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

by Chuck Klosterman

Games described as forgotten typically earn that classification because they deserve to disappear; it’s a modifier historians employ to marginalize or dismiss a given event, often for dramatic effect. But this game is “forgotten” in a non-negotiable context. There’s almost no record of its existence. Fewer than five hundred people saw it happen. It was not televised and there’s no videotape. It wasn’t broadcast on the radio. No official box score was compiled (statistics were kept, but most have been lost over time). Only a couple of small-circulation newspapers made mention of what transpired, and—because it happened before the Internet—googling the game’s particulars is like searching for a glossy photograph of Genghis Khan. The contest has disappeared from the world’s consciousness, buried by time and devoid of nostalgia.

Once people decide they want you to do something, they don’t really care what your qualifications are. However you describe yourself becomes proof that you’re the ideal candidate. This is true in journalism, and in life.

The principal downside to any zombie attack is that the zombies will never stop coming; the principal downside to life is that you will never truly be finished with whatever it is you do.

If you’re a nostalgic person, it means you’re mentally projecting a belief that life was better in the past, regardless of the evidence. You are trafficking in sentimentality and arguing that progress has been (on balance) bad for society. If you dislike nostalgia, it means you believe that same projection is an interpretative lie and that the world is constantly improving, even if it feels significantly worse. When Donald Trump says “Make America Great Again,” he is subtextually supporting the concept of false nostalgia. When Kim Kardashian is venerated as a dynamic genius reflecting the mediated brilliance of The Way We Live Now, her disciples are subtextually assaulting genuine nostalgia.

The central reason smart people (and certainly most critics) disparage nostalgia is utilitarian: It’s an uncritical form of artistic appreciation. If you unconditionally love something from your past, it might just mean you love that period of your own life. In other words, you’re not really hearing “You Oughta Know.” What you’re hearing is a song that reminds you of a time when you were happy, and you’ve conflated that positive memory with any music vaguely connected to the recollection. You can’t separate the merit of a song from the time you originally experienced it.

A secondary criticism boils down to self-serving insecurity: When we appreciate things from our past, we’re latently arguing that those things are still important—and if those things are important, we can likewise pretend our own life is important, because those are the things that comprise our past. [The counterargument would be that personal history does matter, and that the size of one’s reality is the size of one’s memory.]

A third criticism is that emotively dwelling on the past is lazy and lifeless. [The counter to this would be that even those who hate nostalgia inevitably concede it feels good, and feeling good is probably the point.]

So maybe it’s not that we’re overrating our memories. Maybe it’s that we’re underrating the import of prolonged exposure.

IN THE YEAR 2011, I don’t know why anyone would listen to any song every day for a year. Even if it was your favorite song of all time, it would be impossible to justify. It would be like going to the New York Public Library every morning and only reading Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

It’s uncomfortable to admit this, but technology has made the ability to remember things irrelevant. Intellectually, having a deep memory used to be a real competitive advantage. Now it’s like having the ability to multiply four-digit numbers in your head—impressive, but not essential.

Connectivity will replace repetition. Instead of generating false nostalgia by having the same experience over and over, we will aggregate false nostalgia from those fleeting moments when everyone seemed to be doing the same thing at once. It won’t be a kid playing the same song 1,000 times in a row. It will be that kid remembering when he and 999 other people all played the same song once (and immediately discussed it on Twitter, or on whatever replaces Twitter). It will be a short, shared experience that seems vast enough to be justifiably memorable.

A SURVEY by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life suggests that 78.4 percent of Americans identify themselves as Christians.

Very often, young Americans are simultaneously pessimistic about the world and optimistic about themselves—they assume everyone’s future is bleak, except for their own. Charlie is the opposite. He knows he’s doomed, but that doesn’t stop him from trying anything and everything. He believes existence is amazing, despite his own personal experience. It’s the quality that makes him so infinitely likable: He does not see the world as cruel. He believes the world is good, even if everything that’s ever happened to him suggests otherwise. All he wants are the things everyone else seems to get without trying. He aspires to be average, which—for him—is an impossible dream.

Charles M. Schulz died on February 12, 2000. The final Peanuts strip ran the very next day, a coincidence noted by virtually everyone who cared about the man and his work. In the years since his passing, I’ve noticed a curious trend: For whatever reason, it’s become popular to assert that the spiritual center of the Peanuts universe is not Charlie Brown. The postmodern answer to that puzzle is Snoopy—dynamic, indefatigable, and hyperimaginative. Perception has drifted toward what the public prefers to celebrate. It’s a little like what happened on the TV show Happy Days: A sitcom originally focused on milquetoast Richie Cunningham rapidly evolved into a vehicle for the super-coolness of Fonzie.

The fact that Peanuts was the first strip on the very top of the Sunday comics’ front page verified this subjective belief—if comics were rock bands, it seemed obvious that Peanuts was the Beatles.

Charlie Brown knows he’s doomed. He absolutely, irrefutably knows it. But a little part of his mind always thinks, “Maybe not this time, though.” That glimmer of hope is his Achilles’ heel. It’s also the quality that makes him so eminently relatable. The joke is not that Charlie Brown is hopeless. The joke is that Charlie Brown knows he’s hopeless, but he doesn’t trust the infallibility of his own insecurity.

“No matter what I do or what I try, I’m always going to be myself.”

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

Eddie Van Halen doesn’t listen to music. This is not a fake-out or a misdirection, nor is it a seemingly straightforward statement that actually means its opposite. Eddie Van Halen does not listen to music. “I don’t listen to anything,” he tells me from a greenish couch inside 5150, the expansive home recording studio built on his seven-acre residence in Studio City, Calif. I’d just asked if he ever revisits old Van Halen albums, but his disinterest in those records is merely the tip of a very weird iceberg: Unlike every other musician I’ve ever met, he does not listen to any music he isn’t actively making. He maintains that the last album he purchased was Peter Gabriel’s So, when it came out in 1986. He’s not familiar with the work of Radiohead, Metallica, or Guns N’ Roses. He appears to know only one song Randy Rhoads played on, and it’s “Crazy Train.” He scarcely listened to Pantera, even though he spoke at the funeral of the group’s guitarist and placed the axe from Van Halen II in the man’s casket. He doesn’t listen to the radio in his car, much to the annoyance of his wife (“I prefer the sound of the motor,” he says). He sheepishly admits he never even listened to most of the bands that opened for Van Halen and worries, “Does that make me an asshole?” Sometimes he listens to Yo-Yo Ma, because he loves the sound of the cello. But even that is rare.

Digital recording gives me too much control: This seems backward, but it’s closer to common sense. The most reassuring thing about television is that it’s a passive experience—it’s one-way entertainment. You sit motionless and watch what’s happening, and it’s acceptable to totally surrender your agency. The show is being shown, the decision to air it was made by some stranger in Hollywood, and you just happen to be seeing

There is a massive sector of the populace who think they are partially responsible for what occurs in the games they’re watching on television; they believe their psychic energy plays a role in what happens to other people in other cities. These consumers tend to fall into one or more of the following categories: People who get mad at strangers for not standing up and cheering at live events. People who swear at inanimate objects. People who refer to teams composed of people they’ve never met as “We.” People who think God has a vested interest in certain teams succeeding. People who applaud at the conclusion of movies, just in case the director happens to be sitting in the theater. People who worry about Susan Miller.27 People who refuse to accept that even “live” TV events are on a seven-second delay. People who set their watch five minutes ahead in order to fool themselves into being on time.

What I’ve come to accept (and this is both good and bad, but mostly bad) is that—for the rest of my life—I will never not instantaneously know about any marginally insane event. There’s just no way to avoid the information. The world is too mediated and interpersonal relationships are too connected. Since most adult relationships are now based around new technologies,29 it’s almost like there’s a built-in responsibility to immediately distribute whatever interesting information we acquire. People constantly complain about Facebook, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t changed them; they’re complaining because it has changed them. And they know it. They can feel it.

It’s difficult to project fictional scenarios that are more oblique and unexpected than the craziest moments from reality. We all understand this. And that understanding is at the core of the human attraction to liveness. We don’t crave live sporting events because we need immediacy; we crave them because they represent those (increasingly rare) circumstances where the entire spectrum of possibility is in play. They’re the last scraps of mass society that are totally unfixed.

Because TV is so simultaneously personal (it exists inside your home) and so utterly universal (it exists inside everyone’s home), people care about it with an atypical level of conversational ferocity—they take it more personally than other forms of art, and they immediately feel comfortable speaking from a position of expertise.

There’s never been a more obstinate fan base than that of The Wire. It’s a secular cult that refuses to accept any argument that doesn’t classify The Wire as the greatest artistic endeavor in television history. It’s almost like these people secretly believe this show actually happened, and that criticizing any detail is like mocking an episode of Frontline.

The Sopranos was compelling because we were continually watching innately bad people operate within a world not unlike our own—this, in one sentence, was the crux of the entire series.

In The Wire, everyone is simultaneously good and bad. The cops are fighting crime, but they’re all specifically or abstractly corrupt; the drug dealers are violent criminals, but they’re less hypocritical and hold themselves to a higher ethical standard. There were sporadic exceptions to this rule, but those exceptions only served to accentuate its overall relativist take on human nature: Nobody is totally positive and nobody is totally negative, and our inherently flawed assessment of those qualities hinges on where we come from and what we want to believe. This, of course, is closer to how life actually is (which is why The Wire felt so realistic). It’s a more sophisticated way to depict the world. However—from a fictional, narrative perspective—it ends up making the message a little less meaningful. If nothing is totally false, everything is partially true; depending on the perspective and the circumstance, no action is unacceptable. The conditions matter more than the participants.

Breaking Bad is not a situation where the characters’ morality is static or contradictory or colored by the time frame. Instead, it suggests that morality is continually a personal choice. When the show began, that didn’t seem to be the case: It seemed like this was going to be the story of a man (Walter White, portrayed by Bryan Cranston) forced to become a criminal because he was dying of cancer. That’s the elevator pitch. But that’s completely unrelated to what the show has become. The central question on Breaking Bad is this: What makes a man “bad”—his actions, his motives, or his conscious decision to be a bad person? Judging from the trajectory of its first three seasons, Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan believes the answer is option #3. So what we see in Breaking Bad is a person who started as one type of human and decides to become something different. And because this is television—because we were introduced to this man in a way that made him impossible to dislike, and because we experience TV through whichever character we understand the most—the audience is placed in the curious position of continuing to root for an individual who’s no longer good. And this is not a case like J. R. Ewing or Al Swearengen, where a character’s over-the-top evilness immediately defines his charm; this is a series where the main character has actively become evil, but we still want him to succeed. At this point, Walter White could do anything, and I would continue to support his ...

Gilligan detailed this process in a recent interview with Newsweek: “Television is historically good at keeping its characters in a self-imposed stasis so that shows can go on for years or even decades. When I realized this, the logical next step was to think, how can I do a show in which the fundamental drive is toward change?”

Within any complex scenario, there are three kinds of information. The three types are as follows: Information that you know you know. Information that you know you don’t know. Information that you don’t know you don’t know.

If you want details, don’t watch television. Also, don’t read newspapers or magazines and stay off the Internet—buy nonpartisan books about events that happened no less than ten years ago. Modernity is not detail oriented.

I hate this commercial. It’s glib and insidious.

THE MOST IMPORTANT DATE in the history of rock music was August 28, 1964. This is the day Bob Dylan met the Beatles in New York’s Delmonico hotel and got them high. Obviously, a lot of people may want to disagree with this assertion, especially if they are teaching junior high health class. But the artistic evidence is hard to ignore: The introduction of marijuana altered the trajectory of the Beatles’ songwriting, reconstructed their consciousness, and prompted them to make the most influential rock albums of all time. After the summer of 1964, the Beatles started taking serious drugs, and those drugs enhanced their musical performance. They just thought they were having a good time, but the results were astonishing. 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.

My point is not that all drugs are the same, or that drugs are awesome, or that the Beatles needed LSD to become the geniuses they already were. My point is that sports are unique in the way they’re retrospectively colored by the specter of drug use.

There comes a point in every normal person’s life when they stop looking at athletes as models for living. Any thinking adult who follows pro sports understands that certain owners are corrupt and that the games don’t really matter and money drives everything. It would be stranger if they did not realize these things. But what’s equally strange is the way so many fans (and seemingly all sportswriters, myself included) revert back to their ten-year-old selves whenever an issue like steroids shatters the surface.

One of these teenagers was pessimistic about the future, even though he was enjoying the present and despondent about the past. The other was optimistic about tomorrow, despite the fact that his description of today was terrible. It took me a while to figure out which person I could relate to more. I’m still not sure.

It has been brought to my attention that Mountain Dew can dissolve a mouse. This information comes not from some rival beverage critic, but from PepsiCo itself: In an attempt to get out of a lawsuit, the manufacturers of Mountain Dew are suggesting that—if a mouse were somehow trapped inside a bottle of Dew—the rodent would be turned into a gelatinous, unrecognizable blob. If true, such evidence would contradict the accusation of Ronald Ball, a Wisconsin man who claims to have purchased a Mountain Dew at a vending machine and found a dead mouse inside the bottle.

I have friends. But being a “great friend” is something I will never be. I can be a good friend. But not a great friend. A great friend will call you every day and remember your birthday. I’ll get so wrapped up in my shit, I’ll never remember that stuff. And the people who are my friends understand this, and they’re usually the same way. You gravitate toward people who are like you.

It’s not like I’m saying, “I don’t need friends because I’m so strong.” It’s a weakness.

Within the literary sphere, there are at least four ways an author can become semi-important: He (or, of course, she) can have massive commercial success. He can be adored and elevated by critics. He can craft “social epics” that contextualize modernity and force op-ed writers for The New York Times to reevaluate How We Live Now. He can even become a celebrity in and of himself, which means whatever that man chooses to write becomes meaningful solely because he was the one who made that choice.

It’s easy to understand why Franzen’s literary characters are so rich and fully realized; he understands himself better than most people I’ve encountered, which is always the first step toward understanding people who aren’t you.

To classify the Franzen–Wallace relationship as “complex” would be like saying the relationship between Israel and Palestine is “contentious.” They met in the early ’90s when Wallace wrote Franzen a fan letter about his debut novel, The Twenty-Seventh City; soon after, Wallace became recognized as the next great American genius with the 1996 publication of Infinite Jest, only to have Franzen shoot past him (at least in terms of recognition and readability) with The Corrections. When Wallace killed himself, his literary reputation exploded a second time, and countless obituaries noted the Franzen–Wallace friendship. Now they are linked forever. Immediately after DFW’s death, Franzen consciously adopted Wallace’s habit of chewing tobacco, similar to how Michael Jordan started playing baseball and doing crossword puzzles following his father’s murder.

“Here’s the thing about inauthentic people,” he says on the train, speaking in the abstract. “Inauthentic people are obsessed with authenticity.”

“I actually want to write a treatise in defense of pretension,” he says. “I think the word ‘pretension’ has become like the word ‘ironic’—just this catch-all term to distance people from interesting experiences and cultural engagement and possible embarrassment. Pretension can lead to other things. You know, the first time I read Gravity’s Rainbow, I did so because I thought it would make me seem cool. That was my original motivation. But now I’ve read it six times, and I find it hilarious and great and I understand it. You can’t be afraid to embarrass yourself sometimes.”

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.”

“Fairness only matters when you’re in a position of power and you’re trying to make things fair for someone else. Life is not fair. You’re a white, upper-middle-class male in the United States of America. The world is insanely unfair, and 99.9 percent of the time it’s unfair in your favor. You’ve actively marginalized yourself, and that’s your choice. I respect that. But tomorrow, you can cut your hair and become like everybody else. Try being black.”

In early 2004, Burton was working on albums with a couple of uncommercial indie rappers; he had already released three well-regarded (but widely ignored) electronic albums under the moniker Pelican City,

At best, that record is just quirky and odd and really illegal. I never imagined people would play those songs in clubs. I also think the people who love it tend to love it for the wrong reasons, and the people who hate it tend to hate it for the wrong reasons. I think some people love it for what it supposedly did to the music industry, which was not my intent. I did not make The Grey Album for music fans. I made it to impress people who were really into sampling.”

The Wizard of Oz, a movie that so-called synchronicity buffs like to play simultaneously with Dark Side of the Moon (you hit “play” on the CD player when the MGM lion roars for the third time, just before the opening credits, and all kinds of weird coincidences pop up as you watch and listen).