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Chuck Klosterman - Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs (9780743236003)

Patika. Aizrāva un lika uz lietām paskatīties citādāk.

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.

Coldplay, a British pop group whose success derives from their ability to write melodramatic alt-rock songs about fake love.

“For you I bleed myself dry,” sang their block-head vocalist, brilliantly informing us that stars in the sky are, in fact, yellow. How am I going to compete with that shit? That sleepy-eyed bozo isn’t even making sense. He’s just pouring fabricated emotions over four gloomy guitar chords, and it ends up sounding like love.

Real people are actively trying to live like fake people, so real people are no less fake.

my strategy: If I can just coerce women into the last half of that fourth date, it’s anyone’s ball game. I’ve beaten the system; I’ve broken the code; I’ve slain the Minotaur.

Stories like Say Anything are fucking people up.

We don’t need to worry about people unconsciously “absorbing” archaic secret messages when they’re six years old; we need to worry about all the entertaining messages people are consciously accepting when they’re twenty-six.

I’ll never accept pixels killing other pixels as an art form

It’s been my experience that most extroverted people think they’re introverts, and many introverted people make a similarly wrong-headed juxtaposition about being extroverts. Maybe that’s why extroverts won’t shut up (because they always fear they’re not talking enough) while introverts just sit on the couch and do nothing (because they assume everybody is waiting for them to be quiet).

The same goes for anyone who claims to be “creative.” If you define your personality as creative, it only means you understand what is perceived to be creative by the world at large, so you’re really just following a rote creative template. That’s the opposite of creativity.

Seinfeld was about nothing, but its underlying message was that nothingness still has a weight and a mass and a conflict.

And why isn’t my SimChuck happy? Because he’s a self-absorbed, materialistic prick. This is perhaps the most disturbing element of The Sims: The happiness of the characters is directly proportional to the shit you elect to buy them. As far as I can tell, acquiring electronic equipment and name-brand furniture is just about the only thing Sims find psychologically satisfying.

Love Is All Around, But Only Around.

I once read a movie review by Roger Ebert for the film Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. Early in the review, Ebert makes a tangential point about whether or not film characters are theoretically “aware” of other films and other movie characters. Ebert only touches on this issue casually, but it’s probably the most interesting philosophical question ever asked about film grammar. Could Harrison Ford’s character in What Lies Beneath rent Raiders of the Lost Ark? Could John Rambo draw personal inspiration from Rocky? In Desperately Seeking Susan, what is Madonna hearing when she goes to a club and dances to her own song? Within the reality of one specific fiction, how do other fictions exist?

People started becoming personality templates, devoid of complication and obsessed with melodrama.

What I failed to realize is that being a former member of The Real World is the worst kind of fame. There is no financial upside; it offers no artistic credibility or mainstream adoration or easy sex. Basically, the only reward is that people will (a) point at you in public, and (b) ask you about absolutely nothing else until the day you die, when your participation in a cable television program becomes the lead item in your obituary. You will be the kind of person who suddenly gets recognized at places like Burger King, but you will still be the kind of person who eats at places like Burger King.

All these people are forever doomed to the one-dimensional qualities that made them famous nobodies. The idea that they could do anything else seems impossible.


It’s difficult to think of rock artists who are great without being cool, since that’s precisely why we need them to exist.

Every one of Joel’s important songs—including the happy ones—are ultimately about loneliness. And it’s not “clever lonely” (like Morrissey) or “interesting lonely” (like Radiohead); it’s “lonely lonely,” like the way it feels when you’re being hugged by someone and it somehow makes you sadder.

WMMS, the premiere radio station in Cleveland during the Carter administration, was famous for playing Springsteen’s “Born to Run” every Friday afternoon at exactly 5:00 P.M. For years, that was the station’s calling card.

If a musician can’t convince people that he’s cool, nobody cool is going to care. And in the realm of rock ’n’ roll, the cool kids fucking rule.

But “Laura” and “Where’s the Orchestra” really are as good as most of what’s on The White Album. This is because the first song says things so directly that its words shouldn’t make sense to anybody else (and yet they do), while the latter is so metaphorically vague that anybody should be able to understand what he’s implying (yet I’ve listened to this song for twenty years and still feel like I’m missing something).

In fact, sometimes I tell people that they will understand me better if they listen to “Where’s the Orchestra?” And you know what? They never do. They never do, and it’s because they all inevitably think the song is actually about them.

People have always been depressed, but—during the early eighties—there just seemed to be this overwhelming public consensus that being depressed was the most normal thing anyone could be. In fact, being depressed sort of meant you were smart

To this day, women are touched by the words of “Just the Way You Are,” a musical love letter that says everything everybody wants to hear: You’re not flawless, but you’re still what I want.

Those old love letters remind me of my emotional failure and my accidental lies, just as “Just the Way You Are” undoubtedly reminds Joel of his. Perhaps this is why I can’t see Billy Joel as cool. Perhaps it’s because all he makes me see is me.

There are tributes to groups who never seemed that popular to begin with (Badfinger, Thin Lizzy, Dream Theater), and there are tributes to bands who are not altogether difficult to see for real (The Dave Matthews Band, Creed).

Unfortunately, Young can’t learn how to look like a mulatto ex-heroin addict, and this is the only occupation in America for which that is a job requirement.

Premonition, a group whose entire existence was based on the premise that the Antichrist is Juan Carlos, the King of Spain.

“This next song is dedicated to everybody who ever told you how to live,”

The formula is as follows: When discussing any given issue, always do three things. First, make an intellectual concession (this makes the listener feel comfortable). Next, make a completely incomprehensible—but remarkably specific—“cultural accusation” (this makes you insightful). Finally, end the dialogue by interjecting slang lexicon that does not necessarily exist (this makes you contemporary).

There are scientists (goofball sociobiologists, mostly, and also Desmond Morris) who argue that men are visually (and one assumes unconsciously) attracted to the “two-thirds ratio” in nature, which is why the cliché dimensions for ideal women somehow became 36–24–36. Man’s affinity for this ratio supposedly shows up in everything he creates—architecture, auto chassis, the circumference of an Absolut vodka bottle in relation to its height, etc., etc., etc. This is an interesting theory, especially since it would seem to explain why male artists in the sixteenth century were attracted to obese women (one could argue that they were interested in the same 2/3 body ratio and simply inverted the modern-dat proportions). Of course this is a very male-o-centric theory to advocate: Guys would love to somehow prove they want to have sex with Pamela Anderson because of math.

The more we learn about DiMaggio, the more he seems like a cold, sullen badass who was always alone (even in a roomful of people).2 And as for Marilyn…well, she personifies every beautiful/crazy/sexy/suicidal woman I’ve ever met

However, it’s impossible to explain why Tommy Lee is a celebrity. You can’t say “because he’s a rock star,” because he’s not; the last record Tommy Lee made that lots of people liked was Dr. Feelgood, which came out in 1989. Yet Tommy is far more famous now than he was in 1989, and it’s because he’s directed his energy into being a celebrity in the conceptual sense. He is famous for being famous, and for behaving famously, and for taking drugs, and for having his relationship with Pam Anderson available on the pay-per-view menu of most hotels (which makes him more famous, but which only happened because he was famous).

Being a sexual icon is sort of like being the frontman for an Orange County punk band: As soon as you can explain why you’re necessary, you’re over.

Pamela Anderson is the perfect sexual icon because she wants to have sex. You think that makes her dumb? Well, maybe you’re right. But how smart are you while you’re having sex? What part of sex is “intellectual”? Certainly none of the good parts.

God was obsessed with pro basketball.

Americans have become conditioned to believe the world is a gray place without absolutes; this is because we’re simultaneously cowardly and arrogant. We don’t know the answers, so we assume they must not exist. But they do exist.

everyone who loves rock ’n’ roll knows that the difference between the Beatles and the Stones is not so much a dispute over music as it is a way to describe your own self-identity. This is why men need to become obsessed with things: It’s an extroverted way to pursue solipsism. We are able to study something that defines who we are; therefore, we are able to study ourselves. Do you know people who insist they like “all kinds of music”? That actually means they like no kinds of music.

Either you’re with us or you’re against us, and both of those options is better than living without a soul.

We all like to talk about how the Internet is such a ground-breaking educational tool, but we’re missing what it can teach us about ourselves. Porn sites are the window to the modern soul; they’re glimpses into the twisted minds of a faceless society.

When Carl Jung introduced the concept of the “collective unconscious,” he was trying to explain why all humans are inherently scared of things like darkness and vampires—but net porn is the collective conscious. It’s where we all see the things people would never admit to wanting.

Yet with computer pornography (much of which is still free), the key is normalcy—the surfer is hoping to see the girl next door in an almost literal sense.

the endless sites showing men ejaculating on women’s faces while the recipients pretend to enjoy it; this has about as much to do with sex as hitting someone in the face with a frying pan.

And—of course—there is also a pocket of men who masturbate to images of women getting hit in the face with frying pans.

naked from the neck down, your wife and Gwen Stefani have a lot in common. What people want to see with nude celebrities is proof that these superstars are not gods.

“How often have I said,” asked coke-addict Sherlock Holmes in The Sign of Four, “that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?”

Mr. Graham suspected that bad food and inappropriate sexual desires—particularly masturbation—were the true cause of every major illness.

Cereal commercials teach us that anything desirable is supposed to be exclusionary.

A product’s exclusivity is directly proportional to its social cachet, which is the definition of calculated adult coolness. When I say calculated adult coolness, I’m referring to the kind of coolness that generally applies to people between the ages of nineteen and thirty-six. This is different than mainstream teen coolness and aging hipster default coolness, both of which reflect an opposing (and sort of pathetic) consumer aesthetic.

there is a stretch in everyone’s early adulthood where they can choose (or choose against) creating their own personalized version of nonpopulist cool, which may (or may not) succeed.

The desire to be cool is—ultimately—the desire to be rescued. It’s the desire to be pulled from the unwashed masses of society. It’s the desire to be advanced beyond the faceless humanoid robots who will die unheralded deaths and never truly matter, mostly because they all lived the same pedestrian life.

The three questions I ask everybody I meet in order to decide if I can love them: 1. Let us assume you met a rudimentary magician. Let us assume he can do five simple tricks—he can pull a rabbit out of his hat, he can make a coin disappear, he can turn the ace of spades into the Joker card, and two others in a similar vein. These are his only tricks and he can’t learn any more; he can only do these five. HOWEVER, it turns out he’s doing these five tricks with real magic. It’s not an illusion; he can actually conjure the bunny out of the ether and he can move the coin through space. He’s legitimately magical, but extremely limited in scope and influence. Would this person be more impressive than Albert Einstein? 2. Let us assume that a fully grown, completely healthy Clydesdale horse has his hooves shackled to the ground while his head is held in place with thick rope. He is conscious and standing upright, but completely immobile. And let us assume that-for some reason-every political prisoner on earth (as cited by Amnesty International) will be released from captivity if you can kick this horse to death in les than twenty minutes. You are allowed to wear steel-toed boots. Would you attempt to do this? 3. Let us assume that there are two boxes on a table. In one box, there is a relatively normal turtle; in the other, Adolf Hitler's skull. You have to select one of these items for your home. If you select the turtle, you can't give it away and you have to keep it alive for two years; if either of these parameters ar not met, you will be fined $999 by the state. If you celect Hitler's skull, you are required to display it in a semi-prominent location in your living room for the same amount of time, altough you will be paid a stipend of $120 per month for doing so. Display of the skull must be apolitical. Which option do you select?

making compilation albums for friends and particularly for lady friends. Like most uncreative intellectual men, almost all of my previous relationships had been based on my ability to make incredibly moving mix cassettes; though I cannot prove it, I would estimate that magnetic audiotape directly influenced 66 percent of my career sexual encounters.

I was making a mix disc for one of these women (I will never admit which), and it was my intention to find eighteen songs that reflected key elements of our relationship, which I thought I did. But as I looked at the track selection, it suddenly dawned on me that these songs were just as applicable to my other relationship. My feelings for “Woman A” were completely different than my feelings for “Woman B,” but the musical messages would make emotional sense to both, despite the fact that these two women were wildly dissimilar. So I ended up making two copies of this album and sending one to each woman, using all the same songs and identical cover art (computers make this entirely too easy). I expressed identical romantic overtures to two different people with one singular movement. And they both received their discs on the same day, and they both loved them. Part of me will always know this was a diabolical thing to do. However, I'm mostly struck by the fact that all my deepest, most sincere feelings are so totally stereotypical that they pretty much apply to every girl I find even vaguely attractive. My feelings toward every woman I've ever loved can be completely explained by Paul McCartney's "Maybe I'm Amazed," Rod Stewart's "You're in My Heart," and either Matthew Sweet's "Girlfriend" or Liz Phair's "Divorce Song" (depending on how long we've known each other).

Important things are inevitably cliché, but nobody wants to admit that. And that’s why nobody is deconstructing Saved by the Bell.

he was the type of affable stoic who never spoke. He was one of those quiet guys who would offer you a beer when you walked into his apartment, and then he’d silently drink by himself, regardless of whether you joined him or not.

no one will actually die, because we all deserve a second chance.

It was actually a lot like my relationship with the friends from college who used to watch the show with me; I once saw guys like Joel constantly, then periodically, and then never.

Everything is 50-50. Either something will happen, or something will not.

When you roll a six-sided die, what are the odds that you’ll roll a three? 50-50. You’ll either get a three, or you won’t. That’s reality. Don’t fall into the childish “it’s one-in six” logic trap. That is precisely what all your adolescent authority figures want you to believe. That’s how they enslave you. That’s how they stole your conviction, and that’s why you will never be happy. Either you will roll a three, or you will not; there are no other alternatives. The future has no memory. Certain things can be impossible, and certain things can be guaranteed—but there is no sliding scale for maybe. Maybe something will happen, or maybe it won’t. That’s all there is.

Either something is true, or it isn’t. Do or do not; there is no try.

It’s become cool to like Star Wars, which actually means it’s totally uncool to like Star Wars. I think you know what I mean by this:

our whole demographic was comprised of cynical optimists. Whenever my circa-1993 friends and I would sit around and discuss the future, there was always the omnipresent sentiment that the world was on the decline, but we were somehow destined to succeed individually. Everyone felt they would somehow be the exception within an otherwise grim universe.

“Do, or do not,” says the greenish Muggsy Bogues. “There is no try.” And that’s an inspiring sentiment. It’s the kind of logic that drives the world. But

That’s the problem with homeless people: To them, we’re all just a number.

everything you’re feeling and experiencing is just a collective dream the whole world is sharing; nobody is actually living, but nobody’s aware that they aren’t.

Let’s assume you’re a married woman, and your husband is having an affair. If this is the only lie in your life, it’s something you need to know. As a singular deceit, it’s a problem, because it invalidates every other truth of your relationship. However, let’s say everyone is lying to you all the time—your husband, your family, your coworkers, total strangers, etc. Let’s assume that no one has ever been honest with you since the day you started kindergarten, and you’ve never suspected a thing. In this scenario, there is absolutely no value to learning the truth about anything; if everyone expresses the same construction of lies, those lies are the truth, or at least a kind of truth. But the operative word in this scenario is everyone. Objective reality is not situational; it doesn't evolve along with you. If you were raised as a strict Mormon and converted into an acid-eating Wiccan during college, it would seem like your reality had completely evolved - but the only thing that would be different is your perception of a wolrd that's still exactly the same.

The scene I’m referring to is where Wiggins’s character meets a girl and goes back to her apartment, and the girl begins explaining her idea for a surrealistic sitcom. She asks if Wiggins would like to be involved. He says he would, but then asks a much harder question in return: “What does it feel like to be a character in someone else’s dream?” Because that’s who Wiggins realizes this person is; he is having a lucid dream, and this woman is his own subconscious construction. But the paradox is that this woman is able to express thoughts and ideas that Wiggins himself could never create. Wiggins mentions that her idea for the TV show is great, and it’s the kind of thing he could never have come up with - but since this is his dream, he must have done exactly that. And this forces the question that lies behind "What is reality?": "How do we know that we know?"

Leonard describes his eternal quest to kill his wife’s murderers, and the person sitting across from him makes an astute observation: This will be the least satisfying revenge anyone will ever inflict. Even if Leonard kills his enemies, he’ll never remember doing so. His victory won’t just be hollow; it will be instantaneously erased. But Leonard disagrees. “The world doesn’t disappear when you close your eyes, does it?” he snaps. “My actions still have meaning, even if I can’t remember them.”

Most people consider forgetting stuff to be a normal part of living. However, I see it as a huge problem; in a way, there’s nothing I fear more. The strength of your memory dictates the size of your reality. And since objective reality is fixed, all we can do is try to experience—to consume—as much of that fixed reality as possible. This can only be done by living in the moment (which I never do) or by exhaustively filing away former moments for later recall (which I do all the time).

Taoists constantly tell me to embrace the present, but I only live in the past and the future; my existence is solely devoted to (a) thinking about what will happen next and (b) thinking back to what’s happened before. The present seems useless, because it has no extension beyond my senses. To me, living a carpe diem philosophy would make me like Leonard. His reality is based almost entirely on faith: Leonard believes his actions have meaning, but he can’t experience those meanings (or even recall the actions that caused them). He knows hard reality is vast, but his soft reality is minuscule. And in the film’s final sequence, we realize that he understands that all too well; ultimately, he lies to himself to expand it. In a sense, hewas right all along; his actions do have meaning, even if he doesn't remember then. But that meaning only applies to an objective reality he's not part of, and that's the only game in town.

Obviously, we’re all used to seeing thousand of adolescent females at Britney Spears and ’NSYNC concerts, but those shows have nothing to do with music; those are just virgin-filled Pepsi commercials. It’s a teenage girl’s job to like that shit.

The most wretched people in the world are those who tell you they like every kind of music “except country.” People who say that are boorish and pretentious at the same time. All it means is that they’ve managed to figure out the most rudimentary rule of pop sociology; they know that hipsters gauge the coolness of others by their espoused taste in sound, and they know that hipsters hate modern country music. And they hate it because it speaks to normal people in a tangible, rational manner. Hipsters hate it because they hate Midwesterners, and they hate Southerners, and they hate people with real jobs.

Truly depressed people don’t need depressing music.

Lucinda Williams’s music won’t matter in twenty years. Oh, she’ll be remembered historically, because the brainiacs who write pop reference books will always include her name under W. She’ll be a nifty signpost for music geeks. But her songs will die like softcover books filled with postmodern poetry, endorsed by Robert Pinsky and empty to everyone else. Lucinda Williams does not matter.

In the 1960s, the Rolling Stones realized that if you could make an audience unconsciously think about fucking, you could control the way they respond to music.

Lots of people (in fact, most people) do not dream about morphing their current life into something dramatic and cool and metaphoric. Most people see their life as a job that they have to finish; if anything, they want their life to be less complicated than it already is. They want their life to only have one meaning. So when they imagine a better existence, it’s either completely imaginary (i.e., Toby’s nineteenth-century Lone Ranger fantasy) or staunchly practical (i.e., Yearwood’s description of the girl who just wants to get married without catching static from her old man). The reason Garth Brooks and Shania Twain have sold roughly 120 million more albums than Bob Dylan and Liz Phair is not because record buyers are all a bunch of blithering idiots; it's because Garth and Shania are simply better at expressing the human condition. They're less talented, but they understand more people.

My obsession with serial killers began when I was ten years old. My fourth-grade teacher told our class that 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; she said that we would all have driver’s licenses in a few years, and the one rule we always needed 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. I used to imagine nomadic, sadistic drifters thumbing rides with bloodthirsty Volkswagen owners, both desperately waiting for the first opportunity to kill each other. Hitchhiking seemed like an ultraviolent race against time.

Like most incarcerated humans, Gacy loved mail; unlike most incarcerated humans, Gacy was picky about his friends. When anyone wrote to him, he returned a typed, two-page survey that asked fifty-two questions about artistic affinities, political ideologies, and personal values. Nuzum still has that form.

It’s noteworthy that Derf mentions Michael J. Fox as a metaphor for knowing Dahmer; Nuzum made a similar comparison when discussing John Wayne Gacy, but his metaphor was Cameron Diaz. I suspect this kind of celebrity analogy is common. However, part of me deeply disagrees with the accuracy of those comparisons, and here’s why: The fame a serial killer achieves is a sicker—but more authentic—brand of fame. There are thousands of thin young women in Hollywood who wanted to be Cameron Diaz, and hundreds of them could have done exactly that. There are five hundred girls who could have had her career. There is nothing inherently special about Cameron Diaz; until she made a movie, she was just an attractive person. At some point, she became Cameron Diaz. But Jeffrey Dahmer didn't become Jeffrey Dahmer the first time he killed somebody. That's always who he was. Derf claims he "turned into a monster" the day he killed his first victim, but I think that's mostly what he'd like to believe; more than almost anyone, Derf knows that Dahmer was always just a guy who couldn't (ar at least didn't) relate to normal boundaries of right and wrong. To know that kind of person is to know the darkest kind of power. To me, that has to mean something. But Derf will always disagree with me.

some are prone to classify one genre of serial killers as “mission-oriented,” which means they aspire to kill specific people (such as hookers) in order to improve society. Other classifications include “visionary motive” types (who imagine voices inside their head), “thrill-oriented” killers (who find the process of murder exciting), and “lust killers” (who actively get a sexual thrill from torture and execution).

By and large, stuff like Left Behind exists only with that bizarre subculture of “good people,” most of whom I’ve never met and never will.

all-or-nothing way of life.

Left Behind is the first of eleven books about the end of the world. It was conceptualized by Dr. Tim LaHaye, a self-described “prophecy scholar,” and written by Jerry B. Jenkins, a dude who has written over a hundred other books (mostly biographies about moral celebrities like Billy Graham and Walter Payton).

Why do we assume all children are inherently innocent? Innocent of what? I mean, any grammar school teacher will tell you that “kids can be cruel” on the playground; the average third-grader will gleefully walk up to a six-year-old with hydrocephalus and ask, “What’s wrong with you, Big Head?” And that third-grader knows what he’s doing is evil. He knows it’s hurtful. Little boys torture cats and cute little girls humiliate fat little girls, and they know it’s wrong. They do it because it’s wrong. Sometimes I think children are the worst people alive. And even if they’re not—even if some smiling toddler is as pure as Evian—it’s only a matter of time. He’ll eventually become the fifty-year-old car salesman who we'll all assume is morallyt bankrupt until he proves otherwise. As far as I can tell, the nicest thing you can say about children is that they haven't done anything terrible yet.

the one aspect of life that seems clear to me is that good people do whatever they believe is the right thing to do.

Meanwhile, I constantly do things that I know are wrong; they’re not on the same scale as incinerating Jews or blowing up skyscrapers, but my motivations might be worse. I have looked directly into the eyes of a woman I loved and told her lies for no reason, except that those lies would allow me to continue having sex with another woman I cared about less.

Just to cover all my doomed bases, I watched a few other apocalyptic movies after Left Behind: I rented The Omega Code and revisited The Rapture.