I've written many times about my admiration of Chuck Klosterman. Just click on his name in the labels below and you'll be taken to all manner of Klostermanny posts. I like his writing because he doesn't always toe the self-consciously cool line, he encourages his readers to look at the world from different perspectives, and while I don't always agree with everything he writes, I rarely object to it... because he makes me think.
Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto
is another amusing, provocative collection of Klosterman articles, and as long as I skipped the chapters on sport, I found it damned near unputdownable.Here's a few extracts to give you a flavour...
On why some women of a certain age all want their man to measure up to John Cusack in Say Anything...
"We all convince ourselves of things like this - not necessarily about Say Anything, but about any fictionalized portrayals of romance that happen to hit us in the right place, at the right time. This is why I will never be completely satisfied by a woman, and this is why the kind of woman I tend to find attractive will never be satisfied by me. We will both measure our relationship against the prospect of fake love."On why we shouldn't hate the Star Wars prequels...
"When Episode I - The Phantom Menace came out in 1999, all the adults who waited in line for 72 hours to buy opening night tickets were profoundly upset at the inclusion of Jar Jar Binks. "He's annoying," they said. Well, how annoying would R2D2 have seemed if you hadn't been in the third grade? Viewed objectively, R2D2 is like a dwarf holding a Simon."
On Chuck's obsession with serial killers...
"My fourth-grade teacher told our class we should never hitchhike, because the only people who picked up hitchhikers were perverted serial killers. This advice was complicated by what my fifth grade teacher told us the following year, that we would all have driver's licenses in a few years, and the one rule we always need to remember was never to pick up hitchhikers. This was because all hitchhikers were serial killers. According to what I learned in public school, every person on every freeway was trolling for destruction."
On the moral quandaries that arise as a result of finding himself physically attracted to Pamela Anderson...
"Answer this question. Let's say you were given two options: You can either (a) have sex with the world's most attractive person, but you can tell no one and no one will ever know, or (b) you can walk through life with that person hand-in-hand, creating the illusion that this individual is your lover - even though you will never so much as kiss. Which would you pick?"
His argument on the latter, if you're interested, is that most people would choose the first option instinctively but given a little more thought might decide the second was preferable. I'm not sure I agree. What do you think?
