A Book of All-New Pop Culture Pieces by Chuck Klosterman
Chuck Klosterman has chronicled rock music, film, and sports for almost fifteen years. He's covered extreme metal, extreme nostalgia, disposable art, disposable heroes, life on the road, life through the television, urban uncertainty and small-town weirdness. Through a variety of mediums and with a multitude of motives, he's written about everything he can think of (and a lot that he's forgotten). The world keeps accelerating, but the pop ideas keep coming.
In Eating the Dinosaur, Klosterman is more entertaining and incisive than ever. Whether he's dissecting the boredom of voyeurism, the reason why music fan's inevitably hate their favorite band's latest album, or why we love watching can't-miss superstars fail spectacularly, Klosterman remains obsessed with the relationship between expectation, reality, and living history. It's amateur anthropology for the present tense, and sometimes it's incredibly funny.
Q: What is this book about?
A: Well, that's difficult to say. I haven't read it yet - I've just clicked on it and casually glanced at this webpage. There clearly isn't a plot. I've heard there's a lot of stuff about time travel in this book, and quite a bit about violence and Garth Brooks and why Germans don't laugh when they're inside grocery stores. Ralph Nader and Ralph Sampson play significant roles. I think there are several pages about Rear Window and football and Mad Men and why Rivers Cuomo prefers having sex with Asian women. Supposedly there's a chapter outlining all the things the Unabomber was right about, but perhaps I'm misinformed.
Q: Is there a larger theme?
A: Oh, something about reality. "What is reality," maybe? No, that's not it. Not exactly. I get the sense that most of the core questions dwell on the way media perception constructs a fake reality that ends up becoming more meaningful than whatever actually happened.
Q: Should I read this book?
A: Probably. Do you see a clear relationship between the Branch Davidian disaster and the recording of Nirvana's In Utero? Does Barack Obama make you want to drink Pepsi? Does ABBA remind you of AC/DC? If so, you probably don't need to read this book. You probably wrote this book. But I suspect everybody else will totally love it, except for the ones who absolutely hate it.
Klosterman does not go for the easy joke here; although he is consistently and absurdly amusing. Neither is Eating the Dinosaur a mere collection of pop culture references; although Mad Men, Nirvana, ABBA, The Fog of War and other mentions abound. What raises this book to a 5 star rating is the author's ability to weave humor and pop culture into genuinely insightful analyses of issues both important and sublime.
He starts with a very funny and equally revealing essay about why people answer questions during interviews. Just as the reader recognizes that this is not nearly as obvious a matter as it seems on first blush, Klosterman enters into a discussion of the nature of truth and of selfhood. Errol Morris contributes this gem: "I think we're always trying to create a consistent narrative for ourselves. I think truth always takes a backseat to narrative." (This would explain why each of my satellite radio news channels tells me about events in seemingly different worlds.)
Klosterman is less serious but just as interesting in exploring the challenges inherent in time travel. Even it were possible, he argues, the only reason to do so would be to eat a dinosaur.
His dissection of advertising through the medium of Mad Men and Pepsi is subtle and persuasive. He tries to convince us that we understand we are being conned by the ad. However, we reward the message that does the best job of setting the hook because we want to be a part of the process.
His best piece finishes the book and rather courageously tries to resurrect the Unabomber's arguments in Industrial Society for the Future without creating any sympathy for Ted Kaczynski. Klosterman shows how 130,000 years of psychological evolution, in which men observed actual images, have been replaced in one century by mediated experience. The media that the author has made a living writing about has created a new and false reality. "We are latently enslaved by our own ingenuity, and we have unknowingly constructed a simulated world, " concludes the author. "As a species, we have never been less human than we are right now."
Eating the Dinosaur is a lot to swallow. Whether the reader accepts its conclusions or not, however, consumption is both fun and enlightening.
writes,
Chuck seems more aware of his own celebrity and status as a writer in this book than his previous ones. This comes, alongside the welcome addition of an index, making it all the easier to look up his culturally mundane references for a second time, if need be. The following is a sampling of the first 10 things referenced in the index (in alphabetical order, of course): Abba (pgs. 147-158), ABC, Abdul (Paula), AC/DC, Ace of Base, Across the Sea (Weezer), advertising, A-11 offense, Aerosmith, Aero-Zepplin, Against the Machine, and the Akron Beacon Journal.
If you're a fan of his previous works, and particularly Sex Drugs Cocoa Puffs, you should check this out. But if you're reading this, you probably already knew that.
*P.S. the page count here says 255 pages, but in actuality, it is 229 pages, plus the index from p. 233 to p.245... so it's shorter than has been listed. I ripped through it yesterday afternoon, and will probably read it a second time come Holiday break.
