CHUCK KLOSTERMAN

and his

Chocolate Factory

A look at Mr. Klosterman's latest book:
KILLING YOURSELF TO LIVE: 85% of a true story

 

When I originally, accidentally, stumbled into Chuck Klosterman's first book I took exception mainly to his (nonexistent) critical method, his wacky ideas about theory, and what seemed like his ignorance of much of music. There was no reason to be interested in Klosterman the person; his shoddy book was just one of dozens of shoddy books about rock on the "music" shelf at Barnes & Noble; probably wouldn't run across his name again.

His next book, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, was given an excellent evisceration by Mark Ames who, in the New York Press, identified Klosterman as "the metaphor for everything vile in [his] generation."

Along the way Klosterman has somehow savanted himself into a job at SPIN magazine in addition to being published by several respected publications.

Now, his third "book"[1] lands at my doorstep and I'm compelled, against my better judgment, to read it. Most of what Ames said about the previous book holds true for this one, so much that one wonders whether the new one is just the previous one in a different cover. If only that were so.

Klosterman is transparently disingenuous. On one page he's working up some overwrought, pseudo-intellectual, bullshit theory about rock music and society and the entire culture -- tossing off authoritative statements left and right -- and on the next he's dismissing all rock criticism as nothing more than fleeting opinion. Now he's on his way to the Olive Garden, the genuine average guy put off by the pretentious hipsters surrounding him in Manhattan; now the journalist from the big city, hearing a woman mention Kafka and having that blow his "fucking mind" -- because this is North Carolina and she's a waitress.

Klosterman's phony populism and anti-intellectual posing act would make David Brooks proud. At least till he reached the pseudo-intellectual/critical bullshit passages -- the flipside -- which would cause some head-scratching.

In many ways Klosterman is a good example of the current young writer -- carefully covering all his bases, going out of his way to stress his "self-awareness" (yet seeming oddly unaware of how poorly he comes across); going far to make sure he appears smart, cool, honest, and especially a regular guy-next-door at the same time, though none of it rings true on the page.

If he's a metaphor for what's wrong with a generation, that's a pretty harsh indictment -- implying that it's an entire generation shallow, concerned only with itself, narrow minded, with little experience, and having done little during its lifespan aside from listening to the radio when not watching the television. Not to mention the piss-poor taste in music.

But diagnosing entire generations can be left to others. Onward to the book.

•

THE BOOK:
KILLING YOURSELF TO LIVE: 85% of a true story

Like the two that preceded it, Chuck Klosterman's new book is a steaming pile of feces. The problems with it mostly fit into a few simple categories.

WOMEN
Oddly for a voice of his progressive, super-advanced generation, Klosterman usually describes women only by their physical features.[2]

"My boss at Spin (a striking blonde woman named Sia Michel)..." [he refers to her throughout the book as the "striking blonde editor"[3]

"I'm driving north again, heading to Rochester, Minnesota, to see two of my closest friends from college and their lovely wives."

"The third person [arriving to drink with him at a local bar] is yet another local rock critic, and she has an astounding skeletal structure; she looks like Uma Thurman. I think we talk for maybe 33 seconds before I become obsessed with engineering a scenario that will result in me kissing her."

"my Cracker Barrel waitress is an ectomorphic 19-year-old woman with a semi-tragic haircut and slightly big teeth. However, by the time our four-minute conversation ends, I will be in love with her."

"I can't remember her name. She had black hair and pointy eyebrows. She was flat-chested and pretty....Nothing romantic happened....and we weren't close friends."

"Every afternoon, a perfect-looking woman would come over to our pool and try to teach me how to swim,..."

Klosterman rolls into Nashville for the first time, we assume, and his sensitive writer brain has some fascinating observations:

"There are many attractive females in Nashville..."

On meeting Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of Prozac Nation:

"I found myself both repulsed and attracted, which probably happens to her a lot. She had nice hips."

FLIP FLOP
A main shtick of Klosterman's is something Mark Ames had described as the Flip-Flop. There is suspense reading one of Klosterman's books, wondering when this stupid technique will next pop up and make you gag:

"I kept finding two answers to that question: pretty much everything, and absolutely nothing."

"The only thing infidelity does is remind you of the people you're not having sex with,..."

"Everything that ever happened between us is both hilarious and unfunny."

"I see no difference between winning and losing."

"This is the single-biggest problem with taking drugs: What's normal seems crazy, and what's crazy seems normal."

"Lenore and I were together for five years, but we were never really together at all."

""They [his parents] don't understand me, but they understand me."

"Led Zeppelin sounds like who they are, but they also sound like who they are not.....They sound sexy and sexist and sexless....they sound smart but dumb;"

"I wanted to be where things were worse, yet better."

"sometimes rock stars don't start living until they die."

"Whenever I try to be ironic [4], people think I'm serious -- but every time I'm actually right about something, everyone assumes I'm crazy."

 

NONSENSICAL BULLSHIT CRAFTED TO SEEM INTELLECTUAL (TO STUPID PEOPLE)
Self-explanatory.

"there was nothing about her [an old roommate's girlfriend] that was physically, intellectually, or ideologically attractive"

"Traveling to Ithaca might seem harmless, but it's actually a metaphor."

"In New York, people are unhappy on purpose, because unhappiness makes them seem more complex; in Washington, D.C., it just sort of works out that way."

"Rock magazines will run retrospective stories about the impact of those two killings [Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur] for the next five decades, partially because they're culturally significant but primarily because most white rock critics feel extremely ashamed about not being black."

"Nevermind was no longer the soundtrack to living in the early '90s -- now it was that experience in totality. Kurt Cobain had not merely made culturally important music -- suddenly, he had made culture. His death became a catchall event for anyone who wanted their adolescence to have depth: It was now possible to achieve credibility simply by mourning retrospectively." [5]

"At this point, I am certain Kid A is the official soundtrack for September 11, 2001, even though it was released on October 3, 2000."

"The density of my relationship with Lenore cannot be overstated."

"When people want to go into detail about what they were doing on 9/11] "You have to listen, because that person is actually trying to show you that they can talk about life without the safety of ironic distance. September 11 is one issue every American can be completely earnest and unguarded about." [6]

 

"REBEL" OR DUMBASS?
Typically, soon after trying to come off intellectual, Klosterman will pull shit like this below which makes him sound like such the rebel. This too is part of the flipflop -- this phony dual nature.

"I have never read The Merchant of Venice, and I'll never read it, and I don't even care what the fuck it's about."

"I've always been envious of friends who claim to have some kind of profound, erotized relationship with literature, because I don't feel that way at all."

"There's no question in my mind that the dangers of cocaine have been wildly exaggerated by the antidrug lobby."

"I care about basketball with an intensity I feel toward little else in my life,..."

"That said, I am currently snorting cocaine in a Ford pickup at 5:45 P.M. with a man I met 20 minutes ago. And I am doing this because -- somehow -- it seems reasonable."

"I like blues-based rock, but I hate the fucking blues."

Wow, that's edgy -- for a rock "critic" to hate the blues. I've never heard of such a thing!

 

POSE
Part of the "regular guy" pose includes Klosterman repeatedly mentioning how he loves shitty chain restaurants. That's where "the people", man, real people like Klosterman, eat. Won't find those snot-nosed art fags from Manhattan anywhere near these places. He's such a rebel, you see, that he actually LIKES corporate chain stores. It's like, a total 180. That's so radical, dude!:

"After showering with hard water and eating shrimp at a Bennigan's,..."

"While driving to an Outback Steakhouse for supper,..."

"Utilizing the keypad of my GPS, I punch the words Olive Garden into the computer system. I do this for two reasons. For one, the Olive Garden is good; it always makes me happy."

"It turns out I only need to drive 45 seconds to find the establishment I desire: There is a Cracker Barrel across the road."

 

KLOSTERMAN THE DISINGENUOUS
This being the nature of the whole book, it's hard to single out specific examples. But there are some beauties:

"And the fact that I can so precisely remember this [a running time from years ago] reminds me why I will never, ever be cool."

Yeah, it's doubtful someone living in Manhattan and working as a writer for a rock magazine could be perceived as cool.

And in a book that spills all sorts of unseemly personal details...

"...I am so unbelievably glad my parents don't mind that they don't know any details about my life."

 

PSYCHO
You can be breezing along through Klosterman's blather, and suddenly something he's writing will stick out and slap you in the face in a disturbing way; like stumbling into the musings of a psychopath.

"I also have a hard time feeling sympathy for the victims [of motorcycle accidents], since I always assume anyone riding a motorcycle probably wants to die (and kind of deserves it if they do)."

There is for example the touching imagery he uses when reminiscing about a girlfriend with whom he broke up over the phone:

"My relationship with Dee Dee ended like a gangland execution: She called me on the telephone and I shot her in the back of the skull."

 

DOPE
It's so cool being into drugs, dude. Klosterman brags about pot use throughout the book:

[When getting ready for a road trip] "I'm far more worried about (a) which CDs to pack, and (b) how much pot to bring."

"'And if you smoke it [pot] all the time, you'll eventually stop dreaming at night, so you'll always wake up tired.'" [7]

 

EXPLOITATION
The reader will feel relief at not being a friend of Klosterman's after reading passages such as this:

"And midway through our second beer, he [a friend of Klosterman's] admits the one thing I've always known about him -- that he is utterly and hopelessly depressed. 'I want my life to be different,' he tells me, and his voice sounds as lonely as Morrissey's on Bona Drag. '...I want something to look forward to.'.....'That's what we all want,' I say in response. But here's the problem: My friend is telling the truth, and I'm lying."

Probably the most offensive part of the book is Klosterman's writing about the nightclub fire tragedy in West Warwick, Rhode Island involving the band Great White. K. goes to the site of the former bar, The Station, and meets two men there visiting the area which has become a memorial of sorts. Each man lost a loved one in the fire -- one a brother, the other a friend -- and on this lot, among the many primitive crosses present, they have placed two gravestones. Klosterman adds, "(James aligned the gravestones where the beer taps used to be)."

One of the men starts telling Klosterman his story -- what he was doing that night, how he found out about the fire, etc.. On the night of the fire, he begins, "'I was in a titty bar in Florida...'"

Now, if these details are not supposed to raise a smile, then how come, as Klosterman has presented them hear in his book, they sound obviously humorous? Did he choose to include these things not thinking that they would read at all comical?

But Klosterman is working on something here, and he spends plenty of time setting it up. What he's setting up is the reader -- to get fucked. A few pages later -- after having just gained some comedic mileage out of these people -- he has the audacity to point the finger at others (and the reader):

"I remember everyone gossiping about the Station fire the day after it happened; people would concede that it was tragic, but no one could discuss it without a fraction of a smirk. People were sending email one-liners about the fire while the cops were still counting the bodies. Somehow, it was acceptable to condescendingly chuckle at the death of the overtly uncool people in Rhode Island,..."

Ouch, Mr. K., we all feel horrible now; you are righteous.

And part of the purpose here is to reinforce what he's getting at, as if something we're reminded of on every-other page needs reinforcing: that he, Klosterman, -- though forced to live in Manhattan -- is a regular, genuine guy just like the regular guys here in Rhode Island, and definitely NOT one of those snobby, smartasses in cities far away from here. Klosterman has paddled into the woods of this exotic place and found the primitives to be honest, pure, and "authentic."

As condescending, offensive and shot-through with logical holes as his thinking is, Klosterman seems blissfully unaware of what he's doing. Here he gives his penetrating, reeking take on the event:

"To me, that's what makes the Great White tragedy even sadder than it logically was: One can safely assume that none of the 100 people who died at the Station that night were trying to be cool by watching Great White play 20-year-old songs. This was not a bunch of hipsters trying to be seen by other hipsters; these were blue-collar people, all trying to unironically experience music that honestly meant something to them when they were teenagers."

And, Klosterman's conclusion, the cherry on top of that shit sundae:

"I honestly believe that people of my generation despise authenticity, mostly because they're all so envious of it."

 

Whew...that's enough of that. If the reader is screaming mercy now, think what over two hundred pages of this is like.

Anyhow, but, you know, if Klosterman likes shitty products, maybe it's cuz he's a product of shitty things himself....[forget it, even pretending to write like klosterman is painful. The stuff is below parody-worth].

 

WHAT MORE NEEDS TO BE SAID?
We end with the only enjoyable moment in the book:

"[a woman who looks like] Uma Thurman hugs me good-bye, and we agree to become Friendsters."

[Italics and ugly coloring mine]

 

 

1. Actually the product here is a contemporary creation, what critic Lee Siegel has called "the simulated book".

2. Apparently Klosterman's questionable attitude toward women is evident in his previous (second) book as well. Ames writes, "When it comes to Klosterman and women, Klosterman is at his most disturbing, and his most un-self-aware..."

3. This making up humorous nicknames might be evidence K. is influenced by David Foster Wallace. I say D.F.W. in particular because (aside from the nicknames) Klosterman gets a lot of mileage out of a phony act of duality, the "look, I'm an intellectual" beside "look, I eat at McDonald's and do drugs and like stupid pop culture things too" -- and in the past D.F.W. has written in a way that conveys both his intelligence and his social class (and age/generation), side by side in a way that suggests maybe it is unusual to find these two (particular) aspects together. The difference being that D.F.W. is an intellectual. That, and he doesn't try to purposely make himself seem a dumbass.

4. I assume K. means "sarcastic." But in the diminished mental world of himself and his generation meanings disappear; terms like dry, sarcastic, parody, satire, tongue in cheek etc. -- those are gone, it's just "ironic" for everything.

5. This comical statement is a textbook example of K.'s intellectual pretensions.

6. I love how before 9/11 everyone was this wooden, unfeeling robot, just walking around with nothing bad ever happening to cause them pain -- noone ever had a loved one die or anything. Cuz everyone only uses his brain anymore and using your brain at all, that precludes having any sort of emotion. There was only one mode for all and that was being an extreme smartass, we all tossed off jokes about AIDS on our way to the vomitorium before attending a local human sacrifice ritual and maybe indulging in some pedophilia before getting home if we were lucky. And then 9/11 came along and BANG, the entire country was introduced to this exotic thing called emotion and everyone could finally be serious and earnest and feel things. The only question here is...who THE FUCK THINKS THIS WAY? What FUCKING PLANET is this MORON from?

7. This would explain the lack of imagination, and other lacks, in the book.

 

 

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