CKETD
Chuck Klosterman, Eating The Dinosaur – The first time I read Chuck Klosterman I though he was a breath of fresh air. Now I’m getting used to him, and he’s starting to take on the attributes of your typical, aging specious writer. I’ve also discovered that his non-fiction is much more interesting than his fiction, and that his writings on truth and deception, and pop reality, are much more interesting than his writings about sports, although I read those all the way through as well (even when Klosterman, aware that a lot of his readers don’t give a shit about sports, begs me not to – repeatedly).
The collection starts off promisingly with “Something Instead Of Nothing”, where Klosterman questions the art of interviewing (or, in ironic-speak, he questions the act of questioning). There was once a time when I too, like Klosterman, worked as a journalist, and I too learned the art of asking people questions. Except I never thought about writing a 22-page article about it. Kudos to Klosterman. Bravo! “Oh The Guilt” is about the pretention of Kurt Cobain, it’s rifled with pop references a-plenty and talks about the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind, something that happened in my eventful 22nd year of life. “Tomorrow Rarely Knows” is a meditation on time travel in its various film depictions. Cool. “What We Talk About When We Talk About Ralph Sampson” is about the potential of great athletes to fail to live up to their potential, and the potential of non-athletes to ponder this. “Through A Glass, Blindly” is about Klosterman’s obsession with voyeurism, a chapter I tried to enjoy but couldn’t because I just kept thinking about Denis Johnson’s depiction of voyeurism in Jesus’ Son, a book I recently read three times in a row. Curses – foiled again! “The Passion Of The Garth” is about Garth Brooks’ inexplicable urge to – at the height of his popularity – re-create himself as an alt-rocker called Chris Gaines. “The Best Response” is just that – the best response to a variety of goofy situations, vignettes you can read, say “oh, that’s clever,” chuckle, and move on to the next one. “Football” is about the evolution of football. This is the one where he begs readers who are disinterested in sports to zoom beyond the sporty article to get the next one, which is about ABBA (it’s called “ABBA 1, World 0″). “‘Ha ha,’ he said. ‘Ha ha’” is about writing about things that shouldn’t exist – it’s an entire article about the laugh track, its history, its development, and its falseness. Laugh tracks are phony, Klosterman seems to be telling us. “It Will Shock You How Much It Never Happened” is about fakeness espoused by Pepsi corporation in a fake research study about optimism. It probes nonsense looking for sense, as if there’s some sort of meaning to it all. Cool. “T is for True” is about Weezer (mainly), but also about Werner Herzog, Ralph Nader and David Foster Wallace (or maybe it’s about obsessions and dementia). Fail is about the Unabomber’s intellectual and philosophical thesis, the one he was prepared to kill people for, wishing to prove that a return to the ice age is desirable to the existence we currently inhabit. Nice.
There are nearly as many ideas in this book as there are words (not really – maybe it’s more accurate to say there are nearly as many ideas in this book as there are sentences…). The best essay is the first, on the art of interviewing and the strange falseness it is built upon:
Journalism allows almost anyone to direct questions they would never ask of their own friends at random people; since the ensuing dialogue exists for commercial purposes, both parties accept an acceleration of intimacy. People give emotional responses, but those emotions are projections. The result (when things go well) is a dynamic, adversarial, semi-real conversation. I am at ease with this. If given a choice between interviewing someone or talking to them “for real.” I prefer the former; I don’t like having the social limitation of tact imposed upon my day-to-day interactions and I don’t enjoy talking to most people more than once or twice in my lifetime.
In the piece, Klosterman interviews Errol Morris, a hardass who made movies like The Thin Blue Line, and The Fog Of War. He talks about the effect of Prince’s edict that journalists could only interview him if they didn’t record the conversation or take notes.
At the time it wasassumed that Prince did this because he was beavershit crazy and always wanted to be ina position to retract whatever was written about him. However, his real motive was more reasonable and (kind of) billioant: he wanted to force the reporter to reflect only the sense of the conversation, as opposed to the specific phrases he elected to use. He was not concerned about being misquoted; he was concerned about being quoted accurately.” Prince believed that he could represent himself better as an abstraction – his words ould not be taken ot of context if there was no context. He could only be presented as the sum total of whatever he said devoid of specifics.
Klosterman ponders the day that he is interviewed about this book, where he ponders the nature of interviewing. He ponders the time that he deliberately lied about something that was an obvious lie, for no reason. The lie comes up when he writes about Kurt Cobain. “It’s hard to imagine any artist more shamed by his commercial success than Cobain, mostly because no one has ever made so much money by defining himself as anti-commercial.”
Some quotes are laugh-out-loud funny. “Gratuitous aside; I find that “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” significantly increases my fear of the Reaper. This song is a failure.” In the “best response” to a challenge to a movie director who bankrupted his studio by going $200 million over budget on his masterpiece, “on balance, $200 million seems like a small price to pay for this kind of aesthetic advance. Even if all the reviews are negative and it does no business whatsoever at the box office, this will have to be remembered as the first truly successful film.”
But I mistrust Chuck Klosterman, probably because he misuses the word “unconsciously”, mixing it up with subconsciously (“If you watch a comedy that forgoes contrived laughter, you will unconsciously – or maybe even consciously – take it more seriously.” “It takes away the unconscious pressure of understanding context and tells the audiennce when they should be amused.”), and he allows himself horrible phrases like “But no – obviously – I am older.” Is he saying something retarded on purpose, hoping that we don’t notice? What kind of a manic do such a thing? Or could it be that he doesn’t know the meaning of words like “unconsciously” and “obviously”? Is he a writer? Do people pay him to string words together? Does he open himself to analysis and criticism by being hypercritical and overanalytical himself? Well… yes! He’ll also create dumb ponderings like “[Director Werner Herzog] once said that he would only touch truth ‘with a pair of pliers.’” This sounds like a metphor, but maybe it isn’t.”
But then he goes and does something funny by mocking critics who called bands like AC/DC irrelevant at a time when ABBA was hot.
Since at least 1979, AC/DC has been allegedly irrelevant. When the Knack and Nick Lowe were hot, Angus Young seemed oversexed and stupid. AC/DC was irrelevant in 1984 because they lacked the visual impact of less-heavy metal acts like Dokken and they were irrelevant in 1989 because they weren’t releasing power ballads about teen suicide. They were irrelevant in 1991 because of grunge. They were irrelevant in 1997 because they weren’t involved with the mainstreaming of alternative culture. They were irrelevant in 2001 because they weren’t implementing elements of hi-hop into their metal. When they were playing Madison Square Garden in 2008, the always likable New York Times critic Jon Caramanica opened his review like this: “All the recent talk of how AC/DC is due for critical reappraisal? Ignore it.” As far as I can tell, AC/DC has been irrelevant for the vast majority of their career.
Other quotes are genius, and mean a lot to me. I once had a boss who who kept on saying that he never takes “no” for an answer. We all rolled our eyes and said to ourself “sure you don’t…”. Klosterman interviews a man who sells refrigerators to Eskimos (literally), and when asked what advice he has for aspiring salesmen he says “People always say, ‘Don’t take “no” for an answer,’ but that’s wrong. That’s how rapists think. You’ll waste a thousand afternoons if that’s your attitude. However, never take ‘maybe’ for an answer. Ninety percent of the time, ‘maybe’ means ‘probably’. Just keep talking.”
His closing words for his article about laugh tracks is “Build a machine that tells people when to cry. That’s what we need. We need more crying.” I agree.