Chuck Klosterman X: A Highly Specific, Defiantly Incomplete History of the Early 21st Century

by Chuck Klosterman

“It’s hard not to think ‘death drive’ every time I go on the Internet,” she writes. “Opening Safari is an actively destructive decision. I am asking that consciousness be taken away from me.”

maybe it’s not that we’re overrating our memories. Maybe it’s that we’re underrating the import of prolonged exposure. Maybe things don’t become meaningful unless we’re willing to repeat our interaction with whatever that “thing” truly is.

meaningful faith is dangerous. It simplifies things that aren’t simple.

The crux here, the issue driving this whole “Tebow Thing,” is the matter of faith. It’s the ongoing choice between embracing a warm feeling that makes no sense or a cold pragmatism that’s probably true. But with Tebow, that illogical warm feeling keeps working out. It pays off.

Part of my job is annoying people I admire. I hate to admit that, but I have to accept it.

Are you interested in having a detailed conversation about how the glue used with magnetic audiotape was altered in the late 1970s, subsequently leading to the disintegration of countless master tapes? If so, find Jimmy Page. He has thoughts on this.

The way somebody’s voice sounds is much more important than how meaningful the words are. I just look for lyrics I can say with conviction.

“I manufacture opinions,” I said. “Really?” he asked. “How do you know if you’re any good at that?” “By the number of people who agree or disagree,” I said in response. “If a large number of strangers seem to think one of my opinions is especially true or wildly wrong, there is somehow a perception that I am succeeding at this vocation.”

Around the same time Ben Johnson ran his (then unthinkable) 9.83, Florence Griffith Joyner destroyed the women’s 100-meter mark with a 10.49, and that record has not been seriously challenged in the twenty-three years since.

Do not mitigate the significance of this point: The punter was taking steroids.

Though it may not have been their intent, the Beatles took performance-enhancing drugs. And this is germane to sports for one reason: Absolutely no one holds this against them. No one views Rubber Soul or Revolver as “less authentic” than the band’s earlier albums, despite the fact that they would not (and probably could not) have been made by people who weren’t on drugs.

Kindergartners eat Ritalin like candy, but nobody discounts the validity of their Candy Land performance.

“It’s not my responsibility if some people are tone deaf to irony,” he says. “The lead book reviewer for The New York Times [Pulitzer Prize winner Michiko Kakutani] is utterly tone deaf when it comes to irony. She just can’t hear it. Which you’d think would disqualify her from reviewing books for a blog in Kansas City, let alone The New York Times. But there you go. There’s

I was working down there, right after El Salvador had finished a civil war. I thought I could make the world a better place. But then I realized all I was really doing was helping rich people get richer than they already were. I figured if that was all I was doing, I might as well work in professional sports.”

When it comes to drugs, I’m a big proponent of the boat-sails-wind analogy: Your life is a boat, the sails are your emotions, and drugs are the wind. When you’re a kid, your boat is small and your sail is huge, and drugs are like a hurricane. So you need to get to a point in life where you have a big enough boat to navigate the weather.”

By my half-drunk estimate, “Rock and Roll All Nite” is better than 93 of these tracks, along with 12 ties. So the best song by KISS would be (at worst) the 95th best song by the Beatles. Which is outstanding. GRADE: B+

One thing I’ve learned in my life is that—creatively—it’s better to have one person love you than to have ten people like you.

the honest explanation is that my perception of reality is so inflexibly personal that it has almost no correlation to what’s happening in the world outside of my own skull.