Chuck Klosterman's Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs is this book I for no real reason put off reading until last year. I think it was something about the cover, which is this grimy off-white, like a snot-covered child made it his buddy for a few days. This is what Amazon says:
Klosterman, one of the few members of the so-called "Generation X" to proudly embrace that label and the stereotypical image of disaffected slackers that often accompanies it, takes the reader on a witty and highly entertaining tour through portions of pop culture not usually subjected to analysis and presents his thoughts on Saved by the Bell, Billy Joel, amateur porn, MTV's The Real World, and much more. Klosterman goes deep, often employing his own life spent as a member of the lowbrow target demographic to measure the cultural impact of his subjects.
OMG, doesn't that make you want to run out and purchase his oeuvre?!?! I read it eventually and it's very "That's exactly what I was thinking! Or... not really, but I feel like I knew that in my subconscious all along and Chuck has brought it to the surface--thanks, CK!". One essay is devoted to the last season of
Saved by the Bell, when Tiffani-Amber Thiessen and Elizabeth Berkeley left the show and Kelly and Jessi were suddenly, with no explanation, replaced by a tough-talking brunette named Tori. "The Tori Paradox," Chuck argues, is the sole example of realism in
Saved by the Bell, since people tend to just drop off the planet for extended periods of time and then show up equally unexplainedly for the graduation episode and no one mentions it.
So as you can imagine, I was pretty excited to see him read last week; Dan found out about a thing at the Highline Ballroom and a bunch of us got tickets.
What I didn't know is that Chuckie K. would be reading from his new
novel. This is something else entirely. In his book
IV, the last section is a novella-type thing he wrote back in the day and it's pretty bad. I felt impotent and out of control, which I really hate. Ok, that was a
Clueless reference, I mostly felt less excited. But then something wonderful happened: it was good! Like, I wanted to read the rest, which is too bad since it won't come out until September.
And then the table next to us started heckling the general audience during the Q&A, which was weird, especially since they were a bunch of banker-Bar Martinetti crowd-type people, like, go back to your business networking event or whatever.
