Chuck Klosterman

Here's a good article from The Simon about the new Chuck Klosterman book. I never finished reading "Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs" because it started to make my head hurt. I guess it was too smart for me. Below is an excerpt.

Though he may not always follow logical imperatives, he’s an exceptionally creative thinker who questions the cultural phenomena that’s thoughtlessly consumed by successive MTV generations. He manipulates the glamour of celebrity and rock stardom into morsels of mythology attractive enough for a culture suffering from Anorexia of the Idea to bite into.

Younger generations of Americans urgently need to learn to refuse their culture at face value, lest the stories sold by media conglomerates and advertising firms come to define them individually (more than they already do). I’m not arguing that a North Dakotan with a stack of KISS albums and a bong is going to single-handedly change the country. But he might be an enzyme for some sort of progression. And I assert as much knowing that Klosterman analyzes the significance of Morrissey’s Hispanic fan base, Val Kilmer’s uncanny politeness, and the reasons Goths annually coagulate in Disneyland (bingo players “gather”; Goths “coagulate”).

I think I'll give Klosterman another try.