Chuck Klosterman - Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto

Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural Nrth Dakta

Scribner
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Copyright 2003 by Chuck Klosterman

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

33 was previously published in a different form in GQ. Appetite for Replication was previously published in a different form in The New York Times Magazine

SCRIBNER and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

DESIGNED BY ERICH HOBBING

Text set in Electra

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Klosterman, Chuck.
Sex, drugs, and cocoa puffs : a low culture manifesto / Chuck Klosterman.
p. cm.
1. Popular cultureUnited States. 2. United StatesCivilization1970. I. Title.
E169.12.K56 2003
306.0973dc21
2003045535

ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-5824-1
ISBN-10: 0-7432-5824-X

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There are two ways to look at life.

Actually, thats not accurate; I suppose there are thousands of ways to look at life. But I tend to dwell on two of them. The first view is that nothing stays the same and that nothing is inherently connected, and that the only driving force in anyones life is entropy. The second is that everything pretty much stays the same (more or less) and that everything is completely connected, even if we dont realize it.

There are many mornings when I feel certain that the first perspective is irrefutably true: I wake up, I feel the inescapable oppression of the sunlight pouring through my bedroom window, and I am struck by the fact that I am alone. And that everyone is alone. And that everything I understood seven hours ago has already changed, and that I have to learn everything again.

I guess I am not a morning person.

However, that feeling always passes. In fact, its usually completely gone before lunch. Every new minute of every new day seems to vaguely improve. And I suspect thats because the alternative viewthat everything is ultimately like something else and that nothing and no one is autonomousis probably the greater truth. The math does check out; the numbers do add up. The connections might not be hard-wired into the superstructure to the universe, but it feels like they are whenever I put money into a jukebox and everybody in the bar suddenly seems to be having the same conversation. And in that last moment before I fall asleep each night, I understand Everything. The world is one interlocked machine, throbbing and pulsing as a flawless organism.

This is why I will always hate falling asleep.

What you are about to read is an evening book. It was written in those fleeting evening moments just before I fall asleep, and its built on this ethos: Nothing can be appreciated in a vacuum. Thats what accelerated culture does; it doesnt speed things up as much as it jams everything into the same wall of sound. But thats not necessarily tragic. 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; I just happen to prefer examining the question through the context of Pamela Anderson and The Real World and Frosted Flakes. Its certainly no less plausible than trying to understand Kant or Wittgenstein. And while half of my brain worries that writing about Saved by the Bell and Memento will immediately seem as outdated as a 1983 book about Fantasy Island and Gerry Cooney, my minds better half knows that temporality is part of the truth. The subjects in this book are not the only ones that prove my point; theyre just the ones I happened to pick before I fell asleep.

In and of itself, nothing really matters. What matters is that nothing is ever in and of itself.

4 Every Dog Must Have His Every Day,
Every Drunk Must Have His Drink 0:42

13 The Awe-Inspiring Beauty of Tom Cruises Shattered,
Troll-like Face 1:51

All tracks by Chuck Klosterman and Crazy Horse, except The Lady and the Tiger (Lennon/McCartney) and This Is Zodiac Speaking (Klosterman /Desmond Child). Additional vocals by Shannon Hoon and Neko Case on Being Zack Morris. Produced by Bob Ezrin at Little Mountain Sound Studio LTD., Vancouver. No keyboards, synthesizers, or outboard gear were used in the typing of this manuscript.

Sol-ip-sism (solip sizem), n. Philos . The theory that only the self exists or can be proved to exist.

The Random House College Dictionary,

Revised Edition

I remember saying things, but I have no idea what was said. It was generally a friendly conversation.

Associated Press reporter Jack Sullivan, attempting to recount a 3 A.M. exchange we had at a dinner party and inadvertently describing the past ten years of my life.