October 1 - 10, 2008

Fargo Rock City
Chuck Klosterman
2001, hardcover
9 cards

8- "As a writer, there is nothing more flattering than having someone invest their thoughts into something your wrote."
18- "Whenever people look back on their grammar school days, they inevitably insist that they remember feeling 'safe' or 'pure' or 'hungry for discovery.' Of course, the people who say those things are lying (or stupid or both). It's revisionist history..."
25- Brian Eno, "Only a thousand people bought the first Velvet Underground album, but every one of them became a musician."
55- "Sadness and evil are always more believable than happiness and love."
58- metal and interpretation
71- "What music 'means' is almost completely dependent on the people who sell it and the people who buy it, not the people who make it. Our greatest artists are the ones who understand how they can be interesting and unique within those limitations."
72- "Glam is a struggle against normalcy."
73- who has listened to the New York Dolls
105- "The only thing important about art is how it affects people. It only needs to affect one person to be interesting, but it had to affect many to be important."
118- males, loyalty to bands
138- "Life makes art."
221- Americanphile
225- "Hating (and sometimes mocking) music is just as important as loving (and embracing) music."
272- Stone Temple Pilots, Interstate Love Song

August 10 - 13, 2008

Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs*

*A Low Culture Manifesto

Chuck Klosterman

2003, hardcover

15 cards

Lately I've been mentioning to people that I'm reading Chuck Klosterman's books. Everyone seems to have read this book, if not his others. I was wondering why I missed out on this slice of pop culture. I think I know now. By the time it came out in paperback, every weekend I was driving to Detroit and sleeping on the couches of friends and going to shows; at the time I was the only person living in East Lansing in their mid-twenties who was not married or not enamoured with sports bars. It would be amazing if I ever lived in the same city as my friends. While I bought a lot of books I didn't read too many of them. I think it's good I didn't read Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs because I might not have read the other two Klosterman books I read before this. I might have, but I might not have. He's great at discussing the minute details that form the core existence of people my age (most of us watched Saved by the Bell, have some conscious of Sims, listened to bands like R.E.M. and Billy Joel and the Dixie Chicks, saw Reality Bites, etc.) but as he's written more, he's gotten better at it. The track on cereal is first rate and full of acute observations (that's right- all those creatures wanted to steal cereal- what is up with that?) The front pages includes a CD and the stories song titles and play times. Klosterman draws a distinction between a mix tape and a mix cd, placing the mix tape in a higher category. This book is an enjoyable mix cd, the other two are mix tapes.

Selections:

-(life)- "...nothing stays the same and that nothing is inherently connected, and that the only driving force in anyone's life is entropy. The second is that everything pretty much stays the same (more or less) and that everything is completely connected, even it we don't realize it..."

-"...I am alone. And that everyone is alone. I guess I am not a morning person."

-"an evening book"

-"The goal of being alive is to figure out what it means to be alive, and there is a myriad of ways to deduce that answer" (low culture vs. Kant or Wittgenstein)

1- "No woman will ever satisfy me....But this is actually okay, because I will never satisfy a woman, either."

3- (movies) "We will both measure our relationship against the prospect of fake love."

-assessment of Coldplay

4- "...perfect illustration of why almost everyone I know is either overtly or covertly unhappy."

-"They think everything will work out perfectly in the end..."

-"The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love with any acumen of normalcy."

6- footnote- Jordan Catalano from MSCL not being able to read

9- (When Harry Met Sally) "it gave a lot of desperate people hope."

-"Nora Ephron accidentally ruined a lot of lives."

13- (SIMS) "There is no way to win, except to keep yourself from becoming depressed."

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

16- quotes Talking Heads lyrics

-"video technology cages imagination"

19- "I never enjoy the process of buying anything, but I get the impression that most Americans love it. What the Sims suggests is that buying things makes people happy because it takes their mind off being alive."

36- definition of postmodern

41- (Big Brother not having music) "...without a soundtrack, human interaction is meaningless."

44- (Billy Joel, important songs, 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."

-"Black Sabbath is the most underrated band in rock history."

45- "Cheap Trick was good at being cool for everybody."

65- Black Sabbath

70- humorousity

70- Rivers Cuomo- "the Cubism didactic-hobo-core three-piece"

102- "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."

104- (cars- the IROC and Chevy Cavalier make their first appearance- because of my car it seems I fall into the Celtics fan category but it does have 2 doors, not 4)

119- Sylvester Graham!!!! [former resident of the building that houses Sylvester's in Northampton]

120- "Saturday morning commercials for all the best cereals are teaching kids how to figure out what's cool."

121- "They're the first step in the indoctrination of future hipsters: cereal commercials teach us that anything desirable is supposed to be exclusionary."

-"premise that a given cereal is so delicious that a fictional creature would want to steal it."

122- corduroy

124- "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."

125- 3 questions [#1- No, #2 No, #3A]

127- mix tapes vs. mix cds

128- Saved by the Bell- "people born between 1970 and 1977 [you're wrong here- 1978 factors in too]

130- "I watched it because it was on TV, which is generally the driving force behind why most people watch any program."

-"universities always spawn little cultures of terrible TV appreciation..." [yes!]

131- diner

133- "Important things are inevitably cliche."

138- Angela, My So Called Life- "But Angela was so much an individual that she wasn't like anyone but herself; she didn't reflect any archetype. She was real enough to be interesting, but too real to be important." [but this is why she was so great]

140- "Life is chock full of lies, but the biggest lie is math."

-50-50

147- Reality Bites- Gen Xers- cynical optimists [I owned this soundtrack on tape]

-"This is why Ryder has to pick Hawke."

-"She pursued a path that was difficult and depressing and she did so because it showed the slightest potential for transcendence."

156- (films) "What is Reality?"

161- forgetting stuff- "The strength of your memory dictates the size of your reality."

167- "...The most wretched people in the world are those who tell you they like every kind of music 'except country.'"

167- but not "old country"

173- "Tastee Freezes are iconic structures in the rural Midwest, because they say something about your hometown; they irrefutably prove your community does not have enough of a population to sustain a Dairy Queen." [Williamston did have a Dairy Queen when I lived there]

175- "lyrics do matter"

176-177- Bob Dylan and Liz Phair cds

178- Johnny Cash- coffee

183- Esprit t-shirts

185- Gacy and mail

194- (list of people who died in the Oklahoma City bombing] "...that virtually everyone's life is only remembered for one thing."

-"I think this is what motivates people to have children...."

211- acquaintance" "'There's one thing worse than talking to a person who knows about nothing,'" he said, 'an that's talking to someone who knows about nothing except music.'"

219- "dying is always original"

229- "As far as I can tell, the nicest thing you can say about children is that they haven't done anything terrible yet."

230- Kierkegaardian leap

July 29 - August 10, 2008

Chuck Klosterman IV

A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas

Chuck Klosterman

2006, hardcover

17 cards

I think this may be my favorite Chuck Klosterman book. If you're following this you might say, but you've only read one other one and you haven't even read the one everyone in the world seems to have read (Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs). I am reading said book now, and while I am enjoying it, I think Klosterman excels at the essay. Killing Yourself to Live was a well threaded story of stories, but the essay lets Klosterman engage an idea and then beat it around for a while before declaring victory over the topic. This collection of essays also touches on so many great topics, where in a book there are only a few main ideas he weaves together. Klosterman is also saving the footnote by making hilarious asides and revisions when gathering essays like this together with hindsight.

Three comments/thoughts: Klosterman mentions Black Sabbath a lot. I guess maybe it was just twice in this book but it seemed like more. His Chicken McNuggets diet also makes me think of a button Joel told me about seeing in a bar. It read, "Or will it be Chicken McNuggets?" I always look for this button in treasure shops. If I found it I might not give it to Joel (he found a sweet Chin Tiki ashtray that he kept) but I might give it to Chuck Klosterman. Maybe. His comments about the Olympics are also perfect to read right now.

Some selections:

1- "Can I tell you something weird?" he asked..."Always."

14- Britney Spears- "She is not so much a person as she is an idea, and that idea is this: you can want everything, so long as you get nothing."

24- "...is Bono's entire life a performance?"

28- Bono: "I write feelings not thoughts..."

37- Val Kilmer is nice.

43- OED and Webster's Second

45- Bob Dylan

50- (Morrissey) 30-year old ex-wallflowers "reminiscing about how The Queen is Dead convinced them not to hang themselves while everyone else was at the prom."

58- (McNuggets diet) "We are a nation obsessed."

59- orange drink

-"Does life make more sense if you're homeless? Perhaps."

60- (McDonald's) "It's the last universal place in America."

61- pirates, scurvy!

63- "Staying alive is complicated."

76- "...we were more like relationship spectators." (mentions Raymond Carver here and many times)

84- "If you're a true fan of a band, it doesn't matter where that band plays- you just go."

94- (Robert Plant) "...you cannot classify anything anywhere. Classification is a killer."

108- arrested development

109- Post traumatic stress disorder

110- Lars Ulrich from Metallica owned a Basquiat, but he sold it.

115- White Stripes- "Everything will be raw and unrehearsed and imperfect. And that's why it's so f***ing good."

116- formed on Bastille Day in 1997

117- "Detroit people"

119- "People in Detroit know their records."

120- "Record collectors are collecting. They're not really listening to music."

126- (Goths, Disneyland) "What makes someone a normal?"

-"The are not us...They wear polo shirts."

131- Radiohead- "All the wanted to talk about were books."

132- Radiohead's music- "smart on purpose"

138- exhibits Colin told him to check out

-"Everyone in this band probably reads more than you do..."

140- picking words for how they sound

149- footnote- hobo

155- Akron- at the time- "home to the Professional Bowlers Association Hall of Fame"

156- "Is life akin to bowling, or is bowling akin to life."

-"In bowling, your score is not only dependent on what you've done, but also on what you will do."

169- Billy Joel- "...he expresses absolute conviction in moments of wholly misguided affection"

181 and 194- Black Sabbath

200- (Ramones vs. Ratt) "what matters is who likes what you do artistically and what liking that art is supposed to say about who you are."

201- "The things that matter to normal people are not supposed to matter to smart people"

208- "Choice makes us depressed."

209- loss of shared experience

211- "...these shared experiences are how we connect with other people, and it's how we understand our own identity."

211-212-"...they are only pockets of a shared existence. They are things individual people choose to understand and finding others who understand them equally are products of coincidence."

226- "what you need is a) one quality nemesis and b) one archenemy."

235- (Advancement) "For example, Michael Stipe's lyrics don't really mean anything so any 16-year-old can convince himself that those words can mean whatever they want."

237- "'How can you hate the Olympics?' they ask me."

238- "I do not hate the Olympics. I just don't like they at all..."

-"...the Olympics are designed for people who want to care about something without considering why."

-"In order to enjoy the Olympics, you can't think critically about anything..."

240- "Life is f***ing confusing. I don't know anything and neither do you. But this is not what the Olympics want you to believe."

244- "I feel like a mannequin."

253- The Wonder Year- "the only tv program that allowed me to be nostalgic at the age of 17"

254- Kevin- "Did these girls 'like him' or did they 'like him like him'"

-Do we need to be liked, or do we merely want to be liked."

255- human rights, China

256- Bush- "Over 57 million people voted against him."

257- "At some point people confused being liked with being good."

259- "suspect that the most widespread problem we have is the ever-growing sentiment of anti-intellectualism that seems to infiltrate everything..."

-"guilty pleasures"

262- "It never matters what you like; what matters is why you like it."

263- "These things that give us pleasure- they are guilty of nothing. And neither are we.:

268- "If you feel betrayed by culture, it's not because you're right and the universe is f***ed; it's only because you're not like most other people. But this should make you happy, because- in all likelihood- you hate those other people, anyway. You are being betrayed by a culture that has no relationship to who you are or how you live."

277- talking about music too much- 2 words- "overrated and underrated"

283- pirate renaissance

287- "pro-pirate" vs. "pro-chump"

292- if it was 1904 "you wouldn't be reading this essay. Your life would be horrible, but your life would have purpose."

-"Machines allow humans the privilege of existential anxiety."

313- CNN Classic

322- "Pants are on my horizon..."

-"I might feel like putting my hands in my pockets later this afternoon..."

324- "Driving.

Driving.

Driving."

325- "Like all geniuses, I don't work before noon."

326- "Tonya is the kind of person who goes shopping the day after Thanksgiving."

332- "'Here's what's been on my mind,' I began, since intelligent people have no need for salutations."

333- "Part of the reason I have managed to thrive as the smartest man alive is because I'm still willing to keep learning. I totally enjoy evolving."

341- girlie girl [i always though it was spelled girly girl but how would I know]

July 30 - August 2, 2008

Killing Yourself to Live 85% of a True Story

Chuck Klosterman

2005, hardcover

16 cards

Chuck Palahniuk and Chuck Klosterman are different people. I now know that. Even better, Chuck Klosterman's books are about music and they are interesting and they are well written. Klosterman writes about music as a listener but his gift is talking about it as it fits into a person's life, how it infiltrates thinking and understanding and relationships. While the larger subject of the book is an assignment about how rock stars have died, the personal epiphanies and thoughts of Klosterman loom larger than any discoveries that could be made (and rarely were) when say, standing on the spot of the plane crash of the Big Bopper Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens. The observations Klosterman offers appear true to life he lives and there's a sense of honesty in the way he writes about them (even though that might factor into the 85%, 15% ratio). While he's wrong about a few things (no one needs to own Brittney Spears releases p. 16- thinking like this is why there are so many Jethro Tull records where used records are sold), that's ok, no one is perfect and if they were, that would probably be boring.

Some excerpts [with my comments in brackets]:

1- "Ohio. I was qualified to live in Ohio."

4- "We are all tourists, sort of. Life is tourism, sort of."

9- Chelsea Hotel- Stanley Beard, "The kind of person who wants to stay in Room 100 is just a cultic follower. These are people who have nothing to do....You will see that they are not serious-minded people. You will see that they are not trying to understand anything about death."

11- "I have no idea how people travel."

-"Death is part of life."

-"However, this is not necessarily true for rock stars; sometimes rock stars don't start living until they die." [The NYTimes recently had an article related to this- artists and death]

13- "Somewhere, at some point, somehow, somebody decided that death equals credibility. And I want to figure out why that is."

14- missing Car Rock

15- not owning vinyl or a turntable [hmmmmm]

18- diners [not that he really goes to many- chain restaurants instead]

19-compares a woman to the one in "Jolene" by Dolly Parton [How is this the first book I've read this year that mentions Dolly Parton????]

29- Honesty Room

-"...and one day I was structuring my entire life around spending time with her."

33- Springfield, Mass. Basketball Hall of Fame

-"Springfield is a poorly organized town." [So true!]

-"Like all museums, it's a rip-off." [not always true, but understood. Hall of Fames are always a rip-off.]

-"In theory, the Basketball Hall of Fame should simply serve as a pleasant distraction from the road and an opportunity to buy a t-shirt."

34- (Great White concert fire)- "In West Warwick, what used to be a tavern is now an ad hoc cemetery- which is the same role taverns play in most small towns, but not as obviously as this."

42- "Half the people who attend concerts only go so that they can tell other people that (a) certain shows were amazing, and (b) other shows sucked."

42-43- "I honestly believe that people of my generation despise authenticity, mostly because they're all so envious of it."

- Chevy Cavaliers [a friend, when I told her about his mentioning of Cavaliers as a working class car alongside IROCS, said that he probably meant Cavaliers from the 90s. And if he's not, Jettas and other non-working class cars are for suckers.]

45- Synchronicity by The Police

46- "Like all modern people, I had no relationship with anyone in my building."

53- (Washington monument) "but what is this 500-foot masonry structure supposed to tell me? What is it supposed to make me understand? ... I'll never understand why people need to see things just so they can say they saw them."

57- Petula Clark Downtown list

58- "Artists who believe they have any control over the interpretation of their work are completely fooling themselves."

61- "Every summer, Hollywood movie studios convince millions of people to see blockbuster movies they know they're going to hate."

-"Who really cares who Lindsay Lohan is dating? Almost no one."

-"But it's still information they need to have. This is because those people care about something else entirely; they're worried about the possibility of everyone else understanding something they're missing." [v. true]

63- North Carolina

64- "...I must run: Running keeps me alive." [also in agreement here]

64- "This NC oxygen is delicious..." (mentions Superchunk) [yes except when it is above 90]

67- "At their core, the final outcome to every football game (including the Super Bowl) is wholly meaningless.

70- Mary Beth- dreams and media

79- The Standard Hotel

84- (people talking about dreams) "It's a way for people to be honest without telling the truth."

86- Wilco- Yankee Hotel Foxtrot- 9/11 [The thing he missed with this is that the album was streaming on the internet when 9/11 happened. That was the really eerie part of the album and 9/11.]

87- "...what can you say when skyscrapers collapse?"

91- "Right now, most rock journalism is just mild criticism with a Q & A attached. Nobody learns anything (usually) and nothing new is created (ever).

92- "...the pursuit of intellect and the so-called 'life-of-the-mind' makes people broaden their classification for what can be reasonably classified as important."

112-113- "We are always dying, all the time. That's what living is; living is dying, little by little."

141- Rumors Fleetwood Mac [which I discovered is a fabulous album only this year]

143- Jeff Tweedy- transcendent moments, unintentional

-CK mentions guitar strong at the beginning of Fleetwood Mac's "I Don't Want to Know" [my favorite song on the album]- "we loved hearing the inside of a song."

164- "Nothing is going to happen tonight."

166- "...reading was a kind of neutral, reactive way to spend an evening."

171- (3 import stores) "I will never understand what people want out of life."

173- "...the things I write are often things I would never say."

195- Thomas Jefferson to Lewis and Clark- seeing mastodons

196- westerly

198- Led Zeppelin and guys

201- talk radio- though Dick Cheney dead

202- "Right now it would be easier to find uranium than college kids."

205- "I don't miss high school at all."

-"I have nothing to say, but I can't stop myself from talking."

216- "That's the history of KISS and those are the contents of my heart."

217- "I love KISS because the world makes sense when I think about them. Art and love are the same thing. It's the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you. It's understanding the unreasonable."

224- Kurt Cobain's death- people unconnected to Kurt, Seattle or grunge- "...suddenly chose to remember themselves in a completely different way."

227- "...his death changed the history of the living."

-"Kurt Cobain was that popular-yet-unpopular kid who dies for the sings of your personality."

230- (people needing to believe he lived under the bridge) "...Maybe it's something they need to believe, because if they don't, they will be stuck with the mildly depressing revelation that dead people are simply dead."

-"...everything else has nothing to do with the individual who died and everything to do with the people who are left behind..."

231- checking email

232- "We all have the potential to fall in love a thousand times in our lifetime. It's easy."

-"But there are certain people you love who do something else; they define how you classify what love is supposed to feel like....4 or 5 of these people."

-"the individual who embodies your personal definition of love does not really exist. The person is real and the feelings are real- but you create the context."

233- Lucy Chance- "The bar misses you."

235- "I am ready to be alone."