Alright, second entry on my Chuck Klosterman kick. Between lugging boxes to our temporary apartment-home in Hamilton (we sold our house--yeah!), I read Klosterman's 2003 essay collection Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs and found the volume infinitely more interesting than Klosterman's more self-indulgent, overly confessional follow-up, Killing Yourself to Live (see my previous summer reading entry).
'Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs' allows Klosterman to explore his obsessions: The Real World, Saved by the Bell, Billy Joel, the 1980s Celtics-Lakers rivalry, mining each for cultural significance. What I love about his collection is the having-a-conversation-in-a-bar tone he adopts. This m.o. not only affects Klosterman's tone of voice, but also his attitude and approach to the subject matter. He knows his analyses are half-baked (albeit developed in vociferous detail) and invites his readers to point out just how half-baked his theories often are, and develop their own counter-theories. An example of what I mean...for Klosterman, Billy Joel is the only popstar in the rock and roll era who's *great* but not *cool*. He uses these categories with a winking, wicked sense of humor, all the while standing by the utter logic of his own taxonomy. But Klosterman wants to run into someone who can prove otherwise, dares his readers to prove otherwise. Tough to do--he's thought his theories through for hours and hours and hours.
This collection is lots and lots of fun. You can't help but laugh out loud once or twice per chapter. And Klosterman's got some smart things to say about what he unapologetically calls "low culture." Best thing I've read this summer.
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