Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs
August 21st, 2005A Low Culture Manifesto
by Chuck Klosterman
ISBN: 0743236017
If you are the kind of person who has ever enjoyed Cap’n Crunch’s Crunch Berries cereal, jokes at the expense of people dumber than you, and dubious music produced in the eighties, there is a good chance you will like Klosterman’s book.
Not that he writes about Crunch Berries. Other sugary cereals, yes. He also talks about Billy Joel, a Guns N’ Roses cover band, and Mötley Crüe by way of Tommy Lee and Pamela’s infamous videotape. Then there is his fascination with second-hand knowledge of serial killers. He makes Amish jokes on dates. (”I mean, do you think there are twenty-five-year-old Amish people who say, ‘Well, I’m sort of Amish. I currently work as a computer programmer, but I still believe pants with metal zippers are the work of Satan.’”)
Klosterman hates soccer. He gets the difference between Wal-Mart country and alt country music. His most annoying textual tic is “But ANYWAY” which I forgive because of essay titles like “The Awe-Inspiring Beauty of Tom Cruise’s Shattered, Troll-like Face.” To give you an idea how Klosterman’s narratives move along, it seems important to note that when he discusses the original Star Wars trilogy, he curiously fails to mention Princess Leia’s hot outfit in Return of the Jedi.
I suppose this is because his real interest is in The Empire Strikes Back. He explains how this movie paved the way for Generation X to be the way we are:
It’s often noted by critics that this is the only Star Wars film that ends on a stridently depressing note: Han Solo is frozen in carbonite and torn away from Princess Leia, Luke gets his paw hacked off, and Darth Vader has the universe by the jugular. The Empire Strikes Back is the only blockbuster of the modern era to celebrate the abysmal failure of its protagonists. This is important; this is why The Empire Strikes Back set the philosophical template for all the slackers who would come of age ten years later.
In other words, Klosterman is the kind of guy who can compare the Trix Rabbit to Sisyphus. Which he does, for sarcastic amusement.
As expected from anyone in their mid-thirties, Klosterman waxes nostalgic about mixed tapes. This hasn’t stopped him from adapting to the new mixed CD realities, however. (The conceit of the book’s layout is a mixed CD.) To take an analogy perhaps tortuously too far, just like with the mixed CDs, some tracks rock and some sound profound and there are one or two you might skip. This book would be a good short- to medium-length road trip listen. Some lyrics (”The strength of your memory dictates the size of your reality”) may seem important. Then you realize characters in the movies on an tv develop amnesia, not real people, and then you realize he knows this too so you just sit back and enjoy the beat.
