Chuck Klosterman

Chuck Klosterman has pretty much only one overarching idea here: the concept of the villain in any situation as the one who "knows the most and cares the least." It's an intriguing thought, but not one that seems definitive to me at all. And, honestly, I'm not sure Klosterman really thinks it is, either. It seems to just be a notion he likes to keep coming back to.

Other than that, this examination of villains and bad guys and who they are and what they mean is very freewheeling. Individual show more chapters may have a particular focus, but, as a whole, it's not a carefully structured exploration of the idea of villainy that's aimed at coming to any strong conclusions on the subject. It's mostly just Klosterman noodling around with the idea of villains, what they mean to him, what they seem to mean to society at large, and how to wrap his head around it all. He goes a lot of different places with it, thinking about villains in history (including very recent history), in fiction, in sports, in music, and in our culture in general. A lot of it is personal, based in Klosterman's own experiences and attitudes. He spends a good part of one chapter on a list of various bands he used to hate when the was younger, for what now mostly seem like really dumb reasons. He spends another whole chapter comparing Bernard Goetz and Batman. In another, he mostly talks about how hard it is to talk about Hitler. And so on and so forth.

And this loose structure, it turns out, works really well. I found it interesting and surprisingly rewarding to just sort of follow Klosterman's mind wherever it happened to go. He has a lot of thought-provoking things to say, and while I don't necessarily agree with him about everything, I think he actually makes some points that are really insightful and important. He's also just really entertaining to read, with a style that I'm finding it difficult to compare to anybody else's.

This is the first thing of Klosterman's I've read, which seems like something of an oversight. It's definitely not going to be the last, though. I already have his But What If We're Wrong? on the TBR shelves, and I'm now quite looking forward to it. show less

As a longtime admirer of Chuck Klosterman’s writing on pop music and culture, it pains me to report that his latest book, Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story, is a dismal, shoddy piece of work. The premise is promising: Klosterman sets out on a cross-country road trip to visit all of the sites of rock ’n’ roll’s long, rich history of death. It seems a brilliant idea — Klosterman’s combination of irreverence and curiosity make him the perfect candidate to unseat the show more holy-pilgrimage seriousness (and pathos) of most writing on rock ’n’ roll tragedy.

It doesn’t take long for the project to turn sour. Here’s the problem: Klosterman is used to skating by on the wit and originality of his own personal world-view; in his last collection, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, his observations on MTV, pornography, video games, and so on, emerged from a perspective that led him to some surprising conclusions. There was a sense of play, of intellectual gamesmanship, that was fresh and engaging. In Killing Yourself, however, he’s become self-reflexive to the point where he can no longer discriminate between what is valuable and what is piffle; it’s all self-narrative. If he’s looking at something, he thinks his reaction to it — how it affects him — automatically matters simply because it’s him, Chuck Klosterman, looking at it. He has become too lazy and uninterested to make any serious effort at thinking or observing and analyzing what a specific site or incident might mean, and falls back on relaying what it means to him, at that moment.

The most devastating element here is the incomprehensible decision to let Klosterman devote much of the book to pseudo-Hornby writhing about the three (!) women with whom he’s currently involved (that is, either sleeping with or wanting to sleep with). Aside from being, at times, downright creepy, it’s both lazy and irrelevant: as smart and funny and interesting as Chuck Klosterman is, I couldn’t really give two shits about his love life. His self-absorption on this count goes so far as to include a chapter-long conversation between the three women and himself that takes place entirely in his head. What’s sad is that he seems to realize this; the book closes with an actual, real-world conversation between the author and one of his female colleagues at Spin, who urges him not to become “the female Elizabeth Wurtzel.” At this point, one tends to agree wholeheartedly with the criticism, and Klosterman’s only retort is to tell her that “her disdain can only be voiced if I do the opposite of what you suggest.” It’s pre-emptive critical damage control. It’s embarrassing.

It is unsettling to see how turning Klosterman loose on such a promising theme brings out his worst instincts as a writer, because his feature pieces for Spin are often brilliant. A perfect example was his reporting on the Rock Cruise, one of those only-in-America phenomena wherein 40-year-old couples pay to hear REO Speedwagon and Styx perform on a boat. It is hard to imagine a riper opportunity for superiority and ridicule, yet Klosterman never condescends to these people — working-class Midwesterners who are paying money to see over-the-hill versions of the two of the most reviled bands in rock history — and in the end lends both the bands and fans an odd kind of dignity. It is frustrating to know that the author is capable of such insights and then to slog through 235 pages of crap that wouldn’t make it onto a Weezer B-side. One can only hope Killing Yourself was just something he needed to get out of his system.

From THE L MAGAZINE, July 20 2005 show less

Much like the therapist character in this novel, Visible Man left me with a significant amount of cognitive dissonance. I am torn between its brilliant commentary (and metacommentary) on the nature of self and evolving postmodernity and its simultaneous misogyny.

Although Klosterman's character Y (a close insert for K himself) claims he is "not a Jewish" novelist, he seems to be maniacally channeling the ego of Phillip Roth. At one point Y points out that "if an author wants to make a show more fictional character sympathetic, the easiest way to make that happen is to place them in a humiliating scenario," and this is what K does repeatedly to the unreliable, therapist narrator Victoria over and over again. Oh, our overly attached and flawed Victoria becomes the signifier of humiliation at Y's behest. However, this seems to be her one defining characteristic, and given the narrative structure, without this flawed and weak character, Y would cease to exist, for predators are nothing without their prey. I do concede that Victoria is a necessary device for pointing out the contradictions of Y's character, but she usually apologizes for her insight and admits that most of her sentences "read like they were written by a battered wife".

On the other hand, Visible Man is an interesting exploration on the nature and presentation of self. It questions the foundations of reality and is rather reminiscent of the classic Klosterman essay on the Real World, where fictional reality becomes desired over objective reality. However this book goes further, dismissing the idea that an objective reality could actually exist.

So like Natalie Imbruglia, you could say this book leaves me fundamentally "torn". show less

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs is a book that raises a variety of interesting philosophical questions without becoming pedantic. The book is a series of essays primarily focused on the "chicken and egg" concept of whether cultural focal points (MTV's The Real World celebrity sex tapes, Left Behind and Coldplay) create the social consciousness or whether the social consciousness/concerns create these cultural focal points. While at times the author criticizes himself for his shallow viewpoints, show more I found that a lot of them were truly interesting to me and well worth the read.

One of the most interesting chapters to me, oddly enough, was the one concerning how soccer is an outcast sport. I found that point actually quite accurate and compelling, along with the Pam Anderson/Marilyn Monroe comparison. While the book is concerned with low culture, its ideas and philosophies are well suited to even higher cultural concerns.

And, yeah, Coldplay is still awful. show less