in the second category, although she wondered if that made her an optimist or a pothead."
And Klosterman, a man who built his career on dazzling, antic nonfiction, has also done something unexpected. (And yet, at the same time, totally clichéd.) He has written a novel. A novel that is quite good, actually. Not overeager or hyperambitious, but a slow burn of a small-town snapshot that is more "Winesburg, Ohio" than Amy Winehouse, more "Last Picture Show" than "Rocky Horror Picture Show."
It's not difficult to be the cop in the car watching the meth lab, but you will drive yourself sad. You'll find yourself thinking, Maybe the meth lab will blow up ... But it doesn't blow up. It just sits there, falling apart and declining in value, while the people inside lose their teeth and get crazy high
Klosterman (like Dave Eggers before him) was a thrilling antihero, someone who talked more about Billy Joel than Sonic Youth, more about "Star Wars" than Godard. He was not Greil Marcus -- scholar, aesthete, historian. He was a state-schooler from North Dakota who chugged beer, wrote fantastic prose about his romantic misdeeds as related to his favorite music and movies and TV shows, and somehow struck gold. He was just like us -- except for the fame, money and accolades, which also created a twisted kind of resentment even among his fans, because if he was so goddamn much like us, well, then, why weren't we him?
(AM I MISSING SOMETHING HERE? THIS NEW YORK PRESS TAKE-DOWN WAS JUST....WEIRD. I CAN'T BELIEVE THAT WAS PUBLISHED. CAN WE SAY CRACK HEAD? OR... BABYBOOMER...)...CUTFOLDED BOUND SIDE-NOTE
or this, he has been both wildly overpraised (People magazine called him "the new Hunter Thompson") and almost pathologically reviled. An infamous New York Press takedown of Klosterman, following the publication of "Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs," was the media world equivalent of a hissy fit: "I have found the metaphor for everything vile in my generation, and its name is Chuck Klosterman," wrote Mark Ames, his professional jealousy seething from the page. He continued, "Klosterman is, quite simply and almost literally, an ass. His soft, saggy face bears a disturbing resemblance to a 50-year-old man's failing, hairless back end."
For those of us who toil in the trenches of alt-journalism, music blogs or the velvet coffins of midtown Manhattan glossy magazines, there was something both heroic and demonic about Klosterman's meteoric rise. For old-school music critics, he appeared glib, his fame unearned. For those of us who suspiciously eyed the hallowed world of cultural criticism as insular, elitist and frustratingly cold -- and I stand firmly in this camp.
People magazine called him "the New Hunter Thompson".
