I've been chipping away at Chuck Klosterman's Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs: a Low Culture Manifesto and I finished it a couple days ago, sort of unfortunately, because it was really fucking hilarious. Thanks to the ever provident youtube, I was watching some of his interviews and Q&As, and I figured out what the deal is: he writes like he speaks or he speaks like he writes, and either way, one translates so flawlessly to the other that you get this feeling you're having a conversation. He's a funny guy, and the conversation is his medium: what makes his observations, frustration, and experiences so damn entertaining is that he could be telling you, the reader, all this like you were old pals or acquaintances or just strangers shooting the shit in line waiting for coffee. His personality- or one he projects, which would be pretty close to the real thing, I think it's safe to assume- makes up his writings as much as, if not more than, his prose and his musings.
Klosterman's collection of essays does come with its hitches, for example, the layout of the chapters supposedly resembles a CD track listing, adding nothing to the work as a whole. Since most fans and readers, I assume, know him as a popular culture and music critic, there's continuity between this chapter set up and the author's public persona (as opposed to his private persona...?), which I guess could be relevant. Sort of. In any case, it's not a bad idea, but I think it's wasted here.
Namely because the essays and the interstitial commentaries (that was my freebie, no more stupid crossover terms from unrelated fields) hold themselves up fine. I don't always agree with Klosterman's conclusions and sometimes he does come off as kind of dick, but he's obviously not writing this stuff with hopes of winning Mr. Happy Fluffy Bunny of the Year. And overall, he does make some fantastically relevant and entertaining observations revolving around TV, rock bands, Sims, relationships, the sub culture of journalism, and the preoccupations that seem to run underneath current-ish popular culture. And it's funny. I laughed out loud reading this book more than any other since Christopher Moore's A Dirty Job, which slayed me until about three quarters of the way through. It disappoints one so when that happens; when a book rocks until ALMOST the end. Freedom from the constraints of keeping a good plot going is, it turns out, something collections of non-fiction essays have going for them, which brings me back to Klosterman (aha, that sounded like a tangent for a second, didn't it?).
It's tempting to just prattle on about my favorite bits of Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs (why Pam Anderson and Michael Jordan can never be together; 23 hypothetical questions; the oddly frightening social implications of youth soccer; the uncoolness of academic conferences on pop culture- I've noticed this myself; Internet porn; you see why I have to resist this temptation? I might as well put an annotated table of contents here). But I won't (any more), and instead, recommend this one for a good laugh, a conversation piece, and a strategy guide for social navigation.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment